Why Should I Trust You?

With the midterms just three weeks away, communities across the country are pushing back against the construction of new AI data centers. In a deeply divided America, opposition to these massive facilities is emerging across party lines: seven in ten Americans say they oppose an AI data center being built near them.

Today, we bring together Midwestern residents on the front lines of this fight, along with researchers examining the electricity demands and potential health impacts of these facilities. AI data centers promise jobs and investment, but they also raise very real questions about who bears the costs, who reaps the benefits, and who gets to decide what's best for a community. 

We often hear that resistance to the centers is really about worry over AI. In our discussion, we discuss how much of that is true and how much of this is about anger over elected officials seen as siding with corporations over people. 

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guests:

Stuart Day is a community organizer with Ohio Valley Allies and host of the Exposure podcast, covering environmental and industrial issues in the Ohio Valley.

Drew Kassel is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin studying energy systems and the electricity demands of data centers.

Montre Moore is a Milwaukee community advocate involved in local debates over data center development and its effects on residents.

Vina Colley is a longtime environmental activist in Piketon, Ohio, where a massive AI data center campus is proposed near the former Portsmouth uranium enrichment plant.

Natalie Armstrong, is a PhD candidate in environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, looking at the environmental & public health impacts of data centers.

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Our guest is Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan, one of the key races in the battle for control of the Senate.

A physician and former public health director, El-Sayed is making health a centerpiece of his campaign. Along with advocating for Medicare for All, he’s unveiled a new agenda targeting pesticides, polluters, and microplastics, while expanding access to healthier food, issues that overlap with goals of the MAHA movement.

So can a progressive Democrat find common ground and build trust with MAHA voters? And how does he address concerns among some Democrats and traditional public health advocates who view the movement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Trump administration as undermining trust in vaccines, scientific research, and public health itself?

At a time when trust in politicians and institutions is deeply strained, how can El-Sayed convince voters that his agenda can make health care more affordable and help build a healthier country?

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guest:

Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate running for Senate in Michigan

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Researcher and author Renée DiResta has spent years studying how influence works online, including the power dynamics that determine which voices get heard and which ones have influence.

In a new report she co-authored, DiResta not only digs into the transformation from old media to new, but also examines how institutions need to rethink their approach to communication. Which brings us to a bigger question: What happens when institutional authority itself is no longer enough to earn people’s attention or trust?

The old system, in which institutions such as universities, government agencies, think tanks, and nonprofits could rely on mainstream media gatekeepers to relay their insights and messages, has been upended. Today, as influence and attention have shifted toward individual creators, online communities, and influencers, those same institutions (along with their expertise) must find ways to enter these new arenas or risk becoming irrelevant.

In this episode, DiResta wrestles with how institutions can make headway and rebuild trust in this new world while staying true to their core missions.

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek (off)

Guest:

Renée DiResta is an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where she studies influence, propaganda, online information systems and institutional resilience. She previously served as research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. Her latest work, co-authored for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, examines how institutions must adapt to a radically changed media environment—and rethink how they earn attention, influence and legitimacy.

Link to the report:

https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/08/nonprofit-organizations-how-to-engage-social-media-new-media-strategy

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Today we ask: When it comes to spending taxpayer dollars on scientific research, how much should elected politicians decide what gets funded,  and how much should be decided by scientists and those who lead our health agencies? 

Where should the line be between supporting the best scientific questions and the ones that our elected leaders think are best?

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guests:

Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Executive Publisher of the Science family of journals. 2001 to 2009, he served as science advisor to the Republican leadership on the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he was responsible for negotiating budgets for the NIH and several of the other health agencies.

Michael Green, a population health researcher and a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His work includes examining how people's experiences of unfair treatment in health care affect their health. Michael is one of the researchers who filed a class-action lawsuit this month alleging the NIH is using keyword searches to flag grants for things like DEI and gender, and to cut or force changes to those grants. 

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This year is shaping up to be the worst in three decades for measles cases. The biggest case count is in Pennsylvania, home to the country’s largest outbreak right now. At its center is Lancaster County and its large Amish community.

As you're likely aware, the outbreak has also become a political fight, with Governor Josh Shapiro and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly clashing, even over how many deaths to count.

So what is that fight obscuring about what’s actually happening on the ground? And, widening out, what does this year’s rise in measles across the country portend? And finally, how can public health reach low-vaccination populations and help protect them during outbreaks like these?

Today, we hear from Roberta Devers, a traditional midwife and Kennedy supporter caring for Amish families at the heart of the outbreak who now believes everyone who can should be vaccinated; The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett, who has been reporting from the Amish community and spoke with a family whose infant died; immunologist Michael Mina, who has worked with vaccine-hesitant families; and Katherine Wells, the Lubbock public health director who led the response to last year’s Texas outbreak.

What can we learn when we get past politics and listen to the people working on the front lines of these outbreaks?

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guests:

Tom Bartlett, staff writer The Atlantic; has interviewed parents of children who have died from or with measles. 

Roberta Devers, home birth midwife, serves Lancaster County Amish families

Katherine Wells, director Lubbock, Texas Health Department

Dr. Michael Mina, physician, epidemiologist, immunologist, trains healthcare providers who work with vaccine hesitant populations, Chief Medical Officer, Invivyd.

Reading:

"The Measles-Stricken Mother Who Lost Her Newborn Son" by Tom Bartlett

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/08/pennsylvania-measles-infant-death-family/688469/?gift=_5-xEWgGoCTqSjqIeVMUqmJTBAkpC8ldBZ3MpQ9PSu4

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AI’s story feels like it's gotten a lot scarier. Some people in the tech world building AI now say it poses a meaningful risk of catastrophic harm, or even human extinction. Others insist this kind of “doomerism” is wildly exaggerated—that the warnings amount to crying wolf, and that the real danger is slowing down and ceding our advantage to China.

What we do know is that the claims are enormous, sometimes even hard to fully believe or trust, the stakes range from disruptive to potentially existential, and nobody knows what comes next.

So rather than hearing from the people building the technology or the politicians reacting to the warnings, we gathered voices from the human sciences and professions. We’re joined by Stephen Witt, a journalist who has spent years covering AI; Jennifer Reich, a sociologist who studies how people navigate risk and uncertainty; and Rachael Bedard, a physician and New York Times contributor currently focused on deciphering this AI moment.

In an era of collapsed trust, how do we process what we’re hearing from tech giants, naysayers, and politicians? How do we make decisions when the experts themselves disagree about the risks? How much uncertainty—and risk—are we willing to accept? And ultimately, will America’s mistrust of institutions and big business be our armor, or our undoing?

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guests:

Stephen Witt, tech journalist, author of The Thinking Machine, recent opinion piece in the NYT titled "This is Really Bad": https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/ai-safety-threat-technology.htmlhttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/757558/the-thinking-machine-by-stephen-witt/

Jennifer Reich, sociologist, author, University of Colorado -- Denver. Author, Calling The Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines.: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1803zjf

Rachael Bedard, physician, contributing opinion writer to The New York Times, and The New Yorker, The Atlantic and New York. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/12/14/facing-omicron-relapse/

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Charles Eisenstein was a senior adviser and speechwriter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his 2024 presidential campaign and an early architect of the ideas that would help shape MAHA.

In a wide-ranging interview, Eisenstein talks about his heartbreak over how that campaign evolved and, in the wake of Kennedy’s speech at last week’s Republican midterm convention, how he views the possibility of a Kennedy presidential run in 2028. In that speech, the HHS Secretary said the foundational values of the Democratic Party he grew up in had “found a new home” in the Republican Party.

Eisenstein discusses his original vision for Kennedy’s candidacy: leading a movement that would rise above party fights and political divisions. We talk about whether the growing concern over AI could become an issue that finally brings people together across the political divide. What types of candidates does he see succeeding in this moment?

And ultimately, does Eisenstein still recognize the movement he helped imagine?

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek (seeing patients)

Guest:

Charles Eisenstein, former speechwriter and senior adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr's 2024 Presidential campaign; author, philosopher, strategist. www.charleseisenstein.org

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A debate has broken out in medicine and tech over what the role of AI should be. Is it a useful tool for doctors to consult when making a diagnosis, or, given studies now showing how powerful AI can be in diagnostics and other areas, should the field actually begin preparing for a not-too-distant future when what’s best for a patient is AI taking the lead in care?

To explore that question, we're joined by two leading voices in the debate: Dr. Robert Wachter, a leading voice on technology and medicine, who has called AI “the biggest experiment in the history of medicine,” and Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and writer who has written extensively about AI and medicine for The New Yorker.

So, what does it mean to be a doctor if AI is doing the heavy lifting? Is that the best scenario, or is a hybrid model, with a doctor consulting an AI, the better path? And how do doctors and patients learn to trust AI with life-and-death decisions in a world where AI agents have already shown they can go rogue?

But beyond the provocative question of what AI will eventually mean for doctors, what about all the ways AI could make medicine better? Could it provide millions of Americans without access to affordable care with an alternative?

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guests:

Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and health policy professor at Weill Cornell, and a writer at The New Yorker covering medicine and health care. He directs The Physicians Foundation Center for the Study of Physician Practice and Leadership

Dr. Robert Wachter, physician, professor and chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine. Bob coined the term 'hospitalist' which redefined what it meant to be a doctor.  He's the author of 300 articles and six books, including his latest, A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future. 

Disclosure: Dr. Wachter has consulted with or spoken to a number of AI companies, including Google, Curai, Commure, and Qualified Health. He's received a commitment of support for an upcoming documentary on AI & healthcare from OpenEvidence.

Sources:

On Strawmen and Doormen: Robert Wachter

https://substack.com/@robertwachter/note/p-212925424?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=5vii9h 

If AI Can Diagnose Patients, What Are Doctors For?: Dhruv Khullar

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/29/if-ai-can-diagnose-patients-what-are-doctors-for

Will Autonomous AI Exceed AI-Aided Physicians As the Best Medical Care? (if you have trouble accessing this article, please email us at the address below and we can send you a pdf)

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2852952

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It’s been two years since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump and forged an unlikely alliance between the Make America Healthy Again movement and MAGA. Now, as we head toward the midterms, with Kennedy campaigning for Republican candidates, we’re asking: What is MAHA now? Is it working? Is it a political force, a social force, or has it lost its way? 

To hear from supporters about where they see the movement heading, we’re joined by Zen Honeycutt, Aaron Everitt, Elizabeth Frost, Jeff Hutt and Mark Harris. Each has been deeply involved in or closely aligned with MAHA, including several who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign. They represent very different priorities and hold different views of where the movement has gone. Some remain committed; others have grown disillusioned or walked away. 

We’re also joined by former Congressman Tim Ryan, a longtime Democrat, who held MAHA-congruent positions on food and agriculture years before MAHA was a slogan on a hat. Where does he see the movement going from here?   

And then there’s the bigger question: If roughly four in ten Americans support many of the aspirations behind MAHA, what does that foreshadow for the future of our politics?

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek (off)

Guests:

Zen Honeycutt, Moms Across America

Jeff Hutt, former National Field Director, Kennedy Campaign

Aaron Everitt, former Kennedy Campaign volunteer

Elizabeth Frost, MAHA Ohio

Mark Harris, former Kennedy campaign supporter

former Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH)

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Has the Lindsay Clancy trial quickly become a proxy for something larger? — arguments about psychiatry and medication, motherhood and mental illness, personal responsibility, and whether our medical system is fundamentally failing the people who depend on it? 

And in choosing sides, are we at risk of turning one horrific case into evidence for conclusions that go far beyond what this particular tragedy can actually tell us?

We’re joined by two psychiatrists and an ER physician today to talk about all this. 

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guests:

Dr. Julia Riddle, a reproductive psychiatrist and researcher focused on reproductive mental health. She is an Assistant Professor at the UNC Center for Women's Mood Disorders, where she runs a clinic for patients. 

Dr. Anne Zink, emergency medicine physician and public health leader who served as Chief Medical Officer for the State of Alaska before and during the pandemic. Senior Fellow at the Yale School of Public Health

Dr. Bryan Shapiro, a psychiatrist at UC Irvine Medical Center, treating outpatients and training primary care physicians & nurse practitioners on prescribing psychiatric medications.  He is the Medical Director at Outro, a company in which he has a financial stake, and which works to safely taper patients off antidepressants.

Resources:

National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: 1-833-TLC-MAMA

National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline .  Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org

For training MDs/DO/NPs/PAs: https://ncrptraining.org/ 

NCMatter Access Line Toolkits: https://www.med.unc.edu/ncmatters/provider-tools/toolkits/

OB Tool kits: https://www.mcpapformoms.org/Toolkits/Toolkit.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

PSI international: https://postpartum.net

Postpartum Support International 1-833-943-5746

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