Law, power, and politics under cross-examination.
Stay Tuned with Preet treats the news as an argument to be tested, not a headline to be admired. Its conversations move from Trump-era legal fights and Supreme Court procedure to war psychology, voting rules, immigration, and the uneasy incentives behind public power.
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Stay Tuned with Preet is a legal and political interview show centered on the hard edges of public power. Its natural habitat is the place where a headline becomes a statute, a court posture, a subpoena, a ballot rule, or a constitutional claim. The show does not hurry past those details. It stays with them long enough to ask what they actually do. Recent episodes have taken up Iran and nuclear deterrence, the psychology of American force, Supreme Court fights over birthright citizenship and conversion therapy, and disputes over how mailed ballots should be counted. Other conversations examine Trump-related criminal investigations, classified documents, state ethics inquiries, Federal Reserve pressure, and attempts to reshape elections around fraud claims. The frame is often legal, but the stakes are political and moral. A procedural question is treated as something that can alter lives, incentives, and institutions. The show works best when a guest can move between expert vocabulary and plain examples. It uses comparisons from ordinary civic life, professional rules, contracts, voting, and public accountability to make dense arguments testable. The tone is serious, dry, and skeptical. It is also conversational enough to let a joke land before returning to the issue at hand. Preet Bharara’s role in the excerpts is not to perform outrage but to narrow the question until the shape of the dispute is clear. The Insider excerpts with Joyce Vance add a sharper running legal conversation, especially around Trump, DOJ, courts, and institutional pressure. Guests such as Jim Sciutto, Dahlia Lithwick, Michael Pollan, Cory Booker, Steve Vladeck, and David French bring the show into national security, consciousness, virtue in politics, election law, and ideological change. The result is a news-and-law program for people who do not want civic life flattened into teams and slogans. It is attentive to uncertainty. It is impatient with evasions. And it keeps returning to a basic demand: before taking a side, say exactly what rule, power, or principle is being tested.
Made for: For listeners who follow courts, voting, national security, and Trump-era institutional conflict closely enough to want the reasoning, not just the result. It suits politically engaged people who can sit with nuance, procedure, and uncomfortable implications.
What sets it apart: Stay Tuned with Preet stands apart by turning legal procedure into the center of the story rather than background texture. It pairs high-stakes political subjects with careful, skeptical questioning that keeps asking what would actually follow if an argument prevailed.
Join former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara as he breaks down legal topics in the news and engages thought leaders in a podcast about power, policy, and justice. From CAFE Studios and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Preet Bharara tests consequential political claims with direct follow-ups, informed counterarguments, and enough room for guests to show their reasoning.
Preet Bharara builds Stay Tuned around substantial interviews that keep returning to the assumptions beneath public arguments. He presses Lloyd Blankfein on economic forecasting and risk, challenges David French's account of political change with a counterargument about the…
Preet Bharara takes you from Lloyd Blankfein's risk calculus to questions about Comey's indictment.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sober look at how strikes on Iran could reshape nuclear calculations well beyond the battlefield.
Stay Tuned sets limited U.S. strikes on Iran against the larger strategic anxieties they may stir abroad. Preet Bharara starts with the move from presidents who avoided full-scale war with Iran to strikes that included bunker busters during the 12-day war, then turns to Jim…
A serious, grounded conversation about consciousness that fits neatly within Pollan's wider work.
This episode treats consciousness as something that can feel polluted, crowded, and colonized, and that framing gives the conversation its edge.
A lawyerly case study in MAGA, dissent, and the pull of political nostalgia.
Preet Bharara uses this conversation with David French to press on a central fault line in modern conservative politics: what happens to dissent when MAGA starts treating disagreement as betrayal, and how far the break from Reagan conservatism really goes.
Lloyd Blankfein explains when probability gives way to contingency planning.
Risk is framed as a shift in posture, not just a calculation. Lloyd Blankfein explains how market judgment can give way to contingency planning when conditions become extreme: probabilities start to matter less, assets move in tandem, and the real question becomes how to…
A sober look at Gaza's postwar future, where diplomacy depends on making a political alternative credible.
The episode frames Trump's latest Gaza peace proposal as less a headline than a test of what comes after the fighting. Antony Blinken, described as Joe Biden's 71st Secretary of State, ties it to a post-conflict plan he says was developed with all parties and left for the…
A ceasefire becomes a test of how allies and adversaries read American resolve.
Stay Tuned weighs what Iran's ceasefire announcement may mean after a 12-day war that tested assumptions about how far the United States might go.
Politics argued like a public record.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu discusses how President Trump's actions, like attempting to fire Federal Reserve officials and government equity stakes in companies, reflect shifting institutional norms and economic despotism.
Former U.S.
Former U.S.
Dan Harris discusses how small, consistent habits like meditation can improve happiness and offers advice for skeptics, especially relevant during the holiday season.
Preet Bharara interviews historian Jill Lepore about her book on the U.S.
On Stay Tuned with Preet, Rose Horowitch tells Preet Bharara that the share of Americans reading a book or article on a given day fell 40% over two decades.
Preet Bharara talks with CNN chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto about Iran, Donald Trump's war psychology, and Sciutto's book The Return of Great Powers, Russia, China, and the Next World War.
This episode features a discussion with Dahlia Lithwick about recent Supreme Court cases, including conversion therapy laws and birthright citizenship, along with political developments like the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Preet Bharara opens with a blunt idea: consciousness is in some trouble.
This episode discusses new allegations that Trump classified documents at Mar-a-Lago for business gain, the settlement in Michael Flynn's lawsuit against the DOJ, and Attorney General Pam Bondi's efforts to defer state ethics investigations.
Preet Bharara interviews Senator Cory Booker about his new book 'Stand', which explores the role of virtue in politics and discusses immigration policy.
Preet Bharara starts with a blunt claim.
Preet Bharara asks Lloyd Blankfein how to assess risk.
Preet Bharara interviews Dan Senor about the ceasefire in Gaza, shifting Middle East dynamics, and prospects for lasting peace in the region.
Preet Bharara interviews former Secretary of State Antony Blinken about Trump's peace proposal for Gaza, U.S.