The Press Box - Last-Minute Election Stories, Trump Goes on ‘60 Minutes,’ and (Another) White House Reporter Caper

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and a returning David discuss Dick Cheney’s death by reviewing his relationship to the press (12:20), before diving into last-minute election stories covering the final days of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, California's Prop 50, and a fake Bill de Blasio (33:10). Next, Bryan and David talk about everything that came out of Trump’s newest interview with CBS’s ‘60 Minutes,’ what CBS chose to air, and the Bari Weiss of it all (42:24). Lastly, Bryan and David dive through some NFL audio and share their thoughts on the return of a certain football podcast (1:00:02). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David? Yes. First off, are you okay? Yeah, I'm doing okay. Making a comeback here. You're out of the woods? Yeah, yeah. I was a little worried about you last week.

I could see the woods from where I'm standing, but I'm thinking I'm on the other side. Can I give you a little Halloween update here from California? Please do, please do. So the Curtis family did a group costume, Greek gods and heroes. that is so perfectly Kurtesonian

most people we guess the vast majority of let's say personalities in the ringer podcast network would have gone with you know we were the Incredibles or you know we were the cast of the bear or something but yeah Greeks

Greek gods and heroes is just it's right up your alley it really is my daughter was Aphrodite great My son was Odysseus. My wife, Christine, was Demeter. I had to kind of do a little refresher on who Demeter was and roll the whole thing. I'm Googling now.

Go ahead. And I, David, I was Zeus. Nice. And I treasure every Curtis family group costume because you and I both know. The kids are only going to have so much tolerance for this sort of thing. Yeah. Whenever I look at Facebook and see parents that have kids a little bit older than ours, you see the family costume, here we go, this is amazing, and then suddenly it stops and it's just the couple's costume. So I was leaning in.

I mean, I was all in on the Greek gods and heroes. Yeah. And I don't believe in buying, you know, a sad Halloween costume out of a bag at Spirit Halloween. I want to put this together. Yeah. As you would from elements that are found. across the city of Los Angeles. I have a take here, but go on, yeah.

So I went to a used clothing store, just happened to walk in, and there was a giant gold cape. Yeah? I don't know if I know what LeMay is, but if I had to pick a material, it was a LeMay cape. But it was like a used clothes.

This was a piece of clothing. This wasn't just a costume. Someone wore this for a non. a non-silly purpose at some point. Well, that's unclear. Okay. It only had one sleeve by design. So if somebody was, you know, running around the city on roller skates,

maybe they were wearing this as their normal clothes. Yeah, it would work for like a paper route or trying to think why you need one. Maybe a pitcher. That'd be good. Yeah, sure. So I got that, 11 bucks. And then last week, as the days are counting down, I realized, oh, my God. I need hair and a beard to be Zeus.

And by the way, an interesting question that popped in my mind as I'm driving around. What does Zeus look like? Am I thinking of depictions of Zeus or am I thinking of depictions of God generally? It's kind of the same, but go ahead. Or perhaps Gandalf. Yeah. But I'm thinking, you know, flowing white hair, a big, wonderful. bushy white beard.

Mm-hmm. So I go to this place called Halloween Town in Burbank. Yeah? Because I've read, this is the source for Halloween. Is it a pop-up or is this a year-round store? It's a year-round store.

Oh, okay. That's serious. And I walk in and they have all the yard decorations. Mm-hmm. By the way, when we were kids, Halloween yard decorations really were not a thing. We're not a thing at all. It's just, there've been actually,

I've read a couple articles about the proliferation. This year in particular, I heard a thing on NPR the other day. The amount of money people are spending on this stuff is pretty crazy. Everyone has a spider web that attaches to the roof now. Yeah. In this place, Halloween Town, they didn't just have the gravestones you put in the yard. They had the classy gravestones.

Mm-hmm. And I found a, this is also very courtesonian, but I found a bust of Edgar Allan Poe at the store, a very large bust. Like a Halloween decoration? Yeah, sure. Okay. You know, Halloween time.

Yeah, he's one of the, one of the Halloween icons, sure. He was very expensive and I'm like, I'm, I absolutely need this. This is the only cool literary Halloween decoration. So I bought that. But as I'm looking around the store, I'm like, oh my God, they have every possible cool Halloween thing, but they have no costumes. Nope, this place is so awesome that they don't sell costumes, just Halloween merch. Whoa, okay.

So I went home with the po bust under my arm, but no wig and beard. And then the next day I texted Alan Siegel and he's like, actually they have a costume store a couple of blocks away. You just didn't process that. So the next day I was back at Halloween Town buying a flowing beard, buying big white hair. And by the way, the sort of, I don't know, the model for this particular wig and beer turns out to be Merlin. but close enough. Yes. Now, I know it's the wig situation in Halloween is always a little bit weird.

I feel there was there was one, I forgot what it was. There was one Halloween costume I was looking for and I ended up getting like a Willie Wonka wig. That was nothing. It was the only thing. Oh, no, no. There been a couple of times where I've had to get the,

the, what's his name? The famous pop artist. Any Warhol. Yeah, I've had to get the, repurpose a Warhol wig a couple of times because that's the only way you can get like just a sort of blonde. Bob for a man. Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, I thought it was going to be Einstein, frankly, when you started this, but go on. Or Santa was another possibility that my kid suggested. And I'm like, you and I would have to go back to the Joseph Campbell books to determine whether Zeus and Merlin, you know, came from the same mythical source. I'm not totally sure. But sure.

In any case, I look fantastic. They even had spirit gum where you could buy that and put on bushy white eyebrows. This place was fantastic. So I put on my costume I have this big reveal for my kids at home Because they have no idea what I'm about to look like This is early in the day on Halloween And you know I put on this gold LeMay robe

My daughter made me a lightning bolt out of cardboard Okay Colored it yellow I am so happy we And all four of us proceed to this Halloween party Which is happening before the trick-or-treating And one of my daughter's friends comes up to me and says, who are you? And I reply, I am Zeus. And she says, no, no, who are you?

And I said, I am the king of the gods and all mortals tremble before me. And she looked at me and she goes, no, who are you under the costume? And I realized I had triggered a stranger danger moment. Oh, yeah. Yep. Here's a man I don't recognize hanging around a lot of kids. So we had to clear that up. Other highlight from Halloween. I love the chase of the candy, and I think I got that from my dad who never pushed me in sports, but he was one more street dad on Halloween. Because I think he wanted the candy pretty much.

Yeah. And I'd be dressed as like a haystack or a bat. And I'm like, Dad, I don't have any more. I can't do it. No, one more street. We're going one more street. So I love to push that. And before we trick or treated this year, my kids were talking about how there was one particular street near where we live,

where they give out full-sized candy bars rather than the Halloween-sized candy bar, like the one you get at the movie theater. I love how that always seems to happen by street. Like there is a sort of unspoken rivalry that goes on, or at least some sort of tacitist. agreement like oh we're going to be the good street on Halloween but it's totally true. It is totally true but it also seemed like it could be totally bogus and that this is a story like that they heard in one of the Ramona

books that then got laundered through their friends. Yeah sure. It's cool. But I'm like happy to encourage this. Yes. So we went to that street and dude God or Zeus as my witness they handed out the full size Hershey

the full size Kit Katz. Like It actually was real. Wow. There was somebody giving out the big candy bars on Halloween. That is awesome. And everybody was so excited. I have never seen my kids that happy. Did you go back multiple times?

We really should have. There's one guy this being Los Angeles who wears, and he's in the same house every year, wears a very elaborate Michael Keaton-era Batman suit. He wears the same one. every year. I mean, I probably would too. If I had a, if I had a really good replica Michael Geaton Batman suit, I'd probably wear it every day. So, you know, oh, dude, absolutely, fighting crime and at night, standing on rooftops. And this is something that honestly, you know,

given where we are, could have been in a movie or the movie. Sure. But what this dude in the Batman suit does every year is he gives out otter pops. Uh-huh. No candy. All I got is frozen otter pops. So again, in my role as, you know, one more street dad, I'm always like, we got to make it to otter pop Batman before the night is over. And I did walk up to him in full Zeus regalia and say, can I have an otter pop? He goes, there you go in Batman growl. That's so great. I really appreciate everything that you guys went through.

I was going to say, I do prefer to make the costume. It's a lot more fun to have your hands in the costume with a six-year-old who, you know, in previous. years, believe it or not, has been five and four. There's a lot of changing of the mind that goes on. And so a lot of times there's like three quarters of a handmade costume and a last minute emergency run to the costume store to get him to Sonic costume he desperately needs or he's going to cry for Mario. But I like to contribute along the margins.

So this year he was the Mandalorian. And I spent a fair amount of time converting an old BB gun into the Mandalorian's pulse rifle. So there was a there was a handmade component to a very, generic costume. You had a BB gun lying around? It was from a, it was from an antique store. It was like one of those real old.

It looks like a 22, you know, like it's very lifelike, would get you arrested on the street today, sort of BB gun, yeah. Anybody listening to this, David does take gun safety very seriously at home? He wasn't allowed to bring it to school. He wasn't allowed to bring it to the trunk or treat that was a week before. I think he did get to carry it around a little bit on Halloween. It feels like you've got a wrestling tag team. costume or wrestling stable of

you know costume just sitting there waiting to be active just waiting for it to happen yeah with my me and my kid or get down yeah get the whole family involved yeah we could do it would be fun we could do like demolition get like oh make don't be mr fuji just a lot of face pain involved for those who are not follow wrestling basically like kiss yeah that'd be fun all right david coming up on today's podcast Election Day is here and we've got notes on

Zeran Mamdani and the fake Bill de Blasio. Plus Donald Trump is back on CBS News. The White House is still screwing with reporters. Plus some NFL audio and the return we think of a beloved football podcast. All that and much more on the press box. A butt of the rear! Podcast Network. Hello, media consumers.

It's Brian Curtis. It's David Schumer. It's producer Bruce Baldwin back with you. David, we got the news right before we came on this morning that Dick Cheney has died. Yeah. 84 years old. I love this sentence from Robert McFadden's New York Times obit. An overweight, laconic and rather wooden grandfatherly figure with a nimbus of white hair and eyeglasses that caught the light. Mr. Cheney looked like a man on his way to the dentist.

What does that mean? Like he just looked like a little bit like perpetually unhappy. He didn't look like a politician that was ever really happy to be there. Yeah. Politicians like to smile. There were some smile. I got to say, I read the obituary. I also clicked on the New York Times lovely,

a life in photos feature of Nick Cheney, which seems like mostly because it seems so unnecessary in its existence. but I was like to see those old DC photos or whatever. And there was a picture of him as the lone congressman from Wyoming in his post, well, after his first White House stand. And he looked sort of, you know, jovial. Rakeish. I don't know if I would go full rakeish, but there was something in there.

There was obviously also a picture of him and his wife when he was stumping, I guess, prior to his first vice presidential election. and yeah, he was like, or he was like sitting on a stool with a kind of sly grin and she was standing up to introduce him, which you just seemed like a weird, just a weird kind of power imbalance.

But yeah, he didn't always seem very happy, at least in the times that we knew him. And he did have one of those smiles that made it look like, well, that lent itself to the, to the, you know, presupposition that he's pulling all the strings behind the scenes and or that he's just kind of, making a funny joke in his head that he's not going to share with anybody, right?

Because that no one else is going to get it. Yes. Like, I'm not even going to let this one out of the side of my mouth. Yeah. I'm just never going to tell you at all. Yeah. The Times Obit and many other pieces get into Dick Cheney's legacy as an architect of the Iraq War as one of the most powerful vice presidents in American history.

I did want to highlight a few Dick Cheney run-ins with the press. you might remember when Dick Cheney was campaigning with George W. Bush in 2000. A hot mic caught Bush saying, there's Adam Clymer, Major League asshole from the New York Times. And Dick Cheney said back, oh yeah, he is big time. Wait, so, oh, so Bush said the first line. Bush said the first line. Yeah.

And Cheney got the phrase big time attached. to him for a long time. This was before Donald Trump's press office was, you know, writing your mom back to reporters. So to hear something like that. No, it seems sort of quaint majorly. It's a majorly, look at that major league asshole over there. Yeah, big time, you know.

But that was, that was a, that was it to do. Yeah. December 2005, the New York Times published a story by James Risen and Eric Lickblow, revealing that Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity

without court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spine. That was a huge story. That seems sort of quaint too, but go ahead. It really does. Cheney was one of the administration officials who, of course, pushing back

trying to get the Times not to publish that story. If you go back and revisit the original story, you'll find that the Times held it for a year while they did more reporting and then wound up editing it in certain ways. That is a fascinating press story itself. And then in 2006, David,

you'll remember that Dick Cheney went hunting. I was hoping you were going to get here because I do remember this as a press story as much as it is just a kind of bizarre story. If I go ahead. And here's this guy who's so secretive not giving many interviews

unless it's a real Sunday show set piece. We don't know much about his life or as you mentioned his thoughts and he winds up accidentally shooting an austin lawyer named harry winnington in the face wittington uh of course survives uh the times notes that mr cheney was silent for four days he then defended his actions but the episode exposed some rarely seen tensions between mr bush and mr cheney yeah somehow that also seems quaint so so the so the story the story is actually i mean you got it right but it's that they just the white house just chose not to come i mean just didn't say anything about

it at all until the corpus christie caller times wrote had a question about it question them about it four days later and at that point they acknowledged its existence um it's it's a it's a it's a pretty incredible story uh it was widely reported the two were friends but uh but whittington later came out and said they'd met maybe three times in 30 years and At some point, years later, he came out and just sort of threw Cheney under the bus, you know, retroactively said that he violated like the two of the top rules of bird shooting, which are...

What are those rules? Yeah, this is in the Washington Post. It said that Cheney had violated the two basic rules of hunting safety, one that he had failed to ensure that he had a clear shot before firing. And two, he fired without being able to see blue sky beneath his target. Wow. I was not aware of that rule. And for the record, at least up through this 2010 Washington Post article, Dick Cheney had never publicly nor privately apologized to Whittington. Thank God. What a moment.

Just so weird. Cheney did, of course, it was on the stump and endorsed Kamala Harris somewhat improbably last year. He asked to talk to Peter Baker for his 2013 book. called Days of Fire, Bush and Cheney in the White House, which really explored their relationship. Anyway, more to say on Dick Cheney at a later date. David, today is Election Day. Yes. We got some races.

Zaron Mandani or Andrew Cuomo in New York City. Governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia. Prop 50 here in California, which would allow the state to go full Texas and redraw the congressional lines. Hell yeah. We've got our mail ballots here because they mail a ballot to everyone in California and Prop 50 was the only thing on the ballot. Mm-hmm. I had set aside time, okay, I'm going to have to look a lot of the step up and it was like,

oh, I get to fill in one circle. Yeah, you're used to spending like, you know, at least a wrote 20 minutes Googling judges, you know, or whatever or, you know, board members or whatever. But yeah, it's the only thing on there, huh? Is this the glued to the TV kind of a like? night or a one eye on social media kind of election night? Well, I mean, I think with Mondami, it's, it is going to be, will be somewhat glued because I think that that there's real significance to that. And also because the moment when and if he

were to be elected, we got to start watching the White House to see what Trump's reaction is and all that kind of stuff. Separate from that, I don't know. I mean, the midterm or non-presidential elections in general, I mean, off-cycle elections have sort of, have sort of, lost their luster for me. In the past couple of cycles, it seemed like they were, that they were supposed to be clarion calls for, you know, that people read great meaning into. And then when the big elections came two years later, they just people seem to just totally forget about it. I think just the mobilization efforts are so different. And I think that, I mean, you remember the midterm cycle where everybody was voting to, you know, protect Roe versus Wade on the, on the left. And then,

you know, when the, and everyone read that to mean that, like, you know, Republicans, going to lose in a landslide and every election going forward where this was an issue. And it just sort of seemed like that issue fizzled 15 minutes after those votes were cast. So I wouldn't read too too much into it. And for that reason, I'm not going to be totally absorbed. And oh, and there's I think outside of New York, I mean, even here in my home state of New Jersey, it does feel like there's, there's elections that, I mean, there's elections that can be read in a number of ways. I'll just put it that way. You know, Mikey Sherrill is, I mean, maybe a good candidate for New Jersey, although she seems to have impressed precisely nobody since she got the nomination. And I say

this is someone who is a proponent of hers, at least briefly. But, you know, that sort of election, I think it's easy to, when we do the postmortems, we'll be able to look back and say, see, this is the the problem. Like, people either say, see, this is exactly the kind of people candidate Democrats need to run or if she loses and Mamdami wins, then people will say, look, we're just not going far enough left. You know, we're not actually like being, you know, spreading our wings here, you know, actually trying.

So I think that, you know, there'll be a lot of, there'll be a lot to talk about after there always is, but. Aggressive interpretation of the results. Aggressive interpretations. That should be a segment on this show, aggressive interpretations. I think we could do that. I mean, and I kind of forgot that Donald Trump only lost

Jersey by six points last year. Yeah. So mix that into your aggressive interpretation. I mean, obviously there's a pretty notable Republican governors of the state. There have been a lot of Democrat governors too of late that have been, you know, more of the technocratic variety and, you know, from the business world and that sort of thing. You know, outside of like Chris Christie's national platform, New Jersey politics has, you know, It rarely has the amount of influence that you might expect it to based on its adjacency to New York.

But yeah, it swings both ways. I mean, New Jersey is sort of a mini version of the U.S. This election is an interesting test of a couple of things. One is that everything in politics is wildly important when Donald Trump is president. We see the TV stations always just going to battle stations, you know, even when you have. have a couple of Gov elections, New York mayoral election and a California election, all of which we seem to, you know, be able to predict the results of. Also, as we say a lot on this podcast, the resistance is a huge, huge, huge chunk of the audience for every single media outlet. Sure.

You can pretend that's not the case, but it really is. So if you can give you, meaning the media outlet, if you can, you know, say here is a Democratic victory that is a kind of statement about Donald Trump, a statement of discontent. That is the kind of thing people that puts butts in the seats. Sure. It really is. And as Michael Grinbaum notes in the New York Times, so far this year, MSNBC's total audience is down 34% from 2024, according to Nielsen, 34% in the same period CNN's audience fell 21%. So here are these cable news networks that are casting around, hey, we can have an election night. It'll likely result in a number of Democratic victories.

Well, I mean, listen, even on the, it's not strictly cable news issue too. I mean, the New York Times will have to cover these elections and there will be, you know, opinion pieces. There'll be op-eds. they'll be big think pieces about what it means. That's like that that's the job of the, you know, editorial desk, right? I mean, the opinion desk. Like they have to, they have to produce these pieces. They can't just throw up their hands and say,

whatever we say now will probably be meaningless in six months. So there, yeah, I mean, there's going to be, there's a market for that that runs both ways. And you're right. I mean, I'm sure MSNBC is going to cover this with, you know, great, great gravity and, you know, make it seem like whatever happens. Like it's a like it's a really big deal. but I mean, but honestly, like, how much is it going to affect?

It really does seem to me that the ways this is going to affect national politics or our lives outside of the people who live in the places where people are getting elected in any sort of meaningful way is one can Mondami win? And if so, how does that affect the, how does that affect the future of the Democratic Party or the Democrat Party? How do they, do they, does that broaden the scope of people that now seem to be, plausible candidates on a national scale. Maybe.

And then two, does that election or any number of elections inspire our president to engage in more lawlessness or whatever else, you know? I mean, that's pretty much the stakes here. Yeah, Prop 50, you could argue, you know, redrawing the congressional lines will matter for 2026. Oh, you're absolutely. No, that'll matter significantly. This whole, I mean, that, I mean, that's one of those things that could be its own episode

that we should talk about in some depth or the fact that the real like the real controversy seems to be now like are we allowed to cancel each other out? Makes it turns into a subject that seems like almost it cancels itself out. So it's a little bit of a, in some ways it's a non-starter for me.

But anyway, yeah, no, this, I mean, it could obviously be a huge, huge deal. Reid Epstein, New York Times reporter, and what I can only interpret as a shout out to the Press Box podcast has a line in his story about the races today. He's talking about off-year elections. This year predicted former governor Terry McCallif of Virginia,

quote, will be like 2017 on steroids. Thank you, Reed, for thinking of us as you were cobbling together your article. The YouTube TV fight is weird background noise to election night, David. Left me scrambling to watch Cowboys Cardinals last night. probably shouldn't have scrambled as it turned out. Whoops. On Monday, Disney asked YouTube TV to put ABC back on the service for Election Day for the good of the nation, et cetera, et cetera. Even if we're in a fight, put them back for one day so people can watch the results.

YouTube said no and noted in a fairly snippy response. On the last two U.S. election days, the vast majority of tuned in. YouTube TV subscribers chose not to watch ABC. So thoughts and prayers to George Stephanopoulos and the entire ABC news team tonight. Yes. Listen, for sports,

this is a huge issue and maybe it affects the audience of this show more so than anything else. But it is just sort of, it's just sort of nuts that everywhere I go, go to someone else's house,

you go to a, you know, now you go to a hotel that has different streaming services. Well, it's like when you used to go to, remember you used to go to a hotel? Like when you were a kid, and there would be like 13 channels and one would be a good like something interesting you didn't have at home. You know, one would be like the movie channel or whatever.

But and they would just inevitably there'd be a missing network and it would really, as a kid, it would really mess up your viewing diet because you're really like, I'm used to watching, you know, punky Brewster on NBC. And then I changed the channel to CBS to watch this or whatever. You'd be really confused. That's how every single television is now. Like every, every over the top base TV is. missing a network. And it's just sort of, it like, and it only matters now when a sporting game is. When there's a big game on it. And you're just like, wait, what? Why don't I have this?

You know, it's just, it's very strange. This is a great think piece. We all have motel TV now. Yeah, we're all living in motels. I know. And YouTube TV, I think, hits people particularly hard because it was really cheap a couple years ago to get it. And it was like all these other things, it's like, we're not going to be like cable. We're going to be different. all those problems and costs will go away. It's like, no, they're not going to go away. No, not at all. Same problems just over and over again. It's not going to be cheap. It's not, it's not nothing, nothing. Maybe that was promised to you in some way, like the way that Joe Biden kind of indicated that he wouldn't run for reelection when he was running in 2020. But trust me, it was not

promised to you that all your problems would go away because streaming was replacing cable. No, no, it's absolutely crazy. It's weird. that they just haven't figured out a way to fix it yet either. I mean, like, I was happy to sign up for Sling TV because it was just like, okay, this is just cable without having to get a cable box, but they're missing a network or two. I don't even remember which ones I can't get. And then

YouTube TV is like missing a different one. I had Hulu to live TV for a while. None of them do the job. It's just, it's all, I don't, forgive me if one of them has all the channels now. But there's all the different tiers and everything else. It's like, dude, I would pay so much money just not have to think about this at this point,

which means I should probably just get just get cable. Exactly. It's all motel TV unless you have cable. We also have the rise of the election night Manning cast. Yeah. Brian Steinberg at variety notes that CNN tonight is going to have

an alternate broadcast or alternate streaming broadcast featuring Harry Enton, Charlemagne the God, and Ben Shapiro. Mm-hmm. That's real. It will be happening tonight on a streaming service that David and I are not

watching or perhaps watching it from a motel. That sounds terrible. Election Eve stories, David. How many shots did you see of Zeran Mondani running around New York over the last couple of days? Lots. NYC Marathon, talking to taxi drivers of LaGuardia, watching the Knicks with a kid Marrow, talking bills with a kid Pablo. Oh, man.

I'm going to be fascinated to see how that translates to running New York. because that is its own kind of media job. Yeah. Whether you're jousting with reporters, whether you are, you know, being summoned to a fire or something happened to the subway

or something happens to police, you know, in the middle of the night and talking to reporters in that setting or, you know, going over the heads of reporters and talking to people

over social media. Mm-hmm. As he's also done during this campaign, just that transition, because we can not, everyone can look at this, especially thirsty Democrats and be like,

here's how to communicate. Finally, somebody gets it who, you know, not only is using the tools of 2025, but has, is funny and and fluid and policy and has charisma and all that kind of stuff, it will be so fascinating to see how that media campaign strategy translates to governing. It is. I mean, and it does seem to me that being the mayor of New York, maybe one of the only elected positions decided, well, I don't know, presidents seem to have a lot of time to golf.

being the mayor of New York maybe the only major elected position in the country where they attacked it like you like this is actually a very demanding job is true. People have tried to use that against Mom Dami obviously and I don't think it carries any weight but you've seen I mean there's just a lot

of there's just a lot of shit to do when you're the mayor of New York and if you spend too much time on your passion projects then like something's going to fall off right I mean it's just like you you're basically choosing how to spend your time at the expense of doing something else so much of the time.

And I don't know if they'll have time to be doing media in the same way that he's doing it. But it would certainly behoove him because, you know, lefties have found it hard in recent years to keep public approval going in New York. And part of that's because, you know, shits falls apart when you're not paying attention to it. So it's, you know, and especially when you're talking about reframing, reshaping so much of the infrastructure. there's not so much, so many significant pieces of the infrastructure. There's a lot of opportunity for stuff to go a little bit bad. And in New York, that could be a death now, you know, for a political, for a political career. As long as we're talking about Mom Donnie, can we talk about the fake Bill de Blasio?

I was just, I guess I was alluding to him just now. Fake Bill de Blasio is a real, I can't, I would love to know who this fake Bill de Blasio is. Is this like a, do we know who it is? We know who it is. Oh, okay. Because I actually don't know the answer, and I'm torn between it being just like an incredibly craven political operative and like a Baba Booie style like New York, Howard Stern prank caller. I think I can kind of provide a third way there.

Okay. So if you didn't see this, the Times of London had a story quoting former New York mayor Bill de Blasio saying he had some doubts about the policies of Mamdani, who DeBlazio has supported. very, very openly, very vocally supported, yeah. I'll read you the quote here. While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates reportedly exceeding $7 billion annually rest on optimistic assumptions. Dot, dot, dot, about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes, De Blasio told the times. In my view, the math doesn't hold up under scrutiny and the political hurdles are substantial.

Now, anybody reading that should immediately think a couple of things. One, that doesn't sound like the way Bill de Blasio's talked about Mondagia. Certainly not talks. There's a 0% chance that was Bill de Blasio speaking. Right. Like, do people use the word reportedly when they're giving quotes to reporters? And here's the thing. This is a longstanding thing I think needs to be cleaned up in the pig style of newspapers.

But we have become way too lax about letting reporters write the word said. Yes. When something was e-mail. to them. Exactly. I was going to say if you want to give it the most charitable reading of all, this was a, this was Bill de Blasio's, whoever he has doing press, you know, doing his like press outreach for him now, sort of listening to him talk and collating it into an email, right? That's the only way those words could have come in any way from Bill de Blasio. And it's funny because if you, if you read stories, first of all, I read in the New York Times,

this happens all the time. You see ceds that clearly were not said. Yeah. And sometimes they're just after like a little quote to adorn a piece. Yeah. And it's probably harmless. But I have seen people outside the Times have an interview. And I'm reading the interview and I'm like clearly this was an email interview and that's kind of important.

Yeah. But you cannot ask follow ups in the same way. Yeah. We should we should think about this as long as. were redesigned in the entire meeting. I agree. Sometimes it doesn't matter, but when it does, it feels like it really matters because, I mean, and that's to say nothing, you're right, that's to say nothing of the fact that, like, there's so much plausible deniability built into email correspondences.

How many times have we seen politicians deny they wrote an email that they very clearly wrote, you know, but what are you going to say? It's like if you don't have it on, if you're not looking at the person's face, you feel like you can just be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That was, that was not, I did not say that. That must have been my son who hopped on my computer late at night. You know, like, whatever. It's like Charles Barkley saying he didn't write his own memoir.

Well, that's pretty much what happened here because the real former mayor Bill de Blasio saw this quote in the Times of London and went crazy. I did not say that. I did not speak to this newspaper. The Times wound up nuking the story and apologizing. Yeah, the page was the URL was dead by the time I was even aware of it. And they had the funny yellow, you know, when an URL doesn't work, which is always great. situations like this. Like it seems like a good idea.

Like, oh, you know, go to a broken URL. We'll have a whoopsie, you know, someone shrugging. But when you've actually done something bad, that's not a great thing to have. The real story came from Brendan Rueberry and Max Taney in Semaphore. Turns out that the Times reporter sent an email to Bill de Blasio. What he thought was the former mayor and he got a response. I'm going to quote Semaphore here. The person he was talking to.

was a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill de Blasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrats or on Mamdani's policies. I'm Bill de Blasio. I've always been Bill de Blasio. He told some before, I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor, so I just gave him my opinion. That is incredible. And by the way, this is not just, you know, terrible miscarriage of journalism in its way. This could just be a new path forward for journalism.

You know, it's just like, I want a big, right, we're right a big profile of Brad Pitt, can't get Brad Pitt, let me find another Brad Pitt. You know, no, like I'm not lying. I'm hanging out of the dock having a cigarette with Brad Pitt. It's going to be a great story. I think actually I really endorse this plan.

This is great. Also, the fake or the real but not that, Bill de Blasio used chat GPT to come up with that answer. No, that's just this. Which really, which is why it sounded so still. This is the most perfect 2025 story of all time. That's just, it's great. But I mean, the story is actually, listen, that's a huge fuck up.

I mean, just beyond the pale, right? I don't want to make too much light of it. Like I said, by the time that I logged on, that piece was down, but the New York Post was still running their, their. I mean, their version of the story. Yes. Both Murdoch publications, by the way. Although I believe the post at some point edited the lead, or at least like the second or third paragraph to reflect the fact that Bill de Blasio had not said that he, that was not him,

and this was all fake. But then the following like three quarters of the article were the same. So it was just dissecting why a hypothetical Bill de Blasio might have been making these claims. you know, it's just so bizarre. It just, I mean, that in some ways, such more of a deliberate miscarriage of justice than, you know, what the Times of London did. Oh, absolutely.

I mean, if you can't have a census, by the way, everything after this point in this article is not real. Kind of a bad thing. But it's like journalism, it's like journalistic slide of hand too, because it's just yours like, listen, we're updating this live. You know, it's like, oh, we threw in the update, and we didn't really want to take the whole piece. down and now we're going to fix this as we go.

Update is such a great journalistic euphemism. It always means you screwed up. Update. I was wrong. By the way, this story has even one more little turn of the screw here. When Semaphore went looking for this Bill de Blasio, it found him in a very peculiar way. You've heard of the journalistic term doorstepping someone. You show up at their house and try to get a comment. one way or the other.

De Blasio, quote in the Semaphore piece, is giving these quotes to Semaphore in an interview conducted through his ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida. We will allow us said for those quotes. But we should just note how they were said through a ring doorbell from Florida. Are we sure that it was Bill de Blasio on the other end of the ring camera? Well, I assume.

Could that have been Chad GBT too? I don't know. I assume Ben Smith has a fact-checking apparatus there. Make sure those kind of screw-ups don't happen. Andrew Cuomo, David. Thank God. Playing out the string, he was on MSNBC talking to Eugene Daniels and Jonathan K-Part. And he got them mixed up.

Didn't mean to say, but if someone said diversity can also be a weakness. What did you mean by that? Diversity can be a weakness if you have an, antipathy among groups, Jonathan. If you have racism. I'm Eugene. Oh, no. Oh, that's so bad.

He did not get Logan Paul's name confused with whoever else is on Logan Paul's podcast. When he did that one, I assume. When Jonathan Mahler goes decade by decade to New York history and finally gets to the 2020s, I just hope there's a full, wonderful chapter about. Andrew Cuomo's mayoral campaign. It's just so incredible. It's so bizarre. I always talk about how every politician wants to be forced into a race.

You know, everybody, every politician wants to be the white knight. And that really felt like one, what de Blasio thought he was doing here and may still think he's doing here. But it just seems, even if he wins, the whole thing would, it just feels so small. So, and not that he deserves greatness, you know, at this stage of his life, after the career that he had. But it just seems so, I want to say beneath him, because he's there.

You know, he's beneath that, but it just feels so small. He's made it seem beneath him. The only thing I like about Cuomo, and this is just incredibly personal, is his, like, bizarre, gnarled hands remind me of my grandfathers, my late grandfathers.

Wow. You know, it's just like, he has those old sort of, like, I can't quite make a fist hands. And I, that, that's, there's something, There's something very nostalgic about that for me. But this is even more beautiful and well rendered than Dick Cheney looking like someone going to the dentist.

Yeah. Yeah. What does Andrew Cuomo look like he's going to? You know, a meeting in his lawyer's office? I don't know. It's not a happy occasion when he's out there campaigning. No, it never is. One more piece of sound for you.

Barack Obama was on the trail rallying for Mikey Cheryl in New Jersey. Mm-hmm. And a super fan would not. not stop saying that she loved him. All right, we got some medics coming. I love you, but hold on. I heard you, girl. Just settle down.

I'm here to talk to everybody, not just you. I mean, you look cute, but I am married. Michelle's fine, too. I think a medic is coming. Is anybody better at diffusing a screaming superfan than Barack Obama. I don't know. It seems like there's probably a good answer to this,

but that was pretty well done. He'd also just called for a medic because somebody was having some issues there in the audience as where you heard the little part there at the end. Donald Trump, David, was on 60 minutes on Sunday night. 60 minutes of CBS News fame was talking to Nora O'Donnell. The interview ran 70 plus minutes

they chopped it down into a two-segment piece that ran over a little over 28 minutes on television. How we got here? Well, if you remember, Donald Trump filed a lawsuit a little over a year ago because of 60 minutes as editing of a Kamala Harris answer on an episode that Trump himself refused to appear on. Paramount settled that lawsuit for $16 million as Donald Trump's FCC was reviewing Paramount's merger with Skydance. So last week, Donald Trump was returning to a different CBS news, one now owned by David Ellison, whom Trump has praised. And also this time, CBS did their piece for television and they put the whole unedited interview on YouTube. Yeah. You can find it by searching, please don't sue us again, Mr. President.

This sound bite about the New York mayor's race got a lot of play. Zohan Mondami, 34-year-old Democratic Socialist. He's the... Communist, not socialist, communist. He's far worse than a socialist. Some people have compared him to a left-wing version of you, charismatic, breaking the old rules. What do you think about that?

Well, I think I'm a much better looking person than him, right? So, Donald Trump had heard that Zohan Mondani was good-looking and charismatic one too many times. Wow. as for the rest of the interview there were vague promises to quote fix Obamacare if Democrats vote to reopen the government Let's see what else

Said that ice raids hadn't gone far enough That he was sent in more than The National Guard he'd made that comment And he mused about sending in the Army Or the Marines using the Insurrection Act Into American Cities KG about potential land strikes in Venezuela Here's Donald Trump on one of the recent

Partons he granted to Changpong Jiao So far this year, the president has pardoned or shortened the sentences of more than 1,600 people. The latest pardon was for a cryptocurrency tycoon, who is known as CZ. The company CZ founded, Binance, helped boost the profile of the Trump family's crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. He pled guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws. The government at the time said that CZ had caused significant, significant harm to U.S. national security, essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around. Why did you pardon him?

Okay. Are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. I don't know who he is, but I pardoned him. I think he's previously said, and in previous comments said, yeah, somebody brings me a list and says you should pardon this guy and I just say, okay. which just seems like an incredible, well, it seems like an incredible, you know, about of honesty, of honesty for him or any other president or whatever. Seems odd when we'd be using that very significant power, so sort of nonchalantly. But okay, that's fine. I love, listen, I don't know who he is, though.

Listen, I mean, what a just bizarre defense. My only defense is that I'm not doing my job. Yes, but I just, I have nothing for you on that. I don't know. You know, they always make fun of Mike Johnson. saying I didn't see the, I didn't see the quote. I didn't see the tweet. And here's like, I don't know who that is.

Bruce, can we do a super cut of Mike Johnson saying I didn't see that at some point for a future episode because I think, well, that could be a whole decade. John Stewart did it recently. Oh, he did? Okay, I'm sorry. I was going to say that could be our holiday whenever we have to do back to backs for the holidays. You know, we could just do a 45 minute super cut of Mike Johnson saying I didn't see that.

Isn't that what a, this, why do people get to get away with that? I just don't understand. It's like, is that you're not doing your job if you didn't see that. Of course you're not. Of course you're not.

I mean, it's just. And honestly, I was watching this interview and I realized I kind of lost track of where we are in the should we platform Donald Trump conversation. Mm-hmm. But then I was thinking of Barry Weiss and her stewardship of CBS News.

And if there's, anything Barry Weiss wants to do, it's to get Trump officials and Trump himself to talk to CBS. Yeah. Like there was a great thread on Blue Sky. The last has now been vaporized or self-vaparized by Clay Risen, who writes Obitz for the New York Times and before that worked on the opinion desk where Barry Weiss once worked. And he wrote about how she saw her power or saw a source of her power at the New York. Times through her ability to commission articles. So there was the stuff she wrote, the stuff she was editorializing for, but there was also

this power to bring people into the paper. Yes. Especially people who are not the usual people on the New York Times opinion section phone tree. So when we think of what she's going to do to CBS, we usually think of, okay, she's going to sign a story, she's going to edit his stories, you're going to bring in Brett Bear or Scott Jennings. but I think another way to think of it is she's going to normalize relations with the conservative world.

Wait, can I take a quick interjection here just to say that the Brett Bear in particular, but also Scott Jennings' conversations. I love that the vocabulary of college football coaches and basketball coaches has now entered the media world where people are like going into, hey, I heard you're up for this big job. He's like, well, listen, I got a season to finish out here. we got to playoff to schedule for. I'm not going to make any decisions until all that's done. I really respect the university that I now work for and don't plan on going anywhere. But listen, you know, I'm going to say some prayers and see where God leads me. That's pretty much what Brett Bear said.

I know. It's so fantastic. I love that we get this sort of like non-denial denials. It's just now, it's everywhere now. That's great for them, right? Helps your contract, you know? CNN's like, oh my God, we got to go find another conservative to mix it up on Abby Phillips show. Yeah.

What are we going to do? We can't, we can't lose this guy. I mean, listen, good for them as media people, I guess, good for their, you're right, good for their contract negotiations. I think both of those cases are like, I mean, there'll be big statements for CBS, and I'm sure that's 95% of the point, but I think they're probably just incredible miscalculations. Because like you said Jennings is like, his power is his situation, right? he's very good at what he does, but what he does is be surrounded by ideological foes on CNN. I mean, that's it's it. You can't recreate that on CBS, and especially the new CBS.

And Brett Baer is the most nighttime anchor-looking guy on Fox News. But if you take him out of the context of Fox News, I think he looks a lot different. Yeah, and this all just feels like you're fighting the old war. Exactly. You're finding, you're, you want to find the next news anchor so that, you know, the remaining, you know, living humans who watch the CBS evening news might grow by 5 or 10 percent. Shouldn't you just be figuring out the new identity of CBS news through other platforms and stuff like that? You know when this is a totally off subject, but you know when like local newscasters get called up to the main roster they get called in the minor leagues? It's like suddenly somebody from like

News 12 Tulsa is like on MSNBC doing a bed or even sitting in the host chair for a minute but mostly just doing like the mostly you know just being on the scene. Is that built into their contract or does like the major network have to call them and just be like can we pay you $5,000 to come on for one day? Like if you're if you're part of it,

if you're an NBC or a CBS affiliate in New Jersey do you have a national CBS option built in? I feel like you see them make guest appearances when there's like a shooting or a fire or something like that, right? They will press them into service. But anything more official would be separate. I wonder because it would just be funny if they just cast the New York time. I mean, cast the CBS Nightly News with just like every anchor from around the region, you know, every local anchor. Just like, why not? What's the difference? Get him a shot. All you're doing is throwing to other people's stuff, you know? And that's at this day and age, you could just be like, you could just, you could just do

Nightly News is like pop-up video, you know, do you really need someone sitting in that chair? A lot of beloved comedians from the 90s weighing in. Various things they remember. I like that. Before we leave politics, we should note that the Trump White House is at it again. Remember, they were prohibiting Pentagon reporters from walking around certain parts of the building. They're essentially doing something very similar in the White House, saying the White House correspondence can no longer go to an area known as, Upper press.

Upper press is part of the White House that includes the office of the press secretary. This is a move that was tried by Bill Clinton back in 1993 when his comms director was, wait for it, George Stephanopoulos, Clinton backed down pretty quickly. Michael Grinbaum notes in the New York Times. And of course, there's all these tweets, Stephen Chung, who is Trump's comms director, put this out there. Some reporters have been caught secretly recording video. and audio of our offices, along with pictures of sensitive info without permission.

Some reporters have wandered into restricted areas. Our offices are feet away from the Oval Office. Some reporters have been caught eavesdropping on private closed-door meetings. The Trump administration doesn't strike me as shy about revealing the names of such snooping reporters, if in fact they had been snooping. So I find it very unusual that this is the moment. They were pulling back. This is a coincidence.

Also, did you follow the whole Cash Patel government plane story? Yes. He's alleged to have used a government plane to travel to State College, Pennsylvania, where his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, was performing at real American freestyle on a wrestling event. Let's just, first of all, stipulate that she's done more for America than you or I will ever do. She has. Was it a, I tried to look it up.

Was it a professional wrestling event or like a collegiate wrestling event? So this, this says it was an unsc, this is according to the bulwark, which broke the story. This was an unscripted wrestling league founded by Hulk Hogan. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, it's, okay. So it's like real college collegiate wrestling. Hogan and, it was a Hogan and Eric Bischoff joint. I don't even know if they were the founders or they came on as the promoters.

But yes, it was, it was supposed, the idea was that it was taking, like, like legitimate, you know, Olympic or collegiate wrestlers, but promoting it like the WWE. Terrible, terrible idea. Nobody thought it would work. So the reason I brought this up is that Cash Patel posted a very long tweet defending himself. And I want to read this to you and just see if there's any phrases that stick out to you.

The disgusting baseless attacks against Alexis, a true patriot and the woman I'm proud to call my partner in life, are beyond pathetic, he writes. She is a rock-solid conservative and a. a country music sensation. Now, I feel my entire life we have heard the term country music sensation or

more frequently country music superstar. No, sensation's better because it has absolutely no meaning. Like, there's not even like the implication of depth there, right? Yes. You can be a sensation to your parents.

A dolly partner, yes, to someone who performs at home. Yeah. But why is it? always country music. No one says rock and roll superstar. Yeah. It's always country music superstar, country music sensation. I feel it's always with national anthems at random sporting events. That's when you hear it. Yeah. What do you say when it's a rock star? I think you'd actually say who they are and what they do rather than a real generalize.

Is it because country music singer has bad, has some like just specific connotation? The country music singer is Conway Twitty. This is not, we're not there anymore. Country music superstar. Country music sensation. It's bigger than what you might think of. The press notes. And you were talking about your life partner.

It's so dumb. I don't, I guess, but I feel like I was missing, at least the insinuation of the backstory here. Did somebody in the White House get really mad at him for this? Because why did he come out guns blazing instead of just doing what the white House would have done, which is to say yes, so. Shrug. Yeah.

I don't know. There are lots of, shockingly, there's lots of infighting in the Trump administration, including involving Cash Patel and specifically law enforcement. And then I'm not sure. Filed a random dude who was like in charge of logistics who'd been in the FBI for 12 years or something like that? We're going to do some more reporting. My brain shot off, shut off after country music sensation.

This has got to be, it's got, yeah, we'll talk, maybe it'll circle back around. Maybe this is the meltdown that'll keep on giving, whatever,

but I love just the implication and this is like, who can I fire for this to look like I'm a big, like I'm a big boss. All right, coming up in 30 seconds, a podcast we thought we'd lost

is back. Maybe. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter

made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod, they are always gratefully received. David, the AP reports that King Charles III has stripped his disgraced brother, Prince Andrew, of his remaining titles, and evicted him from his royal residence after weeks of pressure to act over his relationship with sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. He will be known as Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor, and not as a prince.

It was an overwork Twitter joke to call him the Prince. formerly known as Andrew. Thanks to TK.K. Parks and Nick Fields. We like me, kind of lost the train of what we were stripping from Prince Andrew, because this has happened multiple times, right? Going back to Queen Elizabeth, I think. Yeah, we're just not embedded enough in the UK to understand. It did seem like he had been, like, as punished as he was going to be,

which is to say not at all enough, but, like, you know, they had stripped enough from him and sort of, but, like, now he's, you remember when, like, Prince Harry went, solo and they had to make up a last name because like they couldn't use whatever they didn't have last names and whatever it was it's weird that they just have went at the ready for the former prince andrew i'm not quite sure how any of that stuff works this is a long list of things i don't know how it works but yes if you're if in your next life you're going to understand the royals congrats you made the overword twitter joke of the week all right david quickly in the notebook dump we got some uh football audio here on sunday the carolina panthers we're top

with Green Bay Packers, 1313, one second left in the fourth quarter, take it away, Fox's Adam Ami. At Lambo, pick is up in the... And as excited as anyone has been about the Carolina Panthers in a very, very long time. Hey, okay, you're probably right. We had a number of listeners, alert listeners,

rushing to tell us that the Panthers-focused podcast Meow Mix announced its return after the win. And I encourage you to seek this out because the replies to that tweet are A, people pissed off that the Meow Mix Pod quit on the Panthers.

Or be worried that the pod coming back will jinx the Panthers. Yes, this is what I said the other week. Yeah, it's a jinx situation now. They can't come back. They've won four out of five since the pod went on hiatus on October 1st. And then Meow Mix Post

posted a confusing new tweet. Even though we planned to record last week before the results against Green Bay, we won't be recording due to overwhelming response from former players. We were just a small fun podcast since 2019 and needed a break from all the time we spent putting the show on. I have no idea what kind of complications meow mix

has gotten into with Panthers fans. But I hope that all sorts of self-ups. This will be great for them. They can just be like the Panthers podcast that just hates Panthers fans now. They can just be the heel announcers of podcasting. Is that a big enough lane to work in? In Charlotte?

The Panthers podcast that hates Panthers fans. Cowboys, it might work. Yeah, you're probably right. Anyway, thanks to Ozza Adam for pointing that out. Speaking to the Cowboys, Jerry Jones gave an interview to Stephen A. Smith. Stephen A was in Arlington for Cowboys Cardinals yesterday. the interview was not for first take

but for the Stephen A. Smith show on Sirius XM. Michael Irvin was also present asking Jerry Jones questions. Anyway, Jerry was asked about making a trade for today's NFL trade deadline and he responded, we certainly have made a trade and we may make a couple more trades before that deadline. We've made one.

But he would not say the trade that he had made. And even by Jerry Jones standards, David, this was some of the most transparent showmanship I have ever seen in my life. I've made a trade, but even in this world of insiders and everybody chasing every transaction, I'm not going to tell you what it is. Here was Joe Buck and Troy Eckman last night, weighing in during the game. Possibly could make two more.

He's kind of left that out there. but not willing to name what the trade was tonight. That'll come out tomorrow. Yeah, he may want to cancel that trade. I don't think one player from what I've seen tonight is going to make a difference for this. Alas, Jerry Jones did not cancel the trade. We learned Tuesday morning that Cowboys have traded a seventh round pick for Bengals linebacker Logan Wilson. Heck yeah.

Squeezing every drop of content out of this crappy Cowboys season. As we're recording this, the Colts acquired Sauce Gardner for two first rounders it looks like from... Yeah, the jets are just tearing it down. They traded sauce gardeners. Two first rounders.

Yeah. We made trades like that anymore. Yeah, exactly. I guess except for Michael Parsons. That's unbelievable. Only in journalism, David, I was reading the athletic over the weekend. And I paused on this headline.

Spurs, talking about the NBA, of course, Spurs injury woes exacerbated by rookie Dylan Harper's calf injury versus sons. Exacerbated is a really weird, only in journalism term. It's also an incredibly weird headline term because it's too long. It's too long of a word for a headline. Yeah. And listen to that headline, Spurs injury woes. Woes is an old-timey sports headline word because it's really short.

But then somehow instead of saying injury woes can, or if you want to use the true only in journalism gold, injury woes mount, you use exacerbated. I have never heard anyone say the word exacerbated in human speech. I might have said that, but you're probably right. I don't think you said that. All right, it's time for something that is often said out loud. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah.

Last Monday's headline about a furry mammal stealing surfboards was grand theft. Oder, Joel did a valiant job guessing in your absence, David. Today's headline comes to us from Sam J and Brandon James Anderson. It's from the Guardian Australia. Quoting here, year 12 students from at least eight schools in Queensland were taught the wrong topic for their final history exams. That's like literal stuff of nightmares. It really is, isn't it? Yeah. Students were meant to studied Julius Caesar, but the affected pupils learned instead about his nephew Augustus, according to the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Again, a mistake that many people, many amongst us have probably made in our time.

It's just like when your son asks you about Caesar and you start up on the Wikipedia machine. All right, let's go on. Indeed, it follows this. Here's a very Australian paragraph for you. School executive said schools involved in. the Bungle would submit, quote, an illness and misadventure application. So students receive special consideration when their papers were marked. I don't know if you ever watch British mysteries, but misadventure is just a wonderful

word that appears now and again in those things. Absolutely true. Wait, why are they receiving a special exemption as opposed to just being given a test over the stuff that they studied? I don't know. Can you just make up a new test? Is that happening with a standardized test? Maybe they just get A's.

Maybe this is a complicated way of saying we're giving them A's and the kids are okay with it. At the big 12 schools we went to, that's what happened. They wouldn't have gone through all the misadventure crap. All right, David, we didn't study Caesar and that affected the entire class's grade. What was the Guardian Australia's strained pun headline? Caesar. Caesar.

Augusta Caesar. What is a phrase one might use when Crails. Oh, yeah. And hail. Exam went sideways. So it is not Hail Caesar.

Fail Caesar. That's great. What the Guardian Australia is. Very good stuff. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Produce some magic by Bruce Baldwin. Coming up on the podcast Thursday,

ESPN's Booger McFarland is going to join us. Talk about all kinds of things, including the Alabama LSU game this Saturday and the firing of embattled Tigers coach Brian Kelly. Cannot wait to talk to Boog on the press box. David, you and I will tee it up next Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you that, David.

See you later, Brian.