Ken Burns

speaker

195 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 14 Nov

Ken Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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The MeidasTouch Podcast · Ken Burns Discusses his New Series "The American Revolution" · 14 Nov 2025 podcast

Yeah.

is about that.

So what we're trying to do is engage all of these stories.

I was talking to the conservative scholar Yuval Levin, and he said, you know, the founders would come to this moment, they would be unsurprised that somebody was seeking kind of monarchical power.

They'd be devastated that Article 1 of the Constitution, which is about the legislative branch, that that would have abdicated their, what they felt was fundamental role in being the check

the governor, the determiner of what the executive was going to do.

And that would be the big shame of it.

And that's from a conservative scholar.

So I have a feeling that when we're in the moment and we're so dialectically preoccupied, everything's red state or blue state,

you know, rich or poor, young or old, gay or straight, north, south, east, west.

We forget the reconciling power of a good story.

The novelist Richard Powers said that the best arguments in the world won't change a single point of view.

The only thing that can do that is a good story.

It's a kind of benevolent Trojan horse that comes out in the night not to murder the citizens of the city or to burn that city, but to remind them of the complexity of human life, that the dialectic of politics and of our computer system, everything's a one or a zero.

do not permit us to enjoy and so i've i've i've labored really long in this field it's really tough to be disciplined but it the rewards are great because you do have a chance to speak to people um that not necessarily agree with your particular politics or one's one side or the other and i was just recently on c-span which has this morning a call-in show they have a democratic line a republican line and an independent line and um

you know, I've been on it before and usually you're dodging bullets from one and the other.

And all of them began their questions, which is, we really love your work.

And so I just thought, okay, great.

Maybe a story, you know, when a person's in crisis, you go to a pastor or a professional and they ask about your parents and when you were born and your childhood.

Maybe for a country in crisis, in division, way more divided during our revolution, there are loyalists

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