How have you and your team handled running the show remotely?

It's been a lot of Zoom. But the biggest challenges that we faced right away were large file sizes. You have to come up with a workflow where you're exchanging the smallest files possible. And that's part of the reason audio is great to deal with, because it's just small .wav files. Overall, the great thing is if you look at the show, you have no idea how it was produced. We have this strategic advantage over many live-action late night shows – our show can look as beautiful as we want.  Another advantage is all our guests are now at home, and they don't have to go to a studio. The barriers to coming on the show are much smaller. It's really just clicking on a Zoom link. So we've been very fortunate – we've had some great guests on the show.

How do you determine which guests fit which segments?

It really is a strategy of: is the guest going to get the joke of this show? Is the contrast between the show and the guests funny? There was something kind of great about, for example, “Inside the Hill,” which is a very upscale, blue-blooded cast, and Congressman Ro Khanna. Khanna is a congressman of the people; he gets the issues that are facing average Americans. And that was a really great contrast between those two.

And then there was Congresswoman Katie Porter. “Hot Take” is probably our most over-the-top show, and we thought, she's got a great sense of humor, she'll get it, what she's up against.

It really just depends on who the guest is and whether they'll get the joke. But there are some segments where we really want to have a point to make. So we'll have to pick a set-up where we feel like we can articulate successfully what we want to say.

Who have been some of your favorite guests so far?

I mean, God, so many of them. Congresswoman Karen Bass was amazing. She was so good on the issues, and I'm not surprised at all that she's on the VP short list. Julian Castro was awesome. He played right along when we asked him to help us crown the “Thick AF” Player of the week. Donny Deutsch immediately got the joke, which was great. I think the guests that have the most fun tend to be the most successful.

That said, we don't want to be partisan at all. So when we have something to say to liberals or conservatives, we want to make sure we say it and challenge them. Even though we are a cartoon, we care deeply about our credibility with our audience. We want to do the news better than the news. We want to make sure we have credibility, and we're not just sucking up to our guests. 

What are your goals for the show? What do you want viewers to take away from it?

I think it's a really tough time out there. We want to provide some catharsis for our audience, a sense that they're not crazy, there are things going on out there, and that whatever they're feeling, we feel too, and we're helping them make sense of the world.

We are a satire of cable news, and I think there are a lot of problems that we want to highlight.  We're trying to expose the problems in the relationship between the news media, our government and business. I love stuff that is silly yet exposes a darker, deeper truth about the relationships that are in our government and in justice. And we want to do that in the most subversive, funniest way possible.  We're in this weird point where the news is so dark that somehow perhaps a cartoon is most equipped to deal with it.