The Press Box - The Mental Health Break Show. Plus, Ben Macintyre on Spies.

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker take a mental break and try to ax any mention of the pandemic, election, or Trump. They rank pun column names (3:00); throw it back to 1996 to discuss early internet journalism (8:30); test Chris Almeida with a new game, Generational Media Literacy (30:30); and then former producer Jim Cunningham joins to say a few words (44:00). Then author Ben Macintyre stops by to discuss his new book, 'Agent Sonya.'(52:00) Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, our boss Bill Simmons had an idea for us in the middle of the election season. What if we did a mental health break show? We didn't mention the names Donald Trump, Joe Biden, the coronavirus. One time. One time. What I want to know is, do you think you and I can pull this off? Dang. I don't know if I can take a mental break, but I think that we can certainly require. record this show. I'm not sure if it'll work.

Yeah, I guess it's less mental health break than just sort of forced forgetting of all the weirdnesses it is in front of us, right? Yeah, there probably should have been like some illicit substances involved. But yeah, but we'll do our best. It's not too late. Today, strange pun column names. Audio from the birth of internet journalism. Plus Agent Sonia author Ben McIntyre on spies, all that much more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network.

Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. Our first segment's a tad awkward, David, because we intended to build this segment around New Yorker writer Jeffrey Tubin, whom you might have read about the last couple of days. Three weeks ago, we had Jeffrey Tubin on the press box via Zoom call. And it was fine, I stress. but what interested us about that interview was this part of tuban's journalistic past raised in

New York you go to Harvard and write for the crimson where you're the sports editor is it true that you wrote a column under the name inner tubin is that is that correct totally true totally true and I love I love being a sports writer I still I still like to write about sports I write for golf digest usually once a year inner tubin which made us think, David, that there's this whole genre of strained pun column names, which often seemed to occur at college newspapers, and we thought,

what if, with the help of our readers, we put together a list of the best strained pun column names of all time? Now, David, you didn't have one of these, did you? There was no Shoemaker's Mark at Baylor or anything like that? No, no.

I'm sorry. I haven't even thought about the best one for me, but we'll figure it out. Shoemaker's Mark is pretty good. Shoemaker's Mark in Kurdistan, respectively. How about what we just go with that? All right. The best strain pun column names of all time.

First up, David, the Celebrity Division. In Politico, veteran reporter Roger Simon wrote, Simon says. And when he was at the Boston Globe, Mike Reese, who covers the Patriots for ESPN, wrote Reese's Pieces. Oh, my God. Adam Schefter, when he was at the University of Michigan, wrote Chef's specialty. Chef's specialty. Is that a thing?

Chef's specialty? Chef's special, I guess, would be more of the pun. Yeah. Look, it's a college newspaper. But Adam Schaefter, a little slack. All right, David, another category for pun column names that just tell us

what the column is delivering. At George Washington, the ringers Alan Siegel deposited Siegel droppings. At King's College, the ringers Tyler Tines was always right on tines. Right on tines.

Listener Eric Snyder made snide remarks. Evan Grossman was guilty of gross misconduct. Rich File, that's FYLE, delivered top secret files. The sports writer Adam Bass, David, was on the Bass Pass. Get it? Not the Bass Pass.

The Bass Pass. Oh my God. Doug Cybor led readers into Cybor space. Jeff Nelson put readers in the full Nelson. That's yeah. Congratulations. Sports writer Kevin Duffy carried the duffel bag. Nathan Beardsley took a

Beards Eye View. And another college sports columnist John Schwartz was of course the Schwartz Authority. That's a good one. I like the Schwartz's dog. Yeah. Yeah, that works. There are some extremely out there pun column names. Tom Fountain

who spells his first name, T-H-O-W-E-O-W-E. O.M. writes, my college column where I ranked various things around campus was Tom's Up, Tom's Down. Get it? Tom's up. Wow. At Tufts, Brian Wally wrote a TV column called Wally and the Teave. He was punting on Leave It to Beaver's Wally and the Beave.

Our man in Melbourne, Australia, Russell Jackson writes, an Australian rules football legend named Jack Dyer was known for his verbal diarrhea and unusual use of the English language once he retired and became a broadcaster. His column in the truth, a Melbourne newspaper was called Dyerere, that is D-Y-E-R-Space, apostrophe E-R-E, diarrhea. Wow. And a personal favorite, until 2014, Joey Baskerville, this is not a joke, was a columnist at the Freeport, Illinois Journal Standard.

Baskerville's column was called Release the Hounds. All right, now we're getting there. Now we're getting there. Warm it up, we're warming up. You just go with the bit here. Now, David, we have our highest tier of strain pun column names, which go beyond mere punting and accidentally describe the subject of the column. You've heard Zach Lowe or old pal talk for years about how the low post is basically the perfect name for a basketball podcast.

We'll consider the following. Weaver. Excellent baseball writer over at the athletic writes, Weaver Wire. Waiver Wire, Weaver Wire. That's great. Or Lansing Michigan sports writer Graham Couch when he was at Michigan State wrote a column called Couch on Fire.

Because if you know anything about college football, right? When they win or they lose, the fans like Couches on fire. And finally, NBA writer, Yaron Weitzman, who recently wrote a book about the Philadelphia 76ers. His podcast is, wait for it. Weitzman can't jump. Look out low post. Wow.

Whitesman can't jump. Thanks to all readers who humored us with your strain pun column names. All right, David. We also wanted some vintage audio for this mental health break podcast. So we found some from June 1996. The now disgraced talk show host Charlie Rose was interviewing Michael Kinsley. about his new website slate.com. Now, do we need to set up the internet in 1996 for anybody who might be listening and doesn't remember it?

No Twitter. No Facebook. I mean, in June 1996, I don't even know that I was aware of the internet. I mean, you had internet access and went on various message boards, like dial up. and I had been at your house while you did that. I'm not sure. I mean, would I have even gone on the internet at the library at that point?

Do we have that in high school? No, I don't think so. No. It wasn't until I got to college, which would have been right after this, when they told me I had to sign up for like an ID to use the internet. And I was just like,

now I'll pass. And then it turned out I needed it for other reasons. But yeah, I had no, I would have, the idea of slate. com would have been, I mean,

I'll just say the internet was a series It was not even a series of tubes to me at this point Yeah, and in 1996 right there was What we would later call legacy media on the internet So you could find the New York Times and the Washington Post But in terms of like original full blown Journalism organs it was basically salon At that point in history

And some smaller things But not a ton So here comes Michael Kinsley Who had edited Harper's in the New Republic with some ideas about how to create internet journalism. Listen to Charlie Rose's intro. Last November, Michael Kensley surprised many in Washington when he announced that he was stepping down

as co-host of CNN's Crossfire. The former editor of the New Republic left the nation's capital to launch Slate a new online magazine published by Microsoft Corporation. Slate features editorials and reviews and interactive forums on politics and culture. After much anticipation it debuted this week on the World Wide Web on the World Wide Web, David. We should note at this point, too, in history, that Michael Kinsler was the co-host of Crossfire, which was a very big CNN show at the time.

And in 1996, the idea that somebody would leave television for a job on the World Wide Web was seen as very, very weird. Well, also leaving print journalism, I mean, the kind of traditional realm of print journalism for, you know, writing on an imaginary dry erase board that no one might ever see. And topping, I mean, above all that, we're in much more of like a, you know, a startup world now than we were back then. And if you, you know, if somebody leaves, you know, I mean, if you and I left tomorrow to start the Pressbox podcast network, that would be a terrible idea, but it wouldn't be a shock to it. I mean, no one would be just like,

how could you jeopardize your family's future except our wives? You know, like how could you, like, you know, it would not be as big of a shock as it was then when,

you know, the idea of someone leaving a comfortable job full stop was pretty shocking back then. And I'll do you one better. He moves from Washington, D.C. to Seattle. Mm-hmm. Or Redmond,

to be more precise. And this was not an age. right, where you conducted a lot of journalism by a Zoom call or, you know, from far-flung places, right? So the idea that you were leaving a media center in the United States to go somewhere else, that was a huge deal. Listen to Rose and Kinsley, talk about that. Editing a magazine from Seattle, any different than editing a magazine from New York since it's seen in cyberspace? Yeah, no, that's going to be one of our real challenges, especially because we have.

have several features in this magazine, which are attempting to keep people very, very current on what the, not just what the news is, but what the spin is on the news and what the buzz is on various subjects. And, you know, to be honest, you're not getting that here in Redmond, Washington. That's why we have editors in Washington, D.C. It's not a hot topic at the Microsoft cafeteria? No, no, they have what they would regard, I think, with some justices, more important things to think about. Great overlap there by Charlie at the end. But just think about this for a second, David.

You are in Seattle, Washington, so you can't hear the buzz around the news. This is just incredibly, it's just so funny to think about this, right? Like the idea that Glenn Greenwald would be living in Brazil and writing about American politics was just beyond anybody's mind, right? you wouldn't know what was going on if you were not physically in the center of the action. This is where our conversation started sounding like we're lecturing Chris Almeida. Are we not? But no, this is without Twitter. I mean, this is so long before any kind of social media sprung up.

But without, I mean, what social media provides, it's been said a trillion times. So right now is a sort of virtual water cooler, right? but there was a degree to which like things could happen in Washington, D.C., but it's like what you heard in the deli line waiting for waiting to get your sandwich that gave you a feel for like what was actually important, right? Or like the way that people were reacting to it. It was, it was, it's interpersonal communication, you know, it's, it's, that's the way that you understood the sort of second level of everything. Um, and communication with people, talking to people face to face, you know, doing that, doing that, doing, doing,

all that. I mean, it's, it was impossible then to a large degree, right? I mean, could you imagine, I mean, listen, we were more capable of talking on the phone in 1996 than we are now. I think I can say that with confidence. I mean, we were able to convey emotion through audio only, which I guess we hope to do over podcasting, but that's not anyone's preferred form of communication really anymore. But, you know, it would have been really hard to do the job as, as nutty as it sounds, from that distance then. Totally. And by the way, the reason he was going was to be close to the higher ups at Microsoft. I mean, it wasn't just a fun move, right? I mean, this was, he, he was there because FaceTime was valuable to the people that were hiring him. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

But no, I think your point is right. Like, the idea that you would have this emotional and intellectual life online that would be completely self-contained, right? And you'd be completely capable of having it without having to actually see people or even talk to people on the phone was baffling. And by the way, we should say this was so baffling that Newsweek, then still a very, you know, ongoing concern, put Michael Kinsley on the cover with the headline, and this is in the Google Doc, you're going to look at it, swimming to Seattle. Everyone else is moving there should you. He's wearing a rain slicker and holding a fish. This was, this was crazy that you are going to move to Seattle and do journalism. Now, let's get into a little bit of the

nitty gritty of what internet journalism looked like in 1990s. We're not going to get in the nitty of how much convincing it took for Michael Kinsley to put on a rain slicker and hold a fish up to his publicity. Come on. I guess. You're on the cover of Newsweek. Even Kinsley. Also, do we need to explain to Chris what Newsweek is? He knows that. He's smiling and nodding. I think he knows. Here's Kinsley on what he discovered about the miracles of internet journalism. I'm not an internet junkie, but last, you know, about a year ago, or a little more than a year ago now, I started playing around with it like many other people. And it just occurred to me that this was a medium in which someone was going to figure out how to do something roughly equivalent to the kinds of magazines I work for and do it marvelously cheaply. There's no paper, there's no printing, there's no postage, and also do it instantaneous.

There's instantaneous delivery as I maybe will get to show you. We will get to show me. We have Slate as a weekly, but we have stuff in it that just came in this morning, which is already up. And if you're living in Europe or Saudi Arabia or anywhere, you can get at it. So a couple things about that. It is still very much a magazine, right? Those are the terms we're thinking of.

We're not doing a website. We're doing a magazine that happens to be online. and as somebody who worked for Kinsley at Slate, I can attest that it was definitely called a magazine. We're going to get rid of delivery costs, right? Which is pretty revolutionary in 1996. I don't have to mail David Schumacher the magazine. He can just get on there.

And then later on in this, it's funny. He says people will read Slate are the people that like to read Time and Newsweek and the New Yorker, except they have a computer, right? That is literally what he is thinking of. This is a magazine reader who just has. happens to have a computer and now realizes they can read another magazine. I liked how he referred to himself at the big beginning or he said he went into negative. He's not an internet junkie.

Now, I mean, I guess it just goes to show you how far as the concept of the internet has come that you would have to qualify whether or not you were a unhealthy abuser of the internet. Then you would be, you know, the level of like internet obsession that we all have attained was something to kind of shy away from at that point in time. But yeah, I mean, the fact that he's selling it to potential readers in foreign countries, I mean, that's a, listen, that is a selling point, but it seems to sort of fly in the face of what he's trying to defend. I mean, it's the old, it just sounds, everything sounds so silly from our vantage point now.

I mean, everything, like the biggest hangups were, how do I read this thing? I mean, it was really like, you know, like handing a hundred-year-old, I mean, telling a hundred-year-old to check out your podcast. It's just there's a huge, there's just a huge barrier for entry. Absolutely. And there was for a time a slate on paper that I believe was sold or at least sort of distributed through Starbucks. So you could get a copy of it printed out if you couldn't actually read it on a computer. You can like Google image search slate on paper as I'm doing right now and get a good idea. I remember it really, really well.

It's not, it's much closer to a high school literary journal than a magazine, right? Including like the skill, like the layout skills and stuff involved. It's, it's pretty spectacular. Now on the Charlie Rose show, both Rose and Kinsley have these very clunky computers. And Kinsley then starts showing Rose the website. And David, they come across something that isn't yet called aggregation. listen to how they describe it. This is the contents page.

Well, we have a feature called In Other Magazines, which tracks what's going on in other magazines, and as a way of sort of measuring the zeitgeist. I think it's one way to get a sense of what's going on in the world very simply, and what people are considering important is to see what time and news we put on their covers every day, every week. And we will actually, because we're in cyberspace, have these Monday morning,

as long before most people get their own time of newsweek if they subscribe. The covers a little summary of their contents with a little bit of spin from us. So listen to that. You can read Time and Newsweek before you receive them in your mailbox. Right, which is a little foreshadowing, isn't it? This whole idea that you're not actually going to need to read Time and Newsweek. There's going to be this thing that's just going to summarize it for you and sort of take the content. And then you're going to think, do I really need to read the original article at all?

Yeah. And I mean, the deeper question of what will replace time of newsweek on our coffee tables, I think he was not able to answer. But, yeah, I mean, it is. Aggregation is a, it's a hard thing for one to wrap one's mind around even now, I think. But, yeah, that's just hilarious. And here's one more note from Rosenkinsley on aggregation. One of the things for people who don't know much about the Internet, one of the amazing things is, We have no relationship with U.S. news or any of these other things.

You can just, you create a link to anything else on the web and just click to it. And there's no need to negotiate or tell anybody about it or anything like that. No need to negotiate or tell anybody about it. This is like the founding principles of content aggregation, right? You don't have to tell the person you're aggregating. As long as, yes, this is, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, pretty hilarious, right? I mean, this is now these are the, this is the morality that we're sort of trying to litigate in like every year. There's some new, there's some new problem or some new

attempt to fix the internet. And it all kind of comes down to, yeah, like the system of aggregation, right? I don't know if it's, I think it's just built into the DNA. Yeah, at least Kinsley was offering a link back in 1996, which, you know, not even always apparent in 2020. Here, David, they go to a feature called Does Microsoft Play Fair? I know this was Kinsley's sort of half-puckish, half-serious attempt to show that Microsoft was going to let him run the magazine without maximum editorial interference, right? Because Microsoft had been the subject to this big antitrust argument at the time. Listen to how that lays out.

This is, this is a feature. It's a sort of an email discussion forum. And our theory on this is it will combine, we hope, some of the immediacy of television discussions with some of the more thoughtfulness and more reflectiveness that comes from people writing things. And if you use email, it's a very good medium for conducting arguments. You read something I wrote, you think about it for a while, and you bang out a response, you send it back, and then I respond to you.

And we have three or four people, including a Microsoft executive. So that, David, is the seeds of social media, right? I'm going to make an argument, you write to me, and then I'm going to write back to you. And Slate was going to thread all those in this sort of prehistoric webpage. And of course, now that would just be your average argument on Twitter. Yeah. And impossible, it's just impossible, again, to wrap one's head around in 1996, that there would be a conversation happening. I mean, literally, the notion that, I mean, an article in Newsweek would be, you would read it and you would accept its premise.

as true and it would only, if there was, the only discussion you would ever hear about it would be, you know, possibly something at home, but more likely, like, you know,

the one or two stories that would bubble up onto the Sunday news shows, um, I felt, like it was the only kind of moment of investigation, you know, beyond that, the idea that there'd be a conversation going on about a story or about the

news around it. I mean, that, it just seems, it's impossible. It just seemed like, like, like how would I be privy to a conversation that you're,

having you know it's they it seemed it seems so alien and just i just responsive reporting i mean not even aggregation saying like like hey the atlanta wrote this thing here's my take on it here's my column i mean even that was seldom heard up back then right i mean there'd be no there'd be no reason to when he's talking about you don't have to have an agreement with the other publisher it's because most of them operated weirdly in like siloed workplaces right i mean you were only sort of self-referential. The expectation for most journalism was that your reader read like the daily, like the local newspaper and then what you made, the magazine you made. I mean, maybe they read more, but you only, but you're speaking to them as if that was their purview.

Do you feel profoundly depressed now having witnessed the invention of the Atlantic wrote something? Here's my column. What a dreary moment that must have been. A lot of this is funny, historic internet, but in this final clip, David, Charlie Rose backs into another issue, which would become much bigger later on. Wait, is a technology company actually getting into content? And what happens then when the technology companies begin to overshadow the content makers? What reservations did you have about doing, publishing a magazine online, an association with Microsoft a computer corporation? Well, I didn't have any of the reservations that some people have about Microsoft getting into publishing.

It seems to me that the problem of conglomeration of the media is a very serious problem, but if a new company comes in, even a big one, even a big powerful one, that reduces the conglomeration and increases the competition. So that seems to me to be a good thing. and Microsoft has guaranteed us, or can't guarantee us, but has promised us, editorial independence, and they've made all the right noises, and I've tested them with this feature this week, and they certainly lived up to that. Oh, it was an innocent time, 1996.

Yeah, it's a giant benevolent, benevolent world-dominating corporation. Yeah, we didn't know the words Google and Facebook, another thing. yet. Oh, boy. The world got a little grizzly after that. Can I tell one Michael Kinsley slate Microsoft story to you? By all means, yeah. So, Kinsley told me this one time.

1996, or maybe 1995, he's on Crossfire on CNN, like he said, and he is going on this top secret mission to Seattle to interview with Microsoft about possibly starting

an internet magazine there, right? And nobody can know about this because, you know, he has not left his job at Cian in yet. He has. It's a big deal. It's got to be kept quiet. So Kinsley gets on an airplane in Washington, D.C. He's sitting in first class. And he looks over and the person sitting next to him is Christopher Buckley, the novelist man who has appeared on this podcast.

Somebody he knows and he knew his dad too. Okay. So now Kinsley is a little worried because, oh, my God. gosh, my cover is about to be blown. So he asked the worst possible question you could ever ask of your seatmate in such an occasion. He says, Christopher, uh, what takes you to Seattle? So Buckley says, well, I'm going to a book signing or doing whatever, some publicity. And he turns to him and says, Michael, what, what takes you to Seattle?

And Kinsley says, I can't tell you. No. Remember, this is the start of a five plus hour flight where these two people are going to be sitting next to each other. And one of them just said, I cannot tell you why I am getting on this plane to answer your very simple question. I can't tell you at all. Anyway, flight ends. Kensley winds up being hired by Microsoft and it's announced. And he gets a note from Christopher Buckley in the mail that contains one line.

It says, well, I didn't think it was Boeing. that could have been the that could have been the first ever the first ever live tweeted plane flight that broke news that everybody was paying attention to if only we were like 15 or 20 years in the future absolutely what is michael kisley doing in seattle all right david time for 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 where they are always gratefully received.

They have an incredible moment in college football Saturday where Indiana quarterback Michael Pennix reached for the goal line on a two-point conversion in overtime in an attempt to upset

number eight Penn State. It was an overworked Twitter joke to look at the replay and write, to me it looks like Pennix was just a couple of inches short. Thanks to Ethan Glore. By the way,

on further review, Michael Pennix got into the end zone. Indiana beats Pennix. Penn State. Striking these same phallic notes, David, in response to a potentially compromising scene in the new Borat movie, Rudy Giuliani issued a statement saying the widely circulated video was, quote,

a complete fabrication. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Are you saying this is a case of erection fraud? Thanks to Charles Pryor III and Andrew 3,000. And finally, David, I'm not allowed to say the name, but did you see the much revile tweet featuring a presidential candidate embracing his son with a tagline, does this look like an appropriate father-son interaction to you?

Yes, I did. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write basically any funny father-son interaction from history, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. I think my favorite, though, was the goya painting of Saturn devouring his son. Thanks to Elliot Kellam and Joe Walski. If you almost made me violate the rules of this podcast, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump.

What will we get into today? All right. Here at the press box, David, you often hear the voice of Chris Almeida, ringer editor who helps us write segments and keeps David and I from driving into a ditch twice a week. Chris is, as he is helpfully put in the Google Doc, 26 years old. we had a funny moment several weeks ago where we mentioned the old word processing program Word perfect

and Chris's response was sorry what's word perfect so we thought we'd play a little game David and I have some media people or media institutions that were famous in our childhood we're going to see if Chris can identify them in a game we call

generational media literacy oh this is going to be good Chris Almeida afraid about myself after that first slate segment. Uh-oh. Nothing really ringing a bell there. We'll see. All right, David, you've got your list.

I've got my list. We'll just rotate these. How does that sound? Oh, wait. I got to pull mine up. I thought it was going to be in the dock. Sorry. All right. Here we go. Now, no, Chris would cheat. We can't let anybody cheat here. Here we go, Chris. Number one, does this name sound familiar? Can you identify Willard Scott?

I cannot. Just folks, we are not being purposefully. here. Willard Scott was the famous weatherman on the Today show in the 80s and beyond. He was the Er Al Roker and it really seemed like a giant, a giant like loss

when he turned over the whatever you used to be a weatherman to outrooke. Wait, when did Al Roker take control? I feel like he's always been doing it as far as I. When we were your age, when we can look that up, when we were your age, the

trivia question was that Willard Scott had previously, when he was young, had played Ronald McDonald's in one of the earliest McDonald's commercial. Oh, my lord. That's, I guess that, I guess that betrays how far back we're going. It looks like he announced his full retirement that is Willard Scott in 2015. He had been not, he went into semi-retirement in 1996, according to Wikipedia. Right as Michael Kinsley was preparing to launch Slate. What a momentous year that was. All right. Your turn. I'm just going to pick a name from my list.

Sure. All right. God. Let me see. All right. Maybe this isn't easy. I don't know. Chris, can you identify Casey Kasem?

Is that a real name? Yes. Casey Kasem. Casey Kasem. No. Absolutely not. Doesn't even ring a bell. Yeah.

Casey Kaysam. Jason was the velvet-voiced host of the national, one of the early national radio broadcast, one of the biggest national radio broadcast, the weekend top 40. He was the, he was the, who's the biggest name? Who's the, it was like the Apple Music guy? It was kind of the Ryan Seacrest of his day. Yeah, yeah, he was. He was Ryan Sechrest of his day.

He was also the voice of. Yeah, he was like the Zane Low of his day. And he did it for a very, very long time. I mean, just just a huge Even if you No one was a Casey Kaysam fan Right?

But he was an institution. That's how you found out What the biggest songs in the country were Because otherwise you were You're listening to a sort of a cloister Local Radio channel that had Pretty particular particular You know playlist.

Yeah. And I would say we often talk about The Impression Championship Belt on this show Casey Gaysam With a very impressionistic voice that it's about everybody could do in the 80s. Hi, folks, Casey Kaysim here. What was his tagline?

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. Oh, yeah, that sounds exactly right. Casey Casey, I don't know if Casey Kaysom was the inception of the radio DJ, like, cartoon voice, but he certainly was, it was like apex, right? All right, Chris, number three, Andy Rooney. Andy Rooney. That does ring a bell. Okay.

Is he a comedian? of some sort. Well, we'll give you partial credit. Well, not all the way wrong. Yeah. So at the end of 60 minutes, he would come on and give a comic grumbly monologue about things that pleased or frustrated him in the news. He was seemingly an old man for David and I's entire life.

He had big white eyebrows and would sort of grumble at the end of 60 minutes. Yeah. So. was he like a producer on 60 minutes like why was he involved there newspaper columnist also I think he would call him a humorist yeah he was he was a humorist I'm trying to think of what the of well it was like it was like well I was gonna say it was like when Lewis Black used to do bits on the daily show but I don't think Chris would even know what that is well anyway very vaguely yeah yeah he he was just sort of a standalone segment farewell to show and he was like

ornery as a as it that was his gimmick uh he was it was he just complained about things and um you know everybody in the audience could either laugh at him or shake their fists along with him when this guy when you exactly like the old guy from up yeah probably a model he might have been a model but when you went to your grandparents house you usually found a collection of kC casem's columns or at least Andy Rooney's column I'm excuse me all the all the 80s figures are running together All right, David, your turn. All right, I have a question. I have a multiple choice question

because we're not sure. This one might be, Brian thought this one might be too easy. So, don't answer. I'm going to read you several answers to this question, and you have to tell me which one is not true. All right? Okay. Okay.

Bob Yucer is, A, the announcer for Milwaukee Brewers games, B, the sportscaster dad in the sitcom Mr. Belvedere. C, the ring announcer for the Hulk Hogan Andre the Giant match at WrestleMania 3. D, the pitchman for Budweiser beer, and E, the eponym for the phrase Eucer seats. One of those things, I'm giving it away, all of those things except one are true. You just have to tell me which one is not true.

Oh, it's not a trick. I just assumed that it was all of them. I mean, I don't have enough knowledge of any of these things to really, to really be sure. Let me guess. Is Euchar seats the, the... No, that's true. People still talk about the worst seats in the arena being, or the, whatever, whatever you're watching or sporting, then being the Euchar seats because of when he, because of his commercials for, and the answer

is actually D, it was a trick question in some ways. pitchman for Miller Light Beer, not Budweiser, but in his Miller Light commercials, he would just, the joke was that he had the worst seats in the house. But he was, how to describe, I mean, Bobby Ekerlake is still around announcing Milwaukee Brewer's games, right, Brian? Yes, he is. But he was such, like, I had, I didn't, I haven't watched a baseball game in my life at, you know, when, when Mr. Belvedere came on, he was such a successful and well-known baseball announcer that he got a sitcom where he was the dad, not even the punchline. I mean, He was sort of the star in a lot of ways, but he wasn't Mr. Belvedere.

The show was built around Mr. Belvedere. He was the dad in the sitcom. He was selling beer. He was just all over the place. And he was probably one of the best, most well-known sportscasters in the world at that point, right? Absolutely. Frequent guest on The Tonight Show, yeah. Oh, yeah.

He was just a sports announcer who was put in the main cast of a show. He was, yeah, a former baseball player, too, turned sports. Oh, that's right. He's a former Milwaukee Brewer. I mean, from Milwaukee, he played for the brewer. And yeah, he was just such a, he was such a, he was a, he was a, he was a American humorist in his own right, right? I mean, he was just, he was such a funny guy. They put him on the Tonight Show and everything and they're like, let's give this guy a pilot.

Master of branding. All right, we'll do a few more and then we'll let poor Chris off the hook. Chris, here we go. Dave Barry. God, I got to get one of these at least. This is, by the way, such a meta comment, such a meta comment on fame because these, these people are. not we're not these are people were gigantic stars in the 80s and this just shows how these people have just been swept away Dave Barry newspaper humor columnist based in Miami and and

Ab was like what the person who would be David correct me if I'm wrong in the conversation for funniest man in America oh yeah at the 80s and 90s yes Dave Barry Dave Barry paperback collections and like far side cartoon collections were were the two constants in every house that you went to. The Dave Barry's like, the Dave Barry reader was like the sex drugs and cocoa puffs of its day. Like there was not a there was not a bookshelf in America that didn't have it. Wait.

So in the 80s or early 90s was the form for funniest person in America writing? Was it not stand up? A syndicated column could get you there. Because remember, people had a lot more access to that on a daily basis than they could stand-up shows. There were no YouTube, right? How are we going to watch anything? There was like the MTV Half Hour Comedy Hour that would come on. There was the, what was the famous club with the brick background?

It's still there. Yeah, the night of the improv thing. Yeah, or whatever. Yeah, I mean, there were ways to find stand-up comedy. But it, I mean, it was never, I don't, I mean, and there was stand-up albums. You know, there was Richard Pryor album. and later Eddie Murphy albums. And one of our buddies from high school,

I remember in ninth grade had a Sinbad album that we listened to. I mean, the Sinbad could have been on this list. Yeah, I was right now when you're explaining Sinbad. Would it gotten that one. But yeah, I mean, listen, when you talked about the funniest people around, I mean, there were like humorists, satirists, you know? I mean, there was, like, PJ O'Rourke was another one.

It was just a kind of a conservative, but just like very kind of arch and funny writer and he was well regarded by people on both sides of the aisle is one of the funniest people around. I mean, I mean, there's, it was a, it was a very,

very different world. Very different world. And I don't, I think some people would be, I mean, listen, being a stand-up was a different thing back then. There was much more of a sheen to it,

right? I mean, the idea that like, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of comics that work now that would probably, probably wouldn't make it on the stage, uh,

back then, but, and then there probably would have been writers or just, you know, whatever. It's a, it's a very different world. And it's a harder, it was a harder way to become a superstar, I think.

I think there was less of an attraction to it until people started making it huge, like, well, all the other sitcom dads of that era, Bob Sagitts and everybody else, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Do you want to do any lightning round, David, just to see if we can get Chris in the plus column here? Yeah, you stop me if you know, you stop me when you know one, all right? just do that. Gene Shalett. Yeah, he's the mustache guy with the crazy.

There we go. Gene Shalett, the legacy lives on. Not the funniest man in America. I only know his face. I don't know what he's famous for. He was a movie critic on the Today Show. Mm-hmm. Yeah, he was like, how to describe Gene Scha.

I mean, it was sort of like Siskel and Ebert on, what did they do the Tonight Show? or do they do? What late night show were they on most? Yeah, they'd be on Letterman or something like that,

yeah. There, it was, it was like almost like a, like, like when a podcaster has a writer on the show and the right,

I mean, I don't even know how to put it. Gene Schallet was not ready for prime time, not ready for AM television either. Part of the joke with him and with Siskel and Iber, despite the fact that we know them

as TV personalities is that they weren't conventional TV personalities, right? They were, they were like pulled away from their typewriter you know, pulled away from the film, from the movie theater to, uh, to, to inform us about this weird, you know, whatever thing they had seen. It was, there was a just deliberate

bizarerness to Gene Chalett that I think something, something from the past even then. But, um, he was, you know, he was how we knew. He was before Rotten Tomatoes. All we knew was was Jean Shalett and Ciskel and Ebert's thumbs, you know, we had to just take their word for it. Yeah, and he was not to be confused with the other mustache critic on the other morning show who was Joel Siegel, right? They were sort of competing mustaches. So this was a regular thing where like someone would come on the show and be like, hey, this movie was bad. And people would be like, wow, very informative.

He was a critic. Yeah. And he was not, and unlike Siskel neighbor, just to just to tweak David's metaphor a little bit, he was not a good critic. It was not a respected critic like those two were. So there's that too. And that was until the video hounds movie guide came and just blew everything on. Okay, here we go. You guys know Jim Cunningham. He was the former producer of this podcast, along with The Masked Man Show.

He has gone on to fame and fortune with the Cousin Sal network. But we thought, since we're doing a mental health break show, we'd invite him back for a minute long, possibly appropriate for this audience message. Here is Jim Cunningham, producer extraordinaire. I had a eulogy planned for the press box finally ending, but I found out. this isn't actually the last episode. So, since I don't really have anything else, here is the recorded phone call of me talking to Brian and David, telling them that I'm leaving the ringer.

Hope you like it. Bye. All right, this is it, Jim Cunningham, calling Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker to tell him about me leaving. Yeah. Hey, it's Jim. Speaking of creepy looking white guys. Who is that person?

Does that person exist on planet Earth? What's going on? Long-haired white guys with beards. All right. Before you say anything, Oh my God. I just want to let you know. I'm done.

No. Come the fucker. This is not, this is bullshit. And what in the actual fuck? If you ever had to tell me anything, that would be a good time. No. Can we just wait a little bit on that? Do you want to get anything off your chest?

That would be a good time. And why would that be interesting? I'm just curious. Sure. All right, so I'm done at the ringar. Yes. Done working with you two. I'm done carrying you two.

Yes. And don't say, don't make this comment about it. If there's anything you have to say or get off your chest or let me know how you feel or anything about what we did or how you feel now, now is a great time. Shit's about to get real. Nobody likes you. Our culture is missing, is really missing something. It's impossible to have a real superstar, pop culture icon. If we got in the time machine right now.

The narrative that they kept trying to, that they've been spinning for the past two. months. I come down in a very similarly fuzzy place. Nobody likes you, period. We sort of work in a Dave and Busters here and... You know, I mean, but they won't, you can't outright say that, right? And it couldn't,

but that characterization couldn't be tossed on a better guy because it was, it's just going to be really interesting to see what happens with him now because... Crap news. Can I be old man Curtis here for just a second and broaden this critique a little bit? This is me walking down Sunset Boulevard with my walker just yelling

at traffic, but I want to say it anyway. The real joy were the things we Googled along the way, or the ancient texts we googled along the way. Was that your response? We all need money and we need festivals. Now he's just his own little asshole. Cool. Thanks for the inspirational words.

Okay, fine, fuck you. Yeah, thanks. See you now. Well, you're fired. Wow. Wow. Wow. I think I'll just, I'd just like to say for the both of us, I think that's right. I didn't realize this is going to be a revenge vehicle for Jim after all these many months. Oh, you didn't know, Jim. But that was great. One of the biggest complaint we get at the press box, other than our woke liberal opinions, that would definitely be number one. But number two is that Jim Cunningham does not slice and dice our voice anymore at the end of the podcast anyway.

Thank you, Jim, for bringing that back for one show only. All right, David, should we say a few words about Borat? Yeah. Before we get out of here, we had a big conversation on the big picture with Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins, which I encourage everybody to check out about the movie. Where do you fall? Let me just start as broadly as I can. Where do you fall on this movie, Borat 2?

I thought it was really good. I think that in some ways it felt too long and in some ways it felt not long. enough you know I mean I did I appreciate the kind of weekly approach that is showtime show had and his early HBO show had and yeah there I mean there's definitely some you know big moments in it most people know with the biggest of them but uh you know I I overall I enjoyed it I enjoyed it it felt like by sort of becoming a part deliberately of the conversation it sort of muted its own sort of upside.

It limited its own upside a little bit. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't just it's, it wasn't going to be appreciated on its own terms. It's just part of everything else that's going on. Yeah. By the way, the Who is America show on Showtime that you were referring to,

wildly underrated. Yeah. And the only reason I can figure is because if something's on showtime, we pay like 50% less attention to it than if it were on HBO. Exactly. I laughed and laughed and laughed through that show. But the, um,

I agree on Borat too, man, I laugh so much. I scream laughed so much through this movie. And I just find, you know,

I am so interested and we obviously violate this role at the time, interested in the meta context of all this stuff. But in some sense to me, it's a little bit like

watching stand-up comedy which we were just talking about a second ago. I think it's funny, right? I'm laughing like crazy. and if I put too much English on it, I'm going to stop laughing. So I don't want to, but I just, I laugh so, so much during that hour and a half.

I thought it was really good. It'll be interesting to see how it's remembered in terms of just like the political spectacle of the whole thing. What had to come out this week, right? Because not only is it the last chance to perhaps to make fun of Rudy and all that stuff, but this is the moment, right? everybody's on edge. So I feel it has like a double kind of thing. One, you laugh at it. But two, it's like a tension release, right?

Everybody is so worked up about the election. Yeah. And everybody's on edge and also everybody's online. I think it dropped. When did it actually drop it like midnight on Thursday night? So everybody was up watching the debate, right? And then, and like immediately all of a sudden like the reaction, the debate reaction tweets turned into, oh, wait, or that's available.

And, you know, people are just going to segueged right into it. Yeah, it was 9 o'clock here on the on the West Coast. And let me tell you, it was a great chaser for the debate. Absolutely. I'm sure. There's, you know, I didn't ask, we didn't talk to Sean about this on, or Amanda on the big picture. But, but I was, I've often wondered, or often over the past couple months, wonder why no one wanted to step up and claim the championship belt of, of the one,

like the blockbuster that was released, you know, digitally during quarantine. I mean, I can't imagine. I mean, listen, people have run the numbers and said there's no way that, like, whatever Marvel movie is in the can could make the billion or $2 billion it would make if they did it this way. But it still seems like, you know, it would be a fun gambit.

This is a movie that took that chance, but like you said, there was no choice. I mean, they had to get it out right now. And this is the only time it made sense. They kind of did the best version of, you know,

the production process that they could. And I purposely not read a whole bunch about this, but I just imagine the kind of threading and rethreading of that story they had to do because of and which becomes a huge. I don't think I'm spoiling anything. It becomes a huge part of the plot of that movie and sort of pays off in fairly spectacular ways that are not quite hinted at in the trailer.

It's it was very skillful to get it all in. And I think, you know, if anything like I said, for resistance, Twitter especially, there's just this need right now for this emotional release. People are thinking they're going to have one next Tuesday night. maybe, maybe not, maybe it'll be next Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. But this is kind of the release before the release. Yeah. It really does feel like that.

It did. I mean, you're right. In that sense, it was really, really necessary. I mean, the other political comedy in the world right now, I mean, we talked about, talked to Sean about this a little bit, but the, you know, like John Oliver leaves me usually less happy than when I begin or more. anxious than when I begin. You know, I mean, there's so much that's going on out there now that even the jokes that

people make online and everything else, it's just like it underscores some deep anxiety in the world. And this was, this did feel like it kind of broke the seal a little bit. It allowed us to laugh. And like you said, just sort of hysterically at times. David, for another view of the Soviet block segue, we had Ben McIntyre on the show today. You know Ben McIntyre. Mm-hmm.

Writer of spy books. Really cool spy books. Yes. Chatted about his new book, Agent Sonia, about spies, about his friendship with John La Corray, and much, much more. Here's Ben McIntyre's books

have the coolest titles. They include the Napoleon of Crime, Operation Mincemeat, and his amazing new book, Agent Sonia, the story of Ursula Kuchinsky, a spy who carried out daring missions for the Soviet Union from Shanghai to the British countryside.

Ben McIntyre is here to talk about the book and other things. Ben, thanks for coming on the press box. Great pleasure. Thank you for having me. So for the people who haven't read the book, who was Ursula Kaczynski, alias, Agent Sonia? Well, Ursula Kaczynski has a good claim to be the most important female spy of the 20th century. That's quite a claim. I realize that. And there are obviously lots of women spies in that era. There are very, very few trained intelligence officers. And that's what, was. She was a professional. She had decided that espionage was her vacation, and that is what she was going to. And she, she embraced communism as a teenager in Weimar, Germany, that sort of chaotic

period between the wars in Germany when the fascists were on the rise on the right, and communism was on the rise on the left. And she chose communism. And it was a faith from which she never wavered. But she was trained. She was trained in Moscow as a highly proficient radio spy, really. That was her main job was to build and use radio transmitters to send secret information. And she did it from Shanghai and Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Nazi-occupied Poland and Switzerland. And as you said, finally, in the British countryside. Now, she is pursued by intelligence services basically across the globe. But none can quite imagine you write that a woman is in fact a top-rank spy. What does?

did they miss? What was the thinking of Intel services at the time? Well, it's almost impossible to overestimate how male dominated the espionage world was in the 20th century, particularly the middle part of it. I mean, Azure is unique in the sense that I know of no other woman who rose so high inside an intelligence service, but she all ruthlessly and brilliantly exploited her gender as a disguise because she worked out very early on in her career as a spy that men simply didn't take women into account in this world. And right the way through her 20 years of spying, men consistently failed to take her seriously.

So towards the end, when MI5, the British Security Service, our equivalent to the FBI, effectively, was right on her trail, they still couldn't quite believe that a woman with three children and a husband who made particular, baked particularly nice cakes in a small rural house in Oxfordshire could conceivably actually be a spy. And she used it, as I say, quite ruthlessly. Another theme you're figuring out here as you're narrating her story is why she's endangering herself and her children repeatedly across the globe, as you say.

How much was her dedication to communism, do you think? And how much was what you call the thrill of her own duality? Like all spies, should I have. I've never come across a spy who didn't like to be operating from some higher principle for some higher cause, some major ideology. And that goes for Ursula too. But that said, I've also never come across a spy whose motives were not also quite mixed. Ursula loved adventure. She was she was a real risk taker. She found, I think, the kind of absurdity of quite a lot of spying rather magical. And she became addicted. I mean, spying is a kind of drug. Secrecy is a sort of. drug. And once you've tasted it, particularly once you've been deep inside it, it's very difficult to give up. So I think in some ways she was an addict. But at the beginning of your question, you touched on a very important issue with Ursula, which is that for her throughout her life, into old age, the struggle between what she saw as her ideological commitment to communism

and her responsibilities as a mother and a wife and as a homemaker and all the other domestic responsibilities you had. These were constantly in conflict. And right at the end of her life, she said at one point, I think I may have been a very good spy, but not a very good mother. And for those, you know, for modern people, that's really very, it's one of the things that it makes us, you know, I think so interesting is that she is extremely honest about looking inside herself and trying to explore her own motives and her own behaviour. And she's extremely self-critical. On the other hand, we have to be aware here of a certain double standard because I've never come across anybody who said of any male spy,

oh, well, they weren't a very good father. We should therefore, you know, cast a moral stone at them. So we have to be a little careful, I think, of setting her up as a sort of, as a kind of fool guy, as it were, for our notions of what parenthood should be about. You know, we celebrate, I just give you one interesting example, which always strikes me is that, you know, we celebrate the French resistance heroes who stood out against the Nazis in Nazi-occupied France.

You know, they refused to be cowed. But they also put their first. They did so time and time again. And they knew that if they were caught, their families were going to be wiped out, as indeed they were. Well, Ursula made the same calculation. We don't approve, I mean, I don't approve of the regime that she served. Stalinism was a Brillerstein operas. But nonetheless, she believed she was she was putting her family in jeopardy for a higher cause.

New York Times Review hit on Stalin a little bit. And so when Joseph Stalin, who is her ultimate boss, is at the same time she is spying overseeing the execution of many of her friends and colleagues, often on completely false charges. Do you think Sonia ever really grappled with that fact as she was carrying out her missions? I think she certainly grappled with it. I think she grappled with it more in later life when she knew the reality of what had happened during the purchase. And by the way, I mean, I'm all in favor of taking a shop at Stalin. There's nothing in this book that is a defense of either communism, let alone Stalinism. But did Ursula know at the time?

And that is the question that had I had the opportunity to meet her, I would love to have asked her. Just to what extent, Ursula, did you know that when your friends and colleagues were disappearing in 1938 and 1939, how much did you know about where they were going? Because, as you say, it was an unbelievable carnage. I mean, something like 700,000 people were murdered during Stalin's purges. Most of them completely innocent. Most of them had done nothing against the regime, but in that weird, boiling, paranoid world that they were all living in.

And Ursula miraculously survived. I mean, it is rather remarkable that she managed to get through it because foreigners and spies were considered to be among the prime suspects in Stalin's purges. She should, by any accounts, have perished. And she didn't. And it's not because she was adept at betraying other people. She wasn't. She didn't do any of that, but nor was she betrayed herself. And it's one of the, it's luck, but it's also, I think, a little tribute to her incredible capacity to inspire loyalty. She was defended time and time again by her bosses, most of whom were then subsequent wiped out. And her associates, right? None of them, as you point out, the book, ever betrayed her

fully, really, and she was able to, that kept her one step ahead of all the authorities. That is absolutely right. I mean, she was never turned in. And bear in mind that the currency at that point of survival, real betrayal. The way you survived in Stalin's world in the late 30s was that you did in your neighbor, you did in your colleague, you secretly turned to the NKVD and said, by the way, you need to know that it's really my friend Leib over there. Whether or not really matter. Now, she never did that. But even more astonishingly, it was never done to her. And she would have been a prime target. Ursula was also a very good writer. She spent the last part of her life turning out all these novels and then her memoirs.

How did that help you write this book? Well, that's, I mean, you've touched on one of the most extraordinary aspects of us here, who was someone who repeatedly invented and reinvented herself. And in the latter part at the end of her life, she turned herself into someone completely different. She turned herself into Ruth Werner, novelist, took a new name, took a new career, and was highly successful. She sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became, she was even described as the East German equivalent of Enid Blighton. She sold a lot of books and she became much more famous as a writer than she ever was as a spy. But it went back to her earliest life. And there is an interesting link here, I think, because right from as a teenager, she had been writing fiction. She

wrote short stories and novels and novelettes and poems. And so she lived in a kind of partly fictive world, if you like. She lived in a kind of imagined world. And I think there is, there is a link, I think, between espionage and fiction writing. I think it's no accident that some of the greatest fiction writers of the 20th century were also spies. John LeCarray, Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, Graham Green, John Buckin. They've all been in the intelligence services at some point or other. So I think that that Ursula turned to novels in the end was no great surprise. But I say they're novels and you asked me how useful they were to me. Well, the truth is I was in fact you, the family, the children of Ursula Katinsky very kindly gave me access to

all of her writings, which included quite a lot of unpublished material. But then there is also the published material which purports to be novelized fiction. In fact, what it is is disguised memoir, because she couldn't, living in East Germany, under the Stasi, write the truths because they would have shut her up and chelot her down. In fact, so she used fiction as cover, really, to write about her own life. And I discussed this, and they said, what you are reading here is not, it's not fiction. It is disguised nonfiction. She's changed the names, but otherwise it's true. And that was an amazing resource for me. It struck me so much reading the book, because she was such a productive writer, you have things that a historian

in another circumstance wouldn't have, like when she's parting with one of her lovers, you know, and you have the dialogue between them, him saying, do you remember how I told you on the ship that we would stay together forever? I mean, that's just got to be a dream as a writer trying to reconstruct something. It was gold dust, Brian. I mean, I'm not sure I could really have written the book without that, because you're right. The book published and the published stuff, give me access to the dialogue. It also has to her thoughts, which you very rarely get as a historian, what people

believe they were thinking at the time and may not be accurate, but you have a kind of a window inside their own minds. And as I said, she was very interrogative of herself. She was constantly asking herself whether she'd done the right thing at various different junctives of her life. And I took on this project in some ways with some trepidation because, hey, you know, living with a diehard communist could be quite tough for three years. I wasn't sure I was entirely going to enjoy this. They can be quite

hard sledding. But in fact, she turned out to be a wonderful companion and actually partly, and to take on a woman's voice was also something that I found quite challenging. But I felt throughout in a funny way because I found these works that she was kind of with me a lot of the time. So I could use her voice. It wasn't me trying to ventriloquise her. She was actually there and helping me write the book. I want to track back to something you said a few minutes ago about the absurdity of spying, the sort of sense of the absurd. What do you mean by that? What is what is amongst this lethal drama that's going on? What is the absurdity that sort of comes through in books like this? Well, it is, I mean, the whole business is slightly preposterous in some ways because, you know,

It's on the continuum of I know that you know that I know, that you don't know that I know. It's often very hard to fill it out where a subject's imagination ends and where reality begins. And I suppose this brings us to the fiction versus fact element, is that spies are fantastic liars. I mean, they are tremendously good at fabulating and making up their own pasts.

We all are actually, but spies are particularly good at it. And so trying to sort of work out, part of the absurdity is that you're dealing with extremely unreliable narrators. I do put Sonia in a slightly different category. She is in fact a rather reliable narrator, but all the people around her are constantly making up. And that creates often moments of high ridicule and high farce. I mean, you said at one point that, and rightly, that Ursula was never betrayed, except, in fact, she was the only person who ever tried to betray her to turn her into the authorities. was in fact her own nanny, which is something that if you wrote it in a novel, people would say that is absolutely preposterous. You can't create a situation where the elderly nanny is about

to turn in this sort of Soviet super spy, but that is actually what happened. So in a way, that's what I mean by the absurdity of it. It often not only is the truth stranger than fiction, it's also much, much funnier. Yeah, and so many of the rights of Spycraft that you recreate in this book, from the buried dropside under a tree to the whispered password to a man holding a newspaper. They seem like things right out of spy movies. I guess I want to ask the question this way. How much of World War II Spycraft do the movies get right? Well, you see, I think I have a little complicated answer to that.

Apart from the mafia and the police, there is no group of people more in love with their own mythology than spies. So they absolutely love the tradecraft. the dead drops, the dead letter boxes, the brush contact, all the code words and so on. I mean, they are absolutely in love with their own stories. So, you know, you get, in a way, quite a lot of the time, they are sort of acting.

I sometimes feel that they are sort of playing a part. Well, it's interesting, yes, how much of the movies get right? Well, interestingly, there was that, I thought it was rather good, there was a sort of TV series of Americans, which some of your listeners know about, which were about sleeper agents, Soviet sleeper agents operating in America, which might look completely ridiculous, but actually it's quite close to the truth. The Soviets had an entire department, Department S, whose job was to create false identities

for agents to settle in foreign countries. And they had dozens in America. They had even more in Britain. I mean, Britain was seen as the sort of prime target in the early part of the Cold War. And Erzschner, they even had a special name. for them, they were called illegals. There were two different kinds of spy in Russian nomenclature. There are legals who tend to be diplomats operating under diplomatic cover who are really intelligence officers. But then there are illegals, often a far more numerous group, who are

individuals living as citizens, who are gathering information covertly, and often they will be sleepers for very long periods. And Ursula was by far and away the most important illegal in post-war Britain. I mean, she was absolutely top of the tree. When you have a big sweeping story, like this, you have characters who sort of walk through the book for a page or half a page. I latched on to the wife of Ernst Grafenberg, whom the G-Spot is named after. New Yorker correspondent Emily Hahn is quite a vivid character. Margaret Sanger gets a letter for one character in this book. What do cameo appearances like that do for a book?

Well, you see, I can never resist a cameo, right? I mean, I love it when these strange figures appear in the kind of, almost in the kind of in the sort of B rating of history because they're not going to get a book on their own. They're not, but they're also tremendously fascinating in their own rights. And I think all of us in life have come across people that we thought, good Lord, that is a truly extraordinary and interesting person.

You never want to write up the whole thing about them. But, I mean, the cameos, I love them. And again, I think it is partly a function of the spy world that a particular sort of picker-esque character is drawn to this kind of business. I mean, you're either a bit odd to want to go into espionage or espionage is such a strange thing

that it drives you a bit potty. So you have these wonderfully eccentric character. And you mentioned a couple of them. The one I loved, who I'd never heard of before, was Agnes Smedley, who wonderfully named Agnes Smedley, who was a recruiter. She was an American novelist,

a highly successful left-wing novelist, but was also a recruit to the, Soviet intelligence service. She'd been picked up by Soviet military intelligence in the 1920s. And she's, in a way, the key to this whole story, because without her, actually, would never have been recruited. But she's also someone who's slightly fallen away from mainstream history. You know, you have to really look around to find someone like Agnes Smedley. But she deserves, she deserves to be remembered, I think, partly because she's so extraordinarily bonkers. I read that you were recruited by British intelligence when you were at university,

which I think most of us would just find mind-blowing. How does a recruitment like that go down? Well, I'm thrilled that this story now seems to have done the rounds because it's so unglamorous. I can hardly begin to tell you. But the phrases, I was tapped up by my lecturer on my last day at university at Cambridge, who said to me, he said over sort of warm sherry,

he said, there are parts of the Foreign Office that are slightly different from other parts of the Foreign. office in the sense that they're not the same as the foreign office. And now I never knew what he was, I mean, I sort of knew what he was talking about. And I ended up having this, um, hilarious interview with a man in Whitehall. And it became pretty clear very early on in the conversation that I was not really the stuff, the sort of chat they were looking for, as I just demonstrated, partly because I can't keep a secret. So I don't think I'm really right for the job. But I've always been fascinated by it. I mean, I do think that spy world allows one to write about the sort of

that are usually sort of commandeered by novelists, you know, loyalty and love and betrayal, an adventure and romance. And you can write about them in the spy world because it's all there and you don't have to make any of it up. It's all in the, if you have enough detail, if you have enough material, you really can tell a story that feels a little like a novel, but is nonetheless completely true. I was going to ask, did the thought go through your mind that I could go the John Le Corre route here and spend a couple of years in the intelligence service and get this whole suite of books out of the experience?

I didn't cross my mind then. I have to say, my first job was as a journalist, which of course is exactly the reverse of being a spy. You're not gathering and keeping secrets. You're trying to find them and tell as many people as possible. So I think I wasn't cut out for the spy world. And in truth, I don't think David Cornwall, John Lackarick, intended to use the material that he got

from being an intelligence officer for fictional purposes. But he did. I did it extremely well. You and he have a friendship. How did that friendship develop? We've been friends for many years, actually. David's been an incredible help and support to me, really more or less throughout my writing life.

I've known him for many, many years. We met, believe it, on a race course in the South of England. His father was a kind of crooked bookmaker, but he's always had a very close interest in the turf. And so I met him at a sort of party in a race meeting. And we just became firm friends. We have a lot in common, although he knows a great deal more about the reality of having been an officer. But he's always been a tremendous friend.

And he's always one of the first people to read my books. I was simply to him first. So I was going to ask you about that because I can't think of anything more terrifying than showing John La Coray a piece of writing about it. spies. Well, he's incredibly, he's a wonderful critic, actually, and he's, he's, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't forbear to tell you when you've got it

wrong, but he's also incredibly supportive, and I really am a huge debt. Yeah, and then he's been absolutely wonderful. He comes to, Ben, this chapter just isn't working. This one needs a, this one needs a good rewrite, but, but I like the answer. Oh, goodness, we haven't got, usually we haven't got

the best stage. I'm afraid I do tend to send them to him when there's not much else he can do about them in the sense that it's just about to go to press. So that's true of most of them. But no, he's an absolutely brilliant critic. And he's also very good on the, really, he's the master of the psychology of the double life. I mean, nobody knows better really how, and I think it is perhaps a rather British trait. It's not unique to Britain, but it is certainly part of the sort of British mentality, that there is a huge kick that a certain sort of Englishman gets out of living a double life,

appearing to be somebody on the outside and being someone else completely different on the inside. You mentioned your career as a foreign correspondent for the Times. What kind of journalist did you set out to be? I initially thought I would be, I wanted to be a correspondent. I mean, I thought that was going to be my world. and I covered the, in Afghanistan, my first tour was covering the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, which I found incredibly fascinating and utterly terrifying. And I quickly realized that that too wasn't really what I was cut out to be.

So I think the smell of the cordite is probably not for me either. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I ended up, first of all, New York correspondent for the Times. and then to Paris for the Times, and then back to America as Washington correspondent for five years at the end, which I found utterly fascinating. I spent about 12 years as a foreign correspondent roaming around, which is such a luxury and something that I think probably doesn't really happen these days. I think I was incredibly lucky with my timing. Was graduating to books, if that's the right word, always part of the plan for you?

Yes, it was. I mean, I was always writing books. I always had a book on the go. wherever I was. I found the combination of journal and book writing incredibly satisfying, the sort of the longer shelf life of the book, the slow kind of accreted nature of writing a long book, of gathering the stuff and the research and so on, but set against that the absolute thrill of a deadline and the immediacy of journalism, which I still love, and it's still probably my first love. There is still, for me, still no greater pleasure than

a breaking story. I think they're absolutely wonderful. But I found that the two elements worked very well together. And I'm also not sure, Brian, I would ever have really written a book had I not had the deadline training beforehand. I think that made a huge difference. In fact, it was something Robertson Davis, the late Robinson Davis is wonderful, who was also a journalist, said to me many, many years ago when I interviewed him, in a book, said, you know, he said, you will find your lack of fear of the, you know, your lack of fear of the,

blank page, which you get from being, you simply can't leave the page empty if you're a journalist. So he said you will find that extremely useful. And I did. I really always have. I'm, you know, I don't, I think it's, it is the journalistic training. You've got to fill the page somehow and may not be right, may not be perfect and get back to it afterwards, but you've got to get it out there. I saw you tell this story a couple of times. The critic John Kerry at the Sunday Times reviewed one of your books. And Carrie wrote what you called not only the worst review I have ever received, but the worst review I have ever read. What book was that?

That was one of my very early books. It was my second book. And it was the problem, the thing that really stung about this review. And of course, you remember the bad reviews. You don't remember the good reviews. The thing that really stung about this book was that John Kerry had ruthlessly identified

the central floor of the book. And he got it right. I mean, it was a brilliant review in the sense that he had me absolutely banged to write. because I was very much over dependent on a single, very unreliable source. And he brilliantly, he worked out by going through the footnotes. That essentially, you know, I was kind of, I was frailing. I was stuck.

And I was sort of doing something that I hope I've never done since, which was, I was sort of, I wasn't making anything up, but I was doing that thing that if nonfiction writers do it, you always smell a rat where they say, at the same time, somewhere else in the forest, this was taking place. And you know when they do that, that they've run out of material. And so he had me absolutely banged to write. So I could practically recite it to you word for word, but it was very useful, actually,

because it set me straight, although I did for a brief period, never writing another word. As one does when one receives a review like that, right? Absolutely. I think bad reviews are much more useful than good reviews in some ways. But they keep us honest. As I strum through the book catalogs here, I find titles like Dead Doubles, the extraordinary worldwide hunt for one of the Cold Wars, most notorious spy rings,

War of Shadows, codebreakers, spies, and the secret struggle to drive the Nazis from the Middle East, et cetera, et cetera. Will we ever get tired, do you think,

of reading about spycraft and spies? Well, I sincerely hope not. I mean, it's some, it's, um, I don't think so. And of course, espionage is more important today, arguably,

than it's ever been in history. I mean, the great cyber espionage battle that is taking place around us, and in every machine we use. So it's, no, I don't think it will. And I think that, and it's become more important.

I mean, spies are fascinating things because, and this sounds like a very strange thing to say for someone who's written so many books about spying, but actually on the whole, usually, spying doesn't make a huge amount of difference. It doesn't usually change the world. It can make, what it does is it oils the wheels of traditional diplomacy. It can make us a bit safer if it's good.

It can make us markedly more unsafe. if it's bad, you know, bad intelligence can be absolutely ruinous, as we know to our cost from a couple of recent wars. But when it works and when it does give you an insight into the mind of your opponent, it can have a strategic impact on world history. And that doesn't happen very often. But when it does, it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, you could probably count the examples on the finger of one hand

where it's actually changed policy. One of them is actually, Sonia, is Shrida Kaczynski. I mean, she, you know, she managed to pass on to the Soviet Union, the secrets of the atomic weapons program, which radically changed the course of history. I mean, you know, she would have argued that we were all made safer by it. That's a debate. We can all continue till the cows come home. But it had an impact. When the Soviets detonated their bomb in 1949, that was partly thanks to Mrs. Burton or as Colonel Ursula Kaczynski of the Red Army, sending secrets from her. the radio transmitter she built in the outdoor toilet at the back of her house. So, you know, she was, she really was someone who actually did change history. I want to end here, Ben, we're a week from the election here in the United States. And the steel dossier has been this sort of fascinating

journalistic thing here. You know, we went from publishing it to, you know, reading it and reading it like one of your books to now regretting publishing it. I don't quite know where we are in the timeline here. But as someone who writes about these things, what struck you about the steel dossier. Well, a whole set of things really. And what you've just identified, the fact that it has gone through so many vicissitudes for all of us of being reliable and unreliable, then being a plant. I was one of those who felt that there was something a bit dodgy about the steel

dossier in the sense that it looked, and various of the people I know in the intelligence services sort of slightly back this up, that elements of it looked as if they had been put their own purpose to be deniable. You know, that there were elements in it that were wrong and there were elements that could be very easily denied. And that's a very useful weapon in some ways because if some of it is true and some of it is untrue, it allows the target, who is obviously Trump, to say, this is all complete nonsense.

But if some of it is true, as one agent said to me, a former officer said to me, he said, But if he knows that some of it's true and he knows that the Russians have information, some of it is true and some of this dossier is reflecting some that is true, he'll always have a stone in his shoe, which I thought was a good way of putting it, that he's going to be, if it's true, then that dossier may have had the effect of making him aware that there was something on him. So that's mind-blowing, right? The truthfulness of the dossier is also the untruthfulness of the dossier and them existing at the same time. sort of as part, at least allegedly, of the plot here, right? They have to both. These may be people, I'm talking to these people who have been in this business perhaps for far too long, who sees shadows where there are no shadows.

You know, as, you know, as James Jesus Angleton, the famous, rather sort of sinuous head of counterintelligence at the CIA once said, you know, intelligence is a wilderness of mirrors, now which bits are reflecting which. So, you know, who knows? I wonder if we'll ever really know either the origin or the real basis, if there was one of the Steele dossier. It's one of those elements in history, like the Zinoviev letter,

like the, you know, the Zimmerman Telegram, all these elements that have all been challenged over the years, their veracity in spy world. And that's in the nature of the game, is that everything true is possibly untrue. Ben McIntyre's new book, Agent Sonia, can be tapped up to use a term, learned today wherever books are sold. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you. All right. It's time for David Chumaker guest is a strain pun headline.

Yeah. All right. Last Monday's headline about the demise of a beloved soft drink was Coca-Cola closes their tab. Today's headline comes from Noah Lieberman. It's from the Isthmus Alt Weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. There is a familiar story around the country, David, that a lot of restaurants are making people eat outside during the coronavirus. Sure. Well, it's about to get cold in Madison, Wisconsin. So a restaurant there bought clear plastic tents that they are putting around each of the individual tables so that people can dine outside in the winter. Okay.

Tents, outdoor dining during cold weather. What was the isthmus's strain pun headline? The isthmouth is the periodical? That is the periodic. And so we're in Madison, Wisconsin. and people are eating outside and tents because it's cold. Oh. Cold.

Um, um, present tense. Uh, did the two, um, warm, uh, god. Oh, warmed over or something like a warmed, uh, like a served cold. So is it something with something being served cold? Dave's giving me the, uh, the Andy Rooney, Dave Barry face right now that Chris gave me. No.

Tent. Oh, man. Winter. Winter. The winter? The winter is coming. The winter is the winter, the line in winter. The winter of.

The winter of our discontents. Oh, the winter of our plastic tents. The winter of our tent. Pretty funny. Oh, man. That's great. Ismus. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida. production magic by Erica Cervantes. We're back on the He Who Must Not Beamed Beat Thursday when we'll get you ready for election day. We'll answer some listener mail, plus Politico playbook author

Jake Sherman stops by to talk about the campaign and newsletter writing. Join us on the World Wide Web for more Luke where it takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.