Ken Burns on filmmaking, PBS, Steve Jobs, and why he rejects AI-generated imagery as a threat to truth

Profitable advertising made easy with Axon. ai. Get over to access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And I believe we have Ken Burns in the reream waiting room. So, we will bring him into the TVP Ultra. Well, that's going on. Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

How are you doing? My pleasure. I'm great. Great to be with you. I would love to start with the first project you worked on ever because I'm I'm fascinated. Your career has such clarity, but uh finding a life's work is often the hardest part of going on the type of journey that you've been on.

And I'd love to understand um who you were as a child, where you found a love for film making, for documentary work, for history, and sort of go through from there. Well, I was born in tragedy. My mom had cancer almost all of my life and died when I was 11.

And a few months later, uh, when I was 12, my dad, who had a pretty strict curfew, would allow me to stay up late at night on watching TV shows, even on a school night. And he started to cry at a at an old movie called Odd Man Out.

And right then and there, I'd never seen him cry before, not when my mom was sick or not, you know, when she was when she died and not at the terribly sad funeral. And and all of a sudden, I said, I want to be a filmmaker. That meant Hollywood.

But I ended up going to Hampshire College in Amoris, Massachusetts of brand new and experimenting, still there, still experimenting school and most of the teachers were social documentary, still photographers and reminded me there is as much drama in what is and was was and all of that sort of combined by age 22 u to realize that I had a latent and untrained interest all of my life in American history and 50 years later I'm still doing the same thing.

How uh walk me through your process. Do you have a do you have a list? Like has your filmography played out the way you would have predicted a decade ago? How how many uh how many twists and turns have you run into in your career? Um zero. I mean obviously life throws a lot of stuff at you.

I live in rural New Hampshire.

That's what I made a decision to live New York leave New York City because I thought that becoming a documentary filmmaker strike one in American history strike two on PBS strike three meant I'd taken a vow of anonymity and poverty and I moved up here finished the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge got nominated for an Academy Award and everybody said you're coming back they'd warned me that if I went up there I'd die if I if I if I stayed I would die and I've I I listened to neither and it's made all the difference.

So I've been able to working in public broadcasting where I couldn't have made any other films any of the films any place but uh one foot tentatively in the marketplace the other very proudly out that I've been able to have directors cut for the next 40 films all of which have been broadcast first on PBS streamed on uh PBS.

So it's it's it's been good. So you you might have a 10-year plan with lots of different projects. Sometimes you may before you'd really gotten into something switch one subject to another. We've been hitting the marks for a pretty long time.

The real struggles are within these and you want to leave the kind of room to experiment, to be thrown a curve, and to figure out how to do it. The recent film on the American Revolution, which now has over 4 billion minutes of watching.

the first time PBS the first time PBS ever entered the the top 10 of streaming programs at the end of November with what I thought was a ridiculous number 565 million minutes is now over 4 billion so there's some pentup curiosity about who we are where we've been particularly what our origin story is uh so it's it's been a long interesting thing but every single one of the films a director cut and that's only possible because I've stayed in public broadcasting and And in in public broadcasting, I imagine we were just talking about uh some of the changes that are happening in Hollywood and how there's often a pressure to go bigger and that usually means bigger budgets.

Okay, you you made a $20 million film, your next one's going to be 70 million. Uh how have you thought about where where the business changes, what more money means, what more success, what more confidence means? Are there h how is how has the business side of your work evolved throughout your career?

Well, we've we've tried not to let the technological tail wag the dog to pick pick up one aspect of your excellent question. You know, we waited 10 more years when many of my colleagues had already switched to digital editing around 1990. We waited till 2001.

We didn't stop film until 2009 and then switched to digital stuff because we didn't want that tail to wag the dog. Um, at the same time, our model is um, you know, an interesting one. It's it's all grant funded. We don't have investors. So, you write a budget. It pays for your salary. There's no profit margin.

There's no contingency. And you empty that bucket. The film's either got to be done or you got to be raising more money. So, they're very expensive. These are labor intensive things, particularly when you take um, uh, you know, 10 years to do something like the Vietnam War or this American Revolution.

And so they're pushing $30 million. At the same time, I raise it all. So I retain that creative control and I relieve PBS of the burden of having to fund more of it than they they already do. Uh and so it's it's a kind of a good situation that to be in and it's really outside of the pressures of the marketplace.

So I don't think about increasing budgets. I can go from a $30 million budget to a 10 million and I'm still these budgets are high for my contemporaries. uh but they don't get to spend. And look, I could have gone save myself all the trouble of raising say $30 million for the Vietnam series that came out in 2017.

10 and a half years. I I I spent 10 of those 10 and a half years raising money for it. I could have gone into a streaming service or premium cable and gotten all that money in one pitch, but they wouldn't have given me 10 and a half years. And that's the point.

I can't tell the story that I want to tell with the depth and complexity.

I mean that film is now let's do the math uh that is 9 years old and it is still probably one-stop shopping even among scholarly works uh to aggregate all of the new scholarship into one place and nothing's certainly replaced it in film and nothing's that I know has replaced it in in scholarship.

So we're feeling pretty good about that. That's great. Has fundraising gotten any easier? Is it is it just as hard every every time?

Did you ever did you ever kind of did you ever kind of uh hit hit a moment where where you decided to maybe pick up return the calls from people that wanted to be more traditional financial backers in a particular No no because this the sacrifice in control is it um you know so we as the films got longer you know in the beginning the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge uh cost $180,000 I probably made two cents an hour over the five years I did it so they're more zeros on the other side.

So I guess it's proportionally harder. I do have a good reputation and one I wish to maintain. And so we're not looking for compromises or ways to sort of get that cash in hand. You sort of part of the duty of running the marathon is to run the marathon.

And the reward is in not only crossing the finish line, but every single moment along the way, the million steps that you take where one part of you is saying no and another part maybe weak voice is saying yes.

And so these are often really complex, you know, struggles in which the analogy of a million problems is not an exaggeration. Uh you just can't see a problem as pjorative. you just see it as inevitable friction to be overcome like picking up that step and and and making another step.

After the adoption of digital editing, what was the next technological advance that you found useful? I don't know.

I'm going to let I um I don't I don't know what I'm doing on your show, but I'm really glad you I'm really glad you reduced it to to uh initials because you know what is there's nothing I mean people say PBS nothing could be less you know sexy than that but technology business programming network I mean KFC has behind it Kentucky Fried Chicken you know I knew all my life or most of my life what it was now it's KFC and I got a this is a really good move.

No, I I I went reluctantly to digital editing because during the 90s, a lot of the interns that would come and work for us, they could see working in analog as some sort of badge. Uh but about halfway through the 90s, I realized these kids want to be race car drivers and I'm telling them how to shoe a horse.

It just doesn't make any sense. And so eventually, almost for them, we switched to digital editing. It's been incredibly interesting.

There are still some things, you know, stuff I might tell my editor that I knew would take two weeks now take uh, you know, two days and things that took two days take two hours and things that took two hours now take two minutes.

And there's, you think there's um salvation in that way, running to daylight there, but there are as many traps as many uh places of quicksand. So, you just want to be sort of careful about about how you approach it. What is your opinion on uh digital restoration of uh archival footage, archival imagery?

Technology seems to be advancing there and yet there's risk. It's terrific. Yeah, there are a lot of risks. You know, a lot of filmmakers are going back to original film masters. They are taking a digitized thing.

And one of the reasons why is that you may have a one and a zero, which is absolute in one way, but as you change the programs, you need to have the machine that did the original thing, and now they're not there. They're in a museum someplace, and you have to go get that thing and figure it out.

So, I know some filmmakers that are I I I can't do it just economywise because I've got 250 plus hours of programming, you know, and that's reels and reels. every half hour is about a reel um you know of of stuff. You can do the math yourself. There's probably you know you know 500 hour 500 reels in all of this.

So it's almost a prohibitive expense. And so you're hoping that your next iteration of masters will be able to read not only the contemporary films that you're working on but the ones you made 20 years ago and updated.

But the restoration part of it to be able to painstakingly do that sort of stuff is is has been really terrific. Can you tell me the story of the Ken Burns effect? Yeah, sure. It's pretty it's pretty interesting.

I got a call in November of 2002 from a guy claiming to be Steve Jobs, you know, and I went, "Okay, yeah, right. " And then I realized very quickly it was Steve Jobs. And he said, "I live in rural New Hampshire. " I said, "Okay. " He said, "Would you come and visit me? " and I said, "Yeah.

" So, a few weeks later in early December of 2002, I visited him um in Certino at Apple headquarters and he ushered me into a room with two engineers and he showed me this stuff. And as I said, if I'm a lite now, you can imagine what I was like in 2002. You know, I could barely do word processing.

And um he said, "So, look, we've figured out a way to download or upload whatever it is your pictures that you take and that we can do all this.

" this and they showed it to me and I was kind of like, okay, a a fairly superficial version of what I've tried to do to wake up the past, not just, you know, visually to explore energetically the surface of the of the of the photograph you're doing.

In a way, the feature filmmaker I used to want to be has a master shot, a long shot, a medium shot, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, insert of details. But here was just a very simple sort of panning, zooming through stuff. You could add it. you press a button and add a music thing.

And and I said, you know, okay, cool. You know, whatever. And and and he said, "Well, you know, next month in January of 2003, every Mac computer from now on will have this. " I said, "Okay, cool. " And then he said, and then he said, "And we want to keep the working title. " And he I said, "What's that?

" And he goes, "The Ken Burns effect. " I said, "I don't do commercial endorsements. " And he went, "What? " And the two engineers kind of blanched. I think they were um you know aware of this Titanic temper which I never saw and he come with me. So we go back to his his office.

We talk for a while and we end up becoming friends till the rest of his life and when I was in the valley I'd stay at his house on the futon above the garage and the plats at PaloAlto and knew his wife and his daughter.

We even gave an internship to his daughter Lisa um the the famous Lisa and um you know it was a terrific friendship. But what I did is I walked out an hour later with about a million dollars worth of hardware and software which I turned around and gave to nonprofits. Usually Final Cut Pro to schools that needed it.

Um you know computers that that nonprofits needed it. I think a couple fell off the truck because we needed a computer. But but But 99. 9% of it went went to a good cause.

And I think he was intrigued that somebody in a world in which it was all a one or a zero for him or somebody would say, "Okay, I'm going to, you know, you should charge. " And the world tells me, "Oh, you should have charged him for this. " I said, then he called it the pan and zoom effect.

I wasn't interested in having my name on it in so far as it could help other stuff. And it ended up, you know, giving me and and way too short in that regard. um a a really a really good friendship with you know not arguably one of the five most important people uh in the United States in the last 150 years.

It's remarkable. What what is your process for truth seeking and uh understanding history? So, I have in my editing room and I've had for years and years and years a lowercase neon sign that says it's complicated uh in cursive. Um, and that can mean a lot of things.

One is when a filmmaker has a scene that's working, you don't want to touch it. But finding out new and destabilizing facts um obligates you to do that. It's not true of every place, but it does in our shop. And so, I think it's the pursuing truth isn't the question. It's there. You can find out the facts.

Uh you just have to wade through a lot of [ __ ] because today everything is just dump truck after dump truck of manure dumped on top of other manure. And it's just hard.

It's one of the reasons why mostly it's to manage a complex narrative with lots of different balls in the air and hundreds of characters in the case of the American Revolution.

Not just the bold-faced names who are, you know, just statues, you know, out in the park collecting pigeon [ __ ] and not and not real dimensional complex human beings.

We try to do that, but introduce you to scores of other characters and and and set a narrative in motion that's at its heart a military one, but is also adorned with very complex political and social and and geopolitical and economic sort of factors. Uh, and so that that takes a while, but also making sure you're right.

I mean, we lock the film, meaning we're not going to do any more work on it. We promise.

We promise the sound editors and we unlock it cuz we found out that word 16 battleships deaths months to we've got a little footnote and it says two scholars of of of of a repute said that that, you know, I'm making this up said that that was right. And then you find out a third scholar who says we're not sure it's 16.

So you scour the narrator's already read and gone home and you're not going to get him back. So you scour all of the writen stuff, you know, hours and hours of stuff and you find a perhaps and you copy it and you move front of perhaps 16 and then you sleep better, right?

Like that's the kind of level of truth seeking as as you put it. And I don't know any any place else that kind of is that that kind of concerned about that level of of accuracy.

But if you add that up a billion times, then all of a sudden you have something get ready to blow your whistles that has four billion plus minutes of watching. It's amazing. Another sound effect. Thank you.

Um, can you uh help me understand some of the through lines uh emotional elements or takeaways or or uh the the fingerprints that you try and leave on your work across the across projects, not just single. Wonderful. Thank you. That's a very thoughtful question.

when I was working trying to raise money and I look like 12 years old and I was trying to get people to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Yeah. Um I remember writing a sentence is that I was not interested in the mere archaeology of dry dates and facts and events. I was interested in an emotional archaeology.

And now I didn't mean sentimentality or nostalgia. That's the enemy of good anything. But I'm looking for that thing that animates art, that animates faith, that animates a lot of the most intimate stuff that we care about.

And that's where you say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but you never ask yourself what's that difference where one in one always in your work has to equal two. In my work, you wanted to equal three. You want to have that unknown factor.

So I guess once when we were working on our jazz series, the uh trumpeter and and composer went Marcela said, "Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. " I'll I'll relate it back to the revolution. George Washington, you know, is the indispensable man.

Without him, we don't have a country. Period. Full stop. And in a world in which we're more interested in bottom up than top down, it's exhilarating to be able to resurrect somebody. But he's also deeply flawed. He owns hundreds of human beings in his lifetime.

And as the writer Rick Atinson says, you know, you can't square that circle. He is rash on the battlefield, risking his life and therefore the entire cause.

Um, he also made some pretty bad tactical mistakes at at the largest battle, Long Island, of the of the war and then later the same tactic, leaving a flank exposed at Brandy Wine, which the British take full example of.

But, and this is the biggest butt I know, he's able to he's able to hire subordinate talent that's better than him, and he's not threatened by it. He's able to inspire men in the dead of night to fight and to remind them that they're not from New Hampshire or Georgia, but they're new a new thing, Americans.

He knows how to defer to Congress. He's incred He has incredible humility. And more than anything, he just waits it out. He he understands he doesn't have to win. He just can't lose. And he does that successfully and defeats the greatest empire on earth. And even more than that, he gives up his power twice.

The second New York is is the British leave New York in November of 1783. That is like eight and a half years after Lexington and conquered. He goes to Annapolis where the Congress is meeting and resigns his military commission.

He's brought back out of retirement to run the constitutional convention and then is unanimously made president and after two terms he walks away from it. And as rich as as George III, the king of England said, um if he did that, then he's truly the greatest character of the age. And so you can have both.

And a problem in a binary world in both computers and media, we want to have a black hat and a white hat. We want to say good or bad. And and and you can't do that in our own personal lives and we ought to extend that to our history. Yeah. The dialectic. I love it.

Um yeah, you have been very fortunate in that it feels like there's no project too big for you to undertake.

And I'm wondering if there's ever a desire how you balance going big with a a massive story that everyone has at least some conception of versus going back to something like the Brooklyn Bridge and refocusing on something very narrow. Is that something that appeals to you?

Do you feel like you've graduated, you've done that, you never want to go back or is there something talk about the tension there? Yeah. Well, it's a that's another excellent question. I mean, within these big huge epic series are all the intimacies that were contained in the Brooklyn Bridge.

And we do have a kind of exhalation. They're big series. We could just say Civil War, baseball, jazz, World War II, national parks, the Roosevelts, Vietnam, country music, and now American Revolution. But within them are I don't I think that's fewer than 10 films. There at least 30 plus films that are shorter than that.

And so they they experiment more with what you're talking about that that earlier experience.

But but again the more important point is that any given minute in a film say a series a lot of people would say okay you're the director but you assign a different producer for each of the in the case of the revolution six episodes. We don't do this. We all we all do work on all of them and they all are shaped.

Same with the editors. They they cross episodes and and they and they do more than one. And so what happens is you have a kind of unity of presentation, but within each scene you have the same kinds of intimacies, the same kinds of small moments that you would find in Brooklyn Bridge.

And you're also elevating not just George Washington to a more dynamic and complex and understandable and real truer um version of who he is, but you're introducing people to scores of others that you've never heard of cuz I never heard of them. you know, a 10-year-old girl named Betsy Amler who's a refugee.

Most of the war, we don't think of Americans as being refugees unless you realize how bloody this was. What a civil war as well as a revolution it was. What a global war. And you're dealing that involves more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American.

And when you say Native American, you don't say them. There are all these nations to our west that are as distinct and separate culturally, economically, diplomatically, militarily as France is from Prussia at that time.

And if you think you're going to just make it them and not say French, Prussian, uh, you know, Delaware, uh, Lapi, Cherokee, you've made a huge mistake and left out an important dynamic. Or take half the population, women, and say, "Yeah, we don't really care about that.

" or the 500,000 20 plus percent of the population that is enslaved or free black Americans. All of that makes a unbelievable dynamic.

And if you add the violence to something that we say is, you know, this sort of bloodless, gallant myth that attends the revolution, just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts and they and they are great thoughts, as great a thoughts as ever been thought. Um, but it ain't the whole story.

And when you try to integrate that whole story, man, you start to have something that fires on all cylinders. And you know, that's what wakes me up every single morning of every day. Yeah.

When I think about uh like what has changed in America throughout my life, um I I I go to Apple, I go to technology, I go to business. And your work has focused, you know, you've obviously touched on business, but you focused on politicians and generals and athletes and musicians and artists.

And I'm wondering about your perception of the business community, the technologists over the history of America, their interaction with your other subjects, how you want to integrate them into the stories that you tell. Well, you know, I I've done four wars.

It seems disproportionate because they're all big long series, but wars are huge sponsors of um of technological change and all you have to do I made a film on the second world war called the war and it ends because of one of the greatest technological changes that you could possibly imagine.

Yeah, the Civil War happens because back in the 1700s, um, an industrialist, Eli Whitney, who will invent the kind of exchangeable parts and the beginning of an assembly line thing, uh, goes down and sees a cousin who's lamenting how long it takes her enslaved people to card a a pound of cotton.

and he invents the cotton gin which revitalizes cotton and slavery and set in motion the wheels economically and technologically that will sponsor this civil the civil war that's upcoming.

So it's all the way through that and we're constantly thinking about and dealing with those changes and and you know one of the stuff in the my head full of ideas you know if I were given a thousand years to live which I won't I won't run out of topics in American history is invention and technology and I'd start with I'd start with Eli Whitney you know because there's a underbelly to it and I go to Steve Jobs because there's an underbelly to it you know I got kids I am you know we're all addicted to this and you know I mean, my new statement is, and it's such a lackey statement.

I apologize in advance for offending your sensibilities, but I say social media isn't. Oh, yeah. And artificial intelligence is Oh, they're not social. Yeah. Ever been in a room of people or a subway car or a block where everybody's on their phone? That is not social. Yeah. And artificial is artificial is artificial.

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure you get asked this question all the time, but uh what walk me through some of the advice that you give for aspiring documentarians. It's really so bad and platitudinous that I'm embarrassed almost to repeat it because there's no laws.

And everybody I know that is a working documentary filmmaker, meaning they don't have a side uh teaching gig, you know, to pay the bills, that are actually making, you know, living uh supporting their families, have all come at it at different ways.

And so I realized that there's no set career path the way there might be for a feature filmmaker or a doctor or a lawyer. And so what I tell them is one is Socratic. You got to know yourself, right? Who am I?

Film is intensely glamorous for teenagers and at a college level the first the you know the introductory classes are jammed with people and then all of a sudden next year it's pretty winnowed down and there ought to be a mechanism within us.

This is the Socratic dimension that says you know what I don't think I have something to say. I thought this was going to be easier than it actually is. I see how difficult it is.

And then the other one has to do with that difficulty that there's way more talented people than there are possibilities of making a film in this economy even with the explosion of documentary films now and some of it quite direct. So obviously some of those people who didn't deserve to get a budget got one.

Um is that is that you have to persevere.

I mean, I used to keep on my desks two, three ring binders um filled with hundreds of rejections just for that first film on the Brooklyn Bridge just to remind me, you know, that it doesn't come easy, you know, and and that was sitting juaposed from a little thing on my door, a quote from a theater empressario in Minneapolis Globe Theater named Tyrone Guthrie.

He said, "We're looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of. " Again, not a very good English sentence, but it just means just bite off more than you can chew and learn how to chew.

And a lot of that is what I try to impart um when people ask me the questions and I warn them in advance that it's just going to sound like I'm sure I've just described things that you guys know about what you do and I'm sure everybody who's listening knows yeah those kind of apply to what I do too.

And so I I I think there's basically in in his essay on self-reliance Emerson says do whatever inly rejoices.

You need to actually figure out what this thing is that is you say I to of which there are millions of eyes and which one is the authentic and how do you proceed to do whatever inly rejoices as he said is it refreshing to change centuries do you think your life would be different do you think um the projects the quality might suffer if you had at some point when you realized that this was going to be the career you had started linearly and done American Revolution, Civil War, World War II, then Vietnam, and you just go year by year as opposed to bouncing around a little bit.

But yeah, it's not even bouncing around because only in retrospect can you do that, right? Exactly. I just My best friend was a book salesman and he I was sick and he threw on my bed a paperback a trade paperback version of David McCulla's The Great Bridge, The Epic Story of the Building of the Bridge.

I read it in one gulp. I said, "We're going to make a film about it.

" And then, you know, we're thrashing about to what to do, and my future wife and I are driving through Western Massachusetts, and we pass a Shaker Village outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts with this beautiful round stone barn, slammed on the brakes, and said, "Who are these people who made these buildings?

" That was the second film. Another guy was trying to convince me to do a film on on Huey Long, the turbulent southern demagogue. And someone else said, "Boy, you know, you did a great film on the Brooklyn Bridge. You know, the Statue of Liberty's 100th birthday is coming up. why don't you do something on that?

I said, "Yeah, but I'm not going to make your film. " And so you if you give me the money, I'll do it, but I'm not, you know, so Liberty Mutual ex uh you know, insurance before they got the [ __ ] emu uh gave me money for the whole thing. And and I made a very complex film which also got nominated for an Academy Award.

But each one of those first four films come from different things. And so you begin to sort of make choices. So at any given moment, you know, and I didn't think until I was in the middle of Vietnam, not the middle, at the end of it, we were locking it.

I was looking at a map we made of the Yadrang Valley in the Central Highlands, and you could see the positions of the Vietkong and the NVA and the Americans. And I thought, boy, this could be the British moving west on Long Island towards Brooklyn. And I looked up, I said, "We're doing the revolution.

" So they come they everything comes that way. And it's much better, you know?

It's like it's like, you know, a batter, you know, you just got to read the pitch and at that given moment the it's a fast ball, so you're going to hit it this way or or or hit it to the opposite field or you're going to try to choke up because he's throwing junk and you got to figure out how to respond.

I mean, it's it's literally I'm so glad there's not a plan, you know, or a chronological stuff and and and and and you can do is take those 40 films and then put them in chronological order and you know that waste some I I I just have to pass something along.

Uh a lot of people in the in the chat are saying that uh they love your work obviously, but uh particularly that they uh became much closer with their fathers through watching documents. This is true and mothers too.

I mean, I particularly with regard to baseball, I don't know how many people come up and said, "I've seen baseball more than you have. " And I go, "What are you talking? " They said, "Well, every single January during the Hot Stove League, my dad and I would watch it.

" And my dad just passed away, but my son is old enough. You know, I mean, I've had so many moving things about that or or mothers taking kids to to baseball games or going over battlefields. So, there's a nice, you know, we talk about how divided we are right now.

All you have to do is look at my films and see we're way more divided at other times. And what brings us together are stories. The power of stories neutralizes that dialectic that you were mentioning.

Neutralizes this false notion that there is a simplistic binary that we can pose impose on everything and figure it all out. You can't. And the complexity of us in the end reminds us that there's only us and know them. So I make films about the US but I also make films about us.

You make the chat also uh uh wants us to ask about AI. I already have an idea of of your reaction. I I appreciate your your uh approach of not letting technology guide the work, but are you at all excited at some point in the future of being able to, you know, recreate a a scene from history using Oh.

uh image or video generation tools. Not really. I don't I I don't think so. I think every once in a while when you're trying to run down a portrait of Benedict Arnold, who's not a popular person in the United States, so there's no real visual evidence left of AI can be helpful in locating that.

You know, I I use it when I Google a question. I notice how quickly the AI answer comes up. I have to take it with a grain of salt right now. It's not that it's wrong. It's just you may not be offered all the nuances and possibilities.

That's going to change and whatever, but not to write a thing or to generate an image. There's a sanctity. I mean, if if you say a picture is worth a thousand words, then if you make it up, then what is it? I mean, when when everything is is um permissible, what's true?

And I just I I I mean, that goes back to your question, you know, what is true? And and I think it's really important to at least have, you know, it's like a kid.

You remember this when you're young, four or five years old, and your mother or your dad sitting on the bench at the park and you're playing, but every once in a while you got to go and touch home base. I want to be that person. Yeah. Very cool. You mentioned McCulla and I'm a fan of Robert Caro.

Uh yeah, we just interviewed him for a film we're doing on on LBJ and the Great Society. I can imagine. Um, are you excited about where that genre of historical writing is going right now? Oh god, yes. I mean, there are so many heavy hitters.

I've been out on the road for the last year, a lot of it, with Rick Atinson, who's twothirds of the way through his trilogy of the American Revolution. Is the first talking head you see accidentally in our film, but no accident. And the last talking head you see, there's Doris Karns Goodwin. David McCulla has left us.

Steven Ambrose has left us, but I was just on a on a on a podcast with Ari Emanuel and um and and Walter Isacson yesterday talking about, you know, what what the Mount Rushmore that wasn't a president would look like and then having great arguments with him and his friend Ben Perski uh and the four of us, you know, arguing and fighting for now the fastest hour that I that I've spent.

So, there's so many there's so many good writers. Walter's influenced two of my films. you know, I he's one of the biographers of Benjamin Franklin, and he also did our he also wrote a biography of our first non-American topic, Leonardo da Vinci. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us, Ken. This was very informative and fun. Yeah, John has done a great job keeping it together, but uh I think he's he's definitely one of your biggest biggest fans, and you've come up you've come up a lot.

Yeah, often times when I can't get a hold of John, she's probably watching and uh yeah, we watched uh so many documentaries together. It was fantastic. What's her name? Uh Marjorie. Marjorie, thank you for watching. Good job. Thank you. Great stuff, Ken. Thank you for joining. Be well. Cheers.

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