Preet Bharara:

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

Evan Osnos:

He said as much to me when I interviewed him in the Oval Office, he felt like he had earned this, meaning, that his record in office was such that, as he said to me, “Any other president in my position, with the economy where it is, with the legislation where it is, they would be running for re-election.”

Preet Bharara:

That’s Evan Osnos. He’s a journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers a range of topics, from domestic politics to foreign governments to espionage. He’s also the author of three books, one of which is a 2020 biography of Joseph R. Biden. Osnos spent significant time with the sitting president and is quite familiar with his inner world. A few weeks ago, Osnos published a new profile of Biden in The New Yorker called “Joe Biden’s Last Campaign.” In it, he details the thoughts and strategies guiding the 2024 trail, from Biden’s age, to his policy successes, to his marketing battles. We’ll talk about all that, plus Osnos gives insight on swing state politics, abortion at the polls, and Biden’s ability to prove people wrong. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Taylor, who asks, “What do you think about the reports that Fani Willis plans to personally try her case against Trump?” That’s a great question. Obviously, you’re referring to the DA in Fulton County, Georgia, who has brought a case against Donald Trump for election interference in the Georgia election in 2020. And the reports are pretty credible that she’s planning to take a major role in the courtroom, not just from her office overseeing the trial. According to a CBS News report by Dan Klaidman, “She has all but taken over the case personally, focusing intensely on legal strategy and getting her team in fighting form for trial. In a significant move along these lines, according to a source close to her, Willis has decided to play a leading courtroom role herself in the sprawling conspiracy case against Donald Trump and 14 co-defendants.”

The article also reports, “Willis is seriously considering handling opening statements for the prosecution and examining key witnesses herself.” There’s also a mention of the fact that Willis will be the primary point of contact for defense lawyers in any future plea negotiations. So what do I make of that? I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, by all accounts, Fani Willis is an able and adept prosecutor, a good trial lawyer, a seasoned and experienced one at that. She has personally tried a number of cases to verdict, including complicated multi-defendant cases that involve the RICO statute, which is one of the statutes that’s involved here in the case against Trump and his co-defendants. So she certainly has the chops, she certainly has the experience, she certainly has the background to try a case of this magnitude and this complexity.

On the other hand, she is the sitting district attorney of a large and sprawling office, and I always thought when I was US attorney, and this is just speaking for me, that it would be a bit of an indulgence to decide to push some other folks aside, career prosecutors aside, and prosecute a case, either big or small, in the courtroom myself personally, because I had an office of hundreds of people, with lots of other priorities as well. Now, it is true I never had a case as big and as high stakes as the prosecution of a former President of the United States, but still, that’s my parochial bias. In addition, Fani Willis is not some unknown career prosecutor. She herself is someone about whom people have formed strong opinions, and it may be the case that you can weed that out during the voir dire process during jury selection.

But it is true that given that sideshow we saw a few weeks ago, with respect to her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, whether you like it or not, there are going to be people in the jury pool who have a negative impression of Fani Willis rather than a neutral one. Whether you can screen that out fully and totally remains a question, but it is a risk that’s not necessarily one that you want to take on. It also may be the case that when a sitting district attorney who’s become quite famous, whose personality is now quite known, decides to personally try a case, it risks that the trial becomes a little bit more about her than about the proceedings themselves, especially because this trial is one of the four criminal cases that we expect to be televised.

And finally, to the extent… and I don’t know if this is true, and I don’t mean to cast aspersions, but to the extent that Fani Willis is undertaking to personally try this matter because she sees it as a way to rehabilitate herself, or as a path to some sort of redemption after being attacked by Donald Trump and his team and by other co-defendants and being pretty strongly criticized, to the extent that is a reason she wants to personally try the case, I don’t think it’s a great reason. And if at the end of the day, Fani Willis, in good faith and with an open mind, believes that she’s the best person to be in the courtroom, take on the major jury addresses, take on the major witnesses, if she thinks that that is so, then it’s her right and in her discretion she can choose to try the case. We’ll see how it goes.

This question comes in an email from Laurie who asks, “Hi, Preet, I want to ask a question about the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the cases related to the abortion drug Mifepristone. There was a lot of talk about the issue of standing. What is that and why is it important?” Well, that’s a really important question, one that first year law students have to grapple with in civil procedure and law schools around the country. And you’re right, it was at the center of the arguments in the Supreme Court last week about the fate of Mifepristone around the country. The idea of standing is basically that a litigant, a party who’s trying to bring an action in a court in the United States based on the constitution, has to really have skin in the game, has to have a reason why that person specifically and concretely, not generally and speculatively, has a claim, there’s really a controversy.

It’s a principle of US law that people who are just concerned bystanders, who don’t have a stake in the claim, have not been directly injured in some way, they don’t get to go into court to file a lawsuit. There are various rationales for why someone has to meet the threshold requirement of standing before one can file a suit. One, obviously, is judicial economy. If everyone, everywhere, at all times, in every jurisdiction, could file a suit because they didn’t like a particular law, or the way a particular law had been interpreted, or the way somebody had treated some other party, even if they’re not a party, would quickly overrun the court system. More fundamentally, based on the text and structure of our government and the Constitution, there’s a separation of powers issue. Generally speaking, our jurisprudence says that it’s the political branches that are responsible for things like vindicating the public interest, or righting wrongs, unless there is a particular concrete non-speculative controversy between two parties.

As the Supreme Court wrote in the case from 1923, where there is no standing, for a court to decide a matter, would force the court to assume a position of authority over the governmental act of another and co-equal department, an authority which the court Says,” we plainly do not possess.” So what does it mean to have standing? Well, there’s a famous case from 1992 that, again, law students learn about every year, called Lujan. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. And basically, there’s a three part test. And unlike many other areas of the law, this has a common-sense aspect to it. One, the party who’s seeking redress must have suffered an injury that’s actually an injury, concrete, and particular, and actual, not conjecture or hypothetical.

Second, there has to be a causal connection, an actual nexus, between the injury that the person has suffered and the challenged conduct of the defendant. You have to be able to show that the actual concrete injury that you have suffered is fairly traceable to the other person’s conduct. And then third, and equally importantly, it has to be likely as opposed to just speculative, that the injury can be fixed or redressed by a favorable decision to the plaintiff. So you need to have an injury, there has to be a causal connection, and redress has to be likely. And if all those standards are not met, you don’t have standing, and you don’t have your day in court. I’ll be right back with my conversation with Evan Osnos.

THE INTERVIEW

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden’s 2020 biography. He’s looked behind closed doors to the Biden campaign, and is here to tell us what he saw. Didn’t I suggest to you that if you did a podcast, you should have Osnosis in it?

Evan Osnos:

That really was an excellent idea-

Preet Bharara:

Running by Osnosis.

Evan Osnos:

And I stole that, and I’ve stashed it away for when I have the confidence to actually do it.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like the name I have for my band, which-

Evan Osnos:

What is it?

Preet Bharara:

The E-Preet Band, which just stowed away for that time in my 60s when I started a band, even though I had no musical ability whatsoever.

Evan Osnos:

That shouldn’t stand in the way. The concept is everything. I am-

Preet Bharara:

With AI, I can do it.

Evan Osnos:

That’s true. That’s true. You can just hum a few bars and it’ll write an entire EP for you.

Preet Bharara:

All right. Now, we’re going to go from fun stuff to this, politics. Evan Osnos, welcome back to the show.

Evan Osnos:

Thanks, Preet. I’m glad to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

So when we were chit-chatting before we hit the record button, I said to you that if you had said to me… the last time you and I spoke at great length about Joe Biden and his presidency, if you had said it was a year ago, I would’ve believed you. It was three years ago. Where has the time gone, Evan?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I would attribute this to our advancing age, but I do think there’s something specific about this period. It is a particularly disorienting time. Doesn’t it feel that way?

Preet Bharara:

It does. So let me ask you this way, we spoke at great length, as I just mentioned, at the start of the presidency, and there were big hopes, big aspirations to do big things, and pass big pieces of legislation. And a lot of that has happened. In a word, how has the last three years gone for Joe Biden, and can we find the answer to that in the polls, and the fact that we have a very, very, very close matchup? So has it gone well or has it not gone well?

Evan Osnos:

Well, I think it’s worth addressing the first question, which is actually there is something strangely disorienting about the time of the last couple of years. And I think that has to do with a piece of the explanation about how he is regarded, which is that we are still, in our own way, I think, reckoning with the psychological overhang from COVID. It was so disorienting and profound, it really screwed up our whole conception of time. And in the beginning of his presidency, there was this long period where we were all still living through COVID, after all, I remember it was still all the way back in the beginning of 2021. And for the first few months that was the preoccupation, there was still this strange period of getting over Trump. So time was… it felt a little bit suspended.

And then I do think there was a fundamental change, a phase shift in his presidency that happened in the summer of 2021. And two things happened then, one, you began to see inflation grow, and two, you had the pullout from Afghanistan go so badly, and so publicly badly. And as a result, those two things really began to shift the course of the presidency. And we’re going to talk in detail about what’s happened, but I think you can’t really understand his presidency without recognizing the way that those two factors began to bend the political curve for him in a way that he’s still trying to recover from.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So let’s take the first one. Logic and common sense would dictate that if three or four years ago, we were in the throes of the pandemic in a very serious way, lots and lots of people were dying, there were lots of lockdowns, people were unhappy, the economy was uncertain, now, fast-forward three years, the pandemic still persists, but it is not what it used to be, the economy is thriving, and the pandemic and all of its associated harms, and ills, and catastrophes are a thing of the past, why wouldn’t the mood of the country be ebullient, and why wouldn’t the guy who was at the helm during that transformation, whether he was deserving of it or not, why wouldn’t he be lifted up and hoisted up on the shoulders of Americans who would be praising him to the heavens? If I had told you three years ago that this is what America would look like three years later, wouldn’t the logical conclusion be that he was going to roll into re-election?

Evan Osnos:

Yes, is the answer.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So what is going on?

Evan Osnos:

Well, I think one of the biggest misjudgments we had about ourselves almost as a species is the way that we would respond to the COVID experience. You remember there was this feeling, this optimistic theory, that initially, COVID itself would pull us together, that there would be that binding effect, and it would almost be like a wartime scenario, we would find ourselves against a common enemy and that that would have a powerful sociological effect. That of course did not happen. The opposite happened. It actually divided us. It revealed us. And so that’s one piece, and that’s a part of laying out what happened. So the fact that it did not pull us together meant then also that a lot of our judgments about what would come after turned out to be suspect. And one of the things we thought would happen after is that the economy would be in this long-term state of ruin. And of course, that did not happen either. What actually happened was something else, which is that you had very intense inflation that grew faster than conventional economics would suggest you would want.

And certainly, all the political voices would say, “You don’t want inflation like that.” But there was actually a rationale for it within the White House. And it’s a controversial argument, but their view was we should allow more inflation in order to have less unemployment, because the inflation will be felt mostly by people at the upper end of the income scale, meaning, that corporations and people like that would be complaining of it but the unemployment would fall mostly on people at the bottom and they would be hurt, and they are usually overlooked in moments like that.

Preet Bharara:

I want to get to the supposed recession in a moment because I have a couple of things to say about that, but going back to COVID, is the reason that the country doesn’t feel the way you might’ve predicted, and certainly doesn’t feel the way, overall, towards Joe Biden the way you might’ve predicted that there’s a lingering hangover in the part of many people about the lockdowns, the scope of the lockdowns, the shifting stance on masks, and other things. Is that just what has caused people not to be euphoric?

Evan Osnos:

Well, that’s part of it on the right and the center right. And then I think there’s something else, which is that… there was a great term I saw actually in the Wall Street Journal, a piece was describing our general sense of dyspepsia, and the term was referred pain, in many ways, that a lot of the things that are making us unhappy in our lives, we attach them to the people in power. Rightly, on some level, there’s no question about it. When we look at our government, we say, “Why aren’t we generally happier?” And the answer is a lot of things. But part of it is that I think, yes, there has been a realization that the lockdowns had this long-term effect, particularly on kids in school, and that is felt across the ideological spectrum. I think there’s a growing sense of that, I don’t think we would handle the pandemic the same way if it happened tomorrow. But I also think there’s just a general feeling that is not unique to the United States.

One of the things you have to look at is favorability of leaders across the G7 around the world, and you find that actually most of them are less popular than Joe Biden. This is not exculpatory, and I feel like I have to say that right away, Preet, because it can sound as if I’m trying to say, “Well, it’s not Biden’s fault.” No, look, part of your job is to provide moral and charismatic inspiration, and part of the challenge for him is that they have actually performed very well on a technical basis of what it means to do the presidency. And what is harder and what will be a real priority over the course of the next seven, eight months is to also regain a piece of what was a big piece of the 2020 success story, was that they were able in his way to make people say, “This man is decent, this man is good.” And perhaps most importantly, and this is one of the pieces of politics that is hardest to generate and engineer, is to make people say, “This man is on my side. This man is on my side.”

And I think that is one of the reasons why there is this broad sense of dissatisfaction, is that people look at politics and basically say, “I’m not sure anyone’s on my side right now at the top.”

Preet Bharara:

I want to point out for the record, that when you use a word exculpatory with a former prosecutor, that is a form of pandering. I don’t use that word with other people on other podcasts.

Evan Osnos:

As a non-lawyer, I’m trying to inhabit the mind of my interviewer here, like a guy in an interrogation booth.

Preet Bharara:

No, you prepped very well. You prepped very well. Is there a sense that people’s political reputations are completely divorced from what they’ve actually done, and what they’re responsible for, and how things are going more so than ever before?

Evan Osnos:

I do think so. The worst cliche about our public culture is to say that the internet has completely ruined our capacity to process information, except that there are these very specific ways that we see it playing out that just demand explication. It’s just fascinating to see how the fact that we don’t have a news culture that you get to the end of the day… and I don’t mean to be nostalgic about this, there were a lot of problems with the way we used to get our news 25 years ago, but it is a fact that we are in the infancy of an existence in which we are inundated with information on such a relentless basis that our brains just simply have not adapted to the ability to process it. In addition to not being a lawyer, I’m not a scientist, but it feels a little bit like we are just as a species not yet adapted to processing so much information coming in and being able to logically sort it into the category that says, “This is Joe Biden’s fault, and this is not Joe Biden’s fault.”

And as a result, we end up, when somebody calls us on the phone, and says, “How do you feel about this guy for president?” We don’t logically answer it by saying, “Well, how do I feel about him in relation to Donald Trump? Who is the alternative?” We answer it by saying, “I’m not happy about all kinds of things, and therefore, I’m not happy about him.”

Preet Bharara:

Okay. I want to talk about this would be recession based on what you just said. So clearly, it’s the case that a determination as to whose fault something is or who gets some credit for something is within the province of the voter, and they can decide logically or illogically to lay blame at someone’s feet or give credit to someone. On the other hand, it is up to the candidate, in this case, Joe Biden, to seize the microphone and take credit, whether it’s deserved or not, for things that, traditionally speaking, any politician worth his salt would’ve taken credit for. So I’m going to quote from this fantastic article you wrote some weeks ago in the New Yorker, Joe Biden’s Last Campaign. With respect to the prospect of recession, you write, quote, “Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, said that a recession was almost inevitable. Biden repeatedly disputed the idea even as a consensus formed. In December,” and this is 2022 you’re talking about, “in December, a Financial Times survey of economists found that 85% predicted a recession within a year. Bloomberg Economics calculated the odds at 100%.” End quote.

Why isn’t Joe Biden, and why isn’t every Joe Biden surrogate, every day, on the hour, like a cuckoo clock, why are they not exclaiming, “I’m the guy who averted the recession, but for me, there would be a recession. No other president has ever accomplished that. Everyone in the known universe predicted a recession and great economic pain, and I got us out of that. On that basis alone, vote for me”? Why isn’t that happening… or is that happening and I’m missing it?

Evan Osnos:

There’s two things going on. One is… and I think it’s worth just really lingering for a second on how vast the wrongness was in the serious economist community, that is just an extraordinary fact. And I don’t think that there’s been an adequate process of self-examination.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, nobody should ever predict anything as 100% or 0%. Bloomberg Economics calculated the odds at 100%. I feel that way about these weather apps. Every once in a while, you see the weather app says 0% chance of rain, and it’s actually raining. The guy running the app should look out the window. Your range of prediction… this is the pre-theory of economics, I guess, or statistics, should always be between 5 and 95%. Nothing zero, nothing 100. Okay, continue.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I think that’s what you call a statistical get-out-of-jail-free card, when the moment arrives-

Preet Bharara:

You’re doing it again-

Evan Osnos:

Well, that’s totally shameless, I know.

Preet Bharara:

Exculpatory jail.

Evan Osnos:

So there’s two things going on. One is, you do actually hear a lot of Biden’s surrogates, and occasionally, you do hear Biden himself, and he said as much to me when I interviewed him in the Oval Office, they are very pleased about the economic performance. In fact-

Preet Bharara:

Okay, you just said occasionally. That makes my point.

Evan Osnos:

Okay, they could be doing it more relentlessly. But here’s what’s happening too, which is that within that top line, excellent performance of the economy, which is far beyond anything that even serious people predicted, I should say most serious people predicted, proving are never predict with 100% fidelity what the result will be, but they are also contending with the reality that your average consumer goes into the store and they are still facing grocery costs that are, let’s say, 25% above what they were before. And people feel that in a real way, and that you cannot wish it away. And I think the political wisdom on this is don’t tell people they’re wrong about things in their economic lives that feel right. And that is a communications issue. You do have to figure out how to get there, but you can’t… as the old saying goes, you can’t jawbone somebody into feeling better about their grocery bill.

Preet Bharara:

No, but you can… look, that has never stopped Donald Trump for taking credit for everything. And although I don’t agree with his political style, rhetoric, tactics, or policies, and a bunch more things, I think it was effective. You quote… I forget who it is, in your New Yorker article, from Republican strategists, and I don’t want to upset my democratic friends and campaign folks, but I’m quoting from this other person who you cite in the article. It’s saying, “Why don’t Democrats have their act together in terms of message? It’s not rocket science, right?” She says. Isn’t that a valid criticism, at least on this point of the non-recession? Just imagine if Donald Trump had presided over a period where everyone predicted a recession, it didn’t happen, he would be saying it nonstop, and it would have some effect.

Evan Osnos:

It’s true. And you have stock market performance that is at one historic high after another. This is a fact, and it was a former Republican strategist who told me, and I love this phrasing, she said, “I’ve never, after all these years of working against Democrats, understood why they cannot,” as she put it, and this is going to sound like pandering, “prosecute a case against Republicans with a knife in their teeth.”

Preet Bharara:

Are you playing a secret drinking game? Every time you use a law enforcement term, Osnos takes a sip.

Evan Osnos:

By the end of this, I hope to have a JD. I think that’s how it works.

Preet Bharara:

Or a hangover.

Evan Osnos:

That’s right. But I love that image. And it’s true, there’s something to it, why not prosecute a case with a knife in the teeth? And I think the answer… you can get into the realm of the different conceptions of truth and how you furnish the details of that. But on some level, Democrats are encumbered by the instinct, and I heard this from voters in many places, to want to elaborate on things rather than just state them clearly, pithily, and… Well, when we look back on the recent history of Democratic Party communications, the high point, the apex was hope and change, which was elegant, and clear, and inspiring, and harder to replicate than it sounds. But that’s the goal in these kinds of processes.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Evan Osnos after this. Isn’t it weird that one of the slogans being used by the Republicans who support Trump is, “Are you better off or worse off than four years ago?” And again, the logic of it escapes me. In what way, literally, can people, using any reasonable metric and good faith analysis, say that they were better off four years ago? Is it because culturally, they were better off four years ago or the direction of the country? And they must use it because it must have some resonance, and it does have some resonance. How on earth does it have resonance?

Evan Osnos:

There’s something really interesting, and I’m glad you picked up on that, that I’ve been thinking about this strange muscle memory that we have when it comes to how we engage with politics. This is part of how Republicans are saying to each other today, “Well, a Republican in office would be handling the economy much better than Joe Biden.” And you say, “Well, stop, because there is literally no way in which the economy could be performing at a higher level.”

Preet Bharara:

Well, other than inflation, I guess their argument is, when they say we were better four years ago, they say our position in the world was stronger, there was no war in the Middle East, there was no war in Ukraine, and we didn’t have the inflation problem. Those three facts are true, but are they able to be glued together in a way that should, in a rational world and with a rational voting public, and maybe that’s the answer, maybe they’re not rational, should those be able to be cobbled together to be a very powerful, resonant message?

Evan Osnos:

Well, look, you have to put this in the binary, because it is pretty hard to make a case that you would not have had substantial inflation even under a Republican president during COVID. And now, we can talk about the democratic difference, the way they handled it, but as I lay on this piece, global supply was a huge piece of the equation and a larger piece than we recognized at the time, basically, the disruption of the supply chain and labor supply during the pandemic. War in the Middle East and war in Ukraine, neither of these happened because of a Democratic president. And it’s very hard to imagine how Donald Trump would’ve done anything to deter Vladimir Putin from anything except an even more extravagant attack on Ukraine.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but the Trump voters don’t believe any of that. They believe, and Trump says counterfactually, if he had been president, those things wouldn’t have happened. So Joe Biden gets the blame for inflation and no credit for reverting the recession.

Evan Osnos:

Well, you have to parse out Trump voters as a concept, because it includes one portion that is essentially dug in and would believe him… we’ll call them the shoot-him-on-Fifth-Avenue people, and they are completely convinced that whatever Donald Trump says is gospel. But that’s not 48% of the country, and I think we have to remember that. And I’ve seen various estimates, there are very smart people who look in tremendous detail at the underlying micro divisions within these communities, and they’ll say, “Let’s assume it’s about a third of the country.” That’s a huge amount of people. But those people were never going to vote for Joe Biden, and they’re not what this election is about. So the people that are in play, and I think this is one of the fascinating underappreciated facts about this election, is that the real people that matter here are just an astonishingly, slender sliver of the population.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like 11 guys.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. Exactly. And they’re all in a minivan going to a Cincinnati game. It’s scary, but it is a fact, and that is where this political reality is teetering.

Preet Bharara:

Well, let me ask you about that. So in recent days, we have heard criticism from some quarters about why it appears that Joe Biden, given that narrow sliver of movable people, why Joe Biden is not conspicuously, or even inconspicuously, courting the Republican voters who are anti-Trump, the Nikki Haley voters, the members of Congress who have a problem with Trump, given the understood abilities that Joe Biden has, his long time in the Senate? A, is it true he’s not doing that, and B, if he’s not doing it, why isn’t he?

Evan Osnos:

I think it’s a somewhat overstated case that he’s not doing it, but I agree that it’s not been a focus. And I think the reason is partly about timing. This is a larger fact about the campaign. People said to me after the State of the Union when Biden overperformed expectations was, “Well, why haven’t we seen this guy for months, and months, and months? Where’s that person been?”

Preet Bharara:

Where was he?

Evan Osnos:

Well, part of this is that he was presidenting, for one thing, he was doing an extremely complicated job that requires a lot of distributed focus. And one of the things we learned about the State of the Union is, when Joe Biden can go to Rehoboth and spend a couple of days, or Camp David, in that case, refining a speech, practicing, getting ready, and going out, and do it, it goes much better than when he’s doing two small ball roundtable events every day and is trying to do things on the fly, that doesn’t go as well. And I think that’s one of the lessons is, pick your shots and do them well. Joe Biden’s all about, “There is a season for everything.” This is one of his core beliefs. And campaigns actually really do adhere to that principle, which is to say that if you get everybody worked up into a fever pitch right now about this being this Titanic duel between these two people, these very specific human beings and their value sets, that would be wrong. You’d be doing it wrong.

You have to do that in six months or seven months. You don’t do it now. And I think to this question of moderate Republicans, what their priority is right now, honestly, what Biden and his team are focused on is making sure that they can rebuild the coalition of Democrats, and eventually, yes, independents and moderate Republicans. But they got to start with getting the Democratic Party motivated here, you have softness among Black and Latino voters, you have the progressive left and young people. That is game one, and then eventually, there will be time to deal with the other piece of this.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting what you’re saying. Do you think the Democratic apparatus in support of Biden, and I have no idea, is very intentional about the remaining months and the arc of the campaign, and are thinking about when they want to hit the gas and not hit the gas like a marathon runner might, as opposed to just-

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I was struck by that.

Preet Bharara:

You were?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, really. That’s an interesting observation. I think, Preet, you’re right, I’ve done a ton of interviews with people around Biden, essentially the senior people who he really deals with on an hourly basis, and then talked to him, and that was the big surprise. And it’s a controversial approach, but they are committed to the idea that there is a timing to a campaign. I’ll give you one example. Mike Donilon, who is one of Biden’s most senior advisors, really the conceptualizer behind his message. So Mike Donilon is as close as you get to stepping inside of Joe Biden’s mind. And Donilon’s got a view that he learned a big lesson in the 2004 presidential race, which you’ll remember was John Kerry versus George W. Bush. And he thinks that the Democratic Party in that year misunderstood what the election would hinge upon.

And at the time, there was this feeling, it was about a year into the war in Iraq, it was beginning to go badly, and there was a sense, “Okay, maybe that’s what this election is about,” or maybe it’s about frustration with the economy or with George W. Bush. And in the end, right before the election, there was a video that Osama bin Laden had made, and it was released, and it had this catalytic effect on people’s mood, it just reminded everybody about 9/11. And Donilon’s view is that, that election, the 2004 election, was always going to be about 9/11, and that Democrats misunderstood that at their peril. And he takes that lesson and applies it to this election. And the takeaway is, that when you step into the ballot box in November, you need to be, as far as Donilon’s concerned, you need to be driven by a really acute understanding that Donald Trump stands for things like political violence, the deep rejection of democracy and democratic principles, and that that is really going to be the overwhelming choice that you’re making.

And that if you do that now in springtime, that effect does not endure in the way that it has to, and that you’d have to pace it correctly. That view that Donilon positioned on that is hardly unanimous. In fact, it’s been pretty vigilantly attacked by people like James Carville who say, “That’s wrong. You’re making a mistake. You’ve got to come out now and do it hard and do it relentlessly. And that if you wait, that the fruit has to ripen on the vine, that you’re going to miss this moment.” And so there is a genuine debate going on, Preet, at the high levels of Democratic Party strategists about are they doing this right? I find that really interesting.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, it worries me, and I see arguments on all the sides, and I worry about overthinking. And so my question to you is, when you present the query, what is an election about, what is this election about, is that something that political operatives and candidates are supposed to divine and discern using all their brain power, or is that something that they can make, and create, and bend? Maybe go an election year, and if you do nothing, it’s about the economy, or maybe it’s about democracy, or maybe it’s about foreign policy, but if you lead properly, one theory might suggest, you can make it about something that it otherwise would not have been about. What’s the paradigm we’re in?

Evan Osnos:

That is at the heart of this really complicated task of figuring out how to meet people, where they are, and still move them. The answer to your question, Preet, is you can’t say if people are located at place A, I’m trying to get you to Z. That’s not going to work. Now, you might be able to get people from A to D, but you just cannot tell people that the reality they inhabit is really wrong. You have to figure out how to rhyme with the moment and how to… this is where politics, and I find this actually more interesting over time, the longer I do this kind of writing, this is where politics has a strange kind of improvisational rhythmic quality to it, and this is where Joe Biden is a really interesting character.

Because on the raw metrics, a lot of people always find him kind of a meh, is the honest answer. But you cannot argue with his political instincts. This guy, over the course of a career, has bet on himself and made a couple of strategic bets along the way that have turned out to be correct. Now, he’s also bet wrong in a few cases, and we should talk about that because I think that’s at the core of what’s happening.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, part of the problem with all of this, and it’s really crystallized by the recession point we were making. One of the greatest books I’ve ever read, and it was a guide for me when I wrote my own book, even though it was in a totally different category, and people who know me well know this, perhaps one of the greatest screenwriters ever in America, William Goldman, who wrote, among other things, The Princess Bride, wrote a book called Adventures in the Screen Trade, the central thesis of which… and of course, he’s referring to Hollywood, and directors, and producers, and considerations about who’s going to be a star, and what movie’s going to work, and what movie’s not going to flop, he says, “Nobody knows anything.”

And you can apply that to a lot of different areas. We have just spent some minutes earlier in this conversation talking about how the smartest economic prognosticators who purport to use data, and analysis, and mathematics got it utterly wrong. Now, you’re talking about something that’s much more fluid, amorphous, complicated, shifting, like politics, and you’re telling me about people who are making these predictions and these strategic calls based on something that’s much, much softer than economics, and it worries me.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. In some ways, Goldman’s thesis that nobody knows anything is true, not only about Hollywood. But it is also, on some level, true about politics, and it’s one of the strangest things I’ve had to come to terms with covering this stuff over the last 10 years. Because you imagine that there’s a money ball quality to these things, and you say, “If I can isolate the unannounced variable, if I can figure out, okay, this is the sort of dark matter-

Preet Bharara:

Biden’s team is like, “Okay, we’re going to use the shift.”

Evan Osnos:

You sort of imagine that’s what’s-

Preet Bharara:

At the White House softball game, they’re going to use the shift and that’s going to make all the difference.

Evan Osnos:

Well, this is it, there’s no bunting in politics. There’s no kind of-

Preet Bharara:

But there is crying, unlike… Look, I’ve thought a lot about over the years, I’m wrong all the time. But there was one thing about which I was proudly very correct, I was in a bar in Washington, I was working in the Senate at the time, and I think it was 2006, and I suggested in a conversation with a cable news reporter, I was waiting for a friend to come meet me, and I said, “If Barack Obama runs,” and he had just become a senator, a newly minted senator, and had given that one speech, I said, “I think he’s got a shot.” And I was ridiculed by both of the other men the entire evening about both the idea that he would ever contemplate running. They thought that was like sheer idiocy and showed my lack of any understanding of politics, of campaigns, and that he would ever have a chance of winning. And these people were more experienced and had covered and worked in politics far longer than I. And I easily could have been wrong, but I wasn’t.

Evan Osnos:

You picked up on something important. So I worked at the Chicago Tribune for almost a decade before I went to the New Yorker. And during that time, I covered Barack Obama’s failed congressional campaign in 1999 against Bobby Rush, I was a baby on the metro desk of the Tribune. But even in the course of that campaign, following him around from senior citizen centers, and county fairs, those kinds of events, you could see that this person was a generational political talent. And that’s why somebody like David Axelrod signed on with Obama even when it looked like he was a political long shot. You could see that. And in some ways, that’s the thrill of politics and also the utter unknowability of it, is that you were right. And this is something that bothers me about Washington where I live, is that we are really susceptible to that kind of group thinking that allows you to end up with 85% of economists saying there’s going to be a recession. That is a billion dollar bad call, and that happens all the time.

Preet Bharara:

It’s good that that was a bad call. I’ll give you an example of a place where I was incorrect on this program, like a lot of other people. I thought Ron DeSantis had a very great and almost inevitable shot at the nomination a couple of years ago. And boy, was I wrong about that.

Evan Osnos:

I can tell you also I was 100% wrong about something on Donald Trump, which is, I thought that he had lost so resoundingly and repeatedly, and then had defiled our mental dream palace of politics, this idea that we don’t do violence when we do it, that’s a fringe thing, that that just made him implausible as a 2024 front-runner. And I was wrong about that. And I think it took a lot of us too long to come to terms with that fact. And I would say that I think that the Biden world probably shared in getting that wrong. Now, they will tell you, “Okay, we always thought he’d come back,” but I think some of their rationale was based on this idea that he had made himself impossible as a future political force.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s why this question of the timing on when you’re going to step up the attacks on the issue of political violence and violating democratic norms, that’s already baked in. He remains viable. And I guess, if you’re making the point that you’re microtargeting, and you don’t have any hope of convincing the cult members of his following, but there are these people in the middle, maybe you wait on that. But then that makes me think why is it the election has to be about anything in particular? Why does it have to be either about democracy, or about the economy, or about culture? Because different people vote for different reasons. And there are some people who are going to vote almost exclusively on the basis of abortion rights, some people are going to vote based on the economy, some people are going to vote based on whatever proclivities they have. Is it too complicated, even given that we have lots of different channels and lots of different platforms? Is it too complicated to fight on many fronts, or not?

Evan Osnos:

You’re right about that. And actually, I had this interesting late inning conversation, back and forth, with some of the Democrats who I was talking to for this Biden piece. They were, through me, having this debate with one another about which one should be the dominant message, should it be democracy, should it be abortion, should it be grocery prices? And in the end, the answer is it doesn’t really have to be either or, but you do make choices about where does the president apply his most forceful personal visibility and message. And so no, it’s not an either or, and the reality is that if you force everybody to say, “Okay, I’m going to vote because I am haunted by January 6th,” then you will lose a lot of people. So it does take the ability to do more than one thing at once.

Preet Bharara:

So isn’t the actual answer to the question, based on what we’ve already discussed, and given how close the election is, and where it’s going to be decided, that you need to just do a focus group of the 11 guys in the minivan? And ask them, “Look, guys in a minivan, what moves you? Is it the economy, specifically, inflation? Is it democracy? What is it?” And then that should be the message to those guys.

Evan Osnos:

I think that there’s some of that, but part of the challenge is, you don’t sometimes know which 11 guys. You could spend all this time courting them, and it turns out-

Preet Bharara:

It was 11 guys in Pennsylvania.

Evan Osnos:

Well, here’s an example-

Preet Bharara:

11 guys in Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. And I would add a little bit of North Carolina, and who knows, but I think the other thing is, this is a true thing, this is a technical reality, that you often don’t know what the real electorate is until after the fact. This is the lesson. If you take away one lesson from 2016, it’s that we didn’t understand the real size and nature of the… we didn’t realize that white men who work in manufacturing and don’t pick up the phone during the day to answer polls, that they would end up showing up when they did and mattering. So that’s actually a real problem, you have to make some guesses about this. But here’s the other thing, one of the bets, and I think this is a pretty reliable one, is that the 11 guys we keep talking about are actually probably under the age of 30. They’re probably in the cities, in those states we talked about.

So they’re not in the suburbs necessarily of Philadelphia, maybe some, but some of them are also young people in the state, and they are probably in dense areas like in Philadelphia, and they’re not sure that they’re going to vote at all. And this is where the race really is focused on young people in a way that I don’t think we have fully described yet in the coverage of this election. They’re going to be a big piece of the puzzle.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, are we wrong to say it’s 11 guys? Is it really probably 11 women who are persuadable in these various swing states?

Evan Osnos:

Certainly it is. But the reason why I make this distinction about age is that all of us, I’m sorry to say, are useless to political strategists. Because we’re baked in, we already have made our core identifying choices in life about whether we are on the left or on the right, about whether we participate in politics or we don’t show up to vote. We’ve made those choices at our age. That’s not true if you’re under 30. And so it’s really in play, and it’s all scrambled by the fact that you have figures like RFK Jr., who is this oddity that is pulling a little bit from the left, pulling a little bit from the right. Would he make people vote who wouldn’t otherwise vote? Do those people remember the year 2000 and the role that third parties play in tipping an election against Democrats? Those are the questions that I think in the end are going to become more and more salient.

Preet Bharara:

This is a bit of analysis from someone you quoted a close aide to President Biden, Bruce Reed. I don’t know if this is just a thing you say to a reporter to put a good face on things, or if it’s a mark of complacency, or something else, he said, quote, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.” End quote. Might I refer Mr. Reed to 2016?

Evan Osnos:

Well, here’s the thing though, in 2016, you have to remember what we knew and didn’t really know about Donald Trump. To the average person who had not gone out and read books about-

Preet Bharara:

Okay, that’s a fair point. That’s fair.

Evan Osnos:

That was a choice between what they thought they knew at the time, and now, it’s a different thing. There’s one line that Biden says that’ll become his campaign speech that you’re going to hear over and over, and it’s an important line, which is, he says, “We know who Donald Trump is. The question is, who are we?” And there’s a little bit of poetry to that, but it’s actually also getting at an important fact, which is, he’s forcing people to acknowledge that this is not about pinning your aspirations to the idea that maybe Trump is this apprentice-like figure who will combine a bit of the old Ronald Reagan Hollywood culture with a bit of Morning in America, and that maybe he will find some way of cutting the Gordian knot, all of that has been lying in shards on the ground of this country.

Nobody believes that. If you’re voting for him, it’s because you are identifying with his really specific, call it what it is, a kind of cult of participation and grievance. And that’s his thing. And I think there’s another thing that Bruce Reed said to me that I love in this piece too… for people who don’t know, Bruce Reed has this way of… he speaks quite rarely, and he chooses his words quite carefully, but there’s no extra energy expended, he says exactly what he thinks. And I find that really thrilling as an interviewer, because you’re like, “Okay, this person is making real decisions about the idea that they believe in.” And one of the things he said to me was, he said, “Joe Biden treats the world as if it’s on the level, and then he tries to force them to be on the level.”

Now, I’m mangling it slightly, his was a little bit more elegant, but the idea is really important because it captures both a strength and a big vulnerability for Biden, which is, when he came into this presidency, he was like, “I can force the Congress to be on the level,” meaning, “I’ll get them to deal with me,” like a conventional presidency and Congress. And of course, they weren’t on the level, let’s be honest, they were never going to be on the level. And they were never going to deal with him in a substantive way, and yet, he did find ways around the edges of achieving historic legislation. And so you could apply that too to what’s happening in the Middle East. In some ways, he approached Bibi Netanyahu and said, “I’m going to treat him as if he is going to do what he says he is going to do with me.” But that as a characterological insight on Biden carries a lot of water with me.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, what you said about on the level and assumptions people make reminds me in a different context of what somebody I think smartly, a few years ago, said about Donald Trump, “The speculation about Trump, is he playing checkers, is he playing chess is all wrong, he’s the guy who was just eating the pieces.” There’s no rule going on. Now, we’ve talked about what this election is, or is not about, what it hinges on, what it may not hinge on, and we haven’t talked about one thing, and that’s Joe Biden’s age. And you quote David Axelrod, who you mentioned already here, is saying, quote, “You give me Biden’s record and take 15 years off of him, and this wouldn’t be a competitive race. This is the barrier he has to overcome and it’s a hard one, because the march of time is immutable.” End quote. If that’s really what this race is about, that’s a harder thing than convincing people about his role in averting the recession, or in what freedom means, and what democracy is about, and reproductive rights, because he is what he is. He is old.

Evan Osnos:

So David’s view, and he and I have talked a lot about it, is one that is pretty broadly felt. And I think you see that certainly showing up in poll numbers, that people just look at Biden and that is their question, the Biden world bet. And it’s a big bet, but it is a substantive one is, that it’s not just about age, yes or no, it’s age versus crazy. To tie it back into that point we were talking about before, Preet, that’s what it is. It’s age versus crazy. Okay. Sure, there’s no question that Joe Biden is older than he was, and you see it, you feel it, this gets to the innumeracy of our politics. You just read it, like one animal to another, Joe Biden is older, yes. But that is a different thing than, is his mind intact? Is his decision-making record defensible? And compare it to the alternative.

The oldest Joe Biden line in the world happens to be truer now than it’s ever been in his career, which is, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” And we now know who that alternative is. So that’s where the age question becomes more complicated than just, is he too old to do this job?

Preet Bharara:

The comparison point is very important. I heard Chris Christie say something once when he was still in the race, which was, “There’s a myth in democracy and among the voting public, who think you get to vote for who you want to vote for,” it’s like, “That’s not true. You get to vote for who’s left.” And these are the two men who were left. When we talk about what the race is about, you quote Biden is saying, “Preserving America’s democracy,” and he said this to a big crowd, “is the central cause of my presidency.” And that’s where I am, because of where I’m situated and what my background is, and what I care about, and what I talk about, and what I do for a living.

But I find it astonishing because I do follow Trump supporters as well on social media because I’d like to know what they’re saying. I occasionally watch Fox News. It’s good to know what the criticisms are. And with a straight face… obviously, I don’t agree with this, but with a straight face, and I think with genuine feeling, there are Trump supporters… and again, we’ve already discussed that they’re not attainable, but it’s important to understand how they’re thinking, they say, with equal if not greater fervor, that Joe Biden is the threat to freedom and democracy and the American way of life. How can both of those things be true?

Evan Osnos:

It is amazing to me that that is the language that has evolved on the right-

Preet Bharara:

And they mean it. Unlike what Trump and some other politicians say, it’s not rhetoric. They believe, and that’s why they’re arming up, and some aspect of that, maybe some of the explanation for January 6th, I don’t really follow it, I try to understand it so that I can argue against it, but in what way in the minds of the Trump folks is Joe Biden the threat to freedom and democracy?

Evan Osnos:

I think some of this has to do with a basic orientation of the politics of the right as it is today, which is that it is fundamentally nostalgic in nature, it is about seeking to reclaim, or rebuild, or recover things that have been lost. And those things are basically forms of power, and they’re cultural power. Let’s be blunt about this, Preet, it’s about a certain white male dominated conception of the United States, and it is one that was largely intact for a very, very long time, and now feels to a lot of people on the right as if it is going away, and Joe Biden is the head of a party in a movement that represents that. And so that’s what they’re talking about. And they can lump into that bucket all kinds of things, they’ll say that it’s about getting rid of the right to bear arms, or the right to raise your children with the curriculum that you want.

In some ways, it’s a kind of endlessly adaptable thesis, but that’s really what it’s about. And I really come to the belief that when we talk about freedoms being taken away on the left, that’s not abstract to people. I was having conversation with friends just in the last couple of days, if you’re a woman who’s looking at the state of abortion rights in this country, and you see them being taken away one by one in state after state, that’s a really specific thing that you can identify. On the right, it is a more atmospheric declaration.

Preet Bharara:

Except when it comes to guns. So people on the right I think feel that efforts to deal in gun regulation are concrete infringements upon what they perceive to be a sacred right. To me, that’s the only counterweight on the other side to the abortion debate.

Evan Osnos:

One of the things that I spent a lot of time doing after moving back to this country 10 years ago was trying to begin to understand where that view of the Second Amendment came from. And I think, as a lot of listeners of your podcast know, it did not come from nowhere, this was an idea that was engineered, and this gets to your earlier question about how much can you engineer a public mood? The belief that the Second Amendment is some inviolable core fundamental concept of American life is an idea that germinated in the 1960s and ’70s, it is not an ancient principle. And we’re seeing that Wayne LaPierre and the NRA go through its downfall right now, but their legacy is that they created a false belief that there is this absolutely essential American concept of ungoverned freedom around guns, which is not actually what the original intent was.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you a very basic question?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Why is it that Joe Biden decided to run in 2024? Is it because he feels that there’s a mission that’s unfinished? Is it just the inertia of being the incumbent? Is it because he perceived there was no one else? Is it because of arrogance? Is it because of duty? Is it any of those things? Is it none of those things?

Evan Osnos:

It’s a piece of all of those things, honestly, Preet. I think the word that really leapt to the surface when I talked to him about this in January was that he felt like he had earned this, meaning, that his record in office was such that, as he said to me, “Any other president in my position, with the economy where it is, with the legislation where it is, they would be running for reelection.” And so on some level, he is willfully avoiding the fact and what the numbers in the polls tell us, which is that people are concerned about age, that they are concerned about him. And this gets to why I’ve always been interested in this person, is that he has this ability, over and over, he’s done it over the decades, to defy expectations, and to prove people wrong, and to outperform those estimates.

And the other piece of this, and it’s really important to capture, just the first part sounds as if, okay, well, that’s a prideful instinct, and maybe he’s not thinking about the implications for everybody, is that he really does look at it with the head of a cold-blooded political strategist and say, “Name the other person who has beaten Donald Trump in a national election.” Please go ahead and name that person, and that person doesn’t exist. That’s a meaningful fact. Gavin Newsom, for instance, if you just take one person who is often talked about as a younger talent, who might step into that position if Joe Biden stepped aside, he pulls about 10 points behind Biden against Trump.

And so you have to be serious about saying who could really come in and galvanize an incredibly divided Democratic Party, and do it fast and not risk a 1968 style divided Democratic Party that ends up awarding the presidency, in that case, to Richard Nixon by 1%. That’s the fear, and I think that’s the piece of this where Joe Biden says, “This is not just about me, it’s also the politics tell me I’ve got the best shot.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, when we talk about Trump’s strength, he was the most formidable, Republican, non-incumbent presidential candidate in modern history. And maybe if we look all the way back to the beginning, maybe since the beginning of the Republican Party, that’s not nothing.

Evan Osnos:

If you think that this is the most important election, and to use the cliche, it really is, of our lifetimes, well, then you also have to be willing to look at the cold hard facts and say, “Which of the people right now stands the best chance of beating this very specific character, Donald Trump?”

Preet Bharara:

And is that Joe Biden?

Evan Osnos:

Well, the problem is we don’t have any reliable way of knowing if there is somebody else who could recreate what he has done on an electoral basis. We just don’t.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we got a long way to go, and we’ll keep focusing on… I’m going to do my part as a Biden supporter, with great frequency, and I’m going to demonstrate that here again, once again, remind our listeners, and remind our listeners to remind their friends, that once upon a time, not very long ago, every economist basically thought we would be in a recession. To repeat, Bloomberg Economics calculated the odds at 100%, and who averted that recession? Joseph R. Biden. Vote accordingly. Evan Osnos, thanks for being on the show. Always a treat.

Evan Osnos:

My pleasure, Preet. Always a pleasure to join you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Evan Osnos continues from members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discuss the viability and potential dangers of third-party candidates like RFK Jr.

Evan Osnos:

I think he takes more votes from Biden, I really do. And I think that’s not anxiety talking, that is the reality that back to the Civil War, the third party entrance tend to take more from the incumbent.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week with a moment of remembrance. For last week, we lost an academic and intellectual giant. I’m talking about the legendary psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. He passed away last week, on March 27th, at age 90. Kahneman was one of the most important and prolific psychologists of our time. He pioneered the research field of behavioral economics, which focuses on human rationality. That earned him the Nobel Prize in economic science in 2002. His groundbreaking 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, propelled him into the public eye. And he went on to win countless awards and honorary degrees, among them, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. It was one of my great honors to interview Dan Kahneman on this podcast in August of 2021. That interview was around the time I interviewed another legend, author Robert Caro. I wrote about the two men in the column for CAFE back in 2021.

I’d like to share some of what I wrote back then. “Dear listener, I don’t know whether I stand on the shoulders of giants as the saying goes, but I do know I get to interview them sometimes, and that may be the greatest thrill of this phase of my career. All of my guests I respect, but only a very few do I revere, and only a very few truly intimidate me with their intellect, output, and impact on the world. This week’s Stay Tuned guest is such a person. Professor Daniel Kahneman is a universally acknowledged giant in the field of psychology, which is to say he is a giant in a host of fields, not just because of the impact of his work on the science of economics, for which he won the Nobel Prize, his research and writing have also revolutionized thinking in education, law, medicine, politics, and even professional sports.

Something about the experience of talking with Kahneman reminded me of another giant whom I had the privilege to interview, a writer I’ve revered for decades, Robert Caro, celebrated biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. My worshipfulness aside, it occurs to me that Danny and Bob, as they like to be called, are in various ways charming echoes of each other. Caro is 85, Kahneman is 87. They’re both brilliant writers and scholars whose every upcoming work is an event. Both bring a legendary rigor to their experiments and their stories. Both know almost better than anyone that it is deep, deep research that animates understanding, whether about a former president or about human decision-making. They have been awash in awards and acclaim for decades, and might be forgiven flashes of arrogance or self-indulgence, but you will not find a whiff of that with Danny and Bob. The unassuming nickname preference is just one sign of that modesty.

But there’s something else, and it may be the most important thing, well into their 80s, neither is within a mile of retirement. Each retains an urgency about his work, a drive to get the next chapter written, the next book published. Their minds are like pistons, so far, undimmed by age. They remind me of the lyric from the musical Hamilton, ‘Why do you write like you’re running out of time? Write day and night like you’re running out of time?’ In a remarkable concession about his latest book, Noise, Kahneman said this in an interview with the Financial Times, ‘The book, Noise, is premature. If I had been 20 years earlier, that’s not what I would’ve done. Having identified the problem of noise, I would’ve started the research program on noise, and given talks about it, and thought about it, and written articles about it. But I started this thing very late. I started it in my 80s, and you just don’t have time. This, in a serious sense, is a book that came too early.’

‘I started it in my 80s and you just don’t have time.’ On this point, Kahneman was right. I think a main reason I revere these men is not just for their past work, but their urgent drive to write more, research more, understand more, to give us more, age be damned. They have wealth, and respect, and awards, and they could easily take a rest. But there is no rest, they continue to give us the gift of non-retirement. And I don’t know what could be more worthy of reverence than that. Daniel Kahneman, rest in peace.”

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Evan Osnos. 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. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director was David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai. The audio producer is Nat Weiner. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.