Rachel Maddow and ULTRA

Happy Holidays from everyone on the SNAFU Team! While Ed and his elves prepare more stories for the new year, warm up with an oldie-but-goodie bonus episode you might have missed: It's Ed's conversation with Rachel Maddow about her podcast, ULTRA. Plus, if you're still in need of a last-minute holiday gift, there's still time to grab a copy of Ed's New York Times Bestseller, SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups, wherever you get your books, or at www.snafu-book.com http://www.snafu-book.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:20Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. Ed here. This week, we're coming to you with a special episode from the archives. It's my chat with the Emmy Award-winning political commentator, Rachel Maddow. Rachel is also the host of the hit show Ultra. And back in 2023, she and I sat down to talk about our fascination with history, the eerily prescient stories in our respective podcasts, and why we do the work we do. It's probably one of my favorite chats I've ever had on this podcast, and so I'm really excited to share it with you again today. Keep listening, and we'll be back with a regularly scheduled episode next week. Enjoy.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Welcome back, snafu listeners. We're back to discuss a dicey subject.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  A far-right coup. An attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States of America.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Nope, not that one.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  In the United States District Court, Washington DC, Chief Justice Edward C. Iker presides at the trial of 30 alleged seditionists.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  There we go, that's the one. That's right, my friends, back in 1944, the Nazis tried to overthrow the US government with the help of some US congressmen, no less. I'm talking about the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, which is the subject of a history podcast hosted by Rachel Maddow called Ultra. Now, Ultra and Snafu have a lot in common. Both podcasts are deep dives into important moments in American history, which are largely forgotten. And yet, they feel oddly prescient to our world today. So naturally, I wanted to sit down and talk with Ultra's creator. So today, I'm coming into your feed with a treat,

• 3:33Speaker 03

  my conversation with Rachel Maddow about Ultra and Snafu. We talk about these two extraordinary stories, forgotten history in general, the roots of authoritarianism, and how it all weaves into current events. Rachel is well-known for being a rigorous on-air journalist, author, and podcaster. She's curious, a deep thinker, profoundly insightful, and pretty damn funny, all of which makes her a hell of a lot of fun to talk to. I really enjoyed this conversation. I learned a lot, and I think you will too. So here it is, my chat with Rachel Maddow.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Hello?

• 4:13Speaker 05

  Hi, and hello, this is Rachel Maddow.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Rachel Maddow, it's so cool to meet you. This is awesome.

• 4:19Speaker 05

  Nice to meet you too, it's great, this is very exciting.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Indeed, I agree. Thanks so much for jumping into our Snafu universe. So what's happening? Where are you?

• 4:31Speaker 05

  I'm in rural Dirt Road, Western Massachusetts.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Dirt Road, I don't know that town.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  It's kind of the ambient vibe where I am. We're really out in the middle of nowhere, it's fantastic.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  What are you hiding from, Rachel? What's going on? You've...

• 4:47Speaker 05

  Humans?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, that's fair.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Are you in a bunker?

• 4:54Speaker 05

  What's weird, actually, and this is true, the cottage that I'm in right now, this little house in which we built this studio, audio studios and stuff, so I can do my TV show from here, has a legit nuclear bomb shelter in the basement.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Whoa. Like, because you built it, or because it was already there?

• 5:10Speaker 05

  No, it was there. It was built by whoever had this house in the 50s, and it's got concrete like this and triple rebar. And when we came in to like flatten out the floor and make everything normal, the contractor was like, "We have to leave the basement."

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Can I tell you something? I'm not like a crazy prepper, kind of doomsday person, but like, I would like to have a bunker.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  It just seems like a nice option.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right, well, this is fun. I would love to go deeper into apocalypse preparation, but we have some really fun stuff to talk about. First of all, your podcast, Ultra, was the number one podcast on Apple for, what, like, five weeks? A bunch of weeks?

• 5:59Speaker 05

  A bunch of weeks. It was number one, and then it was less than number one, and then it was back up to number one again. So it was really a surprise and very exciting. Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  And very well deserved. I listened to it twice. I just had, it was so fun. I listened to it all the way through, and then I was like, "I gotta hear that again, but I don't have as much time." So I listened to it at like 1.8 speed. And, and it's funny, when you listen to something sped up like that, everyone sounds unbelievably intelligent.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  I had the opposite problem, which is that my doctor, who is, you know, just my doctor, like, kind of my friend, but my doctor, texted me all concerned that there was something wrong with me, because he had listened to Ultra, and he was like, "You really, I know you've had issues with depression and stuff in the past, and you really..." Turns out, he was listening to it on 0.75?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my god.

• 6:51Speaker 05

  And he thought I was really down.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 6:59Speaker 05

  He thought he had special medical insight into what was going on with this podcast.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 7:05Speaker 05

  Great.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Ultra, it is an extraordinary story. It is extremely well told. It's incredibly engaging and really, really fun. And I would love to, just for our snafu listeners, if you haven't heard Ultra, can you break it down? Just like, what's the basic story?

• 7:23Speaker 05

  The basic story is, in the lead up to World War II, there was a really, really big Nazi, and I mean that specifically, I don't mean like Nazis, I mean the Nazis, big Nazi effort to try to exploit what the Germans called kernels of disturbance in the United States. And so they were trying to propagandize us really heavily. They supported a bunch of American native fascist movements that were way scarier than we remember them in history. And they paid a bunch of members of Congress and senators to be on their side for this effort. And it all sort of culminated in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, when

• 8:07Speaker 05

  nearly 30 of the folks who were involved with the Nazis in these various plots got put on trial. And they got off. There was a mistrial and they were all let go.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  It's so profound, this story. It is so intense. And it's totally mind blowing. In your description just now, you said the trial was the Great Sedition Trial of, what, 1940?

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Forty-four, yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Forty-four. That implies that this was like a landmark event that we all know and understand. What's so incredible about this story to me, among, there's lots of things incredible about it, but one of the most incredible things is how forgotten it is. And it's something that I think our podcasts share, which is these sort of forgotten history stories that are insanely important. And one of the historians in your podcast actually says at one point, I'm a PhD in history and most of my colleagues who are PhDs in history have never heard of this. And so then, of course, the general public has no idea.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  And I, I wonder, why has it forgotten?

• 9:20Speaker 05

  Well, it's, you know, I was thinking about the parallels with that and, and with Abel Archer, with what you cover in Snafu. And I think there, there is something that's like important for us to reflect on as people who tell stories and who are interested in history, which is that sometimes the reason something is forgotten is because of who won and who lost, right?

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Right, of course.

• 9:47Speaker 05

  The good news-

• 9:48Speaker 03

  History is told by the winners.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  History is told by the winners and sometimes what the winners most want is for us to forget that the thing happened. And that's definitely, I feel like that's a little bit of the story that you unfold in, in Snafu, like with the, the CIA doing its assessment of what happened with Abel Archer and whether it was a close call. They're like, no, no, no, it was fine. It was no big deal.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  And that's part of the history that you uncover and that you tell in the story. But it's also important that the CIA wants it to be minimized, wants it not to be remembered as a significant thing.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:23Speaker 05

  And a sort of different version of that happens in my story where the, the good news ending, to the extent that there is one, is that all of the elected officials who are part of this plot, who are the real bad guys here, the public knew enough, they found out enough about what those guys were up to, that they voted them all out of office. Like all but one of them got voted out of office. And so even though a lot of them were household names, really influential members of the House and the Senate at the time, once they got turfed out by voters who were disgusted by their behavior, they went from being big deals to being losers and the losers get forgotten. And so part of the history that we have to contend with is how much are the players

• 11:04Speaker 05

  here minimized in history, either because it's convenient for somebody or because the good guys won? And how much does that affect whether this story is, is easy to find or easy to be told?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 11:18Speaker 05

  So it's, I just, I think, I find that dynamic interesting because you have to put yourself then in the story in terms of how hard it is for you to find these things.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Well, it's a little bit of a scary reality when you think the forgotten stories of history are very often some of the most important. Because the reason that they're forgotten is that they were either painful, or embarrassing, or extremely problematic. And yet, those are the things that we do have the potential to learn the most from.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  And the other circumstance in which that happens is because it was a really scary thing, and some Americans or some characters in the story rose up and did the right thing and neutralized the danger.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  And that's great.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  But that's also, those heroes, we also need to learn that story. You know, so it's, it can't, it can be like a deliberate shunt this away, let's not think about it. But it can also be a like, whoo, close call, let's forget about it.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  You know.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay, so how the hell did you find it? Like with Snafu, we knew we wanted to do a podcast, and we wanted to do something kind of history and irreverent, and we set about looking for the thing. Did you know you wanted to do a podcast and look for something exciting and meaningful? Or did you just dig up this story, or stumble on it, and then say, this has to be told?

• 12:42Speaker 05

  So I was, I sort of feel like the, all the best stories that I've ever been involved in telling come out of ignorance, like come out of legitimate curiosity. Like, I don't understand where this came from, or this thing that everybody thinks makes sense to them doesn't make sense to me. And I was going through that sort of train of thought, just as part of my news, you know, my day job at MSNBC, thinking about Holocaust denial. So we're having this big upsurge in antisemitism, and kind of antisemitism wedded to political power, which is a very dangerous thing. And at the core of all of it is this sort of burbling thing where people say the Holocaust didn't happen. And I've always felt like...

• 13:23Speaker 05

  It's not obvious to me how that can exist intellectually.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Like, it's one thing to be prejudiced, it's another thing to say, "This obvious thing, and history of which we have all this proof, I choose to contend that it didn't happen." And so I was interested in where that came from, and particularly where it came from in the first instance. Like, how early on did people start denying it? And what I found, to my surprise, is that Holocaust denial really came from the United States. It didn't come from Germany. And it happened really early on. It happened in the 40s.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  Which is nuts, because there's all these American GIs.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 05

  And refugees from Europe, including refugees from Germany, coming here, who are eyewitnesses, who are survivors, who had family members killed, or who are liberating the concentration camps. I mean, it's all this irrefutable evidence, and yet, this thing emerges in the late 40s in the United States, and then starts pinging around the world, where we're going to say that didn't happen. So I was interested in where the hell did that come from, and why, and who were the characters who dreamed this up, knowing that it was false but concocting it for a political reason? And in trying to figure that out, which is a story I'm still going to tell, but I haven't gotten there yet, I realized that, actually, those folks came out of this milieu during World War II in the United States, that we've forgotten about. And they all went on trial,

• 14:46Speaker 05

  and, "Oh, my God, the judge died in the middle of the trial, and they were all set free, and then what happened to them?" So it ended up being kind of the prequel to the story that I wanted to tell, but I realized there was enough there that I should probably tell it.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  That is fascinating. I feel like that's kind of how some of the best stories do come about.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Can I ask you a Snafu question about that?

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Please, yeah.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  I thought, the thing that I most admired about the storytelling in Snafu was your sort of fearlessness about casting doubt on the story. So, obviously, there's, I mean, for everybody who's listened to it, like, there's lots of twists, and lots of, you know, backing up and reconsidering stuff that's earlier been presented. And I wondered, when you constructed the story, and when you decided to do it, did you know about the...

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Doubt and uncertainty and sort of wooliness of the bottom line of that story when you started. Or did you think it was a more certain story when you started and you only got to that, you know, more mature, complex bottom line, once you were into it in the middle of the research?

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was the latter. Like, everything you read about Abel Archer in the sort of, to the extent that it's in the zeitgeist, just little blips and blurbs, it sounds like a very cut and dry

• 16:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  thing. But of like anything, the more you dig, the more nuanced it becomes. And then it became for us as storytellers, just feeling a kind of responsibility to reflect that nuance and the complexity. You know, even historians have some different perspectives on it that are that are very meaningful. I don't know, we really wanted to lean into the integrity of it, and that made it a little bit messier of a story.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  But ultimately, the messiness kind of gave rise to some really exciting questions and kind of pontifications. And that's really where we wound up kind of putting the focus in that last episode.

• 16:49Speaker 05

  Well, it makes it more profound and more real. It also makes it more of a contribution to the history of it, right? To have all the interviews that you do and to have an honest reflection of the real, you know, the legitimate contention with the various facts and the various perspectives on it. It's, A, it's a real work of history with all the jokes included, but also it does get you to a more profound place in terms of getting, I think, encouraging, critical thinking about seemingly cut and dry episodes. I thought, I just thought that was really, like I said, mature and complex and cool.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Go on.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Also, you guys, you're just so handsome. And it was just...

• 17:36Speaker 03

  No, that's, I'm, I'm, I'm literally like getting chills. That means so much to hear from you, Rachel. I really, really appreciate that. And, yeah, we, we really put a ton of work into it. And so that, that means a lot.

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• 20:09Speaker 05

  I think you had it harder than I did because in my case, the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 is forgotten. The only histories of it have been written by people who sympathized with the fascist defendants. And so all the histories of it have all been about how they were railroaded and it was terrible that these people were put on trial and how ridiculous this contention that the Nazis were working with any Americans. Do you believe how prejudiced the Department of Justice is against good American conservatives? And so all the history, all the history of it was really biased and all in the same direction and nobody had ever revisited that history, looking at it from a more balanced perspective.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  And so I didn't have to, I didn't have to contend with sort of, you know, great, nuanced, honest broker perspectives on both sides. There was just a bunch of claptrap written about it and nobody had ever done a broader, less, I think, in my, from my perspective, less biased look at the evidence.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Wasn't, I thought Rogge wrote a book, but were you able to dig that up? Is that, is that findable?

• 21:16Speaker 05

  Ish, yeah. I mean, if you want to get a copy of it, I can maybe give you a deal. I think I own all the copies of it. There were, it never had like a second printing. It never went anywhere.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  So tell us, sorry, tell us who Rogge is because I just brought him up out of the blue.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  So Roggi is O. John Roggi, who is a German-American, interestingly enough. He grows up in the United States, son of German immigrant, speaking German at home. And he's this wonderkind lawyer and prosecutor and Justice Department official. And he ends up being the crusading prosecutor who tries to bring the sedition trial home, who tries to finish it, who fights against the mistrial. And the great twist in my story, in Ultra, is when, as the trial's falling apart, Roggi gets leave to go to Germany. And he gets to try to prove his contention that these weren't just conservative Americans

• 22:14Speaker 05

  who had their own anti-Semitic fascist ideas, that were actually working with the Nazi government, they're being paid by the Germans in many instances. He gets to prove that from the German side. And he interviews all these Nazi prisoners. And they, in fact, give him all the dirt on all the Americans they were working with. And so he's able to prove the collusion, if you will, from the other side. And by the time he brings those findings home to the United States, we have won the war, everybody wants to move on, Roggi has become a political figure in a way that he is, he is very much demonized by one side and then ultimately by the other side. And nobody really wants to hear it. And so he does create this really valuable historical record.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  But by the time it lands, he finally gets it published, he has to fight with the Justice Department to get it declassified and all this stuff. By the time it finally lands in the public record, it's 1961, and this is ancient history, and nobody buys the book, and nobody reviews it, and nobody stocks it in their archives. And it just disappears until, you know, all these decades later, that story ends up being of interest to me because of its resonance with our current situation. And it's, and thank God he did it, because the record's there, even though nobody cared about it in his lifetime, and he died in obscurity.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  It just raises so many fascinating questions and issues. Okay, so antisemitism, or racism in all its forms, these are things that most people agree are bad, right? They're just bad.

• 23:51Speaker 05

  Bad and gone, yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  They also seem embedded in most modern emergences of fascism.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  I know throughout history totalitarianism pops up in many different forms all over the political spectrum. But fascism, and I ask this not as any kind of indictment of conservatism, but fascism in particular seems to bubble up from the right. Why do you think that is?

• 24:22Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, I do think that there's, you know, there's different types of authoritarianism, right? And there's definitely, you know, left-wing authoritarianism as well.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  And when you're talking about tyrannical forms of government, right-wing authoritarianism, which in some instances is fascism, not always, but in some instances is fascism, ends up having a recurrent appeal in our country and in other Western democracies.

• 24:53Speaker 05

  I think because people don't like democracy. I mean, the basic idea of democracy is that everybody gets a say. And if you think that you and people like you should get a say, but other people shouldn't, that's an instinct that people have. And there can be left-wing authoritarianism, which is a different drive and comes from a different place and leads to murder, leads to mass murder and terrible things.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Just as much mayhem, of course.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Just as much mayhem. But on the right, the way it works is me and my people, we're the only people who should count as citizens. The other people who are technically, you're telling me ought to be part of this democracy, are lesser than or evil or they're interlopers. And we not only need to exclude them from the decision-making process, but we need to blame them for all the things that are going wrong here. And we need to exclude them from the decision-making process and punish them for all the terrible things they've done, because if it was just us in charge, everything would be fine. And that's the, that's the basic idea. And that's why authoritarianism on the right almost always comes with antisemitism. It's either going to be antisemitism or it's going to be some other...

• 26:02Speaker 05

  Thing that looks like antisemitism that is directed towards some other minority group. Because you need some out group to define as the source of all the problems. Because you, the in-group, are perfect. And if you were just given full control, everything would be fine.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  And it's just, it's dumb, and it's simple, and it's recurrent.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 05

  And...

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Well, humans, we're dumb.

• 26:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Humans are dumb. We do dumb things.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  And we don't remember what the old dumb things were. So the new dumb things come around, and we're like, whoa.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  Wait, you're telling me it's the Jews?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  Shocker.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  There's that great Hegel quote, "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." And I wonder if you have any thoughts on how we can do better? It feels like, with modern technology, we should be able to be better at learning from history. But maybe we're just not wired for it in our DNA.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  I think that, you know, fart jokes helps.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  You know, like, when, you know, you did that whole riff on, like, the Valentines, like, "I have so many treasons that I love you," like Valentines for spies.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  And, like, the little fake game show that you inserted into, like, the... It's storytelling skill and upping the entertainment quotient in direct ratio with the complexity of the story that you're telling.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  That helps. Like, I don't know that that's technological innovation, but it's, it's an evolution of our sort of ambition to make these stories understandable, memorable, repeatable, you know, both on TV and in this podcast and book world that I'm in, too. I try to tell stories in such a way that they stick. And so even if you can't persuade somebody else to listen to Ultra, or you can't persuade somebody else to read my book about Spiro Agnew, if you listen to the podcast, or if you read that book, you will have absorbed the story well enough that you can give somebody the gist of it and pass it on.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  And, and that's what you're doing in Snafu. That's the whole idea of doing real history that's rigorous and honest and intellectually engaged with the ambiguities and all those things, but it's also fun.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  And it's also not homework. It's just, it's something that's a pleasure. And I think that's, you know, if you've got those skills, that's a, that's a mitzvah. That's a service to humanity and to our country to use them that way.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, you gotta give people some candy with the vegetables, right?

• 28:36Speaker 05

  You gotta do your Nancy astrologer stuff. It turns out to be important.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  It is. It's crazy how important astrology was in the Reagan administration. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  Growing up in the 80s in San Francisco, I have to tell you, the fact that Nancy's astrologer was in San Francisco, I remember being like, kinda proud.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, that's funny.

• 29:02Speaker 05

  This idea that like, the Rasputin pulling the strings in the Reagan White House might be this lady in Nob Hill was actually like a source of regional pride for me.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great. I think the thing that I feel like is missing is, and maybe this is a, Rachel, maybe this is a book pitch for us. Maybe we do a book together. And it's basically like, the lessons of his, these are the lessons. And then here are the events that teach us those lessons. So you can no longer say like, well, I don't know how to interpret that. Or I don't know what to learn from that. Like, we need a compendium of the lessons.

• 29:37Speaker 05

  Lesson 17, stop blaming the Jews.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, yes. That's one, right.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Here's why.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  This is a book we need to write.

• 29:45Speaker 05

  Have a phone that connects between Washington and Moscow. How about that?

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, have that phone. Yeah, and use it occasionally.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  But I think that it's interesting to me that there really is a lot of interest in documentary and history stuff.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  That's a surprise to me. Like, seeing like how popular documentaries are on Netflix, when Netflix offers you with literally equal effort, like clicking on one side of the screen versus the other, you can watch anything. So many people opt for documentaries. There's something, there is a rational and constructive human hunger to learn stuff. And that's, that to me is very heartening. You know, I feel like, oh, great, that's room to run.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  I agree. I agree with that. And I actually, I think the success of your podcast, to me, was very reassuring. Just the, you know, I think the lessons baked into your podcast are so important and meaningful and prescient. And I loved, I was just so thrilled that so many people were getting that.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  Thank you.

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• 33:11Speaker 03

  Both of these stories, Able Archer, or Snafu, I should say, and Ultra are podcasts. And you have an incredible career as a broadcaster, legendary broadcaster for many, many years. How has this kind of segue back into audio gone? And how did it affect how you considered telling this story?

• 33:37Speaker 05

  It's a good question, because definitely, sort of falling in love with the story and doing the research and realizing like, kind of where it was going and what the bottom line of it was going to be and everything. It was definitely an open question as to how to produce it. Like, I know that I could write a book about it, because I'm almost done with the book about it now, or I could try to produce it for TV, or try to make it into a movie, or do some other thing. And ultimately, I decided to do it as a podcast, because I'm kind of just in love with audio. I think that my background in radio was, I don't know, if it stamped a love for audio on me, or if I was just wired that way, anyway.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  But even when I do TV shows and stuff, like, I don't really think about what stuff looks like. I think of the visual presentation of whatever's going on, it's just kind of decoration for the words. And when you do audio, there's this, I don't know, level of, I don't want to say, like, I don't want to be too sappy about it, but there's a sort of level of intensity. Like, you're kind of speaking into somebody's ear, rather than sitting in front of them talking. And it can be intense, and it's also unforgiving. I think you have to be more precise in an audio environment than you do when you have the help of visuals to distract people. So I find it to be more challenging and more rewarding.

• 35:02Speaker 05

  It's also kind of more the way that I like to absorb information. I don't like to watch stuff as much as I like to listen to it.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  That's interesting. I feel similarly. I found myself just devouring podcasts and audiobooks in a way that I I'd never really consumed television. I mean, I watched TV, of course, but I never, I was never like a, you know, addicted to shows or anything and I, but then podcasts would just suck me in and I realized like this is this incredibly powerful vehicle and, and the way that we work with a microphone. It's incredibly intimate. And I, I love that.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  I'm pregnant. Oh, God, I'm pregnant. Oh, Jesus.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  I'm very powerful. My voice is very powerful. No, but I feel when I watch a documentary, especially something historical, a lot of times you can feel the sweatiness of the visuals. They're, they clearly had to dig for something to put here, like, okay, we're panning over photographs here. We're, you know, we've got some weird visual metaphor happening or we're looking at like reenactment footage. Sometimes it just feels like, okay, we get it. Like you had to put something there and you didn't have something. But with audio, there's, you know, there's no cheating. You just, it's all, it's all there. It's all.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Speaking right into the person's ear, which is inside their head, which is right next to their brain.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  It's like a laser.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  And I've, I've found that in an interesting way when we put out the first couple of episodes of Ultra. We didn't make up any of the sound. All the sound that we used was, was, was real tape. But a lot of people thought that we had faked the news broadcasts, that we had found actors who were going to speak in weird old transatlantic accents.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  It is hard to believe that broadcasters spoke in this heightened tone like that.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  It's, it's, it's kind of wild, but they really did.

• 37:05Speaker 05

  That old timey news was all very objective and stayed and there wasn't any opinion or emotion in it. Yeah. BS.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  No, but they really did talk like this.

• 37:13Speaker 05

  And they threw all sorts of shade and they were snide and they were, you know, and lots of asides and lots of opinion. And that's what it sounded like.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Well, so tell, tell us what's happening next with Ultra because there's a very exciting sort of next step.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is, I kinda can't believe it, but Steven Spielberg optioned Ultra to make a movie out of it.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Who's that?

• 37:36Speaker 05

  And so, he's this guy, you know, he's an up and comer.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 05

  He's the one to sort of wonder watch.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  First of all, huge congratulations.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  And it's a no-brainer. This makes perfect sense. The story is so riveting.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  I, I, I hope that that is true. I mean, what I am learning is, as I am sort of tiptoeing into this side of the world, where I have never been before, is that a movie's gonna be made? Is, you know?

• 38:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're like, oh, we're gonna ruin it with visuals.

• 38:08Speaker 05

  Is, well, no, but like, is a movie gonna be made? Like, until someone is buying a ticket, receiving their change, and walking into a dark room where a projector is running, I don't believe the movie exists. You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot that goes in between optioning a movie and then it actually coming into the world. And so, I, I believe that it's going to be a movie, but we'll see. I know, I mean, you know, I did this, my previous podcast was called Bagman, was about Sparrow Agnew, and that's also in the movie-making process. That's gonna be a focus-features film. But it just takes a long time, and there's all sorts of things that happen, and, I mean, I'm, I'm used to a daily production cable news world, where you think of something in the morning, and it's on TV at the, at night, and then you have to stop thinking about it, because you gotta do something else the next day.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  No. That ain't how we make movies, Rachel.

• 38:54Speaker 05

  No, I know, I'm learning.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  There is a whole, a whole rigmarole, and you're very wise to, to kind of hold off on, on the excitement of having a movie until you're walking in the door, but

• 39:08Speaker 05

  But.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  Just having a movie optioned by someone like Spielberg is so thrilling, or focus-features for the, the Agnew story. Those are, those are just such credible storytellers, and, and you can sort of feel confident that they'll be, these stories will be handled very well. I feel like this would be such a cool movie.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  Both of them feel like movies to me, too. Like, I like, you know, I, I watch as much, you know, streaming television and mini-series and all that stuff as anybody else, but I do feel like both of these stories, like, seem like, you know, sit down for two hours and watch a single arc in the movie theater, like, it just, and I, I would, I'd just love for it to work in both cases, so.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  I also think I should play O. John Rocky.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  I think I should be Roggy in this movie, right? I mean, that just feels obvious.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Obvious, obvious, for sure.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Okay, so both of our podcasts have a lot of present day relevance and prescience. And yours, I think, is really, really intensely relevant to right now. So in what, at what stage in your process did the events of January 6th happen? Was that, were you already working on this podcast?

• 40:29Speaker 05

  No, I wasn't working on the sedition trial by that point. What was weird is that the resonance stuff, like, I felt like I got a little kick in the teeth from the universe because when the first episode of Ultra was posted, when it, when we published, was the day that the Oath Keepers' sedition trial started. So that was, that was weird.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  And then it was eight episodes, and by the time we got to episode eight was when we were waiting for the verdict. So it was really just, that was uncanny. I just felt like that was a, that was a little, that was unsettling, almost. But, you know, it also, I feel like you do, in trying to pick the right story to tell, you have to believe in the story on its own terms, sort of regardless of the resonance. Like, yes, there is going to be resonance, and there are lessons to be learned and things to be gleaned from the past that could help us in our current contention. But I don't feel like you can, you can't let that drive, you know? That has to, a little bit of that is just going to be stuff that you can't see along the way.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  I was thinking about it with Abel Archer and Snafu with the, before the Korean airliner was shot down, you highlight how the Russians were essentially paying, were giving bounties to their own side for people who were spotting radar, incursions on the radar. And so you were essentially saying, like, that's, that's bad news in terms of what eventually happens with this, the civilian airliner being shot down after being misidentified as a, as a military threat in Russian airspace. Well, you know, Just within the past week, Russia just gave medals to the fighter pilots who dumped all that fuel on the US Reaper drone over the Black Sea. I mean, it's the same, I mean, I'm sure you weren't thinking about that when you did

• 42:19Speaker 05

  Able Archer and Snafu.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Oh, of course.

• 42:22Speaker 05

  But Russia is doing the same thing monetarily and with military awards rewarding people for doing incredibly reckless things that threaten conflict between the East and West.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, one of the things that I think was really profound in Ultra was what this idea that emerged that there was no legal remedy for all of this horrible behavior.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  The legal remedies failed. There was a mistrial and then the government basically just gave up on prosecuting these misdeeds and because they didn't want the headache. And so, Raggy sort of makes the case in that Meet the Press interview that the remedy then must be just transparency and information, getting it out there, educating the public.

• 43:16Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  That's all you can do. When this bad behavior can't be actually meaningfully reprimanded in some way, all you can do is expose it.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  And I think that's very powerful. It's also a little bit terrifying and disheartening. And I wonder if you feel like the January 6th trials have, they've obviously gone a lot smoother than the Great Sedition Trial, but is that evidence of progress? Do you think we're doing better?

• 43:50Speaker 05

  It's interesting because it really does, I think it cuts both ways. I think there is a case to be made by looking back. At the fascist movements in this country that were supported by Nazi Germany, including an element of that that operated inside the Congress. There's ways to look back at that, all that story that I tell in Ultra and say, you know, some of these things were legit crimes and people should have gone to jail.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  And that, like, crimes were committed here and crimes should have been prosecuted as such, including by some members of Congress where that escaped punishment, I think largely because they bullied the Justice Department into not coming after them. And we're seeing a little bit of that happening. We're seeing some resonance with some of the stuff that's happening right now in our news cycle. But the other, the sort of good news side of what Rocky was preaching on Meet the Press that day is that, you know, the people need to know this information. The legal remedy isn't there. The legal remedy is, the legal solution has failed. The legal remedy cannot be used as our, the sum total of our response here. What has to happen is that the people need to know.

• 45:01Speaker 05

  And obviously, people knowing isn't an end in itself. That doesn't fix it. What he means, what goes unsaid, is that when the people know, they will act.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  And you can trust Americans to defend our democracy and to stand up against tyranny and to reject authoritarianism and antisemitism and all the other things that go with it. But they need to know that it's happening. And so that calls on all of us.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  One would hope.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it calls on journalists, it calls on activists, it calls on everybody who can contribute to the public record, including, you know, dorks making podcasts down the road. But hopefully, it means that a well-informed public will make righteous decisions, and I want to believe that.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  I do, too. And I think that's a good note to end on. Rachel, thank you so, so very much for jumping in the booth here and having this chat with us. It's just really, really fun. And I wish you the best of luck with the movie adaptation.

• 46:02Speaker 05

  Thanks, Ed. Thanks. This has been super fun. I appreciate it.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Snafu is a production of iHeart Radio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Pipelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug, and Whitney Donaldson. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, associate producer Tori Smith. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis. Olivia Canny is our production assistant. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Special thanks to Allison Cohen and Matt Eisenstadt.

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