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At Barron's

Ken Burns on the American Revolution, AI, and More

At Barron's

At Barron's

Business

4.720 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2026

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This 4th of July weekend, revisit Andy's conversation with filmmaker Ken Burns. This interview was recorded on April 29, 2026.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

At Betfair we know that nothing is certain in football, least of all when it comes to England.

0:07.0

Maybe it really is coming home this summer. Maybe it isn't. Maybe we can squeeze three number tens into our lineup.

0:15.0

Maybe we've only got one ten and he plays up front. Maybe 48 teams is just too many. Maybe some of them aren't as bad as you think.

0:24.4

Everyone's got an opinion. Back yours at Betfair. 18 plus gamblerware.org.

0:29.8

Hey, it's Andy. Ken Burns is a filmmaker who needs no introduction and his latest documentary

0:35.7

series is the American Revolution. Burns is also

0:39.5

the CEO of Florentine Films. This interview took place in April, and were re-airing the conversation

0:46.2

for this July 4th weekend when we'll celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of our nation.

0:52.6

Burns and I talked about everything from the role of

0:54.9

business and business people in the revolution to how he finances his films and why you won't

1:00.7

see an AI generated script in one of his films anytime soon. At Barron's, we'll be back next week

1:06.9

with more original interviews of CEOs in business, finance, and technology.

1:18.3

Hello, everyone and welcome to Ad Barons. I'm Andy Surwer. And welcome to our guest, filmmaker Ken Burns, Kansas, great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:29.0

Great to be with you, Andy. Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. Great to be with you, Andy.

1:33.5

Great to see you. So, of course, Ken really needs no introduction, made the Civil War, made baseball, all these incredible documentaries. And his latest one, the American Revolution is out now.

1:39.5

It's fantastic. I highly recommend it. And you've gotten great reaction, I would imagine, Ken.

1:46.5

Yeah. So we had a national broadcast, you know, that old-fashioned thing, in the middle of

1:51.8

November and collected about 20 million people, which is pretty great. But almost immediately,

1:58.1

it was reported that for the first time in history, PBS had entered the top 10 of streaming programs.

2:03.8

We stayed at number 10. I don't want to gild the lily too much.

2:06.8

And a metric that I hadn't heard of before, 565 million minutes of streaming.

2:13.2

Well, that's now, without another second broadcast, over four four billion minutes so i think that in this

...

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