Ed Helms (2:39)

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 the Definitive guide to History's Greatest Screw Ups, I. I had the absolute pleasure of stopping by the legendary 92nd.

Mike Falbow (2:56)

Street Y in New York City, where.

Ed Helms (2:59)

I got to sit down with a dear old friend who also happens to be an Emmy winning comedian, producer, writer, and professional destroyer of pomposity. I am talking about none other than the great Samantha Bee.

Mike Falbow (3:15)

Sam and I go all the way back to our daily show days, which.

Ed Helms (3:20)

Feels like roughly 400 years ago in political time.

Mike Falbow (3:23)

So it was really a joy to.

Ed Helms (3:25)

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 on stage in front of a fired up.

Mike Falbow (3:49)

New York crowd, it just gave the.

Ed Helms (3:51)

Whole night a kind of electric buzz. And it was just an absolute treat. So stick around for my conversation with Sam B. 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, 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. Okay, that's it. Now please enjoy my chat with the brilliant Samantha Bee.

Mike Falbow (4:52)

All right.

Samantha Bee (4:53)

This is so. Oh, my God, this chair is so comfortable, Ed. I had no idea the chairs would be so amazing.

Mike Falbow (5:00)

I mean, it's good cause I just came from my YMCA workout.

Samantha Bee (5:04)

That's right. I'm so sweaty. I'm so excited to be here with you because I miss you.

Mike Falbow (5:12)

I know. I haven't seen you in ages.

Samantha Bee (5:15)

Ed, 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 all those things.

Mike Falbow (5:30)

Wherever you get your podcast.

Samantha Bee (5:31)

Wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. The world is bananas, basically. Yes. So thank you for writing a book about.

Mike Falbow (5:40)

Someone had to point it out about how the world.

Samantha Bee (5:42)

Yes, the world was always bananas is what I'm hearing from this book.

Mike Falbow (5:47)

Yeah.

Samantha Bee (5:49)

So the book is called snafu. Tell us right off the bat, what is a snafu? What does that acronym stand for?

Mike Falbow (5:54)

Well, SNAFU is an acronym that started during World War II. It stands for Situation Normal. All fucked up Great. 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. Yes. And yeah, the soldiers used it because I guess World War II was pretty fucked up and it became just sort of a catchy phrase that made it into the lexicon.

Samantha Bee (6:28)

It's a little bit like FUBAR. It's a little bit like FUBAR.

Mike Falbow (6:31)

It'S exactly like FUBAR, which I think, and I haven't done the research, but I think came from the same time.

Samantha Bee (6:36)

Same time. Fucked up beyond all repair.

Mike Falbow (6:39)

You know what? FUBAR's better.

Samantha Bee (6:41)

No, it's not FUBAR.

Mike Falbow (6:42)

It's got a little more punch to it.

Samantha Bee (6:44)

They're both very good. Okay, so. Okay. It's the definitive guide to history's greatest scripts. 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 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 real uranium. You all haven't read the book yet, but you're about. 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.

Mike Falbow (7:41)

Great question.

Samantha Bee (7:42)

Thank you.

Commercial Announcer (7:44)

Yes.

Mike Falbow (7:45)

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.

Samantha Bee (8:09)

Yes.

Mike Falbow (8:09)

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.

Samantha Bee (8:21)

These blunders These bad ideas are epic. Many of them are potentially world ending, but so many of them are childish and silly. I love.

Mike Falbow (8:34)

Yes. I love that observation.

Samantha Bee (8:36)

They're childish. They're like, should we detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon?

Mike Falbow (8:44)

This is full Looney Tunes. That's a chapter in the book.

Samantha Bee (8:48)

Yes.

Mike Falbow (8:48)

Just to give you another little bit of 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 pure, like, episodic reading. You could just pick it up.

Samantha Bee (9:07)

Yes.

Mike Falbow (9:08)

Leave it on your toilet. I won't judge you if you're reading. It's good anywhere.

Samantha Bee (9:14)

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. Is anyone else shaking through the. Yes.

Mike Falbow (9:26)

Subways.

Samantha Bee (9:27)

Oh, my.

Mike Falbow (9:28)

I've been living in LA too long. I'm like, earthquake, earthquake. Oh, no, I forget that 92nd Street Y and the Angelica Film Theater. Rattle with the trains.

Samantha Bee (9:41)

That's right. You know that every time I go to. Every time I go to la, I've experienced a minor earthquake. Every time I go, I'm a harbinger of doom. Whoa. Just like a tiny little shit.

Ed Helms (9:51)

You are.

Samantha Bee (9:51)

I know. Well, so what I'm saying is that was an earthquake. Yeah. Okay. 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?

Mike Falbow (10:12)

So the podcast came first. We started working on the podcast about three years ago, and it is a very different thing because each season of the podcast is a very deep dive into one thing, 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. And the book, as I just described, is lots of things.

Samantha Bee (10:45)

Perfect.

Mike Falbow (10:45)

Less of a deep dive.

Samantha Bee (10:47)

Perfect for the bathroom is how he describes it.

Mike Falbow (10:51)

Let's talk more about how perfect it is for bathroom reading. No, but the process for building both of these things is not dissimilar because it's an amazing team that worked on both.

Samantha Bee (11:10)

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 like that podcast nerds. Podcast nerds.

Mike Falbow (11:21)

Yeah.

Samantha Bee (11:22)

This is a team of goddamn nerds. Top notch.

Mike Falbow (11:26)

This is an amazing team. Researchers. And just pulling together so much information, helping structure information.

Samantha Bee (11:36)

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?

Mike Falbow (11:44)

It's building a pool of possibilities, pouring through them. And then in the case of the. In the case of the podcast, it's like, do we have the depth? 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? And the book avoids things like the Titanic or. Or the Donner Party or things that. Which are actually amazing and just epic stories that are incredible to learn about. But I think what makes. We made a decision early on to kind of chase things that are less known to the popular memory. And that, I think, has really been a exciting thing about the podcast and the book. A lot of these things, people just don't know.

Samantha Bee (13:17)

They really don't know. Many of the stories were surprising to me, and so many of the stories actually have 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 was 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?

Mike Falbow (13:49)

Yeah. Okay, so there's an entire chapter dedicated to Project Iceworm. And so. And you're right, it's so wild how prescient it is, because as early as the 1950s, it was very clear that Greenland was strategically excellent for launching missiles. And so Project Iceworm is exactly what it sounds like. 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.

Samantha Bee (14:43)

What a great idea.

Mike Falbow (14:45)

I mean, a flawless idea.

Samantha Bee (14:47)

Flawless.

Mike Falbow (14:48)

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.

Samantha Bee (15:04)

Right.

Mike Falbow (15:04)

And they put a nuclear reactor in it because they needed power. And everybody loved nuclear stuff in the 50s.

Samantha Bee (15:12)

Jesus.

Mike Falbow (15:14)

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. And needless to say, ice is an unstable structural shift. 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.

Samantha Bee (16:12)

Yeah, prefab structures. And a nuclear reactor.

Mike Falbow (16:15)

And a nuclear reactor just for.

Samantha Bee (16:18)

Just for funsy.

Mike Falbow (16:19)

And the Danish government was like, you know what? You guys are cool. Just don't tell us what's up.

Samantha Bee (16:28)

We do not want to know.

Mike Falbow (16:29)

Yeah. And it just. None of it worked. No, 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, which is a great place to read my book.

Samantha Bee (16:56)

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.

Mike Falbow (17:15)

Well, now there's a lot of nuclear waste frozen under the ice, and people got sick from that local Greenland indigenous people. And it was tragic. And there is 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. One of the things global warming will do that's bad.

Samantha Bee (17:46)

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?

Mike Falbow (17:56)

Yeah. Yeah, 100%. 100%. Actually, as soon as it's ours, we probably will. We probably take care of it. Yeah. A lot of promises were made that it would get cleaned up, and it never did. And of course, yeah, actually talking, I.

Samantha Bee (18:10)

Mean, on the subject of global warming, there's a really great. Pretty short chapter about the ozone layer in the. 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.

Mike Falbow (18:41)

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 seeing a problem, understanding the problem, and then actually pushing hard against industrial interests to fix that problem. And it worked.

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Samantha Bee (19:05)

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, you could tell people the population would act.

Mike Falbow (19:20)

You could actually inform people that maybe things were bad or unhealthy for them or the world.

Samantha Bee (19:27)

Right.

Mike Falbow (19:27)

And they might listen.

Samantha Bee (19:29)

Oh, dear. Anyway, one thing that this is more a comment than a question is that the book is. It's very funny and it's. Of course, 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 velocity that is really frightening right now in particular. And what really strikes me about many of 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.

Mike Falbow (20:41)

I mean, that's your opinion.

Samantha Bee (20:42)

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.

Mike Falbow (20:51)

Yeah, no, you're right. This is a. What's what. What feels different right now is how transparent the, the incompetence is, or seems to be. But that also, like, we're probably just seeing the top 10% of the iceberg.

Samantha Bee (21:09)

Right.

Mike Falbow (21:10)

And it will be decades of unfolding insanity.

Ed Helms (21:14)

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Mike Falbow (23:47)

There are a few threads that I think emerge in studying these things. Yeah, and one is one that I mean hubris obviously. And the secrecy is a big one that you just mentioned. Another one is the the group. Think of people in a closed bubble.

Samantha Bee (24:14)

Right?

Mike Falbow (24:14)

Right. And that's what that's what happens in institutions like the CIA or the FBI. Season two of the podcast is a deep dive into an incredible story about citizen activists in the 70s who broke into. 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 that. Which was a very curated image. He was very deep into kind of manipulation of pop culture. He was involved with movies that starred Jimmy Stewart as, you know, 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 we didn't have hard drives. So most branch offices of the FBI had most FBI files. And they took everything and they poured 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 Congress people 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 Medzker.

Samantha Bee (26:54)

Well, that is.

Mike Falbow (26:55)

That gave me chills.

Samantha Bee (26:57)

Yeah.

Mike Falbow (26:58)

Yeah. It's an incredible story of citizen activism and heroism and people putting themselves at risk 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. 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. Yeah.

Samantha Bee (27:54)

Do we still have that?

Mike Falbow (27:57)

But here's what. But here's what's, 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 really. 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.

Samantha Bee (28:40)

Right.

Mike Falbow (28:42)

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.

Samantha Bee (29:00)

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 see. I take the point like we have made. We have majorly blundered in the past, and we have. The force of human good has prevailed.

Mike Falbow (29:21)

Yeah. It's a choice to see things that way.

Commercial Announcer (29:25)

Sure.

Mike Falbow (29:26)

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 and a kind of, like, tendency towards equilibrium of some kind.

Samantha Bee (29:47)

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 that's. There's a really. There's a missing piece right now and that it's not really taught in schools.

Mike Falbow (30:13)

Yeah, no question. I think. Look, I mean, the rise of a strongman is generally the function of an anxious population and a population that is not. That isn't rooted in the fundamentals of. Of civil society and the process of civil society, and in our case, a constitutional democracy. And I'm just agreeing with you.

Samantha Bee (30:44)

Yes, we're just agreeing with each other.

Mike Falbow (30:46)

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. You feel a lot better about a lot of your own life choices.

Samantha Bee (31:09)

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.

Mike Falbow (31:19)

No, of course. I mean, it's the one thing that we know for sure is that we never. We never learned from history. No, 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, the cost is tremendous. Human suffering. And I hope. Well, I don't know where we're headed.

Samantha Bee (32:00)

Well, you know what? We could talk about cats with Microphones embedded in their cat first.

Mike Falbow (32:04)

Can we talk more about human suffering?

Samantha Bee (32:05)

Can we talk, please? Okay. I do want to say that every time I read something about cats with implanted listening devices and pigeons with backpacks with aerial photography, though. How cute. That's pretty cute. That's pretty cute.

Mike Falbow (32:24)

They put little camera pouches on pigeons to turn them into spies.

Samantha Bee (32:29)

To turn them into pigeon spies.

Mike Falbow (32:31)

Yeah.

Samantha Bee (32:31)

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.

Mike Falbow (32:42)

Yeah. Just ask Siegfried and Roy.

Samantha Bee (32:46)

Oh, God.

Mike Falbow (32:48)

They're not trainable. This is like, anybody knows that. And 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 very sneaky and sly. If we can implant a microphone in their ears and train them to go sit next to bad guys, then we'll be able to hear what the bad guys are saying.

Commercial Announcer (33:14)

Yeah.

Mike Falbow (33:15)

This is another chapter. Sorry.

Samantha Bee (33:16)

This is a. This is a chapter from the book. There's teams of adult people.

Mike Falbow (33:20)

Yeah.

Samantha Bee (33:22)

Workshopping these ideas. Yes. Spending taxpayer dollars to put these ideas on a whiteboard, and everybody's back slapping and going, great idea, Hank. I love this.

Ed Helms (33:37)

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Samantha Bee (35:38)

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Mike Falbow (36:10)

In the book, there's a. There's a section of five of the 634 attempts by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Samantha Bee (36:19)

Yes.

Mike Falbow (36:19)

Now, the. A lot of them didn't necessarily get past the drawing board, but there is a record of them. And at what point, like, that's a comedy writer's room. I mean, the ideas are so nuts. There was one idea to put thallium salts in his shoes, which is a certain kind of poison toxin to the human body that will make your hair fall out. Why is that advantageous? Well, the thinking was that'll make his beard fall out, and the beard is what really tethers him to leadership in Cuban culture. And without his beard, he'll be dethroned and humiliated. He will like the steps. It's so rude, Goldberg, just to get from A to Z. And then maybe he'll. He'll get overthrown because his beard fell out.

Samantha Bee (37:18)

That's a really. That's like. That's really long game thinking. Yeah, they're like, we'll step by step, hair by hair. We will destroy his manliness.

Mike Falbow (37:29)

It's gonna take a minute, but it's. We're gonna get there.

Samantha Bee (37:35)

Oh, my God. Okay, there's a season three of the podcast, and these are really comp. These are such complimentary endeavors. But 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? Sure. It's really.

Mike Falbow (38:05)

Yeah. So everybody knows prohibition as part of our collective memory. I was pretty resistant to this story because I was like, everyone knows Prohibition. Everybody, you know, like, is this really that 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 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, and so they. For 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 will get severely ill or die. 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 this. And thousands of people died as a result.

Samantha Bee (39:46)

Thousands of people died. Did anybody experience consequences based on this? No, not at all.

Mike Falbow (39:54)

No. And it was fully exposed.

Samantha Bee (39:56)

Fully exposed.

Mike Falbow (39:57)

Yeah.

Samantha Bee (39:58)

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 or failed upward anyway. We're not big on consequences. I guess we all know that. Now. Are there favorite, 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. They sound really interesting.

Mike Falbow (40:34)

It's mostly zooms.

Samantha Bee (40:36)

Mostly zooms. Virtual.

Mike Falbow (40:39)

It's hard to be raucous on a zoom.

Samantha Bee (40:40)

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 bucks lined up for this one?

Mike Falbow (40:52)

Well, yes, there are hopefully many books to come. Tell all your friends about it. So it sells really well. And I can just keep churning these out. But the ones that fell by the wayside tended to just not meet the criteria, which would be mostly things that are too well known. So. And then I think once we found a good number, we were like, okay, it's just time to start the research.

Samantha Bee (41:24)

I liked that you covered MK ultra, which is a story that people.

Mike Falbow (41:30)

That's probably one of the most well known stories in here. That and the Suez Canal container ship.

Samantha Bee (41:38)

But you did cover an angle of MK ULTRA 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 a larger story. Can you talk about that one? It's very interesting.

Mike Falbow (41:53)

Well, yeah, the MK Ultra, for those of you who don't know, was the. Thank you so much. I guess that's the cue that we're.

Samantha Bee (42:04)

You're transitioning, actually. But I want to hear your.

Mike Falbow (42:07)

Shut up.

Samantha Bee (42:08)

It's happening.

Mike Falbow (42:08)

This time has stopped.

Samantha Bee (42:10)

These people have questions.

Mike Falbow (42:13)

MK ULTRA 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 to try to understand. Basically, again, it's. It's Cold War and the thinking is maybe this new psychedelic drug is a secret to 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 MK ULTRA was this guy, George White was basically given free reign 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, then they would dose them somehow unbeknownst to them, and then he would watch them and take notes, among other things, presumably. And. And so many people were traumatized, hurt, taken advantage of, exploited throughout the whole MK ULTRA process, which lasted years and 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 and he had nightmarish visions for the rest of his life. And who knows if did the CIA help create Whitey Bulger? Who knows?

Samantha Bee (44:46)

On a happy note, at least Jimmy Carter helped stave off a nuclear catastrophe in Canada. A Young Jimmy Carter.

Mike Falbow (44:57)

Yeah, this is an awesome one. This is like some of the snafus have. Have like a little hero story baked into them. And that's. That's you. You. You're bringing one of them up where? A nuclear reactor. It was a research reactor in Ontario, just up. 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. And then couldn't pick up the phone because he was punching buttons and it was like.

Samantha Bee (45:24)

And the rods are coming out like. And it's a whole Simpsons.

Mike Falbow (45:27)

That's it. So 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.

Samantha Bee (45:37)

And it changed the game in Canada for sure. We have a of lot of rules in Canada now.

Mike Falbow (45:43)

Yeah, well, that could be Canada for long.

Samantha Bee (45:46)

Yeah, well, that's true.

Mike Falbow (45:48)

That's true.

Samantha Bee (45:50)

That's going to be exciting for us.

Mike Falbow (45:53)

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. Run out in 90 seconds.

Samantha Bee (46:33)

They're like a Formula One pick.

Mike Falbow (46:35)

Yes, it's a great analogy. I love that. That's exactly what it's like. Like with those rivet guns.

Samantha Bee (46:40)

Yes, a rivet.

Mike Falbow (46:40)

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.

Samantha Bee (47:04)

It's so badass. We need. You know what? I do feel like America is like full of Jimmy Carter's. We just have to summon. Yeah, we just actually have to summon the will to save the day.

Mike Falbow (47:13)

Amen.

Samantha Bee (47:14)

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.

Mike Falbow (47:26)

God willing.

Samantha Bee (47:27)

God willing, each and every one.

Mike Falbow (47:31)

Our partner in the podcast is Film Nation Entertainment, and we'll see what happens.

Samantha Bee (47:37)

Okay. Do you have a favorite snafu. Oh, do you have an all time favorite or. That's a good question. It's hard to pick a favorite.

Mike Falbow (47:44)

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? And that's an important one. Some things are just too tragic or too horrifying. And so 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 great enough story and a powerful and meaningful enough story that we didn't need to be as funny in season two of the podcast.

Samantha Bee (48:33)

Right.

Mike Falbow (48:34)

And I'm so proud of that one. Which is ironic because it's probably the least funny of the three seasons.

Samantha Bee (48:41)

Right.

Mike Falbow (48:42)

It's still funny. It's still funny. But it's also incredibly poignant and incredibly moving. And as you learn about these individuals and the risks that they undertook.

Samantha Bee (48:56)

Is there a role for me in the movie? Just kidding. What? Okay, what has. This is a good question. What has been the hardest historical event to research? Maybe the one hidden behind the most kind of layers?

Mike Falbow (49:15)

Well, in season one of the podcast. Season one of the podcast has a hero who is an historian that we interview extensively throughout that season, and he basically uncovered what is the story of season one. And he did it just by doggedly 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.

Samantha Bee (49:55)

Wow. You know what? I want to take a second to celebrate. 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, like. But really, there's no. Like.

Mike Falbow (50:22)

We couldn't make fun of them if they weren't great, if they weren't.

Samantha Bee (50:25)

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 Journal. 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 have fun with it.

Mike Falbow (50:46)

Yeah, we just make it silly.

Samantha Bee (50:49)

Oh, this is good. Are there any crazy New York City historical events that you can tell us about?

Mike Falbow (50:54)

There are so many. There's one that. Let's see.

Samantha Bee (51:00)

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.

Mike Falbow (51:09)

Sure. That's Atlantic City.

Samantha Bee (51:10)

Atlantic City. But I mean, it's like, regionally.

Mike Falbow (51:13)

Yeah, sure, regionally.

Samantha Bee (51:16)

And he didn't even know the story.

Mike Falbow (51:18)

He didn't even know the story. 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. 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. And it's just wild. It's kind of fun. The deeper you dig on so many of these things, the more there's more. Is there.

Samantha Bee (52:13)

We're gonna have so much to talk about in 10 years about this period in time.

Mike Falbow (52:18)

You think?

Samantha Bee (52:19)

Yeah, I don't know. Oh, just. I don't know. Just a hand, I'm pretty sure.

Mike Falbow (52:23)

Feels like a leap forward.

Samantha Bee (52:24)

Kash Patel's gonna fix the culture.

Mike Falbow (52:26)

He's gonna fix it. New York City snafus.

Samantha Bee (52:28)

Oh, yeah.

Mike Falbow (52:29)

I mean, where do you start?

Samantha Bee (52:31)

Yeah, right.

Mike Falbow (52:33)

I felt a drop of liquid hit me today.

Samantha Bee (52:37)

You did.

Mike Falbow (52:38)

And it's that. I feel like that is a universal New Yorker.

Samantha Bee (52:41)

It is. Welcome to New York.

Mike Falbow (52:43)

It's just like, where did that come from?

Samantha Bee (52:46)

Liquid.

Mike Falbow (52:46)

It's not raining.

Samantha Bee (52:47)

No.

Mike Falbow (52:48)

And I hope that it's like a pure drop of air conditioning condensation, but it's probably something way grosser.

Samantha Bee (52:59)

So bad.

Mike Falbow (53:02)

One of my favorites, truly, is the Citicorp buildings. You guys know that story, the City Corp 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. It was engineered to, I think, take hurricane force winds at the Sides. But a diagonal could have knocked it over.

Samantha Bee (53:40)

Oh, my God.

Mike Falbow (53:42)

And so they. They, like, what do you do in that situation? It's done. It's fully occupied. And they surreptitiously went in and. And, like, added new struts and bolts to the building to fix it. Oh, over. Over many, I think many months or years, and residents of the building or tenants of the building had no idea.

Samantha Bee (54:10)

Do you know what? That's not what you want to. That's not what you want to 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, 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 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.

Mike Falbow (54:42)

Oh, my God. I don't remember that.

Samantha Bee (54:43)

Okay, all right, well, Citicorp, that's great. You know what? Oh, I'm gonna walk out this door and so much fluid is gonna go on my head.

Mike Falbow (54:55)

Yeah, it is. You don't know what it is.

Samantha Bee (54:58)

This was so fun for me. What a joy.

Mike Falbow (55:00)

Sam, get out of here.

Samantha Bee (55:02)

Comfy chairs. I never want to leave. What are you going to inscribe in people's books? Oh, boy. So much.

Mike Falbow (55:09)

I want your life stories I'm going to tell. Right. I put everything in there.

Samantha Bee (55:12)

Long wisdom. Thanks, everybody, for coming. Enjoy. Thank you.

Mike Falbow (55:19)

Grande, ladies and gentlemen.

Frank (Cosentyx Testimonial) (55:21)

Gentlemen, so joyful.

Samantha Bee (55:24)

Thank you. Thank you.

Ed Helms (55:27)

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 Falbow, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, Whitney Dominic, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Torrey 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 Welch, Megan Halson and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Kerry Lieberman, Nikki Itor, 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 Screw ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com thanks for listening and see you next week. Using Venmo without cash back is like leaving your wallet open in a wind tunnel. Pick the right card, the Venmo debit card and let the cash back roll in. It's not a financial miracle, just avoiding a classic everyday snafu. Because with Venmo Stash you can get up to 5% cash back at your favorite brands. Just pick a bundle of your go tos to shop with your Venmo debit card and earn cash back at them and you're free to mix things up. You can easily swap out your bundle of brands every 30 days. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See Terms at Venmo Me Stash Terms.

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