Mike Pesca's Esprit de Corps: The Gist Wipes The Slate Clean And Flies Solo

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2022

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For seven years Mike Pesca hosted the political commentary podcast The Gist under the aegis of the Slate Media Company. The show became the longest running daily podcast of all time, racking up somewhere around 1400 episodes and attracting an enormous audience that accounted for a significant portion of Slate's revenue. Last February, Slate suspended The Gist following an office meltdown over a race-related—actually a race vocabulary-related— discussion on the company Slack channel. This led to a seven-month investigation that made Mike yet another high profile casualty of cancel culture. He's anything but canceled though, which is proven by the return of The Gist, which he's doing on his own steam. Mike spoke with Meghan about what went down with the old Gist (which he calls Season One, even though it lasted seven years) and what's coming up for the podcast going forward. They also talked about what makes podcasts work, how much effort podcasts require and what it was like working at NPR back when, as it Mike put, workplaces of all kinds came with a certain esprit du corp — or jovial feeling of pride and unity in an organization. Somewhere along the way, Mike points out, esprit de corps was replaced with struggle sessions.

Guest Bio:

Mike Pesca is the host and creator of The Gist, the longest running daily news podcast, and the author of Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs In Sports History. In addition to guest-hosting NPR Programs All Things Considered and the news quiz Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, Mike's work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Planet Money. He has frequently appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and The PBS Newshour, and written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, GQ, Slate, and Baseball Prospectus.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So many people at organizations are good people who want to do the right thing,
0:08.0	who have maybe heard the message of, you know, who am I as a person not in that marginalized community,
0:15.0	to ever question the experience of that marginalized community.
0:19.0	You know, it's a nice get out of ethics-free card, but people have that, people have
0:24.2	that mindset.
0:25.0	Or people say, you know, all I need to know is that these words cause angst, caused discomfort
0:33.4	among people who I'm sympathetic to or I personally know in general I'm in favor of, you know,
0:41.1	the uplift of marginalized communities. Better to be on the side of not, you know, inconveniencing,
0:47.6	not insulting them. I mean, there's so many juristics or off-ramps to not get involved.
0:56.1	It's sometimes a wonder that anyone shows any bravery at all.
1:03.5	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast.
1:05.8	I'm your host, Megan Down.
1:07.9	My guest, whose voice you just heard, is Mike Peska. If you are a podcasting
1:13.0	aficionado, Mike probably needs no introduction. He is the creator and host of The Gist,
1:19.9	which is, according to reliable sources, the longest running daily podcast and podcast
1:25.6	history. I'm going to tell you more about Mike in a minute, but first I need to do a little housekeeping.
1:32.4	The first item is to say that the paperback edition of my book, The Problem with Everything,
1:38.5	is out in paperback this week, February 22nd, as a matter of fact.
1:44.0	That's 2222.
1:46.3	How's that for a nice pub date?
1:48.6	It includes a new forward that I wrote just for this edition, reflecting on what's happened
1:55.7	since the hardcover came out.
	...

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