Poker Face Goes To Interesting Places
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tony Tost, now showrunning Poker Face, reflects on the show's expertly woven mysteries, genre roots, and why women who don’t want to pick up a gun keep finding themselves forced to fire. Tost, an expert in poetry and Johnny Cash, brings a reverence for populist storytelling to a format that straddles the procedural and the mythic. He also discusses why westerns are still a hard sell in Hollywood—even when they’re smart, stylish, and starring Sydney Sweeney. Plus, Mike gets hit with a burst of esprit de l’escalier over NATO dues and Plymouth Barracudas.
Produced by Corey Wara
Production Coordinator Ashley Khan
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Friday, July 11th, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:07.2 | It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. |
| 0:09.3 | The French phrase of the day is, Esprit de Lescalier. |
| 0:12.9 | Esprit de Lescalier, the spirit of the staircase. |
| 0:16.1 | It is that phenomenon where you think of the perfect thing to say, only you're out the door |
| 0:19.8 | and walking down the stairs. In America, it's sometimes known as they're out of view at the jerk store, to quote |
| 0:25.4 | a Seinfeld episode. So it happened to me, and it will happen to me in the interview. But it also |
| 0:29.7 | happened to me as I was a guest on the Slate Political Gab Fest yesterday. Thank you so much, David |
| 0:35.3 | Plotz, for having me on again. I think it was only the |
| 0:37.7 | second time during season two that I've been on that show, which I listen to just about |
| 0:43.1 | every week. And there was another replacement summer guest because Emily and John were out, |
| 0:49.0 | and it was Susan Glasser, whose work I've known of for a while and I've read some of her books. |
| 0:52.9 | She now writes for the New Yorker. |
| 0:54.4 | She was at Politico for a long time. |
| 0:56.4 | And we were talking about pretty much the deficiencies of Donald Trump. |
| 1:00.6 | It was a version of the discussion Jeff and Corrine and I had on Not Even Mad. |
| 1:06.3 | It's nice as a pundit where, like the Native American, you could use all parts of the insight Buffalo. |
| 1:11.8 | So I laid it all out there and yes, Donald Trump is a very, very, very silly man and very |
| 1:17.6 | impetuous and doesn't have a long time horizon. |
| 1:21.3 | But I did perhaps in an effort to bend over backwards a bit say something like there is a bit |
| 1:27.1 | of scleroticism in |
| 1:28.6 | foreign policy, and maybe there are one or two things that we could give the guy credit for. |
... |
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