Politics aside, President Obama’s appearance with Zach Galifianakis on Between Two Ferns was pretty big news. This interview with creator Scott Aukerman digs into the backstory on how they got the President on board.

Zach and I didn’t really think that anything would come of it. I mean, we’d been hearing rumors that President Obama has perhaps been interested in doing the show for quite a few years now and it never really panned out. And then months and months went by and nothing really happened with it. So, approximately three weeks ago, we heard that if it was ever going to happen, it was going to be now, so we should get ready and prep.

It really came around in a week. We heard he was interested, and Zach and I prepped and wrote up a treatment for them to look at, with what we wanted to do with the video and how we wanted to approach it. For me, the most important thing was that it didn’t come across as an advertisement. I really wanted it to be a funny, normal “Between Two Ferns” video. And the great part about it was that the White House was very accommodating of that and didn’t want to get in the way of our process. They didn’t want it to be just any kind of ad; they knew that it had to be funny and it had to be what we normally do for anyone to actually watch it. So, to their credit, they actually stayed out of our way with it. But yeah, within a week Zach and I had pitched what we wanted to do, they accepted it, and we flew out to the White House [laughs] and filmed it.

Here’s the video: