Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. I’m Preet Bharara. President Biden nominated Ajay Banga to lead the World Bank almost exactly one year ago. Since then, Banga has made a splash by committing the World Bank to more aggressively addressing climate change, promising a more efficient bank bureaucracy, and reaching out to the private sector for economic backing for his ambitious goals.

Banga was born in India and had a staggeringly successful career in the private sector before taking on this challenging new role, including a decade-long tenure as CEO of Mastercard that saw the company’s profits boom and its corporate culture lauded. Ajay is also my friend, and so I’m excited to talk about all that he’s accomplished at the World Bank on this first anniversary of his nomination. Ajay Banga, welcome to the show.

Ajay Banga:

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

I can’t believe it’s your first time.

Ajay Banga:

I guess you finally came around to choosing me at your show.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you’ve always been very important, but now you’re very, very, very important. So it’s good to have a friend on the show. Congratulations on almost exactly one year as president of the World Bank. I hope it’s gone well. We’re going to talk about some of your goals, whether you achieved them or not, what you’re thinking about for the future.

But before we do any of that, we have a very thoughtful, intelligent, educated audience, but I never want to assume knowledge. Could you just explain briefly to the uninitiated what the World Bank is, what its function is, what its role is in the world?

Ajay Banga:

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you that it’s a good place to start. The bank basically gets money capital from shareholders who are the richer countries, and we are able to use that in the bond markets to leverage up the bank’s balance sheet and then use that weighted average kind of money we’ve raised to put out for use. So the bank’s got multiple parts. The part that lends money or gives money to the poorest countries in the world is called IDA. That’s the International Development Agency. Think about giving money as a grant, basically free, with no repayment or at very concessional terms like 0.1, 0.2% for many long years, 20, 30, 40 years to countries now, mostly in Africa, but till recently a number of countries in the other part of the world as well.

This goes for development purposes, health, education, food security, climate, pandemics, all that kind of stuff. Then, if you are a country that’s a little better off than those who are at the lowest end of the ladder, it’s kind of like a middle income or lower middle income, the part of the bank that deals with you is the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, IBRD. That gives money, long-term money, at just a little below the market rates at which you would’ve been able to access the money, and that’s the second part of the institution, again, used for the same kinds of purposes of health and food and climate and development and people and education and that kind of thing.

Preet Bharara:

What if you’re a wealthy country? Do you give loans to them and just charge 80% interest?

Ajay Banga:

No. So then you’re coming to the right place, which is the third part is IFC, the International Finance Corporation that deals with the private sector. And here, the idea is to crowd in private sector money into these development causes by putting in the seed capital that either de-risks the deal adequately for them to feel comfortable or enables them to crowd in where they wouldn’t normally have gone. Think of the challenges of a foreign exchange risk conversion or political risk guarantees and the like. We can help get them over that hump.

The fourth is something called MIGA, Multilateral Insurance Guarantee Agency, which actually provides those political risk guarantees between a private entity that’s investing and the sovereign that they’re investing in. The sovereign doesn’t keep up to its promises. You kind of sitting out there with your hands and saying, “What am I doing here?” That’s when the insurance guarantee comes in. And the last one is this Investment Settlement Dispute Agency, which helps to settle the kind of a dispute between a private company and a sovereign, so like an arbitration. So IDA for the poorest countries, mostly free money.

IBRD for lower middle-income and middle-income countries. A little more expensive but not above what the market would do. IFC to get the private sector in. MIGA to provide political risk guarantees, and ICSID the one that deals with all the challenges of investment disputes. Overlying all of this, Preet, is what’s called the knowledge bank. This is the money bank as you… if you think of it that way. There’s a knowledge bank, which is the subject matter expertise that cuts across human capital development, prosperity, like domestic resource mobilization and jobs, planet mitigation, adaptation of energy infrastructure, and digital.

There are subject matter experts that we can bring to the party to help countries think about how to apply all this knowledge to their own development. That’s the money bank and the knowledge bank. Last year, we put 120 billion to work across these in the developing world. Over the last five years, to give you a number, a hundred million people have got jobs because of the work we do. 500 million people have ended up getting educated, and almost a billion people have got access to healthcare.

Preet Bharara:

So going back to the origin of the World Bank, why did a number of rich countries establish the World Bank? Was it a thought of charity in some way, self-interest, a combination of the two, or something else?

Ajay Banga:

So the Bretton Woods Institutions, both lower bank and IMF, were set up back in 1943, which is why it’s our 80th anniversary kind of now. And the logic was that the IMF would look at the overall macro and fiscal systems across countries, and the World Bank could help redevelop countries. Remember, the Second World War was just getting over then, and the first objective of the World Bank was to focus on Europe and Japan and help them to reconstruct. The bullet trains in Japan were first funded by the World Bank as an example.

Of course, a few little while later, those countries began to come out of their circumstances in the 60s, and then the World Bank began to pivot towards the emerging markets. Those days in Latin America and Asia, and now, more recently, more and more attention is being paid to Africa because that’s where the next big development challenge is.

Preet Bharara:

Who decides the priorities of the World Bank, where money gets spent and what regions it gets spent and on what issues the money gets spent on?

Ajay Banga:

So there’s a board of the World Bank that comprises the representatives of the shareholders who have put in money into the bank as well as those who receive money from the bank. And that board essentially is a large part of the strategy definition of the bank management has ideas about what kind of efforts we should be putting money into. Those ideas are informed and guided by board members outside think tanks and governments.

And that kind of comes together in the idea of what we should focus on. How much money specifically goes to something is mostly management working projects. Remember, we’ve got to have bankable projects to the other end with the capacity in those countries to execute. And so, it’s not a perfect system, but it kind of is an iterative process of trying to get to how to prioritize money where things will actually make a difference and move the needle.

So at COP 28, I said that the World Bank could put 45% of its financing into climate-related financing by 2025 next year in, half into mitigation, half into adaptation. That’s kind of a vision. I don’t know whether we’ll get to 45 or 43 or 47, I don’t know whether we’ll get to half of or 45, 55, but it gives you the idea, Preet, of where we are going and what our priorities are.

Preet Bharara:

Why climate change so specifically, and some might say disproportionately, depending on where you stand on the ideological spectrum. Your predecessor, I understand, left office a year early in part based on controversial statements about climate change. Why is that a focus, and why is that the appropriate focus for the World Bank?

Ajay Banga:

Great question. I believe that solving for poverty, which is kind of what the bank was created to do, is not possible without widening the approach of the bank to include pandemics and climate change and food insecurity and fragility conflict and violence because they’re intertwined. So when you think about putting money into climate, 45%, half into mitigation, half into adaptation. The half that’s going into adaptation is going directly into development-related work. I’m talking about saying we should build hospitals that are resilient to weather patterns so that they can be used even when there’s bad catastrophes of weather in that space.

We should be building roads where they don’t get washed away with rainfall. We should be looking at climate-resistant varieties of seeds because clearly things that could grow at 35 degrees centigrade will not grow at 45 degrees centigrade. We should be looking at better ways of recycling water and using water better for food agriculture work because guess what? There isn’t enough water in these countries. The idea that somehow these are just climate and not connected directly to the impact of quality of life, of health, of nutrition, of atmosphere, of education, that’s a wrong way of thinking about it.

You got to think about these as intertwined challenges and therefore it’s really critical to not try and put them in little buckets that don’t belong. It’s just the way it is. I get the example of both you and I are of Indian origin. So if you go back to many years ago in India, if you had good irrigation, good rainfall, well, farmers began to grow two and three crops in a year. Well, guess what? When the rainfall was bad for four or five years in a row, well before India’s irrigation systems were even expanded to what they are today, what happened? You didn’t have two or three crops in a year.

You had one. When you only had one, you couldn’t afford the cattle you had kept. You got rid of the cattle. That means you got rid of your dairy income. When that happened, you couldn’t afford the farm laborer. When you got rid of the laborer, you pulled your kids out of school to work on the farm, and you start with the girl child. So when you put that together, all the gains on poverty, starting from putting the girl child to school so she has a better opportunity in the future, get put away by four years of poor rainfall. You cannot dissect these things into pieces. If one thing the pandemic taught us was that you cannot take healthcare out of the equation on poverty.

Preet Bharara:

When a country, even in 2024 that is developing, wants to maintain its status and wants to maintain its economy with investments in fossil fuel for energy, how does that fare in an application to the World Bank?

Ajay Banga:

It’s a really good point. I believe that you can do a lot of work with renewables, but you do need base load of power in a country to be able to get the renewables to work on that. Eventually, when battery storage technology is adequately advanced and cheap enough, you may not need that any longer, but today, you do. So this comes up once in a while in a lot of places. The World Bank hasn’t funded any coal plants for a long time, since 2010, I believe. We do fund natural gas when it’s part of a transition.

So if I can make sure that we are funding a natural gas project, like last year, we funded one in the Central Asian republics, and the idea was it was part of a transition for that country from where they were to where they were going. It wouldn’t be stranded assets that would reduce the incentive to go to renewable. We do that. But fossil fuel-related, as in natural gas, basically related financing is a very small percentage of our total energy. If you put about four to $5 billion into energy last year, maybe a couple of hundred million went into natural gas as part of this transition plant.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. You said no coal plants. Is that a written policy, or is that a norm?

Ajay Banga:

I think since 2010, we haven’t financed a coal plant.

Preet Bharara:

But is that a matter of written policy of the-

Ajay Banga:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

… bank? Yeah.

Ajay Banga:

That’s now policy in the bank for quite a few years, well before I came.

Preet Bharara:

So you also mentioned mitigation, and people may have a better understanding of that, but what are some examples of why there needs to be mitigation in connection with climate change?

Ajay Banga:

Terrific question. So the work being done in the developed world finally about reducing the emissions-heavy nature of our growth, even that reduces the emissions in the developed world in the 10 or 12 middle-income countries that are growing very rapidly, both in terms of population but also in terms of personal consumption, which they should. They deserve it. What then happens is that their consumption of energy goes up dramatically as well. That chart is not a good chart.

What we may reduce in the developed world will more than be overrun by what’s going to happen in the middle-income countries. The question is, therefore, since we can’t afford that because we share the air and the water we live on, then how do you try to change the curve over time? That’s the idea of mitigation. Now, some of that has to do with renewable energy versus fossil fuel and even within fossil fuel, moving from coal and oil to natural gas. But a large part of it then has to do with other things.

So to give you an example, in Dubai at COP 28, I stood up and made a big pledge on methane. Methane is 80 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide but gets only 2% of the climate financing in the world. And while methane comes, the biggest, single source is probably what comes out of oil flaring, gas flaring, but also the leakage from oil pipelines. And there was a big announcement around that as well, made by the US and China and others. But then there’s all the other sources, waste management, dairy, and agriculture.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, cattle. I thought cattle. Cattle was a big source.

Ajay Banga:

Exactly. And rice paddy. So we’ve done projects on all three. Cattle we did in India, rice we’ve done in Vietnam, and waste management in Brazil, where we now know the practices that drive emissions, methane emissions from these drown dramatically. I’m talking 40, 50, 60% down compared to doing it the usual way.

So what I’ve committed is that over the next 18 months, we’ll sign up eight to 10 countries and try and take out 10 million tons of methane that would’ve otherwise been emitted from the system. The target is to take out 65 million for the world. If I can take out 10, that’s a pretty good start. That’s another, to me, mitigation issue. So mitigation is not only about renewable energy. It’s about all these other things as well.

Preet Bharara:

What about when there’s a natural disaster that is traceable to climate change in a country, and they want to rebuild a town or a city? Does the World Bank come into play there also, or no?

Ajay Banga:

It should and should do much more, Preet. One of the things I’ve just announced over the last few months, first for small states, 47 small countries in the world, we announced back at COP 28 with Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados that we would do the following. When they encounter such an event which could wipe out double digits of their GDP in a few hours, right, Preet? Even…

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Ajay Banga:

And even if you’re a middle-income country, you lose double digits of your GDP. That’s a pretty dramatic situation. And so what we will do is, for the next two years, we will suspend all your debt and interest repayments on any loans that might be due with the World Bank, and we’ll fund that cost from our own philanthropic and trust funds. So there’s no cost to providing that to you. You’re basically… It’s like you’re done for two years, and we’ll re-come back at the end of two. So those two, you can focus on your people and rebuilding. We extended that a couple of days ago to include bigger countries as well.

And here, what we are talking about is, if we had already sanctioned you a bunch of projects in your country and this catastrophe hits, you can take portions of that sanction money and immediately divert it to fighting the catastrophe. So you can start looking after your people as… Look, for example, let’s say I’m building a hydroelectric dam in some country, and they’ve got a 2 billion outstanding loan there, and they get hit by a catastrophe. That hydroelectric dam isn’t the most important thing right now.

So let’s say 200 million out of that 2 billion you can immediately take from us tomorrow morning and use to fight the impact on the victims of that catastrophe. Second, we are putting catastrophe insurance into a number of the loans that we are putting out. So if you do get hit, the insurance kicks in and at that point you have the money to be able to use to fight these things off. So there’s even more we should be doing, I’m guessing, but these are pretty good starts to make sure that we are there when you have a problem and our hand is in your back.

Preet Bharara:

Part of the reason I’ve been asking from time to time about whether or not something is a written policy is I wonder how enduring these things are. So explain to folks you have a five-year term. Is that correct?

Ajay Banga:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

And is that subject to change if there’s a change in the US presidential administration, or will you remain in this job if you want to for another four years?

Ajay Banga:

Yes, it’s a five-year term without change of administration being factored in. And then you can be here for another five if, one, you wanted, but two, most importantly, if your shareholders want to vote you back in.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have a boss?

Ajay Banga:

Yeah, my shareholders are the boss. I’ve got a board which has 25 members. But remember, our shareholders are not like a private company shareholders.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Ajay Banga:

There is a percentage of voting that belongs to a country based on their contribution of capital to different parts of the World Bank over the years. The United States, the single largest shareholder, with somewhere around 16% of our capital, and then Japan is the second largest, then China.

And then a number of European countries follow Europe as a whole is actually larger than the United States in shareholding, but as different countries, they’re not. So it kind of goes down a sliding scale off that. And they’re very much present. They sit in my office, or 25 executive directors with advisors. They’re in the same building. So it’s a pretty different model from a private sector board.

Preet Bharara:

But how much independence do you have? How much influence do they have? Let’s say you want to change the 45% right now designated for climate-related investments or loans, and you wanted to up that to 55%. Can you do that just by yourself?

Ajay Banga:

You can, but it’s in your advantage to discuss it with everyone because there are… there’s going to be implications of the way people feel about that on both sides. And what you don’t want to do is end up alienating the people who are, in turn, responsible for approving all the projects that you’re going to hand out against that 45%. And so the right way to do it is to consult with them. I think on anything that’s major strategy, you have to consult with them because that’s the relationship you need to have with your board.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the main difference between being the president of the World Bank and the CEO of Mastercard?

Ajay Banga:

Aside from what I get paid?

Preet Bharara:

Different kinds of… Yeah. Well, we can go into that if you want.

Ajay Banga:

No, no. But I think the real big difference is, and it’s a good difference in some ways and challenging in others. The real big difference is I tried to do, Preet, as you know, even at Mastercard, things on financial inclusion and making Mastercard an important part of the community and making its business model work for that. Here, this is what you do. This is not the second thing you do. This is what you do. And I think being focused on development, being focused on poverty, being focused on livable planet is kind of what we do.

And I think that’s a big difference. We are not in it to make money off it. There’s no profit motive, but there is a very clear motive of the eradication of poverty with the quality of life that you should have on a livable planet. The other side that’s not as easy to deal with is that, essentially, shareholders and management in a private company are a very different equation of how they work. Management runs the company, has a duty to return capital to its shareholders, but if you do a good job in Mastercard, in my 12 years, we grew our market cap from 20 billion to 360 billion.

I had very happy shareholders. It’s not that they wouldn’t want more focus on one thing or the other, but essentially, I ran the company and did it to try and build the right value for my shareholders. Here, it’s far more of a consultative process where this is taxpayer money that’s coming to the World Bank, and I believe that puts a responsibility upon the World Bank and its management to care about how that money is used on behalf of taxpayers in so many countries. So it comes with the territory.

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask you a larger question. Obviously, much of your focus is on climate change and, as you said, mitigation and also adaptation. And it seems like that’s going forward without too much controversy. And I think you can make the argument that it’s within the wheelhouse of what your agency is about.

Do you think there’s an obligation on all sorts of far-flung agencies in the US and elsewhere to have as some of their mandate, if it makes sense, a focus on climate? And the reason I mentioned that is the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, has been thinking about and has been adopting disclosure requirements relating to climate that’s controversial in some sectors. Do you have a view on how other government agencies or intergovernmental agencies should be thinking about climate?

Ajay Banga:

No, you know what? It’s not that much of my focus on climate change. It is that much of my focus is all on eradicating poverty, but on a livable planet. So in livable planet is pandemics, is climate change, is fragility and conflict and violence. Unfortunately, that’s become a harsh reality in our world, right. And is also food insecurity. These are intertwined. That’s why I ended up putting a number out there for climate change of 45% because it, in turn, impacts all these other things.

I think other government agencies have to think about their mandate, Preet. If your mandate, like mine was, including the livable planet, if your mandate includes something which impacts whether it’s climate change or healthcare or something else, then by all means, you should fulfill your mandate. But that definition of your mandate is a very important starting point as compared to just scope, Preet, which everybody can then get involved with.

And so I’m a little more driven by what is it you’re tasked with doing and what is it that the taxpayer expects you to deliver. And if the taxpayer expects you to deliver, in my case, poverty eradication on a livable planet, then I’m going to use that to be the definition of what I aim for. And so any other government agency should get that starting point and then work from there.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you have said that, obviously, there’s a need for private capital to help solve the problem of a livable planet. What is the mandate for private companies in the private sector in relation to this issue?

Ajay Banga:

I love that question. Thank you for asking that. My view is… If I step back for a second, my view is that the amount of money that is required to be plowed into the emerging markets for getting to impact just renewable energy is trillions if you listen… per year, if you listen to the estimates put out there by consulting firms. Now, let’s add onto that the pandemic. And let’s add onto that challenges of healthcare and education and jobs. A billion people in the Global South, Preet, will be eligible for jobs in the next 10 to 12 years, a billion. Currently, the Global South is in a trajectory to have 350 million jobs created. That’s a very big gap, a very big challenge. That demographic dividend must not be allowed to become a demographic liability. It will if you’re not careful. Now, forecasts are our destiny, so we can make a difference to this.

But you see what I mean? That whole… That way of thinking requires trillions across the spectrum. No multilateral development bank balance sheet, no rich government or other governments. You put them together. There isn’t enough money to do this. You have to bring in the resources of the private sector as the only sustainable way of getting large sums of money and innovation and people put into this task. So then the question is, what makes it possible for them to come in? They have to make a return for their shareholders, a fair return. So the question is, are the business models ready for that? And I’ll give you the example of what we are learning for renewable energy, where I created this private sector lab comprising 15 of the world’s leading CEOs from asset management companies and operators, Tata, Temasek, BlackRock, Ninety One, HSBC, Standard Chartered. They’re all there. Macquarie. They’re there.

And what are we discussing is that there are three big challenges. And the first one is certainty of regulatory policy. Even if you know that wind and solar per unit are lower for power generation than fossil fuel today, and therefore, there is a business case for it, the reality is we don’t have good regulatory policy clarity on the ground from the direction of travel for the country to tariff policy certainty and so on. You’re not going to put your money in there. You’re going to put it where you get that policy certainty. Today, you may get that with the IRA and the US, or you may have most certainty in Europe than you will in a developing country. That’s a problem and a huge problem where we can help because the bank has regular and direct contact with governments and countries on policymaking. Second is political risk insurance.

So even if this happens, you may still have a [inaudible 00:25:33] that doesn’t live up to its commit principle. So I was saying the Multilateral Insurance Guarantee Agency, MIGA, a World Bank arm, does a pretty good job on that. We are doing 6, 7 billion a year. Can we make it 20 a year over the next few years to help sort of grease the skids on this topic? The third topic is foreign exchange risk. You’re investing in euros, dollars, and yen, and you’re going to get paid in local currency. And these are 10, 20, 30-year investments. And there’s no hedging market in these countries that is wide enough or deep enough to take care of that. So how do you account for that as a private investor? Well, one of the ways of thinking about it is if you are investing in a country where you know the average depreciation over 30 years of that country’s currency is seven to 10%, you, as an investor, should put that into your calculation and eat it.

Goes past 10, or maybe the local government should take some share of that. And if it goes past that highly volatile, well then maybe the multilateral bank like us should absorb that tail risk so that you, as a private investor, are not making more money than you would’ve made. You are capping your risk at the risk of long-term effect, stability, or volatility. And it’s the rest of it that somebody else eats with you so you can put your money to work. So there are things like this to be thought through, which can facilitate much larger private sector investment. And I was just talking renewable energy. You can do this for healthcare. You can do it for education and so on and so forth, the infrastructure and so on and so forth.

Preet Bharara:

Last question before you go. You may or may not remember, but you and I first met and became friends when I began as US Attorney to start doing these public forums to educate the public and the private sector folks about the cyber threat. And you were an expert on it and taught me a lot of things. That was maybe 11, 12 years ago. What’s the state of cybersecurity today as compared to when we first started talking about it?

Ajay Banga:

Yeah. In fact, you asked me to come speak with you at NYU School of Law. Wasn’t it? Where we first-

Preet Bharara:

NY Law School. Yeah.

Ajay Banga:

Yeah. I think we did that first, and then from there, it kept building. I had the good luck to participate on a presidential commission on cybersecurity, which is kind of what you and I were discussing on that panel as well that day. I would say, in some ways, Preet, much has improved. So basic cyber principles are improving. There are some things that need to happen. For example, remember I was saying that passwords are really not adequate protection. You can see a much higher level of second-factor authentication, a much higher level of biometric acceptance.

That kind of thing is much safer than old-fashioned passwords when the most popular password in America was password, and that’s not secure. And so that kind of thing, there is improvement on. There is a great deal of focus across some of the developed world and even in the developing world, like in countries like India and others, where there is a great deal of focus on developing the right digital skills in people so they’re more cyber aware and more capable of dealing with this new environment.

More needs to be done, but there’s a lot happening. Where things still need to happen, I think, are on two fronts. And one is, I had this idea that all the gadgets that a guy like you and I buy somehow, there should be some kind of a grade for the cyber capability of that gadget. So you’re buying a television with a camera on it, and right now, you learn about pixels and length to aspect ratio and so on, and the three 4G versus LED versus all that.

Shouldn’t you have a simpler grade? A bit like what Mayor Bloomberg did for New York City’s restaurants and ABC, shouldn’t you get a grade like that? So a guy like you, me, doesn’t have to be a tech geek to know this camera has better systems on cyber safety than that one. It may be cheaper. It may not have as many pixels, but then you can make an informed choice as a consumer as to what you’re trading off. Kind of like a food nutrition label kind of thing, if you know what I mean.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Ajay Banga:

And then the last item that I think we need some more improvement. I believe there is work going on in what I’m saying just now, but it hasn’t yet hit the market. And the last one, to me, the more contentious and difficult one, is do we need the equivalent of a Geneva Convention in the world on what will work for cybersecurity. So should some nations get together, even if all cannot, and say, “Hey, these are rules we’ll live by.

Thou shalt not do this. Thou shalt not do that. If other people do it, we will get together and make them pay.” And I’m not sure how easy that is to get done in today’s fractured polity, but I do believe this kind of thing is important, and I think the EU and the US and other countries do have agreements on, for example, data privacy and data sharing. Maybe this is one of the topics that can be worked on over the next few years. It would create a fairly important step forward.

Preet Bharara:

We could talk about 20 more topics, but I know you’re very busy. Thanks for being on the show, and congratulations again on your first year.

Ajay Banga:

Thank you very much, Preet. It’s eight months in, but it feels like a year.

Preet Bharara:

Well, a year since you were nominated, so we’re celebrating a little bit early. Ajay Banga, thank you so much. For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the CAFE Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider.

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 at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, 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 letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director was David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.