Preet Bharara:

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

Bina Venkataraman:

It does have an impact to do these individual actions. But we also need to think about how we act in community and we all have communities, whether it’s our workplaces, our families, our neighborhoods, and indeed our political actions when we vote, and it’s all the way up and down the ballot that that matters.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Bina Venkataraman. She’s the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, and a fellow with the think tank, New America. Bina has spent much of her career studying and working on public policy. In 2013, she took a break from serving as the director of global policy initiatives at the Broad Institute to work in the Obama White House. As a senior advisor for climate change innovation, Bina work to prepare for and address climate and public health disasters, like global pandemics. Bina’s work has prepared her for the moment we’re in today. As the climate crisis worsens, the inclination may be to throw up our hands in defeat. But Bina has an important message. Don’t give up. In 2019, she published her book, The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, about how to visualize and plan for the long run. She joins me this week to talk about how to be hopeful about the future, and how to put that hope into practice and policy. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s get to your questions. So folks, as some of you may know, this past Monday, September 20th, marked the four year anniversary of this podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet. And a bunch of folks had comments and questions relating to the anniversary. This is from Twitter user @EricSchneiderGA, who wrote, “I’m super curious, what the hell were you thinking? It’s turned out fantastic, and almost certainly better than you could have hoped. How did you take the crazy uncertain path?” I guess, Eric, that’s a series of excellent questions. And I don’t know. Contrary to popular belief, I have not really over planned my life. I was fired by the president at the time in March of 2017. And as I think I’ve described on other occasions, decided to write a book, talked to my brother who ran this media company, we thought what the heck, let’s try a podcast.

Preet Bharara:

And almost four years ago, we started with a discussion of the details around my firing, and then very nervously, I interviewed former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta. And I have no shame in saying, I was very nervous for that interview, I was very nervous for the launch of the podcast. And I still get nervous when I interview people, which I think is a good thing. And I never would have expected the podcast to become as popular as it has become, and a part of so many people’s lives. So, I just want to take this opportunity to thank you for the ride. I’m going to keep doing this as long as I possibly can. I want to thank those listeners who say they have been with us since the first episode four years ago. And I want to thank any new listeners, and people who maybe we gather and collect along the way. And of course, I want to thank the incredible brilliant CAFE team that has evolved over time.

Preet Bharara:

We started with this one podcast, but then other podcasts and offerings and newsletters, and have made something that I think is durable and long lasting. And now, as you know, we’re part of Vox Media, and we have a lot more things in store for you in the future. Everyone at CAFE, from Tamara Sepper to the rest of the team, have really made this what it is. So, I want to thank our listeners, I want to thank our team, and I want to thank all of you for sticking with us.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from Jeanie Mack, who writes, “Listening to bad blood about fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes. I know you have to prove intent to convict a fraud, but can there be negligent fraud, or second degree fraud unintentional?” So of course, as Joyce Vance and I discussed on the Insider podcast, and you may have heard in the sample in the Stay Tuned feed, this is a much awaited trial. It’s in its second week. It relates to the alleged fraud of Elizabeth Holmes and her former boyfriend for cheating both patients and also investors with respect to their blood testing technology products. So, under the federal wire fraud statute and other fraud statutes that I’m aware of, there’s no such thing as negligent fraud. The idea of intent and negligence are incompatible with each other. Intent implies a certain mental state of willfulness, depending on the thing that a particular statute requires you to prove, there are different mental states whose thresholds need to be met. There’s intentional, there’s some other lesser mental states or negligence that you mentioned, and recklessness.

Preet Bharara:

But the basic premise of criminal law and criminal law relating to fraud, is that if you’re going to deprive someone of their liberty, as opposed to subject them to some penalty or fine, you have to show that they intended to engage in the fraud. The wire statute itself says very clearly whoever having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud. So you I need to show that what’s in the person’s mind was an intent to steal, cheat, lie, engage in the criminal fraud scheme. By the way, that allows the defendant to be able to argue in their defense, mistake, or accident, or reliance on the advice of counsel or some other kind of thing that shows, “Look, I may have engaged in some of this conduct, but I was unintending to defraud anyone. I forgot something, or I made an error, or my lawyers told me that it was okay to make this without representation. So you can’t find me criminally liable.” That’s why these fraud cases are hard to make and hard to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

Preet Bharara:

It is very rare in a white collar fraud case to find some confession, or written statement or communication somewhere in which the defendant says, “I am now commencing upon a fraud, or upon a scheme or artifice to defraud.” Most of the time, you’re asking the jury to infer criminal intent, intentional conduct from surrounding circumstances. And that’s what they’re going to have to do in the case of Elizabeth Holmes. This question comes from Twitter user Peter B, who asks, “What are your thoughts on the lawyer for Trump Orgs CFO telling the judge that more indictments are expected?” So, I’m not sure. You’re talking of course, about the court proceeding that occurred this week, where the Trump Organization CFO, Alan Weisselberg, had a court appearance and they talked about various issues relating to motion practice and discovery. And during the course of that proceeding, a lawyer for Weisselberg said, “We have strong reason to believe there could be other indictments coming.” And that got a lot of attention, presumably because everyone’s thinking to themselves, “Could the other indictment be against someone whose name is Donald Trump?”

Preet Bharara:

I continue to think that that doesn’t seem likely and certainly doesn’t seem to be something that can be deduced from the statement of a defense lawyer at a legal proceeding. I think it’s significant, that that speculation came from a lawyer for the defendant, and not from the prosecutor in the courtroom. There’s no indication of the prosecutor who was also present at the hearing said anything about future indictments. Often it’s the case, the prosecutors will tell the court that they expect additional charges or additional defendants and additional charges, so the court has some expectation of the timing of when a trial should be and can think about how complicated the case is going to be. That didn’t happen here. That’s not to say there won’t be additional indictments, there are various people who are clearly under scrutiny. It’s obvious that this was considered by the DA’s office to be a scheme, schemes and conspiracies have multiple people who are involved. Sometimes it can be charged and sometimes are, sometimes they’re not, there have been people who have been given immunity.

Preet Bharara:

But among the folks who may be in the crosshairs of the DA’s office include Matthew Calamari Senior, who is the chief operating officer, who I wouldn’t be surprised if that person was indicted in the future. But the mere fact that a defense lawyer says indictments are coming, we have good reason to believe that so, doesn’t mean that Donald Trump is going to be facing criminal indictment anytime soon. By the way, it is interesting how this came up. And the basis on which the defense lawyer is making the statement, is because prosecutors gave to the defense a package of discovery that includes documents found in a co conspirators basement, and they’re apparently tax documents. So, additional evidence coming to light being shared with a defendant in a case, gives rise to the reasonable supposition that there may be more cases coming but we’ll have to wait and see. This question comes from Twitter user @CookieTodd, who asks, “Are you a pumpkin spice person?” To which I have a three part answer. No, no, and also no.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this. My guest this week is Bina Venkataraman. She’s the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe and a former senior climate advisor in the Obama administration. This week on Stay Tuned, we look into the future, whether it’s training for a marathon, or saving for retirement, or preventing mass extinction, we all have to think about our road ahead as individuals, as a community and as a nation. And Bina has ideas for how to do that, and how to do it well. Bina Venkataraman, welcome to the show.

Bina Venkataraman:

Thanks so much for having me on. I’m glad to be here.

Preet Bharara:

So before we get to anything of substance, how did I do on your name?

Bina Venkataraman:

You did pretty well. I mean, you said it.

Preet Bharara:

Pretty well, but not… I didn’t want to ask you-

Bina Venkataraman:

You said it. Well, you said it in a very legit Indian American way like most Americans wouldn’t say it that way. They would say Venkataraman. And being-

Preet Bharara:

Really, would they even get that far Bina?

Bina Venkataraman:

Well, I’ve heard it pronounced so many ways. It’s been butchered many times. I think sometimes people look at it and they just get overwhelmed. It’s not even like they’re looking at letters, they just get nervous. It’s like their heart start palpitating and they’re all like, “What am I going to do?” So, yeah. I think it confuses people but it’s fairly phonetic. There’s one silent A that always gets people.

Preet Bharara:

Well that makes it… that made it easier for me once you realize there’s that silent A, although I think you do not have the most mispronounced last name of any guest on the show. That also goes to an Indian American.

Bina Venkataraman:

Who’s that?

Preet Bharara:

Anand Giridharadas.

Bina Venkataraman:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And thanks for just saying his name because I’ve actually met him before but have not attempted his last name yet.

Preet Bharara:

Even though you have a long Indian last name. Isn’t that interesting?

Bina Venkataraman:

Yes. It’s sad but true.

Preet Bharara:

We had a whole conversation about his views about people who don’t bother to learn the pronunciation of someone else’s name. Are you offended when your name is mispronounced? And I’m sure that happens everyday.

Bina Venkataraman:

I have more the opposite reaction, which is that if someone pronounces it correctly without asking me, I want to embrace that person. I have this uncontrollable urge to just give them a big hug and thank them. I am so used to people mispronouncing it. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, and you can imagine. The teachers struggled, soccer coaches.

Preet Bharara:

The first day of school, and also you’re at the end of the alphabet. So-

Bina Venkataraman:

The end of the alphabet, having my name butchered.

Preet Bharara:

You had to wait for the whole roll call.

Bina Venkataraman:

Yeah. It was a small enough town, but people got to know me by my first name. I sort of started to think of myself as like prince or Madonna, just call me Bina. Just don’t even worry about the last name.

Preet Bharara:

All right. So look, your last name is long, but it fits very beautifully on the cover of the book you wrote, I was going to say recently, but it’s been a couple of years. But it’s still incredibly salient, maybe more salient than it was before. It’s called the Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age. And two years ago, I think you correctly described our age as reckless. I think in a lot of ways, we’ve gotten more reckless, and then more crises. And let me see if I can summarize one of the main thrusts of the book and of your thinking of your writing in recent times, and then you can correct me. One of the central points of your discussion is that people are short sighted or tend to be short sighted when they’re making decisions. And they don’t think about future consequences. They’re more geared to the short term, they don’t have foresight. And foresight, you distinguish from prediction, as being different things.

Preet Bharara:

And the unfortunate thing about the lack of ability to have foresight and make smart decisions with smart judgments about future consequences based on current actions, is that at no time in history before now, have we had such a great ability to have information about the future. Whether you’re talking about economic trends, or you’re talking about the path of storms and hurricanes, we have more information about the future, but we’re still woefully inadequate to the task of making good decisions that will make our futures better. Is that fair?

Bina Venkataraman:

You’re more or less on to it. I would say, yeah, think back to being a person in ancient Pompei at the time that the Soviets blew and destroyed the city. There had been actually a pretty devastating earthquake and Compania, that region of Italy 16 years before Vesuvius and the eruption that we all know so well, and statues were toppled and flocks of sheep were killed by this earthquake. But people didn’t know what seismic activity was. The smartest people of that era, thinking back on Seneca, who was sort of one of the wise philosophers and had been the tutor and advisor to the Emperor Nero, he thought that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were caused by subterranean winds that were trying to wrest themselves from the Earth and come out. And so, I think now where we are, where we… We basically saw the early warning signs of a global pandemic, we see the early warning signs, and indeed now maybe in some ways late warning signs of a warming climate. We know that we are living longer than our grandparents.

Bina Venkataraman:

We know that if we genetically engineer certain kinds of organisms or edit the genetic code of embryos that we can have an effect on a future that is very long lasting. Nuclear waste is another example of that. So we are not in this sort of state of ignorance that ancient people or even recent predecessors in history were in when it comes to the future. So with all this information and all this predictive power and growing scientific prowess with data science and other areas of progress, we have I think, a greater responsibility to do better at honing exactly what you say, foresight, which is not the same as a good forecast. Foresight involves the wisdom and judgment to act on the information we have about the future. And yet we seem to struggle so much with it. And I guess the one little disagreement I’d have with the way you described it is that I don’t think that we lack the ability to exercise foresight.

Bina Venkataraman:

I think what we often lack is the know how and the will to do it, and one of the things I wanted to document, the reason I wrote the optimist telescope, is that I felt that it was really a misconception that has poisoned a lot of our discourse and really constrained our thinking, limited our imagination and allowed us to excuse sort of living in the moment, living for today and not for future generations in a way that isn’t really living by our values to say that we’re not capable of doing that. This is somehow a curse of human nature that we can’t think ahead, because we do, we have throughout history.

Preet Bharara:

Look, and I’ve got… You’re right. That’s not your point that we lack the ability. In fact, you say the opposite. That as you say it’s a matter of will, and parallel to that, that this idea of short sightedness is not immutable. But there’re some reasons including an experiment that I think is very interesting that you provide a fresh take on that I want to address in a moment. There are some reasons that people think… Well, it’s maybe not immutable, but it’s sort of ingrained in us. And one of those that you also mentioned the book, is that it used to be the case that people didn’t live very long. And hundreds if not thousands of years ago, you could expect to live 30 or 40 years, there’s something sort of built into us not to envision ourselves very old. I think you have a great line, you have an easier time imagining death by shark attack than having false teeth, which is an interesting way of putting it.

Preet Bharara:

Is there something to that idea? I know you’re not an evolutionary specialist by training, but something to the idea that for thousands of years, humans didn’t live very long. So, it wasn’t important to our survival to be able to make decisions that would be good for us when we are 70, or 80, or 90.

Bina Venkataraman:

I do and I talked to evolutionary psychologists about thinking ahead and foresight in researching the book. And one thing I think is fascinating is that we tend to plan ahead based on our past experiences. So, a lot of experts in this area think that… The purpose of our episodic memory. So when you remember a scene from your past, a scene from your childhood, or when you’re arguing with your spouse about what happened, what conversation happened at that dinner five weeks ago, or five months ago, you’re relying on your episodic memory to recontour those events. And what a lot of evolutionary experts believe, is that the purpose of that is to help you prepare for something in the future, a future threat. So if you were attacked on this particular stretch of the plains by an animal in the past, remembering that is useful, so that you can avoid that or avoid that scenario, or be more vigilant in the future and survive into the future.

Bina Venkataraman:

But the kind of foresight it takes to think ahead across your own lifespan, as it becomes longer, think ahead into the future, or even think about future generations, which some of these problems require us to do today, that’s a totally different capacity that isn’t necessarily directly linked with your imminent survival, or whether you’re imminently going to die. And so, there might be a reason, we don’t know for sure. But there might be a good reason why we’re not so adapted to this. And also, yeah, our lifespans have rapidly expanded in some ways over time. And we-

Preet Bharara:

The recent time, given how long humans have been on the Earth and the amount of time it’s taken for life expectancy to go from 30s, or 40, to 80, and even 85, 90 years old, is a tiny, tiny amount of time during the span of our existence. Right?

Bina Venkataraman:

Right. Exactly. For most of human history, our lifespans have been limited to less than 40 years. So, it’s our medical progress. It’s our progress with sanitation and basic public health that has allowed human lifespans to be so much longer in such recent history. And yeah, so does it make sense that we don’t yet have the capacity to really deal with that and reckon with it, to a large degree it does make sense. But we have done these things throughout human history. Just think about the shift to the agricultural revolution where people started tracking the seasons, tracking the stars, planting seeds and waiting for later harvest. That really was the basis for city planning later and all the different sort of exercises and collective foresight that human beings have been able to do. And it started with planting and waiting, not just killing and eating, right?

Bina Venkataraman:

And that, if you take that across recent history, there’s so much more that sort of we’re called upon to do, whether it’s planning for a pandemic, or trying to educate the young for their future. But that is sort of what is called for. Right? It’s sort of what we need to do, because we live in civilization.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Part of what’s intertwined in all of this is the idea that if you can figure out ways to forego immediate gratification in favor of some larger benefit in the future, then you’re going to do better for yourself and societies and organizations who adopt that strategy will also do better for themselves. And there was I guess, an experiment that I remember reading about a long time ago, that I haven’t thought about in a while. And it becomes sort of an article of faith that if you can show that a child is able to delay immediate gratification, for example, not immediately eating a marshmallow on the promise that if you wait 20 minutes, you’ll get two marshmallows or two other treats of your choice, that said something about that kid. And because it was observed in such a young person, it must be something that’s ingrained. And you have a powerful response to that in the book. Could you explain?

Bina Venkataraman:

Sure. Yeah. So, this is the infamous marshmallow test, where you give the kid one treat, or ask them to wait for the second treat to come later after some indefinite period of time. And then the sensational headlines when the first results were published of basically, the higher test scores that the kids who waited for the second marshmallow were getting in high school and how they were getting higher achievement in terms of getting into college and finishing college. And so people started saying, “I got to get my kids to pass this marshmallow test when they’re young, because then they’re going to be successful, or if they pass it, I know they’re going to be successful.” And if they don’t wait for the second treat, then I know they’re kind of screwed in the game of life.

Bina Venkataraman:

And if you look at the body of research that actually followed that initial marshmallow test, and even the work of the psychologist Walter Michelle, who was behind the original marshmallow test, it paints a very different picture, which is that when you look at what determines whether people will wait for the second treat, a lot can be learned, and a lot depends on sort of social dynamics and cultural dynamics. So for example, if you put kids into groups, where they’re all wearing a red t-shirt, and you say everyone in the red t-shirt waited for the second marshmallow, kids are much more likely to wait for that second treat. If you compare the children of Cameroonian subsistence farmers who pass this test at a much higher rate waiting for a treat, a local treat, local doughnuts at much higher rates than German and American toddlers do. You see that there’s a powerful influence of culture on whether-

Preet Bharara:

Could that be… I don’t mean to interpose an obnoxious question. Could it be that the quality of the treat in certain places is not as high as a marshmallow?

Bina Venkataraman:

It’s very possible, but the test design kind of controlled for that. So, in a lot of the Western studies, kids are given the choice of their favorite treats. So it’s either a pretzel or a cookie or marshmallow and-

Preet Bharara:

And they choose their favorite. Right.

Bina Venkataraman:

They choose their favorite. And in the Cameroonian community, they pitch the local puff, which was the doughnut of the culture and had kids either wait or not wait for the second treat.

Preet Bharara:

That I must admit sounds very delicious. But the other interesting thing that I had not thought of was the observation that it could be that depending on your background, your upbringing, and your trust in adults keeping true to their word, that it might be smart to eat the marshmallow right away, because promises of a future treat don’t always come true.

Bina Venkataraman:

That’s right. And you see sort of echoes of this in other areas of society, right? So if you’re poor and you just need to put food on the table, it doesn’t make sense to save a lot of money for something that may or may not come down the road? It’s hard because at some level, it makes sense to be saving for the future. But if you need to eat and if you don’t eat, you won’t survive to make it to that next year or next five years. It can make sense to sort of say I have to put my immediate needs in front of something that’s much more long-term. And we see it with people who go to pawn shops for example, and they’ll pawn off things that are valuable to them or their families. And that kind of act of desperation where they’re not sure what’s going to come tomorrow, but they know that they need something now.

Bina Venkataraman:

And so I think part of what the upshot of all this is, is that people need for one social safety net and basic support in order to be able to think long-term in their lives. But also that cultural norms and the environment that people are in can have a huge effect on whether they’re able to delay gratification. So, you can do things within the setting of a hospital for example, to encourage doctors not to over prescribe antibiotics, which is the sort of short-term impulse to solve a problem for a patient. But you can set norms in that hospital or that doctor’s office among peers, sending report cards to all physicians, this happened in the UK National Health Service, whereby setting a norm that you wait and you don’t prescribe until you’ve tested and made sure that that patient has a bacteria that will respond to that antibiotic, you actually can change the nature of the short-term decision making.

Bina Venkataraman:

And so, what people don’t, I think, understand when they read the headlines about the marshmallow test, is that it’s not the fact that this is just built into some people’s nature to wait much longer for the future. It might be that some people are naturally better at it, and some people are naturally more inclined to be indulgent. But there are all kinds of ways in which that can be affected by what you learn, what you do, what environment you’re in, and what your socio economic condition is.

Preet Bharara:

And in some ways, almost most fascinating to me, is the ways that you’re conditioned to think about the future and not just think about it. The interesting thing about the word foresight, which is a theme throughout your book and your writing, is that almost literally you have to see. You have to have sight of your future self. And you have this term that you describe as empathy for your future self, because people don’t think of themselves in the future, and they don’t think about the travails they’ll be going through in the future. But there are other experiments that have been done. They describe several of them which take a part, and you engage in one yourself on your own, is causing people not just to think about their future and think about what money they need for retirement, or the health decisions and diet decisions they make today so you’re healthier tomorrow, or 10 years from now, or 20 years from now. But literally to physically see an image of yourself aged.

Preet Bharara:

And that in the experiments you described in the book, when people were subjected to computer enhanced aging pictures of themselves, not just pictures of themselves, but videos of themselves like a mirror, an aging mirror of themselves. When asked questions about things they would do relating to savings and other decision making about the future, they thought ahead more. What do you make of that?

Bina Venkataraman:

Well, this was really cool and fascinating to me. And it did get me thinking that part of what we need is not just prediction of the future to scare people like, “When you’re old, you’re going to need money, you ought to save.” Right? I think my parents have said that to me in the past.

Preet Bharara:

Oh my God, do you have the same parents?

Bina Venkataraman:

Yeah, I do. Maybe they know each other. Maybe they drink Chai together. But often what’s missing is not that people… It’s not like I lack the knowledge that someday I am most likely statistically speaking, particularly being a woman, being relatively healthy, I’m most likely to get old. If I’m lucky, I’ll get really old.

Preet Bharara:

What about the shark attack? What’s like with the shark attack?

Bina Venkataraman:

Oh, the shark attack-

Preet Bharara:

Have you done that number?

Bina Venkataraman:

… I’m an open water swimmer. So I have probably a slightly higher risk of shark attack than most people.

Preet Bharara:

Above zero.

Bina Venkataraman:

But it’s much lower than for example, car accidents or something like that. But because we can vividly imagine it, right? Because it’s so visceral, we’ve seen jaws. Because it’s so horrific, right? We’re kind of scared of it. And I kind of think this played into how people responded to Ebola versus how they responded to something like COVID-19. Ebola, the way you die with Ebola is so horrifying. And people can really imagine it viscerally. And so it creates more of a sort of fear reaction and a sort of let’s prepare for this and really avoid this threat. But I digress.

Preet Bharara:

Your digression was a good one. And if I can digress further, because you raised it. And it’s a thing that I’ve been thinking about, not in the context of your arguments here, but if it were the case that we had universally seen viral video of the way people die intubated, day after day after day from COVID, which we don’t have, because for obvious reasons and privacy reasons and respect for people. But if we had that kind of video and people would visualize those kinds of things, and their own personal future with COVID if they don’t get a vaccine, or if they don’t mask up or they don’t take precautions, do you think based on all the research you’ve done that would have a material effect on how people in this country would make decisions?

Bina Venkataraman:

I don’t think there’s a silver bullet in terms of what would get people to take COVID more seriously, but I do think that it would have an impact based on the research I’ve seen and this is anecdotal, but I was talking to a traveling ICU nurse recently who said she was really struck by when family members were finally allowed to come into the ICU once their family members were on the brink of death, by how surprised they were by how bad it had gotten and how advanced the condition was and what it really looks like. And that she talked to several people who finally decided to start getting vaccinated or masking after seeing that firsthand. And we really don’t because of the need to quarantine and keep people separated, right? We haven’t had the same degree of sort of press coverage of what happens and how these deaths occur and how it can really impact a family.

Bina Venkataraman:

There have been some good stories out there. But I think COVID is also much further complicated by the way in which this became so politically polarized. So, I don’t pretend that it’s just about imagination, but I think imaginative empathy has some effect on our ability to take problems and future seriously before they come and actually hit us. And you were talking about the virtual reality avatars. This was an experiment that Hal Hershfield, who was a UCLA economist did, and he showed college students virtual reality avatars of themselves in old age where they could look back at a sort of living as you said, living mirror image of themselves as an old person. And he found that comparing that to just telling them about old age or retirement, or showing them pictures of other old people, and imagery of senior citizens and what kind of needs they have when they’re older, that this virtual reality avatar experience led to the students in the study showing more willingness to save for their future and more commitment to doing that, and what they would put aside would be greater as well.

Bina Venkataraman:

And that to me is interesting. It’s one study of many studies of a sort of constellation of studies across different disciplines in different contexts, that to me point to the need to not just give people information about threats that are coming in the future opportunities, they should take advantage of like saving or learning or going and getting a degree. But really, to help them be able to imagine themselves in future contexts and bridge what I think of as a real gap in having imaginative empathy for our future selves and also for future generations. And it’s also strange that when you think about it, the entire enterprise of contemplating the future is an imaginative enterprise. We don’t see the future really. I mean, movie makers conjure it for us, we have dreams about the future. That’s all exists in our minds, we don’t take it in with our senses by smelling it or touching it.

Bina Venkataraman:

And so we have to have some help, right? Our bodies are getting sensory stimuli from everything in the present. From the doughnut I can smell on my counter right now that’s beckoning me to eat it, to that impulse purchase that appears for me in my Twitter feed. And that all can just hold a lot more sway on us, because it’s stimulating us in the present.

Preet Bharara:

But there’s also an argument, and we talked about this before. With respect to the marshmallow test, some people may not have confidence that there’s a long future for them. And even if the actuarial tables will tell them, “Well, you’re 25 now, you’re likely to live to be 75, or 80.” The thought for some people… And tell me if this is at least partially rational, is you only live once, and I want to enjoy myself now, I don’t want to unduly… What is the balance. I don’t want to unduly save money and not go out to dinner, and not go out to the movies and not have decent clothes because I’m trying to provide for myself in the future when I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.

Preet Bharara:

So this idea, part of what you talked about is, that foresight is about the exercise of judgment, not just having… It’s not just about knowledge and information, because there’s a lot of knowledge and a lot of information and a lot of data, but then acting upon it in a way that’s wise in your own interests and in the community’s interest if you’re talking about a community. How much do you alter your current behavior for the future? And maybe that’s a good segue to talking about climate change that seems to me, a lot of the debate about climate change is not necessarily that we should or should not do something, but how much do we do? How much do we hold ourselves back economically and otherwise, to prevent against this thing in the future?

Bina Venkataraman:

Yeah. So there’s a wonky answer to your question. And then there’s the sort of personal one. And I’ll start with the personal and just say that, we all need to indulge in the moment. We all need to sometimes go for that extra glass of wine or piece of chocolate, or just really live in the moment and savor the moment.

Preet Bharara:

Could you hold that on one sec? I’m Going to go get a couple of marshmallows. I think I need some s’mores.

Bina Venkataraman:

And why not?

Preet Bharara:

Right now.

Bina Venkataraman:

Why not? Yeah. It’s like if you’re not trying to hold back from eating two marshmallows, if there’s no reason for you not to eat two marshmallows, it’s fine for you to have a sugar high that afternoon. It’s not going to get in the way of whatever your long run goal is. If you were trying to prosecute a really important case and eating five marshmallows before you went for some sort of like crash session with your colleagues was something that was helpful, why not?

Preet Bharara:

And it was very enhancing.

Bina Venkataraman:

Performance enhancing marshmallows. I think we should go into business, this could be something. This could be big.

Preet Bharara:

I think you started to say mushroom. We’re not going change that in the edit. I think, I’ll just let the record reflect that Bina first said mushroom, changed it to marshmallow, you need not comment further.

Bina Venkataraman:

I will not comment further at this time. But so, we all need these indulgences. And this is not… I am sort of the last person on Earth, anyone who knows me to sort of be thinking that we need to police every single one of our actions for whether it’s good for future Preet, whether it’s good for future Bina. No, that’s not what we’re talking about here. And the wonky way of talking about this and kind of bring your framework to these decisions is that economists call this discounting the future. So when I say I would rather have $20 today, then if you’re going to give me $20 six months from now, because between now and then I’m going to use that $20 to do something interesting with that I’m going to enjoy in the next six months, or I’m going to invest that $20 and turn it into more money.

Bina Venkataraman:

That’s can be a very rational decision, right? You can say that I’m going to live for the moment. And this can actually make a lot of sense for you. And particularly if you are facing the end of your life, it might make more sense for you to take higher risk in a moment and not save for the future. And we see this reflected for example when people are in situations where they feel like their life is endangered. So, there was a study of soldiers in the Israeli army smoking lots more cigarettes and being interviewed about that, and sort of feeling like, “Well, I might die anyway, I might as well enjoy this smoke.” And so I think that there’s something to that, that isn’t always irrational, it isn’t always something that’s negative or bad for you.

Bina Venkataraman:

But what I think gets in the way, is when we have something we really want to do, like suppose you really want to get fit for like a marathon, but you keep having a cigarette because you’re like, “I could really use this, it’ll take the edge off in the moment, or I just feel like living for the moment.” And then when it comes to training for the race, you find you can’t actually do the training for the race. Because in the moment you keep indulging that impulse. Well, that’s the kind of thing where it’s probably irrational if it’s more important to you to be healthy enough to run the race than it is for you to have that fix if you really step back and you think about it. You’re more interested in being a person who runs a marathon than a person who smokes, then there’s some sort of gap happening between your aspirations for yourself, and the way you act on those aspirations and your values. And that’s the kind of thing where I think we get into trouble.

Bina Venkataraman:

And if you take that into the realm of climate change, as a society we talk about children all the time, people, every one of us who votes, who participates in our neighborhoods, in our communities, we care about children, whether we have them ourselves, whether we have nieces and nephews, whether we teach children, we care about future generations. And yet we do this thing where collectively as a society, and this has a lot to do with what’s broken in our politics, what’s broken in our democracy, not just about personal decisions, just to make that very clear. But we put that aside, and we don’t act on our aspirations for the future.

Preet Bharara:

When you say we, I think this is part of the issue. Is it the case when we talk about will, willpower, collective will, that we, whatever that we means, lack the will, or is there a very vocal and obstructive minority in this country and in other places that are preventing a majority of folks from enacting policies that would have more foresight and that would be better for our future with respect to climate change?

Bina Venkataraman:

I think certainly the latter now. Today, I think we have a critical political majority that cares about climate change, and not just cares about it, but makes it an urgent priority. 10, 20 years ago, we didn’t have the critical political mass that we would have needed even if we had a functional democracy to get aggressive climate policy passed in many places. It took more political courage and leadership.

Preet Bharara:

So why did that change? Do you think it’s because of data? Because in lots of places in your book and other people say the same, that mere data doesn’t count. Is it more data and also the experience of fluctuations in weather events and these massive hurricanes? What do you think has caused the shift in consensus over the last 20 years?

Bina Venkataraman:

I think part of it is that we are seeing more and more climate disasters. The writing’s really on the wall, we don’t have to bridge the imaginative empathy gap as much as we used to, because we are seeing climate change on our doorstep, whether it’s wildfires in the west, heat waves in major cities around the world, or these devastating storms. So, more and more people are experiencing the impacts of climate change. But I don’t think it’s just that, I think it’s also that there’s been an ongoing generation of political momentum on this. And I do think it’s in part served by the coming up of millennials and Gen Z, who really care deeply about this and realize that this is the problem that they’re going to be presented with that it’s going to affect their entire lives and affect where they live, how they live.

Preet Bharara:

Is there some distance there intuitively? And I think it’s wonderful. Intuitively, we think about young people as being on a spectrum of how much foresight they have, and how much planning for the future they do, they have the least of it, I think, is the analysis. Because they’re young, they don’t imagine themselves old, they’re indestructible, all their body functions work well when they’re young. Is it interesting to you or peculiar to you at all that it’s the young folks who are thinking about something that will harm them and the country decades into the future?

Bina Venkataraman:

I think it is interesting, but I don’t think it’s always the case that young people lack foresight. I think young people also have vivid imaginations. So yeah, if you tell a kid to start thinking about their life when they’re 35, and planning for that, and you better start saving this money that you’re earning on your summer jobs, so that you can afford an apartment later, they’re going to be kind of bored by that idea. But if you tell them to imagine some really exciting future for themselves, like, ‘You’re so great at the piano, you could actually be a professional pianist if you practice and practice.” Or, “You know what? Your community is going to be flooding, and it’s going to be in disaster unless something is done about this problem.” You’ll find that a lot of young people will be able to imagine those futures and be able to actually activate themselves to do something, whether it’s a future they want, like becoming a rock star, or whether it’s a future they don’t want, like avoiding some of these climate impacts.

Bina Venkataraman:

So, I do think that while we can’t necessarily rely on young people to be the best at impulse control, the kind of imagination of the future it takes to shift the political zeitgeist, I think has always belonged to the young. You look at the way that the young and the civil rights movement in this country really imagined a future that looks different, where there would be integrated schools, integrated buses, that was driven by people who were not so entrenched in the world as it was, and in society as it was that they could actually imagine, “No, this could be and ought to be better. And so I do give young people a lot of credit for talking to their parents about climate change, for making this a salient issue for doing things like what Greta Thunberg, but also thousands of young people have done around the world, which is get in the streets and say, this political problem is so urgent and you need to think of it as urgent because it affects our future.

Bina Venkataraman:

One thing I do find fascinating is the way that the university divestment movements have happened. And to me, this represents sort of what happens when you can align foresight and long-term institutional approaches with political momentum, political constituents who care about something. So Harvard just announced that it’s finally going to divest from fossil fuels. You can debate whether a divestment from fossil fuels is the most impactful way to address climate change or not. But you have to admit that it is a significant movement that’s happened that’s achieved a lot of traction. And what’s interesting to me is that you have universities whose endowments are long-term investors and not beholden to making quick profits and sort of acting like sort of normal, short-term investors might in particularly the United States or China these days. And then you have a constituency of young people on their campus who are in front of them making this an urgent political issue. To me, the university campus is of course, a rarefied place. But there’s something about that microcosm that I think has something to teach the rest of our society.

Bina Venkataraman:

We need more institutions to be aligned towards long-term investment, long-term goals, not just short-term rewards. And then we need political constituents that demand that we act on these problems immediately that make it a high price for politicians or business leaders to not act on this problem the way that students made it a high price for their trustees or their presidents.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Bina, after this. I’m going to go back to the example of telling the young person, if you practice hard, you can be a rock star, I think it’s relevant. Because it’s a positive visualization, right? It causes you to work towards something. And this is another insight of your writing, and that is, are we spending too much time when we talk about climate change presenting a future of doom and destruction, which as a natural psychological matter causes some people to just put their heads in the sand because it’s an unpleasant thing to think about. If that’s true, at least with some segment of the population or some segment of the decision makers, are there ways to think about addressing climate change that are more about becoming a rock star, more about something positive than about simply trying to avoid the destruction of life as we know it?

Bina Venkataraman:

You are speaking my language Preet. This is exactly what I urge people to think about and do who care about this problem, for exactly the reasons you said. The research I did for the Optimist’s Telescope really demonstrates that when people think the world is going to hell in a hand basket, they will live for today, they’ll party like there’s no tomorrow. And who can blame them? So-

Preet Bharara:

It’s going to be a run on marshmallows.

Bina Venkataraman:

A run on marshmallows.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to just carry the marshmallow metaphor throughout the entire interview.

Bina Venkataraman:

You see, it’s funny, because I don’t even love marshmallows. I do love the s’mores.

Preet Bharara:

Well, s’mores. Yeah, you got to put them in them in the s’mores.

Bina Venkataraman:

Yeah. Once it’s a s’more and there’s dark chocolate on it, it’s got my name on it. But… So, let’s go with the s’mores.

Preet Bharara:

So what are the future marshmallows in climate change?

Bina Venkataraman:

Exactly. We need to kind of think, how could my community be better? This is about not just having a safer neighborhood, but maybe it’s about having a greener neighborhood. So, there are these micro forests that have cropped up. It’s a movement that started in Japan, but now you can find them in cities around the world. And they’re actually kind of beautiful cities, landscapes, little fully developed forests that are engineered basically with landscape architecture. And they cool a city during heat waves, but they’re also just more beautiful parts of the city where we have so many concrete jungles that people might not be able to imagine looking differently when they look at their community and they think about what the future their community could be. So we need to try to populate people’s imaginations with ways of addressing the climate crisis that actually make their lives look better. And I think for young people, we’ve done a lot to kind of mess with their heads in the way we’ve talked about this problem.

Bina Venkataraman:

We shouldn’t be sugarcoating any of these predictions, they are very dire. The fact that we are already seeing these climate impacts and seeing them outpaced the predictions of scientists from a few decades ago, the melting of glaciers is going faster, the warming of the oceans is going faster. Some of these climactic disruptions are just way outpacing what people thought. But when we talk about it to young people, and we say we have only five years to act, or it will be too late, as if that’s in the scientific modeling, it is nowhere in the scientific modeling, it’s nowhere in the IPCC, the global network of scientists.

Preet Bharara:

You what it is? It’s in the talking points of the opponents.

Bina Venkataraman:

It’s in the talking points of the opponents. Absolutely. I do think that denialism of climate change has shifted into a new front of defeatism, we can’t do anything about this anyway. And that is just as dangerous. And just as I think troubling and anxiety inducing for young people, as if we had never acknowledged this problem to begin with. And it’s just not true that if we don’t do anything in the next five years or 10 years, that it won’t matter to do something, it’s always going to matter. The amount of emissions that we can cut, the amount of warming that we can prevent, no matter how much that is, it will materially make life better for people in the future, it will cause less disruption if we can cut emissions by a certain amount, it would it be better if we could cut off fossil fuel emissions immediately, probably, most definitely. But the fact that we aren’t making progress fast enough, is not a reason to give up entirely.

Bina Venkataraman:

And so we have to stop talking about it that way with young people because I do think it can be disempowering to feel like, “Well, there’s nothing we can do, and all the adults are letting us down.” And then exactly to what you said, it’s trying to help them see themselves as part of a story. So, can you imagine yourself not as the victim of endless climate disasters that are going to be by the way a lot like living under COVID-19, your life is disrupted, your schooling is disrupted? Can we instead help young people see themselves as the heroes in a story banding together to save their communities to do things that really matter becoming the next writers, becoming the next prosecutors, becoming the next politicians that are credited with solving parts of this problem. Technologists who are going to be developing new ways of absorbing carbon or new ways of creating electricity. Put their minds on how they can be part of creating a new society.

Preet Bharara:

This is maybe an odd way to put a question, but I sometimes think that the decision makers are removed from where the problem is. And although we had a deadly storm here in the northeast, a number of people died in New York City because of Hurricane Ida, it wasn’t the kind of catastrophic event that we saw with Hurricane Katrina, and we’ve seen sometimes in other countries and with Puerto Rico. And do you think that if we saw massive calamitous climate related events, specifically in New York City and in Washington, DC… Maybe this is a mcob way of thinking about it, the policymakers would be quicker to act?

Bina Venkataraman:

I don’t know, because I think we’ve sort of seen enough among their constituents. And there’s something fundamentally broken where we have fossil fuel companies who have heavily funded political campaigns and spread disinformation about these problems to their constituents. We have people actively in denial that this is a problem, just like we have people actively in denial that we’re living in a pandemic, where if you don’t get a vaccine, you’re at a much higher risk. And so, I think, yes, would it make a difference if it was just so in people’s face that they couldn’t help but act? I think it would. But I think we’re kind of getting to that point. I think it’s increasingly becoming hard to bury one’s head in the sand about this problem. And the question is whether the urgency of that and the vividness of that experience can override the political dysfunction we have in our democracy. And at what point that tipping point in terms of our political and social momentum to address this problem becomes so overwhelming that it becomes an imperative for leaders to just make this happen.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, some people know, I’m asking you these questions not just because you’re a thoughtful, smart person who’s written a great book, and writes about these issues, you were a senior advisor for climate change innovation in the Obama White House. So, you have some expertise here. I want to talk about individual action. And I’ve talked to some folks, people who you and I mutually are familiar with. And behind closed doors, they will sometimes say, individual action, trying to reduce your own individual carbon footprint, avoiding beef, things like that. That’s a lovely idea. But they will do nothing to address climate change in any meaningful way. Don’t discourage them, but there’s a little too much emphasis, according to some people I’ve talked to. On individual action, people should spend more of their time figuring out ways to lobby the folks in power, both the corporate interests, and the political interests and others, to engage in very, very massive policy shifts. Is that fair?

Bina Venkataraman:

I would say they’re not mutually exclusive. So, if you want to ride your bike more often, because it both makes you feel healthy and you can then abstract that into being part of a collective solution, where it’s quite true that if more people biked and didn’t drive, or took public transit and didn’t drive, that we would be better off when it comes to this problem. If you can see yourself as part of something larger and taking that individual action and it inspires you and motivates you. That’s great. But I do think that individual actions can be almost like a gateway drug to more political action and organizing around this problem, or even starting up a business. So, when you talk to some of the entrepreneurs who’ve been involved in clean energy businesses, some of them are the very kind of people who chose to eat less meat or ride their bikes more, or do things to reduce their own carbon footprints in their families.

Bina Venkataraman:

And so I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. But I do think that, it can be hard to feel like your individual actions make a difference. And the reason for that is partially because we are very isolated from each other, we kind of feel like we exist in these atoms and the pandemic has only exacerbated that feeling I think, of being socially isolated, and each thing we do not having sort of a larger effect. But I also do think we’re at the stage in this crisis where we do, we need much larger scale action, but we also need it at all different levels. So, what I say to people is, don’t beat yourself up for eating hamburger. If you can eat less red meat and work that into your diet, if you can do it in a sustainable way, that’s great. If you can find a way to reduce your carbon footprint, that’s also great. And it matters. It’s important. Imagine if everyone did that. Imagine if all of your listeners and many followers did that, it could actually make a productive impact. But it’s not just about you doing that for yourself.

Bina Venkataraman:

The economist, Robert Frank has written a book called Behavioral Contagion, which shows the ways in which when people make an individual decision like quitting smoking, that starts creating new social norms. So you might look at yourself in isolation and say, “My not eating this or my biking doesn’t make a difference.” But the way that you influence the people in your family, the people in your communities, the people whose lives you touch, can make a huge difference. And that’s how we shifted the social norm around smoking indoors for example. I feel like I’m going hard on the smokers today, which I don’t need to do.

Preet Bharara:

There’s another example you give in your book, which I thought was fascinating. And that is, you might think in your neighborhood if you get solar panels, it’s not a big deal. But there are studies that I believe you cite too, that show when somebody gets solar panels, there are influences in their neighborhood, and you tend to get other people in the neighborhood to do the same thing. So-

Bina Venkataraman:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

… these things do spread.

Bina Venkataraman:

Absolutely. And once people do a thing, when a politician is proposing a policy that might give people rebates around installing solar and hike the taxes up somewhere else to compensate for that in terms of government spending, they’re going to be more likely to do it if they’ve seen and even put up those solar panels themselves. So, it does have an impact to do these individual actions. But we also need to think about how we act in community. And we all have communities, whether it’s our workplaces, our families, our neighborhoods, and indeed our political actions when we vote, and it’s all the way up and down the ballot that that matters. I can’t tell you how many people in public utility boards influence how much green energy gets produced in this country. So, getting yourself to be aware as an individual of how your vote matters, and how you can influence these larger context matters a lot.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, so what’s the most important thing from a policy perspective that needs to be done? And in answering that, do you think we need in addressing climate change, do we need more steaks or more carrots?

Bina Venkataraman:

I think we need all of the above.

Preet Bharara:

All of the above.

Bina Venkataraman:

It’s a real challenge to say that there’s one silver bullet when it comes to climate change.

Preet Bharara:

Not one silver bullet. But if you were in charge of prioritizing, I know that things are not mutually exclusive. But if you had one must pass thing, what would it be?

Bina Venkataraman:

One must pass thing, I think it would be carbon tax and dividend or cap and trade for the US. In different countries, I would produce a different answer. But to decarbonize this economy, I think we need to unleash the power of market forces in a way that we haven’t yet. That said right now, in the budget reconciliation bill that Congress is considering, there is a program that I think is almost nearly as important, at least in terms of getting a lot of immediate emissions reductions, which is the clean electricity payments program. And so, if I were just saying what is the most politically feasible, urgent thing that needs to happen, I would say it’s making sure that that gets passed in this new budget bill. And what that will do essentially, is give funding to utilities to switch over to green energy and set targets for utilities around the country to move to wind and solar and cleaner electricity and move away from fossil fuels. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that needs to be happening a lot more quickly in this country, and it can make a huge impact on our emissions.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you’ve been very generous with your time. I know you have lots of important things to do. Bina Venkataraman, thank you for being on the show. It’s a pleasure.

Bina Venkataraman:

It’s been a delight to talk with you. Thanks so much for having me on.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Bina Venkataraman continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. To try out the membership free for two weeks, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. So, I want to end the show this week on a continuing theme that has to do with COVID. I was in a discussion with some folks recently, and we were talking about how we should feel about the people in the country who just refuse to get vaccinated and who are choosing not to protect themselves and those around them from this devastating virus. And a question came, is it okay to feel disdain for those people? Are they deserving of mockery? How are we supposed to feel about them? Can you be angry? And I get it. I get the impulse. I feel angry sometimes. I think to myself as many of you probably do also, if everyone just got the damn shot, we’d be all done. And you know what? We’d all have more freedom much sooner.

Preet Bharara:

But I think more deeply about it because I have a platform. And as someone who has a platform and the ability to reach people, and maybe be persuasive, I try not to speak with disdain, but in ways that are calculated to persuade people to do something different. Because I like all of you, care about the well being of people in all communities. And unless we get more people in skeptical communities to get the vaccine, it’s going to be bad for the rest of us. So, I try to talk about it and think about it in a different way. I see an opportunity to show people facts to focus not on the people who will never ever in a million years get the vaccine, but people who are just skeptical, some without good reason, some with maybe some understandable reasons, even if you don’t agree with them. And some of the stories that we’re hearing coming out of the pandemic, I think are very valuable, and they deserve to be told and retold. So, that brings me this week to the ordeal of Robbie Walker, whose story was told by CNN earlier this week.

Preet Bharara:

Robbie was a healthy 52 year old father of six from Florida, who got COVID earlier this summer. Same age as me, twice as many kids. His family thinks that he contracted the virus from a gathering on July 4th, where no one in his family was vaccinated. By the time Robbie got sick with fever, and tested positive, 11 other family members and friends had also gotten the virus. Within weeks by July 25th, Robbie Walker was in critical condition. The disease severely damaged both of his lungs and he made the incredibly tough decision to be intubated, knowing at the time that many, many patients of COVID who get intubated never leave the hospital. According to the CNN report on the phone with his wife Susan that day, he cried. And this may sound familiar. He said how much he regretted not getting the shot, and he begged her to get vaccinated against COVID. Robbie’s condition got worse and worse. Within 10 days of being intubated, the doctors told his wife, he was very unlikely to make it out of the hospital alive. And so the only possible option left for him was an extreme treatment called ECMO.

Preet Bharara:

That is an intense medical procedure that literally requires removing blood from the body, altering its oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, and then pumping it back into the body with the hope it will allow the heart and lungs to recover. But because all of the local hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID patients, no hospital in the state had space for Robbie or the ability to perform the ECMO treatment. So, Susan went on a mission to find space. The family called 169 hospitals in and around Florida, including Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia. Not one had space for Robbie. Well, to make the long story short, as it would happen, a doctor in Connecticut got word of Robbie’s need for ECMO treatment. And he was able to be airlifted, it was a very sensitive mission. Airlifted to a hospital in Connecticut to get treatment from Dr. Robert Gallagher. In that Connecticut hospital, Robbie spent 22 days on ECMO.

Preet Bharara:

This is what his wife told CNN, “When I walked into the hospital room to see two tubes 20 feet long, holding his blood outside of his body, the sight of that I was like, ‘Oh, Lord, what have I done?’ But it worked. And Robbie got better.” And now we get to the part of the story that you probably have been anticipating. Robbie got better, and he had another revelation as well. And that is he wants people to get vaccinated. In fact, he made a declaration that he’s not going to be around people in his home, who are not vaccinated. They put a sign on their front lawn that reads, if you’re not vaccinated, you can’t come in. And the experience of Robbie Walker has convinced many, many of his friends and family members and colleagues to finally after great resistance, get the vaccine. One of their friends Tory, who wasn’t planning to get the vaccine after Robbie’s ordeal got vaccinated and so did her husband, and so to their 21 year old son.

Preet Bharara:

Another one of the couple’s friends, Joel Nicholson had not planned to vaccinate her sons aged 14 and 17, but based on the experience of Robbie, she got them vaccinated. In fact, according to CNN, the family’s ordeal has inspired at least 60 friends, family and colleagues, 60 to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Now, I know many of you’re probably thinking the same thing. What a shame it is that it has to come to life or death for people to get the shot. But sometimes that’s what it takes. And I know it’s a familiar story. Someone doesn’t want to get vaccinated, they get sick, they die, or they almost die. And then people have a revelation. But because it’s familiar, I think that’s the reason it’s important. And bears repeating because it could save lives.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Bina Venkataraman. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag ask Preet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24 Preet, or you can send an email to staytuned@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE Studios and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Your host is Preet Bharara. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Adam Waller, the technical director is David Tatasciore. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noah Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jay Kaplan, Jennifer Corn, Chris Boylan, and Sean Walsh. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara, stay tuned.