Preet Bharara:

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

Evan Osnos:

The Chinese side came in feeling as if they had figured out how to work both with and against Trump. He was inclined to try to create moments of crisis, and then if they stood up to him, they were almost uniquely capable of making him back down.

Preet Bharara:

Welcome to Stay Tuned, I’m Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Evan Osnos. He is, as many listeners of this show know, an author and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Evan is a frequent guest of the show because he has the rare ability to explain power from the inside out. He does this through deeply reported human scale portraits of leaders, systems, and national change. One of his main areas of coverage has been China, and he’s just returned from Beijing where he was covering the historic Trump-Xi Summit. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

Where exactly do US-China relations stand? And what did the Trump-Xi Summit reveal about the two leaders in America’s role in the world?

Evan Osnos, welcome back to the show.

Evan Osnos:

Thanks, Preet. Great to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

Are you jet-lagged from being in China?

Evan Osnos:

I am, but actually, all it does is clarify my obsession with this topic, so. I just landed last night, actually.

Preet Bharara:

We’re recording this on May 20th; Wednesday, May 20th. What is the time difference, 47 hours? Is that possible?

Evan Osnos:

It’s 12 hours exactly.

Preet Bharara:

You’re one of the foremost experts on and reporters about China, our relationship with China. Trump had a meeting with Xi, leader of China for a long time, who has consolidated a lot of power. We can talk about that also. Why do they meet? It’s a really dumb question. Why do they meet, and why do they meet in such conspicuous conditions so that everybody is watching and trying to interpret every word that’s uttered, every report that’s made? Is that really conducive to getting progress on things that we can agree upon or not?

Evan Osnos:

Well, it can be. It’s interesting to me. That’s a really interesting question because they meet for slightly different reasons. I think each side has a pretty separate understanding of it. As you heard from Trump, he talked a lot about being friends with Xi Jinping. This word, I mean, this quite simple word came up over and over. He would say, “We’ve become friends,” or, “He’s a great friend.” And he is, as we all know, inclined to improvise his way through a meeting like this based on the temperature, the moment.

One of the more memorable little details was at one point they’re walking through Zhongnanhai, which is this very private leadership enclave. It’s the headquarters of the Communist Party, and Xi Jinping is showing him trees and showing him flowers and Trump turns to the cameras and says, “Huh, I like it. I could get used to this.”

And interestingly, the translation was slightly different, and in Chinese it was translated to Xi Jinping as, “I like it. I could get used to this. I don’t want to leave.” Anyway, I said put that aside for a second.

The Chinese side treats it very differently. The Chinese side is sending a message both to the world and to its own system in the things that Xi Jinping says. In the public portion of the event, when he made comments at the very beginning, that was extremely carefully produced, meaning that he had eight or 10 sentences, all of which carried a very specific strategic value.

Preet Bharara:

And vetted word for word within his government?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, but he’s self-vetting, which is different than his leader. I mean-

Preet Bharara:

Well, how is his self-vetting different from Trump’s self-vetting?

Evan Osnos:

Well, that’s a great point actually. Well, I mean, Trump is, let’s just say, vetting in live, vetting in real time, which is to say that he’s making choices about where to go. I say that Xi Jinping is self-vetting because his predecessor, Hu Jintao, as I think even anybody with a minimal understanding of China knows, Xi Jinping is unusually powerful. He’s the most powerful Chinese leader since Chairman Mao who died in 1976. In my lifetime, we’ve never had anybody quite as dominant in China. And Hu Jintao was a guy who was very much just one member of a much larger, more powerful system than he was. So a guy like Hu Jintao didn’t open his mouth without those words being vetted.

To put it in perspective, there was a moment once when Hu Jintao was meeting with Robert Gates, then the American Intelligence and Defense Chief. And at one point during the meeting, China’s military tested a jet that had never been tested before, and it caught Hu Jintao unaware. It was either intended to humiliate him or was okay to humiliate him and that was very different. And so part of the reason why you see Xi Jinping riding so hard over the military is that he never wants to be the guy who is caught unaware by his own military.

Preet Bharara:

And that will never happen to him.

Evan Osnos:

If it happens, that’s an earthquake, because there’s a reason why he has been taking down senior military leaders one after another. And that is to ensure that, as the old party mantra has it, that the gun must always be subservient to the party, to the interests of the party.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you, do you speak the language?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I do.

Preet Bharara:

Fluently?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, but it’s deteriorated unfortunately, but it’s there. I plug along.

Preet Bharara:

When they’re having meetings, do you listen to one or the other, or do you have them both the English and the Chinese? I mean, by China, when you say Chinese, is it Mandarin?

Evan Osnos:

It’s Mandarin. Yeah, in a meeting, I will listen to the English certainly, because in real time it’s easier for me to make sense of it in English.

Preet Bharara:

The reason I ask is my current job doesn’t require a lot of interpreting and translating, but my prior job, sometimes you would have targets a prosecution who spoke a different language. And one time we had some suspects who came in and they wanted to proffer with the prosecutor and they spoke Urdu, which is very related to Hindi, which I don’t speak particularly well, but I understand.

And I was like, “The interpreter is totally mucking this up.” And luckily, I’m getting all of it because I actually have some facility with the language.

And then there are times, very passable high school Spanish. And you’d have the witness speak for 40 seconds and the interpreter would say, “The witness says no.”

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I think he said more than no, how technically correct in the context of bilateral talks do the translations have to be? And second, if they deviate from it, are they doing that deliberately and do the interpreters have a propaganda role too?

Evan Osnos:

The interpreters in this summit and in general, the interpreter role is extremely sensitive and important, but in this summit especially, it was really a vital and I would say fragile bridge between the two. I’ll tell you exactly what I mean. And by the way, there was a short piece done by a journalist named Chang Che that looked actually at very detailed differences between the translations, so credit to him for identifying some of these things.

Preet Bharara:

I’m onto something.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, you are, very much so. Here’s why. As an example, I remember once writing a piece years ago actually about a trial that involved Pashto translation. And in that case, there’s a level of call it embroidery or metaphor or imagery that was important in the way that a Pashto speaker would be emphasizing certain things. Was it literal or was it figurative?

In Chinese, there is an important shadow of this, meaning that if somebody uses a Chinese expression that says something like, “This is as irreconcilable as fire and water,” you might hear that the first time and think, well, that sounds pretty furious, but actually, that is boilerplate. Whereas in the other direction too, there are things that he might say that Xi Jinping might say that sound bland but are a bombshell. So when he said in this meeting with Donald Trump that the world is undergoing changes unseen in a century, that sounds like a kind of routine boilerplate, right? But from the Chinese side, actually that is understood to mean the United States is in decline and China is rising.

Preet Bharara:

Now, do the Chinese have plausible deniability about what it means because the literal words used in English are not derogatory?

Evan Osnos:

That’s helpful. Yeah, there’s some wiggle room there.

Preet Bharara:

If the UK prime minister and the US president are meeting and they want to play a game, they can’t do it, except I guess there’s some English idioms you could use, but is language being exploited for that reason? In other words, was there a plainer way for Xi to say that the United States was in decline that would’ve left no doubt? And do you think, I’m just trying to understand the intrigue and the level of shrewdness here.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, you’re right, zero in on that. There is an expression he could have used in Chinese, which is quite simple, which is, “The east is rising and the west is declining.” And he has used that expression over the years.

Preet Bharara:

But here, he did not.

Evan Osnos:

He did not. Yeah, exactly. He was one step removed from that. He was using this more elliptical phrase, but here’s why having the background on that phrase is quite revealing. He used that phrase, to give you one example, in a meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow when he was there in 2023 for a state visit. And when he was leaving, this was picked up on the cameras, he was leaving his visit with Putin at the end, and they’re standing in the doorway and Xi Jinping says to Vladimir Putin through interpretation because they don’t speak the same language, but they’re very close. Xi Jinping calls him my bosom buddy, which is a hard phrase to translate into English. Well, so these two bosom buddies were standing in the doorway, and Xi Jinping says to Vladimir Putin, “We are living through changes unseen in centuries.” And here’s the key thing, he says, “And you and I are driving the changes.” And that’s an amazing revelation.

Preet Bharara:

That’s bringing Putin in as a cohort on the good side.

Evan Osnos:

Absolutely, and he didn’t do that with Donald Trump.

Preet Bharara:

Right, so what do you make of the fact that it’s very confusing because it allows Trump, I don’t know if this was intentional or not, it allows Trump to say, “No, he was talking about,” well, I guess Donald Trump chose a third interpretation. It’s like the particular formulation that Xi used means, if you know anything about Mandarin, Biden. Biden put America on the decline, not me. What do you make of his reaction there? Was it weak? Was it strong? Was it necessary?

Evan Osnos:

I actually thought in a strange way it was quite a shrewd solution to a problem, which is that he had just had a meeting in which he declared the other guy his great friend, and then he found out clearly, somebody alerted him that the guy had more or less insulted the United States to his face. So he said, “Oh, he wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about the former guy.” So look, that’s what he could do, but this is where both of these two guys operate with a use of, to borrow a term, strategic ambiguity.

Preet Bharara:

But that’s not new. That’s why I can’t be a diplomat, and many other reasons also because no one’s asked. I find it very difficult. Well, my line of work is not about that.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like you don’t go to court and obfuscate. You don’t say, “Yeah, you can find him sort of guilty.” No, you have to be very plain and clear.

And so this strategery of allowing plausible deniability, talking in a way… I mean, look, in American politics, the other thing I was thinking of that this reminds me of is what people call the dog whistle where you say something that is clearly meant to appeal to racists or other bigots, but the words you used, and by the way, that’s not an interpretation of a foreign language, that’s plain English. And is the phrase I used something that the people who I want with the ears whose votes I want, do they understand what I’m saying or not? So it’s not a new concept, but it’s new for me to understand when it comes to the international stage.

Evan Osnos:

It’s become also more central, I think, to our political drama because Trump does operate in that way.

Preet Bharara:

A lot.

Evan Osnos:

I mean, he is very proficient in the dog whistle. Yeah, and it’s interesting, I like how you’ve identified really almost a difference in the nature of communication. I mean, a legalistic interpretation is to find those holes in the language and drive a truck through them and to say, “Here is the hole. This is what you’re hiding and this is why it doesn’t work.”

And in fact, in diplomacy, a lot of it is built on developing those loopholes. I mean, the entire nature of the US-China-Taiwan relationship, for instance, is based on one of these rhetorical loopholes created back in 1972, and we’re still living in a world created by that. But I think this is a weird way in which Trump and Xi are somewhat suited to one another in the sense that they had the same ultimately something approximating the same goal in this meeting, which was to try to get back to business. Trump is not a hawk when it comes to China. He is this strange personalistic kind of-

Preet Bharara:

What kind of bird would you say he is?

Evan Osnos:

Well, in the China world, people would-

Preet Bharara:

Turkey. Is he a turkey when it comes to China?

Evan Osnos:

Well, people would call him a panda hugger is actually the way it would be described in the-

Preet Bharara:

I’m not familiar with that type of bird.

Evan Osnos:

Well, this is the old China analysis way, which is you’re either a dragon slayer, or in his case, a panda hugger.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe you can make me understand this because as we’re talking about it, how does anybody know the rules of engagement? Not even on where you mass your weapons, or where you build a base, or what your trade policy should be, that to me is almost easier to understand than what are the rules of engagement rhetorically between and among nations, particularly when those talks include rivals or downright enemies and those rules of engagement change? And they also depend on who’s doing the speaking and what the pattern has been for that speaker. It just strikes me as an incredible… Going back to my first question, when you allow for unscripted moments, even though you say Xi is always very, very, very scripted for good reason as we’re discussing, it just strikes me as a recipe for misunderstanding and disaster. Am I wrong about that?

Evan Osnos:

It is. Well, before this summit, people were saying that the most interesting people in the room were actually the interpreters because particularly going from English to Chinese, as we know, Trump makes a whole lot of comments where they branch off of one another. He starts on one sentence and then adds a second one, he minimizes the meaning of the first half and so on and so on. And what was the translator going to do? What we now know based on actually hearing the way it was translated is that they eliminated a lot of those digressions. In Chinese, I will tell you, Trump came across as sounding much more lucid and linear. In a way, there was a Chinese sane-washing going on in the interpretation-

Preet Bharara:

I see.

Evan Osnos:

… and I hadn’t really focused on it until you raised this issue today, but I think that’s important because what they’re doing is narrowing the aperture of what he’s talking about so that it is the most operationally relevant for Xi Jinping. And they didn’t do that on the Chinese side, the Chinese interpretations were fairly straight coming in English.

Preet Bharara:

Xi Jinping knows and understands that Trump does not view China as a mortal enemy, correct?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. I think he thinks that Trump is inclined to be friends, which is a weird word. As a diplomat said to me a couple days after the summit, I was in Beijing and the diplomat said, he said, “Xi Jinping doesn’t do friends.”

Preet Bharara:

Well, neither does Trump. I mean, Trump is a guy, as far as I know, and I just read an entire book about Trump and how he’s actually very strategic and tactical, and the author concedes he doesn’t have any friends. So the word friend has different meaning for him, which is another interpretive issue we could talk about if we need to, but this fact that I’ve tried to establish through my witness, Evan Osnos, of China perceiving and the leader of China perceiving that Trump doesn’t perceive them as a mortal enemy, does that give them an advantage, a material advantage? Does that mean, do they think that Trump is weak? Does that affect their calculation about Taiwan? What happens in the minds of the Chinese when they have the perception that we’ve described of Trump?

Evan Osnos:

I believe that they concluded that Trump was very convenient for them. I don’t think that they have decided that the United States system is no longer, and that would be how they’d put it, determined to be a mortal threat to China. They still fundamentally believe that beyond the person of Donald Trump, that the United States is fundamentally structurally dedicated to encircling and undermining the People’s Republic. That is like a core belief. And even though there was all of this bon ami and friendship and giving each other compliments and sending Trump home with a handful of rose seeds, which was one of the things that happened, that doesn’t change Xi Jinping’s basic belief that these two systems are incompatible.

This is where the tactical meets the strategic, which is that the Chinese side came in feeling as if they had figured out how to work both with and against Trump. They could figure out that he was inclined to try to create moments of crisis, and then if they relented, he would continue doing it, but if they stood up to him that they were almost uniquely capable of making him back down. That was what the events of the last 16 months have taught them. I think that they believe they had the upper hand.

Preet Bharara:

Is Trump, in his policy and attitude and rhetoric towards China, materially different than it was in the first term?

Evan Osnos:

Yes, it is. In the first term, he was acting much more as an agent of an emergent set of ideas about China, which is that to be much more hawkish, to be much more confrontational, to give up on the idea of engagement, which really had been the operating system of US-China interactions going back to 1972, which is when Nixon went to meet Mao. Trump was the first US president to say, “We’re done with that. We’re going to try to challenge them.”

This started really with this trade war that US launched in 2018 against China. He was surrounded at the time, remember, by people like H. R. McMaster and John Bolton, and figures who believe fundamentally that the US and China were on a collision course. None of those people are around in the second administration. And even if you go a layer down in the National Security Council, there were people in the first administration who were shaping policy in a profound way. Those people are gone and instead, and it’s one of the things that I don’t think has gotten enough attention in interpreting the relationship today is that the National Security Council, when it comes to expertise on China, has been really hollowed out, and it’s a skeleton of what it once was. So Trump is operating, we know this I think broadly speaking, he’s operating much more without expertise or challenge or anybody telling him that his instincts might be.

Preet Bharara:

He doesn’t need it.

Evan Osnos:

He doesn’t need it in his mind.

Preet Bharara:

In his mind.

Evan Osnos:

And so he’s going in there and saying, “I’m going to figure this out as an improvisation.”

Preet Bharara:

Can you remind folks what the phrase meant at the time, “Only Nixon can go to China,” and then update it and say if that has any applicability to Trump going to China?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. The idea at the time in ’72 was that Nixon was a dedicated anti-communist. It was core to his identity. He was as much of a hawk as you can get, so that meant that he was politically protected on his flank. Nobody else could go to China and build a relationship without being criticized.

Preet Bharara:

Nobody thought he was a commi.

Evan Osnos:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Nobody thought he was going to go and consort with economies as a commi.

Evan Osnos:

No, he couldn’t be accused of it. He was uniquely positioned. And so he and Kissinger had this… Kissinger wanted to be the great man of history who could create, open the channel between these two countries. Nixon also for all of his profound deficits was somebody who did think about foreign affairs in this kind of grander sense. The two of them were inclined to try to go, and Nixon had the political positioning at home to be able to do it.

In the current context, there’s something there too, which is that Trump as the leader of the Republican Party today presides over an institution that is somewhat divided. I mean, it has made itself much more devoted to the idea that China is our natural total enemy. That’s the party line for the GOP now. And this is where it gets weird, except when you get to the very top where Trump is the one who says, “Look, I have a lot of respect for that leader.” He refuses to say whether he’s a dictator, all of those kinds of things, but it is really almost a species of one within the Republican Party who is departing from that, so I think you’re right to make the comparison.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Evan Osnos after this.

How does China perceive their options with respect to Taiwan given, A, their perception of Trump’s feelings towards China and, B, America’s activities in Iran?

Evan Osnos:

How does China perceive his attitude towards Taiwan? I think that they realized, even before he was reelected, that he had a very different view of Taiwan than previous American presidents. He started saying something basically unprecedented, which is he started saying, “Gosh, Taiwan is 9,500 miles away from us here in the US, and it’s just off the coast of China.” So he was articulating without saying so explicitly the idea that there are natural spheres of influence and control.

From Beijing’s perspective, this was cause for celebration. I mean, now they were very mystified by it. They couldn’t figure out was this some sort of triple play that he was running that, luring us into a trap. No, he was saying what, as he often does, what his metabolic instinct was, which is, “This doesn’t look to me like home.”

He then reiterated that view after the summit, and that’s been a real bombshell in the world of people who study China and the United States is that he has said that he’s willing to treat an arms deal with Taiwan as a “bargaining chip.” And nobody’s ever said that in the history of US presidents, that’s in fact in utter contradiction with how it’s usually talked about.

Preet Bharara:

Being in utter contradiction is not a normative conclusion? Is it good or bad for the United States?

Evan Osnos:

I think it’s very, very bad for the United States and here’s why. And don’t take it from me, take it from Ronald Reagan who set out this idea in the ’80s, which is that there are certain things the United States doesn’t do that would jeopardize Taiwan. And one of them is it doesn’t talk about arms deals with Taiwan, it doesn’t talk about those with Beijing. The idea being that that is in some sense undermining the possibility of having this very fragile, complicated, enduring relationship between the three.

Preet Bharara:

Can we just pause on that for one second? Is that more or less norm breaking than the way Trump speaks about NATO?

Evan Osnos:

It’s comparable. You’re right to draw the analogy actually.

Preet Bharara:

He does it on a lot of stuff.

Evan Osnos:

And here’s why that matters. I mean, sometimes we all look at it, we shrug and we say, “Oh, Trump doesn’t believe that words have power, that he thinks they’re just wind.”

But again, back to your earlier point about ambiguity, no, on some level he knows that they are both wind and they are earth-shattering. And particularly when it comes to diplomacy that these kinds of… The reason why words matter is that they are the constituent ingredients of confidence of ideas. The notion that the US and NATO have an inviolable bond is based on the way that our leaders talk about it. It’s this kind of crumbly thing, meaning that it’s not like it’s just about what’s written on the page. It’s really about whether each side believes that the other one is there for them in a crisis, in a pinch.

There was nothing that preordained before 9/11 that NATO would come to our support and they did. And now I was just in Europe recently before this China trip and I had just… Everywhere I went, I was having conversations about how does people in NATO think about the United States now. And one of the really remarkable, this sounds like such a tiny little phrase, but it made a big difference in my understanding, which is I was talking to somebody in Germany and we’ve heard about a rupture, for instance, in the global order, a rupture in the nature of NATO. I asked this, I said, “Are you guys angry with the United States? Are you disappointed?”

And he said, “No, no, no. It’s not that, it’s not that. We’re just moving on.” And moving on is a big deal.

Preet Bharara:

That’s-

Evan Osnos:

Exactly. I mean, when you’re-

Preet Bharara:

When you’re breaking up in a relationship-

Evan Osnos:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

… and the other party.

Evan Osnos:

That’s what I was just thinking.

Preet Bharara:

You want there to be some emo, did you cry a little bit?

Evan Osnos:

Just moving on.

Preet Bharara:

No, I’ve moved on.

Evan Osnos:

That’s usually what she says when she’s carrying the houseplant and she’s leaving for the last time and just says, “I wish you the best.” And that’s tough stuff.

And so in the Taiwan context, it matters immensely because Taiwan, as most, I think everybody knows, lives in this weird place between. It’s not an independent country, it’s also certainly not under the control of Beijing, so it lives in this self-governing liminal space. And when the US president indicates that it’s not clear if he would come to Taiwan’s defense, that has a chemical effect on the internal politics of Taiwan, meaning it makes it much harder for people who want to stand up against Beijing.

Preet Bharara:

Has Trump made it more likely that Beijing will take violent action against Taiwan?

Evan Osnos:

I wouldn’t go so far as to say yes to that because I think their decisions around taking violent action will depend on their own self-interpretation, but I think there’s no question that Beijing will make that decision based partly on its interpretation of America’s willingness to intervene or not. And so by him suggesting pretty clearly that he’s not inclined to do so, yeah, it does make it easier for China to reach that conclusion.

But the reason why I hesitate to say that, okay, this just flips a switch, is that there’s a lot of pieces that go into that. And at this point, I think that the preponderance of the evidence, to borrow a phrase I don’t understand, would suggest that they are more patient than they are impatient about going into Taiwan because they see the risks. They watched what happened to Vladimir Putin going into Ukraine, they watched what happened in the United States going into Iran.

Preet Bharara:

No, so you’ve anticipated my next question. The two most powerful military powers in the world are China and the US. I don’t know if you put Russia a third, but Russia is somewhere up there. Two of those three powers, as you just pointed out, had been embroiled in what they thought was going to be a walk-off home run situation and it’s turned out to be a long, long, long… I mean, to maintain the baseball metaphor, on the 20th inning and it’s still going, do they think Taiwan is different or does that have a real impact on the thinking of Beijing?

Evan Osnos:

I am increasingly aware of the fact that they are very mindful of what happened in Ukraine to Russia. And when I say increasingly aware, that’s a long way of just saying that I’m doing a lot of reporting on this trying to understand internally the Chinese interpretation of what’s happened in Ukraine. I think it’s very clear now that they’ve come to believe that Vladimir Putin discovered some horrifying truths about himself and his country, which is that he had been misinformed about the military. His military was much more corrupt. It was Swiss cheese. It was not able to do what he thought it was, and he has undermined his, to use a Chinese phrase, comprehensive national power by going in.

This is where having a long-term obsession with a country is useful because I remember being in Beijing now 12 years ago talking to people about the first invasion of Ukraine, the Crimea operation. And at the very beginning people were saying, “Oh, Xi Jinping is very impressed. He’s talking about it. He’s amazed that Putin was able to go in, get this piece of real estate, get a lot of resources, doesn’t seem to have caused him any problems.”

And then when I was back again a year or two later, people were saying, “Oh, the word’s gone out, don’t flatter. Don’t talk about the Ukraine operation. Now it looks like it’s blowing back on him.”

And when you fast-forward to today, I think one of the key reasons why Xi Jinping has been going after his military so consistently and relentlessly in recent months, which is in some ways one of the most important facts of our time, is that this purge going on within the Chinese military is partly because he wants to make sure that if he ever pulls the trigger on Taiwan, that he doesn’t find himself in the humiliating, ultimately weakening position that Vladimir Putin is in.

Preet Bharara:

I have two related questions. The first one, I’ll warn you right now is a geography question, but it occurred to me when you started to talk about Taiwan. What is the larger figure, the number of miles between the United States and Greenland, or the number of miles between China and Taiwan? You know the answer to that question?

Evan Osnos:

China to Taiwan is relatively close.

Preet Bharara:

It’s really close.

Evan Osnos:

In fact, there are elements of Taiwan that are a swimmable distance from China.

Preet Bharara:

Well, maybe for some people.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, well, I’ve-

Preet Bharara:

Is it 20 yards?

Evan Osnos:

No, it’s a couple miles. It’s a couple miles.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s not swimmable.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I’m with you on that, actually. I’m more of-

Preet Bharara:

To this guy.

Evan Osnos:

… dog paddle.

Preet Bharara:

If I had floaties, if I had the floaties and-

Evan Osnos:

No way to invade.

Preet Bharara:

And a yacht.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. A yacht and the floaties, that would be a hell of a picture.

Preet Bharara:

But the reason I asked that question, I mean, this may be very obvious. I’m just stating the obvious. Does Trump have empathy for, and sympathy for China’s desires, and to some extent Putin’s desires because he himself is acquisitive? It’s become very clear to me that obviously he wants to be in Mount Rushmore, he wants to win the Nobel Prize, but he really wants to have as one of his legacies expanding the square mileage of the United States of America. And so he kind of gets that, is that a fair assessment?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, it is. In his way, it’s a classical interpretation of power, meaning that it was much more fashionable in the 1600s than it is today.

Preet Bharara:

And in non-democracies.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, certainly. Democracies were few and far between at that point. There’s a great, an American scholar named Rush Doshi who has laid out this interesting way of understanding how the US is going about accruing power in a different way than China is. China basically is subscribing to the theory that if you look at the 17th century, 18th century, what you see is that countries developed their power by mastering the technologies of their time. For instance, it was the Brits who mastered the Industrial Revolution, and the Americans who mastered the energy revolution and that allowed these countries to pull ahead. Whereas if you were focused and some of these countries did lose their way at points and begin to focus just on the acquisition of territory, that that really does not lead to the rise of a great power.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that is so interesting, and it’s as if you are helping to choreograph this interview, Evan, because I was like, “How am I going to segue to AI?”

Evan Osnos:

Well, here you are.

Preet Bharara:

But I will quote my guest from just one minute ago: the countries develop power by mastering the technology of their time. Unquestionably, the technology of our time, literally in real time right now, and for the foreseeable future is artificial intelligence. Who’s mastering that technology in the world?

Evan Osnos:

Well, we’re both dedicating ourselves as if it was an existential issue, and we’re really the only two countries that are at the forefront of that. I think that any fair interpretation will tell you, and this is not an original observation, but just to get us up to the state of the art on thinking here is that the United States is more or less a step ahead when it comes to the absolute frontier of the technology. There’s a big robust debate as you can imagine around are we six months ahead, one year ahead, three months ahead, whatever. That’s less interesting to me than the nature of the lead versus the nature of what China’s doing. What China’s doing is broadly diffusing it across the economy more efficiently. It’s very interesting to me having just returned from being on the ground in China that you see AI everywhere, either real or fake, meaning that it’s being incorporated into every product practically right up the-

Preet Bharara:

Commercials, ads?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I was-

Preet Bharara:

Journalism? What’s AI doing in your field in China?

Evan Osnos:

You don’t hear as much about.

Preet Bharara:

There’s not as much journalism.

Evan Osnos:

But in some ways, China was already using AI for journalism a hundred years ago in the sense that they had a set of predictive algorithms that they would use to fill out every sentence anyway. I was standing at one point and I was just taking pictures of this billboard that was one of these LEDs that changes every 20 seconds, and each ad that came up had some AI component, whether it was for a food product or for cars or something.

Now, part of that is that when China goes in on something at the leadership level, and this has been true since 1949 when the Communists came to power, they will adopt the language everywhere immediately. Everywhere all at once as we say, but it’s also that they really have imbibed the idea that this is going to be the thing. And you know why this is what’s so interesting to me, Preet, they believe, the Chinese leaders are sure that they have come upon a big insight, which is that they missed the Industrial Revolution when it happened.

They were a poor country and they didn’t get it. Then they missed the information technology revolution, and they didn’t invent the internet and they didn’t really catch up to it until too late. And they’re convinced that they must not miss the AI revolution, and to follow the biotech biological revolution, the idea of human bodies living longer and stronger. And so this has become for them an all encompassing focus.

Preet Bharara:

So in the West, I feel like there’s a lot of philosophizing, which I enjoy and I like, and I think is very important. There’s a lot of attention to ultimate existential questions about our humanity, not necessarily about our being able to live and breathe and whether AI will kill us physically, kill our human bodies. Well, that’s clearly a concern on the part of some people, but more metaphysically, what does it mean if our art is produced by AI? You don’t have to see what the next Spielberg movie is and see someone else’s vision. You can order up a menu, say, “I want a rom com today. I would like it to star this actress,” who’s probably an AI actress, “this actor. I would like it to have a lot of tension and suspense. I would like there to be three car.” And you get a probably pretty good movie.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, I watch movies like that now that are not Oscar winning, AFI top 10 contenders, but I will sometimes look at the listings. I’m in a mood for a certain kind of suspense or action film. Imagine a world in which I can pick the story, is that a bad world or not? And do we spend, given the economic aspects of this, and obviously Hollywood has economy and that’s not unimportant at all, but are we in the West luxuriating too much in the metaphysics of this at the expense of thinking how it’s going to affect everyday jobs?

Evan Osnos:

I don’t think we are. I think we’re right to be asking these core questions because this ultimately does get to the question of jobs. And this issue that you’ve hit on is a real preoccupation of mine. I think about it constantly now, not just in terms of my own profession, what will journalism look like in five years or 10 years, but also more, not to use too grand a term, but what is art going to mean in five or 10 years? That kind of algorithmic approach you described where we take the elements we know that are satisfying.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know what art means now when I go to a museum, so that’s me.

Evan Osnos:

But part of that, but here’s the question. Here’s one answer to the question of what art means. It happens to be the hundredth anniversary of The New Yorker so it’s a moment to be thinking about what is this weird magazine and how did we come to be? I came upon this funny, I thought really in some ways telling little detail, which is that one of the important early writers, Joseph Mitchell, was once asked years later, “What is it about our place? What is The New Yorker? Why does this strange magazine, this combination of nonfiction and politics and poetry and cartoons?” That would never work if you just imagine pitched it in a meeting. So why does it work?

And he said, “It’s devoted to this basic idea, which is the wild exactitude of life.” This phrase is a big… For me, it was really opened my eyes. The wild exactitude of life refers to the utter impossibility of predicting how strange we all are, how we’re not actually utterly predictable. And in fact, to the degree we are predictable, we’re boring and we’re not very satisfying.

The nature of really satisfying art, and I use that word with some hesitation because it sounds too fancy, but the nature of satisfying creative work is when it surprises you, when it departs from that. If anybody had told you, Preet, that a drama about gay hockey players was going to become one of the defining films of the last 12 months, you would’ve been surprised, right?

Preet Bharara:

No, you are totally correct. I think about this in another context, which is certainly not my expertise, and I’ll tell you what it is in a moment, but this concept of surprise, both in entrepreneurialism and in art, and in the other area, which is relationships and love, to me, if you lose surprise across populations, and if the possibility of the unlikely thing goes down to zero because of technology, then we’ve lost something. And so in the romantic world, the young people today, may I call them that as I’m not as young as I used to be? If all of your relationships get set up not because you happen to meet someone at a party or at a bar or on a train, but through an algorithm, how often will there be an unlikely couple? And that bothers me, and your point about art is also just like that.

And then in technology and in entrepreneurialism, I moderated a fireside chat with two very interesting venture capitalists last week, and I asked the question: the most successful entrepreneurs, at least today, do they think what does the world need and what is lacking and I’m going to provide it? Am I going to fill some yearning that people have already like a better mouse trapper, or do I think of something that makes me passionate and that the world doesn’t know it needs and I’m going to give it to the world? And the unanimous answer was the second, but I feel like that is in jeopardy for the reasons you say.

Evan Osnos:

I agree with you. I also think that we don’t venerate the language of wild surprise in the way that we should. In fact, what do you hear about? We hear about the value of pattern recognition. That’s one of those things that we constantly say, “Oh, that’s a strength.” And that if you want to become a great entrepreneur, you should be great at matching patterns. I would argue that’s a recipe to being a brilliantly mediocre entrepreneur.

Now, I say this as somebody who’s not entrepreneurial, that’s not my profession. I mean, in the world of creative work, yes, one needs to be entrepreneurial to be doing the kind of work I’m doing. And in fact, if you become formulaic, this is where I think it gets fascinating, and you’re onto something important, which is on a level that we don’t even explicitly acknowledge, we are as a species desperately craving surprise and to be proven wrong in our algorithmic predictions and our expectations.

To tie it into China, this is a very direct issue because I’ll give you an interesting example. About a decade and a half ago, a little more now, there was a moment which sent the Chinese creative industries into a crisis, which is Kung Fu Panda. This was a film that was created, it was created in the West and all of a sudden China was like, “How could it be that they came up with Kung Fu Panda?”

Preet Bharara:

A little bit mortified.

Evan Osnos:

And it was mortifying. The answer was because the Chinese system is philosophically and politically boxed in to this system of pattern recognition where the way you survive and the way you advance is by never deviating from those bounds and by being the best student and so on and so on. But the problem is that you never come up with that wild pathbreaking idea.

Preet Bharara:

It saps creativity. Look, the piece of art that in my household every child in this household knows every word of every song by heart is Hamilton.

Evan Osnos:

My son too.

Preet Bharara:

What was that pitch like?

Evan Osnos:

Exactly right. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

How does that get made? And then here you have this wonderful product and not to get even overly philosophical about it, I’m not saying this is government imposed, it’s like the ancient tension between liberty and constraint.

Evan Osnos:

It is, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

If you’re liberated to think of anything, if you’re liberated to meet anyone, if you’re liberated to say art is not a perfect likeness of this woman who is smiling mysteriously in the most famous painting ever, but a blank canvas with a red circle, then have we lost something? Now, on the other side, I don’t know, you and I and other people who are very privileged and like esoteric art, maybe that’s like some people feel about space exploration. It’s great. I mean, I love space exploration too. I think it’s worth every penny, I think we should spend more on it, but when there are people who are in food deserts and have other issues, how do we spend our money? How do we spend our resources? How do we spend our time?

Evan Osnos:

This cuts both ways, because part of what got us into trouble over the last 16 months, particularly at the beginning of the Trump administration, was the idea that you could take somebody like Elon Musk who is a genuinely, whatever people think of him, and I have a lot of criticisms of him, but he is somebody who does depart from what we know to already be true and done and he says, “I can do something different.”

Now, that was wildly, tragically, catastrophically misapplied when he came to Washington, and he and his cohort thought we can apply that to government. We’re going to go in, we’re going to take these systems like USAID, like foreign aid, and we’re going to be radical thinkers, and we’re going to say nothing is sacred, we’re going to blow it up, and we’ll accept the broken pottery and move fast and break things, and on and on and on.

And I think to quote Bill Gates, “The sight of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a good one.” And I think the reason why I mentioned this is we’re living in this period where these questions of what constitutes legitimate informed radical innovation is a different question from what constitutes just being somebody who wants to break things in the name of disruptive innovation because that’s a cheap and ultimately I think destructive form of wild thinking.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk for a couple of minutes about AI and its ability to write? Because on an experimental basis from time to time, I have asked AI to do a task, and for some things it’s perfectly serviceable, and in some things it’s terrible. If you ask AI, “Write me a toast on the occasion of my father’s 85th birthday.”

And maybe if you don’t love your father, maybe if you don’t love or care about your father, or have any fond memories that are unknown to Claude or to ChatGPT, then maybe it’ll do a fine job, but it’s going to do a shit job because it’s too personal a thing. And if you’re going to preside at some kind of ceremonial thing, it’ll give you, if you otherwise suck, it’ll give you something better than your suckiness.

But on something specific, I’ve tried this a couple of times. Write a paragraph in soaring, inspirational style about X. And Evan, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t do it. And I remember looking at, I did this once, and I looked at the paragraph, it would have taken me two days to write that paragraph, and it wouldn’t have been as good. So there’s both sides of that, not my worry. My worry and also my interest is to the extent it is that good now on the one-off paragraph that I’ve asked it to write and I’m sure it’s much better than even that for a lot of people, what’s it going to be like in a year, and what’s The New Yorker going to be like in five years?

Evan Osnos:

This is a recurring, slightly haunting question for me. I am very conscious of that puzzle because as you say, it can often be incredibly mediocre when you’re writing about something that is beyond the scope of published information. But if you’re talking about, “Analyze the US-China Summit for me in the style of Evan Osnos,” it’s probably going to be unnervingly close. And think of the time I would say, “Yeah, it’s amazing.” I mean-

Preet Bharara:

So what it can’t do is your footwork.

Evan Osnos:

Correct. It’s a big deal. Actually, you’ve hit on, this is in some ways, to my mind, the saving grace.

Preet Bharara:

That’s where your superpower is.

Evan Osnos:

This is the return of shoe leather, because what happens is, yeah, sure, it can process the same think tank reports, it can go through a hundred podcasts, it can translate from Chinese into English and so on and so on. What it can’t do is go out and talk to that person who is unlikely to have been interviewed to understand this relationship and have that person give you… So in a weird way, what hollowing out I think is the middle layer. What you end up… Friends of mine who work, for instance, for the wire services, that work cannot be replicated at the frontline level, going out to the scene of the crime and finding out exactly what did the murderer look like. That kind of thing is not what the AI can do. The middle layer, it certainly can do.

And then at the highest level, which is coming up with something that is not just soaring and inspirational, as you said, but is original. And this is where we’re getting into the keyword here, and I’ll give you an example. So I’m a big George Saunders fan, and when I read George Saunders or when I listen to him talk, what I find satisfying about him is partly because he wears this lightly. He’s not a guy who walks into the room and says, “I am a great literary innovator and I am about to blow your mind.” There’s not a lot of bullshit there.

And yet when you actually listen to what he says, it is so crystalline, it’s so true to life that he manages to understand something about us that is this is the thing that the AI is still struggling to do and it may get there. I suspect a technologist on this conversation would say, “Yes, it’s going to get there.” The ability to be not vague and to hone in so precisely that you feel recognized is for the moment the comparative advantage, for the moment.

Preet Bharara:

Are you writing a book at the moment?

Evan Osnos:

I am, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Can you share the topic, or no?

Evan Osnos:

Well, I won’t tell you the specifics other than to tell you on this point actually.

Preet Bharara:

Because I was going to ask, are you using AI to aid your research in a way that you didn’t five years ago? Obviously, you couldn’t have five years ago.

Evan Osnos:

I am. I’ll tell you an interesting… So I’m doing a book right now that involves a lot of archival research and here’s what’s interesting-

Preet Bharara:

Well, AI is great.

Evan Osnos:

Except, here’s what’s interesting. Preet, you have to have, without knowing it, climbed into my world for a moment, this is really on my mind because if I ask it for instance, “Okay, what are the archival resources out in the world that I should be pursuing to understand this element?” And I’ll make it more specific. So I’m looking at a piece of American industrial history from the early 20th century, the advent of new technologies. I mean, wonder why a person would want to be looking at that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I have no idea.

Evan Osnos:

Exactly. And so what’s cool is the AI will say, “Yes, here is an archive at a specific library that you want to go to,” but then it doesn’t actually have any idea what’s in that archive. And what’s fascinating to me is the only way you’ll get into that archive and be able to find out what’s in there, what’s revealing, these are oral histories taken one-on-one 100 years ago is to go and listen to those oral histories. That’s a human act, and to figure out what is meaningful in that 90 minutes of conversation in highly accented English, that is a human act, and that’s the difference. Somebody would be able to AI a book on this topic.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but I don’t share your optimism because the thing you described, that’s just because there’s a wall up, there’s a firewall up. That is something if AI was granted access, it could certainly do.

Evan Osnos:

It’s true, but it’s not that there’s just a fire, it’s just those things haven’t been even digitized.

Preet Bharara:

I guess. Yeah. But they can be.

Evan Osnos:

They will be.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a short lifespan on that privilege that we humans have. There’s a great cartoon, I think I mentioned it before on the podcast. Where else would I have seen a brilliant cartoon but for the pages of The New Yorker? And it’s a picture of two guys with clubs in their hands and it’s a guy and the caption is it’s a lawyer saying, “AI can’t play golf with the judge.”

Evan Osnos:

That’s exactly it, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Good point.

Evan Osnos:

No AI Roy Cohn.

Preet Bharara:

No AI Roy Cohn.

Evan Osnos:

It will. Eventually, a humanoid robot will be happy to go out and play with the judge.

Preet Bharara:

The thing about AI that is democratizing, and I made this point multiple times, so you were an accomplished author, and very gainfully employed as an author. So you’re in a very privileged and experienced spot, but I bet there are some folks who are like, they want to write a book and one of the reasons they don’t write a book is because they can’t do the research and they can’t afford a research assistant or multiple research assistants. And now for a few dollars a month, they can sit in their home and they can actually research anything that they want. Even if you’re writing a novel, I’ve always thought you don’t have to go to that street in Tokyo and take it in with your… I mean, that’s better.

Evan Osnos:

No, but you’re right.

Preet Bharara:

That’s true. You can now describe the street in Tokyo for your chapter seven of your book. It’s still using a lot of the same perceptive abilities, but you can conjure the street on your screen, and there are a million other ways like that, that maybe people who have talent and know how to tell… It seems to me that AI will be a great boon to people who know how to tell a story and have something to freaking say who haven’t been able to because there are barriers to entry, because they don’t have a hundred million dollars to make a film. They’re not Jerry Bruckheimer, and they can’t blow up a building, but now they can.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Now they can. So am I wrong to be optimistic about that?

Evan Osnos:

No, I think you’re right about that. I agree with that. And look, I am not, in some ways I don’t want to gloss over what is the core fact of what I believe, which is everything you’re describing sounds correct to me, which is that it is going to democratize the ability to do the kind of work that is right now prohibitive because people don’t have the time or the money to be able to do that. I really do believe that.

Here’s where I think it gets interesting is that there is still something specific about going to that street in Tokyo and being able to describe it with a level of satisfying, exhilarating clarity. And here’s an example. I mean, David Grann, who was a great author and colleague at The New Yorker, wrote a book called The Wager, which I think a lot of people may have read. It was about a shipwreck in 1700s. He wrote this book about the shipwreck, which happened way down at the southern tip of South America, and he got to the end of his research and he’s like… He read every book there was on what the topography and the geology and the biology was down there.

And he realized, “Look, I just am not going to be able to do this justice unless I go down there and get on a boat.” And he wrote out on this boat on the heaving seas to go to this little tiny island where the boat ran aground and the drama unfolded. And on some level, there’s a million shipwreck books. There’s a reason why his book was a colossal enduring bestseller. On some level, people who don’t even care about shipwrecks because he captured a way in which you could lose yourself in it. And I think there will come a day when the AI is able to do that. Right now, it’s not able to do that.

Preet Bharara:

But the problem is, just in terms of the proportion of the population who can achieve the thing you’re describing is vanishingly small. I was thinking about when you were telling the story, Robert Caro, one of the great biographers, non-fiction writers ever, extraordinary. And we talked about how for one of his books, he wanted to see how a mile of road was built and he thought he’d go for three days. I don’t have the numbers exactly, and he stayed for six months.

Evan Osnos:

Totally, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And he did the equivalent of our thought experiment of the street in Tokyo and that’s amazing. Robert Caro, as a writer, I would dare say, is more rare than a billionaire in terms of wealth. And so it is unrealistic, I suppose, to think, oh, well, only Robert Caro can do that. Yeah, I can’t. You can still get a lot of A- books and A quality books on a lot of things that don’t require a visit to the Tokyo street, or to board the ship. And I guess the ultimate question, which we don’t have to decide here is that good or bad?

Evan Osnos:

I think that there will be a lot more B+ books and I think that will allow a lot of people to write books that never could otherwise. And some of those will be A books, A+ books even. I think what we can agree on is that the goal remains the same, which is there’s a reason why Robert Caro on LBJ is so extraordinary is, as he says, you have to turn every page. And it’s not just that it’s the folders that are marked LBJ and campaign contributions.

In fact, it’s the strange folder, called it the wild exactitude. It’s the folder called miscellaneous where you find some tiny little slip of paper with a stray name written on it that explains to him because he knows the connections that allows him to then realize, oh, this is a window into an entire subterranean fundraising network that LBJ presided over that was the real origin of his power, and that’s what explains how he came to be. And so there may come a day when that is possible, but at that point, the AI will be approximating this incredible kind of willingness to go further and farther, which is what made Robert Caro who he is.

Preet Bharara:

Well, as usual, Evan, I could talk to you for many hours on many topics, not just China.

Evan Osnos:

Likewise.

Preet Bharara:

Come back soon.

Evan Osnos:

Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

Thanks, Evan.

My conversation with Evan Osnos continues for members of the Insider Community.

Evan Osnos:

We’re this strange balance between both on one hand admiring the forces that have created enormous fortunes, and at the same time, very wary of them.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

After the break, I’ll answer your questions.

Heads up, folks. Stay Tuned is going live. I’ll be speaking with my friend and colleague, former US Attorney Barb McQuade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Sunday, May 31st. We’ll be talking about her new book, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. To get in person or virtual tickets, head to cafe.com/barb. That’s cafe.com/barb. I hope to see you there.

Now, let’s get to your questions.

As many of you know, I’m a pretty huge Bruce Springsteen fan. As many of you also know, he’s been on tour, and so I’ve been getting questions along the lines of the following that came from Melinda who writes in the Stay Tuned Substack chat, “Were you able to attend Bruce’s Land of Hope and Dreams Show? What was the experience?”

Well, Melinda, I was not only able to attend, but there were a total of three shows in the New York area last week, and I went to all three. I talked about my experience at one Springsteen concert a little bit on last week’s episode with my guest, George Packer. But since then, I’ve been to two more concerts and have had a little more time to reflect on the experience. I’ve always answered the question about why I like Bruce Springsteen the same way I did a number of years ago when I did a television interview. And I was asked, “Why do you love Springsteen?”

And I decided the best answer I’d ever heard about that question was something that Jon Stewart once said. And Jon Stewart once said about Bruce and seeing him in concert, “Do you like joy? Well, if you like joy, should go check out a Springsteen concert.”

But as I said on the podcast last week, I was not immediately overcome with a feeling of joy because the circumstances of this concert and this tour are a little bit different. It’s called The Land of Hope and Dreams, but the context for this show, the inspiration for the show that Bruce Springsteen announced at the last minute was a set of tragedies that took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota that we’ve talked about on the podcast a number of times. The ICE shooting and killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. So joy isn’t the first word that comes to mind.

And as I said to George Packer, I felt a little bit, especially the first night, the first concert, that there was an underlying foundation of rage not just in Bruce, but in the audience. But it wasn’t a destructive rage, a pointless rage. A sort of baseline I would say, if I can, righteous rage, patriotic rage about what is happening to our country, and why we’re not doing more to stop these terrible things that are happening in our country.

But don’t get me wrong, there was joy of plenty. E Street Band was in rare form, and Bruce Springsteen brought his characteristic energy, although I will note for folks who are going to see him in other cities going forward, he does take the stage very close in time to the call time of 7:30 so if you’re thinking you’re going to arrive at 7:40 or 7:45, you might miss him playing Born in the USA. It was a pretty serious setlist, songs like Darkness on the Edge of Town, Death to My Hometown, Streets of Minneapolis of course, Youngstown, American Skin, Long Walk Home, House Of A Thousand Guitars, and many, many others, so it was a bit more sober than some Springsteen concerts I’ve been to in the past.

But of course, the big treat was his accompaniment by Tom Morello. Sort of incidentally playing into the theme of quiet rage, Tom Morello, of course, from the band, Rage Against the Machine. And though I’ve heard him and Springsteen sing together on YouTube, The Ghost of Tom Joad, nothing prepared me for this rendition live three times last week, twice in Manhattan and once in Brooklyn. It seems not everyone in the audience knew the song necessarily or at least all the words to it, and may not have been familiar with the collaboration between Tom and Bruce, but when Tom Morello comes to the microphone and sings the following lyric, it hit in a way that I haven’t felt it before.

And the lyric is this, “Wherever somebody’s fighting for a place to stand, or a decent job, or a helping hand. Wherever somebody’s struggling to be free, look in their eyes, ma, and you’ll see me.”

Now, as familiar as I have been on dozens of occasions with the power of Bruce’s song and Bruce’s spirit, it’s less common to hear the power of his words. He didn’t overdo it, but from time to time, he would make comments about the state of affairs in this country, comments that many of you, if not all of you, would agree with. He made respectful reference on a number of occasions to the deceased, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

At one point he actually gave a short speech, about four or five minutes, but boy did it pack a punch. He began by saying we are living through troubled and troubling times, and then he described a number of issues that we’ve talked about on the podcast week after week after week. He talked about waging an unwise and illegal war, about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the violation of due process, undermining the independence of DOJ, even mentioned the Comey indictment based on seashells, the eradication of USAID, the damage to NATO, the whitewashing of history, and a lot more.

But I will say the most significant applause, the most sustained cheering that brought tens of thousands of people to their feet on each and every night that I attended came when Bruce delivered the following message.

Bruce Springsteen:

Honesty. Honesty, honor, humility, character, truth, compassion, humanity, thoughtfulness, morality, true strength and decency, don’t let anybody tell you that these things don’t matter anymore, they do.

Preet Bharara:

And the crowd, as they say, went wild. Approving just this list of good qualities, which every voter in America has a right to expect their leaders to possess. Bruce went on to say about these qualities, “They are at the heart. They are at the heart of the kind of men and women we are, the kind of citizens we want to be, and the kind of country we want to leave for our children.”

Now, what about that rage I mentioned? Which I feel often, and you must too. Well, Bruce at the end of the concert indirectly seemed to address that also. At the end of the show, he reminded the crowd the very last words spoken by Renee Good to the officer, who in moments, would shoot her dead. She said to him through the window of her car, “I’m not mad at you. I’m not mad at you.” And then she was dead. And then Bruce told an important truth.

Bruce Springsteen:

There is no one coming to save us, we’ve got to do it ourselves. So join us, and let’s fight for the America that we love. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?

Preet Bharara:

And so I’ll end my thoughts the same way Bruce did at the end of each concert last week. God bless Alex Pretti and Renee Good, God bless you, and God bless America.

Bruce Springsteen:

One, two.

Preet Bharara:

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. 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 deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising oroducer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.