Talking to Each Other

Brinda Adhikari is a producer, storyteller, journalist, and co-host of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” which launched in January 2025 with a goal of attempting to understand why so many people have lost trust in public health institutions. Adhikari and her co-hosts, journalist Tom Johnson, physician and medical journalist Dr. Mark Abdelmalek, and virologist Dr. Maggie Bartlett, have interviewed senators, government officials, and public health leaders and critics from across the political spectrum.

In the spring, Adhikari convened a conversation between five grassroots leaders in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and five public health leaders, including Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, of the Yale School of Public Health and Adjunct Professor Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, who writes the “Your Local Epidemiologist” newsletter. This first conversation led to a second and then a third (with some different participants, including Dr. Anne Zink, MD, senior fellow). Here’s how the conversations came about.

As told to Michael F. Fitzgerald

I had made a connection through Braver Angels, which brings together Red state and Blue state people to have conversations. They put me in touch with some people, and one of them happened to be a MAHA mom. At first, she seemed a bit suspicious of me, and I was probably a little suspicious of her. But her name’s Brenda and I’m Brinda, so that was kind of a cute thing, and after a few conversations, some wall broke between us. We just really connected, talking about how our kids were doing, genuinely supporting each other on different things.

After that wall broke, she suggested I meet some of her friends, a couple of whom ran Robert Kennedy's campaign in Ohio. One of them was Elizabeth Frost, MAHA Ohio’s grassroots coordinator.

I asked Elizabeth, ‘If you could wave a magic wand and you could get something changed today, what would it be?’ I expected her to say something about school lunch or toxic exposures or maybe vaccine safety. And she was like, ‘Honestly, the thing I want the most is to talk to people from the other side, from public health. I just don't know if it's possible anymore, we're so divided. I wish they knew where we were coming from. I wish I could know better where they were coming from.’

I was just like, ‘hmm, let's make it happen.’ And she was like, ‘what?’ And I said, ‘I happen to be in touch with a few people in public health. Let me flag this and see if they’d be into it.’ And I texted a bunch of them and literally within minutes, they all got back to me saying, ‘absolutely, we want to do it.’

I was sort of stunned by how quickly everybody was game to do it. I think it came at a point when a lot of public health folks were like head in hands, not sure what to do, and the MAHA folks were on one hand feeling good because their guy’s in power, but on the other hand feeling deeply misunderstood. They think they're being lumped in with MAGA and with all these cuts.

Because I knew Elizabeth ran the MAHA Ohio office, I asked her to choose some people. I was very open to these folks because I trust Brenda. Brenda knows all of them because she worked with them. When I sent them the list of who was coming from public health, they were like, ‘Really? They're going to talk to us?’ They were particularly impressed that Dr. Paul Offit who was instrumental in the development of the rotavirus vaccine was included.

When you're thinking of something as content or an episode, you're immediately in the framework of like, ‘Ok, how can I take it to the next level, make it more interesting to the audience?’ I didn't want to do that with this. These are two groups who generally don't come together. They talk about each other a lot. They think about each other a lot. They think about a lot of the same issues, but they never talk to each other. My hope was that people wouldn't hang up on each other within the first 15 minutes.

I was stunned by how people brought their real honesty and pain to the table with people that they'd never met before. I think we all left the conversation sort of ‘whoa, that was kind of amazing,’ and we should share it with the world.

Elizabeth and Megan in particular wanted to talk more about the experience, maybe share some things they wish they'd said that they hadn't. We did like a Russian nesting doll conversation where we're playing the episode and we're also talking about it.

The second episode got into tougher things, but I felt like both the groups now had earned a modicum of trust with each other. I was really glad and proud of both groups for talking about difficult things, but in a really interesting way that didn't devolve. It's so rare in my experience when I watch things on social media or listen to Senate hearings or whatever. There's always just that moment where it makes me super uncomfortable. I didn't have that with this. They were still talking about really difficult things, but they were modeling a different way to do it.

These are very emotional conversations for this country, and it was emotional for this group too, but I think they showed that even emotional conversations still have to be within bounds.

My goal is not to get everyone to agree and walk away kind of kumbaya. The conversations themselves are the goal. The goal is to come up with a framework by which we can talk about difficult things, maybe work on a couple of interesting things together that we agree on and figure out how to move forward on the things we disagree on.

I'm really delighted to see that Katelyn and Megan have started working with Elizabeth on frequently asked questions about childhood immunizations, making these information sheets that include the MAHA people in a conversation about vaccinations, so that they would trust something a little bit more. I didn't see that one coming.

I also didn't see coming a bunch of the MAHA people texting me after Dr. l Offit's story about being in the polio ward as a kid [as a boy, Offit had a foot procedure and was isolated in a polio ward for six weeks, an experience that has shaped his life and work]. They're like, “These are the conversations we need, it's civil discourse.”

The biggest challenge can be staying true to what we’re trying to create. It can be easy to get swayed by folks who are like, ‘Well, what are you gonna do? What's the point? What's the product on the other side?’

Americans are increasingly finding members of Congress untrustworthy, members of the media untrustworthy. I feel like the only people they do trust are people they know personally. Maybe we [as a podcast] can bring things to the people level as opposed to the institutional level and see what we can achieve that way.

I would love to have lots of these conversations happening all over the country. It's great to take people out of the shouting match arenas of Twitter and TikTok or wherever people shout these days. It seems so far away, based on how the rhetoric is in this country, but the truth is, they care about a lot of the same things, and there's a lot of common ground.