It's Bari Weiss's World! with Mike Pesca

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2026

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're back from the holiday break! (Sort of.) This interview with the inimitable Mike Pesca was recorded on Boxing Day and released right away to paying subscribers. Now it's available to everyone.

Host of The Gist and author of the newsletters Pesca Profundities and The Gist List, Mike has turned the humble "bonus segment" into a multi-level rmarketing scheme multi-tiered pricing philosophy. How does he do it? We'll find out!

We also talk about the hardest part of the creator economy (discovery), the incentives that reward martyrdom and outrage, and, most of all, Mike's December 26 Substack post No One's Nice To Bari Weiss. The CBS News editor-in-chief has been all over the headlines this past week after spiking delaying a 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, the notorious El Salvador terrorist prison, that was on the cusp of airing. Is it because the segment needed to "move beyond the forty-yard lines?" Or is something else going on?

Also: a discussion on a mega-viral Compact article about systemic discrimination against white millennial men, a cry against Hamilton erasure, and why my lack of grip strength is more than made up for by my alarmingly hyperextensive fingers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The fact that these were some of the dumbest ideas and that they were dominant and that they did derange our culture, it really is worth looking back at that and not saying, oh, yeah, that happened.
0:12.4	Whoopsie.
0:18.9	Welcome to the unspeak easy podcast. The podcast, formerly known as the unspeak-easy podcast, the podcast, formerly known as the unspeakable,
0:25.2	for conversations that are surprising and thought-provoking without being rage-baity,
0:31.1	the most nuanced podcast in all of podcast land.
0:35.1	I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:41.6	I'm here with Mike Peska, host of the Gist,
0:48.4	the longest daily running, the longest running daily news podcast in the U.S.
0:54.2	There's a lot of most, I like that we're in superlative mode here. Yes, yes.
0:54.7	Always.
0:59.8	Also, there are some qualifiers that we need, like I think it's news and analysis, but also some we don't, like in the U.S., it's in the universe.
1:02.3	There's no Moldovan news and analysis.
1:04.2	That's right.
1:05.3	That's right.
1:05.8	That's right.
1:05.8	It's sort of like, what do you say?
1:08.7	This is the number one program on this radio station right now.
1:14.9	You know what you need? When you say nuance, you need some lazery sound effects. You need like a deep voice guy to say nuance, nuance, nuance. Yes. In a world. Yeah, in a world where nuance stock car races at the local uh yeah
1:29.0	track yeah yeah i need to get the guy that does all the movie trailers um anyway i don't know
1:34.9	it's always great to talk with you there's you know there's i don't we're i should say we're
1:40.3	recording this on boxing day i know you're a sports guy so i'm surprised that you
1:47.2	were available thought you would go to a boxing gym or something do you know what's called
	...

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