#2336 - Ken Burns

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Ken Burns (0:06)

Shrink by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

All right, we're up, Mr. Burns. Pleasure to meet you.

Ken Burns (0:14)

It's my pleasure, thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

I'm a huge fan, dude. I've been watching your work for so long, and I've always had so many questions about how a person like you becomes a person like you, how you become the preeminent documentarian of our time. I mean, you have so much work out there. It's really extraordinary. And all of it on PBS, right?

Ken Burns (0:35)

Right, all of it, all of it.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

Which is also extraordinary.

Ken Burns (0:38)

You know, it's the Public Broadcasting Service. It's the Declaration of Independence Applied to Communications, just as the National Parks, you could say, was the Declaration of Independence Applied to the Landscape. I mean, like manifestations of really American things. It may not seem obvious to us, but it seemed obvious to me that that's where I should go. So, I had lots of, I headed for the hills out of New York 46 years ago, because I thought I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff. And I lived in the same house that I've lived in since then, in the same bedroom for 46 years in this tiny little village in New Hampshire. And when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, that was a film called Brooklyn Bridge, everybody said, oh, you're coming back to New York, you're going to LA. And I said, you know, I'm staying here, it's so labor intensive.

And I can sit here in front of you and tell you that every single one of my films is a director's cut. I'm not going to sit here and give you an excuse. Well, that one, they wouldn't let me do this or they didn't give me this amount of time. And so I could, with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say, I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War. And they'd give it to me. But they wouldn't give me the 10 and a half years it took me to take. You see what I mean?

Joe Rogan (1:53)

It's the time.

Ken Burns (1:54)

It's the time and the ability to marinate the ideas, to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate the various scholarships, as you know better than anybody. There's lots of different viewpoints and perspectives. And you want to find a way in which you can kind of, if not average them out, you can find a way in which you can understand them and you can have a conversation, a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss the complexity and the undertow of any subject. You pick it, the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution, most recently.

Joe Rogan (2:26)

How early on did you realize that the only way to get this full autonomy was to do with PBS?

Ken Burns (2:36)

I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it and I honestly can't do it. I realized that I was striking out trying to raise funds from folks and the people who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment for the Humanities who were this, all required me to give it for free as I still do to PBS. We had foundations and that and so suddenly that dream of being a filmmaker, which I had since 12, I wanted to be a filmmaker at 12, of the communion of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experiences, suddenly I had to go, you know what, it's okay. I'm trading hundreds or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of viewers on a smaller screen and they're not watching it together but they're having an experience and I can do something over time. I can do a Civil War series and it can be 11 and a half, 12 hours and get deep, deep into that experience. Or Vietnam, which is 18 hours, 10 episodes, or Country Music, The National Parks, jazz, baseball. I mean, there are like 40 different things.

Joe Rogan (3:36)

American Buffalo.

Ken Burns (3:37)

American Buffalo, most recently. And Leonardo da Vinci, the first non-American topic, we're just finishing the American Revolution. It's just, it was right for me. It was right for me.

And I like the fact that they have, BBS has one foot in the marketplace and the other out. That foot is tentatively there. And so it also reaches all parts of the country. It's the largest network in the country. It's 330 stations. And they really serve rural stations mostly. It's not this Upper West Side, Nob Hill, snobby kind of thing. It's homeland security and crop reports and weather and continuing education and classroom of the air as well as children's programming and what I think is a pretty damn good prime time schedule. So it works in the context of all of America, not just some of America.