Welcome back to Waco, American Apocalypse. This is the Netflix

podcast Companion Series and this is episode 3, the toll it took.

With me again today is Lee Hancock, a prominent interview subject in the series,

and perhaps the premier chronicler of the

chronicler of the Waco story. One of the things that I feel as a filmmaker telling historical stories

is we as storytellers function as sort of a digestive organ for the culture as a whole.

These powerful, potent shocking stories happen in real time and it's not until you have a little bit of distance and perspective from them that

It's possible culturally to understand you know, what happened and what was the import and why and what was that human experience.

So in this episode, what we'd like to do is discuss the lasting impact that this story had on the people who lived it.

As a filmmaker, I feel like there is this kind of secondhand processing of trauma that I'm

often engaged with which is one's hearing the stories of people who have lived

through you know an intense traumatic experience and

what you're asking them to do when making a series like this is in some way to go back in and emotionally

connect with what that trauma was and so it's always a tight rope walk.

On the one hand, you want people to express some of the most devastating moments of their lives

and be able to in some way relive them verbally by conjuring the memories of what

happened and yet at the same time one has to be very careful that you're not

retromatizing people by asking them to explore these things.

And so hopefully people are able to unburden themselves from them and to share what they were with lots of other people.

And Lee, I'm curious, your experience of this trauma is much closer than mine and much more direct.

And you went racing out of Dallas,

you know, the moment you hear about this happening

...