From WXXI news this is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made on September 18th, 2022, when PBS premiered a three part series called the US and the Holocaust.

Here's how PBS billed the series.

The three part, six hour series that examines America's response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century.

Americans consider themselves a nation of immigrants.

But as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge.

That series was created by a team including Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

We spoke to Novick when the team created the series on Vietnam, and today it's a chance to talk to her about documentary filmmaking, the power of history, and an event coming up next week at MSK.

She is the featured guest at an event, and there's also an event on the MCC campus in which students and the general public are invited to a presentation on seeing history, a conversation about Visual storytelling.

Lynn Novick, welcome back to connections.

Good having you.

Thank you so much for having me.

I just have to apologize.

I'm getting over laryngitis, so I may have to take a sip of water every now and then, but it's great to be with you.

It's great to have you, and we appreciate you making it work for us.

I want to tell listeners we'll link to information about Lynn's visit coming up here.

And she is supporting the noon event on Thursday, April 24th.

That is open to the public with a media sponsorship there, and we're glad to do that.

So it's a seeing history, a conversation about visual storytelling.

And my colleague Beth Adams will sit down for a live interview with Lynn that day to talk about, well, the some of the themes we're going to talk about this hour, and I'm sure they'll go in different directions there as well.

Lynn, let's go back to September 18th, 2022.

PBS premieres this series.

What did you and Ken and the team hope that that series was, was going to accomplish with your audience?

Well, we made the film.

As is the case for many of the projects Ken and I have worked on, because it was history.

We didn't know.

We didn't want it to learn.

We wanted to understand how it was that, America was not a place where refugees were really welcome as the rise of Nazism was unfolding and as the catastrophe, you know, took place in Europe.

And so we decided we wanted to explore what were our immigration policies.

Who was welcome here, and when and how did that change over time?

And what was going on in the United States as the Great Depression was unfolding?

And World War Two was exploding?

Now what we're we've sort of, I guess I would say a lot of us have what we know about the Holocaust is focused on what happened in Europe, if we know about that.

And we really wanted to turn the lens onto the United States.

And so that precipitated a multi-year process of exploration.

Getting to know people who had survived, who had made it to the United States, either during before the war or after, people who came here as refugees and went back to fight against the Nazis.

And just getting a sense of the politics, the culture and the history of that time was revelatory, to say the least.

It really was.

Lynn, when you go into a project like that.

you know, we're all human.

We all have ideas about the world or certain biases, but some documentary filmmakers are, you know, unabashed about making an an advocacy piece in certain ways.

And some documentary filmmakers are bringing their lens to do their best to present history, maybe stories that were undercooked or not known.

Well, doing their best to kind of scrub out any preexisting notions.

So tell me about curiosity and what you what you bring to a project like that and how you explore it in ways that feel like it does not become just advocacy, you know?

Thank you so much for that very, very thoughtful question.

And I really appreciate the chance to to talk about this, because documentary is a very capacious genre, and there's lots of different ways that people approach it.

And as you say, there are many filmmakers who are making a film to make a point or to make an argument or to convince you of something.

And for Ken Burns, myself and our collaborator Sarah Botstein, who directed the film with us, Jeff Ford, who writes our scripts and our editors, all of our team, we are not interested in making arguments.

We're interested in telling stories that are true, that are fact based, that are, let's say, effective, affecting rather.

And that through that narratives that people tell us, we can understand the past better than we would otherwise.

And so we open a project without an agenda, without having, a plan of what we're going to say.

And we learn from the material.

What is important?

What happened?

Why?

With, you know, no thumb on the scale, as Ken always says.

So it's it's really not the purpose is not advocacy.

The purpose is exploration, education.

Hopefully enlightenment.

If I may be so bold to say that, that just figuring out what happened and oftentimes there will be people in our films certainly in our advisory group, that disagree vehemently about the reasons why certain things have taken place and what the motivations were of the actors who are making decisions.

And so we allow we welcome that disagreement and kind of argument about how to interpret the events of the past.

The past is super messy.

It's not laying out there on a silver platter for us to just hand it to you.

It's very complicated.

And so that's the joy of what we do actually, is trying to figure it out and put together the narrative that to us and to the people we have advising us, really is the best explanation we can come up with for what happened, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I wonder is your career is going on?

I mean, we're talking to Lynn about, in many ways about the most recent work, the US and the Holocaust.

But, you know, Lynn's resume is much longer than that.

And certainly working with colleagues like Ken Burns, who listeners know well, of course.

I mean, it's a long list of projects throughout your career.

You talk about having an ethos of not putting a thumb on the scale it feels now.

Lynn, like almost everything in society gets viewed through this lens of, well, is that musician?

Is that a is that a right leaning musician or a left leaning musician?

Is that a Reagan appointed judge or an Obama appointed judge in ways that was not discussed, this overtly and this politically before?

And so I wonder if people, you know, if they question, well, you know, as Lynn Novick, right or left leaning, is Ken Burns right or left leaning?

And do I want to watch it?

Therefore, do you feel that that inflects some of what the public is consuming more than it used tours?

Is that just my perception?

Well, I think I'm not the only one to say that we're all affected by the political and media landscape that we live in, and it has become more fragmented and more divisive and more polarized.

And how we navigate that is a huge question for all of us right now.

And I don't think I have any answers.

One of the things I've come to realize more and more, as we've lived through some quite momentous events, is that when you're in the middle of something, you really don't understand what's happening.

And people told us that about growing up in Europe.

You know, as Hitler was coming to power, you couldn't grasp the realities of your situation or during World War Two that when you're in the middle of something, it's just impossible to fully understand the implications of the things that you're seeing and feeling and hearing.

And so I look forward to hearing what historians and documentary filmmakers will say about this time, probably about 20 or 25 years from now, when we understand better how it all plays out.

and I but I do like to hold on to hope that there is a space somewhere in the public media landscape, certainly, where we can, shall I say, rise above the polarization and find ways to come together around shared stories about our past.

And sometimes that's very challenging, and perhaps no more so than now.

But I do not give up hope that it can happen or that does happen.

And I've seen it happen in our work time and time again, especially if we're telling a story that people are not familiar with but are curious about.

And we're not telling you what to think, and we're not, hectoring you about what you should feel or not feel about events that happened in the past.

We'll just, you know, lay it out for you.

And when people tell their personal stories, pardon me?

You hear a fire alarm going off in my building?

I actually don't hear it.

Oh, good.

Okay.

we can reach people through direct connection to other human beings.

And that is how we learn about what's going on in the world and our history.

I think listeners know I'm a big fan of the work of my guest this hour, Lynn Novick and her colleagues.

and you know, one of the first interviews I did hosting this program in 2014 was with Ken Burns.

I think that was day two.

That was a pretty big thrill.

Great way to start.

Oh, wow.

Without a doubt about the the Dust Bowl.

I'm trying to think anyway.

I mean, I think we talked just about his entire.

He was coming to Rochester.

Oh, great.

He was coming to Rochester for an event, and he's always been so generous with his time.

Lynn is generous.

I mean, I want to mention again to listeners that there's a series of events coming up next Thursday, April 24th.

There's a 5 p.m. event at around the Country club, and MCC is glad to host Lynn for a dinner and presentation.

And there's a noon event at MCC that she is proud to be a media sponsor, and that they would love to see members of the public for an event called Seeing History A Conversation About Visual Storytelling.

That's a live interview that my colleague Beth Adams will be hosting with Lynn Novick that day.

So and we've been talking about Lynn's work on the U.S. and the Holocaust, which was released in in 2022.

I want to listen to a clip that has been on my mind a lot lately, and I think it relates to the work that it relates to the work that you do, and it relates to who sees it and how we even get our work in front of audiences and who's in the dialog and who's elevated.

And what I don't want to do is I don't want to gatekeeper and say that, well, only credential people can talk about something or but at the same time, you can the team you have such experience and skill, and qualifications to tell these complex stories and, and now that there's a podcast and and media landscape.

Well, let me just go ahead.

Here's what happened.

There was a recent debate that summed up a lot of these platforms, I think, and how fragmented we are.

Joe Rogan, host, of course, one of the most listened to podcast in the world.

He does numbers, of course, way, way bigger than I do and probably bigger than PBS or a lot of legacy media sources.

And one of his regular guests lately is a comedian named Dave Smith.

Now, Dave Smith has become a regular commentator on Israel and Gaza.

Smith and Rogan have strong views about Israel, and a British journalist named Douglas Murray has very different views about Hamas, about Israel, etc.. Now set aside.

That's not what this is about.

And that's not we're talking a lot about set aside what supposed sides they're on.

What I think is interesting is how each of them views the current dynamic, where a growing majority of people, especially men, are getting their information from popular influencers and brand builders and internet content creators who don't have much or sometimes any expertise.

One of them is Daryl Cooper, a self-styled historian who has recently said that Churchill was the real villain of World War II, not Hitler, and Hitler would have been happy to make peace if not for Churchill.

Joe Rogan had Cooper on his show, but not, you know, actual historians.

So this extended clip that I want to listen to includes Rogan and the British journalist Douglas Murray and comedian Dave Smith, with Rogan and Smith claiming that anyone's opinion is worth putting in a documentary, or putting out a podcast, or putting on a show and elevating whether they have actual knowledge or not, that we're all equal.

And they begin by talking about Daryl Cooper, who Rogan finds interesting and Murray finds dangerous.

He's not doing a podcast like talking to people, okay?

Nor is he doing scholarly work, nor is he working in the archives.

Come on.

I mean, this is he is not the historian of our era.

He's not claiming to be.

This is the thing, Joe.

This is like punching jelly.

No, but you you don't you don't.

But consider his work.

What I'm saying.

Because I don't need to consume endless versions of revisionist history.

I understand, but it's revisionist history.

If you listen to his work, it's not revisionist history.

He's basing it on historical.

But yeah, I know, but okay, so this is my point about jelly.

It's a shapeshifting thing.

Comedian or historian?

He's not a comedian.

Historian or podcaster would be historian or actual historian.

You say he doesn't claim to be a historian, but he's pumping out tens of hours.

Of what?

Neither does Dan Carlin.

He doesn't claim to be a historian either.

You see, my point about the move?

It's like some weird jujitsu move.

I don't know where you say, hang on, you know all about this as well.

You say, I'm not a historian, but I'm going to spend my time talking about history.

I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing.

I'm not an expert on this, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing.

It's a weird move.

Yeah.

I'm still slightly bemused about this move from I'm an expert on this, and I have used to.

I'm a comedian.

I've never claimed to be an expert on anything.

This is the problem, Joe.

I mean, if somebody.

You have to claim to be an expert on something, to have an opinion on, something you don't have to be.

You don't have to be.

So this is like, I'm not a historian, but I'm pumping out history.

But I'm not an expert.

But I'm talking all the time about.

But you're not even talking about specifically on what he just said.

No, I'm saying this is my point about this.

You say I'm not an expert.

So what's the solution to not talk about it?

No, it's to have more experts around.

It's Doug Douglas Murray talking to Joe Rogan and and Dave Smith.

And I'm curious to know what you make of that.

I mean, Murray is basically saying just make sure that the voices who are I'm, you know, that you're bringing on actually know what they're talking about.

where I'm coming from, I'll just say, without engaging directly in this particular, you know, these people and what they do and don't know about whatever they're talking about, right?

That I agree with the premise that expertise can come from different places.

So, for example, I made a film about people who were incarcerated, who were earning degrees, college degrees while in prison, and they are the experts of their story.

We're not going to learn about them from experts.

We're going to learn about what it's like to be in prison and to go to college and to deal with, this enormous transition from incarceration to freedom and reckoning with their past lives and the mistakes they've made and their families, and thinking about how the world sees them and how they see the world.

And all through the lens of education.

And they're developing enormous expertise about many issues in our society.

And I value their perspective and their opinion and their nuanced understanding of complex questions.

But an expert who has studied the same thing might not have, and I could replicate that with every project we've made where.

So, in other words, someone who's lived through something, who's a witness is going to have a particular type of expertise, someone who has studied it and done the best to understand why, prohibition happened.

Let's just say, why did we decide to, make it illegal to transport, manufacture and sell alcohol when people thought it would be a good idea?

It turned out to be a terrible idea.

So, you know, people can have opinions.

Hopefully they would be informed by something that gives them, the right word is not legitimacy, but a perspective that's informed credibility.

They've taken the trouble.

Credibility comes from you know, well, I guess I'll back up and I'll say, I believe there are facts, there are truths.

There are things that happened.

And yet we also know that over time, you know, we reinterpret history, we learn new information.

So we can't necessarily say something that was a fact in 1800 is 100% still considered, you know, a fact today because maybe we've learned more.

So human knowledge is always changing and growing.

Our understanding of ourselves in the past is also evolving.

And so I think it's it's tricky.

It's a very tricky question about who we raise up and who we ignore.

Yeah.

And so I feel pulled in multiple directions listening to a clip like that.

I mean, I think a lot I think a lot about conversations we've had and lessons I've learned as a journalist.

one example, the disability community, has a really consistent refrain that's powerful that I've never forgot, which is nothing about us without us.

And, you know, they want they want to be at the table as the experts of their own story, which is absolutely understandable.

And, you know, you get tired of hearing about quote unquote experts talk about you when you're not in the room.

And so but and that applies in so many different directions.

And it's really, really powerful.

And on the other side of that, it's a strange and kind of, indelible thing that leads to internet fame these days.

I don't know how to quantify it.

I'm not exactly sure what the right secret sauce is for.

For young men, it's mostly other, sort of similarly aged men the Theo Vons, the Joe Rogan's, the Daryl Coopers, who have kind of exploded and and they don't tend to have a ton of expertise in a lot of the subjects they talk about.

Daryl Cooper has become, you know, Tucker Carlson held them up as some sort of, countercultural historian because he's blaming Churchill, not Hitler, for the Holocaust and minimizing the deaths of millions of Jews.

And, you know, you wonder, like, how did we get here?

How does this person end up at the center of the story when they don't have the credentials?

And why is their message so appealing?

Meanwhile, why are fewer people watching docs?

Why are fewer people listening to public radio?

How do you I mean, it's a challenge for all of us, and I don't know what to do about it other than to just kind of try to talk our way through it and make sure that we're on different platforms and we're taking our mission to different places that maybe we didn't in the past.

I don't know how you feel about that.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I agree with that.

You can't, play the exact same game, I presume.

You know, I really don't live on social media very much and I don't.

And so this is I know this is going on, but I'm so busy doing the work that we're doing that I don't, I don't have expertise, I'll say on what to do about this particular problem.

and I think if you have a loud microphone and you get taken a big microphone, you get taken seriously, right?

And then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So yes, I would hope that people with those megaphones feel some sense of responsibility to do their homework.

I think that's so I think that's so well said and so important because I was listening to Dave Smith in that clip, the comedian who's saying, like, I'm a comedian.

I'm not saying I'm an expert.

Yeah.

But now if there's 50 million people listening to you, right, all of a sudden it matters more whether you know what you're talking about.

If you're just talking to people in your basement and three people are listening.

Okay, but if God, if a million people, if half a million people are listening to your podcast, then I think it's different.

And I think that the responsibility probably would be different.

but, I mean, I don't know, I don't want to gatekeeping either.

I don't want to be the guy who was like, well, there's only journalists and then there's non journalists and no one should.

I mean, I don't want to do that either.

I want everyone's voice to be respected.

And that's part of what we try to do in creating a public square with the show, if that makes sense.

Lynn.

Absolutely.

That's that's exactly I think that's beautiful.

And I think we can just expect of people who have, who want the microphone to have some sense of, obligation to do their homework and to not say things that are so provocative and, disruptive of the, you know, that just get people riled up and angry.

I mean, what one of the things I've learned lately for because of both the work on the US, on the Holocaust and seeing what went on there and the project that we're going on now on the history of crime and punishment in America is just what a powerful emotion fear is.

Fear is probably the most powerful human emotion.

I wish it were love.

I wish it were joy.

I wish it were, you know, curiosity.

But fear trumps everything.

fear is the thing that we will, It will, it will basically drive us to do things that we wouldn't otherwise do.

And understandable.

We have to survive as a species.

So that's why fear is so powerful and why it has such a hold over us.

But when people are using fear, yeah, I want it for a number of reasons right then.

And that's, you know, that's dangerous.

So I guess I guess I would hope that anyone with a microphone or a megaphone is aware of the power they have.

let me grab a phone call, because if you don't mind, I'd love to ask you more about your next project in just a second or, Dario in Geneva and Finger Lakes Public Radio was.

Hey, Dario, go ahead.

Hello.

Thank you for giving me the very powerful microphone for a second.

No problem.

Hi.

I just wanted to make a comment on how I think that, popular media spheres podcasters, especially big ones like Joe Rogan, tends to mistake the opinions or perspectives of a single person as a replacement for empirical data or expert based information because you can't refute an individual's perspective or story.

And so they say, oh, this person experienced and said this.

And while that is technically true, where it's coming from might not exactly be accurate or pertinent to the discussion at large, but it becomes the replacement for proper information and opens the gateway to warped perspectives.

Yeah, Dario, it's a really good point, and I actually think that it actually gets deployed in two very different ways.

One of them, and I won't mention any news networks, but news networks do this when you've got a news department and you have an information department, or if you've got a talk show host or media commentators or prime time hosts who are not journalists, what what they will do, what the news department will can do is say, well, people are saying X, people are saying that, you know, a president wearing a tan suit is the sign of a president who doesn't love America.

And you're going to like what is what is that about?

But by saying people are saying and all you have to do is cite your prime time host who said it the night before, then it becomes news.

That's not really news, and that's a way to kind of manipulate the news, to push an agenda.

And then on the other side of that are people who I think are acting in good faith.

And they heard something and they think that just hearing it on a well, listen to podcast is an indication that it's credible because it's, you know, a top 20 podcast.

And, you know, why else would this be on there?

So I don't think it's malicious.

in that way.

I also don't necessarily know that it's the best source to say, well, in Novick, this ought to be featured in your next documentary, because people are saying it.

what do you think, Lynn?

Yeah, no, it's quite a good device to say people are saying, and you don't really know what that means.

So, you know, it's, there's all kinds of verbal devices or tropes or effects.

People have to elevate something or to add more weight to something that shouldn't really have any weight, I suppose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, this is really I'm getting a little out of my lane, honestly, because I'm, I'm mired in the 19th century right now.

You know, when we're trying to sort of figure out from sources that we can, what's the history of the story we're trying to tell and how things can get twisted around in the very fast world we live in right now.

Is is, it's hard to even really grasp it while it's going on.

I'd rather live in your world, where you get to go back decades and centuries.

but let me ask you, have anything you want to add there?

Is he there?

yeah.

Go ahead.

Do you think we, as a culture, can combat this replacement of information and sources where they're replacing them with opinions?

How can we combat that as, educated, listeners to these, to these podcasts or information or news or whatever?

Yeah, it's a really good question.

And I would I would start by saying Dario and this is not just because Lin's on this program, but really learning history and the context and the power of history through smart, well credentialed filmmakers.

Documentary filmmakers is a great place to start.

I think understanding your sources is, is a good place to start.

I think we should be teaching confirmation bias, recency bias, motivated reasoning in school to middle schoolers all the way on up and probably reinforcing those messages all the way through higher ed for people who go and, because I think we have to understand our biases, I get affected by it all the time.

I'm curious to know what Lin thinks, but, I mean, I think about your work on the various, series.

I've already seen that you and the team do Lin, and I think, you know, that's a great foundation of knowledge, but.

But how do we evaluate what's credible now?

well, one of the one of the tools that we use is what we would call triangulation, which is, you know, if you hear something that sounds like you're not sure that could be true to on your own, try to do some homework with sources that you would trust that you think are legitimate or that have, have, an ethos of trying to get at the truth and actually work with facts and as you can verify something through multiple sources.

And maybe that is true, and maybe it's new knowledge that we didn't have before, and that happens all the time.

And that's great.

That's exciting.

And, you know, the internet is a very dangerous place though, because I get served up to you is just the most popular thing, what the algorithm thinks you want to see.

So it does.

I wish I had had training and how to do this, since I'm too old to have, you know, learned how the internet functions in a way, right?

I just use it without really thinking about it too much.

I mean, I used to say when we were first doing the filmmaking work with Ken Burns in the 1980s and 90s.

Well, when the internet first started, I remember saying to my team, don't use Wikipedia.

You have to go into a book and you have to find a source for whatever it is that we're looking for.

You can't trust what's on Wikipedia.

Well, I mean, we've all evolved.

Wikipedia has a lot of, you know, fact checking.

And I'm not going to say whether everything on Wikipedia is true, but I think there's a lot of my point is only it's good.

The internet has.

Yeah, an enormous amount of data and information that is reliable, and parsing it and figuring out what is trustworthy is, is a challenge that we all face every day.

Every single day.

Yeah.

And so the last thing I would say is, I'm, I try to teach myself this all the time.

I'm not trying to lecture from the mountaintop.

I miss flawed as anybody, but I try to remind myself that when my mind changes about something, or I learn a piece of history I didn't know about, or if I really start rethinking, a bias or an opinion.

That's not a moment of weakness.

That's a moment of strength.

That's a really powerful moment.

and we don't have to tie every belief we have just to identity that is immovable.

I think it's a very important thing to teach kids that that you, that you will go through life and you will not have it all figured out.

And it's okay to not have it all figured out.

It's okay to be humble.

It's okay to listen more than you talk, and it's okay to understand where your biases come from.

I struggle with that all the time, but I think that that's a really good thing that we can be doing.

and then I trust really, really good journalism and credentialed experts and, and people who've been doing this for a long time and people who are so good at it.

And after we take our only break, I'm lucky enough to have just one of those people on this program.

Lynn Novick, who is with us, director and producer of the US and the Holocaust, as part of a long list of outstanding pieces of work that you've probably seen on your public media, places like PBS.

And Lynn is coming to Rochester, as a guest of MCC, and she is the media sponsor for a noon event next Thursday, next Thursday at noon on the 24th, my colleague Beth Adams is going to be hosting a live conversation with Lynn Novick, and they're going to be talking about seeing history, a conversation about the power of visual storytelling.

And that should be an outstanding conversation there.

They would love to see you there for that.

We'll have information in our show notes if you want to attend, and then just get an event that evening at around the country club as a guest of MC.

So a lot going on, and we're going to come right back and and talk more about what is next for Lynn and the team.

You mentioned a little bit about the series about Crime and Punishment, and we're going to talk about that next on connections.

I'm Evan Dawson Wednesday on the next connections, Ellen Smith of Keeping Our Promise joins us with an update on how the new administration's immigration policies are helping civics people who helped the United States military in countries like Afghanistan.

Then, in our second hour, a conversation with local recycling leaders answering your questions on what can and cannot be recycled, composted, and more.

That's Wednesday.

Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Rochester Area Community Foundation, presenting Evening Out with the Arts, a celebration of arts access featuring chamber music, ballet, live painting and more.

Wednesday, May 14th at the Harrow East Ballroom.

Tickets online at Rack f.org.

This is connections I'm Evan Dawson, so Lynn mentioned this next project and can you give a sense to listeners?

Lynn, how you and the team decide what stories to tell?

And then if there is an average for how long you can?

Yeah, I know it's going to change.

And I know probably every time you think you're near the finish line, then something else pops up.

But give me a sense for how that process works.

Yeah.

So we don't pick a topic lightly because we know how long it's going to take and what it's going to cost and what's going to be involved.

And so often the case that projects will kind of percolate on a backpack burner for a while while we're thinking about, should we do this or should we do that?

And maybe events will change our mind, or we'll find out about a resource that would make the project really doable.

And honestly, the idea of doing a history of crime and punishment in America has been something that Ken Burns and I and Jeff Ward and Sarah Botstein been talking about for about ten years, since we were working on college behind bars and realizing that we didn't know anything about our criminal justice system, truly the history, and that we knew a fair amount about what was going on around us in this era of mass incarceration, but really did not know.

I would say for myself, I knew almost nothing about how the justice system operates, why we have prisons, what the police to what are the different states and the federal government's rules.

I just really, honestly knew nothing.

So that's a really exciting opportunity to decide to make a film about something about which you don't know that much, and you assemble a group of people to advise you.

As I was saying before, people with lived experience of incarceration, historians who have studied that, people who have been judges, prosecutors, police officers, with historical perspective, and we basically sit in a room and start to hash out what should be in the film and over time we have, put this together.

It's coming out on PBS next year, and there's actually a Rochester connection, which I wanted to bring up.

one of the really extraordinary characters that we've come across is a man who grew up in Rochester in the 1820s.

He was part of the free black community in Rochester.

And, his father died when he was about six, and he ended up being sent as an indentured servant to a wealthier family because his mother couldn't take care of him.

And to make a long story short, he ended up in, juvenile detention.

It wasn't called that, but, he misbehaved when he was a indentured servant away from his mother at age six.

And so he ended up in something called the House of Refuge in New York City and eventually never really was given the skills to sort of survive in society and ended up in and out of prison for 20 years.

His name is Austin Reed, and he wrote a memoir of incarceration when he was in prison in New York state, off and on, and the memoir was discovered about ten years ago and published.

And it's an extraordinary document, told in the first person.

So as you were talking about expertise, he is an expert on what it was like to go to prison in New York state in the 1840s.

And so we're telling his story, among many other stories in the film.

And how often are you finding remarkable stories like this?

And and then you end up saying, I don't know if we can get all this into the film.

I mean, the cutting room floor is going to be filled with great stuff.

Of course.

Yes, that's that is actually the challenge.

That is actually the job, if you want to put it in a nutshell, is to cast your net wide, collect an enormous amount of material and then sift through it and then figure out what stories have depth, what stories really captivate us, what stories help us understand the larger context, the human dimensions of something?

What if we're talking about something like crime and punishment can be very impersonal, so individuals telling us what it was like is enormously helpful.

So, you know, I don't know if everything you see in the film, there's probably 100 other things that aren't there that we knew about and decided not to put in that.

Make sense?

Yeah.

And and I'm, I'm always sort of thinking about how history connects to recent events.

And I'm certainly not going to ask you to weigh in on fixing current politics.

Lin, that's not your job.

It's above.

Thank you.

It's above everybody's pay grade.

you know, and but I'm thinking about this week, you know, you have President Trump welcoming buchele from El Salvador, who, you know, as much as people might recoil at a person incorrectly deported from the United States.

And now, in one of the world's harshest prisons, and the leaders of our country and El Salvador are kind of going well and nothing we can do.

what's what is interesting about Bukele is he came to power when crime was high and people wanted something more authoritarian.

And I wonder if there is throughout all of history, if there is the sort of natural push pull where, when, when crime or public safety is viewed as more of an urgent problem, do we lean more authoritarian?

And then over time, do we kind of put our gaze back on making sure we protect all human rights and due process?

And is that an optimistic pose for me to strike this idea that, hey, we figure this out over time to try to find a balance as opposed to, you know, keying in on what looks like atrocities, whether it's in the 1800s and 1900s today.

Yeah, that's very, very thoughtful.

And I'm probably not fully prepared to answer it.

But I will say, as I said before, that fear is such a powerful driver.

And one of the fascinating things we've learned is that, criminal justice policy tracks with fear.

It doesn't necessarily track with crime.

So you could be existential fearful about economic insecurity, terrorism, climate change.

infrastructure problems, illness, you know, any number of things.

The media feeding us a diet of scary things, which we want to watch.

And so fear health care, I mean, any number of things that are truly frightening.

And sometimes this, feelings of foreboding and dread, there's not much we can do about all of that sometimes.

Or leaders don't have solutions, but they can make us feel safer by focusing on crime and that this is a new, not not new new theory, but it's a deeper understanding of how we make decisions as a society that may not be the best for us.

Yeah.

And your insight about fear being perhaps the most powerful of all human emotions is really interesting.

I mean, what I think my favorite movie listeners are getting the movie recommendation.

Here you go.

Okay.

I think one of the only perfect films is Albert Brooks is Defending Your Life.

And, the concept of that film is this is this afterlife where we go after we die to a place called Judgment City, where the universe is deployed, to decide if our human lives were lived with an absence of fear, or at least not dominated by fear.

And you go on trial for the life that you lived.

And it's an examination of whether you were too much controlled by your fears.

So fear can be powerful in different ways, Lynn.

I mean, it is it can, it can really sort of arrest our ability to change and to do what we think we should.

or it can be a survival instinct that we, we need to have.

How how has fear factored into some of the storytelling and what you were seeing in this Crime and Punishment series?

Yeah.

it factors enormously in different ways.

in that.

Understandably, we are all afraid of violent crime happening to us or someone we love.

And it can happen and it does happen.

And so, unfortunately, we listen to the loudest voices in the room sometimes, or we just are driven by fear and want to make it go away.

And so we sometimes that an anecdote or a particular horrific crime story, drive public policy and not to the not for the greater good.

And you also see political leaders on all sides.

This is a bipartisan, issue that leaders on every side of the spectrum get involved in.

They want people to feel that they're in control, that they're going to make you safe, and they're going to feel a lot of pressure from the public to do something.

That's one of the refrains we hear a lot do something, do something understandable.

And sometimes the doing of something might require a long term commitment to, let's say, drug treatment, better schools, you know, any number of things that are social factors that will cause disorder and crime to go up.

if you're the mayor of a city or you're the governor or you're a senator, you're probably not able to fix those things so easily.

But you can look strong and smart on crime by raising more harsh, sort of set of policies.

And this is what the dynamic started to happen in the 70s essentially, till now.

Before that, things were a little bit different.

And we'll have to watch our last episode to get into a deep dive about this.

But I think we see that it's not new in the 1970s and 80s.

There's sort of a push and pull across American history, and we go through periods where fear is less of a driver, and sometimes one is more of a driver.

What's the series release plan?

It'll be on PBS in the fall of 2026.

So about 18 months from now, I guess.

Yeah.

All right.

Clock's ticking.

let me let me, let me grab another phone call from Fred in Brighton.

Hey, Fred.

Go ahead.

Thank you for taking my call shortly.

I appreciate some of first time caller, long time listener.

it was interesting, you know, that your, your guest is talking about fear, and earlier on, you were talking about Joe Rogan, who I don't listen to.

I've heard quite a bit about him.

and also some other people who I have not heard of.

and a lot of it, I think, has to do with people being, manipulated by fear mongering.

And I would like to go back to the original 800 pound gorilla in the middle of the room, which was Rush Limbaugh, and I think there was a failure.

on the point of.

I don't know if it would be the mainstream media, but, he would it was an entertainer, but nobody called him out for that.

And so a lot of people, for better or for worse, took him seriously.

And I guess my question is, is, is there some way, you know, with all these people who are out there, you know, doing their podcast and things like that can be identified as having, political bent or just, public opinion.

And thank you.

I'll take my your answer off the air.

Yeah.

Fred.

Thank you.

First of all, thank you for calling.

Thank you for listening.

It's always lovely to hear from people for the first time if they've been listening for a while.

And I very much appreciate it.

And the whole team here does as well.

there's a lot of interesting stuff there, Fred.

I guess I would think about, connecting Limbaugh to some of our modern habits.

And here's how I would do that.

First of all, I saw a recent study, and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about this a lot, where teenagers and younger kids, single digit, who use TikTok, 50% say that they wish TikTok was never invented.

But it does exist.

It's on their phones and they use it all the time, so they know that it's probably not good for them, or at least not in huge numbers, not in long stretches.

But they do it anyway.

To not a great habit.

They recognize that, and if it didn't exist, they'd feel better off, but they're going to consume it.

Limbaugh was kind of the same way.

I think people knew ultimately that that probably wasn't the best form of entertaining people and dividing people.

And, you know, that's not a career that I would have wanted for myself.

I understand if you listen, if listeners, if you listen to Rush Limbaugh and you liked him, that's fine.

But I don't know that it was good for the country.

So I think Fred is making a fair point there.

And we do need to think about how we consume and what we are, where we're getting information from, who we are elevating to the status of someone we trust.

by the way, I don't dislike Joe Rogan.

you know, he's earned a lot of success.

I like the idea of being open to hearing all points of view.

He definitely has that as an ethos.

I understand Douglas Murray's point that Rogan has, tipped toward the conspiratorial or the credentialed lately.

And Darryl Cooper's a great example.

You can't sway me on Daryl Cooper when Daryl Cooper says that Hitler was not the villain of World War two, I think we've lost it.

But, but overall, I think the notion of fear, I think that's part of what Lynn Novick is telling us, is that fear is so powerful that it gets, it can drive policy, it can drive political campaigns, it can convince the public to go along with things, especially if they're scared for their families or their safety.

And, probably just a reminder to us, Lynn, to be aware of it, that fear is powerful and that sometimes it can be used against us, and sometimes it can be a powerful survival tool that can be helpful.

I mean, it's never all one thing, but it is powerful.

Yeah.

And I was just to bring it back to, the U.S. on the Holocaust.

I think, you know, we we set out to make the film to try to understand, you know, as Hitler took over more of Europe and the Jews, the persecution of Jews became, more and more evident.

And it was not something that had to be discovered after the war, you know, why was the United States not willing to welcome refugees and the polling during the 30s, during the war and after a really didn't change much.

and the polling the public really felt we don't want to let people who are trying to flee Nazi ism come to the US, mostly Jewish people, but other people do, and it was fear.

So that's just to bring it back to that.

There was a sense that these are not people that are us.

These are the other.

These are people who don't belong here, don't take away jobs.

I'll do whatever anti-Semitic tropes were there that you couldn't trust them.

And there's a whole host of reasons, but generally it was fear and fear that it would be bad for America to welcome more immigrants because, even though America is a country of immigrants, at times of insecurity, you know, the people who are the other are the threat.

And it was pretty tragic to see that even as news was coming of millions of people being killed, there wasn't a sense among the broad American public that we should do anything about it.

And that's pretty heartbreaking.

yeah.

And, Fred, if you want to mark the Limbaugh era as the start of the commodification of fear in the media, there's probably some case to be made there.

you know, he really wanted his listeners to fear Barack Obama and the idea that he might not have been born in this country.

And what would that mean in this?

He is sort of a foreign agent.

Those fears are totally irrational, but they're powerful.

Barbara Ann Brighton.

Hey, Barbara, go ahead.

Hi, there.

you were talking about when, Mr. Burns was in Rochester one of the time.

This was in 1999 or so, right around there.

when he did the, Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony film and, I just wanted to register my disappointment that it was only a half an hour, really, or whatever.

It wasn't a full documentary, and I wondered if Lynn had anything to say about that.

And also, I wondered if they were considering, more women's history for another, another film.

Okay.

Thank you, Barbara Lynn.

Yeah, well, I wasn't there for that event.

I think the, the the film that Ken and, colleague named Paul Barnes made about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony.

It's called not for ourselves Alone.

I believe it's a two hour film, but they probably only showed a half hour of highlights when it came to Rochester.

And so, you know, I agree it could have been longer.

There could be more told about women's history for sure.

And I'm definitely interested in exploring some themes.

I haven't quite figured out what they would be, but there are so many extraordinary women whose stories never get told, and I think it would be beautiful to tell them.

We do have a story in our history of crime and punishment, of several incredible women, so you'll get to know them in the larger context of, history of prisons and incarceration and reform.

and vigilantism.

There's some amazing women who we have a lot to learn from.

One of them is her name is Kate Richards O'Hare, and the other was to be Wells.

So thank you, Barbara.

Always good to hear from you and Dennis in Pittsford.

Hey, Dennis.

Go ahead.

Hello.

Thank you.

in the late 60s, I read a book called, It was, the report of a commission, Presidential Commission on Crime.

And the book was something like the Challenge of Crime and Free Society.

And, and it talked about the levels of crime.

And, you know, we've we've kind of gone through higher levels and gotten back down to those levels.

And yet at that time, it was considered so serious that there was a presidential commission when there, you know, you must have run into that.

And that figures in your work.

Caitlin.

Yes, yes.

I believe you're speaking about the report of the Kerner Commission, which put out the Kerner Commission was formed in 1967, in the aftermath of a lot of, urban unrest, riots and rebellions and crime was going up and the commission took a year to study the problem.

the president Johnson, you know, asked them to look into it.

And, the recommendations were that we have segregation and poverty and lack of opportunity and the ghettoization of people is driving crime and, resentment and fear.

And so we need to address those problems that was the that was the conclusion that came to us at the time.

But yeah, but the the question of crime.

President Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt declared a war on crime.

President Johnson declared a war on crime.

Crime is has become a more and more important sort of factor in our society in the 20th century.

And to this day.

Lin, I've really enjoyed the conversation this hour, and I just want to close with this maybe 30 or 40s or so.

So your series that have come out, I mean, they come out with a splash.

What would you say?

I don't know if there's a way to characterize the the response to the US and the the Holocaust, but what stands out to you about some of the response to that work?

It was it was really beautiful and gratifying to hear from so many people how much they learned from watching it, and how it helped them understand our own history and how we are tied into the history of the world.

And my favorite comment to get is always, I didn't know that.

I did not know that.

And that that really is very meaningful.

And I think also the chance to get to know some people who were in their 80s or 90s, even 100 that we interviewed, who are no longer with us, some of them.

Yeah.

So, you know, we get to it's it's like a magic portal to the past to speak with people who lived through it.

And when they're gone, they're gone.

But we're really grateful that we have their testimony in the film.

And that makes it, hopefully live for, you know, many generations so vital that that that touched a lot of people.

I think just hearing from these these people who were children in the 30s and 40s about what it was like to grow up in that time as a Jewish person in Germany or Czechoslovakia and see Hitler come to power and slowly begin to realize that the ground you're standing on is not solid.

Lin, I want to thank you for taking the time, director and producer of the US and the Holocaust, among many others.

We'll see you next week, April 24th, Thursday in Rochester.

Thank you for the time today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Have a great rest of the day.

Lynn Novick and from all of us.

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