It's Thursday, May 28th, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Peska.

We're going to have Estead Herndon on the show. He formerly of the New York Times, has a new podcast out with Vox.

So I guess Rupert's his boss now. It's called America, actually. It's pretty good. I've been listening to it. Very good is the conversation that we had. Does it sound like I'm saying, if you really want to hear Estead Herndon, the gist, that's the best podcast for him. No, the podcast is very good. I recommend it. Recently, however, he had a semi-Quincentennial conversation, you know, the 250th anniversary.

Heather Cox Richardson was his guest.

That's fine.

I think Heather Cox Richardson probably has a lot of outlets.

I'm glad that Ested hooked her for this one.

But in his lead-up, Estead threw out there, America, 250, 250 years. How are we doing? And instead said, So we are 250 years into this American experiment. And I'd say it's going okay. I'd give us like a C-plus. And I thought, huh? A C-plus? That's not very good, especially not with great inflation. A C, I mean, this is America.

I think you got to at least give us a B plus.

I mean, a B plus, America, we're a B plus.

Yeah, I know it's not going to fly during the big, huge viewing of the tall ships

during the semi-quincentennial celebration, but a C plus a little low.

Now, look, there was no calculation to what Estead was doing.

And of course, if you don't know this, Estad is black and African-American.

And of course, that has to factor in our legacy of slavery.

But I think that if you're comparing the grades to the ideal, you could say America

certainly comes up short, but if you're comparing it to the ideal nations operating in the

world at that time, America was almost always better. So if you grade on the curve, which literally means

you have to give some countries an A, America, for most of its tenure, was maybe yours

deserving of that A. I mean, for the first 70 years, it's not even close, we're the only constitutional

democracy, you can get by, you're not going to maybe be oppressed living in Belgium, which

in 1831 had some version of a constitutional democracy.

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