Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. This podcast is all about going deeper with the women-shaping culture right now. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work behind it all.
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I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world.
I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real-world cafe right here in New York City. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app. And it's very empowering.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello, Snafu listeners, Ed Helms here. I mean, who else is it gonna be? I'm the host, this is my podcast. So yeah, it's Ed Helms, and I've got another really fun surprise for you. This week, I'm sharing the live recording of one of my favorite stops on last year's book tour, where I was essentially roasted to a crisp by the one and only Tig Notaro.
Now, Tig isn't just a brilliant comedian, actor, writer and podcast host. She's also a longtime friend. We go way back. And I've always admired her completely singular comedic voice. She has this magical rhythm to her delivery, like a deceptively gentle, slow burn. style to her jokes, and then these punchlines that just hit you in the gut so hard.
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Chapter 2: How does Tig Notaro roast Ed Helms during the conversation?
I'm out. I am out. Yeah. Because you didn't even read anything on that paper. Well, I realized this was my grocery list. For Galeson's? Ham. That's not true. Can I tell you, speaking of Mississippi, my cousin, who is a grown woman, 29, married, has a child. A couple of years ago, and she's not, and I know people here in Mississippi, and you picture whatever you're picturing.
There are civilized areas and people. My family is one of them. My cousin went to college. She went to business school. Found out a couple of years ago, ham is not an animal. She thought, like, chicken and... fish. There were hams running around. They don't teach that in business school. No. Where does she go to business school? In Mississippi? No, in New Orleans. Okay.
That is one of the few meats that has multiple names. Ham, bacon. There are all these things that aren't what it is. That's only two. Also, pig. Pork. Ham, pork, bacon, pig. What'd you say? Beef. That's not a pig. But it is not a cow also. Her point is that it's not a cow.
Oh, right.
I was going to say, are you from Mississippi? All right. Well, let's get in to these questions. All right. Ed. I'm an onion. Just start peeling the layers.
Okay.
It's going to get real. All right. If it's going to get real, then tell us a little bit about why you chose to write this companion book for the Snafu podcast. Wow. I'm so glad you asked. What spawned your interest? What a great question. In this type, I'm a slow delivery. I'm still asking the question. What spawned your interest in this type of history project in the first place?
That feels like a question you wrote before. You use words like spawned in a lot of regular time. And snafu. Yeah.
I always say snafu.
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Chapter 3: What stories from Ed's book, SNAFU, are highlighted?
And a lot of them are just interviews kind of style shows, which I love. And I was consuming a ton of these shows as a fan. And I was like, do I fit into this podcast space somewhere? And if I do, what does it look like? I didn't really want to do an interview show because I felt like there were just so many of them out there. And it's like, well...
history is a fun thing that I've always loved to just kind of go down these little rabbit holes of looking into stuff. Uh, our show, this show Rutherford falls was very kind of history oriented. I played a, an historian with who owned a museum in that show. And, uh, And I just, yeah, it was something that felt very organic to me. But then it's like, well, I still want it to be funny.
And then it was like, well, what's funny in history? The snafus, the car crashes of history that we can't turn away from. Those will be fun. That'll be a fun thing to do a podcast about. So we partnered with the great people at Film Nation and their podcast department. And set to work on this thing and it just turned into a really intense with deep research and heavy audio production.
Were you expecting that, the deep research, or did you not account for that? The first season, I think we were very ambitious, but it worked. Like, it really clicked, and we kind of figured out, got a rhythm on how to do this. Anyway, in doing all that research, you just accumulate basically like a pile of these crazy stories. And some of them don't, warrant the full podcast treatment.
It just doesn't have quite as much material there, but it's still really funny or interesting. And those just started to pile up, and it was like... all right, this is fodder for a book. It's like it's all right here. It's just sort of like quick.
Each chapter is a different snafu, so it's not nearly as deep a dive, and the stories are just kind of quick and fun and easy, which is part of what makes this book such a fantastic gift.
Yeah.
For Mother's Day or Father's Day, you can pick it up and just go anywhere and find a five to ten page little fun story. It's basically a book of short stories. There's 31 snafus in there. It's a great beach read. It's perfect for your nightstand. You can read it in the bathroom. Really? Yes. You know of people that have read it in the bathroom? I'm just saying you can.
I haven't asked people, but I've been told that it gets things moving. That one chapter is equivalent to nine grams of fiber. Would it be the longest enema? Ever Given. So there is a chapter about the Ever Given, which is a container ship that was wedged in the Suez Canal. That's one of the more recent ones that you might remember. And yeah.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Ed face while writing SNAFU?
One thing that emerges when you read the book, the Cold War did not bring out the best in us. Like, we were very scared and made a lot of really terrible decisions. This is one of them. So a plan was hatched to shoot a nuclear warhead at the moon. Now, why would you want to do that?
Well, the thinking was that if we can hit the moon with a nuclear warhead, the Soviets will see that and they'll be like, holy shit. And then I guess we win the Cold War, because they're so scared. Because they're like, oh my god, the Americans can hit the moon with a warhead? We're done. We just surrender.
So they really thought that this would shut down the Cold War or scare the Soviets really badly. So they went really far down this road. They spent a lot of time and money researching this. Carl Sagan worked on this project. A young Carl Sagan. He likes planets. But he was part of this plan to actually shoot a warhead at one. Millions of dollars went into this. Yeah, untold millions. Yes.
They eventually realized that any tiny malfunction or miscalculation could very easily result in the nuclear warhead slingshotting around the gravitational field of the moon and just coming right back at us. The other thing they realized is that even if they hit the moon, even if they actually were on target, that it wouldn't look like much.
I think the hope was the Soviets would see this big crater on the moon or see a big explosion on the moon. But they realized that it would really just probably be kind of a little gray dust cloud. It wouldn't... You wouldn't really see very much. And that detail I love because that is literally Wile E. Coyote. Every time Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff, it's like poof, that little dust cloud.
And this is a Looney Tunes idea. You could see Acme on the side of this warhead very plausibly.
I'm Lori Siegel, a longtime tech journalist.
And consider my new podcast, Mostly Human, your bridge to the future.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app.
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Chapter 5: How does Ed Helms incorporate humor into historical narratives?
My dad was very politically engaged and we loved Jimmy Carter. We always, he was like a venerated figure in our home. But I feel like sadly in sort of the popular memory, he's considered kind of wimpy. You know? Even though he did a lot of really badass stuff, both as a president and especially as he's one of the most productive post-presidents we've ever had. And I think of him as a hero.
I always have, and I've always resented this kind of popular sentiment that he's just sort of this wimpy, ineffective guy. But this is like a great little nugget of proof that he was a really courageous badass with serious leadership and
I can really accentuate this point even more with a detail about this story, this snafu in your book, that when I said, I know what happens, this is what I'm talking about. His urine was radioactive for how long? Like three months afterwards.
Afterwards.
Yeah. That's a badass. Yeah. Okay, make fun of Jimmy Carter all day long, but have you had radioactive urine? And they were very afraid that all these workers would not be able to have children, and Jimmy Carter had four very healthy children. He's a tough guy. Yeah, yes. Give it up for Jimmy Carter. Those are some of my favorite live moments is when one person claps and nobody chimes in.
And it's just an awkward, and then you go, oh, did you feel like I should pull back? Nobody's joining. Oh, she's not even acknowledging that I'm talking to her. What are some patterns that you observed and lessons studying snafus? The...
Okay, so the... Well, one of the things that... I don't think this is something that we sort of culturally would say we learned from this book, but the book reiterates it in a very powerful way, which is that we just don't learn from history at all, which is so sad and dumb. We're so dumb. And we just do the dumbest stuff. But I do think there is, like, a...
a positive takeaway from really digging into these snafus. The more you look into these really dumb or horrifying, crazy events from history, It's very easy just when we're in this moment like we're in right now, and this I think applies whatever your political stripes are, wherever you fall on the sort of conservative, liberal spectrum, this moment that we're in feels...
volatile it feels like it feels unstable it feels uh a little like you know like we're polarized and there's a just tremendous uncertainty about the future which is just unsettling makes us anxious When we look back at crazy things in the past, it's actually kind of nice to be reminded that we've been there before. Like, people have been terrified lots of times in the past.
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Chapter 6: What are some surprising historical snafus mentioned in the episode?
Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy?
Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.
Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you.
The guy was a spy.
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