Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms Live at 92NY with Samantha Bee About this episode Samantha Bee is as lively as ever. And on this special episode of SNAFU, Sam helped take Ed's book tour to the big apple, LIVE at the 92NY in New York City. They reminisce on their early days at The Daily Show together, and naturally touch on some of the most bonkers chapters in Ed's book, SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups. Don't miss out this holiday season, and buy the New York Times Bestseller wherever you get your books, or go to: www.snafu-book.com
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:34 Speaker 04 Hello, Snafu-universe. It is I, Ed Helms, your ever-dutiful captain, steering this ship straight into the iceberg of history's biggest screw-ups. And this week, we're going live, baby. Well, sort of. I mean, you're not going to be listening to something that's happening live, but it is a recording of a thing that was live. You know what I mean. All right, so during my book tour for Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups, I had the absolute pleasure of stopping by the legendary 92nd Street Y in New York City, where I got to sit down with a dear old friend, who also happens to be an Emmy-winning comedian,
2:16 Speaker 04 producer, writer, and professional destroyer of pomposity. I am talking about none other than the great Samantha Bee. Sam and I go all the way back to our Daily Show days, which feels like roughly 400 years ago in political time. So it was really a joy to just hang out and reminisce about the salad days, and also dig into some juicy stuff, you know? Like the decades of epic screw-ups I write about in the book, how the book actually came together, and even some reflections on how the screw-ups in the book might inform how we navigate the present moment. And doing all of this live onstage in front of a fired-up New York crowd,
3:00 Speaker 04 it just gave the whole night a kind of electric buzz, and it was just an absolute treat. So, stick around for my conversation with Sam Bee. And hey, if you're in the market for a gift that's equal parts history lesson, comedy show, and stocking stuffer, look no further than my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available at snafu-book.com or wherever fine books are sold. The audiobook, narrated by yours truly, is also out now. Think of that as kind of cozy little earmuffs for your brain. Only instead of warmth, they're packed with shocking blunders and questionable decision-making.
3:44 Speaker 04 Okay, that's it. Now, please enjoy my chat with the brilliant Samantha Bee.
4:02 Speaker 04 All right.
4:04 Speaker 05 This is so, oh my god, this chair is so comfortable. Ed, I had no idea the chairs would be so amazing.
4:10 Speaker 04 I mean, it's good, because I just came from my YMCA workout.
4:14 Speaker 05 That's right. I'm so sweaty.
4:19 Speaker 05 I'm so excited to be here with you because I miss you.
4:23 Speaker 04 I know.
4:24 Speaker 05 Oh, make it.
4:25 Speaker 04 I haven't seen you in ages.
4:26 Speaker 05 And when you asked me to do this talk with you, I could not have been more excited. I love everything that you do. I love SNAFU. I love the podcast. If you don't know it, you really should. Like, download, like, subscribe.
4:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, wherever you get your podcasts.
4:42 Speaker 05 Wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, the world is bananas.
4:47 Speaker 04 Basically.
4:48 Speaker 05 Yes, so thank you for writing a book about how...
4:51 Speaker 04 Someone had to point it out.
4:52 Speaker 05 About how the world was... Yes. The world was always bananas is what I'm hearing from this book.
4:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
4:59 Speaker 05 So the book is called SNAFU. Tell us right off the bat, what is a SNAFU? What does that acronym stand for?
5:05 Speaker 04 Well, SNAFU is an acronym that started during World War II. It stands for Situation Normal All Fucked Up.
5:13 Speaker 05 Great.
5:14 Speaker 04 And most of us know it just as a term that means disaster, or terrible situation, or a pickle. Maybe it would be a lighter usage.
5:24 Speaker 05 A pickle.
5:25 Speaker 04 And, yeah, the soldiers used it because, I guess, World War II was pretty fucked up. And it became just sort of a catchy, catchy phrase that made it into the lexicon.
5:39 Speaker 05 It's a little bit like FUBAR. It's a little bit like FUBAR.
5:41 Speaker 04 It's exactly like FUBAR, which I think, and I haven't done the research, but I think came from the same time.
5:47 Speaker 05 Same time.
5:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:48 Speaker 05 Fucked up beyond all repair.
5:50 Speaker 04 You know what? FUBAR's better.
5:51 Speaker 05 No, it's not.
5:52 Speaker 04 FUBAR, it's got a little more punch to it.
5:54 Speaker 05 They're both very good. Okay, so, okay, it's the definitive guide to history's greatest groups, and I have to say that it was a soothing... Like, it's pretty bizarre that a book that contains many stories about us on the precipice of nuclear meltdown actually cheered me up. And I think that that says a lot.
6:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:13 Speaker 05 About where we are. So we've got... You know, one of the first, one of the first stories in the book is about a fun toy set for kids called the Gilbert Atomic Energy Science Kit that contained really uranium.
6:26 Speaker 05 You all haven't read the book yet, but you're about to, and it's excellent. We've got nuclear reactors melting down, we've got cats with spy equipment implanted into their ears, Howard Hughes-related giant claw machines retrieving Russian subs. It's excellent. Okay. Was it difficult to narrow down all of the world's fuck-ups into only one volume? Because I feel like it's kind of endless.
6:52 Speaker 04 Great question.
6:53 Speaker 05 Thank you.
6:54 Speaker 04 Uh, yes. Which is why I kind of, just kind of put some parameters on the whole thing. Just the curatorial decision-making boiled down to it's mostly American stories. It's also mostly recent. The book is divided up into sections by decade.
7:19 Speaker 05 Yes.
7:20 Speaker 04 So it's basically the 50s to now. So that's a pretty small window for human folly. There's a lot of other stuff that people did that was dumb.
7:31 Speaker 05 These blunders, these bad ideas are epic. Many of them are potentially world-ending, but so many of them are childish and silly.
7:44 Speaker 04 I love, yes, I love that observation.
7:47 Speaker 05 They're childish. They're like, should we detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon?
7:54 Speaker 04 This is full Looney Tunes. That's a chapter in the book.
7:58 Speaker 05 Yes.
7:59 Speaker 04 Just to give you another little bit of a sort of structural breakdown, there are 31 chapters that are divided up into decades, and each chapter is its own snafu, which makes it great for just, like, episodic reading. If you just pick it up.
8:18 Speaker 05 Yes.
8:19 Speaker 04 Leave it on your toilet. I'm not, I won't judge you. If you're reading, it's good, anywhere.
8:25 Speaker 05 Tell me about, okay, so the podcast that you do, Snafu, the book, the format of the book differs from the podcast, because the podcast is like one big deep dive.
8:34 Speaker 04 Is anyone else shaking?
8:35 Speaker 05 Through the, yes.
8:36 Speaker 04 Subways.
8:38 Speaker 05 Oh my.
8:39 Speaker 04 I've been living in LA too long, I'm like, earthquake.
8:43 Speaker 05 Oh, no.
8:44 Speaker 04 I forget that 92nd Street Y and the Angelica Film Theater rattle with the trains.
8:51 Speaker 05 That's right. You know that every time I go to LA, I've experienced a minor earthquake. Every time I go, I'm a harbinger of doom.
9:00 Speaker 04 Whoa.
9:00 Speaker 05 Just like a tiny little sh-
9:01 Speaker 04 You are.
9:02 Speaker 05 I know. So what I'm saying is that was an earthquake.
9:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, oh, okay.
9:07 Speaker 05 What is the difference between the podcast process, which is very long-form, and, I mean, it's long-form to write a book, but it's more chapterized. So what is the difference between the process of doing those two things?
9:22 Speaker 04 So, the podcast came first. We started working on the podcast about three years ago, and it's, it is a very different thing because it's, each season of the podcast is a very deep dive into one thing.
9:38 Speaker 05 Yes.
9:39 Speaker 04 One snafu. So there are now three seasons of the podcast out, and each season is eight episodes. And again, deep dive into one thing.
9:49 Speaker 05 Yep.
9:50 Speaker 04 And the book, as I just described, is lots of things.
9:55 Speaker 05 Perfect.
9:56 Speaker 04 Less of a deep dive.
9:57 Speaker 05 Perfect for the bathroom.
9:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
10:00 Speaker 05 This is how you describe it.
10:01 Speaker 04 Yes. Let's talk more about how perfect it is for bathroom reading.
10:05 Speaker 05 I don't know.
10:07 Speaker 04 But the process for building both of these things is not dissimilar.
10:13 Speaker 05 Right.
10:15 Speaker 04 Because it's an amazing team.
10:18 Speaker 05 Right.
10:19 Speaker 04 That worked on both, so...
10:21 Speaker 05 Tell me about your team, because this is an incredible, I mean, these people must be professional, is it a group of historians, professional researchers, fact-checkers?
10:30 Speaker 04 Podcast nerds.
10:31 Speaker 05 Podcast nerds?
10:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:33 Speaker 05 This is a team of goddamn nerds. Top-notch nerds.
10:37 Speaker 04 This is an amazing team. Researchers and just pulling together so much information, helping structure information.
10:47 Speaker 05 How do you, I mean, how do you, as a team, how do you curate the stories that you want to tell? How do you decide? What is the research process like?
10:55 Speaker 04 It's building a pool of possibilities.
10:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 04 Pouring through them, and then, in the case of the... In the case of the podcast, it's like, do we have the depth?
11:09 Speaker 05 Right.
11:09 Speaker 04 Does this story have the depth to carry a whole season? And then, do we have access to the materials or the people that we want to talk to? And then, for the book, again, it was a matter of finding these sort of organizing principles or like, kind of, curatorial limitations that would guide a little bit of decision-making. Ultimately, the other critical component to both the podcast and the book has been, are these stories really well-known or not?
11:50 Speaker 05 Right.
11:51 Speaker 04 And the book avoids things like, the Titanic, or, you know, the Donner Party, or things that, which are actually amazing, and like, just epic stories that are incredible to learn about. But I think what makes, what, we made a decision early on to kind of like, chase things that are less known to the popular memory.
12:17 Speaker 05 Yes.
12:17 Speaker 04 And that, I think, has really been an exciting thing about the podcast and the book.
12:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:25 Speaker 04 A lot of these things, people just don't know.
12:27 Speaker 05 They really don't know. Many of the stories were surprising to me, and so many of the stories actually have a modern, a really modern relevance. I mean, I'm sure you could not have expected this when you were curating the book, that we would be talking so much about Greenland right now. And there is an amazing story about Greenland in the book, and I really had no idea. And it, not only is a very interesting story about something we knew very little about, but is a kind of a origin story about the United States and their relationship to Greenland and Denmark. Can you talk about that?
12:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, okay, so, there's an entire chapter dedicated to Project Ice Worm. And, and you're right, it's so wild how prescient it is.
13:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:13 Speaker 04 Because, as early as the 1950s, it was very clear that Greenland was strategically excellent for launching missiles. And, and so, Project Ice Worm is exactly what it sounds like.
13:33 Speaker 04 Greenland is a giant sheet of ice. So, someone hatched the idea, "Well, what if we could build a railroad system underneath the Greenland ice sheet and ferry missiles around and launch them from wherever we wanted in Greenland."
13:53 Speaker 05 What a great idea.
13:55 Speaker 04 What a great, I mean, a flawless idea.
13:57 Speaker 05 Flawless.
13:58 Speaker 04 So, they opened up Camp Century, which was a sort of military, a US military installation that had some cover stories but was essentially a research project to see if this was feasible. And they put a nuclear reactor in it because they needed power. And everybody loved nuclear stuff in the 50s. And they started to build, basically, an army base under the ice. And then they started digging tunnels to see if they could get train tracks out, you know, across the whole country.
14:39 Speaker 04 And needless to say, ice is an unstable structural...
14:48 Speaker 05 Ice shift.
14:50 Speaker 04 Yeah. It's, so many things went wrong. They realized that the breathing that people were doing was accumulating, the moisture from people's breath was adding to the thickness of the ice over time. And so, the walls were shifting constantly, the ceilings were, they basically installed, they dug out these massive holes and then installed prefab structures, like, kind of like...
15:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, prefab structures and a nuclear reactor.
15:26 Speaker 04 And a nuclear reactor.
15:28 Speaker 05 Just for funsies.
15:30 Speaker 04 And the Danish government was like, "You know what? You guys are cool. Just don't tell us what's up."
15:38 Speaker 05 We do not want to know.
15:41 Speaker 04 And it just, none of it worked.
15:45 Speaker 05 No.
15:45 Speaker 04 None of it worked. And sadly, now, there is still a ton of nuclear waste and a ton of human waste because they just dug a giant pit in the ice for all the soldiers' bathroom activity.
16:04 Speaker 05 Right.
16:05 Speaker 04 Which is a great place to read my book.
16:06 Speaker 05 It's a great place to pick up a book. So essentially, the subway rumbling that we felt that was so minor was just constantly happening under the ice as people were living and working, and nobody really knew what the outcome was. Eventually, they took everything out, but now we have a long legacy.
16:26 Speaker 04 Well, now, there's a lot of nuclear waste frozen under the ice.
16:31 Speaker 05 Great.
16:32 Speaker 04 And people got sick from that, local Greenland indigenous people, and it was tragic. And there's also, just all of that human waste, and it's a lot, is frozen. And global warming will reveal it. And it's one of the things global warming will do that's bad.
16:57 Speaker 05 I feel great because I feel that when we purchase Greenland, which is going flawlessly, we'll probably clean it up because we have a really good track record of that, right?
17:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:09 Speaker 04 100%. Actually, as soon as it's ours, we probably will.
17:12 Speaker 05 We'll probably take care of it.
17:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:14 Speaker 05 Really take big care of it.
17:15 Speaker 04 A lot of promises were made that it would get cleaned up, and it never did. And of course, yeah.
17:19 Speaker 05 Actually, talking, I mean, on the subject of global warming, there's a really great, pretty short chapter about the ozone layer in the kind of section on the 1980s. And it was, it's a great reminder that scientific consensus is possible, and sometimes we act in our own best interests after tremendous, you know, tremendous push and pull, but sometimes we can get there. Does that feel realistic anymore? I'll show myself out.
17:52 Speaker 04 I hadn't thought of that story in that context, and I'm so glad you made that connection. Because that really is, that is a great example of, of like, seeing a problem, understanding the problem, and then actually pushing hard against industrial interests to fix that problem. And it worked. It really worked.
18:16 Speaker 05 And that's not to say that it wasn't a complicated journey to get there, and I'm sure it took a long time, but there was a kind of a sense that you could harness people's personal activity and people, the population would act.
18:30 Speaker 04 You could actually inform people that maybe things were bad or unhealthy for them or the world, and they might listen.
18:40 Speaker 05 Oh, dear. Anyway, one thing that, this is more, this is more a comment than a question, is that the book is, it's very funny, and it's, of course, it's like, it's chilling, but it's very interesting, but it is a great reminder that the world is now, but it has always been a scary place, with incompetence and institutional chaos and insane ideas. Those are forever. I feel like it's happening at a speed, like a real, a velocity that is really frightening right now, in particular. And what really strikes me about many of
19:21 Speaker 05 the stories in the book is that all of this, like, subterfuge and all these crazy ideas really happen behind the scenes, like, behind a very secretive veil. And we just learn about them by accident. Someone's going through Carl Sagan's old applications for grants, and they're like, "Hey, what now? What are we reading? Is this real?" But we're seeing so much incompetence so openly. Can you, I guess...
19:51 Speaker 04 I mean, that's your opinion.
19:53 Speaker 05 That's my opinion. True. And I just wonder if we want to take a minute and consider what we're going to find out in the future about what was happening now.
20:01 Speaker 04 Yeah. No, you're right. This is a... What feels different right now is how transparent the incompetence is.
20:10 Speaker 05 Yes.
20:10 Speaker 04 Or seems to be.
20:11 Speaker 05 Yes.
20:12 Speaker 04 But that also, like, we're probably just seeing the top 10% of the iceberg.
20:20 Speaker 05 Right.
20:20 Speaker 04 And it will be decades of unfolding insanity.
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22:44 Speaker 04 There are a few threads that I think emerge in studying these things. Yeah. And one is, one that I, I mean, hubris, obviously. Sure. And the secrecy is a big one that you just mentioned. Another one is the, um, the, the group think of a, of people in a closed bubble. Right. Right? And that's what, um, that's what happens in, like, institutions like the CIA or the FBI.
23:23 Speaker 04 Season two of the podcast is a deep dive into an incredible story about citizen activists in the 70s who, uh, broke in, basically, they felt that the FBI was being very dastardly, surveilling people, harassing people, encroaching civil liberties. But who do you go to when law enforcement is out of line? And also, at the time, J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI and an American hero. Everybody loved him. And, uh, which was a very curated image. He was very deep into kind of manipulation of pop culture.
24:08 Speaker 04 He was involved with movies that starred Jimmy Stewart as, you know, the, the, the ideal FBI agent. And so forth, but these activists realized that they had one option, which was to somehow infiltrate. They decided to stage an elaborate heist and they, at insane personal risk to themselves and their families, broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole all the files. And that was at a time when this, we didn't have hard drives.
24:49 Speaker 04 So, most branch offices of the FBI had most FBI files. And they took everything and they pored through it and they found actual documentation and evidence of some of this horrible malfeasance that J. Edgar Hoover was up to. And they sent it to a number of congresspeople and reporters. And most of them chickened out. One person published those papers. And I think she is in the audience tonight, too. And it's Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.
25:50 Speaker 05 Well, that is...
25:51 Speaker 04 That gave me chills.
25:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's, it's an incredible story of citizen activism and heroism and people putting themselves at risk for just to do the right thing. And it led to, the fallout was incredible. It led to... The exposure of COINTELPRO, which was Hoover's counterintelligence program, which was basically an institutional harassment of so many different groups, civil rights activists, anti-war activists and others.
26:30 Speaker 04 And it led to the church hearings, which is the only reason we now have any congressional oversight over all of these intelligence agencies, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI. I don't know how much good that's doing now.
26:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, do we still have that?
26:53 Speaker 04 But here's what I think also incredible about that story and this moment is that we're in a moment where the FBI feels like a political tool again, but the key word is "again." You know, it was a terrifying institution through J. Edgar Hoover's epic reign. I mean, he was in charge of the FBI for so long and used it just for so many petty grievances and so forth. And it feels like we're getting there, if not already there, again.
27:36 Speaker 05 Right.
27:37 Speaker 04 I don't mean to say this in a way that diminishes the sort of terror of the moment or the intensity of the moment, but what that J. Edgar Hoover story shows us is that there can be light at the end of the tunnel.
27:56 Speaker 05 You do say that in the intro to the book, that you sort of see the book as a force for optimism in a very chaotic world, which feels kind of counterintuitive, but I take the point. We have majorly blundered in the past and we have, the force of human good has prevailed.
28:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a choice to see things that way. It's almost like, but I think it's a good choice. But I do think that what these blunders and face plants and terrible snafus throughout history show us is a resilience also.
28:37 Speaker 05 Right.
28:38 Speaker 04 And a kind of like tendency towards equilibrium of some kind.
28:43 Speaker 05 Right. How much does it frighten you that our civic education is so inadequate? Like, I feel that people just don't really understand the function of government. I'm not saying the people in this room. We all know what the function of government is, but I feel like there's a missing piece right now, and that it's not really taught in schools.
29:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, no question. I think, look, I mean, the rise of a strong man is generally the function of an anxious population and a population that isn't rooted in the fundamentals of civil society and the process of civil society and, in our case, a constitutional democracy. And I'm just agreeing with you, yes.
29:41 Speaker 05 We're just agreeing with each other.
29:43 Speaker 04 I will say, the other great thing about, so studying snafus can be a little bit uplifting for the reasons we just discussed. The other reason that studying snafus can feel really good is that you get to say, "Man, I'm not that dumb."
29:59 Speaker 05 That is...
30:00 Speaker 04 You feel a lot better about a lot of your own life choices.
30:05 Speaker 05 This is, again, this is not a question, but I wrote this down. Much of our history is very stupid. Are we condemned to repeat our stupid history? I think maybe.
30:15 Speaker 04 No, of course. I mean, it's the one thing that we know for sure, is that we never learned from history.
30:23 Speaker 05 No.
30:23 Speaker 04 I think human enlightenment is not a straight line. It's a game of chutes and ladders. And you're just constantly, there's step forward, "Oh, shit, I fell down the slide and I'm going backwards again." And it just, you know, we have these huge stumbles, and unfortunately, they're... The cost is tremendous human suffering. And I hope, I, well, it's, I don't, I don't know where we're headed.
30:56 Speaker 05 Well, you know what? We could talk about cats with microphones embedded in their cat fur.
31:00 Speaker 04 Can we talk more about human suffering?
31:01 Speaker 05 Can we?
31:03 Speaker 04 Please.
31:04 Speaker 05 Okay, I do wanna, I do wanna say that every time I read something about cats with embedded, implanted listening devices and pigeons with backpacks.
31:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:16 Speaker 05 With aerial.
31:17 Speaker 04 How cute is that, though?
31:18 Speaker 05 That's pretty cute. That's pretty cute.
31:20 Speaker 04 They put little camera pouches on pigeons to turn them into spies.
31:25 Speaker 05 To turn them into pigeon spies.
31:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:28 Speaker 05 And you know, cats make the best spies because they're so incredibly trainable and they listen to everything you say. And they go exactly where you want them to go and do exactly as they're told.
31:38 Speaker 04 Yeah. Just ask Siegfried and Roy.
31:41 Speaker 05 Oh, God.
31:44 Speaker 04 They're not trainable. This is like, like, anybody knows that. And this is, this is where that like bubble group think of like, just somebody who didn't have, doesn't know cats was like, hey, they're, they're very sneaky and sly. If we can implant a microphone in their ears and train them to go sit next to bad guys.
32:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:08 Speaker 04 Then we'll be able to hear what the bad guys are saying.
32:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:11 Speaker 04 This is another chapter, sorry, this is a.
32:12 Speaker 05 This is a chapter from the book. There's teams of adult people.
32:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:18 Speaker 05 Workshopping these ideas.
32:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:21 Speaker 05 Is spending taxpayer dollars. To put these ideas on a whiteboard.
32:27 Speaker 04 Right.
32:28 Speaker 05 And everybody's backslapping and going, great idea, Hank. I love this.
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35:07 Speaker 04 In the book, there's a, there's a section of five of the 634 attempts by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro.
35:16 Speaker 05 Yes.
35:16 Speaker 04 Now, the, a lot of them didn't necessarily get past the drawing board, but there, there is a record of them. And at what point, like, that's a comedy writer's room. I mean, these ideas are so nuts.
35:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
35:34 Speaker 04 There was one idea to put thallium salts in his shoes, which is a specific, a certain kind of poison, toxin to the human body that will make your hair fall out. Why is that advantageous? Well, the theory, the thinking was that it'll make his beard fall out, and the beard is what really tethers him to leadership in the, in Cuban culture. And without his beard, he'll be dethroned and, and humiliated.
36:03 Speaker 05 He won't seem...
36:04 Speaker 04 The steps, like, it's so Rue Goldberg, just to get, get from A to, and then maybe...
36:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
36:11 Speaker 04 He'll, he'll get overthrown because his beard fell out.
36:15 Speaker 05 That's a really, that's like, that's really long game thinking.
36:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:19 Speaker 05 They're like, we'll, step by step, hair by hair.
36:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:22 Speaker 05 We will destroy his manliness.
36:25 Speaker 04 It's gonna take a minute, but it's, we're gonna get there.
36:32 Speaker 05 Oh, my God. Okay. Well, there's a season three of the podcast, and these are really, these are such complimentary endeavors, but the, I'm listening to season three of the podcast now, and it is built around a story I really have never heard before. It takes place during prohibition, and the story is really about the government poisoning the industrial alcohol supply. And it's a really fascinating story. Can you talk about that a little bit?
37:01 Speaker 04 Sure.
37:01 Speaker 05 It's really something.
37:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, so, everybody knows prohibition. It's part of our, our collective memory. I was pretty resistant to this, this story, because I was like, everyone knows prohibition. Everybody, you know, like, is this really that?
37:19 Speaker 04 Big of a deal, but the more we dug into it, it was like, oh, this is horrible. Well, during prohibition, the consumer alcohol supply was eliminated. So bootleggers would start to pull from the industrial alcohol supply. But most of that alcohol had been through a process called denaturing, which is basically the government adding things to alcohol to make it extremely yucky.
37:43 Speaker 05 Right.
37:43 Speaker 04 And just not palatable, and maybe even give you a tummy ache. And that was, for a long time, enough. But bootleggers were very, very driven.
37:55 Speaker 05 Right.
37:56 Speaker 04 And so they were figuring out ways to sort of work around that. Also, people were just drinking it anyway and getting sick. But then, as part of the prohibition effort, they thought, well, maybe if we can deter... Like, what are some ways we can deter people from drinking? Oh, let's make the industrial alcohol supply, like, fully poisonous. Fully poisonous to the point where anyone who drinks it, like, will get severely ill or die. And that, that will be great, because then people will start dying, and they'll be like, well, I shouldn't drink anymore. Because that's how people behave.
38:38 Speaker 05 This is...
38:40 Speaker 04 And thousands of people died as a result.
38:43 Speaker 05 Thousands of people died. Did anybody experience consequences based on this?
38:49 Speaker 04 No.
38:49 Speaker 05 Not at all?
38:50 Speaker 04 No, and it was fully exposed.
38:52 Speaker 05 Fully exposed.
38:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:54 Speaker 05 You know, that is actually another theme that really emerged for me, is that we are not consequence-oriented people. A lot of people who had ideas that were this bad, that resulted in tragedy or near tragedy, just sort of got other jobs.
39:12 Speaker 04 Yep.
39:12 Speaker 05 Or failed upward. We're not... Anyway, we're not big on consequences.
39:16 Speaker 04 No.
39:17 Speaker 05 I guess we all know that now.
39:18 Speaker 04 No.
39:19 Speaker 05 Are there favorite stories that you tossed about in the writers' room? Which you must have so much fun in your rooms. Like, they sound really raucous. Like, I mean, they sound really interesting.
39:31 Speaker 04 It's mostly zooms.
39:33 Speaker 05 Mostly zooms.
39:35 Speaker 05 Virtual fun rooms.
39:36 Speaker 04 It's hard to be raucous on a Zoom.
39:37 Speaker 05 I guess that's true. Are there favorite stories that you had to leave out? There must be so many more stories in your arsenal. Do you have a volume of 20 books lined up on this one?
39:48 Speaker 04 Well, yes, there are hopefully many books to come. Tell all your friends about it, so it sells really well.
39:56 Speaker 05 Yeah.
39:56 Speaker 04 And I can just keep churning these out. But the ones that fell by the wayside tended to be, tended to just not meet the criteria.
40:07 Speaker 05 Right.
40:07 Speaker 04 Which would be mostly things that are too well-known.
40:11 Speaker 05 Right.
40:12 Speaker 04 So, and then I think, once we found a good number, we were like, okay, it's just time to start the research.
40:21 Speaker 05 I liked that you covered MKUltra, which is a story that people...
40:26 Speaker 04 That's probably one of the most well-known stories in here. That and the Suez Canal container ship.
40:33 Speaker 05 It's true, but you did, but you did cover an angle of MKUltra that I did not know anything about. So it is, in a kind of a familiar story, there is, it is a kind of a side story in the larger story. Can you talk about that one? It's very interesting.
40:49 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, the MKUltra, for those of you who don't know, was the...
40:55 Speaker 05 Thank you.
40:56 Speaker 04 Thank you so much. I guess that's the cue that we're...
41:01 Speaker 05 We are transitioning, but I actually, but I want to hear your...
41:04 Speaker 04 Shut up.
41:05 Speaker 05 It's happening.
41:06 Speaker 04 It's time to stop, stop talking.
41:07 Speaker 05 These people have questions.
41:10 Speaker 04 MKUltra is a really hilarious and totally heartbreaking and horrific chapter in CIA history where, essentially, the world's supply of LSD was purchased by the CIA, and it was administered to people in prisons and in mental institutions, and sometimes just people on the streets, in the name of science and research.
41:44 Speaker 05 Right.
41:45 Speaker 04 To try to understand, basically, again, it's Cold War, and the thing is, maybe this new psychedelic drug is a secret to...
41:56 Speaker 04 Either a truth serum or mind control. And these were things that the Soviets and the American government were taking very seriously and researching extensively. But so many people were experimented on with no knowledge. The kind of like funny, sick part is that within MKUltra was this guy, George White, was basically given free rein to... He built an apartment in San Francisco that had a two-way mirror. And he would have sex workers bring their customers back to this apartment. And he would watch that.
42:40 Speaker 04 Then they would dose them.
42:42 Speaker 05 Right.
42:43 Speaker 04 Somehow, unbeknownst to them. And then he would watch them and take notes.
42:47 Speaker 05 Oh.
42:48 Speaker 04 Among other things, presumably. And so many people were traumatized, hurt, taken advantage of, exploited throughout the whole MKUltra process, which lasted years. Including, by the way, Whitey Bulger, the famous Boston mobster. He was in federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia, my hometown. And actually consented to what he thought was research into different kinds of mental illnesses. And was given massive doses of LSD for months.
43:32 Speaker 04 And he had nightmarish visions for the rest of his life. Who knows if the CIA helped create Whitey Bulger? Who knows?
43:43 Speaker 05 On a happy note, at least Jimmy Carter helped stave off a nuclear catastrophe in Canada? A young Jimmy Carter?
43:54 Speaker 04 Yeah. This is an awesome one. This is like, some of the snafus have like a little hero story baked into them. And that's, you're bringing one of them up, where a nuclear reactor, it was a re- Research reactor in Ontario, just up the Ottawa River from the city of Ottawa. And the reactor starts to melt down, but it's based, the supervisor gave the wrong instructions to somebody and then couldn't pick up the phone because he was punching buttons.
44:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, and the rods are coming out like in the Simpsons.
44:24 Speaker 04 It's very Simpsons, yeah. It's a very Simpsons moment. And a meltdown initiates. And it's the first, I believe it's the first nuclear meltdown in human history.
44:34 Speaker 05 And it changed the game in Canada.
44:36 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
44:37 Speaker 05 For sure. We have a lot of rules in Canada now.
44:40 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, that could be Canada for long.
44:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, that's true.
44:45 Speaker 04 It's gonna be our rules.
44:46 Speaker 05 That'd be fun. That's gonna be exciting.
44:49 Speaker 04 Anyway, the nuclear reactor starts to melt down. They call the US military for support and Jimmy Carter is 25 years old and is working on nuclear subs and is like, knows a lot about nuclear stuff, brings his men up there. They have to dismantle this reactor, but it's so radioactive that they can only be exposed to it for 90 seconds at a time. So they build a replica of the reactor on a tennis court nearby. They start rehearsing this dismantling process, basically in a tag team fashion. So they run in, undo some bolts and run out in 90 seconds.
45:30 Speaker 05 They're like a Formula One picture.
45:31 Speaker 04 Yes, it's a great analogy. I love that. That's exactly what it's like, like with those rivet guns. And they run in there and they get it done. And Jimmy Carter is one of the leads of that whole operation. And what I love about it is, I love Jimmy Carter. And a lot of people think he's kind of a wimp, which I think is a cynical, tragic take on his legacy. This is one of the most heroic things you could ever do, and it's so badass.
46:01 Speaker 05 It's so badass. We need, you know what? I do feel like America is like full of Jimmy Carters. We just have to summon.
46:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:07 Speaker 05 We just actually have to summon the will to save the day.
46:10 Speaker 04 Amen.
46:11 Speaker 05 Anyway, okay, we have some audience questions and they're very good questions. This is, the first question from Caroline is, will any of these stories become a movie? They are cinematic. I agree with you.
46:23 Speaker 04 God willing.
46:24 Speaker 05 God willing. Each and every one.
46:28 Speaker 04 Our partner in the podcast is Film Nation Entertainment.
46:31 Speaker 05 Right.
46:33 Speaker 04 We'll see what happens.
46:33 Speaker 05 Okay. Do you have a favorite snafu? Oh, would you have an all-time favorite? Or, hmm, that's a good question. It's hard to pick a favorite.
46:41 Speaker 04 A lot of the snafus, I forgot, I left out a criteria in the curatorial process. One of the criteria is like, can we find the funny?
46:49 Speaker 05 Right.
46:50 Speaker 04 And that's, that's an important one. Some things are just too tragic or too horrifying.
46:55 Speaker 05 Yes.
46:56 Speaker 04 And, and so, what we, in season two of the podcast, which is the one I told you about with the burglary, the citizen activists that broke into the FBI, that one is, we found some funny, but also felt like it was just a, a great enough story and a powerful and meaningful enough story that we didn't need to be as funny
47:28 Speaker 05 Right.
47:29 Speaker 04 in season two of the podcast.
47:30 Speaker 05 Right.
47:31 Speaker 04 And I'm so proud of that one, which is ironic because it's probably the least funny of the three seasons.
47:38 Speaker 05 Right.
47:39 Speaker 04 It's still funny. It's still funny.
47:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:43 Speaker 04 But it's also incredibly poignant and incredibly moving. And as you learn about these individuals and the risk that they undertook.
47:53 Speaker 05 Is there a role for me in the movie?
47:57 Speaker 05 What, okay, what has, this is a good question. What has been the hardest historical event to research?
48:05 Speaker 05 The, maybe the one hidden behind the most kind of layers?
48:12 Speaker 04 Well, in season one of the podcast,
48:16 Speaker 04 season one of the podcast has a hero who is a, an historian that we interview extensively throughout the pod, throughout that season.
48:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
48:25 Speaker 04 And he basically uncovered what is the story of season one. And he did it just by doggedly.
48:38 Speaker 04 Just chasing down, like, he was the one that just submitted infinite Freedom of Information Act requests. And just beat the door down and finally got the goods.
48:51 Speaker 05 Wow. You know what? I want to take a second to celebrate. Like, we got, I mean, we worked at The Daily Show together for a bunch of years, and we always got a lot of credit for the work that we did. But I actually, like, there's no world in which we could do the work that we did without the work of journalism, without the work of, like, dogged journalists, like, but really.
49:18 Speaker 04 We couldn't make fun of them if they weren't great.
49:21 Speaker 05 If they weren't, and if they weren't, like, if they weren't working to reveal the layers of hypocrisy, we wouldn't have had anything to make jokes about. Like, there's no Daily Show without great journalism. There's no John Oliver without great journalism. There's none of, you know, none of that exists without that, like, dogged work. And then we vampire off of it and, like, have fun with it.
49:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, we just make it silly.
49:45 Speaker 05 Oh, this is good. Are there any crazy New York City historical events that you can tell us about?
49:50 Speaker 04 Uh, there are so many. There's, uh, there's one that, uh, let's see.
49:57 Speaker 05 Well, I loved in the, in the season three of the podcast, in the prohibition one, that you have on one of the creators of Boardwalk Empire.
50:06 Speaker 04 Sure, that's Atlantic City.
50:07 Speaker 05 Atlantic City, but I mean, it's like, regionally.
50:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, sure.
50:11 Speaker 05 Regionally. And he didn't even know the story. He didn't even know the story.
50:16 Speaker 04 That's right, yeah. Terry Winter created Boardwalk Empire. And, man, he's such a fun interview. He gets his own episode. There's a bonus episode that's just that interview with Terry Winter. And he researched prohibition so much.
50:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
50:34 Speaker 04 And it's the same thing with the first season of the podcast, which is a crazy story. I won't launch into it, but essentially it's the story of the movie War Games, but the real version. And it really did happen. And I interviewed Matthew Broderick, who was the star of War Games, and told him about this, and he had no idea about that.
51:01 Speaker 05 Oh, my God.
51:02 Speaker 04 And it's just wild. It's kind of fun. The deeper you dig on so many of these things.
51:07 Speaker 05 Right.
51:08 Speaker 04 The more there's, more is there.
51:10 Speaker 05 We're gonna have so much to talk about in 10 years.
51:12 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:13 Speaker 05 About this period in time.
51:15 Speaker 04 You think?
51:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, I don't know.
51:17 Speaker 04 I don't know.
51:17 Speaker 05 Just a hint. I'm pretty sure.
51:19 Speaker 04 It feels like a leap forward.
51:21 Speaker 05 Cash Patel's gonna fix the culture at the FBI.
51:23 Speaker 04 He's gonna fix it.
51:23 Speaker 05 It's gonna be fine.
51:24 Speaker 04 Oh, wait, New York City snafus.
51:25 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
51:26 Speaker 04 I mean, where do you start?
51:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
51:29 Speaker 04 Right. I felt a drop of liquid hit me today.
51:34 Speaker 05 You did?
51:35 Speaker 04 And it's that, I feel like that is a universal New Yorker.
51:38 Speaker 05 It is. Welcome to New York.
51:40 Speaker 04 It's just like, where did that come from?
51:42 Speaker 05 Liquid.
51:43 Speaker 04 It's not raining.
51:44 Speaker 05 No.
51:45 Speaker 04 And I hope that it's like a pure drop of air conditioning condensation.
51:52 Speaker 05 Well, no.
51:53 Speaker 04 But it's probably something way grosser.
51:55 Speaker 05 So bad.
51:56 Speaker 04 And, no, but the, one of my favorites truly is the Citicorp buildings. You guys know that story?
52:03 Speaker 05 I don't.
52:04 Speaker 04 The Citicorp building, right here on the Upper East Side. It was built and fully constructed, and a grad student, an engineering grad student, was researching it and writing about it, and realized that it didn't have the proper engineering to withstand hurricane force winds at a certain direction.
52:28 Speaker 05 Okay.
52:28 Speaker 04 It was engineered to, I think, take, like, hurricane force winds at the sides, but a diagonal could have knocked it over.
52:37 Speaker 05 Oh, my God!
52:38 Speaker 04 And so they, like, what do you do in that situation?
52:42 Speaker 05 Oh, no.
52:43 Speaker 04 It's done, it's fully occupied, and they surreptitiously went in and like added new struts and bolts to the building to fix it.
52:57 Speaker 04 Over many, I think many months or years. And residents of the building, occupants or tenants of the building had no idea.
53:07 Speaker 05 You know what, that's not what you wanna, that's not what you wanna find out when you're like trying to buy into the building. And they go, by the way, it's not structurally sound. It's probably fine. Do you remember, okay, do you, did this happen or did I dream it? That when you were living here, a building fell down behind your building? Is that your building? Someone at The Daily Show was, had, lived in an apartment and they were building an apartment, building behind their apartment? And the whole thing collapsed one night. It all fell down.
53:38 Speaker 04 Oh my God, I don't remember that.
53:40 Speaker 05 Okay, all right, well, Citicorp, that's great.
53:45 Speaker 05 You know what?
53:47 Speaker 05 Oh, I'm gonna walk out this door and so much fluid is gonna go on my head.
53:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is. You don't know what it is.
53:54 Speaker 05 So many droplets. This was so fun for me. What a joy to just sit here with you.
53:58 Speaker 04 Sam, get out of here.
53:59 Speaker 05 These comfy chairs, I never wanna leave. What are you gonna inscribe in people's books? Oh, boy, it's so much.
54:06 Speaker 04 I want your life stories. I'm gonna tell, right, I'd put everything in there.
54:09 Speaker 05 Long, long wisdom. Thanks, everybody, for coming. Enjoy.
54:14 Speaker 04 Thank you. Sam D, ladies and gentlemen.
54:24 Speaker 04 Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Our post-production studio is Gilded Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our video editor is Jared Smith, technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Our creative executive is Brett Harris, logo and branding by The Collected Works, legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson.
55:07 Speaker 04 Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etor, Nathan Otoski, and Alex Corral. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
55:40 Speaker 02 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.
56:10 Speaker 06 Halloween's almost here, and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share. And I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21.
56:25 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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