Ken Burns

What's interesting is I've had the great privilege of interviewing Barack Obama for eight two-hour interviews.

I've got a couple more to go, but there's no rush because what's happened in the recent political administrations is that it's constipated the scholarship.

So by this time, there'd normally be 25 books of scholarship on Barack Obama's presidency, but it hasn't happened.

And so there's no urge to go and do it till you can get to that point of triangulation.

That is to say, the perspective that comes from new scholarship and new things in which you're not solely dependent on scholarship.

38 maybe it's 23 i don't so i guess my when do you feel comfortable that you're like okay i think i can tackle it i can tackle an era now where new information isn't going to change i used to say 25 30 i still believe it i do believe that because of the rate of information i i wish there was more scholarship and i will wait for that before i really begin to try to structure and put together the obama thing it's really just unbelievable stuff but i'll give you a

an example that's close to tell you.

So we did a film that came out in 2017 on the Vietnam War.

It was 10 episodes, 18 hours.

If I had done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in 1985, America was in a recession.

There's a Pacific Rim, but we're not talking about us.

We're talking about Japan is ascendant.

And we would see Vietnam as this ball and chain, this sort of like perpetual rain cloud over- It was a scar on our-

So if you wait, if I waited 20 years to 1995, we are the sole superpower.

We're in the middle of the largest peacetime economic expansion.

We have just fought a Gulf War with all, all, all of the, you know, assembly of people.

We would say Vietnam is important, but it's, you know, we've liberated, we've escaped the specific gravity.

If I waited 30 years,

And it's 2005.

We're bogged down in both Iraq and Afghanistan.