From The Office to SNAFU: Ed Helms on History, Politics & Comedy

This is a long podcast, so you're going to have to talk a lot.

Oh boy.

Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher.
My guest today is Ed Helms. He's an actor and comedian best known for his work as a correspondent on The Daily Show in the early and mid-aughts, and especially for playing Andy Bernard in The Office and Stu in The Hangover Trilogy.
You know who Ed Helms is. But he's also the author of a new book called Snafu, A Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups.
It's smart, funny, and full of little-known stories about human arrogance, government overreach, and in some cases, plain old stupidity. I'm excited to talk to him.
I always think he's such a cerebral and interesting comedian and plays a variety of characters incredibly well, all of them with a heart, which is what I am always attracted to when I'm talking to comedians. And of course, I love talking to comedians.
At a time when the Trump administration is trying to sanitize our history, it's good to talk to someone who isn't afraid to get real about the mistakes that are a big part of who we are as Americans and as humans. Our expert question comes from Dr.
Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. So stick around.
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That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn.
Get started at servicenow.com slash AI dash agents. Ed, thank you for being on On.
I'm so excited to be on On. So you're a man of many talents.
Obviously, you're an actor, but you're also a producer, musician, podcast host, author. And I don't know if I'd call you a political activist, but you're very active politically.
So we're going to start with that and get to your book and everything else. Great.

You ready?

Let's dive in.

Let's dive in.

So you campaigned for the Harris-Walds ticket in Reno and Scranton.

By the way, my family's from Scranton.

Talk about why you decided to get involved.

I mean, obviously, when you're famous, you get a platform.

So why not use it?

On the other hand, one of the knocks on Democrats is that they use too many celebrities or stuff.

What's the calculus in your head as you thought about how to engage publicly in the election? I don't overthink it. It's not a complicated calculus, honestly.
I had been posting some things that supported the campaign, and then they reached out. And I was like, anything I can do.
This feels like a critical moment, and I'm there. And they said, well, can you be in Reno in like two days? And I was like, actually, I can.
That works. And so I bounced out there, and I met Tim Walton.
I was incredibly impressed and charmed. He's just a lovely guy.
And that sort of galvanized me more. I grew up in a very politically engaged home, and so I've always been a little bit of a politics junkie and a news junkie.
And my dad collected campaign memorabilia, which was really fun.

We just always had, like, old, you know.

And I grew up in Atlanta, so he was a big Jimmy Carter, Southern Democrat, my dad. And so we had all this, I don't know, just campaign paraphernalia around the house.
So it was always something. And why was that? Tell me about your parents.
Why were they politically engaged? What was his? It's a good question, the why of it all, which I haven't, I don't know that I ever, I never kind of buttonholed him on that question, the why. But he's someone that I think always had a sort of like justice streak.
You know, someone who wanted just to see fairness around him in the world. And growing up in the South, really during civil rights, you know, he saw so much social injustice around him.
And this is me speculating somewhat, but I think that that sort of galvanized a desire to see a better world and affect change in however he could. And, you know, he worked hard on Andy Young's campaign for mayor of Atlanta.
And I can remember Andy Young coming to our house when I was a little kid and just being like, wow. He was the star.
He really was. And then for some reason I had that too.
I grew up with a kind of like preoccupation with fairness. And I would get really frustrated and confused and angry as a kid when I felt like bullies were getting the best of somebody.
Oh, we've got lots to talk about. There's something going on in this country right now.
Yeah. So it's interesting because you're a board member of Represent Us, an anti-corruption organization that advocates for systemic change in the political structure.
There's a huge amount of corruption happening right now in real time. But one of the big changes you're pushing for, speaking of fairness, is ranked choice voting.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska recently spoke out in favor of it, and that's how Alaskans elect their leaders. But the state almost repealed ranked choice voting in a ballot measure last year.
Voters in at least six other states rejected it, and Missouri passed a law banning ranked choice voting. I'd love you to talk a little bit about this idea.
I am very enamored with ranked choice voting, although it has its critics. And why don't voters like it? Because it sort of tends towards electing reasonable people often, like Lisa Markowski.

Well, you just answered your question. Why don't people like it? It's because it's the system that best represents the largest number of voters' sentiment.
And when you have entrenched minority power as we have in this country, it's very hard to sell someone on ranked choice voting. I have this feeling, I get into these debates, I have a family member who's very conservative, and I've gotten into these debates with him about ranked choice voting, and everything that he comes back to me with, I'm just like, this is just Kool-Aid.
Like, you have definitely, you're not citing, to me, there's no intellectually honest argument against ranked choice voting. There's only cynical propaganda messaging.
And unfortunately, that's been incredibly effective. What's his best argument? That it's confusing, which is a canard.
Like, it's not confusing. Ranked choice voting is just when you, you know, you rank all the candidates based on your favorite.
They did in San Francisco for the mayor, and it's fair. People think it's fair because if you have your choices and your favorites and your second favorites, it makes it—it's just harder for the voter, I think, is the difficulty.
The voter has to think harder, which they don't tend to want to do sometimes. And I think there are real questions about how do you do this transparently because it's a multi-step process.
So, like, how can you be the most transparent in the process of calculating rank choice results? And that's a fair question, but I think there's answers to that. Yeah, it tends to vote in people who are more reasonable.
Right. And the reason for that is that every candidate is actually now answering to every voter.
Right. Because every voter has a say in where a candidate will rank on their ballot.
So if you're a far-right candidate or a far-left candidate and you're just, like, throwing red meat at your base, then most voters are going to look at that and be like, ah, that's a little extreme. So I'm going to put them lower in my ranking.
So then the most extreme people tend to get marginalized. And that's not a bad thing.
I'm going to move on to the idea of using the media in affecting this. Because a lot of it is the media, I don't think, does a great job explaining things.
And you said you're fascinated by partisanship and division. How much blame does the mainstream media deserve? And specifically since you're in comedy when it comes to political satire and your comedy alma mater, The Daily Show, still one of the best.
And what do you think its role should be, something like The Daily Show? And Jon Stewart's protested that he's not a journalist, but he clearly is more than just entertainment. People would say to me when I worked on The Daily Show, they're like, you know, I get all my news on The Daily Show.
And I was like. My kids do.
Yeah. But I was like, that's kind of like doing your grocery shopping at the candy store.

Like, you're not getting any vegetables.

But I think you need both. I think you need the establishment media sort of doing their best.
And they've dropped the ball quite a lot. But then you need the sort of peanut gallery, which is the Daily Show and comedians just lobbing satirical bombs at the media that just kind of keep them honest, but also keep the public entertained and engaged and reflecting a little harder on these things.
That's what I think John always did so brilliantly was like, was just be a funny gadfly that would make you or make audiences laugh, but then later on they're still thinking about something like, oh, yeah, that thing that he pointed out that Mitt Romney said, that was so hypocritical. Like, what? Yeah, and then they're thinking about it more.
But I do think the mainstream media, where I get the most frustrated with, I mean, first of all, like, what is the mainstream media? But sort of our bigger institutions like CNN and Fox News and The New York Times, et cetera, is the horse race of election coverage is so sensationalized that it dramatically diminishes the integrity of the message of the candidates. And then, of course, with Fox News, Fox News was really blossoming while I was on The Daily Show.
And I remember just feeling kind of heartbroken that this thing was emerging. And their slogan at that time, they since abandoned it, but their slogan was fair and balanced.
Do you remember that? Yeah. Literally just fair and balanced.
I used to say neither fair nor balanced. It was just so cynical.
Like, they're so overtly unfair and unbalanced. But to say that seemed almost like a snark.
Like, they're just kind of laughing at us. Although they may believe it.
Well, interestingly, a political scientist named Dr. Dana Young studied the difference between liberal versus conservative late night TV.
And there's a lot of comedy on Fox. Well, I don't think it's funny, but it's there.
In a nutshell, she found most liberals mostly watch comedy shows that use irony to create humor. And conservatives generally watch shows like that that use fear to create outrage.
Sure. Or I would also, I would add ridicule.
Ridicule. Yeah, ridicule.
You're absolutely right. Irony usually signals some level of detachment.
Is there something to be found in these right-wing, I'm thinking of Greg Gutfeld and the others, to start cultivating this idea of outrage. And why does that work better in some forms of comedy?

It does.

Yeah.

I think this is, you're getting into a question about a fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives. And I think that progressives tend to think too hard and analyze and even navel gaze a bit.

And that's a great landing pad for irony.

And conservatives tend to love things that are very simple and black and white and clear.

And the more you analyze something or get into the nuance something, the more frustrated they're likely to get and they're going to want to cling to the simpler ideas. And that's a more primal response in some ways, which I think also speaks to the fear, you know, gravitating towards fear.
Are you surprised that something like Gutfeld, which is billed as a comedy show, is as popular as it is comparatively? No, I don't think I'm—I used to be surprised at how—at the sort of rise of Fox News. But I understand, you know, looking back through history, it just feels like we're at a moment where the American population is severely lacking in general sort of civic education and economic education.
A lot of people are struggling with economic opportunity, and that has people on edge. And when people are on edge, they're likely to gravitate towards simpler and or fearful, fear-based messaging.
So speaking of history, it's interesting because it sort of dovetails into your podcast and your book, which is called Snafu. Let me read the bottom.
Here it is right here. The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups, which are happening in real time, so you'll be able to have a sequel pretty easily.
I know. I was trying to write a fun, like a book that's just sort of a fun, cheeky look back,

and all of a sudden we're in this moment where it's like, yeah, so this is a—

What can we fuck up today?

Yeah.

It's like an hour-by-hour fuck-up.

For people who don't know, what does SNAFU stand for?

SNAFU is a term—it's actually an acronym that emerged during World War II.

It stands for Situation Normal All Fucked Up. So it's basically like, you know what? Everything's fucked up, but isn't it always? And it kind of describes the moment we're in right now.
And you have a podcast. You have a podcast.
Yeah, so I started a podcast a couple years ago called Snafu, and season three just came out.

Each season is a deep dive into one big sort of major historical snafu.

But we tried to kind of find things that are off the beaten path, some things that you may not know about.

Not well-known snafus.

Exactly.

And same with the book, by the way. There's a reason there's no chapter in the book that's just like, World War II.
Right. You know, these are, the curation of the book is much more about...
Vietnam, right? All right, so one of the threads running through is government overreaching government stepping all over American civil liberties.

There's so many of them. And this is actually often a conservative talking about, but why are these so good for this kind of idea? Well, I think it goes back to the whole reason I engage with Represent Us and why I engage with politics to begin with.
There's just something so frustrating and unnerving about institutional chaos or hypocrisy or even just downright dastardly behavior. And yet there's just no shortage of it.
It's been all around us for centuries, Well, for thousands of years. But in American history, it's fascinating to look back and just call attention to these things that I think make people think and also give people a little bit of context for the present moment.
Right. So some of the stories actually feel relevant today.
For example, in the 1960s, the U.S. Army tried to secretly build a nuclear missile launch site under Greenland's ice sheet, speaking of Greenland, without Denmark's permission.
And of course, at the time, Greenland was part of Denmark, continues to be, by the way. It was called Project Iceworm by the Army.
Can you explain? Yeah, this is an incredible story. So, Project Iceworm was this insane idea to build tunnels underneath the ice sheet of Greenland so that they could maneuver nuclear missiles all over the island nation undetected and then launch them from wherever they wanted to.
600 missiles. So this was the plan.
It wasn't like one. Yeah, it's kind of a, it feels like a crazy harebrained plan.
And so to test this as a possibility, they built basically like a fort on Greenland and they started digging tunnels just to kind of experiment and see if this would work. And they also added a nuclear reactor there for power, and it didn't work.

It did not work at all.

Basically, they were tunneling into the ice, and it was caving in around them and on top of them.

And over time, they realized this is just not a good idea.

All attack payer expense, by the way.

Yeah, and also no one in Greenland was aware of this.

And the president of Denmark was like, you know what? Just don't tell me. Do what you guys want, but don't tell me, and it's fine.
But then, of course, because of nuclear waste, people in a nearby village were getting sick, and then it was revealed. And now, even now, there's nuclear waste frozen in the ice there along with, like, years of human waste from the fort that they built there.
And that's all going to thaw in due course with global warming and be exposed and just be a terrible hazard once again. Which is why the perfect time for Donald Trump to buy it.
That's the perfect time. There you go.
To steal it or take it or whatever.

You have a lot of stories about the CIA, too, which is always full of these kind of schemes.

They're schemes, really, kind of wacky schemes.

One involves a cyborg cat.

Another involves pigeons.

There's a story about a lot of LSD, which I think is relatively well-known.

Sure.

Tell us your favorite one.

And also, why did the CIA come up with so many of these harebrained schemes that seem doomed to failure, at least in retrospect? Great question. I think probably the cat one is one of my favorites.
Go ahead. Recount it for people.
So, basically, the CIA is always looking for ways to surveil, always looking for ways to be sneaky about getting intel. And so basically the idea was we're going to insert a microphone surgically into a cat's ear because cats have directional ears and they always – they're incredibly sensitive and they're perfectly shaped to capture sound.
And isn't this a great idea? And then we'll train the cats to go and sit next to bad guys in parks or wherever and listen to their conversations and we'll be able to hear it and record it. Because cats are so well-trained.
Exactly. It's called herding cats.
Who needs to research whether or not you can train cats? We all know this. You cannot train cats.
Siegfried and Roy, unfortunately, learned this very hard way. Very much so.
It's – They tried. Yeah.
So, it was obviously a debacle. The other one you mentioned that is very funny, too, is trying to put little backpacks on pigeons with surveillance equipment.
Now, what's crazy is, like, with drone technology, this is happening in kind of a whole new way. Little drones, baby drones.
Yeah, but. Micro drones.
There's something. You know what cracks me up about these things is they just feel like something that a 10-year-old thought of.
Right? Yeah. Like maybe one of these CIA guys was just like over dinner like, how are we going to listen to the spies? How are we going to listen in on them? And the kid's like, oh, you could strap a microphone to a cat.
Yeah. And he's like, you're on to something.
This is great. Talk about – you spent some time with a tiger on Hangover, obviously, too, speaking of cats.
Yes. I thought about joining the CIA at one point, but it was the whole gay thing they didn't like at the time.
Now I'm sure they'd be thrilled. But did it make you feel differently about the agency? At the end of the day, would you say it's been a net positive or a negative, or you thought, what a bunch of crazy people? Oh, no, I've never had a particularly good impression of the CIA.
I mean, there are so many examples of just... Malfeasance.
Yeah. I mean, but I, I don't know, it's season two of the Snafu podcast goes really deep on the FBI in an incredible story about a group of activists outside Philadelphia who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole all the files and began leaking them to the Washington Post in 1971.
But the reason that they broke in is because they could tell that the FBI was surveilling and harassing people in very illegal, threatening ways. But there was nothing they could do about it.
They couldn't go to the FBI and say, hey, some of your guys are bad. It was like they were caught and this this is part of why this moment that we're in right now feels kind of scary, but also familiar in a J.
Edgar Hoover way. But these activists, feeling that they had no recourse, broke in and at massive risks to themselves and their families.

And these weren't criminals, but they staged an unbelievable heist. And I strongly encourage your listeners to listen to Snafu Season 2.
It's a very thrilling and heroic story. But it basically uncovered so much of the corruption within the FBI, so much of what they

were doing that was explicitly illegal, and some of it evil, you know, like sending letters to Martin Luther King to try to get him to kill himself and all these things. And that led to the church hearings, which is the only reason we now have any congressional oversight over all of our intelligence institutions, the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA.
There's a misbehavior. Season three of Snafu is about prohibition, by the way.
You go all over the place here, specifically how the government killed thousands of Americans by adding poisons to the industrial alcohol, which bootleggers were turning into alcoholic beverages. It sounds crazy, but the idea is to scare drinkers into sobriety by killing them.
Explain what happened and then tell us what parallels you see today, if any. That's a wild one.
So during Prohibition, of course, there's still industrial alcohol that needs to be produced and distributed around the country. The industrial alcohol supply is also what bootleggers are stealing to then turn into consumer alcohol.
The government knew this. They understood this.
And they started adding – for a long time, they'd been adding chemicals to alcohol to make it basically gross, like unpalatable, undrinkable because it just tasted so bad.

And that process is called denaturing alcohol. And during Prohibition, they thought, well, what if we add some poison to this so that people aren't just getting, you know, a little bit nauseous or that it tastes bad, but it's just starting to kill people.
And thousands of people died as a result. It's an incredibly tragic story.
It's darkly, also weirdly funny in some ways. It's an example of how the most holier-than-thou intentions can result in some of the most despicable behavior.
Right, right. Right? Yeah.
No, a lot of your stories end in despicable. You're like, oh my God, this is another movie.
It's like, I'm feeling like I'm listening to Erin Brockovich over and over again. Like, what did they do? Yeah, exactly.
You know, and then they got away with it. That's the, that's the part that's.
They basically got away with it. There was, they were exposed, but there, but no one really.
That's what I mean. Yeah.
There were no consequences. Exposure is not getting, is not, is still getting away with it if you're not put in.
You're right. So is there any parallel to today? Because there's a lot of snafus again, happening in plain sight right now.
Now it's explicit. What was implicit is explicit now.

It's like they're doing the corruption or the criming in plain sight. Sure.
In the broadest sense, I would just say government overreach is sort of the biggest parallel. But, gosh, where do you start? There's so much going on right now that feels like it's mean-spirited and harming people.
During Prohibition, I don't think that this behavior was that adding poison to alcohol was necessarily mean-spirited. It didn't come from a place of like, we want to punish these people.
It was more like, this is going to help us get people to stop drinking. It was an incredibly flawed logic, but

now it does feel like we're in a moment where pain and suffering are an objective.

Or intentional.

Yeah.

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wherever you get your podcasts. Okay.
So every episode we get an expert question from someone. In your case, we got one from a very serious person, Dr.
Lindsay Travinsky, a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She's author also of Making the Presidency.
Let's hear her question. Hi, Ed.
Congratulations on the book. In your podcast and in this book, you are sharing history with a public audience, and that is amazing.
Anyone who loves history always wants it to be available to the maximum number of people and the maximum number of places. But there are so many options, museums, books, classes, materials online, podcasts.
How do you see yourself in conversation with those? Are you a part of the history community? Are you a conduit sharing information from other places and trying to get it to new listeners? I'd be really curious to know how you think about that and how we can get people more interested in history in lots of different types and spaces. Thanks so much.
Great question. Are you a historian? Honestly, I've felt a little bit like I'm in a bubble with a lot of this stuff, and I'm eager to engage more.
I've been doing a ton of podcasts over the last couple of years as a guest to help promote my podcast and this book, and that's opened me up to a lot of what's going on out there more. And I'm really hoping on this book tour I have coming up that I get to meet a lot of people from that space.
My brother is a history teacher in Washington, D.C. Yeah, middle school history teacher.
I'm insanely proud of him, and he's been an inspiration and someone that I feel like is part of my connection to, like, history on the ground. But in her question, how do you think people should learn about history going forward? Obviously, certain things like podcasts, Roman history podcasts are booming, for example, right? Because for some reason men love to listen to Roman history.
I do, too. Let's be clear.
But how do you get to people when you want to talk about history, especially in the current partisan environment? And certainly Trump is doing his best to rewrite history. It's probably fair that Americans aren't particularly well-informed about world history, for sure, American history also.
How do you get people to understand history in a way that's—obviously you're doing it a funny way, but it's also dark, too.

Sure. Well, history at its best is great storytelling.
I think it is incumbent on people who are passionate about history and whether it's a professor at a university or a teacher in an elementary school or someone with a podcast to convey these narratives, these historical narratives in incredibly engaging ways. And especially in this moment we're in, that where we're so just awash with distractions and insanity.

It feels like,

especially with the way that

Pete Hegseth is like,

you know,

washing the

Pentagon websites

of

female or

African American

or like

any prestigious

accomplishments.

It just is insane.

Like,

this is a moment where we have to be extremely skeptical of our sources of history as well. So, like, if you're looking at a government website for history right now, you need to be asking, am I getting the full picture? And really assuming that you're not.
Are there period events of history that you find yourself thinking about now?

And what piece of history do you wish Americans knew really well,

if you had to go back as the different things you've looked at?

I feel like that J. Edgar Hoover's sort of reign of terror of the FBI for so long is incredibly instructive to this moment,

in part because the DOJ and the FBI have become basically just political arms of the president. And it happened so quickly, and it's very – I think that's – that is scary, but also looking back at J.
Edgar Hoover, we're able to see, yes, that was also an extremely scary time, and it took a lot of courage for a lot of people to bring that to light.

And like I say in the introduction to the book, part of what looking back at snafus does for us with distance, like looking at these horrible things from a distance, gives us at least a little bit of a high altitude sense that we move through these things. We get through them.
And there are generally some heroes to these stories. And we can look to those heroes as fucked up as a situation might be.
We can look to those heroes, for examples, on how we can do better in the present moment. Absolutely.
So I'm going to switch a little bit and we're going to talk a little bit about news to finish up. We're going to – let's go back to The Daily Show for a minute.
You are known for doing field pieces because this is how to communicate this stuff to people. You've said the formula was find the news item and then just take the dumbest possible stance.
Here's a clip from a segment you did called Mass Story about gay marriage becoming legal in Massachusetts. I love this one.
Now that gay marriage is legal, Massachusetts ranks dead last in illiteracy, 48th in per capita poverty and a pathetic 49th in total divorces. Somehow Don and Robert, one of the state's first married gay couples, don't see the problem.
A lot of things that affect the state of Massachusetts far more profoundly than, you know, two people who love each other and getting married. Name one thing in Massachusetts that's not ruined.
Well, I guess I look at the people around and I can't think of anything that gay marriage has actually caused, other than letting people get married. Easy for them to say.
It still stands up. Oh my gosh, blast from the past.
I know, I know. If you were doing that now, what would you go for? Pick one dumb news event that you would go and then be dumber.
Gosh, it's hard to say, but you know what's interesting? Listening to that and hearing the sort of the angle of attack that we used as correspondents on that show, purely in the service of satire and comedy, is also what you're seeing unironically with Jesse Waters or, you know guys. And it's that I think in some ways we may have paved the road for some of those guys.
Right. It's like network.
Yeah. But I think, what was your question? Oh, about something today that would be worth diving into? Yeah.
God, it's overwhelming. Oh, let me help you here.
Elon Musk said he's going to be spending less time in DC after Tesla fell drastically compared to a year ago. The public seems to be turning on it.
Most people think he has too much power. Most people think Doge hasn't done a good job, which is actually factual.
Yeah, that's a great one. You know, I think you can just take the dumbest possible take, which is that Doge is a massive success and that it's doing amazing work.
And you butter up Elon Musk and that he's not leaving for, like, how cynical is it to think he's leaving because Tesla is tanking or that Doge is failing? That's a cynical take. The right take is that he's taking a victory lap.
Right. And he's...
Yeah, that's what he's doing. That's what they're actually doing.
Right. I don't know why they're doing it, but they're saying everything was great.
I'm like, except it wasn't. You know, and the numbers keep falling.
Oh, God. It's Orwellian.
It's fully Orwellian at this point. If it wasn't so stupid, that's the problem.

And it's stupid and Orwellian at the same time. I would argue that's the saving grace, is that it's stupid.
That's stupid. I'm just curious.
It's totally unrelated. His internet sense of humor as a professional comedian, what do you make of it? I think it's odd for someone his age to be obsessed with 4chan-style jokes.
Unfunny, correct? It's sad to me. It's sad.
But It's like, I mean, trolling is so, it's such a window into like primal darkness in humanity, I feel like trolling behavior in general. And it's one of the things that the anonymity of the internet has just shown us in this like black mirror.
Oh, this is really who we are. Like we're pretty awful.
Humans are pretty awful. And I think it's really sad and disgraceful that someone who has built such an empire has so little gratitude and so little of a sense of, wow, a lot of people have contributed to my success.
A lot of people still work hard in my factories and buy my products. And I rely on those people for my wealth.
But it's my wealth and I'm not going to, I don't know. It just is, there's so, the lack of gratitude, the lack of perspective, the eagerness to troll and harm and hurt.

You know, when he tweets about someone, they get—their lives can completely unravel.

They get doxed and stalked and death threats and everything.

Yeah.

He said, my heart is seething with hate, just so you know.

It's not.

I feel that, Kara. Yeah, I know.

I feel that for you right now.

I'm seething right now.

You're seething.

He's just unfunny.

You're smoking.

People who can't see Kara right now, there's actually smoke rising off of her body. Honestly, you're just not funny.
He's just not funny. If he was funny, I would say so.
You said that Trump has a fragile little ego like Andy Bernard. There may be more parallels.
If you've indulged me just for a second, the office was full of lovable incompetence and some fetal incompetence. The Trump administration kind of resembles that, except it's not funny and it's not lovable.
I'm just curious if you had to put people from the Trump administration into a character from the office, if they remind you of, if you don't mind, I'll ask you a few. That's really interesting.
Well, part of what made the incompetence on the Office so funny and lovable is that the stakes are so low.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

You know, when somebody messes up something huge in The Office, like, it's a paper company.

Like, it's not, there's no reverberations across the globe.

But, gosh.

Let me try.

Pete Hegseth.

Try it.

Okay.

Pete Hegseth would be a little like Packer. Yeah.
Yeah. Someone thinks Meredith, actually, because alcoholism.
Oh, interesting. J.D.
Vance. J.D.
Vance is a little Dwight-ish, I think. He's a little Dwight-frutty, maybe.
Yeah, absolutely. Karen Levitt.
You know what? This is a—she's probably is—she's like a cross between Angela and Ellie. Okay.
Marco Rubio. It's hard because I love the characters in The Office.
Yeah, I know. So it's hard to compare them to people that I struggle to like.
But he's a little bit Oscar Nunez because you never see Marco's smile. Like, he's so, he feels so tense to me.
Because he's living in hell. Yeah, it feels like he's, you're right, he's living this, like, he's just signed up for a life that is so against who he is at his core.
And so he's living a lie. And in some ways, that was Oscar's sort of thing.
All right, two more. Kash Patel, speaking of the FBI.
Oh, what was Zach Wood's character? There's something about something there, like intense loyalty, a subscribing to a hierarchy with dedication and, like, actually being well-spoken in the midst of all of it.

Yeah, Gabe.

Gabe, of course.

All right, last one, RFK Jr.

When Will Ferrell guested on the show, that was, that had RFK vibes.

We'll be back in a minute.

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We're going to finish up talking about the entertainment industry in general. You're currently executive producing and starring in a film called Smudge the Blades about Canadian youth hockey team on an Indigenous reservation.
It's your second project that deals with issues faced by Indigenous people with co-star Jana Schmieding. You also starred and executive produced in a series for people called Rutherford Falls.
They're not obvious choices for you. Explain why you're doing these.
Rutherford Falls emerged as Mike Schur was one of the writers on The Office and also went on to create amazing shows like Parks and Rec and others. And he and I have always been close and always sort of like, when are we going to work together again? What's it going to be? And a bunch of years ago, we just started having these open-ended phone calls, long conversations or visits.
We'd go to each other's offices and just hang out and just explore, like, what's activating us right now? And this was during, I think, the first Trump campaign around 2015. And we were sort of wanting to tell the story of a guy who didn't understand historical context and had a lot of beliefs and an obsession with his own family origin story.
And we wanted to sort of like pull the rug out from this character. Like, what if he learns that he always felt like his family was like a very noble and courageous family that did the right thing through the Civil War? And he's built his entire identity around this.
He's created a museum about his family and so forth.

We were talking about this with another friend of ours,

Sierra Ornelas, who's a Native American comedy writer.

And then it was like, oh, you know what?

There's more, there's a deeper story to tell here.

Maybe this is a guy who believes his family, like, did the right thing by the Native American community. And then we roped Sierra in, and she became a showrunner and co-creator with us.
And Jana became my co-star on that show, and it really emerged into what it became, which is really a story about reflecting on the narratives that we cling to, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what happens when maybe you're wrong or those things fall apart. And I think, and weirdly in this moment, I think a lot of people have, we've all, I know for myself, we've all been telling ourselves that America is a certain way or has a certain story to it, and suddenly things are shifting

and like, oh, maybe I didn't understand things the way I thought I did.

Right.

Anyway, that's the origin story.

In a lot of ways, you're reclaiming history, right?

You're reclaiming it the way it's told.

Yeah.

And I think looking at past mistakes is like a triumphant exercise.

It's like, look where we are. Look how we got through that thing.
Look how we emerged. You know, this new executive order about the Smithsonian, that's very unnerving because it does seem to be like we don't want to, or we're scared of our history.
It's such a fearful posture. Like, no, no, no.
History is inarguable. History is not something we can, and we either reckon with it or we don't.
And if you don't, then you're just living a kind of this false, kind of like cardboard cutout of a existence. Which some people want to do.
Okay, I have two more quick questions. Streaming has revolutionized the entertainment industry.
The office, they're starting to actually be profitable. Obviously, Netflix is killing it.
YouTube is also killing it, by the way. The Office was once the most streamed show on Netflix where NBC reclaimed the show to put it on Peacock.
And thank God, because it was a big success for them. It's also in syndication, in cable and stuff like that.
How does that work for you? How do you think of your career? Because I'm assuming you're not getting paid every step of these ways that they're taking the office and taking advantage of the finances around it. But you also had a hit Netflix film called Family Switch, for example.
How do you look at the industry right now? The simplest answer is I am confused and a little bit scared of the industry that I have come up in because the rules that I came up with and the structures that I came up through have been so dramatically altered and dismantled that it's confusing. And at the same time, there, of course, there's tremendous opportunity also.
And so it's a matter of trying to focus on that. There used to be a sense of, like, I know how to get a movie made.
At least I know the steps I need to take to get a movie made and or a TV show. I know that I'm going to pitch to this person, and then if they like it, they're going to take it to this studio and so forth.
Like, there was a way of understanding things. That has largely evaporated, and now there's a much bigger emphasis on kind of building something holistically and then presenting it to a buyer.
The other hard part is you used to be able to rely on this idea that something successful would become part of the sort of zeitgeist or part of the popular conversation. And now so much consumption of media is so siloed that, you know, if you're really deep on a TV show and excited about it and want to go to work and talk about it, you can't be sure that the person in the cubicle next to you even knows that show exists.
Right, right. You know, and that's— Because you're in your asylum, yeah.
That's a strange thing. Unless it's one or two things.
Like, my son just called me and says, did you watch Severance? I'm like, yeah, I did. Yeah, of course.
Certain things break, right, still. But not in the same way.
You're absolutely right. But also, like, the severance numbers aren't, and I don't know what.
No, they're not big. But they're not the numbers of, like, ER, you know, or, like, a big network show from 15 years ago.
Right. So what does that mean for you as an artist? Do you think this is an opportunity to be? This is the same thing that's happening in the media industry and i've embraced it for a long time and so i'm like great mess i like it and some people are very entrepreneurial you seem very entrepreneurial you're doing your podcast and stuff like that um is do you have to be entrepreneurial now is it a good thing or do you like the old paternalistic kind of ways where they just give you the town car and the multimillion-dollar salary and then just go over there and be funny? Well, I miss it only because I understood it, and now I feel like everyone's a little more adrift in figuring things out.
I think maybe the hardest thing in this moment is it's so unclear what buyers want. So when you're developing a show or a movie, you're like, well, maybe this streamer will like this, but those three won't.
And is there something – so whereas you used to be able to take something to the town with a pretty decent idea that like these movies are working or these kinds of TV shows are working and that's what people are buying. Now, it's so hard to tell.
And that's a little bit scary. Or they don't buy what you think they were going to buy.
A very well-known friend of mine was like, I can't believe I pitched this and nobody wanted it. We all have those stories.
I have almost a very similar story with lots of big stars in a big, funny TV show with a famous creator didn't get picked up. And no one wanted it.
And it's like, but we did the math on that. But it is – so that's scary and unnerving and a little frustrating.
But at the same time, always, like, anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit is going to be just looking for those avenues. And it's still fun.
I mean, it's still – it just – it reinforces the core of the process, which is to focus on what you love. Like, what do you love to create and make and what's going to inspire you? And it's what's – I'm so lucky to have had the opportunity to work on things that I love and to now have – like, the expansion of the landscape has allowed me to kind of, oh, take this hobby, like an interest in history, and make a cool podcast.
And there's infrastructure. There's money for that.
We can get – you know, iHeart and Film Nation are our partners in my podcast.

And, like, they give us money to make this thing.

Well, they're making money in case you're interested.

That's fine.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

All right, my last question.

Give me one of your snafus.

Oh, boy.

um one of

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I think I think I think I. I think for me, a personal snafu that I can point to, this is a little heady, but I moved through life for a very long time feeling a little detached from the world, feeling like I didn't quite understand the world around me and that people operated differently from me or thought differently from me.
And that that was a little – always this kind of unnerving feeling that I had. And I always – I could always get along well and move.
And I had close relationships. I'm lucky to have had wonderful people in my life who I love dearly.
So I wasn't really necessarily adrift, but I always felt like I didn't, there was things I didn't understand. I didn't understand how people did certain jobs or how certain things came so easily to people.

And some of these things are maybe like managing just aspects of one's life, right? Logistics of life always confounded me and has always been a struggle for me. And this is a, I'm not unique in this sense, but I went to therapy for many years in my 20s, again, in my 30s and 40s.
And I still couldn't sort of crack this feeling that I'm different and that I wasn't clicking in some way.

I finally read a book called Driven to Distraction, which is one of the original sort of academic texts on the ADD or ADHD phenomenon. And I wept reading that book because there were so much about my life that I saw and understood in this book.
Um, that was just this epic awakening. And also, this was just a couple of years ago.
And so for me to think back on so many of the things that were so hard for me or so confusing or scary or unnerving for me, both socially and in terms of like just steering and navigating life, my heart breaks for that younger me, being so confused and isolated in those feelings. And I sort of think of that as like a snafu in the sense that I really wish.
Well, it's actually the opposite of a snafu. Well, the awareness now, but just had I had an earlier intervention of some kind or the awareness or curiosity to kind of like take that tack a little bit earlier or a lot earlier, that some things could have gone differently.

That said, I have very little to complain about.

Oh, don't do that.

Don't do that sentence after.

Don't do it.

Don't do it.

I appreciate it.

That's a wonderful story.

That is actually a wonderful story.

And it's a good thing to end on.

Ed Helms, thank you so much.

What a pleasure.

Thank you, Cara. On with Cara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Megan Cunane, and Kaylin Lynch.
Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcast. Special thanks to Eric Littke.
Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda

and our theme music is by Trackademics.

If you're already following the show,

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a Pam.

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