Stay Tuned with Preet

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last couple of years has been a book that was based on a long series of interviews in done, I think, in 2000s or maybe 1999 with Putin. And it's kind of Putin in his own words. And one of the stories he tells that was you stop me if you've heard this because I think it's quite well known now, but he tells a story about when he was growing up in what was then Leningrad in a sort of fairly in his apartment block. He and his friends used to play on the stairwell. And one time he was charging up and down there and he came across a rat and he cornered the rat. And he describes how the cornered rat at some point then flew for his neck. And he he describes this and he says, you know, he makes the point that, you know, this taught him a life lesson of how what happens when people are cornered.

Jonathan is a contributing correspondent to NBC News and a former senior editor of Newsweek. He's written books on presidents including FDR and Obama, and in 2020 he published a biography of Carter called His Very Best, Jimmy Carter Alive.

And what I try to do in His Very Best is explain that his presidency is badly underrated, not that he belongs on Mount Rushmore or in the top rank of presidents, but it's badly underrated.

I devote a whole chapter to it in my book, because it starts out with him admitting his shortcomings.

And so I think it was just wrong of Kennedy to do that. He should have known that he was softening him up.

I think that his epitaph as president should reflect [that he was a political failure, but a substantive and farsighted success].

You wrote a book three and a half years ago, it came out, Trick Mirror, Reflections on Self-Delusion.

And I want to ask you about some of the themes from the book.

I don't remember writing that but I bet it was in a blurb for Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I think is pretty much the ur-text for all of this.

I think that's pretty much the ur-text for all of this.

I really buy that model that you kind of naturally, but like performing, performative has kind of a deservedly bad rap as a word, as a bad connotation. But, you know, I do think we are performing in real life when we're on the subway.

I don't remember writing that but I bet it was in a blurb for Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I think is pretty much the ur-text for all of this.

I think that's pretty much the ur-text for all of this.

There's in that Shoshana Zuboff book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she compares, you know, this entire this entire economic structure.

Yeah, I think that's a review of Angela Garbus' great book, Essential Labor.

And it's about what I think many of us hoped would be a larger reconsideration of labor and what is actually, what kind of work is valuable that seemed like it would have had to come from 2020, right?

And I think that, you know, the thing about childcare has this unique lever into that is that taking care of a child, having children, this is kind of a crucible and experience through which almost everybody passes, right?

It seemed to me so incomprehensible that anyone could pass through the experience of early parenthood and not think that childcare, childcare workers should be paid $100,000 a year, you know?

And I think that's what needs to happen. Like I think it just seemed so, you know, because I think there's maybe some plausible excuse for not knowing how hard and important farm work is maybe or something like that, right?

Midnight's Children is the...

A great novel written by somebody in his 30s. And there have been many since.

And sometimes it's an angry book and sometimes it's a bitter book and even vindictive at times. And honest and charming. And it's all over the place in that way, in the best sense.

in which he tells the story straight.

I think Salman Rushdie would have wanted nothing more than for him to be on this show instead of me and talking about a book instead of a stabbing.

And in her first novel, which was published when she was 24, White Teeth, there's a character who is radicalized, terribly unsophisticated, and there's a scene of him walking to a demonstration, clearly against satanic verses, against Rushdie. And one of his friends says, did you read the book? And he says, no, of course not.

It's called Gatekeepers, how the White House chiefs of staff define every presidency.

There's a reason why the subtitle of my book, The Gatekeepers, was how the White House chiefs of staff define every presidency.

There's a reason why I called the book The Gatekeepers.

Now he's out with a book about the first two years of the Biden administration. It's called The Fight of His Life Inside Joe Biden's White House.

In your new book, The Fight of His Life Inside Joe Biden's White House, tell folks briefly what your major takeaway was in writing that book.

Elie's new book, Untouchable, How Powerful People Get Away With It, takes a page from his experience successfully prosecuting top mob bosses and explains how Donald Trump has been able to evade the law with countless misdeeds in recent years.

The book is called Untouchable, How Powerful People Get Away With It.

I say in the book, nothing protects power like power itself.

I have the last chapter in this book is called waiting for Garland, right? It's a play on waiting for Godot or waiting for Guffman.

I wrote a piece for us for cafe about the cost of this because now Cassidy Hutchinson has testified, but you know what? She lied. She lied to the committee her first time under that lawyer we talked about.

The NFL, they have contingencies for everything. Anything catastrophic, anything complete. I mean, you name it, they plan for it.

They're sort of like the Pentagon. And they like to think that there are, they have scenario planning.

I thought it has done an abysmal job over the years protecting its players.

If you were worried about your brain health, your long-term health, I would not recommend that anyone plays football.

And I would also not give the NFL terribly big points for actually helping out over the years, although they've actually-