America's Elite Are Finally Exposed by the Epstein Files | Anand Giridharadas & Preet Bharara

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

Great to be back with you.

We both had black hair in January, right?

What a decade this year has been.

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

And it's a shame to have people around a table and no one thinking, everyone just being on their script. So she had these 40 — she published these 40 questions on her Substack, which is called Group Life. Really good. You should check it out. And one of them was actually from my daughter, who's seven, and came up with a question of what is the naughtiest thing you've ever done that was worth it?

Yeah, but not for your podcast.

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

And I'm like, 'Does that guy want to defund me?' Like, how does that work?

Do cops with podcasts also get defunded? How does that work from the liberals? How does that work?

Yeah, I'll have to ask ChatGPT about that.

Oh, the one I loved, the one I really loved, which we didn't end up doing, was: what is a moment when you realized you were becoming more like someone else in this family?

And it's a really easy, seemingly easy way, including for kids, because we have two little kids and a nephew. It's an easy way into, you know, heritage and these kind of bigger ideas of what make us us. And we ended up actually doing one question on Thanksgiving, and then the next day, or actually Saturday night, we did another one about, you know, what was the thing that most surprised you this year and what do you most want to carry into or have happen to you the next year? Anyway, we love these questions and it's really amazing to — it's a little bit like how really elegantly designed technologies are as easy for 8-year-olds as they are for 80-year-olds. Like a really good question like that sort of has the same function. Somehow you get the 80-year-old and the 8-year-old to kind of be on the same page. And it's a good way to sneak some heritage into the mac and cheese of a fun, zesty conversation.

Everyone needs an editor.

You should have seen how long it originally was.

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

I decided, and I don't recommend this.

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

They came from the House Oversight Committee. So they were released by the House Oversight Committee, and you know, there have been some earlier things released, but this was a giant, giant pile of, I think, 20,000-plus documents, many of them emails. And I was kind of reading the press coverage like everybody else and, you know, seeing these different frames being put on it. And then I was like, I'm a words person. I'm a text person. I should read these emails. I don't know what for. I don't know if it's going to become something. And by the way, like you and I do independent media now. Independent media actually allowed me to do that, right? Before it was a New York Times article, before it was a commission from anybody, I was able to say, you know what, this is going to take days — I didn't even know how many days — this is going to take a long time. But I am going to take that long time because a lot of what I was reading was like 'Larry Summers got dating advice' as the story, or this thing, or, you know, finding a thing. There was a lot of name-search journalism, and I understand it because I've been on deadline as a journalist, like I understand the pressures. But it felt like we had gotten this really rare glimpse into how a very powerful group of people thinks, talks behind our back, and we were just getting a bunch of tabloid stories or people looking for connections to Donald Trump. And so I said, let me just read this. And I started reading, day one, day two. It was 12 tranches. I don't think I finished, you know, the first tranche or the first day. It was just a lot of stuff.

No.

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

It was on a Google Drive that the House Oversight Committee put out. So then there's 12 tranches. You go into tranche one and then there's four, five folders within that, and you go into images and then it's like images of all these...

I started at the top and I just kept reading. And a lot of it, you know, the way you'd imagine if you go into an email — I'm sure you know this more than me — is that a lot of it becomes repetitious because it's one email, the original email, and then there's like a thread. So then all the things get reprinted again. So it's a lot of repetition. But I started reading and the first impression I had was, you know, it's as boring, a lot of it, as your and my emails, right? It's 'what time is this going to happen?', 'what time is this person getting in?', you know. In some ways, for all the insanity of that email box, it's also a person's email box. But the more I kept reading, and these bold-faced names — the Larry Summerses, people from the Gates Foundation and Harvard and all these other institutions emerged — the more I realized that I was getting a glimpse of an entire social network, a group of people who shared certain codes of speech, certain ways of thinking, certain shorthands, right? The same way a profession, your profession, the legal profession, has habits of mind, habits of speech. Well, this is not a profession, but it is a social network that in many of the same ways has a culture, has mores, has lines, boundaries, connectivity. And I realized I was really getting an anthropological look into a group of people who are very good at making sure you don't get a look into how they operate. That's sort of one of their most important undertakings. They all spend a lot of money through lawyers and, you know, IT people and others to make sure you don't get this kind of glimpse normally. So the more I read, I was like, this is important. Not just because you can get a kind of base-hit story of 'Larry Summers said this one thing' or 'the Gates Foundation had this one connection,' but rather precisely because of the network effect of this group of people and a rare chance to understand them. So I started reading for that understanding, and a couple of things emerged as I did that reading. One, it flipped around this basic question that everybody's been asking, which is: how could all these prestigious, eminent people — you got a monster over here, Jeffrey Epstein, the monster over here, which everybody agrees on — but how could all these people who in a way were saying, you know, obviously are not quite like him or at all like him, how could, you know, cabinet secretaries and CEOs and prominent Democrats and prominent Republicans and people who, you know, men, women, all kinds of people, eminent people from eminent institutions, how could they consort with a guy like this?

And the more I read, the more that became a kind of question with an obvious answer. This was a group of people, diverse in their own way, but with this fundamental thing in common. So many of them belonged to this kind of elite social network that was, I think, able to look away at the pain that Jeffrey Epstein had caused, at the abuse he had engaged in, because looking away was a superpower in this social network. It was an essential skill for a lot of these people, and one that didn't begin to be practiced when Jeffrey Epstein came back to society looking for rehabilitation. This looking away happened when folks in this network were looking away from economic distress that many of them helped cause in the financial crisis. It was economic pain. It was a looking away that they practiced as they kind of allowed technologies to run rampant over, you know, teenage girls with body image issues and workers being obsoleted. It was a looking away that has allowed for the most extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in 100 years. So when you look at what does this group of people have in common despite differences of party and profession and more, this is a social network of people — again, not every single person, but this is a social network of people — that is actually quite good at disregarding pain, that is quite quickly able to lift the fingers to the ears when people are screaming. And so then it became less and less of a surprise that they had been able to look away from his crimes.

It's a great point, and I'm not saying nobody here worked on those issues. What I'm saying is — and my book Winners Take All, which you and I talked about a long time ago, made this argument that often in this powerful social network of people, what Ro Khanna, a congressman from California, calls the Epstein class, even when they look at the problem, there is a looking away. Right? That's another way to think about the argument that I made in Winners Take All, which is that you think about someone like Bill Gates looking at the problem of, you know, public health and vaccines in COVID and using his voice and clout in that moment to insist on patents.

Right. So there's a looking at a problem, but because you are who you are as a billionaire, because you come with the interests and worldview you do, it is possible to look at and look away at the same time. And I would say, you know, you and I have both probably been to more than one charity gala in New York City.

Where people in tuxedos gather around, right? I would say that room is full of people who are, on one level, looking at poverty, looking at want in New York or wherever. And I would say at a meta level, what is actually happening in that room is often a looking away. So you are right that in this network, by MIT Media Lab, there's all kinds of people doing all kinds of stuff related to poverty, right? And that was one of the institutions that helped rehabilitate him. You know, I'm sure Larry Summers has written many sentences about poverty in his life. The question is, what was the prevailing attitude to power in this community? And when you had someone like Larry Summers, for example, an architect of financial deregulation, which many experts will tell you culminated later on in the financial crisis, right? In our system — you're a justice guy — we unfortunately don't live in a world in which people like that get justice. We live in a world in which people like that have impunity. And Larry Summers, having helped bring about, along with many others, a financial crisis in 2008, becomes rewarded as Barack Obama's chief economic adviser, right? And I think if I were to go to nice parties in New York and say that, people would say, 'that's unfair, that's unfair.' But I think like 95% of people in this country feel very deeply the truth that they can make no mistakes, that there is literally no margin for mistakes anymore in this country. You can't even make the mistake of getting sick. But that if you are an economist who helps guide a deregulation agenda that tanks the economy, you will get promoted. If you are a foreign affairs expert who helps sell a war that turns out to be a lie, you will literally get a better professorship and TV gig. Right? There is in this country a group of people who survive at the top no matter what. And what I found reading the emails is they are surviving because they live in this kind of parallel society where they trade information, non-public information. They trade favors. They are constantly checking in on each other and offering each other kind of intel on this, that, introductions. 'Do you need to meet this person? Do you need an investor for your fund?' Right? Regular Americans are starting GoFundMes to fund their medical bills. But in this group, if you happen to be passing through Athens, a Jeffrey Epstein or someone else will say, 'Oh, I know an investor in Athens. Would you like to meet an investor for your fund?' And so it is a kind of footloose, fancy-free elite that has internalized the impunity that has been a fact in this country, that has internalized — you know, we could have, you could imagine a different America in which a thousand people had gone to prison for 2008. You could imagine such a society.

For 2008.

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

Say it again.

But even holding all those constant, we certainly prioritize low-level drug dealers with that same regime of protections and whatever, we end up with like more people in prison for those kinds of things than any other country. And then you look at an opioids crisis or you look at, you know, the financial crisis or other things.

Yeah. As a general matter, for lots of different reasons, psychological, forensic, and otherwise, it is easier to get away with a fraud than it is to get away with a violent crime or a narcotics crime. Right? You catch someone with the dope, you know, essentially they're guilty. It's a lot harder to do some of that other stuff.

So first things first, because I think your question is fair and should be addressed. Right. There is sometimes this question that is put to me and others: why are you criticizing this elite if you have had good fortune? And I think, my god, the first and only thing to spend good fortune on is the freedom it gives you to be more honest than you would be able to be if...

And I'm not — like this piece. There's all kinds of elites, right? There's an educated elite. There's a professorial elite. There's a legal elite. There is a kind of political elite, people who hold elected office and people around those people. Like many of those are very important in our society. I have specifically in my writing written about an oligarchic elite, which is to say people who have probably more money than they would in a more fair society, who use that money specifically to buy political power that they're not entitled to in a one-person-one-vote system. Right? I do not rail against, you know, some people having PhDs and therefore teaching when others are not teaching. Like it is okay for there to be various forms of gradation in society. I don't rail against people with law degrees having a monopoly on the practice of law. I am very specifically focused on the idea — maybe, you know, my failing is that I took my grade school education at its word. I was told one person, one vote. I was told that a lot of people died for that at home and abroad. And when I see distortions to it, I get upset. And I will say I have had good fortune and I've written about my good fortune. And part of why I'm able to read those emails is I understand those people. I have written about them for years. I have been in those rooms, as you have. And I often find that critics of those worlds often don't understand those worlds very well. Often don't understand how they actually work. Right? I often hear from people, 'Well, you know, this TV channel that you work for, like, the executives must be calling you every day to tell you not to say this, not to say that.' I mean, it's interesting. That's the fantasy in their head. Like, that's never — it's literally never happened. By the way, it happens in all kinds of other ways that those people are unaware of. And having the actual textured understanding of how these institutions work, how people think. So I have been in many of those rooms. I've also spent a lot of time in my life and reporting career sitting on mud floors, you know, reporting and talking to people about their lives. But I have been in those rooms. I try to get into any room I can. And what I try to do is not become a citizen of the room just because I'm honored to be invited or because the drinks are nice. I try to retain the integrity of saying what I think and what I find to be true regardless. And I've done it long enough that I don't know, I keep going to the rooms.

Well, I mean, I think I don't get invited to a lot of rooms, but I get invited to enough because I'll tell you something. At some very deep level — and people have said this to me from these worlds — you know, Tom Wolfe had this line about writers as being like the village gossip. Like writers are not always thinking about these things, you know, out of their head, like inventing these thoughts. There are all of these ideas that you and I might talk about, they're out there in people, right? You work at a law firm, you work for a big corporation, if you work in the government, there's a lot of feelings you might have about the way that place is run, about the way the law works, about the way the system works. Of course, you can't say those things in many of the contexts you operate in. The more senior you are, you may not even be able to say those things to your spouse. So there's a lot of public opinion out there that is laying latent, that is lurking in people. And so when someone like me, or someone like — name the person — absorbs those things, often from talking to people, often from those whisperings, sitting in my living room, and then can go find them through reporting, find those intuitions through reporting, what often actually happens is that people in those worlds feel a certain relief because they can't say it, but they actually want it said, right? Because — and this happens to me — when I wrote Winners Take All, even some of these billionaires literally wrote to me and were like, 'Thank you for writing that.' Like, 'I disagree with this, I disagree with that, but thank you for saying this thing.' Because you know what? Even billionaires recognize that living in a society in which most people are miserable and most people with a dream and an idea can't realize it anymore, it actually starts to suck for them too, right? You and I have spent time in India. You can have all of God's money in India, right? There's a lot about India and even your experience of India as a billionaire that is limited by the quality of the average in India. The quality of institutions is unfortunately related to the quality of the average. The quality of the water, which you can't fully remove from your life — water is in everything — is related to the quality of the average. At some point I think even the most powerful people realize it's no fun to live in a place where everybody's life is grim.

Oh, how to live.