If you recognize Ed Helms' face — and let's be honest, nearly everyone does — it's most likely from the many seasons he spent playing paper salesman and a cappella superfan Andy Bernard on "The Office," without any serious doubt the most beloved sitcom of the post-"Seinfeld" TV era. It's also plausible that at some point you've inhaled Helms' presence in the somewhat raunchier "Hangover" movies, a smash-hit trilogy exactly coterminous with the latter years of "The Office." Both, in different ways, feel like products of a different time.

Well before that, longtime viewers of "The Daily Show" knew Helms as a regular contributor from 2002 to 2006, whose dry, affable and more than slightly nerdy persona (it's a word Helms embraces, people) often seemed to take the edge of his pointed political satire. In the years since he and fellow "Daily Show" alum Steve Carell closed down "The Office," Helms has appeared in numerous films and TV series without quite landing on a long-term project, and also become a regular on the bluegrass circuit playing banjo, guitar and piano with his band the Lonesome Trio. (He literally co-authors a bluegrass blog, and if that's not embracing nerdhood, then nothing is.)

Helms visited Salon's New York studio recently to talk about — well, none of the above, actually, but a project that definitely fits his overall résumé in a bunch of different ways. His podcast "SNAFU," now in its second season, is broadly focused on what he calls "history's greatest screw-ups," and while he disavows any overtly partisan political intentions, let's just say a certain orientation is visible. The people who screwed up, in this season's narrative, were the FBI agents of the 1960s and '70s, who conducted massive spying operations on American citizens, mostly but not entirely in the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

This enormous surveillance operation was first dragged before the public eye thanks to a remarkable Robin Hood escapade run by a group of young activists, who staged a break-in at a small FBI office in the outer suburbs of Philadelphia in 1971, stole a bunch of incriminating files and leaked them to the press — and most implausibly of all, never got caught. What they did would be literally impossible now, but they set an example echoed in more recent years by intelligence whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, among others. Helms' highly entertaining podcast focuses on the most remarkable and absurd aspects of this story but also, in its own way, offers a heartfelt tribute to these unknown heroes of democracy, coming at a moment when its peril is obvious.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

This season of your podcast “SNAFU” focuses on issues like the FBI and government surveillance and a relatively little-known, but very important event that happened in 1971. What's the source of your interest in that material?

I've been a big fan of podcasts for a long time, and I just was sort of like, "Do I fit into this space somewhere? Is there something I could be doing?" And then I started talking to our buddies at FilmNation, like, "Oh, let's do something together. Well, what is it?" And then the conversation just kind of went to like, "Well, what are my personal interests and hobbies and so on?" And so we just dug into, well, I've always just been a little bit of a closet history nerd.

But there's great history podcasts out there already. What's our take? And then we just landed on, well, what about history's greatest screw-ups? These are sort of the car crashes of history that you can't turn away from, and they're fascinating. There are lessons baked into them, or lessons that we may or may not have learned. A lot of times these epic stories are long forgotten, even though it's hard to believe. So that's sort of how we got started. We did Season 1, which was the story of Able Archer 83 and a NATO military exercise that almost caused a nuclear holocaust. Just a little end of the world for everybody, no big deal. That one was incredibly fun, lots of dark humor in that, and I think also lots of lessons in that that we're still trying to learn.

So then it became, well, what's Season 2? Well, it just so happened that my aunt who lives here in New York City, in about 2014, I think, sent my whole family a book for Christmas. She said, "This is a book. My friend wrote it. It's a little dense, but enjoy." And so we all got this huge book, it's called “The Burglary,” and it's written by Betty Medsger, who was a Washington Post reporter, went on to become the dean of journalism at Berkeley, I believe. Really just a storied career, a remarkable woman. And she happens to also be good buddies with my aunt here in New York City. And so when her book came out, my aunt was like, "Check out this cool book." I don't think anyone in my family read it except me. And I got into it because it is dense. It is a very —

Does that speak more about you or about your family? I guess a little of both.

It's more about books you get for Christmas, right? Does anybody read those, really?

"What these activists did was to unravel a terrible snafu within the FBI at the time, which was........

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