David McCloskey on Why Real-World Spying is "Too Crazy for Fiction"
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today on The Gist, a look at Donald Trump's plan to cap credit card interest rates at 10%—a populist move that might actually rob the poor to pay for the rich man's travel perks. Then, former CIA analyst and The Rest Is Classified co-host David McCloskey discusses his new novel, The Persian. He explains how real-world Mossad operations inside Iran are so "insane" they don't even need to be exaggerated for fiction, from remote-controlled machine guns to the devastating pager attack that crippled Hezbollah's command and control. He also breaks down the "unlikely but plausible" tradecraft used in the Israel-Iran shadow war and why the U.S. organizational and legal structure wouldn't—or couldn't—pull off the same stunts.
Produced by Corey Wara
Coordinated by Lya Yanne
Video and Social Media by Geoff Craig
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Wednesday, January 14th, 2026 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:07.8 | It's the gist. |
| 0:08.6 | I'm Mike Pasca. |
| 0:09.5 | So Donald Trump has a proposal to cap credit card APRs at 10%. |
| 0:15.0 | No, I want a cap on credit card interest rates because, you know, some of them are 28, almost 30%. |
| 0:22.6 | And the people don't know they're paying 30%. |
| 0:25.9 | The people out there, you know, they're working. |
| 0:28.7 | They have no idea that they're paying 30%. |
| 0:30.9 | No way. |
| 0:32.3 | We're putting a one-year cap in 10%. |
| 0:34.6 | And that's it. |
| 0:36.0 | They know it. |
| 0:36.7 | He's never really, although he is, you know, |
| 0:38.8 | he likes to think of himself as a Wall Street and finance guy and watches the markets and cares |
| 0:43.2 | about the Dow like it was 1989, it's never really liked the banks. Uh, they shunned him is a little |
| 0:48.7 | bit of the reason why, though he finally found Credit Suisse. The banks hate this idea of capping credit cards, |
| 0:55.8 | and I got to say, I kind of agree with them. On the one hand, I thought that, all right, |
| 1:01.5 | everyone who's getting charged 12.99% if you bring it down to 10, it's not going to destroy the |
| 1:07.1 | credit card industry. But I did a little more looking into the credit card industry |
| 1:11.9 | guided by a couple of friends I know, not in the credit card industry, but I don't want to |
| 1:16.6 | brag or seem too highfalutin, but they own credit cards. And also someone who contacted |
| 1:22.1 | me, who's a reader, great reader, Kathleen, of The Gist List, where I said maybe this is a good idea. It's not. And here's |
... |
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