Hey, everyone, this is Snaffo, the podcast about history's greatest screw ups.

I am your host ed helms, and today, before we wrap up season three next Wednesday, I thought i'd insert a little special bonus episode here.

I'm really excited to take you behind the scenes of Snaffo a little bit and also share with you a bit more about my Snaffu book coming out very soon, which I'm so so excited about.

So to do that, I have roped in one of our incredible, brilliant, unbelievable, talented, hilarious, and did I say brilliant, I think I did.

Snaffoo producers Carl Nellis.

Carl, thanks for joining us today.

Hey, thanks for bringing me onto the mic.

A little wild to be here.

You're on camera.

You're in the hot seat today, Carl.

I'm feeling it.

Feel the heat, Yeah, you feel the heat.

Because whenever we're recording a Snapoo episode, Carl is here.

Carl is with me.

He's helping me with the spontaneous rewrites and edits, he's reflecting with me, and he's just one of the great sort of guide posts in this whole process and also just a genuine history fiend like myself.

Which is why it's so fun to collaborate with you.

Carl.

Here's another little little Easter egg for you, Carl is in season three.

Also, Carl voices some of the characters throughout the season.

Do you want to fill us in on any of.

Those, Well, I'll never tell who it is, but yeah, it's it's such a joy to do that and many of the other producers of Gilded Audio Film Nation team.

Season three was so fun because they were those little chances to voice a bit here and there.

Yeah, we roped in the whole gang, and lots of little pieces here and there, which always makes it fun.

Let's talk a little bit about where these snaffoos come from.

Like you mentioned, we do have a we have a great team between Gilded Audio and Film Nation and my company, Pacific Electric.

We just have a lot of really smart, wonderful people contributing to the show.

And let's talk a little bit about how we find these snaffoos.

Carl.

Yeah, So.

We often think of it like a treasure hunt.

You know, there's so many great stories across time and play.

We know they're out there, and so we get together, we set the vision, and we go looking and we just come back with so many incredible, sometimes small, sometimes big, you know, amazing stories of great screw ups to cover and consider, take lessons from, sometimes laugh at, laugh with it's so fun that we're all doing it together, and then we come and bring them to each other, discuss pick the best ones.

It's chuckle.

Yeah.

And let's be honest, there are too many.

Yeah, there are too many snapfoos to choose from.

We do dumb things.

We've done dumb things throughout history.

It is one of the great consistencies of human behavior throughout the centuries.

We're just very, very dumb.

And so there's so much to choose from.

And as we as we dig through everything and decide what to put on the podcast, we have stumbled on such a treasure trove that this is what fueled the book.

So I'm going to turn the tables on you, Carl.

I'm usually the one interviewing on this show.

I want you to interview me a little bit about the book so I can help listeners understand what to expect and why this book is going to be so fun and cool.

Yeah.

Absolutely, Well, and let's start right there with the foundational idea, why why go from audio to book?

And what excites you about turning these snaphoo stories into a book?

Great question.

Well, I love the audio medium because there are so many opportunities to be playful, and it's obviously very adjacent to the film and television mediums I'm so used to.

But there were a lot of snaffoos that didn't have.

The depth that we require to dive into them on this show, and so it started to gel that maybe these are like, maybe these would just make.

Good book chapters.

A book allows you to.

Be visual, right with illustrations and historical documents and so forth.

We brought in an amazing illustrator, Mark Harris and had him sort of interpret some of these snaffoos into his particular form of artistic expression, which is these really cool kind of collage style pieces, and they're peppered throughout the book.

That's something you can't do in a podcast, right, you can't rope into Mark Harris to throw in some jazzy visuals.

And so do I feel like we've like we got this really cool collection of art, Like I want to hang this stuff in my house.

It's a new and different kind of collaboration for the team, and one that that's been really really fun.

You're right, it's so gorgeous.

And some of the ways that he manipulates historical photographs, like you're seeing the real photograph of the real thing, but then he's really put it into his style and his idiom.

It's so so fun to see.

For my part, I was a book editor before audio, so I went book editor audio, now.

Back to book again.

I'm just feeling right at home.

I'm so so glad to be doing this project.

Hey man, what are you feeling about this.

Being your first book coming out?

Do you have particular book feelings with this book about to launch?

Great question, book feelings, Like you said, never written a book before.

I usually only look at books with pictures, cartoon books.

I don't I'm scared of stretches of text.

No, I will say that it's such a different approach and the process is so much more isolating and kind of individual that there's some beauty to that.

I think it just hit me, like.

How much work it is to make a book, and there's just so many steps to the process.

The editing, the revising, the notes, and getting so much incredible feedback from the team.

Is a lot.

And then on the publisher side, editors, their team.

They're also putting in work when you hand it off to them.

So maybe we think of books as individual projects, but like you said, there are these pieces different people getting it ready to go out where people can actually pick up a chunk of paper and read the ink off it.

There's a lot of steps along the way from your desk to there.

It's fun to see it all come together as we head toward launch.

Yeah, very very proud.

I'm also really proud of the comedic tone that I think we as a team on the podcast have worked so hard to dial in over these three seasons, and that I can tell you just it's it's informed so much of the book as well, like it's always echoing in my head, like how would we say this in the podcast, what's the funny thing or what's the appropriate joke here, versus like what's the easy joke or the maybe this joke is too crude, maybe this is not a place for a joke.

It's a constant analysis but really really a fun part of the process and something I'm really proud of and speaking of.

What the stories are about, how they shape the tone or invite certain kinds of Like you said, jokes, pathos, et cetera.

Let's head into the book a little bit.

Can you take us inside?

How is it set up?

What are readers going to find in there when they crack open the cover.

The book is structured in six parts, which are roughly decades, starting in the fifties and through to the present, And within each of those chunks is a bunch of like a handful of snaffoos.

It's really, I think, instructive and meaningful to group these snaffoos by decade because it gives us a little bit of a cultural lens for context, and it's a fun way to look at things.

We all have associations with the sixties, we have associations with the seventies and the eighties and so on, and so we bring those associations to these stories that happen in these time periods.

But also like they're meaningful, Like the things that are happening culturally are really affecting even what we think of as a snafu, right, Like.

Yes, yes, it helps us in thinking about it and like, oh, this is my grandpa's snafu.

This is the one that had him like white knuckling his armchair, and oh this was my dad's snaffoo.

And then, like you said, we come up to the present and there are stories where I'm like, yeah, I remember that, I remember how I felt reading that in the news, and then the story that we get in the book kind of peels back that headline layer and takes us into with each story some of the intricacies behind it.

And that's a fascinating process.

Even for the stuff that is in the present where I'm like, yeah, that's my snaffoo, that's my present day snafu.

I'm like, wow, there's some new nuggets here, even for me who remembers that present day event.

You're right, like, each of them has a different flavor of the different decade.

Yeah.

So, speaking of those stories, what are some of your favorites from the book now that you've put this book together, Like what's sticking with you?

Honestly, they're all my babies, so it's hard to pick, but there are a few that jump to mind.

One I love because.

It has a little bit of a Hollywood rasmtaz to it.

There was a CIA operation called Project Azorian, and basically a Soviet sub sank in the Pacific Ocean.

The Soviets didn't know where it was, but we did.

We knew exactly where it was.

And not only that, we wanted it for you know, serious intel, right, it would have lots of technology, and it is a nuclear sub.

I would have all this Soviet.

Technology that we were trying to decipher and code breaking manuals and all kinds of stuff.

So we wanted this sub.

But it's like two miles deep in the middle of the North Pacific.

You can't just like go and get that without causing a huge hub up.

So the CIA approaches Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire Hollywood producer and weird businessman's who's like literally living in the penthouse of a Las Vegas casino at this point.

And they say, hey, Howard, will you pretend like.

You're gonna get into deep sea mineral mining and build and that you're going to build this ship that for your mining operations, But actually it's our plan to build a ship to lower a claw down into the ocean to grab this nuclear sub.

But we're gonna, we're gonna the cover story is that you are doing deep sea mining.

And Howard Hughes, of course, who's insane, is like, yeah, sure, that sounds awesome.

I love to lie about deep sea mining.

Yeah, exactly.

So they do this.

They build this this crazy ship with a giant claw, just like the Arcade Claw games, and they head out.

Into the middle of the Pacific.

They lower the claw.

It's two miles deep, and they get the sub but of course it takes forever.

It's like it takes like two days just to winch it back up, and then once they get to the top, it breaks.

It's just a wild, hilarious and insane story, and I just I love how much hubris is baked into it.

But then also like it's weirdly successful.

It's a funny thing to include as a snaffoo because a lot of people, a lot of CIA people were saying, I know that we didn't get all the intel we wanted, but we still pulled off this insane thing.

So it's still like we want to call it a success, but at the end of the day, they it hardly justified the hundreds of millions of dollars it cost to do what they did.

So I think it's it rests firmly in the snatfuo category.

But it's just an awesome and wild, wild story.

What's one of your favorites from the book.

Well, and just from that story, there's also a phrase the CIA used to cover their tracks about that secret operation that has entered the public lexicon.

And if you want to know what it is, got to read that chapter of the book.

Thank you, Yeah for me.

There's one from the nineteen fifties where there was a Canadian nuclear reactor that melts down and the Canadians need immediate emergency help to contain the disaster that's happening, and so they reach out to the nearest experts and it's some US nuclear sub guys in New York State.

They head up over the border.

They work out a wild plan to save this melting down nuclear reactor.

And the thing that's so cool about this story is that the person leading that team trying to save the melting down nuclear reactor is future President Jimmy Carter.

And he's what twenty two, I think, yeah, and it's twenty you know, he's very very young at this point.

And there's also a little connection in this chapter to the Almond Brothers that I love.

It's one of those really funny moments that I'm glad of the book.

Well, Jimmy was buds with the Almond Brothers, which is a great detail.

He's from Jimmy's from what America's Georgia, and the Almond Brothers are from making Georgia that it's just this Georgia where.

We all walks am from Atlanta.

It's like we just we all stick together Georgia, Georgia, folks, you know we have each other's back.

How about one more from you at And is there another chapter that you'd like to talk about.

We get into the fabulous Suez Canal disaster, which most people know, and because it was so recent, this the giant tanker or container ship that just got wedged in the Suez Canal and suddenly made the world realize how dependent we are on this teeny tiny little stretch of water that is actually a corridor for the biggest supply chains in the world for everything.

And they wind up dredging and digging and digging and digging.

But the great detail is that it's actually this full moon occurrence that allows the tide to rise high enough to just barely nudge it off the bank and get it free.

But it's just a wild story and there's so many fun details.

In terms of the book coming out, you know, I mean, we're talking about this because we're getting close.

What's it like gearing up for a book launch?

Does it feel similar to you?

I mean, you've had so many incredible projects come out over the years, including some great podcasts.

I might say, how is gearing up for a book launch feel compared to promoting a new movie or TV show?

It's very similar.

Honestly.

The book tour will feel similar to.

Like a movie promotional tour in that I'll be doing talk shows, and I'll be doing appearances and all kinds of stuff.

The big difference is that I expect to be having much more in depth conversations with interviewers on the book tour, talking more about the content of the book.

Typically, on a movie tour, you're just kind of staying pretty superficial about how fun it was to make.

The movie and what's in the movie.

In this case, I'm excited to really kind of like play a bit of more intellectual ping pong with people and just get into some of the ideas and ramifications of these snaffoos and how they've resonated or what meaning they've had throughout history.

You're going to get to talk history You're gonna go around the country talk in history with folks like I get to nerd out so exciting.

I get to nerd out in such a fun way and I truly can't wait.

And So if people want to see you on this book tour that you're doing to support the launch of the book, where can they go where you're going.

To be fabulous question.

Well, I'm also doing live in person appearances in lots and lots of cities all around.

Just off the top of my head, I'm going to probably forget some but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, d C, Atlanta, Georgia my hometown where I grew up, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles my current hometown where I live now, and.

Ding Ding ding Ding.

You got it, all of them?

Yeah, yeah, So I'll be having events in all those cities where people can buy tickets and come.

See go to Snafoo dashbook dot com for all the details about where you can both pre order the book and there's links to buy tickets to these events in all the different cities.

Fantastic If you were going to cast yourself in one of these Snaffoo stories from the book, is there someone you would want to play.

Obviously, these are snaffoos, so we're talking about screw ups.

But if you had to be in one of these screw ups, who you want to be?

I mean, listen, I've made a career of playing people screwing up on camera, so I could really probably slot into any of these.

But I think that.

I think, actually it would be pretty cool to play Jimmy Carter where he's basically saving the planet.

It's the first nuclear reactor meltdown in history, and that's the snafu, but Jimmy Carter is the hero, like he comes in and saves the day, So that would be a cool one.

Of Course, I'm not in my twenties anymore, so that might be a little bit of a stretch.

The other one that I think would actually be really funny to do is to be like a crew member or the captain of the Ever given the ship that was lodged in the Sue's canal, I feel like that's a very Armando Yaanucci, kind of like Veep or even like The Office, Like if you imagine the wheelhouse of this giant container ship is kind of like dunder Mifflin with just people like milling about doing their mundane jobs, and then all of a sudden, the biggest disaster in logistics history is upon you.

That feels like a ton of fun.

All right, I'm gonna retake control of this interview, Carl.

You did a stupendous job, and I got to watch my back here.

You're gonna like take my job.

You're a great surviewer.

No danger, no danger of that.

But thank you so much, Carl for picking my brain and just having a fun little breakdown both of our podcast process and a little bit of backstory on this book, which I'm so proud of.

Enjoy the rest of season three Formula six and check out snafuo dashbook dot com and come see me live in person.

Let's talk Snafu.

I'll sign your books.

It's gonna be great here here.

Do'll miss it, Lady,