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

Speaker 1 This is a long podcast, so you're going to have to talk a lot.

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And of course, I love talking to comedians.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Our expert question comes from Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library.
So stick around.

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Speaker 1 Ed, thank you for being on on.

Speaker 16 I'm so excited to be on on.

Speaker 1 So you're a man of many talents. Obviously, you're an actor, but you're also a producer, musician, podcast host, author.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 18 Great. You ready? Let's dive in.

Speaker 1 Let's dive in. So you campaigned for the Harris Waltz ticket in Reno and Scranton.
By the way, my family's from Scranton. Talk about why

Speaker 1 you decided to get involved. I mean, obviously, when you're famous, you get a platform.
So why not use it?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 18 I don't overthink it.

Speaker 23 It's not a complicated calculus, honestly.

Speaker 27 I had been posting some things that supported the campaign, and then they reached out, and I was like, anything I can do.

Speaker 29 This feels like a critical moment.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 19 I'm there.

Speaker 33 And they said, well, can you be in Reno in like two days?

Speaker 25 And I was like, actually, I can.

Speaker 24 That works.

Speaker 33 And so I bounced out there.

Speaker 34 And I met Tim Waltz and I was incredibly impressed and charmed.

Speaker 36 He's just a lovely guy.

Speaker 34 And that sort of galvanized me more.

Speaker 20 You know, I grew up in a very politically engaged home.

Speaker 39 And so I've always been a little bit of a politics junkie and a news junkie. And

Speaker 41 my dad collected campaign memorabilia, which was really fun.

Speaker 39 We just always had like old, you know, I grew up in Atlanta, so he was a big Jimmy Carter Southern Democrat, my dad.

Speaker 45 And so we had all this, I don't know, just campaign paraphernalia around the house.

Speaker 3 So it was always something.

Speaker 1 Why was that? Tell me about your parents. Why were they politically engaged?

Speaker 47 What was his it's a good question, the why of it all, which I haven't,

Speaker 23 I don't know that I ever, I never kind of buttonholed him on that question, the why.

Speaker 16 But he's someone

Speaker 49 that has, that I think always had a

Speaker 50 sort of like justice streak.

Speaker 25 You know, someone who wanted just to see fairness around him in the world.

Speaker 38 And growing up in the South,

Speaker 55 really enduring civil rights, you know, he saw so much social injustice around him.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 59 And,

Speaker 23 you know, he worked hard on Andy Young's campaign for mayor of Atlanta.

Speaker 56 And I can remember Andy Young coming to our house when I was a little kid and just being like, wow.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 1 He was the star.

Speaker 52 He really was.

Speaker 60 And then I, for some reason, I had that too.

Speaker 37 I grew up with a kind of like preoccupation with fairness.

Speaker 35 And I, and I would get really frustrated and confused and angry as a kid when, when I felt like bullies were getting, getting the best of somebody or like.

Speaker 3 I've got lots to talk about.

Speaker 1 There's something going on in this country right now.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska recently spouted 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.

Speaker 1 Voters in at least six other states rejected it, and Missouri passed a law banning ranked choice voting.

Speaker 1 I'd love you to talk a little bit about this idea of why I am very enamored with ranked choice voting, although it has its critics.

Speaker 1 And why don't voters like it? Because it sort of tends towards electing reasonable people often, like Lisa Markowski.

Speaker 35 Well, you just answered your question.

Speaker 21 Why don't people like it?

Speaker 35 It's because it's the system that best represents the largest number of voters' sentiment.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 32 when you have entrenched minority power, as we have in this country,

Speaker 18 it's

Speaker 43 very

Speaker 23 hard to sell someone on ranked choice voting.

Speaker 65 I have this feeling, I get into these debates.

Speaker 59 I have a family member who's very conservative, and I have gotten into these debates with him about ranked choice voting.

Speaker 34 And

Speaker 62 everything that he comes back to me with, I'm just like, this is just Kool-Aid.

Speaker 32 Like, you have definitely, you're not citing,

Speaker 56 to me, there's no intellectually honest argument against ranked choice voting.

Speaker 39 There's only cynical propaganda messaging.

Speaker 35 And unfortunately, that's been incredibly effective what's his best argument that it's confusing which is a canard like it's it it's it's not confusing um

Speaker 1 ranked choice voting is just when you you know you you rank all the candidates uh based on your favorite they did in san francisco for the mayor and it it uh it's fair it's people think it's fair because if you have your choices and your favorites and your second favorites it makes a it's just harder for the voter i think is the difficulty is hard the voter has to think harder which they don't tend to want to do sometimes.

Speaker 33 And I think

Speaker 44 there are real questions about how do you do this transparently because it's a multi-step process.

Speaker 35 So like, what are the, how can you be the most transparent in the process of calculating ranked choice results?

Speaker 69 And that's a fair question.

Speaker 42 But I think there's answers to that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it tends to vote in people who are more reasonable. Right.

Speaker 65 And the reason for that is that every candidate is actually now answering to every voter.

Speaker 24 Right.

Speaker 28 Because every voter has a say in where a candidate will rank on their ballot.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 23 So I'm going to put them lower in my ranking.

Speaker 39 So then the most extreme people tend to get marginalized.

Speaker 17 And that's not a bad thing.

Speaker 1 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, has done a great job explaining things.

Speaker 1 And you said you're fascinated by partisanship and division. How much blame does the mainstream media deserve?

Speaker 1 And specifically, since you're, you know, you're in comedy, when it comes to political satire and your comedy, Alma Madder, The Daily Show, still one of the best.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 1 And I was like, my kids do.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 35 But I was like, that's kind of like doing your grocery shopping at the candy store.

Speaker 20 Like, you're not getting any vegetables.

Speaker 47 But, but I think you need both.

Speaker 35 I think you need the establishment media sort of doing their best. And

Speaker 43 they've dropped the ball quite a lot.

Speaker 70 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.

Speaker 25 That's what I think John always did so brilliantly: was like,

Speaker 41 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, you know, Mitt Romney said, that was so hypocritical.

Speaker 18 Like, what,

Speaker 37 yeah, and then they're, then, then they're thinking about it more.

Speaker 46 But I do think the mainstream media, where, where I get the most frustrated with,

Speaker 53 well, I mean, I don't, 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

Speaker 73 that it

Speaker 64 dramatically diminishes the integrity of the message of the candidates.

Speaker 68 And then, of course, with Fox News,

Speaker 56 Fox News was really blossoming while I was on the daily show.

Speaker 24 And I remember just being, feeling kind of heartbroken that this thing was emerging.

Speaker 17 And their slogan at that time, they since abandoned it, but their slogan was fair and balanced.

Speaker 23 Do you remember that?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 46 Literally, just fair and balanced.

Speaker 1 I used to say neither fair nor balanced.

Speaker 60 It was just so cynical.

Speaker 67 Like, this is, they're so overtly unfair and unbalanced.

Speaker 72 and but to say that seemed almost like uh

Speaker 1 like a snark like they're just kind of they're 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 um 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.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 47 Or I would also, I would add ridicule.

Speaker 1 Ridicule. Yeah, ridicule.
You're absolutely right. Irony usually signals some level of detachment.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It does.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I think this is, you're getting into a question about a fundamental difference between

Speaker 23 progressives and conservatives.

Speaker 47 And

Speaker 70 I think

Speaker 47 that

Speaker 37 progressives tend to think too hard and analyze and even navel gaze a bit.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 36 that's a great landing pad for irony.

Speaker 35 And conservatives tend to love things that are very simple and black and white and clear.

Speaker 17 And the more you analyze something or get into the nuance something, the more frustrated they're likely to get.

Speaker 23 And they're going to want to cling to the simpler ideas.

Speaker 40 And that's a more primal response in some ways, which I think also speaks to the fear, you know, gravitating towards fear.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Are you surprised that something like Gut Fowl, which is a billed as a comedy show, is as popular as it is comparatively?

Speaker 75 Aaron Powell, no, I don't think I'm.

Speaker 77 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

Speaker 17 economic education.

Speaker 56 A lot of people are struggling with economic opportunity, and that has people on edge.

Speaker 23 And when people are on edge, they're likely to

Speaker 50 gravitate towards

Speaker 30 simpler and or fearful, fear-based messaging.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 speaking of history, it's interesting because it sort of dovetails into your podcast and your book, which is called Snafu.

Speaker 1 Let me read the bottom line. Here it is right here.
History's the definitive guide to history's greatest screw-ups, which are happening in real time. So, you'll be able to have a sequel.
Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 1 Pretty easy.

Speaker 63 I was trying to write a fun, simple, like a book that's just sort of a fun, cheeky look back.

Speaker 28 And all of a sudden, we're in this moment where it's like, yeah, so

Speaker 1 this is what can we fuck up today? It's like an hour-by-hour fuck-up.

Speaker 1 For people who don't know, what does Snafu stand for?

Speaker 79 Snafu is a term.

Speaker 27 It's actually an acronym that emerged during World War II.

Speaker 25 It stands for situation normal, all fucked up.

Speaker 50 So it's basically like,

Speaker 78 you know what?

Speaker 71 Everything's fucked up, but isn't it always?

Speaker 69 And it kind of describes the moment we're in right now.

Speaker 1 And you have a podcast. You have a podcast.
Yeah.

Speaker 40 So I have a podcast.

Speaker 80 I started a podcast a couple of years ago called Snafu,

Speaker 24 and season three just came out.

Speaker 23 Each season is a deep dive into one big

Speaker 30 sort of major historical snafu, but we've tried to kind of find things that are off the beaten path, things that you may not know about.

Speaker 1 Not well-known snafu.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 33 And same with the book, by the way.

Speaker 57 There's a reason there's no chapter in the book that's just like World War II.

Speaker 3 You know, these are

Speaker 3 the curation of the book is much more about Vietnam, right?

Speaker 1 All right. So one of the threads running through is projects, is government overreaching, government stepping all over American civil liberties.
There's so many of them.

Speaker 1 And this is actually often a conservative talking way, but why are these so good for this, for this kind of idea?

Speaker 48 Well,

Speaker 77 I think it goes back to the whole reason I engage with Represent Us and why I engage with politics to begin with.

Speaker 35 There's just something so frustrating and unnerving about institutional chaos or hypocrisy or even just downright dastardly behavior.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 34 yet there's just no shortage of it.

Speaker 23 It's been all around us for centuries,

Speaker 3 well,

Speaker 42 for thousands of years.

Speaker 20 But in American history,

Speaker 20 It's fascinating to look back and just call attention to these things that

Speaker 23 I think make people think and also give people a little bit of context for the present moment.

Speaker 1 Right. So some of the stories actually feel relevant today.
For example, in the 1960s, the U.S.

Speaker 1 Army tried to secretly build a nuclear missile launch site under Greenland's ice sheet, speaking of Greenland, without Denmark's permission.

Speaker 1 And of course, at the time, Greenland was part of Denmark, continues to be, by the way. It was called Project Ice Worm by the Army.
Can you explain?

Speaker 24 Yeah, this is an incredible story.

Speaker 3 So Project Ice Worm 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.

Speaker 18 200 missiles.

Speaker 24 So, this was the plan.

Speaker 1 It wasn't like one.

Speaker 24 Yeah, it's kind of a, it feels like a crazy hair-brained plan.

Speaker 40 And so, to test this as a possibility, they built

Speaker 39 basically like a fort on Greenland and they started digging tunnels just to kind of experiment and see if this would

Speaker 3 work.

Speaker 78 And

Speaker 47 they also added a nuclear reactor there for power.

Speaker 32 And

Speaker 63 it didn't work.

Speaker 24 It did not work at all.

Speaker 28 Basically, they were tunneling into the ice and it was caving in around them and on top of them.

Speaker 56 And over time, they realized this is just not.

Speaker 29 not a good idea.

Speaker 1 All attack payer expense, by the way.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 34 And also no one in Greenland was aware of this.

Speaker 35 And the president of Denmark was like, you know what?

Speaker 39 Just don't tell me.

Speaker 25 Do whatever, do what you guys want, but don't tell me and it's fine.

Speaker 50 But then, of course, because of

Speaker 45 nuclear waste, people in a nearby village were getting sick.

Speaker 25 And then it was revealed. And it just is.

Speaker 46 And now, even now,

Speaker 25 there's nuclear waste frozen in the ice there, along with like

Speaker 58 years of human waste from the fort that they built there.

Speaker 1 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 steal it or take it or whatever um

Speaker 1 you have a lot of stories about the cia too which is always full of these kind of schemes or 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 harebrain schemes that seem doomed to failure, at least in retrospect?

Speaker 46 Great question.

Speaker 50 I think probably the

Speaker 39 cat one is one of my favorites.

Speaker 1 Go ahead, recount it for people.

Speaker 53 So basically, the CIA is always looking for ways to surveil, always looking for ways to be sneaky about getting intel.

Speaker 77 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.

Speaker 24 And isn't this a great idea?

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 1 Because cats are so well trained.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 It's called herding cats.

Speaker 18 How

Speaker 67 who needs to research whether or not you can train cats?

Speaker 46 We all know this.

Speaker 60 You cannot train cats.

Speaker 23 Siegfried and Roy, unfortunately, learned this a very hard way.

Speaker 3 Very much so.

Speaker 79 It's

Speaker 1 they tried.

Speaker 76 Yeah. So

Speaker 36 it was obviously a debacle.

Speaker 81 The other one you mentioned that is very funny, too, is trying to put little backpacks on pigeons with surveillance equipment.

Speaker 35 Now what's crazy is like with drone technology,

Speaker 44 this is happening in a kind of a whole new way.

Speaker 1 Little drones, baby drones.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but micro drones.

Speaker 65 There's something that, you know what I, what cracks me up about these things is they just feel like something that a 10-year-old thought of.

Speaker 31 Right? Yeah. Like maybe one of these CIA guys was just like,

Speaker 47 at, over dinner, like,

Speaker 39 how are we going to listen to the spies?

Speaker 65 How are we going to listen in on them?

Speaker 71 And the kid's like, oh, you can strap a microphone to a cat.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And he's like,

Speaker 16 you're on to something.

Speaker 1 This is great.

Speaker 1 Talk about, you spent some time with a tiger on Hangover, obviously, too.

Speaker 1 Speaking of cats,

Speaker 1 I thought about joining the CIA at one point, but it was a whole gay thing they didn't like at the time.

Speaker 1 Now I'm sure they'd be thrilled.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 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 negative, or you thought what?

Speaker 43 Oh, no, I've never had a particularly good impression of the CIA.

Speaker 27 I mean, there are so many

Speaker 37 examples of

Speaker 1 just malfeasance.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 67 I mean, but, I, I don't know.

Speaker 49 It's, it, it's

Speaker 68 season two of the, of the Snafu podcast goes really deep on the FBI

Speaker 39 in an incredible story about a group of activists in 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.

Speaker 37 But

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 29 They couldn't go to the FBI and say, hey, some of your guys are bad.

Speaker 76 It was like they were caught.

Speaker 67 And this is

Speaker 32 part of why this moment that we're in right now feels

Speaker 39 kind of scary, but also familiar in a sort of, in this, in a J.

Speaker 43 Edgar Hoover way.

Speaker 20 But these these activists, feeling that they had no recourse,

Speaker 3 broke in and

Speaker 46 at massive risks to themselves and their families.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 these weren't criminals, but they staged an unbelievable heist.

Speaker 81 And

Speaker 64 I strongly encourage your listeners to listen to Snafu Season 2.

Speaker 78 It's a very thrilling and heroic story.

Speaker 39 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

Speaker 25 evil, you know, like trying to sending letters to Martin Luther King to try to get him to kill himself and all these things.

Speaker 78 And

Speaker 31 that led to the church hearings, which is the only reason we now have any

Speaker 32 congressional oversight over all of our intelligence institutions, the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA.

Speaker 1 This is the misbehavior. Season three of Snafu Podcast is about prohibition, by the way.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 That's a wild one.

Speaker 3 So during prohibition, of course, there's still industrial alcohol that needs to be produced and distributed around the country.

Speaker 33 The industrial alcohol supply

Speaker 38 is also what bootleggers are stealing to then turn into consumer alcohol.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 39 And that process is called denaturing alcohol.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 59 during prohibition, they thought, well, what if we add some poison to this so that people aren't just getting

Speaker 50 a little bit nauseous or that it tastes bad, but it's just starting to kill people.

Speaker 55 And thousands of people died as a result.

Speaker 34 It's an incredibly tragic story.

Speaker 25 It's darkly also weirdly funny in some ways.

Speaker 28 It's an example of how

Speaker 39 the most

Speaker 39 holier than thou intentions can result in some of the most despicable behavior.

Speaker 3 Right, right.

Speaker 1 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 Aaron Brockovich over and over again.

Speaker 1 Like, what did they do?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 1 You know, and then they got away with it.

Speaker 1 That's the part that's.

Speaker 76 They basically got away with it.

Speaker 34 There was, they were exposed, but there, but no one really.

Speaker 75 That's what I mean. Yeah, there were no conversations.

Speaker 1 Exposure is not getting, is not, is still getting away with it if you're not put in. You're right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like they're doing the corruption or the criming in plain sight.

Speaker 57 Sure.

Speaker 32 In the broadest sense, I would just say government overreach is sort of the biggest parallel.

Speaker 27 But gosh, where do you start?

Speaker 44 There's so much going on right now that feels like it's mean-spirited and harming people.

Speaker 18 During prohibition, it's, I don't think that this behavior was,

Speaker 38 that adding poison to alcohol was necessarily mean-spirited.

Speaker 33 It didn't come from a place of like, we want to punish these people.

Speaker 41 It was more like, this is going to help us get people to stop drinking.

Speaker 43 It was an incredibly flawed logic, but

Speaker 69 now

Speaker 56 it does feel like we're in a moment where pain and suffering are an objective.

Speaker 3 Or intentional. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 1 Okay, so every episode we get an expert question from someone. In your case, we got one from a very serious person, Dr.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Hi, Ed. Congratulations on the book.

Speaker 86 In your podcast and in this book, you are sharing history with a public audience, and that is amazing.

Speaker 86 Anyone who loves history always wants it to be available to the maximum number of people and the maximum number of places.

Speaker 86 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?

Speaker 86 Are you a conduit, sharing information from other places and trying to get it to new listeners?

Speaker 86 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.

Speaker 24 Great question.

Speaker 1 Are you a historian?

Speaker 47 I 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.

Speaker 40 I've been doing a ton of podcasts over the last couple of years as a guest to help promote this, my podcast and this book.

Speaker 74 And that's opened me up to a lot of what's going on out there more.

Speaker 35 And I'm really hoping on this book tour I have coming up that.

Speaker 55 that I get to meet a lot of people from that space.

Speaker 67 My brother is a history teacher in Washington, D.C. Yeah, middle school history teacher.

Speaker 22 I'm insanely proud of him.

Speaker 35 And he's been an inspiration and someone that I feel like is part of my connection to like history on the ground.

Speaker 1 But in your question,

Speaker 1 how do you think people should learn about history going forward? Obviously, certain things like podcasts, Roman history podcasts are booming, for example, right?

Speaker 1 Because for some reason, men love to listen to Roman history. I do too, let's be clear.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's probably fair that Americans aren't particularly well-informed about world history, for sure, American history also.

Speaker 1 How do you get people to understand history in a way that's obviously you're doing it in a funny way, but it's also dark, too?

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 43 history

Speaker 68 at its best is great storytelling.

Speaker 27 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

Speaker 27 in incredibly engaging ways.

Speaker 25 And especially in this moment you're in,

Speaker 45 that where we're so just

Speaker 65 awash with distractions and insanity.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 24 Like this is a moment where

Speaker 43 we have to be extremely skeptical of our sources of history as well.

Speaker 27 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?

Speaker 38 And really assuming that you're not.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, what do you, are there period events of history that you find yourself thinking about now?

Speaker 1 And what piece of history do you wish Americans knew really well if you had to go back to the different things you've looked at?

Speaker 63 I feel like that J.

Speaker 39 Edgar Hoover's sort of reign of terror of the FBI for so long is incredibly instructive to this moment, in part because

Speaker 35 the DOJ and the FBI have become basically just political arms of the president.

Speaker 24 And it happened so quickly.

Speaker 74 And it's very, I think

Speaker 80 that is scary, but also looking back at J.

Speaker 40 Edgar Hoover, we're able to see, yes, that was also an extremely scary time.

Speaker 43 And it took a lot of courage for a lot of people to

Speaker 20 bring that to light.

Speaker 31 And like I say in the introduction to the book,

Speaker 45 Part of what looking back at Snafus does for us with distance, like looking at these horrible things from a distance,

Speaker 53 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.

Speaker 36 And we can look to those heroes as fucked up as a situation might be.

Speaker 68 We can look to those heroes, for examples,

Speaker 32 on how we can do better in the present moment.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. So, I'm going to switch a little bit and we're going to talk a little bit about news.
And to finish up, we're going to let's go back to the daily show for a minute.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Here's a clip from a segment you did called Mass Stereo About Gay Marriage Becoming Legal in Massachusetts. I love this one.

Speaker 61 Now that gay marriage is legal, Massachusetts ranks dead last in illiteracy, 48th in per capita poverty, and a pathetic 49th in total divorces.

Speaker 61 Somehow, Don and Robert, one of the state's first married gay couples, don't see the problem.

Speaker 85 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.

Speaker 21 Name one thing in Massachusetts that's not ruined.

Speaker 38 Well,

Speaker 85 I guess I look at the other way around. I mean, I can't think of anything that gay's marriage has actually caused.

Speaker 85 other than letting people get married.

Speaker 49 Easy for them to say.

Speaker 75 still stands out.

Speaker 71 Oh my gosh, blast from the past.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 79 Gosh, it's hard to say. But you know what's interesting listening to that and hearing the sort of

Speaker 33 the angle of attack that...

Speaker 55 that we used as correspondents on that show,

Speaker 74 purely in the service of satire and comedy, is also what you're seeing unironically with Jesse Waters or you know some of these guys.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 63 it's that I think

Speaker 62 in some ways we may have paved the road for some of those guys.

Speaker 32 Right.

Speaker 1 It's like network.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 34 But I think what was your question about something today that would be worth diving into?

Speaker 3 Yeah. God,

Speaker 23 it's overwhelming.

Speaker 1 Oh, let me help you here. Elon Musk said he's spending less time in DC after Tesla fell drastically compared to a year ago.
The public seems to be turning on him.

Speaker 1 Most veterans think he has too much power. Most people think Doge hasn't done a good job, which is actually factual.

Speaker 75 Yeah, that's a great one.

Speaker 67 You know, I think you can just take the dumbest possible take, which is that Doge is a massive success and that

Speaker 39 it's doing amazing work.

Speaker 43 And you butter up Elon Musk and

Speaker 24 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?

Speaker 39 That's a cynical take.

Speaker 24 The right take is that this is a vict, he's taking a victory lap.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 57 And he's.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what he's doing. That's what they're actually doing.

Speaker 1 I don't know why they're doing it, but they're saying, everything was great. I'm like, except it wasn't.

Speaker 3 You know, and the numbers keep falling. Oh, God.

Speaker 3 It's Orwellian. It's fully Orwellian at this point.

Speaker 1 If it wasn't so stupid, that's the problem. And it's stupid and Orwellian at the same time.

Speaker 3 I would argue

Speaker 1 that's the saving grace, is that it's 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 it's i think it's odd for someone his age to be obsessed with 4chan style jokes it's they're unfunny correct it's sad to me it's sad it's like uh i mean trolling is so

Speaker 24 uh it's such a window into like primal darkness in humanity i feel like trolling behavior in general

Speaker 32 um and it's one of the things that that the anonymity of the internet has has

Speaker 35 just shown us in this like black mirror.

Speaker 52 Oh, this is really who we are.

Speaker 43 Like, we're pretty awful.

Speaker 39 Humans are pretty awful.

Speaker 28 And

Speaker 35 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,

Speaker 43 wow, a lot of people have contributed to my success. A lot of people still

Speaker 37 work hard in my factories and buy my products.

Speaker 56 And I rely on those people for my wealth.

Speaker 41 And, uh, and, but it's my wealth and I'm not going to, I don't know.

Speaker 42 It just is, it, there's, there's so the lack of gratitude, the lack of perspective, the eagerness to troll and harm and hurt.

Speaker 16 You know, when he tweets about someone, they get, their lives can completely unravel.

Speaker 45 They get doxxed and stalked and death threats and everything.

Speaker 1 So he said, my heart is seething with hate, just so you know, it's not.

Speaker 44 I feel that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 I feel that for me right now i'm seething right now you're seething he's just unfunny

Speaker 23 like people who are people who can't see kara right now there's actually smoke rising off of her body

Speaker 1 honestly you're just not funny he's just not funny if he was funny i would say so um you've said that trump has a fragile little ego like andy bernard there may be more parallels if you indulge me just for a second the office was full of lovable incompetence and some venal incompetence um the trump administration kind of resembles that except it's not funny and it's not lovable.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 34 That's really interesting.

Speaker 64 Well, part of what made the incompetence on the office so funny and lovable is that the stakes are so low.

Speaker 28 Yes. Right? Yes.

Speaker 62 You know, when somebody messes up something huge in the office, like it's a paper company.

Speaker 42 Like it's not, there's no reverberations across the globe.

Speaker 51 But,

Speaker 1 gosh. Let me try.
Pete Hagseth. Try.

Speaker 49 Okay.

Speaker 73 Pete Hagseth would be a little like

Speaker 70 Packer.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Someone thinks Meredith, actually, because alcoholism is

Speaker 1 J.D. Vance.

Speaker 61 J.D.

Speaker 46 Vance is a little Dwight-ish, I think.

Speaker 38 He's a little Dwight Fruity, maybe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely. Karen Levitt.

Speaker 67 You know what? This is

Speaker 67 she's she probably is

Speaker 62 she's like a cross between Angela and

Speaker 37 Ellie.

Speaker 1 Okay, Marco Rubio.

Speaker 50 It's hard because I love the characters in the office.

Speaker 75 So it's hard to compare.

Speaker 34 It's hard to compare them to people

Speaker 52 that I struggle to like.

Speaker 79 But he's a little bit of Oscar Nunez because you never see Marco smile.

Speaker 49 Like he's so, he feels so tense.

Speaker 1 Because he's living in hell.

Speaker 67 Yeah, it feels like he's he, you're right.

Speaker 24 He's living this,

Speaker 39 lie, like he's just signed up for a life that is so against who he is at his core.

Speaker 23 And so he's living a lie.

Speaker 64 And in some ways,

Speaker 40 that was Oscar's sort of thing.

Speaker 1 All right, two more. Cash Patel, speaking of the FBI.

Speaker 65 Oh, what was Zach Woods' character?

Speaker 76 There's something about something there, like intense loyalty, subscribing to a hierarchy with dedication and

Speaker 1 like actually actually being well-spoken in the midst of all yeah gabe gabe of course all right last one rfk jr

Speaker 56 uh when will farrell guessed it on the show that was uh

Speaker 40 he that that had rfk vibes

Speaker 1 we'll be back in a minute

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Speaker 1 We're to finish up talking about the entertainment industry in general.

Speaker 1 You're currently executive producing and starring a film called Smudge the Blades about Canadian youth hockey team on an Indigenous reservation.

Speaker 1 It's your second project that deals with issues faced by Indigenous people with co-star Jana Schmeeting. You also starred and executed producing a series for people called Rutherford Falls.

Speaker 1 They're not obvious choices for you. Explain why you're doing these.

Speaker 39 Rutherford Falls emerged as Mike Scher was one of the writers on the office and also went on to create amazing shows like Parks and Rec and others. And

Speaker 25 he and I

Speaker 18 have

Speaker 34 always been close and always

Speaker 46 sort of like, when are we going to work together again?

Speaker 41 What's it going to be?

Speaker 39 And a bunch of years ago, we just started having these open-ended phone calls, long conversations

Speaker 55 or visits.

Speaker 30 We'd go to each other's offices and just hang out and just explore like what is, what's activating us right now.

Speaker 65 And this was during, I think,

Speaker 32 the first Trump campaign around 2015.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 40 we were sort of wanting to tell the story of a guy who

Speaker 51 didn't understand historical context and had a lot of beliefs and an obsession with his own family origin story.

Speaker 34 And we wanted to sort of like pull the rug out from this character.

Speaker 29 Like, what if he learns that his, he always felt like his family was like a very noble and courageous family that did the right thing through the Civil War?

Speaker 59 And he's built his entire identity around this.

Speaker 25 He's created a museum about his family and so forth.

Speaker 68 We were talking about this with another friend of ours, Sierra Ornelis, who's a Native American comedy writer.

Speaker 25 And then it was like, oh, you know what?

Speaker 33 There's more, there's a deeper story to tell here.

Speaker 25 Maybe this is a guy who believes his family like did the right thing by the Native American community.

Speaker 35 And then we roped Sierra in and she became a showrunner and co-creator with us. And And Jana became my co-star on that show.

Speaker 34 And it really

Speaker 27 emerged into what it became, which is really a story about reflecting on the narratives that we cling to, then the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what happens when maybe you're wrong or those things fall apart.

Speaker 43 And I think, and weirdly, in this moment, I think a lot of people have, we've all, I know for myself,

Speaker 20 we've all been telling ourselves that America is a certain way or has a certain story to it.

Speaker 35 And And suddenly things are shifting and, like, oh, maybe I didn't understand things the way I thought I did.

Speaker 57 Anyway, that's the original.

Speaker 1 In a lot of ways, you're reclaiming history, right? You're reclaiming it the way it's told. Yeah.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 71 I think looking at past mistakes is

Speaker 41 like a triumphant exercise.

Speaker 3 It's like, look, look where we are. Look what we've done.

Speaker 63 Look how we got through that thing.

Speaker 20 Look how we emerged.

Speaker 33 You know, this new executive order about the Smithsonian,

Speaker 23 that's very unnerving because it does seem to be like we don't want to or we're scared of our history.

Speaker 63 It's such a fearful posture.

Speaker 37 Like, no, no, no, history is inarguable.

Speaker 34 History is not something we can, and we either reckon with it or we don't.

Speaker 60 And if you don't, then you're just living a kind of this false

Speaker 58 kind of like cardboard cutout of a

Speaker 3 people want to do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 YouTube is also killing it, by the way. The office was once the most streamed show on Netflix before NBC reclaimed the show to put it on Peacock.
And thank God, because it was a big success for them.

Speaker 1 It's also in syndication in cable and stuff like that. How does that work for you? How do you think of your career?

Speaker 1 Because I'm assuming you're not getting paid every step of these ways with that they're taking the office and taking advantage of the finances around it.

Speaker 1 But you also had a hit Netflix film called Family Switch, for example. How do you look at the industry right now?

Speaker 35 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

Speaker 23 have been so dramatically altered and dismantled that it's confusing. And

Speaker 24 at the same time,

Speaker 27 of course, there's tremendous opportunity also. And so it's a matter of trying to focus on that.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 28 And or a TV show.

Speaker 25 I know that I'm going to pitch to this person.

Speaker 44 And then if they like it, they're going to take it to this studio and so forth.

Speaker 25 Like there was a way of understanding things.

Speaker 36 That has largely evaporated.

Speaker 78 And now

Speaker 39 there's a much bigger emphasis on kind of building something holistically and then presenting it to a buyer.

Speaker 24 The other hard part is

Speaker 65 you used to be able to rely on this idea that something successful would become part of the sort of zeitgeist or something or part of the popular conversation.

Speaker 16 And now so much consumption of media is so siloed that

Speaker 34 if you're really deep on a TV show

Speaker 79 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.

Speaker 60 Right, right.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 1 you're in your asylum. Yeah.

Speaker 18 That's a

Speaker 1 one or two things. Like my son just called me and says, Did you watch Severance? I'm like, Yeah,

Speaker 18 I did. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 Certain things break, right? Still, but not in the same way.

Speaker 3 You're absolutely right. But also, like,

Speaker 3 the Severance numbers aren't.

Speaker 38 And I, I don't know, they're not big.

Speaker 3 They aren't big.

Speaker 34 But they're not the numbers of like a hit, you know, of like

Speaker 3 ER

Speaker 35 or like a big network show from 15 years ago.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 1 So what does that mean for you as an artist? Do you think there's an opportunity to be, and this is the same thing that's happening in the media industry? And I've embraced it for a long time.

Speaker 1 And so I'm like, great, mess. I like it.
And some people are very entrepreneurial. You seem very entrepreneurial.
You're doing the podcast and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Do you have to be entrepreneurial now? Is it a good thing?

Speaker 1 Or do you like the old paternalistic kind of ways where they just give you the town car and the multi-million dollar salary and then just go over there and be funny?

Speaker 24 Well, I, I, I miss it only because it was

Speaker 27 it, I understood it.

Speaker 35 And now I'm a little bit, now I feel like everyone's a little more adrift and figuring things out.

Speaker 48 And, um,

Speaker 25 I think maybe the hardest thing in this moment is it's so unclear what buyers want.

Speaker 28 So when you're developing a show or a movie, you're like,

Speaker 68 well, maybe this streamer will like this, but that those three won't.

Speaker 24 And is there something?

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 67 Now, it's so hard to tell.

Speaker 1 And that's a little bit scary, but yes, 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.

Speaker 68 And I was like, We all have those stories.

Speaker 64 I had, I have almost a very similar story with lots of big stars in a big funny TV show with a famous creator.

Speaker 38 Didn't get picked up and no one wanted it.

Speaker 65 And it's like, well, but we did the math on that.

Speaker 34 But it is, so that's scary and unnerving and a little frustrating.

Speaker 23 But at the same time, always like any, anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit is going to be just looking for those avenues.

Speaker 32 And

Speaker 62 it's still fun.

Speaker 51 I mean, it's still, it just, it reinforces the core of the process, which is to focus on what you love.

Speaker 43 Like, what do you love to create and make?

Speaker 28 And what's going to inspire you?

Speaker 34 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 an 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.

Speaker 34 And there's infrastructure, there's money for that.

Speaker 28 We can get, you know, iHeart is

Speaker 41 and Film Nation are our partners in my podcast.

Speaker 60 And like, they help, they give us money to make this thing.

Speaker 1 Well, they're making money in case you're interested.

Speaker 2 Wait a minute.

Speaker 1 Wait a minute. All right.
My last question. Give me one of your snafus.

Speaker 3 Oh, boy.

Speaker 75 I think for me,

Speaker 30 a personal snafu

Speaker 39 that I can point to.

Speaker 80 This is a little heady, but

Speaker 77 I moved through life for a very long time

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 16 And that that was a little always this kind of unnerving feeling that I had.

Speaker 33 And I always, I could always get along well and move.

Speaker 64 And I had close relationships.

Speaker 23 I'm lucky to have had wonderful people in my life who I love dearly.

Speaker 68 So I wasn't really necessarily adrift, but I always felt like I didn't.

Speaker 67 There was things I didn't understand. I didn't understand how people did certain jobs or how certain things came so easily

Speaker 77 to people.

Speaker 34 And some of these things were maybe like

Speaker 65 managing just just aspects of one's life, right?

Speaker 23 Logistics of life always confounded me

Speaker 55 and has always been a struggle for me.

Speaker 25 And this is a,

Speaker 32 I'm not unique in this sense, but I went to therapy

Speaker 25 for many years in my 20s, again, in my 30s and 40s.

Speaker 39 And I, uh,

Speaker 25 and I still couldn't sort of crack this feeling that I'm different and that I wasn't clicking in some way.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 37 And I wept reading that book because there was so much about

Speaker 39 my life that I saw and understood in this book.

Speaker 26 That

Speaker 77 was

Speaker 44 just this epic awakening.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 58 it also, this was just a couple of years 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 uh in terms of like just steering and navigating life um

Speaker 34 my heart breaks for that younger me

Speaker 25 being so confused and isolated in those feelings um

Speaker 44 and i i sort of think of that as like a snafu snafu in the sense that

Speaker 1 I really wish the opposite of a snafu.

Speaker 37 Well,

Speaker 73 the awareness now,

Speaker 57 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

Speaker 3 or a lot earlier

Speaker 30 that some things

Speaker 38 could have gone differently.

Speaker 68 That said, I have very little to complain about.

Speaker 1 Oh, don't do that. Don't do that sentence after.

Speaker 1 Don't do it. Don't do it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 16 What a pleasure.

Speaker 81 Thank you, Kara.

Speaker 1 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Megan Kinane, and Kaitlyn Lynch. Nishak Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcast.

Speaker 1 Special thanks to Eric Litke. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 1 If you're already following the show, you're one of the lovable, more competent office characters, a Pam. If not, well, that's your snafu.

Speaker 1 Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Carris Wisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Carraswisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

Speaker 1 We'll be back on Thursday with more.

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