Michael Townsend & Jeremy Workman: "Secret Mall Apartment"
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
Michael Townsend and director Jeremy Workman tell the wild true story of an eight-artist collective that built a hidden home inside Providence Place Mall—part prank, part art project, and a pointed reply to gentrification. They revisit grainy 2003–07 footage, a tape-art 9/11 memorial, and the logistics (and ethics) of living behind a cinderblock wall in America's retail cathedral. Plus: a look at Christine Lagarde's plan to collateralize frozen Russian assets for a Ukraine loan—and why that's diplomacy by euphemism. Also: "No Kings" rallies, protest as pressure valve, and the politics of bounce houses versus Red Scare rhetoric.
Produced by Corey Wara
Production Coordinator Ashley Khan
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Transcript
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| 0:15.1 | If you like the gist, I think you do, I think you'll also like risky business, a podcast hosted by Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova. |
| 0:22.4 | You know them. They're journalists who moonlight as high stakes poker players, though that might be |
| 0:27.0 | misstating where their incomes primarily come from. I think it's the poker. They talk about odds, |
| 0:32.6 | incentives, and outcomes, and they talk about democracy. You know, in politics, every moves a calculation, and sometimes our leaders can make bad |
| 0:40.6 | bets, and sometimes we as citizens suffer bad beats. |
| 0:44.5 | Check out risky business available in your favorite podcast app. |
| 0:52.8 | It's Monday, October 20th, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:56.9 | It's the gist I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:58.8 | President Trump is now, once more, crosswise, with Vladomir Zelensky, |
| 1:03.8 | wanting him to give back some territory to get this peace deal done. |
| 1:07.5 | Trump's 8th, 28th, something like this. |
| 1:09.9 | We don't know how this is going to play out, |
| 1:11.4 | and there's a lot of towing and froing in peace talks, isn't there? There is one aspect of one |
| 1:16.3 | of the conditions, or I should say, one of the ideas undergirding the conflict that I do want to talk |
| 1:23.1 | about. And this was asked on Face the Nation by host Margaret Brennan to Christine Lagarde, who used to run the IMF. |
| 1:31.8 | Now she's the European Central Bank president. |
| 1:35.5 | And it's the idea of we have all these frozen Russian funds. |
| 1:39.8 | Why not use those funds to give a loan to Ukraine, collateral. |
... |
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