Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Anand Giridharadas:

If you are an economist who helps guide a deregulation agenda that tanks the economy, you will get promoted. If you are a foreign affairs expert who helps sell a war that turns out to be a lie, you will literally get a better professorship and TV gig. There is, in this country, a group of people who survive at the top, no matter what.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Anand Giridharadas. He’s a writer, political analyst, author of four books, and publisher of the popular Substack newsletter, The.Ink. Recently, he wrote a scathing article for the New York Times titled How the Elite Behave When No One is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails. In it, he delves into what he believes the thousands of emails from the convicted sex offender reveal about this nation’s top 1%. We discuss Anand’s findings, plus whether there’s such a thing as an ethical billionaire and how the wealthy can make the best use of their money. Then I’ll answer your questions about President Trump’s meeting with New York City’s newly elected mayor and about how the Senate passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in less than a day. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. We all have a script, but how do we step outside of it? Anand Giridharadas has some ideas. Anand, welcome back to the show.

Anand Giridharadas:

Great to be back with you.

Preet Bharara:

It is so good to talk to you. I should let the folks know that we are recording this in the afternoon of Monday, December one. The first Monday and the first day of the last month of 2025. It’s been a great 12 or 13 years this year. How you doing? How’d you make out this year?

Anand Giridharadas:

We both had black hair in January, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yes. I had an encroaching hairline back in the beginning of 2025.

Anand Giridharadas:

What a decade this year has been.

Preet Bharara:

What a decade this year has been. But let’s first talk about the most recent important event for a lot of people, Thanksgiving. As I was telling you before we hit the record button, I saw you on TV on Morning Joe talking about Thanksgiving. And you mentioned that your wife, your very lovely wife, Priya, had made some suggestions for questions that did not relate to politics and wasn’t the usual type of question that friends and families could ask each other. Could you mention a couple by way of example to the audience?

Anand Giridharadas:

So, my wife, Priya Parker, is a conflict facilitator by training and her superpower is when people come into a room, and you’ve dealt with this in both of your careers, the legal one as well as the podcasting, when people come into a room, they have scripts. A witness has things that they want to say. Lawyer has things they want to get out of them. A podcast guest has a book they’re trying to promote with a message. And Priya’s superpowers to get people off their scripts. So, Thanksgiving, we often go around the table in our family and many families, “What are you grateful for?” So, Priya was like, “This year, how can we give people some different questions to get you off your scripts?”

Because when you’re on your script, you’re not thinking. And it’s a shame to have people around a table and no one thinking, everyone just being on their script. So, she published these 40 questions on her Substack, which is called Group Life. Real good. You should check it out. And one of them was from my daughter who’s seven and came up with a question of what is the naughtiest thing you’ve ever done that was worth it? We’ve done that question before and it’s so good. It’s so good.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have an answer to that question, Anand?

Anand Giridharadas:

Yeah, but not for your podcast.

Preet Bharara:

Whose podcast would it be for?

Anand Giridharadas:

You’re still kind of a cop. I mean, I know you’re a podcast hopefully.

Preet Bharara:

Would you tell?

Anand Giridharadas:

No offense, but I mean-

Preet Bharara:

What’s so funny is, you know what just reminds me, I shouldn’t tell this, but obviously I’m pretty vocal in my views against Donald Trump and I have a lot of progressive views, but I’m not the most progressive person in America. I’m centrist on various things. And I said something along those lines and somebody tweeted, no, you kind of forget that Preet’s all anti-Trump and we love that, but he’s still a cop with a podcast, which he didn’t mean as a compliment.

Anand Giridharadas:

You should just own it. This should be on the buses, on the new fast and free buses.

Preet Bharara:

Does that guy want to defund me? How’s that?

Anand Giridharadas:

A cop with a podcast.

Preet Bharara:

Do cops with podcasts also get defunded? From the liberals, how does that work? Okay, you don’t have to say.

Anand Giridharadas:

You can have something like, I’d rather be a cop with a pod than a pod with a cop. You can play with it.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’ll have to ask ChatGPT about that. So, that’s a good question. What’s another question and what question did you actually use?

Anand Giridharadas:

Oh, the one I really love, which we didn’t end up doing was what is a moment when you realize you were becoming more like someone else in this family? And it’s a really easy, seemingly easy way, including for kids, because we have two little kids and a nephew. It’s an easy way into heritage and these kind of bigger ideas of what make us us. And we ended up actually doing one question on Thanksgiving and then the next day we did another one about what was the thing that most surprised you this year and what do you most want to carry or have happened to you the next year?

Anyway, we love these questions and it’s a little bit like how really elegantly designed technologies are as easy for eight-year-olds as they are for 80-year-olds. A really good question like that sort of has the same function. Somehow you get the 80-year-old and the eight-year-old to kind of be on the same page. And it’s a good way to sneak some heritage into the mac and cheese of a fun zesty conversation.

Preet Bharara:

So, I’m going to move from a tasty subject like Thanksgiving to a pretty nasty subject, but it’s one that occupies a lot of time and attention on the part of law enforcement, on the part of DOJ, more or less depending on your perspective, politics, Democrats, Republicans, the wealthy, the elite. And even though he’s been dead for a number of years, and that’s the matter of Jeffrey Epstein. And the reason I’m asking you about it is you wrote, I thought a particularly interesting article which went on at some length, New York Times pay you by the word on it. How does that go?

Anand Giridharadas:

Everyone needs an editor, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

No, it’s good. I like the length. There’s a lot to chew on there.

Anand Giridharadas:

You should have seen how long it originally was.

Preet Bharara:

How long was it originally?

Anand Giridharadas:

I think it was getting close to 5,000 words before.

Preet Bharara:

That’s the New Yorker.

Anand Giridharadas:

Heroic how we brought it down to 3,000.

Preet Bharara:

That’s not the New Yorker, not New York Times.

Anand Giridharadas:

And I have to say that I was very gratified. The New York Times published it 3,000 words online and then they gave it a full page, which is what 3,000 words takes. They gave it a full page in the Opinion.

Preet Bharara:

No, it’s deserving. I don’t agree with everything there, and I have some questions about some of your assessments, but what’s interesting about your piece, well, many things. It’s thoughtful as your pieces always are, even if everyone doesn’t agree with all of it or doesn’t understand all of it. But from my perspective, I come at it from the law. It’s my old office that prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell. I think about what’s happening to her in prison. We talked about the circumstances surrounding his death. So, it’s crime and punishment. You talk about the Epstein phenomenon from the perspective of the people who were in his circle. So, in preparation for the article, and the reason you required as many words as you did in part is because you did a thing. It took you five days. What did you do?

Anand Giridharadas:

I decided, and I don’t recommend this.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, thanks. I’m glad you did it.

Anand Giridharadas:

I read all of the emails basically for five days, six days, something like that. And it’s interesting, I finished a book, not related to this, recently that is sort of in production. I’m not yet in my next book. So, I’m in this moment when I have more creative time and I have time to think about things in a bigger way, which I call it the off season for a non-athletic person like me. And these emails came around and I was just reading the same press like everybody else.

Preet Bharara:

And these emails came from where?

Anand Giridharadas:

They came from the House Oversight Committee. So, they were released by the House Oversight Committee. And there’d been some earlier things released, but this was a giant, giant pile of, I think 20,000 plus documents, many, many of them emails. And I was kind of reading the press coverage like everybody else and seeing these different frames being put on it. And then I was like, I’m a words person. I’m a text person. I should read these emails. I don’t know what for. I don’t know if it’s going to become something. And by the way, you and I do independent media. Independent media actually allowed me to do that. Before it was the New York Times article, before it was a commission from anybody, I was able to say, “You know what? This is going to take day.” I didn’t even know how many days. This is going to take a long time, but I am going to take that long time because a lot of what I was reading was like Larry Summers got dating advice as the story or this thing or finding a thing.

There was a lot of name search journalism. And I understand it because I’ve been on deadline as a journalist. I understand the pressures, but it felt like we’ve had gotten this really rare glimpse into how a very powerful group of people thinks, talks behind our back. And we were just getting a bunch of tabloid stories or people looking for connections to Donald Trump. And so I said, “Let me just read this.” And I started reading day one, day two. It was 12 tranches. I don’t think I finished the first tranche on the first day. It was just a lot of stuff.

Preet Bharara:

Can I picture this? Did you print them out?

Anand Giridharadas:

No.

Preet Bharara:

You read them on-

Anand Giridharadas:

… I think it would have been bigger than this room. I mean, it was like-

Preet Bharara:

You read them on your laptop or your phone?

Anand Giridharadas:

It’s a Google Drive that the house oversight committee put out. So, then there’s 12 tranches, you go into tranche one and then there’s four or five files folders within that and you go into images and then it’s like images of all these.

Preet Bharara:

So, you started at the top and you just plowed your way through.

Anand Giridharadas:

I started at the top and I just kept reading. And a lot of it, the way you’d imagine if you’d go into an email, I’m sure you know this more than me, is that a lot of it becomes repetitious because it’s one email, the original email, and then there’s like a thread. So, then all the things get reprinted again. So, it’s a lot of repetition, but I started reading. And the first impression I had was, it’s as boring, a lot of it, as your and my emails, right? It’s what time is this going to happen? What time is this person getting in? In some ways, for all the insanity of that email box, it’s also a person’s email box. But the more I kept reading and these bold faced names, the Larry Summers’, the people from the Gates Foundation and Harvard and all these other institutions emerged, the more I realized that I was getting a glimpse of an entire social network, a group of people who shared certain codes of speech, certain ways of thinking, certain shorthands, right?

The same way a profession, your profession, legal profession, has habits of mind, habits of speech. Well, this is not a profession, but it is a social network that in many of the same ways has a culture, has mores, has lines, boundaries, connectivity. And I realized I was really getting an anthropological look into a group of people who are very good at making sure you don’t get a look into how they operate. That’s sort of one of their most important undertakings. They all spend a lot of money through lawyers and IT people and others to make sure you don’t get this kind of glimpse normally. So, the more I read, I was like, “This is important, not just because you can get a kind of base hit story of Larry Summers said this one thing or the Gates Foundation had this one connection, but rather precisely because of the network effect of this group of people and a rare chance to understand them.” So, I started reading for that understanding and a couple things emerged as I did that reading.

One, it flipped around this basic question that everybody’s been asking, which is how could all these prestigious, eminent people … You got monster over here, Jeffrey Epstein, the monster over here, which everybody agrees on. But how could all these people who in a way were saying, obviously are not quite like him or at all like him, how could cabinet secretaries and CEOs and prominent Democrats and prominent Republicans and people who … Men, women, all kinds of people, eminent people from eminent institutions, how could they consort with a guy like this? And the more I read, the more that became a kind of question with an obvious answer. This was a group of people diverse in their own way, but with this fundamental thing in common. So, many of them belonged to this kind of elite social network that was, I think, able to look away at the pain that Jeffrey Epstein had caused, at the abuse he had engaged in, because looking away was a superpower in this social network.

It was an essential skill for a lot of these people and one that didn’t begin to be practiced when Jeffrey Epstein came back to society looking for rehabilitation. This looking away happened when folks in this network were looking away from economic distress that many of them helped cause in financial crises. It was economic pain. It was looking away that they practiced as they kind of allowed technologies to run rampant a over teenage girls with body image issues and workers being obsolesced, it was a looking away that has allowed for the most extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in a hundred years. So, when you look at what does this group of people have in common despite differences of party and profession and more. This is a social network of people. Again, not every single person, but this is a social network of people that is actually quite good at disregarding pain, that is quite quickly able to lift the fingers to the ears when people are screaming. And so then it became less and less of a surprise that they’d been able to look away from his crimes.

Preet Bharara:

Some people would say, if you think of the list of folks who were corresponding in that set of emails that you spent five days reading, a lot of those people, and I know you have a view on philanthropy, but some of those people did not look away from certain categories of pain. They have focused on it. They have invented things. They have tried to bring solutions to economies other than the United States. There’s a whole lot of looking at problems and looking at pain and solving pain in some quarters on the part of some of those people. How do you explain if you agree with A, do you agree with that and B, so far as it goes. And then B, do these people compartmentalize where they look at pain and where they turn away and do they do both?

Anand Giridharadas:

It’s a great point. And I’m not saying nobody here worked on those issues. What I’m saying is, in my book Winners Take All, which you and I talked about a long time ago, made this argument that often in this powerful social network of people, what Ro Khanna, Congressman from California calls the Epstein class, even when they look at the problem, there is a looking away. That’s another way to think about the argument that I made in Winners Take All, which is that you think about someone like Bill Gates looking at the problem of public health and vaccines in COVID and using his voice and clout in that moment to insist on patents. So, there’s a looking at a problem, but because you are who you are as a billionaire, because you come with the interests and worldview you do, it is possible to look at and look away at the same time.

And I would say you and I have both probably been to more than one charity gala in New York City where people in tuxedos gather around. I would say, Preet, that room is full of people who are looking on one level looking at poverty, looking at want in New York or wherever. And I would say at a meta level, what is actually happening in that room is often a looking away. So, you are right that in this network, by the MIT Media Lab, there’s all kinds of people doing all kinds of stuff related to poverty, right? And that was one of the institutions that helped rehabilitate him.

I’m sure Larry Summers has written many sentences about poverty in his life. The question is, what was the prevailing attitude to power in this community? And when you had someone like Larry Summers, for example, an architect of financial deregulation, which many experts will tell you culminated later on in the financial crisis, right? In our system of you’re a justice guy, we unfortunately don’t live in a world in which people like that get justice. We live in a world in which people like that have impunity and a Larry Summers, having helped bring about, along with many others, a financial crisis in 2008, becomes rewarded as Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor. And I think if I were to go to nice parties in New York and say that, people would say, “That’s unfair, that’s unfair.” But I think 95% of people in this country feel very deeply the truth that they can make no mistakes, that there is literally no margin for mistakes anymore in this country.

You can’t even make the mistake of getting sick, but that if you are an economist who helps guide a deregulation agenda that tanks the economy, you will get promoted. If you are a foreign affairs expert who helps sell a war that turns out to be a lie, you will literally get a better professorship and TV gig. There is, in this country, a group of people who survive at the top, no matter what. And what I found reading the emails is they are surviving because they live in this kind of parallel society where they trade information, non-public information, they trade favors, they are constantly checking in on each other and offering each other kind of intel on this, that, introductions.

Do you need to meet this person? Do you need an investor for your fund? Regular Americans are starting GoFundMes to fund their medical bills. But in this group, if you happen to be passing through Athens, a Jeffrey Epstein or someone else will say, “Oh, I know an investor in Athens. Would you like to meet an investor for your fund?” And so it is a kind of footloose, fancy, free elite that has internalized the impunity that has been a fact in this country that has internalized. You could imagine a different America in which a thousand people had gone to prison for 2008. You could imagine such a society.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. You could also imagine … Yes, I have a lot to say about this in the past.

Anand Giridharadas:

And I’m not saying you … I’m just saying in general, one could imagine a society that had put fewer people dealing pot in prison over the years and more people for causing a financial crisis.

Preet Bharara:

In my view, that is an easy political slogan that doesn’t fully take into account why we have the laws we have and how we bend over backwards in our criminal justice system to make sure that notwithstanding what people think when they look at these political prosecutions, that people who are targets of a federal or local criminal prosecution have all sorts of benefits, advantages, and rights as against the sometimes characterized as jack booted cops. Well, we can talk about that another time.

Anand Giridharadas:

But even holding all those constant, we certainly prioritize low level drug dealers with that same regime of protections and whatever, we end up with more people on prison for those kinds of things than any other country. And then you look at an opioids crisis or you look at the financial crisis, other things, or I would even say things like climate change, which is certainly a mass death event of a different kind with a lot of willful blindness and fraud and other things. I don’t think it’s just a political slogan. We have made a choice to be very, very tough and not very second chancey for lots of people. And suddenly all the protections of our system, which are real and are important, I agree with you on that, play a much bigger role in why people who happen to be powerful don’t get prosecuted.

Preet Bharara:

As a general matter, for lots of different reasons, psychological, forensic, and otherwise, it is easier to get away with a fraud than it is to get away with a violent crime or a narcotics crime, right? You catch someone with a dope, essentially they’re guilty. It’s a lot harder to do some of that other stuff. This concept of the elite, and I know we’ve talked about this before, I don’t mean this to be like a cheap podcast host turning of the tables, but I’m sure you get this all the time, right? Where’d you write this piece? In the so called failing New York Times. We’re doing a podcast, you have a Substack, you have a lot of folks who listen to you. You, as you said, have get invitations to these events. Who’s elite and who’s not? Is the elite monolithic? Are you elite? Am I elite?

Is being categorizable as an elite, necessarily pejorative? Last question, which is the easiest of the whole bunch. How should one live one’s life? The reason I find you so interesting and thoughtful is all of your work, not all of your work, but much of your work and the work that we have talked about raises implicitly the question, okay, fine. What should these guys be doing? Let’s say you’re hugely talented at coding or at acting, and then you get to be in the elite, whatever that means, whether it’s the Epstein elite or the Epstein class or otherwise, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to become Buddha?

Anand Giridharadas:

So, first things first, because I think your question is fair and should be addressed, right? There is sometimes this question that is put to me and others. Why are you criticizing this elite if you have had good fortune? And I think, my God, the first and only thing to spend good fortune on is the freedom it gives you to be more honest than you would be able to be if you didn’t have that fortune.

Preet Bharara:

I agree with that. I agree with that. People don’t like people who renounce their class.

Anand Giridharadas:

And I’m not, like this piece, there’s all kinds of elites, right? There’s an educated elite, there’s a professorial elite, there’s a legal elite, there is a kind of political elite, people hold elected office and people around those people. Many of those are very important in our society. I have specifically in my writing written about a oligarchic elite, which is to say people who have probably more money than they would in a more fair society who use that money specifically to buy political power that they’re not entitled to in a one person, one vote system. I do not rail against some people having PhDs and therefore teaching when others are not teaching. It is okay for there to be various forms of gradation in society. I don’t rail against people with law degrees having a monopoly on the practice of law. I am very specifically focused on the idea.

My failing is that I took my grade school education at its word. I was told one person, one vote. I was told that a lot of people died for that at home and abroad. And when I see distortions to it, I get upset. And I will say, I have had good fortune and I’ve written about my good fortune. And part of why I’m able to read those emails is I understand those people. I have written about them for years. I have been in those rooms as you have. And I often find that critics of those worlds often don’t understand those worlds very well, often don’t understand how they actually work. I often hear from people, “Well, this TV channel that you work for, just executives must be calling you every day to tell you not to say this, not to say that.” I mean, it’s interesting that’s the fantasy in their head.

It’s literally never happened. By the way, it happens in all kinds of other ways that those people are unaware of. And having the actual textured understanding of how these institutions work, how people think. So, I have been in many of those rooms. I’ve also spent a lot of time in my life and reporting careers, sitting in mud floors, reporting and talking to people about their lives, but I have been in those rooms. I try to get into any room I can. And what I try to do is not become a citizen of the room just because I’m honored to be invited or because the drinks are nice. I try to retain the integrity of saying what I think and what I find to be true regardless. And I’ve done it long enough that, I don’t know, I keep going to the rooms. It’s not-

Preet Bharara:

So, why do they keep inviting you to the rooms?

Anand Giridharadas:

Well, I mean, I think I don’t get invited to a lot of rooms, but I get invited to enough because I’ll tell you something, at some very deep level, and people have said this to me from these worlds … Tom Wolfe had this line about writers as being like the village gossip. Writers are not always thinking about these things out of their head, like inventing these thoughts. There are all of these ideas that you and I might talk about, they’re out there in people, right? You work at a law firm, you work for a big corporation. If you work in the government, there’s a lot of feelings you might have about the way that place is run, about the way the law works, about the way the system works. You can’t say those things in many of the contexts you operate in. The more senior you are, you may not even be able to say those things to your spouse.

So, there’s a lot of public opinion out there that is laying latent, that is lurking in people. And so when someone like me or someone like, name the person, absorbs those things often from talking to people, often from those whisperings sitting in my living room, and then can go find them through reporting, find those intuitions through reporting. What often actually happens is that people in those worlds feel a certain relief because they can’t say it, but they actually want it said.

And this happens to me when I wrote Winners Take All, even some of these billionaires literally wrote to me and were like, “Thank you for writing that. I disagree with this, I disagree with that, but thank you for saying this thing.” Because you know what? Even billionaires recognize that living in a society in which most people are miserable and most people with a dream and an idea can’t realize it anymore, it actually starts to suck for them too, right? You and I have Spent time in India. You can have all of God’s money in India. There’s a lot about India and even your experience of India as a billionaire that is limited by the quality of average in India. The quality of institutions is unfortunately related to the quality of the average. The quality of the water, which you can’t fully remove from your life, water is in everything, is related to the quality of the average. At some point, I think even the most powerful people realize it’s no fun to live in a place where everybody’s life is grim, but yours.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Anand Giridharadas after this. I’m asking this because I’m really interested in the answer, right?

Anand Giridharadas:

Oh, how to live.

Preet Bharara:

But let me reframe it. We can be Aristotle for a moment, the examine life. If you’re a person who wants to do good, and let’s say you didn’t come by your billion in one of the four ways that Robert Reich says are the only ways to become a billionaire. Just stipulate with me for a moment, and you might have a critique of this stipulation, but stipulate with me for a moment that there’s a person who didn’t break the law, didn’t inherit his or her wealth, and was an excellent investor, or invented something, and obviously had largesse from the government, and it took a village and all sorts of other things. And they find themselves at age 50 with a few billion dollars.

And they got to that point because they were focused on the business, or they were focused on the investing, or whatever the case may be, or they got lucky, and they invested in something that before it was big. And they have a lot of money, and they worked really hard, and they’re pretty smart, and they may be undeserving of the $3 billion, because who could possibly be deserving of $3 billion? They’re not criminal, and they’re not heirs. And now they wake up in the morning, and they want to do good, and they want to do well, and you’re having dinner with them, and they say to you, “Anand, I didn’t do this for the money. I did this because I care about chips, or I care about processing, or I care about …”

Or whatever the case may be. “And I want to live a good life, and I want to make the world better, and I want to make my country better, and I want to make the rest of the world better. Should I give all my money away? I was thinking about starting a foundation, but Anand, you talk about how philanthropy is an excuse. I don’t want to look bad in your eyes if I do that. Should I spend all my money on political advocacy for the kinds of things that would bring out structural change? Should I diversify the way that I spend my money to make the world better?” What would you say to a person like that at dinner?

Anand Giridharadas:

So, I’ll give you one kind of overall framework and then some more specific thoughts. I think there’s a quote I love. I think this is actually from a moment, as far as I recall, where Desmond Tutu was asked to speak to a group of very wealthy people. I guess I only get invited to things like that when he was not available.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not bad.

Anand Giridharadas:

So, he was speaking to this group of philanthropists, and he said something along the lines of, “Don’t do your work, philanthropic work, to make the poor more comfortable in their chains, break the chains.” So, I would start with a distinction between there are forms of giving that are essentially in the business of making chains more comfortable. You could have velvet on the chains. You could coat the chains in butter. You could try a metal that doesn’t get as cold. There’s various ways you could imagine being in the chain comfort increase business, and then you could just imagine other things that are in the chain breaking business.

So, now, let me be very specific. So, if you were to think about education, and a lot of what these people have done is essentially accept a system in this country that funds public education through property taxes and local property taxes. So, basically, if you live in nice places, you get nice schools, if you live in poor places, you get shitty schools. We all know this. It’s actually crazy if you think about it. It’s not that far away from being as crazy as racial segregation because it effectively becomes racial segregation in a lot of parts of this country. We all know it, and it’s all just there. And it’s a great example of chains.

Okay. So, now you think about a lot of what happens in philanthropy or in education, which is a favorite topic of these people, because they’re often education was very important in their own life. I would say broadly, it’s a lot of chain comfort increase, right? Let’s have this charter school, let’s have this program, let’s fix this curriculum, let’s have some Black girls get some STEM coding class after school.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So, what should they do instead?

Anand Giridharadas:

I struggle to think about a very wealthy person who’s invested in the idea of education, who has said, “I’m taking on property tax-based education funding in this country.” By the way, if someone with Bill Gates’ clout and money was like, “I’m going to get rid of that way of funding education, that’s the civil rights struggle I’m put …” That’s within the kind of orbit of something someone like that could do.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. That’s very aspirational.

Anand Giridharadas:

Sure. So was civil rights.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, but Bill Gates has a lot of money. How would you propose he could use that money to undo local laws that fund public education, not at the federal level, but in town after town after town, city after city after city, maybe he could launch a public ad campaign, maybe he could give money to particular people, but there are a lot of billionaires. I’m just playing devil’s advocate for the sake of sharpening our arguments. There are a lot of billionaires who have causes. They’re not that cause, and maybe it should be that cause, but they have other causes and they don’t get their way. They don’t even get elected to office. It is sometimes the case that I think.

Anand Giridharadas:

I’m just asking, has anybody tried on that issue? They all start charter schools. They all do these little programs that you and I know very well. I’m just saying, isn’t it interesting that not one person of prominence in a big way has taken on that? You can disagree with me on whether that’s a good … I’m just telling you, I think it’s interesting.

Preet Bharara:

What if you’re not Bill Gates? What if you’re the … My hypothetical was, again, we’re a little bit philosophizing here. I chose the hypothetical of the very, very rich person who has more money they can spend in their entire lifetime, but not in the top five of the world, right? A lot of wealth. So, that person … I’m going to change it a little bit or make it more concrete so we can get a model for that for the person I’m talking about. So, if you have Bill Gates’ kind of money, you can do that gigantic moonshot kind of a thing. What if you’re not Bill Gates’ kind of money? You’re just very, very rich.

Anand Giridharadas:

I mean, well, there’s a few answers. One is you could do that in one place, right? I mean, I remember I was in Cleveland where I actually grew up until I was 10 years old and doing an event for Winners Take All. And a group of people who I think knew each other and young people worked together on some of these issues came to me and they said, “You have no idea, you’re writing about lots of very prominent, rich people in this book,” but they’re like, “the dynamic you’re writing about is more pronounced in a place like Cleveland.” And I was like, “Why?” They’re like, “Well, for the exact reason you just said, no one in Cleveland is like, ‘I’m going to transform education all around the world the way a Bill Gates is.'” And it’s not the same level of wealth, but there’s definitely people with $800 million in Cleveland. There’s definitely people with a couple billion dollars in Cleveland, right?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know if there’s that many.

Anand Giridharadas:

There’s some money in that city. And what those people end up doing is very much like the chain comfort increase because they don’t even have those kind of global ambitions. And so it’s all just like orchestra, stadium, little arts program and a place like Cleveland that is the larger area, still very segregated in all these ways, they just don’t touch that stuff.

Preet Bharara:

So, can I give an example of something in between those two things maybe? Our efforts, including the expenditure of money on the part of a rich person to dramatically reduce death from malaria in Africa. Is that a bad thing to do? Is that putting velvet on the chains?

Anand Giridharadas:

And again, like this is-

Preet Bharara:

No, no, no, no. Okay. What’s the critique of that effort?

Anand Giridharadas:

Okay. So, there’s several, and it depends on what actually happens the way those programs work because there’s a range of outcomes. So, some of the things, obviously if you are spending money in saving lives, that’s a good thing and that very much goes in the category of like the good part of it. And sometimes maybe we can imagine that’s the only thing going on, but let’s speculate that may not be the only thing going on in that equation. So, here are some of the other things that go on that just need to be held in conversation with the good thing going on. One thing that has gone on, and there’s a lot of scholarship on this, Dambisa Moyo has a great book called Dead Aid about this, is that aid of that kind, philanthropy, foreign aid even, even as it helps people, can sometimes distort the relationship between leaders and their own public, right?

So, there have been arguments made that when you start to have leaders who are basically getting all their money from international organizations, they basically manage for that client instead of the client of the public and the traditional taxation representation bond where leaders are accountable to people because they’re raising money from them doesn’t develop, right? That’s one thing. You also have the question of whether those programs are run well and whether they are run with the biases of those people. The Gates Foundation quite famously in Africa was run in a very McKinsey spreadsheet kind of way that often missed lots of social context. You and I know those guys. They’re not very smart about certain kinds of things, about people and societies and communities and power. Well, to the extent that fighting HIV means understanding those kinds of social context, it’s often just like an imperious force that has limited human intelligence about those kinds of things.

That’s been another problem. Then there’s been the problem of interests, right? So, going back to the Bill Gates patent example, you help, you help, you help. But when the help conflicts potentially with your own ideological proclivities or your class proclivities, patents are important, intellectual property is important. You might find that people like that end up siding with their own cohort instead of with the people they’re serving. So, again, no one is saying that the individual malaria net that arrives and saves the life, it’s fantastic, but unfortunately it has to be understood in the context of a distribution of power that is insane. And the core thing that I tried to raise in Winners Take All is how do we understand the ways in which some of these good deeds, not all of them, but some of them, are even as they are helping some people, also doing a second thing, which is shoring up the system that hurts way more people.

And so it’s easy to count the number of people saved by malaria nets. It’s a very easy math to do. It is harder to count the amount of death and suffering that is caused by that country remaining poor because of its debt obligations that the same country that may be donating those nets is refusing to compromise on the debt of. And so I was always up against something very difficult with Winners Take All because people were like, “Here is some help right here. Are you saying this help is bad?” But I think at the end of the day, you just have to look at the outcomes. For all of this help that has been done for all this philanthropy, this $400 billion a year in America spent on philanthropy, does anybody feel like they’re getting a better, healthier distribution of power year by year at the end of that $400 billion?

Do you feel like, okay, they spent $400 billion philanthropically last year, philanthropy meaning for the love of mankind? Does anyone feel the love? And if not, then it raises two possibilities. One, people are delusional or two, which I’m more likely to believe that $400 billion of philanthropy is not quite doing the thing we imagine it may be doing. And it might in fact net, net be doing more to preserve power relations that are morally indefensible, even as it gestures just enough at helping just enough people to keep the whole thing going.

Preet Bharara:

There are various responses just for the sake of understanding where you’re coming from. It’s not clear to me that everybody thinks in terms that you and I might think about them, power structure, relationship to wealth, mobility. These are things that we value and we think are important, but when you ask the question, “Does the $400 billion do X or Y?” The way you formulate it was very articulate. If asked a different way, I don’t know, the recipients of some portion of that, particularly sticking with the malaria example, will have life, who have lived a long life, who have had children and families because of some of that largesse, I don’t know which bargain they would take because life is important.

Anand Giridharadas:

Can I give you one little example that I think you’ll know and relate to? We both have origins, family origins in India, and I remember going to India as a child. I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, go to India. Very, very different society, very different distribution of power. Mostly poor people and then a very small number of people with privilege. And I remember my family was fortunate to be in those privileged ranks. And in those privileged ranks, everybody has servants, cooks, drivers, separate servants who come in and clean the floors in the bathrooms because in the Indian kind of way of thinking, you don’t want the people cooking to also be cleaning bathrooms. You have middle class people in India who have multiple servants.

And in India, there’s this thing that happens. Anytime there’s a kind of calamity, a lot of these servants living in the city by themselves, their family, their children, their wife or husband back in the village somewhere in a rural area, very poor area. There’s no money, no jobs in that area. So, this money is being sent home. And anytime anything goes wrong in the extended clan of one of those servants, someone’s roof caves in, a nephew gets on a motorcycle accident, someone is sick in a hospital, members of the Indian elite unfailingly will give money to that servant, say, send it home to the village, no questions asked, not alone. Just go fix the roof, go get your nephew healed, get a new motorbike.

And you could see it on the surface. And when I was young and looking at that, you could say, “These are very generous people. In America, people are not regularly handing out money to other people to fix their roof. What a generous society.” But the older I got, I realized that it wasn’t a generous society at all because the people doing that ad hoc giving were standing on top of a system that they absolutely insisted on keeping, a system in which there’s no minimum wage effectively for people in those jobs. They work night and day. There’s little bells that are rung and wake them up. No one cares. They sleep on the floor in many people’s houses in the Indian elite. Beautiful food is being had in the house, but they’ll have a giant metal plate just of rice and maybe a little bit of dal, lentil soup.

And so you have these little acts of generosity all the time, your roof, your motorcycle, this and that. But everybody doing those acts of generosity is profoundly committed to nothing changing. And it’s really clear when you look at someone else’s society, I think when you look at our own, it is more like that when you’re talking about the super elite than we’d like to admit.

Preet Bharara:

I’m doing my best here to promote your thinking and thoughts into a philosophy. I don’t know what we would call it, because I keep going back to what your arguments imply larger scale, right? Not everyone will love the following point, but there is, in fact, on the part of the ultra wealthy, no legal, statutory, constitutional obligation to do any of this, not to save people from malaria, not to save people from cancer, not to give them a roof over their heads that doesn’t have leaks in it. And so the philosophical question I have is, and I think there are several that could be, because when I read what you write and I hear what you say, I think, well, what’s the principle on which we require from these people who have so much money that they not only should do things with their power and authority, but particular things, right?

In your mind, a better thing to do would maybe even take up a quixotic fight against how we fund schools rather than solving a malaria problem, that’s fair. Is it that to whom much is given, much is expected, whether that’s wealth, authority, or anything else. And on that score, as a philosophical matter, and maybe you don’t want to delve into this because it’s beyond the scope of conversation, but it’s fascinating to me. If you’re an ordinary person of ordinary means, but you have some extraordinary talent, maybe you have extraordinary political gifts. Is it an abdication of your responsibility to humanity and your fellow citizens in your country or your community not to seek power? Because I’ll tell you, depending on the state, depending on the Senator and depending on the billionaire, pound for pound, a person who can make policy and government can do a lot more than someone can do with a billion dollars. That’s arguably why Michael Bloomberg spent a gazillion dollars and got one electoral vote. But do you care to opine at all on the obligations of other people who are not wealthy?

Anand Giridharadas:

So, I actually, this is going to surprise you.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, no.

Anand Giridharadas:

I actually am not focused at all, nor do I actually think there is much of an obligation of these super elites to do anything. You asked me a setup of if there was such a person with this money, what should they do? So, I can answer that, but I actually would not put any stock or expectation on that happening. I actually have a view of them that I actually think is more honest and frankly freeing for them, which is like, if you are a money making person, just make your money. What I want to have happen is for the rest of us to figure out a distribution of power, a structure of regulation that makes sense for us. I actually think what has gotten very confused is government trying to work on behalf of what business people want and business people trying to solve the social good.

It’s all very confusing. A close friend of mine who’s a French guy, lives in Paris, works in private equity, has done very well for himself. He’s like, every time he comes to America, he’s like, “American business people are crazy.” He’s like, “It is so great being a rich guy in France because you know what? You just try to make money and you don’t have on your conscience that the way you acquired that company is going to take healthcare away from people. On your conscience, should we shift that base of old employees from a defined benefit pension to this, that?”

In France, a business guy can just be a business guy. In America, a business guy is making these kingly decisions about whether people will live or die. It’s a really interesting perspective. I actually want our business people to just be business people. And what people may not realize, but you know very well because you know the law, everything that happens in the economy, everything that happens in capitalism happens in a permission structure, very detailed permission structure of the law, everything that happens, every contract, et cetera, every wage that is paid. So, we don’t need kindness from people who’ve had great fortune in their life. Although if there is some and they actually want to listen to this and do some real system change, fantastic. We don’t need that.

We need to actually reform the permission structure so that there are rules. When you are paying someone, can you do this form of wage theft or can you not? In some countries you can’t. Some countries it’s really easy to. Very simple. It’s just a rule. When you want to bust a union and you see one forming, can you do X, Y, Z or can you not do X, Y, Z? Some countries you can, some countries you can’t. It’s not crazy. It’s just like there’s variety around the world enough to see that you change this rule, you get this outcome. Vinod Khosla, one of the most successful fellow Indian American, one of most successful venture capitalists.

Preet Bharara:

Been a guest on this show.

Anand Giridharadas:

He is someone who is very much in this world, but he sees it from outside also. He’s an insider outsider in many ways. He said to me once, “What a lot of my peers, his peers don’t understand is that capitalism exists by permission of democracy.” What that means is there is nothing stopped. There’s nothing unlawful about a 95% capital gains tax and marginal income tax. Nothing unlawful about it. It could be an unwise policy choice, but if everyone wanted to do it or 95% of people want to do it, it could be done. So, you wouldn’t have a lot of capitalism left after that. Capitalism exists by permission of democracy. So, there will be people who have more and people who have less. But at some point, the people in the bubble of capitalism and stewarding it, if you lose all the people on the outside, they’re not going to give you permission anymore.

They’re not going to renew your permission. And my warning to those people would be, you now have in both parties, people running against you. Donald Trump fraudulently and some people on the left more seriously, but the idea that there’s a wealthy, powerful elite that is rigging the system to the exclusion of most people has now become an issue of consensus in American life in a way that it was not when you and I were growing up in this country. And so capitalism exists by permission of democracy.

If you push people and push people and push people so that they feel like they can’t afford to have their arm break once a decade or get pneumonia once a decade and survive economically, but you can fail at your cabinet job, get a hedge fund job while president of Harvard parlay your failures deregulating the economy into a job as Obama’s chief economic advisor, consort with a pedophile monster and just expect to enjoy continued fame, glory, adulation, and resources showered on you. People are at some point are going to say enough with this whole thing. And I think that’s what they are saying. And I think there’s great wisdom in this feeling that people are having and we ought to listen to it.

Preet Bharara:

I think the person you’ve made reference to the most from the five days of email reading you did was Larry Summers. Why is that?

Anand Giridharadas:

Because I think Larry Summers, there was a lot of people I encountered in the emails who appeared kind of in one capacity. There are scientists who are dealing with Epstein sharing science factoids and like a lot of rich guys, he has like his little like science theories and then he runs them by the scientists and they share their research and they kind of share research tidbits that like a very rich guy would like. What if climate change is actually a great way to deal with overpopulation? These kind of like rich guy asides, which if you’ve been like locked in the bathroom at the TED Conference for a few minutes, you’ve heard these kinds of asides and comments. But Larry Summers was one of the people who I think was most illustrative because he operated and operates and operated across so many kind of silos of the elite and interacted with Epstein in a lot of these different ways.

So, he is the intersection of the educated elite in this country. As president of Harvard, obviously fundraising, dealing with billionaires, dealing with wealthy people, he was someone who moonlighted, the New York Times reported, he moonlighted for a hedge fund while he was president of Harvard. I remember at the time thinking, what a profound story, right? You think about Harvard, hundreds of years of history and you could just imagine the people who ran Harvard first few hundred years would have never thought that they needed another job, that that job’s such a demanding job, important job, life, world shaping job. Only in our time would someone feel like they also need to work at a hedge fund while running Harvard.

Preet Bharara:

Is it the fact that he worked at a hedge fund or the fact that he had a second job or both?

Anand Giridharadas:

It was the fact that he felt he needed to do any other job because he was certainly being paid enough and there were problems of plenty to think about, but it was the fact that we live in such a financialized, greed crazed society that a man feels a need when … You know what those jobs are like. You don’t have a spare 15 minutes. You have so many things, you have so many departments that are not getting your attention, so many problems that are not getting your attention. You’re finding time just to make some extra money. Again, it’s not about personal blame, these little signs of our culture that you get a glimpse of a whole culture that we live in a time in which a president of the most important university in the world didn’t feel that job was enough and that it was important also to help guide investing, to help engage in investing.

Preet Bharara:

So, can I share here my own personal email exchanges with Larry Summers?

Anand Giridharadas:

Yes, can’t wait.

Preet Bharara:

They’re not as crazy as some of the things that you read and we’ve consulted with the lawyers. I think it’s fine for me to read these to you and I just want to get your reaction. So, we tried to get Larry Summers on the show, like lots of people try to get him on their show. And so back in April, someone suggested to me that if you want Larry Summers to be on your podcast, you have to ask him directly. If you have a staff person or representative or you delegate it, he will not respond.

And at the time, lots of stuff was going on with the economy and the tariffs were going on. I thought he’d be an interesting voice to have. And I wrote to him, “Dear Larry,” and I wrote The long paragraph is very polite. The first sentence is, “I hope you are well in these tumultuous times.” Talked about my podcast, which I’m sure he may or may not have been aware of, but he certainly was aware of me. I made reference to a mutual friend who was jauntly written, I thought pretty persuasive, asking him to please consider being on the podcast. And I mentioned some other illustrious guests we’d had in the podcast, including in the economic field. You know what his response was?

Anand Giridharadas:

What’s that?

Preet Bharara:

How many listeners do you have? What do you make of that?

Anand Giridharadas:

Everything. Gosh. That’s everything.

Preet Bharara:

While you’re thinking, I drafted a response. My draft response was, “A lot more listeners than the podcast you’ve been going on.”

Anand Giridharadas:

Okay. But this is such a … I love that you pulled that out because-

Preet Bharara:

But I didn’t send that. I didn’t send that. That was just me being annoyed and being full of myself.

Anand Giridharadas:

No, I don’t think that was either annoyed or full of yourself. I think that is a valid response.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it was considered impolite. So, then, to just finish, and then I’ll let you opine. So, the crack team at Stay Tuned, behind the scenes going to take down the fourth wall, said, “No, you can’t send that one.” I’m like, “I don’t know. He might’ve liked it.” And they said, “Send an actual polite response.” And I answered the question with some facts and figures, and it’s a very popular podcast, and here’s why, and here’s some of our download numbers. And then he responded within minutes simply and transactionally, “I’ll do it.” As an expert and understanding human nature from the reading of emails, what do you glean from that?

Anand Giridharadas:

I mean, you said it right at the end, transactional, which is a word we might throw around, but I think of you as someone, you and I might have differences of philosophy and perspective as we’ve aired in this hour. And yet I think of you as someone who you have to be living under a rock to not know some of the things you’ve done and some of the things you stand for, to know some of the stands you’ve taken that permanently endangered you, you took them anyway. None of that … Let’s try to do it nonjudgmentally. None of what you have done in your life, Preet … The things you’ve done in your life matter to me. And if I found out your podcast had one listener like-

Preet Bharara:

You’d still come on.

Anand Giridharadas:

The things you’ve done in your life would matter to me infinitely more than that number. You have to get into the frame of mind of a person for whom the kinds of things you’ve done in your life, public service, taking inconvenient stands for justice against a corrupt and dangerous president, they simply don’t count a lot for someone like that because it is about what you can do for them. And nothing you’ve done in your life is on its own something you can do for Larry. What can be done for Larry is only conveyed by the numbers you could offer him, the reach you could offer him.

So, if you take the judgment out of it and any contempt I might feel for him out of it, you’re getting a glimpse sort of as the emails did for me in general with this group of people. You’re getting a glimpse into how someone like that is thinking, how they’re processing. And then it helps you to understand when … By the way, he was very cold to you in that email, but I’ve seen him emailing with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender. I want to say to you, Preet, he never took that tone with a convicted sex offender.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not even the tone. So, just on a non 30,000-foot level, I don’t know anyone, I don’t know anyone of any stature or not of stature, whatever that means, who would respond to an email like the one I sent, whether from a big podcast or a small podcast, without even like one sort of general human nicety. “Hey, how are you? Good evening. Great to hear from you. How’s it going? Or sincerely or best regards.” Even the bullshit that gets put in an email automatically by AI. I don’t mean to overstate it about the email.

Anand Giridharadas:

No, no. I think you’re getting onto something very important actually.

Preet Bharara:

But I’ve thought, and who knows, Larry Summers may be the president of the world and deport me to India because of the second chance rule on the part of elites, but I don’t care about that. A little thing like, you can’t say thank you, you can’t say,” You’re so busy. You have so many jobs that someone, me or one of a million people, you don’t say thank you. There’s no pleasantry at all, but pleasantries abound, am I correct, Anand, with one Jeffrey Epstein?

Anand Giridharadas:

What you’re saying about the lack of kind of even just basic human interchange with you, it sounds trivial and I want to explain to people my theory of why it is not trivial at all. Okay? And so this is really important to understand. So, one piece of evidence we have is like the way he’s interacting with you. Another is that the thing that’s gotten the most attention in the emails regarding Larry Summers is his pursuit of dating advice, extramarital dating advice from a convicted sex offender and Jeffrey Epstein to try to seduce this young woman, Chinese economist apparently reportedly. And there’s been a bunch of stuff around that. And it’s interesting to read these emails.

I mean, forget the kind of moral component of it that many people will bring to it. It’s just really interesting to see. Once again, I would say the same lack of human understanding that you found in one way is also reflected in the flirtation emails. And it is almost like a 12-year-old boy, just like the skill level at talking to people, connecting people, understanding what people mean when they say a thing. It was like a 12-year-old boy writing to a convicted sex offender, maybe in his mind like, “Sex offender, he must know a lot about sex.” It almost felt like, I mean, I’m not joking like-

Preet Bharara:

I know, you don’t mean it as a joke.

Anand Giridharadas:

The way TV bookers are working quickly and they’re like, “Oh yeah, he knows about that.” It’s like, “Who would know a lot about my situation with a girl? Oh, maybe the sex offender.” So, he’s emailing him and he’s asking these really 12 year old boy level questions. Here’s why I think it’s actually profound. You’re getting this evidence that someone who has had that kind of power over what shape is education taken the world? What shape does the economy take? How should our regulations be structured? Who should be punished? Who should be bailed out in the wake of a finance? Someone who’s really making these decisions that are all too human, that absolutely ricochet through, spread through, saturate human lives. And you’re getting a glimpse of how I don’t think it’s just him. I think you could … I’ve met Sam Altman. I would say the same about Sam Altman from OpenAI.

I’ve met a lot of these people in different worlds of that elite. A lot of these people making these decisions that end up affecting a lot of humanity are actually some of our people with the least fluent human understanding. A lot of the people making decisions for all of society are the most socially awkward people we have. A lot of people making decisions about the future of humanity don’t seem to exhibit much humanity themselves. And so your seemingly superficial point about the way he was seeing you, treating you, not seeing you, I would argue you got a glimpse of a mentality that must have been the same mentality in the room when he was deregulating the economy. Must have been the same mentality. I don’t think he has another brain available to him, unless there’s been some technology I don’t know about. The same brain that couldn’t see you as a human being in that email interaction, or that had a 12-year-old boy understanding of how to seduce someone outside of marriage.

That same brain was the brain deciding whether you got a homeowner’s bailout in 2008, 2009, 2010, or the bank’s got a bailout. That brain is the brain that is deciding in other people whether we’re going to do AI this way or whether we’re going to do AI in a way that is actually better for your community. There is a kind of brain that doesn’t see human beings very well, and we have somehow made the insane choice to elevate that kind of brain, the very kind of brain that emailed you and couldn’t see you as a person. We have somehow chosen in so many spheres of American life to elevate that brain to being the chief deciders about the future of humanity.

Preet Bharara:

Anand Giridharadas, thank you, sir. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for your insight.

Anand Giridharadas:

Thank you for having me. Thanks for the chat.

Preet Bharara:

Talk soon. My conversation with Anand Giridharadas continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and the physical attribute Anand thinks contributed to his rise.

Anand Giridharadas:

The smile is important, not just as a physical gesture, obviously, but as I think of a kind of powerful thing metaphorically and rhetorically, because I think progressives in general have, as a movement, have had an affect problem.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about President Trump’s meeting with New York City’s newly elected mayor and about how the Senate passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in less than a day.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Laura who writes, “I was surprised at how quickly the Senate passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. I read that they used a procedure called unanimous consent. Can you explain what that means, how it works, and why the Senate would choose to use it?” Laura, thanks for your question. I actually have a fair bit of experience with unanimous consent from my time working in the Senate, so I’m glad you asked. It’s a term that reporters and journalists bandy about, but it’s good to take a moment to explain what it means.

Now, as you probably know, the vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act came amid a lot of intense public pressure. Polling from Marist, for example, found that more than three quarters of Americans support releasing the Epstein files. Amid that public support, the House advanced a bill that would legally compel the Justice Department to release the files and the vote in the House, 427 to one. Then as you know from Schoolhouse Rock, the bill had to move to the Senate, where many expected it to stall for quite a while. Instead, the Senate acted with remarkable speed. Just hours after the House vote, the Senate approved the bill also using the very procedure you mentioned, unanimous consent. So, what is unanimous consent? Well, it’s a little bit apparent from what the words mean. It’s essentially a procedural shortcut, one that the Senate relies on far more often than people realize.

Unanimous consent allows the Senate to fast track a piece of legislation that has broad bipartisan support. So, instead of moving through all the usual steps like extended debate, roll call votes or opportunities for amendments, the Senate can agree to waive those requirements as long as no senator objects, not a single senator can object. In practice, when a senator asks for unanimous consent to take up or pass a bill, a single I object, is enough to stop the request. If anyone has a problem, the chamber shifts back to the regular and much slower legislative process. There’s another dynamic worth mentioning. Passing a bill by unanimous consent also means senators don’t have to cast an on the-record vote. Maybe they’re not in favor of the bill or not in favor for the nominee, but they don’t have to put that on the record because that might be politically bad for them.

They simply refrain from objecting. That can sometimes be a deliberate strategy when lawmakers want something to pass, but prefer not to have their members take a recorded vote on it. I have one bit of personal experience with the method of unanimous consent. That’s how I got confirmed to the United States Attorney back in August of 2009. But getting back to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, President Trump, as he said he would, signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act the next day. Now the Department of Justice has 30 days to release all unclassified Epstein-related records. Whether the administration follows through promptly or follows through at all is something we’ll have to watch, but the clock is ticking. Stay tuned. This question comes in a voicemail from Vanessa.

Listener Vanessa:

Hey, Preet. I’m calling today because I watched the White House Oval Office meeting between Mamdani and Trump and noted something that you’ve long comment on that Trump never laughs. But in that meeting with Mamdani, he was laughing, and dare I say, joshing with Zohran Mamdani. And I wanted to hear your thoughts about the dynamic and the politics and the optics.

Preet Bharara:

Vanessa, I really love this question and you make a very astute observation. I have said many times over the years that one very substantial peculiarity about Donald Trump among many is that generally speaking, he has never been seen to laugh or almost never. I’ve never really seen him laugh and many people aside from me have noticed this. Back in 2016, the nation ran a piece actually entitled, Have You Ever Seen Donald Trump Laugh? It pointed out that aside from a couple of isolated moments, Trump has almost never caught laughing on camera. And even people who’ve known him for years say it’s rare to see him genuinely laugh. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, has also made this point. She said that her uncle doesn’t laugh and that neither did his father, Fred Trump. In her view, when you were able to laugh, you’re also letting your guard down, and that was frowned upon.

But during Donald Trump’s recent Oval Office meeting with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, he actually did the thing we almost never see. He let his guard down. He looked relaxed, he joked around, and at a few moments, he actually appeared to laugh out loud. For example, when a reporter asked Mamdani whether he still believes Trump is a fascist, Trump jumped in with this.

Zohran Mamdani:

I’ve spoken about-

Donald Trump:

That’s okay. You can just say yes.

Zohran Mamdani:

Okay.

Donald Trump:

It’s easier. It’s easier than explaining it. I don’t mind.

Preet Bharara:

And later.

Reporter:

Why did you fly here? Aren’t trains greener?

Zohran Mamdani:

I’ll use every form of transit and I want to make sure that they’re all affordable in New York City, and that’s why making buses fast and free is a centerpiece of our work.

Reporter:

There is a bus that goes-

Donald Trump:

I know, but if he flew, that’s a lot quicker too. I mean, he’s working very hard. For him to be, that’s a very long drive. I’ll stick up for you. The plane takes you 30 minutes and driving takes you almost-

Preet Bharara:

So, it turns out the president, interestingly, won’t laugh with his cabinet. He doesn’t appear to laugh with his own children on camera, but he will laugh at the socialist mayor elect, Zohran Mamdani. Now, it remains really interesting to me, this failure to laugh because clearly, whether you like him or not, Trump has a sense of humor. While he doesn’t himself laugh, he does like to make other people laugh. His comic timing has been commented on. There are occasions where he’s gotten a laugh out of me, not in recent years, but in the past. I actually discussed this observation and the difference between laughing and smiling with Anand and the bonus segment for insiders. Anyway, on a more substantive level, the meeting between Trump and Mamdani is truly interesting. Did they hit it off temporarily? Will they have a good relationship going forward after the lead up and all the kinds of things that Trump and MAGA Republicans have been saying about the mayor elect of New York City? But if you watched it, whether it was genuine or part of some larger strategy, it was pretty interesting. And the question is, can we rightly quote Casablanca? I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Anand Giridharadas. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky, @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenaway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.