Ken Burns

Right.

So anybody who says, oh, I'm this, it's actually diminished.

The person who is humble is humiliated.

by their atomic insignificance, as one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in the 19-teens, a reporter, is actually inspirited by that.

And I wish to be inspirited because I think that's the only condition in which we're then able to make the kinds of decisions, the creative decisions, the personnel decisions, the thoughtfulness or to have that regard for not necessarily following the well-worn path.

Oh, you know, I feel so grateful, Joe.

You know, my best friend once said to me when we were much, much younger, we'd been friends for more than 50 years.

He said, there's only one center of the universe and you're not it.

It was a great gift.

It was a really great gift.

And I don't know what I was doing or whether I was even doing anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me to remember that there's no center of the universe.

Yeah, out there.

And that's another thing.

I was thinking, you know, there is that beauty Emily Dickinson called sunsets and sunrises, the far theatricals of day.

It's like a perfect description of it.

But when you go out and it's 10 below zero in my town and I'm up a mile and a half out of town, which has five or six streetlights, so there's no glare and you see the Milky Way and you just, you are just, what can you do but just be humbled by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are

But that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have not significance but just would add something.

So I live in a state.

Politics comes through all the time.

Everybody's got a lawn sign, right?