Episode 998: America 250 – The American Revolution with Ken Burns
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
4.6 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Newt is joined by legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns to discuss The American Revolution, his sweeping six-part, twelve-hour PBS series exploring America's founding struggle through leaders and ordinary citizens alike. Burns reflects on what he calls "emotional archeology" — his lifelong approach to history — and shares why he considers the Revolution the most consequential event since the birth of Christ. The conversation turns to his star-studded voice cast, including Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and Paul Giamatti, and the decade-long journey of bringing the project to life. Burns and Newt close on a deeper theme: the idea that there is "no them, only us," and what that means for America as it marks its 250th anniversary. The American Revolution streams free on PBS platforms through July 12th.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:08.4 | Welcome to Neut's World Podcast on the IHeart Podcast Network. |
| 0:13.8 | The Greatest American Inventions. |
| 0:17.1 | Today's inventions done more to reshaped daily life in the last 30 years than any other. |
| 0:22.7 | And it began not in a garage or a university lab, but in the Pentagon, the Internet. |
| 0:30.2 | On the night of October 29, 1969, a UCLA graduate student named Charlie Klein attempted to log into a computer at Stanford, |
| 0:41.7 | 350 miles away over a network called ARPANET. |
| 0:47.4 | He typed L, Stanford received it. |
| 0:50.7 | He typed O, Stanford received it. |
| 0:53.9 | He typed G. The system crashed. Those two letters, |
| 1:00.1 | L and O, were the first message ever transmitted over what would become the Internet. |
| 1:07.4 | Klein called Stanford the telephone to report what happened. His colleague reportedly laughed. |
| 1:13.6 | History doesn't always announce itself clearly. |
| 1:16.6 | Harpanet was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. |
| 1:24.6 | Cold War strategists worried that a nuclear attack could destroy centralized telephone |
| 1:29.1 | switching centers. The solution? A network with no center. Information broken into small packets, |
| 1:36.4 | each finding its own path through whatever routes remained available. If one path was destroyed, |
| 1:42.8 | packets would root around it. The concept was called packets switching, |
| 1:46.9 | and it was the revolutionary idea at the heart of the Internet. |
| 1:54.5 | In 1974, Vince Surf and Bob Kahn published a paper describing TCP slash IP, the universal language of the |
| 2:05.6 | internet. Before it, different computer networks existed but couldn't talk to each other. |
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