Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild are joined by Undark editor-in-chief Tom Zeller Jr. to talk about the show’s successes and failures, and about their respective hopes for the future.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. To hear past episodes, you can also find Entanglements on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Brooke Borel: Hi, Anna.
Anna Rothschild: Hi, Brooke.
Brooke Borel: How you feeling?
Anna Rothschild: I’m a little sad.
Brooke Borel: I’m also a little sad, because I love recording with you, and this is our last episode of the season of Entanglements.
Anna Rothschild: And possibly our last episode for a while.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, exactly.
Anna Rothschild: The world of podcasting is a complex one and, for a whole variety of reasons, we do not have a future season planned, at least for now. But we would love to come back in the future.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: But we thought this would be a good opportunity to reflect on what we’ve built here at Entanglements, so we are bringing back Undark editor-in-chief Tom Zeller Jr.
Brooke Borel: Hi, Tom.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Hi. Good to be here. I always sort of am trepidatious when I come to the show because it always means the end of something.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Tom Zeller Jr.: It’s either the last episode of the season or, now, the last episode for the time being.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. But we’ve done a lot of great work, and that’s what we’re going to talk about now. Tom I thought maybe you could start it off by reflecting on — this was your idea, really. I mean, we modified it and we built on it and all this stuff over our seasons, but this was originally your idea. So why did we want to do this again?
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yes. You know, when we first launched Undark, which is now 10 years ago, we had T-shirts made that said Undark on the front, and then on the back it said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I don’t know why that comes to mind now. Why Entanglements?
I mean, I think the conceit was to find a way to kind of cut through all the vitriol and noise that had come to typify not just our political discourse, but scientific discourse too, which had become embittered and heated and not very illuminating in the post-Covid era, but even a little bit before that. And in the swamp of social media, I guess I thought there had to be a way that we could have civil discussions about these really divisive topics again. About putting fluoride in the water or, where did Covid come from? There had to be a way to have civil and intelligent and informative conversations about these topics without it sort of just disintegrating into political gamesmanship and ideological tribalism, especially when it relates to science.
Because, I mean, this was the whole rationale for launching Undark in the first place. I felt like somehow we had lost an understanding of what science is supposed to do in the culture. It’s not a cudgel and it often is not something that gives us absolute certainty. It just gives us indicators and risk factors and other weather vanes that can kind of help to point us in the right direction. But there’s always going to be more questions, and if we can’t come together and talk about these things in a civil way without drawing battle lines, then we’re never going to get anywhere. And we’re also going to lose the very thing that science provides to us as a culture.
So I just yearned for something that brought smart people together in a way that they could talk in a civil, respectful environment. And that’s sort of what I brought to you, Brooke. I was like, “We need, we need something like this in the world.” And then you and Anna just sort of took it from there and knocked it out of the park.
Brooke Borel: Did we succeed?
Tom Zeller Jr.: I mean, it exceeded my wildest dreams, I have to say.
Anna Rothschild: Aw, thanks Tom.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah. And I think you guys know it. You know, one of the things I always remember about the beginning of this is that I feel like you particularly, Anna, were nervous.
Brooke Borel: I think that’s accurate.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Because we were wading into topics that I think in a lot of ways our peers in the press had also become entrenched on and had sort of decided that this was the framing that was right, this was the framing that was wrong. And to tiptoe into that wrong territory, that wrongthink, was kind of a scary thing.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I was being a wimp.
Tom Zeller Jr.: I’d love to hear about your evolution as you started doing the show, Anna.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I think I’ve gotten a lot more brave about how I approach these topics since doing this show. I feel a lot more bold as a journalist having done this. And hearing just how rational people are when you really get down to it. A lot of the time the beliefs that people have are coming from really well-thought-out places. And so even when they go against the mainstream, there’s reason to be listening. I may not always agree, but there’s a reason to be listening and paying attention. And so I think that’s something that’s very lost these days, which is the whole reason why you wanted to start this. But yeah, I think for me as a journalist, this show has been both very challenging and also one of the best learning experiences of my life. So I’m very very proud of it.
Brooke Borel: Oh, amazing.
Tom Zeller Jr.: That’s really gratifying for me to hear. And I wonder if you can look back, if you can cast back, can you be specific about what you were afraid of? What made you nervous about wading into these conversations?
Anna Rothschild: I think a few things. Thing one is literally just sometimes a sense of reverence for certain scientists whose opinions I’ve just — their work I just think is really incredible. And I think that that is something that I’ve really had to challenge making this show. That just because you can historically really respect somebody’s work doesn’t mean they’re right 100 percent of the time, first of all. And it also doesn’t mean that I have to care about their opinion if I publish something that goes counter to a belief they have. Or that maybe doesn’t even go counter to it, that just asks questions that challenges a belief they have.
And then I guess the second is more professional and social, right? It’s not just the scientists’ opinions, it’s also the opinions of my peers. And my peers in the world of science journalism. And will they think I’m being irresponsible by publishing on the origins of Covid or fluoride in water or whatever the case may be, you know? And that’s been a challenge, too, but in some ways I’ve been able to overcome that one easier than this sort of, I’m embarrassed to say, a bit of hero worship that I think I’ve held in the past. Which I think was important for me getting into the world of science communication, right. It’s not helpful in science journalism.
Brooke Borel: I think it’s why a lot of people get into this line of work. But if you don’t have training as a journalist, which I didn’t either coming into this, you kind of go through this evolution.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah.
Brooke Borel: The more you focus on the journalism side of things.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly.
Tom Zeller Jr.: It was a big learning curve for me just coming and kind of launching Undark and working with a lot of people in the freelance science journalism community, just to discover that a lot of them, in ways that are really understandable, come to science as a fan, or maybe even someone who was a scientist themselves and decided they wanted to write. But they don’t — it’s sort of a learning curve that you have to start thinking about science and scientists critically, in the way a journalist does, and that doesn’t always come naturally to people in this field for reasons that I think are obvious.
But at the end of the day, scientists are human. Their discipline is affected by greed and by careerism and by special interests, and nobody wants their bad work to be known. And, I guess I spent a lot of time in the early days of Undark just trying to break the spirit of science writers and make them be less enamored of science writ large or at least be a little more skeptical.
Anna Rothschild: Well, and I think it just also really just goes to the difference between science communication and science journalism, right? You have to be a really good communicator to do this well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean — and I think a lot of people feel like they’re really rigorous science journalists because there are these things at the margins that you can dig into, and you can feel like you’re pushing the envelope. But a lot of people still shy away from the biggest issues because there’s just a party line in science, and they feel like that’s the line we don’t cross because, for whatever reason. But that’s the difference between journalism and communication.
Tom Zeller Jr.: I think those lines sometimes are valid. But if we can’t interrogate the lines or ask questions about why the line is here and not there, I think that’s how journalism got in trouble with Covid. You know, a lot of us just sort of took the word of a certain set of scientists as being gospel and said, “This is where the line is,” but without really — I mean, there were journalists out there questioning them, but they were shunned in some ways. And that’s not healthy. I mean, that’s not a healthy way for our profession to conduct itself. We should be able to say, “Look at the line. Why is it drawn there?” There’s probably good reasons.
We should be able to talk about it. As soon as you start saying, “We can’t talk about this,” is when you lose a lot of people. They’re just like, “Something’s being hidden. I’m not being leveled with.” And I understand the fear, I think, of platforming ideas that are sort of outside the mainstream, but we need to be able to do that and explain why they belong at the margins if in fact they do.
Anna Rothschild: And the funny thing is, for some of these topics, I have people in my life who are still mad at me for not going even farther down different —
Brooke Borel: Like what? Tell me more.
Anna Rothschild: I guess I just mean I have like a lot of anti-vaxxers in my life who I’m very close to, for example. Or people who think that Covid wasn’t just created in a lab, but was created with malicious intent in a lab, and that the fact that we didn’t go there in our podcast was a mistake and an oversight. And so there’s always a line. There’s always going to be a line, you know. There’s always a new frontier is what I’m trying to say.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, depending on your perspective and your reading of the evidence or —
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah, and I would welcome a conversation on those topics too. Like, if you had the right people, I mean, there’s no other way to convince people that they’re wrong except by having a fair conversation about it out loud.
Brooke Borel: Well, if we could find them.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah.
Brooke Borel: If we could find them. One of the biggest challenges on this show was finding the right people to talk to on certain things. Sometimes we would have one person, we’d finally find one person, and we couldn’t find the right match for them. Sometimes they didn’t want to speak to anyone directly, or they’d have a list of people and they’d say, “I’ll come on, but not if X, Y, and Z come on, opposing me,” or whatever. Sometimes we couldn’t find the right match-up in expertise, or we didn’t want to have a professor of 30 years in conversation with a postdoc because that had a power differential that felt unfair. There are all kinds of things that made it extremely difficult.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Can I get you guys to dish a little bit here?
Brooke Borel: I don’t know.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Talk a little bit about, you know, what was the biggest struggle? What episode really was just like, “My gosh, I can’t believe we can’t get people to the table on this”? You don’t necessarily have to name names, but by all means, name names if you’d like to.
Brooke Borel: The Covid origin would —
Tom Zeller Jr.: What happened? Yeah.
Brooke Borel: Well, I mean, ultimately the two guests that we finally got on wouldn’t even speak directly to each other, or at least one of them wouldn’t speak to the other.
Tom Zeller Jr.: I remember the fluoride episode being a little bit of a struggle, too. In fact, those two people, did they not have beef?
Brooke Borel: They did have beef. Well, the fluoride one actually came together more easily than — I mean, so the fluoride one, we went into that particular episode after Michael Schulson, our contributing editor at Undark, already had done a pretty big investigation on sort of the latest epidemiological research out of Canada and sort of digging into the nuances, beyond the classic sort of argument against fluoride being sort of a tin hat argument — just rife with conspiracy theories.
So I had a list of sources, a list of potential people to interview. And I was able to reach out to most of them, and most of them actually did say no. They didn’t want to go on. Christine Till, who is the researcher up in Canada who had produced these epidemiological studies that suggest not that fluoride’s dangerous for everyone, but there might be some negative effects specifically for fetuses that were under development, that sort of thing. And she was willing to come on, but it was quite hard. A lot of people wrote back and said they absolutely were not going to come on, and it took a while to find someone who was willing and who wasn’t feeling a little salty about the stuff we had already published.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Well, and the person you —
Brooke Borel: Yes, they had a professional beef. He spearheaded a letter-writing campaign accusing her of —
Anna Rothschild: Misconduct?
Brooke Borel: — scientific misconduct, yeah. But they had never actually talked directly before, and I think that was a very successful episode in that sense because we were able to get these two people — and that conversation was uncomfortable at times, for sure — but I did appreciate that the two guests that ultimately came on had a willingness to engage with each other, and I think that was a successful episode. But it was kind of hard. I think it would’ve been far harder to identify the right people and to contact them and to zero in on potential guests if we hadn’t already done a big, investigative piece on that topic.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Didn’t you have a hard time finding guests for the geoengineering episode as well?
Brooke Borel: Geoengineering was a little hard. I did have a really hard time finding the right people with the right expertise, and I did eventually land on Raymond Pierrehumbert at Oxford. And he was great, but he also said, “I will only come on the show if you don’t choose certain other guests,” and he named one person who’s been very adamantly sort of pro-geoengineering and he just wouldn’t go on the show with that guy. So we found someone else.
Tom Zeller Jr.: It’s really disappointing to me that professional scientists could behave that way. But I thought the episode was great.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I thought it was a really good episode.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Tell me a little bit about some of your favorite episodes. What are the shows that really stood out to you as sort of your best work?
Brooke Borel: I think our first-ever episode, which gave us a false sense of security that this was going to be way easier, right? The question was: “Will AI Kill Us All?” And we had these two great guests on, and they were — the question worked well, they had enough tension between them, and not tension personally, but enough tension in their perspectives that it made for a really lively, interesting conversation. One of them changed the other one’s mind a little bit, or at least gave, like we heard on air: “Oh, I never thought of it that way.” And then at the end they’re like, “Let’s go get a beer and talk about this more.” So it just was so great, and it was easy to find them, relatively easy to find them.
And so many of the other episodes just didn’t come together quite like that. Sometimes there wouldn’t be quite as much difference in the two people’s perspective. Like we would pick sometimes these topics that were floating around on social media or in headlines that seemed like something that was under a lot of debate. But if you looked at how researchers were talking about these topics versus how politicians or how people who didn’t really have much expertise were talking about them, it ended up being a little bit more nuanced, and sometimes that didn’t really hold up with our model in a way that I think was as satisfying for an episode.
Tom Zeller Jr.: How about you, Anna? Any favorites that stick out for you?
Anna Rothschild: There are a few, I guess. One that actually I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is from the first season, one that Brooke did on risky science, like who should decide who gets to do risky science.
Brooke Borel: I liked that one too.
Anna Rothschild: And I think about that episode all the time just because it feels really foundational to so much else that we’ve done on the show. Ultimately, a lot of these questions, like the scientists themselves sometimes do have really strong differences of opinion, but a lot of the time it’s really more of a policy question. The real debates are around policy and speed and buy-in. And I just think that that episode just underlies like so much else that we’ve done on the show. So I’m really glad we did it. And I will say, I was a little bit like, “What even is this episode?” Like when Brooke first pitched it to me —
Brooke Borel: You were like, “I’m glad you’re doing that one.”
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. Like, I don’t really —
Brooke Borel: You can take that one.
Anna Rothschild: You can take that one. But I think about it often. And I think we’ve taken so many of the issues we talked about in that episode are ones we later ended up covering.
Brooke Borel: Gain of function, geoengineering.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Tom Zeller Jr.: You know, when I think about it, over time, these episodes really came to embody and reflect back the thing that Undark was launched to try and do. And that was really gratifying.
Anna Rothschild: Yes. So many of the issues that we have talked about, especially this season, and last season too, are differences in philosophy and semantics and regulation. They’re not necessarily differences in, should we do X, Y, Z or not.
Brooke Borel: Or totally reading the data in different ways.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. So I just, I just think that’s really interesting. And that’s really not the impression you get if you’re just like a lay reader of the news, I think, a lot of the time.
Brooke Borel: So one example of an episode where it’s a topic that’s very politicized right now that we were able to find a couple of guests on to speak, I think, in a really interesting way, was the population crisis. We hear a lot about: We’re having this fertility crisis, this population crisis. We’re going to run out of humans sometime in the near future, and it’s going to have catastrophic effects on our economy and on society and such. There are pushes to have people have more babies and also pushes to have more traditional families and traditional marriage and such to support those babies. And we were able to find a couple of really interesting guests who could have a good-faith conversation about that, talking about the data and not falling into that pronatalist view that we hear a lot about in the zeitgeist today.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. They weren’t taking a moral stance. They were looking at the data and drawing conclusions from the data, but different conclusions.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Tom Zeller Jr.: So no one was arguing that we should have more trad wives? Is that what you’re saying?
Brooke Borel: No. Neither of them — we did talk about trad wives a little bit, and neither of them were in support necessarily, or they were neutral. I don’t know.
Anna Rothschild: They were neutral.
Brooke Borel: Yes, neutral.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Well, all I can say is that was really a terrific episode.
Anna Rothschild: It was a great episode. Yeah, I loved that one.
Tom Zeller Jr.: I also want to make sure that we touch on episodes that you really hoped you would be able to do or that you even did a lot of research on but just didn’t pan out for one reason or another.
Brooke Borel: I mean, there were some topics that we discussed quite a bit and talked to a lot of people about and did a lot of research on, and they didn’t ultimately come together. One was gender-affirming care. It was really hard to find the right question there. It’s such a sensitive area and some of the bigger questions out there that are very politicized were not the questions we really wanted to ask because, I don’t know, they’re overly covered and also they’re not always arguments that are made in good faith.
Anna Rothschild: They also don’t necessarily involve scientists.
Brooke Borel: Exactly. They don’t have the — it’s just not the right fit for our show. But we were trying to figure out what an interesting, respectful, thoughtful question could be around that. And we came up with some stuff and we talked to this one researcher so many times, and I feel badly because we ultimately didn’t end up doing the episode. Maybe someday we’ll come back to that. But again, maybe it wasn’t even the right fit for the show. Maybe we were struggling so much with it because maybe having that sort of framing question that we use on the show, it’s not for every story, it’s not for every topic. Not everything fits in a way that makes sense.
Tom Zeller Jr.: How about you, Anna? Are there any episodes that you really wanted to do but couldn’t get across the finish line?
Anna Rothschild: I have a bee in my bonnet about ultra-processed foods, and I did talk to one scientist who was a little bit more skeptical about the ultra-processed foods framing of stuff, and I think that it would’ve been really cool to have her on the show. Her view isn’t vastly different. She’s not saying that bags of chips should be at the bottom of the food pyramid or whatever.
Brooke Borel: Yes, we should all be eating Cheetos for breakfast.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. But she has a much more nuanced approach than I think we’re hearing a lot these days in the world of nutrition. And also is just really questioning the term ultra-processed foods, period. So I’m very interested in this.
Tom Zeller Jr.: It’s really a great topic, and it’s something that’s in the air now because of the MAHA movement and RFK.
Anna Rothschild: I know. I also still would love to do an episode on what’s the best way to treat pedophilia, and I reached out to a bunch of people for that one.
Brooke Borel: It’s so tricky.
Anna Rothschild: But that was a really, really tricky one. And I did — I thought I was going to get somebody on at one point who would be a great guest, and ultimately they backed out, I think for PR reasons basically.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah. Well I just want to say that I’m deeply impressed and grateful for the ground that the two of you were able to cover over these years. And honestly, we should all feel proud that this is out there and that we’ve reached listeners and that we’ll continue to reach listeners hopefully for years to come.
Brooke Borel: I mean, I will say that although the show is ending, at least for the foreseeable future, I do think that what we have built here, I hope to continue to see out in the world a little bit more. This idea of not having debates all the time, but sitting down and actually having a conversation with someone.
It doesn’t have to be with someone who’s not going to have a good-faith conversation with you, right? But if there are people out there that are willing to sit down and look at the evidence and speak about how they see it, how they read it, where their differences are, sure, but also where they have common ground, which gets lost. The whole point of the show is probing into that common ground, because otherwise it gets lost in these debates, right? I hope to see more of that in the world of science, between researchers, amongst science writers and science journalists. That’s my hope.
Tom Zeller Jr.: I think that warrants an amen.
Anna Rothschild: Amen.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: And that’s it for this episode of “Entanglements,” brought to you by Undark Magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Our amazing producer and editor is Samia Bouzid. The show is fact-checked by Undark deputy editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell, and Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor-in-chief, Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening.