#386: Ken Burns — A Master Filmmaker on Creative Process, the Long Game, and the Noumenal

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dot com and Enter the code TIMPODCAST, all one word, at checkout and get one hundred dollars off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Get a great work out at home anytime you want. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIMPPODCAST. to get started. Hey boys and girls, ladies and gents, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers, people who are the best or one of the best at what they do.

My guest today is certainly that Ken Burns. You can find him on Twitter at Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than forty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in nineteen eighty one, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever. made, including the civil war. I'm gonna pause at this point in the list Because not everyone who's listening to this has seen the Civil War or realizes just how massively popular. It was a Now

Critics. thought no one watched civil war. Why? Because it's more than ten hours long. And at the end of the day. It was broadcast on PBS on five consecutive nights. in nineteen ninety and uh almost forty million viewers.

More than actually 40 million viewers tuned into at least one episode, and viewership averaged more than fourteen million viewers each evening, making it the most watched program ever to air on PBS. Now this is forty million plus people watching something that is produced to be ten Plus hours long. That's this is not a five second cat video on YouTube. So let that sink in for a second. But back to the list. So the Civil War, baseball. Jazz, the Statue of Liberty, Huey Long.

Lewis and Clark, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Unforgivable Blackness, subtitle The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. And for those of you who don't know, Jack Johnson was an incredible boxer. The war. The National Parks subtitle. America's best idea, The Roosevelt's Jackie Robinson, Defying the Nazis, subtitle The Sharps War, The Vietnam War, and The Mayo Clinic, subtitle Faith, Hope, Science. Kent's films. have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations.

And in September of two thousand eight. At the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. His newest work is Country Music. I have it here right next to me. It explores the history of a uniquely American art form, country music, from its deep entangled roots and ballads. blues and hymns performed in small settings to its worldwide popularity, learn how country music evolved over the course of the twentieth century, as it eventually emerged to become America's music. Country music features never before seen footage and photographs. Of course, this is

Kins. trademark, so to speak, plus interviews with more than eighty country music artists. The eight part and sixteen hour series is directed and produced by none other than Ken Burns, written and produced by Dayton Duncan, and produced by Julie Dunfe. It debuts on PBS on Sunday, September fifteenth. At eight seven central. Again that's Sunday, September fifteenth, at eight. seven central. The first four episodes will stream online on the PBS platforms, including PBS.org and PBS apps, timed

To coincide with the Sunday, September fifteenth premiere, and the second four timed to the broadcast of episode five on Sunday, September twenty second. So each episode will stream for a period of three weeks. The simple version of that is On TV. Sunday, September fifteenth.

At Ace Eastern seven central, eight Eastern Seven Central. And uh if you do not have television, if you're a cord cutter, you can go to PBS dot org or use one of the PBS apps. PBS Passport members will be able to stream the entire series for a period of six months beginning Sunday, September Fifteenth. So all that said, without further ado, please enjoy, and my God did I enjoy it, this wide ranging conversation with none other than Ken.

Burns. I Ken, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I am thrilled to be having this conversation. I've been a fan of yours for effectively as long as I've been

uh consciously aware of what I'm watching in front of me. So I can't say the first few years but shortly thereafter. And uh I thought we might bounce around quite a bit in this conversation. And begin with something that came up in the research I did for this podcast episode and it relates to mementos

in your pocket. Do you still carry mementos in your pocket and whether it's past tense or current tense present tense, can you describe what those are and why? You carry them. I've just dug into my pocket and Some change.

I have four items which I've had for Many, many years now. They've no no one's been retired. Um one of them is a coin palm to me by an ex Marine who was the headmaster at the Greenwood School in Tiny Putney Vermont, the Greenwood School is equally tiny and is a school for boys. with learning differences, meaning they suffer from dyslexia or uh ADHD or executive function.

A host of things. This school addresses this problem head on. It's been around for about forty years. And after Thanksgiving when the boys come back ages ten, eleven to Seventeen. When they come back from Thanksgiving vacation, they are all asked To memorize.

the ten complicated sentences of Lincoln's Gettysburg address and then publicly recite them. a difficult task for any one of us, but if you have these learning differences it can be a nightmare. And when the boys successfully complete that Um they they are given a coin by the headmaster in typical kind of military fashion, even though it's not a military school and he's anything but militaristic. But

I was asked once many, many years ago, to be a judge. I found myself in tears at the effort of these boys to to do it and said somebody's gotta make a film about it. It obviously would be a cinema verte film, which is not my style, but As the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of uh the Gettysburg address came up in twenty thirteen, I thought you know what, I gotta dive in and do it. So we embed it in the school with a sound man and a cameraman and uh assistant and recorded three hundred and some hours and when the whole thing was over he And we made the film and realized that the kids had never in the then thirty five years history of the school been to Gettysburg. I rented two buses and took the whole school there and put them up for a night and gave them a tour

of the battlefield uh is the kind of coded to this film. When it was over, he he palmed uh a metal in my pocket. So I have that Greenwood School thing. Um The oldest thing I have is what's called a feeling heart. It's a stainless steel uh shape of a heart with a little indentation in it. So you can sort of hold it and palm it. It's not like a coin. It it has a little bit more dimension to that. And it's maybe you know, much bigger than the silver dollar. And it was sent to me by a woman in upstate New York, an artist who had fashioned this

And she had written after the Civil War series was broadcast in uh September of nineteen ninety and sometime in the first few weeks after that she had uh sent me a heart. I then got another two hearts for my two oldest daughters and recently got two more hearts to give to my uh two young daughters who are, you know, uh fourteen and and and eight. And so

It it just it's always there. I can feel it and sometimes I find myself just Um you know. Oh. uh holding it in my hand, I'm I'm sure doing exactly what she had intended the heart to do. Um, another object I have was given to me by a friend and it's a mini ball.

now polished and free of all the calcification that it tends to it. The mini ball is a bullet. that would have been um used during the civil war. And it was found on the on on Gettysburg. As well. And so I carry around. a reminder of the time when we came closest to our near national suicide when now it turns out through the work of Drew Kilpin Faust the

uh former president of Harvard's extraordinary scholarship that instead of the six hundred or six hundred and twenty thousand that was generally accepted as the death toll in the civil war. It looks like it's more like seven hundred and fifty thousand, three quarters of a million, well more than two percent of the population, an extraordinary death toll. Yeah, and and the poem Casey at the Bat says in this favored land. And then the fourth and final object that I've carried around for years and years is a button

Off a jacket. of a friend of mine uh Uh father. Uh his son gave it to me, so a friend of mine's grandfather as well. um war on an army uniform and he had landed uh

at D Day, uh at at Normandy. And so I've just got to I've kind of kept these reminders um Uh in my pocket and they're comforting. Uh I do have one object that I can't fit in my pocket, but I have next to me at my desk. At home in New Hampshire.

uh and it's the leg irons uh that I purchased at auction Um heavy, weighty, horrible. things. They are a human invention whose only purpose is to keep other human beings in bondage. Which is a legacy of uh very Difficult part.

of our history and uh reckoning we still not have fully completed. And um it turns out that Though I don't necessarily go looking for it in my projects. Um That that that question. Um

is always lingering in in in our American story. And whether it's country music, it's there, whether it's in uh the national parks, it's there. In unlikely places, it's there in likely places like a biography of Jackie Robinson or Jack Johnson or Jazz. But it it seems to this question of the fact that we know We were born under the sign that all men are created equal, but the guy who wrote that second sentence of the declaration, our creed

owned more than two hundred human beings when he wrote it. and didn't see the contradiction or the hypocrisy and more important didn't see fit in his lifetime to free any one of those human beings who had inalienable rights. And so You know, if you're gonna do a deeper dive than just mere

regurgitation of conventional wisdom, then you have to deal If it's ever present. subject of race. And so I wish I could tell you that I could carry around Those leg irons, but they don't fit in the pocket. And they have a weight and a disturbing heaviness to them that

that is nevertheless very close to me when I'm at home. Can you have a A remarkable memory. And you also must receive, be offered, be exposed to

thousands of different objects that you could keep. Uh What you said as reminders uh earlier, are there particular reasons why you chose of all the other options, let's start with the objects in Your pocket. Uh what what is what purpose do those serve for you?

Well you know I You're asking a question Which requires an answer from the head. And I'm not sure the head made the decision to keep them. I think the heart did, and the heart doesn't necessarily

have a rational or easily articulated response to the question, which is a good one and an obvious one. And I wish I could be truthful And uh And honest. I mean I do get lots of D. objects and

mainly these are things that are close to me. I mean, I never thought when I received this healing heart that I would put it in my pocket, but I did Instinctively and it's never left. I mean I can't tell you how many times I'd emptied it to go through T S A screenings, you know? Uh it it's it's It's really there. And uh

There's a kind of commitment and loyalty to it that that I can't explain. And the bullet was given to me by a friend. Um, and he I adore him. He's one of my closest friends and it He's a uh he's a big bear of a loving Man.

And I just the you know, there's something So contradictory about a bullet being anything but a bad thing. Uh and yet it it represents all of the totality of the civil war. The woman who had sent

Miss Steelinghart wrote in her letter that she saw the series that we made on the civil war. As an American Bahavita. you know, this this you know store and you just kinda went, Whoa and I I don't think I was it it was the flattery of that that stuck it in my pocket. It was the something of it. And it may have been the struggles that it took me to go through, the growth that I'd undergone. Obviously these kids at the Greenwood School had moved me to my core And I just presume that some other filmmaker better equipped to do a cinema there I film.

uh would do it, but found myself having to do it and found myself with uh a crew that was really excited and And was able to get a lot of fly on the wall stuff. And It meant a lot. Um, to me.

And uh the button Is the button, is the button, you know, the greatest uh invasion in human history took place. on June sixth, nineteen forty four. And uh off west coast of France. That and ended um what

Adolf Hitler had ended began to end in in in twelve years what Adolf Hitler had intended to be a thousand year Reich. Mm. Well let's talk about I would like to talk about the heart. Maybe that's uh almost a contradiction in in terms, uh but

I have been very hyper analytical my whole life and I think have neglected to pay attention to signals from uh the body. And I've been trying to cultivate this Over the last few years in particular, and a woman I'm named Diana Chapman and Jim Detmer introduced me to this concept of the whole the whole body or the full body, yes. And I've

Red That at least in response to questions like when you start one of these big movies, what's the first step? that you talk about uh looking for the big whole hearted yes that isn't coming from your head but your heart kinda like falling in love. And so what I've been trying to do is

pay attention to the sensations, whether it's heart centered or gut centered. to assess whether something is a full yes for me. What what does a full wholehearted feel like to you and w and could you give us an example of a project where that was a clear signal. Sure. Uh I think the best example is the one

sort of right in front of us, uh which is country music. I had had country music as an intellectual. didactic expository idea, if that's what it was on a list that I've recently found from the nineteen nineties. And from another list from the R meaning that I was thinking about right and there might be fifty different things. You you know the lottery where they've got all these ping pong balls bouncing around and then one drops down. Imagine these are all just completely arbitrary

Head things. Uh uh just an idea, oh we should do this, we should think about that, what about this? And so you just want to write'em down so you don't forget'em and whatever, but nothing happens. And nothing did happen, and I I I I had forgotten that they were even there. But I remember visiting a friend of mine in uh Dallas, Texas, who had been raising money for us and wonderful dear friend. And he I came down for breakfast one day. We done an event, I was staying at his house and Um, I guess we were the first people up and he said, You ever thought about country music? And when he said it It was like this huge whole body explosion.

And I looked at him and was just I could feel it in my chest. And I could feel it in my gut. And so it wasn't I started to

Answer yes. And then I realized that that yes was so feeble and so partial because it had to do with sort of trying to be oh yeah, well it's on a list you know like that But I realized that the my r my my physical and more importantly my emotional reaction to that had completely obliterated what little blip

It was as a kind of mental construct that had worked its way in the nineties and later the aughts onto a sheet of paper with ten, twenty, thirty other subjects. Some of which I've done, some of which I haven't done, some of which I'll get to. Some of which I will never get to. And so this was something else. And so as I I kind of felt like I got down on one knee. I didn't physically and proposed

to country music at that. It was a big yes. Now the the biggest thing I knew is that This project would have to go through one of my partners who I knew knew more about country music. And more importantly, he and I had been thinking about another big project.

And we're just throwing around some ideas and doing a little research. Could we possibly pull this off? And we were not in quicksand, but we were uh you know, our back rear right tire was stuck. And I went back to New Hampshire and I went to him and I said What about oh look, we don't need to abandon this other thing. But what about country music? And it it like he looked at me like Yes.

And the two of us I mean that from that moment, I mean I do remember what the other project was but it it you know, we hadn't shot anything, we hadn't written anything. There had been no budget raise for it. It was just early conceptual stuff. It was dropped in favor of the next eight and a half years of work. And it was

You know, you say total This is wholeheartedness. That's what it is. It has to be the integration so that you You physically commit to it, you you mentally commit to it, but you emotionally commit to it. And that yeah. is very similar to the chemistry we feel

with others when we fall in love, either romantically or as friends. And Uh Um As all the films have been, it's just been A wholehearted yes because you realize that the story is

fire or the stories are firing on all cylinders, that they're complex they represent challenge and opportunity and uh difficulty. You know, I once It was with a group of students recently and I told them that every film that I'd done with at least a million problems.

But I didn't think But I didn't think that the word problem was necessarily pejorative. But it represented friction that needed to be

overcome. It was the necessary friction of the creative process of the making progress, you know, and you just that wall won't hold itself up. So builder, you need to have scaffolding and souls work that once you reach a certain stage Can be disassembled. So w this is what we had to do and how do you take you're not gonna be the encyclopedia, you're not gonna be the reading of the telephone book. How do you take something as monstrously big as the Civil War, baseball or jazz, or the national parks or World War Two, or the Roosevelt or Vietnam

Country music and say What do we tell? Where do we start? How do we go back and pick up its ancestors. Where do we end? Um how do we tell this story? Just really practical things. that have to do with the craft and the art of filmmaking and larger big question things, and all of that represents in the case of the series, maybe millions of individual problems in quotes. Like

If you look at them as as Is is just whatever a runner takes to overcome that brain that's screaming stop as you're running a marathon, then you understand what we're engaged in. Because people always come up and say, Wow, you just spent ten and a half years on Vietnam, eight and a half years on country music? How do you do that? I said, I'm sad. I don't wanna leave it. You know like

The fact that I'm talking to you is one of the Palliative Kind of. aspects of this. The promotional stuff permits is the is the airlock. Because all of a sudden you've been attending to the stories

You lift up and and you begin to share it with other people and they begin to synthesize some ideas. And you know, they're saying, Oh, you intended this and you and you say, No, we didn't. We just wanted to tell a story But now that you're saying this, we realize the way in which this historical moment say resonates in the present. Harry Truman once said, The only thing that's really new is the history you don't know. People are So fond of saying history repeats itself.

It does not. Uh, Mark Twain is supposed to say that history is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And if he did say that Mm-hmm.

He's so on the mark because I believe that human nature doesn't change. Ecclesiastes put it this way, you know, there's nothing new under the sun. That's the old Testament. And that may be the best what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. And so I think that that suggests that human nature doesn't change and that it it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And we begin to perceive patterns and echoes and theses, rhymes. Twain would say

And um I love that. We attend to the storytelling part of it. I happen to work in American history the way somebody painter works in oil as opposed to watercolor. Unfortunately the word history is mostly made up of the word story. Plus high. You know, you don't have to get into the

Um binary his story or her story. It's just story plus Hi. Which is A wonderful greeting.

And You know, we finish it and then we look up and go Mike. God. It is resonating with the present and every single film I've done. Like you will look at country music and you will cannot believe that we were editorially complete.

before the Me Too movement started. You will go, Oh no. Oh no. They were aware of the Me Too movement and they and they they just Work it in.

Or I used to start my stump speech. For the Vietnam War. series that came out in twenty seventeen. So imagine where we've been for the first nine months of twenty seventeen and for the preceding election year. And I said What if I told you that I had been working for ten and a half years about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration? About a White House in disarray obsessed with leaks, about a president certain the press was making up stories about him lying. about asymmetrical warfare that confounded the mighty might of the US military, about huge big document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilized the political equation and accusations that a political party

reached out to a foreign power during the time of a national election to influence that election. You would say I'd been working on the last year and a half. But all of these things were true. of the Vietnam War when I started in December of two thousand and six. And were also true when we finished locked the picture.

No more work on it. in in December of twenty fifteen, a month before the Iowa caucuses out of which Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge. As a candidate. And that's I could take any film.

Any film. And do that. that I've worked on and it's nothing that we're prepared for. It's only And after the fact kind of collection of accounting.

You finish the film, you don't wanna leave it and so you're Obligated because of the shoe leather necessary to promote Um Public broadcasting films.

You do in forty cities and you begin to construct something that talks about how you related to it. But it's true of everything. Everything including The civil war. You know, every film I've made, it just resonates in the present.

And suggest the twin is absolutely correct. That's one hell of a rhyme. And I have a question about motivation. You mentioned eight and a half years, ten plus years. Some people have signs in their office. these motivational quotes of various types. Uh effectively some version of go get'em, tiger, you can do it, et cetera. I have read that you have a neon sign in your editing room Uh what does it read and how did you choose

This particular sign. Mm-hmm. Well, you know

Filmmakers are notorious. Uh for once something works. You don't touch it, right? You say, leave that alone, it's work. Right. And that may be great in Hollywood, but if you find out

new and contradictory facts. you're kind of obligated to to do it. And we never w have a set research period followed by a set writing period. followed by a a script that's now writ etched in stone that informs the shooting and the editing. We never stop researching, so we're always finding out stuff and we never stop writing. So we're always corrigible and willing to be flexible in in what we do. And we're often filming interviewing before we've even written a a word of a script so that every time you see a talking head in our film, it's a happy accident. It's not that I've gone to you and it said, Hey

You know, Mr. First, could you please um get me from paragraph two to paragraph three and episode four? Uh thank you. Uh thank you. You know Could you say that again, but do it with a little bit more economy? Yeah, that was it. But now could you end the way you did the first we've never done that. We just go and have an interview. And if it doesn't work, it's our fault. If it works

It's their greatness, right? And so we have this complex process that uh I think serves us very well in the in the pursuit of a complicated story. So what's the neon sign?

It's a It's complicated. And it's the license to say Even if it's perfect, even if it's working, let's open it up and add in that That Complicated.

conflicting contradictory facts. And sure it might destabilize it, but let's let's do it anyway. And so it just says in cursive lowercase. Um, it's complicated. And then the onside. And it's something we've said to each other for a long time. It's it's sometimes like a scarf or a muffler of warm gloves on a cold day. It just arms you against

the the the scariness of of going out into that unknown region. At other times it's just like, Yeah, this is what we do and I wanted it I finally immortalized it by putting it in me on So that we could all remember that this is what we celebrate. That's That's the thing.

making a film years ago on the Statue of Liberty, I interviewed the now past uh statesman Saul Linowit. Um Wonderful interview and he was quoting Judge Learned Hand. Could there ever be a better name for a jurist than Learned Hand. And apparently Learned Hand said Um

Liberty is never being too sure you're right. And I'm sure he meant it in a rather narrow political, perhaps jurisprudence sense. But I took it in a broad spiritual sense, you know, that the opposite.

Of faith. is not heresy. Yeah. It's not doubt. Mm.

It's just Conviction. Right. So faith requires doubt. It doesn't require

Um It doesn't require certainty. And and what we've tried to do is instill in ourselves, which is the hardest thing to do. It's much easier to try to instill it in others, um, this idea. Yeah. That were not done.

We gotta open this up again. Uh we've learned Contradictory stuff. And We're you know, for a while our Vietnam script its footnotes were longer than the script itself. Like we would say.

Four regiments of Viet Cong, uh four regiments of N VA went down the Ho Chi Minh Trail that month. And we'd have an ask or uh you know, footnote one seventeen. And footnote one seventeen would say You know, this scholar says this, this scholar says that, this scholar says that. Because it's in these two places we're going with four. But later on we found out after we locked the film that yet another scholar had said three and we were beginning to feel a little bit more comfortable with that and would rather err on the conservative side. And so we changed. We found where the narrator had said the word three and we cannibalized it.

and moved it over. S sometimes we call it a Frankenbite. And we um put the three in instead of the four. So that we could just exhale a little bit. No one would ever, in a million years, not even a scholar, take us to task for it. But that was not acceptable for us. So we'd rather

Uh and if we hadn't been able to find that that that tree, we would have asked the narrator back in, Peter Coyote back in and And and um Record it. I I'd like to talk about the civil war. And uh maybe we could start with a question about Civil War, just do do you have any idea how many people have seen

Have watched the civil war. Do you have any estimates? No idea. I know we reached about forty million people. who watch Summer All of It. uh the first time is broadcast about this time uh twenty nine years ago in September.

of uh nineteen ninety. And uh I know that in subsequent broadcasts it's done very well. It's you know in worked itself into schools. Um many, many other people look at it regularly. Uh so I assume it might be, you know A couple multiples of of that original forty million. Uh it's gone out.

Astronomical numbers. I mean they're huge, huge numbers. And yet Twenty plus years ago. Television critics. Least some. thought nobody would watch the Civil War, uh for for for many reasons, including that, you know, this new musical cop rock was gonna blow you out of the water. That didn't end up being the case. And

Uh what what I wonder, especially given that we're j we're just talking about faith conviction and so on. Have have y have you, as someone who comes across, say in an interview like this, as Uh Completely confident. And uh

and uh c clear in focus. Have you ever felt lost or had self-doubt? Are there any stories that you can paint just to Provide a Um uh uh maybe a fleshed out human picture of you c could you talk about the di a difficult time or any difficult time that you've gone through? Well I am a very, very anxious person and uh I now don't have too much time for anxiety because people that I love

are anxious now too and I've got to give my attention to them. So the early games, the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge through the Civil War were agonizing every morning up at four A. M. I I remember I asked Shelby Fo about Grant and he said Grant meaning US Grant had what they call four o'clock in the morning courage. That meant that you could wake him up at four o'clock in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left side and he'd be as cool as a cucumber. And I remember thinking, Oh my God, I wish I had four o'clock in the morning courage. And I think I've developed it now and I've I've learned how to harness it and turn it around, but it was debilitating, crushing anxiety about whether this would work. You know, I I was told while I was making the civil war that yeah, sure, these first six films on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Shakers and Huey Long and the Statue of Liberty and Congress and Thomas Hart Benton an hour and a half, an hour in length.

People will watch still photographs for that long, but they're not gonna look for the five one hours that initially we proposed the civil war to be, and it ended up being nearly twelve hours in length. And that That was terrifying to be told that over and over again. And I remember I knew the film was good when it was done, but I remember arriving in Los Angeles for the Television Critics Association meeting and several of the critics would say, Ken, it's terrific, but you know nobody's gonna watch it because of this cop box show by Steven Botchko, but more because we were in an age when people were addicted to

uh M T V cutting and that the two and a half minutes was the length of the a American attention span and I remember Thinking Well, that's too bad.

Uh you know, it was le it didn't produce anxiety the where the actual making of the film did. And I'm so grateful for those loved ones and colleagues and sometimes they were both. Oh short me up and pretended that I was okay or You know, uh

Covered for me if it was just too too much. Um, really, really important people still in my life to this day. Um But I remember

I thought that all real meaning accrued in duration. that the work we're proudest of that you're proudest of, I would presume that the relationships you care the most about. have benefited from our sustained attention and that it's okay to have both. That we do need The

fast paced, fast cutting two and a half minute MTV uh music video, just as today as people were telling me during the aughts that no one would watch the the the national parks or the World War Two because of YouTube, which you know meant that kitten with the ball of yarn. Um Th the th these could coexist. That that the that the stuff we cared about, that all meaning accrued in duration was an important thing and what was true is that the Civil War bore it out. I mean then as soon as we were working on baseball they said, Geez eighteen and a half hours? Not not even eleven hours and forty minutes the Civil War, but eighteen and a half hours? Nobody's gonna watch that.

And then there was a strike and and everybody did. And jazz, oh man, nobody's gonna watch, you know, eighteen hours of black people, right? I just said I think so, or or the national parks. Uh that's not a travelogue, that's not a you know, which lodge or in to Your f you should have your family stay at. And so I just started trusting. at some point along the way. And I got I gotta

And I it's funny that you asked this because I've just been dealing it recently with a loved one. I developed in the early to mid nineties a sort of sense of three Things I call them. My uh one of my daughters calls them the three truths. I'm not willing to I will leave them to that. I just call the three things.

that I try to do is I help others, friends and and loved ones with anxiety of this debilitating kind. That This will pass. You know, all things are transitory. Get help from others and be kind to yourself. And if I had to do a neon sign, another neon sign, I think I'd do the three things. And I've learned to internalize them in in large measure because like that

alcoholic or drug addict who becomes the most effective Counselor. somebody who's been through the ringer of it ha is I think a much better Um is a much more authentic.

Spokesperson. And this goes back to country. This is at the heart of it is the sincerity or the authenticity that is at the heart of these relatively simple songs. Um that are, as the songwriter Harlan Howard said, three chords and the truth. So it's acknowledging that there's a simplicity to it. Doesn't have uh sophistication or the complication of classical music or some forms of jazz. But that back end, the truth. It means it's dealing with universal human things. And I find the universality of those three things Similar to the effectiveness of good country song Charlie Pride says in the introduction. So if you hear Hank Willi hear Hank Williams say

Hear that lonesome whipper will, he sounds too blue to fly, the midnight train is whining low. I'm so lonesome, I could cry. Yeah. Yeah. No I don't you know, if you've got music which Wynton Marsala says in this film and country music, not just jazz, is the art of the invisible.

The only art form that's invisible is music. And you add to it poetry. which is the distillation of language, our form of communication. Then you're mainlining a completely benign form of heroin, emotional heroin, right into your bloodstream and it gets there really quick. It's it's effects are only positive. This is the Hank Williams who also wrote

I've got a hot rod for it and a two dollar bill and I know a place right over the hill, you know, and he goes on to talk about the joy of young love or the possibility of new love. uh in that just as he speaks, you know, the silence of a falling star. lights up a purple sky. And as I wonder where you are, I'm so lonesome, I can cry. Hm. There's just

There's no one within the sound of my voice. That has not experienced. Yeah. I uh moved to Austin, Texas a few years ago and spent a lot of time on Willie Nelson Boulevard. I saw him pervor uh I saw him perform recently at Austin City Limits

And uh my I think my memory serves me right that he uh was part of the pilot for that series in nineteen seventy two. So it's it's and it was just spectacular. Just absolutely spectacular. Uh so I'm looking forward to digging into uh country music. I did have a a follow up question. on the three truths, as your daughter calls them.

Uh. The third in particular, be kind to yourself. Could you hardest. Yeah, ca it's the hardest for me too. Could you describe what that looks like for you? Are there any practices or things that you now say to yourself Uh in your in your own head that's different.

Yeah. I I I can I can talk myself down From the first thing. I'm Smart enough.

to surround myself with people that are willing to put up with Uh Doing with the second thing. It's but I'm a complete failure on that last thing too. I I can pay lip service to it only because I know it's true.

And it's therefore not Phone it is web service. It is the truth. But I think this is the hardest thing for all of us is how to be kind. to ourselves. How do we

How do we not murder this moment. Uh how do we How do we prepare ourselves for the next moment, whatever it is. And to to try to liberate ourselves from the prison of

The contemplation of the past which may promote depression. Not to Not to deny the chemical. uh origins of of that. Nor anxiety, which is

and anticipation. um the future. Thomas Jefferson had a wonderful thing. How much pain has caused us. The evils which have never happened. And it really surprised me that Tom

who was really good at ignoring some fundamental things right in front of him, like the fact that he lived in a plantation and his comfortable life was due entirely to people that he owned and did not pay. could realize too that these these basic elements of the human heart. are often have to do with worry. What that is is a great late eighteenth century, uh or maybe he wrote it in the early nineteenth century, um commentary about worry. How much pain has caused us the evils which have never happened.

Mm. Thomas Jefferson uh was was also a uh fan of Seneca the Younger. And the the philosophical school of stoicism, as was uh George Washington, who had uh play about Cato performed at Valley Forge to bolster the morale of the troops. Are there any uh do you gravitate to any uh particular philosophies or

philosophical writings if uh not that you have to but I'm I mean you're very well read clearly. Well well, you know, uh I love what Um Jeffrey Ward, who's my longtime writing collaborator, uh along with Dayton Duncan. Jeff has been writing a little bit longer and he wrote The rose of belt.

And and he was uh Uh quoting Franklin Roosevelt when I asked it what his philosophy was. He said He was A Christian and an American and left it at that.

And you know, at the end of the day I'll hide behind FDR's skirts. You know I am I think a Christian. I'm not a practicing Christian, but I'd like to believe that I'm a believing

Question. And that I'm an American. And uh that basically says that I do not need to shoe to any one political philosophy because There's always the the

the possibility and in fact it isn't a possibility. There's always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in Might also be true. And that requires the nimbleness of human that it that requires a human Dexterity that the binary aspects of politics don't

Um subscribe to and that's why I think F DR said is exactly right. And I have friends as close colleagues as possible who I guess would call them Atheists and others who uh have other faith. uh in addition to Christianity, but

This is what I a I am what I am, I think Popeye said. And I like I like both. You know, I like I like that American part, you know, it's for all the things that we've I do believe, as Lincoln said in his message to Congress, what we'd call the state of the union in December of of eighteen sixty two.

That we were the last best hope of urge. Yeah. the this myth of exceptionalism poisons us and pollutes us and allows us to incubate isolated as we are by these two magnificent oceans that have protected us as well, permits us to incubate so many horrible tendencies, uh an addiction to money and guns and uh suspicions. Of the other.

You know, I I have Spent my entire professional life Um living in a kind of space I like to think about it. It will sound now absurd to you as I explain it.

uh between the two letter lower case Plural pronoun us. And it's capitalized

uh version. the US. That is to say, all of the intimacy and warmth Along with we and our

And all of the breadth, the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction, even the controversy. of the United States. And what I've learned over forty plus years of practicing in my professional life telling stories in American history about us. In the US.

Is that there's only us. There's no them. You know, country music has been since the very beginning an alloy, a mixture of things. stronger because it has constituent elements that make it stronger. And that at any time in our history when we suggest that pulling out one aspect of it will make it pure American You have a priori

Weakened the ally and made it brittle. And more breakable. And I like our suppleness. I like our Muttness. I like our mongrelness, which is of course abhorrent.

uh to various currents that are boiling and swirling in the United States. Um This is what makes us stronger. The banjo, one of the key instruments of country music, is from Africa. Um A P Carter of the Carter family, the original Carter family. Uh Bill Monroe.

uh the founder of Bluegrass. Uh Uh the aforementioned Hank Williams. and Johnny Cash, people who deserve to be on the Mount Rushmore of early country music. all had an African American tutor that took their chops from here to way up here to qualify them.

for consideration in that pantheon on that Mount Rushmore. And Jimmy Rogers The first superstar at the same time that the Carter family grew up suspici with the blues Sung by the black uh train crews that he worked with in southern Mississippi. So while he didn't have one mentor the way Hank Williams did, Move is

Tot pain about whom you said Everything I learned about music I got from Rufus. That's that's not bad for arguably the most important country singer or songwriter. it just tells you that whatever superficial thing you've got about country music in your head, whatever conventional wisdom that you think you're now uh gonna

uh enjoy It ain't true. That it's always been a mixture. And it's always been mostly working class. This is a story of women, really strong women from the very, very beginning. It's a story of people coming out of poverty, black and white, and changing the dynamics of their lives. And if they didn't bring other people out they gave them at least the tools to dream how to do that. It's about geographical dislocation and psychological dislocation. And at the end of the day

This extraordinary marriage of This invisible art form combined with the poetry of the words and the for us. As filmmakers startling emotion we did not ever expect. to find in the story uh of country music. Yes.

Yeah. Ask a question about the making of Ken Burns because you said I am what I am, which is true. You are what you are. I can't deny that. But uh I uh my my girlfriend said to me recently over dinner she was she was she was uh quoting someone else, but she said that every every child is born into a different family in the sense that if you have two or three siblings, as people change over time, you're born into a different family. And likewise, I would imagine that there are certain

aspects of kenness that have remained the same for a long time, but you made choices that have shaped who you are today and I wanted to ask about one in particular. And this is Hampshire College. Yeah. Could you could you talk about

Hampshire describe Hampshire College and how you ended up there because I I actually do not know. Okay, so I I am the son of an anthropologist and a uh mother who had uh an advanced degree in biology, but couldn't really use it. She raised two sons until she died of cancer in nineteen sixty five, which is the dominant event of my life. Uh shortly afterwards I watched my father cry at a movie and decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. I had seen the safe haven that it had provided for him, a man who I had never seen cry, not during my mother's illness, not at her death, not at her funeral, a point

uh pointed out to me by friends, uh which I knew meant that was There was an implicit criticism. And I saw my dead cry in a movie called Odd Man Out. Anyway I was gonna be a Hollywood director. So flash forward, I am in my senior year at high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

And my best friend subscribes to a magazine apparently that I have never heard of called Newsweek. Our family subscribed to Time Magazine. I didn't know there was anything else but Time Magazine. for a newsweekly, which I devoured by that time uh cover to cover. And here was the description of a tiny experimental college that had just opened in the last few weeks. This is October of nineteen seventy. It had opened in September of nineteen seventy, which was For lack of a better word.

of a graduate school experience at a undergraduate level. That is to say you were trusted to either know what you wanted to do or to find out what you wanted to do and you proceeded in much the same fashion you would in graduate school with a de-emphasis on classwork and more emphasis on independent study and the assembling of your own examinations, your own proposals. and the assembling of a faculty, small faculty group of two or three who would judge it along the way and finally Pass on it, pass or fail. I I like falling in love with country music. It just lit me up and I said, I wanna go there he said, I'm applying

And um I was supposed to go to the University of Michigan where I could get in for free or nominal stuff'cause my dad taught there. Um I I Hampshire was the most expensive college on earth. uh room board intuition in the fall of seventy one to uh the class to which I hope to enter

in was four thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars, thirty dollars more than Harvard University. And I basically moved all my chips. I quit school early. I had advanced placement courses that permitted me to interpret the Michigan laws that said I needed o X number of credits not four years of high school or three years of high school. And then I had that and that I was leaving after Christmas and the guidance counselor said, You were making a big mistake. And I worked in a record store part time. I now went full time to that. saved up money, my grandmother gave me a thousand dollars. I had inherited a thousand dollars. I pushed all my chips into year one. fully intending to come back to Michigan just having, you know, blown it all on that, you know, uh experiment.

I so fell in love with Hampshire. I am so A poster boy for it. that I couldn't not do it. So I quit I took a leave from Hampshire my second year and worked literally as an indentured servant to a dear friend still who ran the bookstore at the college and got enough money

uh to pay for the next two years of Hampshire. And though it took four years, I spent only three years actually uh matriculating there and ended up with a a uh bachelor of arts in film study and design. Uh and I left there with this sort of naive and perhaps arrogant assumption that I could

um my own film company rather than do what everyone else was supposed to do, which is go to New York or LA or whatever big city and apprentice at a film company and work your way up. So I started with two other Hampshire grads. Florentine films in nineteen seventy six, the year after I graduated, though we'd been talking and thinking about it. For a long time. And That's been my only employer, meaning I've got the worst

Ever Which is two quick questions. Thank you. In essential, we had two teachers, film and uh photography teachers, mostly still photographers, social documentary still photographers, Elaine Mays and Jerome Liebland. They became mentors in the best sense of the word, almost in a medieval renaissance sense of of a real master student relationship. And my relationship with Jerry Liebling was complete uh true to the end of the his life. He died in two thousand eleven. I

worship him and uh all that he gave me. I w if he did not exist, you would not be having this conversation. I said that, you know, w once Dizzy Gillespie said of Louis Armstrong, know him, know me. No Jerry Leling. No me. Period, full stop.

What are some of the things that uh stuck with you from Jerry or were imprinted upon you that had such a tremendous impact? Or was it his care for you and how would you describe what was imparted? He was a curmudgeonly Uh Uh Kind of tough guy.

I remember I was a precocious film student all through high school, not having any formal courses to take, but studying and reading and I knew and I had a sentence which I think I can still do from Andrew Saras, one of the great critics and proponents of the French O'Tour theory, that the director is the author of the film. And he was talking about Nicholas Ray, who made Rebel Without a Cause, but he also made a film called Johnny Guitar, whose screenwriter was Philip Yordan, who was eventually blacklisted uh uh during those uh terrible Hollywood days in the fifties. And so there was a sentence that I had looked at as uh perplexed and you'll understand exactly why, uh perplexed uh teenager, where it said, Jordan set out to attack McCarthyism, but Ray was too delirious to pay any heed as Freudian feminism and Marxist masochism prevailed over Pirandellin transcended polemics. Whoa. And to me, that was my holy grail, right?

Go I finally got up a nerve second semester of Hampshire to I I'd been in a lane maze. His his colleagues and younger colleagues and somebody he had imported to Hampshire the year I came, the second year he'd come the first year. And um

I I I I showed this sentence uh I I I went into his office and I suddenly like just said blurted it out. I was showing off, right? That not only had I memorized it, but I think I knew what it meant. I'd like to have this discussion with him. And when I finished the sentence he looked at me

And he got it from his desk. And he walked around the desk and he took me by the elbow, which he always did to everybody, both in affectionate ways, but this was clearly not in an affectionate way. He sort of lifted me out of my chair. move me to the door, open the door, and push me out into the hallway and shut the door. And I sat out there contemplating suicide because Jerry uh was known for this to being a terrifying person. I thought here I'll go in and I'll disarm him with this wonderful sentence which I was going to attempt to deconstruct and everything would be great and my career such as it is, and I rarely use the word career after that.

Um would be launched. And he had reminded me this was just absurd gobbledygook that Hollywood called itself the industry which ought to be warning enough. And um we were interested in something else. He was a great, great still photographer. I urge you to Google him labeling L I E B L I N G extraordinary photographs which he put up in our in our classes along with our photographs and and our films and They're stunning. He was about his he wanted us to know history. He wanted us to know ethics.

He wanted us to be humanists. He understood there was a there was an essential reciprocity that took place. Stuff didn't occur. Stuff wasn't imparted just during classes. Often he'd say, My car's broken down, can you drive me to North Hampton the next town over? And I'll pick up the laundry. I said sure. And along the way you'd get Look at the way the angle of that light hits. You see the the way that woman uh brushed her arm there. And he wasn't trying to say this is a good thing or a bad thing He was just saying

Noted. As his daughters say he would always say go C do be. Go, get out into the world, see, look around you, do, make something, you know, relate. Have an exchange with somebody, B, take it in.

Go see do be. And that to me Along with Hampshire's sort of secret sauce of how they organized it. was it. I do not recognize the person who went into Hampshire in September.

of nineteen seventy one and the person who left in May or June of seventy five. I just completely rearrange my molecules and I have always had this extraordinary devotion and affection for it. And when I lost Jerry Um when we lost Jerry, his family

Obviously. Um Hm. Teaching had reached so many people that we all still gather and collect to talk about him what he and Elaine had had given us over those years and how transformative

that exposure to their generosity, whether it was artistic or human, it really doesn't matter. And I love the fact that in retrospect those lines were blurred. Some of the best times I've ever had in my life were at his house. You know, where we could we just go and listen. Yep, I really

look back also on my own history and the mentors who had the largest impact certainly had no clear boundary between sort of work off work hours and off hours. And and that's the same now true for me. That is to say I I don't distinguish. I mean I I I I understand that the world sort of Sunday night gets a little bit Unhappy.

And that I know Friday afternoon is some Say that I don't have that. I don't have that.

Um the cliche is if you love your work, you don't work a day in your life. And you know It is a cliche. I'm still a finding one at that. But it Um It's pretty true.

Um, the people I love are the people I work with. I work with my daughter. She's one of my producers. She teaches me stuff, as does my son in law, all the time. And uh people I mean, my cinematographer, we barely talk to one another. We have been working together. What Forty six years. That's incredible.

he was in Hampshire and now we just we go into situations and it's just sort of It's almost like telepathy. Where we just And all of it. If he if you were talking to Buddy Squires who's this extraordinary cinematographer about Jerry

You'd be hearing different sorts of things, but the meaning would be exactly what I've imparted about Jerry Linwin. Mm. How did your How did your father

respond if at all to your decision to push all of your chips under the table for this one thing. Uh, particularly given that you only had funds for one year. Uh

Ark are no. Uh, I think a lot of it had to do with some stuff that was that that befell him. I he was not as mentally sound as he should be. I came across a few years ago a letter from my mother to his mother her mother in law in which she's saying I'm dying

He can't possibly take care of them. And uh We muddled through, we did okay, and I think when I decided this he knew in some respects that I needed to get out of Dodge. that it couldn't be at the scene of the crime that is the death the place where my mother had died.

And uh I think Because he wasn't financially involved, he had no resources. He was in a kind of publisher parish. Uh situation with the University of Michigan, which eventually ended up with the parishing. Uh

h he was in no position to help. So it was really I was gonna do this and then I think he was happy for me that I had found the clutch necessary to put myself in gear because he's still the most brilliant man I've ever met. Like a Maserati, my younger brother Dis Rick described him as uh without a clutch. So you can rev the engine in the driveway, but you can't go anywhere. And that was my dad.

Depression or something that resembled depression and what if you don't mind me asking. No no no I I believe I I think we would all generally agree that it was probably bipolar. But uh no significant attempt was made at a diagnosis. He was eventually uh ended up at a uh sort of tertiary level university in Western Michigan and uh got somebody who was supposed to help him who didn't really.

And so we never really He was never really treated for that, but it it was uh Yeah, it it was it. Sad, sad life time. However He's the smartest person I've ever met.

He was an amateur still photographer and a professional anthropologist. And my very first memory The first little film strip that runs through my head. Is him Just couple seconds of him building a dark room in the basement of our track house in Newark, Delaware, where he was the only anthropologist in the state of Delaware. And then uh the next clip is of me being held in his very

a strong left arm as he manipulated the tongs in that finish dark room. One of the few things he finished, uh, in that eerie red light with those ghastly smells of the chemicals as I watch the miracle. of a picture come out of a blank page. And If you think about what I do

There is an anthropology to it? And it is rooted in the DNA. My DNA of my work is a still photograph. Even if I've got all the footage in the world. I will still often default. a real meaning to communicating with a single still image. And that's my God as much as it is Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mays. It's my dad with the kind of anthropology the

Um and so Mm-hmm. A lot of you know, strength and

I hope goodness comes uh came from my mother who I had a very short time with on this earth. I mean I We just passed this past April Um Sixty uh fifty five years without a mother, which i I have to tell you, Tim, is way too long.

To be without a mother. But at the same time she is present. every single day of my life in the way my father isn't. And yet I Actually have to pay him The honor of having

created not only me but my brother and my mother too and My brother Rick is much more Um understanding of this. And we just had a interesting conversation together at the Telly Ride Film Festival, which was supposed to be talking about us as filmmakers, and we immediately went to this Dynamic.

And uh he spoke about Him is feeling the physical love of my mother and me Always kind of pushing away and going out and doing things and having projects. And so the thing that I'm lacking is that sense of ultimate

security which he actually has Yes. not the ability to execute in quite the same way that I am. And so it was just one of the most amazing conversations I've ever had in my life. uh with the gift of my brother. uh speaking

truth to a situation that informs Every film I made. I mean my uh I was ha going through a crisis and my father in law my late father in law said to me Um I said I seem to be keeping my mother alive'cause I couldn't be present on the day she died, April twenty eighth.

is always approaching and then always disappearing, but I was never aware of that day. And he said, I bet you blew out your candles as a young boy Uh, wishing she'd come back. I said I did it my last birthday. You know. And he said, You're kidding.

And he said, But look what you do for a living and I said, What? 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 from that moment on I plowed towards finding a way I've never not been present. On um April twenty eighth, and for a long time it took me going to Ann Arbor with my then small children and renting a car and making a picnic out of it and visiting a grave that we had finally established. My father had not bothered to pick up the ashes, uh and became one of those

Forgotten. repressed memories of childhood and all of a sudden at this crisis we my brother and I realized you know what? We have to uh to do this and so we track down our ashes at some Godforsaken cemetery way outside of Ann Arbor. And put a plaque there and uh

For many, many years I would go there every year. uh with or without my daughters and turn it into um an event. And uh my mother's name was Lila. L Y L A. Um an old nineteenth century stone. She was named after her mother who was born in the nineteenth century. And when my oldest daughter, Sarah had her first child.

She named her Lila, L Y L A. She was born on uh January eighteenth, two thousand eleven. And uh I can't begin to tell you that we never said

Lila, we still in a even at this talk at Telluride Film Festival, we refer to her as mommy. Two men in their sixties, their mid sixties, referring to mommy because that's who she was, right? Her father went from daddy to dad. Uh our mother always was mommy. And I can't begin to tell you that though we never said the word Lila, it was always draped in black crate.

from April twenty eighth, uh, nineteen sixty five until My granddaughter Lila. was born in which case We say twenty times a day and we talk to her and she's beautiful and she um

You know, the birds sing and it's a wonderful Wonderful thing. Um uh measurably with what we were talking about before, anxiety and and the burden of that. That is uh that is really beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that and Being so forthcoming.

Uh I think that uh Yeah, not only is your personal experience Uh informative, I would imagine, for a lot of people listening. A as you mentioned, I mean the the similarity of blowing out the candles and wishing

your mother to be back. I I'm sure that Transcends. uh the the experiences of the two of you to many people who are listening who have lost a loved one of of one type or another. And I also think it's really important and uh courageous of you to talk very directly about your father's struggles with

with mental illness, with depression. I have Uh very severe bipolar depression on both sides of my family. And that applies to blood relatives, but also relatives by marriage. Uh my aunt died of a percocet plus alcohol overdose last year, which was certainly correlate correlated to depression. And so th this this this is really just a a way of saying thank you for talking so Vulnerably.

My my late father in law was an eminent psychologist, and I felt when he had given me this gift Um saying waking the dead that that's what I did for a living. I was obligated in some ways to

To be transparent. In my in my individual biography and life if I were going to continue doing what I was doing. seemingly so successfully. That is to say If I was going to feel

uh the ability to um talk about Abraham Lincoln, I needed also or Jackie Robinson I needed the ability to talk about Lila. and Robert and about my brother Rick and about Uh my granddaughter Lila and my daughter's

Sarah, Lily, Olivia and Willa and do so. With You know No differentiation. I I'm sure they at times would like to have

a a free and separate life, which they do have. Uh, and because of the notoriety of the film sometimes there's Uh people come up to me and talk to me about things that are emotional. You know, a veteran will say

about the Vietnam film, this is the best thing I've ever heard. This helps me, or I hear from another veteran that his best friend watched it and said he thinks he's okay now. I mean That's what happens. And I realize that that the emotional archaeology that I had said at the very beginning of my first film I wish to pursue. I was not interested in merely excavating the dry dates and facts and events of the past, but looking for an emotional archaeology that would sort of glue those shards, those dry, brittle shards together.

And I have to by saying the word emotional put an asterisk. I do not mean nostalgia or sentimentality. That's the enemy of good anything. But I do believe that there are higher emotions that we are frightened of, and so we would retreat to a rational world. uh most of the time where one and one always equals two When in fact what we want Out of our love, out of our sex perhaps, out of our faith, after out of our art.

out of maybe just something simple like a cup of tea or a we're looking at a sunset, we want one and one to equal three. And I'm looking for that. Periodically that. Yeah. improbable equation to obtain

in the films that we are working on. Well, Ken, I think that uh as a narrative alchemist of sorts that you you have managed with many uh of your films, much of your work.

to create that Uh. That unlikely. synergy of one plus one equals three. If you look at all of the ingredients, all of the elements that you've pieced together over decades Uh the the

This That the sum is greater than I'm gonna mess up this one. I always mess this one up. What is it? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There we go. Well but you know, Tim, that's exactly it. When we say that, let's just stop for a second and take a rational approach. Let's say the sum of the parts comes up to here.

But the whole is up here. What is in there? What is in there? That's the only question there is. There's the phenomenal world.

that we can see and and uh we know is reflected light. Filled with colours and sounds and all of these sorts of things. And there's a numinal world, an unseen world, which is Actually much more compelling if we knew how to trust and access it. And that's the big human dilemma. There's nobody

Gets out of this alive. No one. Gets out of this alive. And and this is a an amazing And we could be reasonably

Um Uh excused as a as sentient for lying in a fetal position sucking our thumb Waiting for that inevitable end, but we do not.

We raise babies and we tend gardens and we build buildings and we paint paintings and we make films and we are in conversation with each other. And we're keeping uh as Witt Marsell calls it the wolf from the door. The wolf is the apprehension of our own mortality. And that's what storytelling is. You know, storytelling is basically honey, how was your day? You know, and then you're required to edit human experience.

And how you edit human experience is really what it's all about. You know, honey, how your day. You know, it doesn't begin I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb. Unless of course somebody T bones you and that's exactly the way you describe it. But You say, Oh, you'll never believe what an SOB my boss is and then all of a sudden Aristotelian poetics that's not so scary. Aristotle wrote an essay called Poetics.

About storytelling, beginning, middle and end, protagonist, antagonist, climax, dane and all You begin to obey the laws of the editing of human experience and by sharing a story like raising a baby, like tending a garden, like building a building, we ensure a kind of immortality. Well said.

And the editing of the human experience is also one of those ever so Valuable. Invisible arts.

Right alongside. music and uh I want to remind people that Your newest work is country music. explores the h the history of uniquely American art form country music. And uh I have a a long description here that I'll include in the show notes. It'll also have already been heard in the introduction. Uh I'm holding it in my hand right here, A Story of America One Song at a Time. I cannot wait to dig in and it

premieres Sunday, September fifteenth. eight seven central. You can also stream it. And it's available on the PBS video app. Uh so you can find that on PBS.org and also on the apps. I'm very excited about this and I'm so thrilled that we were able to spend some time

Yeah. Uh is there anything else that you would like to say, Ken, before uh before we wrap up? I no, I think that I would let Merle Haggard, who we were very fortunate to be able to interviewed for this country music thing many, many years ago, six years ago and he passed away Soon afterwards. Um

He said it It's what we believe in, but can't see. Like dreams and songs. and souls. And I love that idea that songwriting

Creating songs, combining music. might be these things that we believe in but can't see. I've quoted you a couple of lines Um Uh Um

Hank Williams. you know, could you Johnny Cash uh At my door the leaves. are falling a cold wild wind will come Sweethearts walk by together.

And I still miss. I don't know. That's all I'm seeing. And it is a com if I sang it, it would be a combination of music and words. And it's Stuff that we believe in like dreams.

And songs and souls. Merl Hagard, one of the greatest of all, Emmy Lou Harris in our film. Later on, five episodes later, this is in the introduction that he says this, but five episodes later she said, You want to know what country music is? Get a Merrill record. Any Merle Haggard album. And put the needle.

uh just dating her. Put the needle on any cut. Any cut. It doesn't matter which one and begin from there. So I think if if you take it from this I always think when he ever appears on our film he's like Zeus. And uh I just think if you take it from this

This God from uh Olympus. Uh that it's the things that we believe in but can't see. Like Dreams. And songs.

And so You feel like you're dealing with that Numenal world that I was speaking about. that um You are Apprehending or trying to apprehend.

something that is just beyond our can No pun intended. And is Is there for us. if we expose ourselves to it. And I think that's the business of art. Uh Leo Tolstoy said, art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another.

Sounds pretty. Sounds pretty straightforward and simple and and I will sort of leave you with two great philosophers more Haggard and Leo Tolstoy. And

It seems easy, but sometimes it's complicated. And it's worth the complication. Ken, thank you so much for taking this time. I had I had just a Oh oh wonderful. experience bouncing around here in the ether having this conversation. And um I I highly recommend everybody check out Country music, pbs.org forward slash country music. They can say hello, give a give a hand wave on the internet at Ken Burns on Twitter. And this has been such a pleasure. Thank you, Ken.

Kim, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off. for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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