Interview with Helen Czerski author of Blue Machine and Storm in a Teacup

In this episode of Book Science, I'm joined by physicist, oceanographer, BBC presenter, and author Dr. Helen Czerski, a world-class communicator of science and an expert on all things ocean and bubble.

We talk about her most recent book, Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World — a sweeping, human-centered tour through the ocean’s role as a planetary engine. We discuss how her background in physics informs her writing, her playful and cinematic style, the challenges of scientific storytelling, and why books still matter.

We also explore:

• The hidden structure behind ocean storytelling
• Why physics is for everyone
• The importance of curiosity and perspective
• Her work with the Cosmic Shambles Network
• Featuring Indigenous voices in ocean science
• The power of books as immersive tools for understanding

Show Notes & Bonus Content:
Show Notes, Full episode transcript, extended reading list and more at TrippCollins.com 

Find more episodes of Book Science

Explore Helen’s work at HelenCzerski.net
Learn more about Rare Earth on BBC Radio 4

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Stay curious, get off the scroll, and get out into the world.

Transcript

Tripp: This show was recorded in Norm, Melbourne, Australia, where the traditional custodians include the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and we pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. I'm Tripp Collins, and this is Book Science. The podcast explores how the best science books are written and why they matter. 

Today on Book Science I'm joined by physicists, oceanographer, BBC presenter, author, and yes, bubble expert Dr. Helen Czerski. 

Dr. Czerski is from Northwest England and has a PhD from Cambridge in experimental explosives physics. But then she found something truly interesting, the ocean. She is now a professor at University College London. Along the way she became not just a leading scientist, but also a skilled communicator, bringing science to broad audiences through the BBC. 

She's also a central member of the Cosmic Shambles Network, an independent network of creatives who like to bring together interesting ideas from science, music, art, literature, and comedy. Helen's books include Storm in a Teacup published in 2016, Bubbles published in 2018, and Blue Machine, how the ocean shapes our world published in 2023. Blue Machine is a master class in science storytelling, and it's the most comprehensive science book about the ocean since Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us. It's a sweeping, elegant, deeply human exploration of the ocean as a planetary engine. It shows us that the ocean isn't just a passive backdrop to human activity. It's a dynamic, structured and energetic system that governs climate, shapes ecosystems, and sustains our civilization. And crucially, it's a system we often take for granted, in part because we can't see it. But Helen is working hard to bring an understanding of the ocean to everyone. 

The book is full of moments that surprise and delight me. A visit to the fish market leads to a discussion of distribution of biomass by body size. The evolution of fiendships becomes a meditation on humanity shifting relationship with nature. Even the Humble Act of paddling a canoe turns into a thread that ties together energy, motion, tradition, and scientific insight. Helen wants people to understand physics is for everyone. Through her books, you can gain confidence in your ability to explore a world, to question it, and to understand it. Blue Machine is an invitation to see the ocean not just as a mystery, but as a knowable, wondrous part of our shared world. 

I am thrilled to bring you this conversation with Dr. Helen Chersky. 

Tripp: In Storm in a Teacup, you write, “The atmosphere gets all the glory, but the oceans are the power behind the throne. Next time you look at a globe or a satellite picture of the earth, don't think of the oceans as simply blue bits between all the interesting continents. Imagine the tug of gravity on those giant slow currents and see the blue bits for what they are, the biggest engine on the planet.”

 So even back then, it seems to me that you had the seed planted for Blue Machine. Can you talk about the evolution of that idea for you? 

Helen Czerski: Yes. It's interesting how ideas grow because it's the case for several projects that I've done. When you look back, I haven't seen that one. It's a good spot, but these things are rattling around at the back of your mind, and they just haven't found a shape yet. 

When the next book comes, you find a way to make use of that shape. Storm in a Teacup is about the physics of everyday life, as the title says. I guess it came from this continual, like this thing, especially 10 years ago, maybe it's a little bit better now, but I walked around the world and said in various environments, I'm a physicist, and the response from more than 60% of everybody was exactly the same word for word, and it was, oh, I hated physics at school. And I just thought that was ridiculous because I just saw physics as a bunch of toys. And there is this perception that physics is all quantum mechanics and cosmology, and it's all kind of a bunch of stuff, so you've got to be very clever and have very strange hair for some reason to study. But I just saw physics as patterns that helped me explain the world, and once you've understood the pattern in one place, then you keep applying the same pattern. Once you understand how surface tension works, then you see it elsewhere, you see it again, and you see it again, and then you understand all of those things just through having seen one pattern. So Storm in a the Teacup was really my attempt to stand up for physics not being for other people, I guess, but also giving people agency. Everybody does know some intuitive physics, right? We all know when we drop things, approximately how long they're going to take to get to the floor. 

So it's all there. I think the physics of the natural world is really interesting. And some of the snobbishness of quantum mechanics and cosmology comes from the idea that they're far away and difficult and beyond our ken. And yet, actually, there's a relatively small number of laws involved in these things. And the equations might be very complicated, but fundamentally, you're dealing with some gravity, some fundamental forces. And it's not that it's simple, but you've got a relatively constrained playing field. Whereas when you look at the world around us, you've got all these different forces competing, jostling, until you get a much richer situation. And it just kind of gets dismissed as trivial. But actually, there's so much we don't know. So it's really stupid to go, oh, well, obviously understanding snails is for the children. 

And then you go, well, how does the snail work? I don't know. It's just ridiculous. It was an attempt to stand up for the interesting physics in the middle, which is the physics where we live. And obviously that's important. And then as part of that towards the end, I was always interested in the physics of the natural world. And I started talking about life support systems. 

I think we have three. We've got our own body, our planet, and then the infrastructure of our civilization, which is a life support system for us now. And that's why climate change is such a thorny problem. It's because two of those life support systems are clashing, right? The infrastructure of the planet are clashing. That's why it's difficult. 

Otherwise, it wouldn't be a hard problem. So seeing all of that came along with me learning more and more about the ocean. I was late to oceanography. And I sort of discovered it by the back door. And I was really indignant when I first came across the ocean that nobody had talked about this. I was that kid that had read every science magazine and book and I'd read all the things I was supposed to read. 

Nobody had mentioned the ocean. And so it was always there as a thing that I knew there was a story and I knew I didn't understand it. Certainly in 2016, I didn't understand it nearly as well as I do now. But I knew there was something to say. And so it's all just sort of, you progress along the ideas of something to say. 

Tripp: And it's the right size idea for a book. The ocean can easily occupy an entire book, maybe a series of books. One thing you've previously said in an interview was that maybe you hadn't offered to write a book before Storm in a Teacup, but you wanted to wait until you had something to say. 

Helen Czerski: Yeah. Well, there are two practical reasons for that. One of them was just that, you know, I was a postdoc. I was moving around before I came to University College London. 

My academic, and I'm being careful deliberately here, but the academic environment I was in was very dismissive of that kind of thing. It was difficult for other reasons. And so there was a practical reason for waiting to write that one. 

But also I think there is, there's this very weird thing I think when people say, oh, I'd like to write a book and you go, why? What is it you've got? Like, what is the thing you've got to say? But I mean, it's fine. But what is it? 

Right? What is the thing that's going to go in all these words? Because it's quite a lot of words. And of course, the process of writing is the same as the process of thinking. So you think writing forces you to confront yourself and to think about what you're doing. 

So of course, there is a process of writing while you're thinking. But I do think that the world is very full of people who want to be the one talking, not for any reason, just because they're insecure for all these other reasons. And they think for some reason that's going to fill the gap. 

And of course, it won't unless you have something to contribute. And so I find the world of modern social media very difficult because it seems to be full of people who want to be talking so that they're the one talking in order to fill some other gap in their lives. I don't think that's the work you work. I think that, you know, we've all got things to contribute and that's great. And we work out what those are. But when you've got sort of experience and ideas and you've got things and then there's something to say, then it's worth somebody else's time. You've got to do the work before it's worth somebody else's time. 

And actually a world where people haven't done the work before they take everybody else's time is what drives us all mad, right? It's the reason that we see a lot of what's on social media as kind of, it's this sort of shallow waste of time. And not all of it is, but, you know, it's because the only point of it is to hold your attention. It's not to do anything else for you. It's not giving you anything. 

Somebody hasn't put the work in to really make it worth your while, but you're somehow drawn into watching anyway. You know, I do think lots of people have can make contributions in different ways, but I don't think it's healthy that people want to be the person who's talking just so they're the one who is talking. And we don't really question that very much in the moment. 

We just assume that the tech bros of one and that your Instagram follower account is the only thing that defines you as a human. Yeah. That's horrible. And, you know, so, yeah, I was kind of reacting against that before it was a thing, I guess. 

Tripp: I'm going to transition a little bit into asking about structure because I think your books sometimes find themselves in having a very interesting structure. And I'm going to point out this passage in Blue Machine about the dead water phenomenon. 

It's like the center of this Russian doll. And it goes ocean anatomy, layered ocean, Mediterranean, and Ambracian Gulf, internal waves, dead water, and then we have like an anecdote about Nansen on Fram. And I just, I don't know, I love that. And I think you had a knack for structure and weaving in and out of stories while never losing the big picture. So I don't know, can you talk about your approach to that? Is that something you think about during the writing process? 

Helen Czerski: No, I just don't take it. I'm just saying interesting, right? And obviously the logic. I mean, the logic is in the series of ideas, but it doesn't matter how you express the ideas, right? So there is a structure underneath it that took a long time to kind of shimmy into place. But the structure, once it's there, should be invisible, really. 

You should only see the sort of, the beautiful things that hang off it. So I think the key to all of that, I mean, so I've never thought about that list, for example, but I know I had a series of ideas that built on one another and that's what's underneath it. And then I think what surprises people is just, I mean, this is the wonderful thing about science, right? It's the universality of it, that you have a concept that is both common to a seafarer 2,000 years ago trying to win a battle and to an Arctic explorer and to a modern ship going through a canal, you know, in a particular. So there's this universality about it. You know, it's almost taboo in some ways in our culture to jump around, it's seen as childish, but actually that's the point is it's all connected. It's the pattern. 

Right? So, so all what I'm interested in is, is telling a story of patterns to some extent it's a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, right? But the point is that if you're led through a series of ideas that's satisfying. 

There's no reason to go the boring way, right? Yeah, that's right. So I just think that those links, people really respond to that sort of, oh, I hadn't thought of it like that, right? And we are human brains like that kind of thing because it changes your perspective on the world. And what you're doing as a science writer, I mean, people think it's about facts and it's explanations. It isn't actually it's about perspective. What you're doing is laying out a perspective for somebody. You're an expert in something you've got, you know, in my case, a physicist or a solution. So you've got a particular perspective on the world. And what you're doing is sharing that perspective. 

It's not about which fish lives and exactly which part of the Atlantic Ocean on a Tuesday, although you need to get that right. And that's very, very important. It's about leaving people with a sort of mental picture that they can carry with them as a frame to hang other ideas on. And that is that perspective thing is what it's all about. 

Tripp: Part of what I'm hearing is like, is that the structure isn't important for setting boundaries. It's scaffolding for your ideas and your ideas need to make connections. And those connections can take you anywhere and they should take you anywhere, anywhere that's interesting. 

Helen Czerski: Yeah, I mean, I'm not a very good surfer, but it's kind of like surfing that you've got to know where you're going, but you can't look down. 

Tripp: Yeah, your writing is fun. I think it's curious, conversational. It's tackling like very complex topics, but also it's very invitational. I think sermon and teacup in particular is very invitation. There are many invitations to action. It's like, go on, try it yourself, figure it out and learn about why things the way they are. I was just wondering if you could talk about that, like what drew you to invite people to participate in the book? 

Helen Czerski: Well, isn't it silly that adults think that kids should play with things and they shouldn't? I mean, it's just a ridiculous idea, right? I had a friend after, so I had a couple of friends from my badminton club who read Storm in a the Teacup before it was published. And one of them came back, he texted me one morning and he was at a business conference in, I don't know, Switzerland or something. And the text message went, I'm sitting at a breakfast in a really posh hotel and I'm looking at the piece of toast that's been buttered on my table. And I really want to push it off the table, see where it falls to the side down. And the point is, I mean, in a posh restaurant, you will probably annoy the way to this. You spend too much time deliberately pushing toast off the table. But in principle, that is not a children's activity, right? 

And we have to get away from this idea that this is childish. And actually, the response to talk of Storm in a the Teacup was very interesting because you write a book like that, you get invited to give talks and speak to lots of people and it's very nice and they ask lots of questions and that's great. And it was very striking that in the, what you might call the more intellectual press, you know, sort of the Guardian reading, you know, growing up newspapers, that sort of thing, they were like, oh, well, it's very nice. 

Yes, very nice. Whereas the people who had no reason to, you know, the people who were just like the plumber or someone on the talk radio show in the middle of some tiny county in Britain, they were like, oh, that's really weird. My dog does this. Why does that happen? They didn't have this sort of cultural feeling that they should be too clever to know this. So they just went, oh, I've noticed the thing. Why is that related to that? 

And they made these brilliant connections because they weren't too snobbish to think that somehow they were too clever to know it. I have very little time for that. I think everyone should be prepared to play because all of us are still learning. 

Tripp: Yeah, it's almost like society expects you to mature out of curiosity, which is like the worst thing possible, right? Like you need to stay curious your whole life. You're never going to be too old to know. To think about something, to learn about something, or to make these connections. Another thing about your writing I wanted to bring up was it often strikes me as cinematic and sometimes you write in scenes. For example, you're explaining viscosity and buoyancy with fat globules and milk. To set this up, you tell the story of door-to-door milk delivery and there's this small bird called the blue tit and it learned to poke its beak through the little tin lid to get it at the cream, which had risen to the top. When I'm reading, I visually play out the scene in my mind. I can almost hear David Adburrow in the background narrating the scene to me. I know you're a presenter for BBC, but I wasn't sure how much does your work in visual media influence your writing, setting scenes in this way, a conscious part of your writing style? 

Helen Czerski: I think of myself as someone who describes what I see in creative ways. In a way, I have to see it a little bit. It's also true that there's no doubt that having done a lot of TV, certainly at the start influenced how I write because TV is a visual medium. If they want to explain gravity, they don't give us stuff whether you're on top of a mountain or in the bottom of a cellar. They just want something visual. 

I guess I had a sort of education in those first few years at the BBC where I saw people who went, oh, okay, right. We want to demonstrate the downward leg of the Hadley cell. Let's chuck you out of the plane over the Sonoran Desert. And you can talk about sinking air on the way down. And I thought that was the stupid thing in the world when I suppose first suggested it to me. But it worked. It worked really well. And that clip is still used by schools in Britain because it sort of makes it real. 

Right. You can have all these diagrams of arrows going up and down and all this kind of stuff. So I guess there's no question that my way into this was that kind of thing. But then the thing it's paired with is that I have always been a poker of things, if you like, that I've always had that. And that's weird. 

Why does it do that? You know, I grew up in my family from the north of England and they just write down to Earth up there. And if we didn't know, they go, oh, let's do it. Let's try it and find out. And it wasn't sort of, you know, there was no kind of expectation that anything posh was going to come out of it. It's just like, oh, oh, well, let's do it. 

You know, it's very sort of pragmatic. I've always had that thing where I can look into something and see something slightly beyond just out of complete confidence that it is there. I once did with Cosmic Shambles, which is a network of interesting science stuff that I work for. Well, it was my idea that we do an advent calendar one year where we ask people for the most boring photo they could possibly take. And we collected 25 of them or however many you need for an advent calendar. And the challenge for me was to find some interesting physics in every single one. And I could do it really easily because I've had years of practice of doing it. 

Right. So it's just that habit of looking and just a lot of adults, I think, walk around the world and go, oh, I wonder why that is. And then they throw that thought away and I just hold on to them. 

Tripp: Why continue to write books? What does the book bring that other mediums on? 

Helen Czerski: The book is the single greatest tool humanity has for conveying what is in one person's head into another person's head. I've always been a reader and completely like I drive my partner mad because he thinks I've got too many books and I'm like, you can't have too many books. It's just not a thing. 

That's not possible. And I think that the thing that books do that we have moved away from a little bit is they completely immerse you in something and they give you the chance to start something and actually get to the end of it. The long way around. And that, especially in the modern world, is an enormous privilege because everything's fast. Everyone's busy. Everything's like, gotta do it now. 

Gotta do it now. And so the thing about a book is you can you can really explore an idea and you can bring people with you and they are like such powerful objects. I think it's in the fact that in our world today, libraries, not digital as well as physical are often dismissed and defunded. 

I think it's close to criminal because this is common heritage of mankind. You know, we can pick up a book. You and I could both walk into a building somewhere near us wherever we are now and we could pick up a book that was written 300 years ago and we could transplant what was in the head of a person 300 years ago into our own head. Right. That's powerful. So that's sort of that. 

And then the other thing about writing books is especially for someone who, you know, if you do TV or you do radio, you do these things. There's always an editor. Right. 

You've always got a commissioner who's going, Oh, well, does it need to be that long? Well, what about this bit or why are we doing that? Whereas with a book, you are completely responsible and fine. You know, my publisher might have some opinions and might say, Oh, well, you know, could we, I didn't quite get that bit and maybe she's that bit. 

But, you know, should that be a bit earlier or something? Although not much with with my book. So I have a really good publisher and she kind of gets how I write. There's always an editor. 

Right. So the point is that when you write a book, you are solely responsible for this journey and it's not edited in the same way. Of course, you have an editor, but fundamentally, you have the privilege of going, I want to go this way. And it's my book. And so we are going this way and you can play the whole thing out because often with ideas like this, it's kind of in your head and you can't quite explain it to someone else. 

And with a book, you can write it all down and you can go, This is what I mean. So it's very exposing because you are personally responsible for it. But on the other hand, this is what I think. 

Right. I mean, I have thought of all the words I said on TV or the vast majority of them. I came up with a lot of the ideas, you know, I frayed, I framed them. Of course, there were writers and editors who did the structure and that kind of stuff. But in a book, these are my words and I am responsible and I'm allowed to say what I think without tweeting it to see what anyone else else thinks. And so, you know, you get to read what's in my head and that is the privilege of a book. 

My responsibility, but also with my privilege. So what is cosmic shambles? Cosmic shambles is a network that is led by Robin Ince the comedian and Trent Burton, who's the producer and comprising a bunch of the rest of us. We are comedians, musicians, scientists, people who are interested in ideas. The work that Robin and Trent do is cosmic shambles is kind of an umbrella for lots of different formats, but they all basically have the same idea behind them, which is the ideas are interesting. And we shouldn't necessarily put ideas in boxes, you know, if we can see the links between a piece of music and then some piece of science about the sex life of a fly and then go from that to 17th century literature and philosophy. 

Why shouldn't we? There are links and that's part of the joy of being human is that we can encompass all of these things, right? Within it, we can take all these things on their merits and that variety is totally the fun of being human. So cosmic shambles is basically a network for a bunch of us. So there's a sort of core and then, you know, we invite various people to join in to get as many voices as possible along the way. But the whole point of it is that is a celebration of curiosity without snobbishness, really, and just enjoying the weird and wonderful places it takes us. You know, I have I met a friend who's worked with me on the shambles network recently, the musician Steve Pretty. 

And, you know, one of the last things we did together was when diving scuba diving in a pool in London, so I could video him playing the trumpet underwater. Like, not so. So that's what cosmic shambles is. And I think this mixture of music and science and comedy is a very powerful, satisfying thing because you don't have to be in a pigeonhole. You can just enjoy all of this. You know, if you're watching one of our shows and you're not particularly interested in the sex life of the fly, wait five minutes because something else is coming along. We're all into that. 

Tripp: Yeah, I found it just through your work. But man, it's been such a rewarding rabbit hole just to go in there and see all the different kinds of topics. And there's podcasts, there's YouTube videos, there's productions, there's everything. 

So it's a really fun experience. One of them I wanted to ask you about in particular. So I think it's a recent YouTube video and you might even be at Ocean Science meeting and you have this powerful interview with Monique Verdin, a Native American from the Mississippi Delta. And I encourage listeners to watch the interview and look up the work of Monique Verdin. But can you tell me why you featured her story? 

Helen Czerski: Well, Shambles came along to New Orleans for the Ocean Sciences meeting, partly because Shambles people love New Orleans, like the production, so I think that's their favorite place. But also because it's such an opportunity, I mean, that Ocean Sciences meeting is such an opportunity to mix all the ideas about the ocean because the ocean is so big and complicated, the biologists and the chemists and the, you know, everyone's doing their own thing. And it's also complicated. And it's a kind of melting pot. So we like the idea of that. So, yeah, it would transfer the world if you're going there and we've got a few other reasons to be there. 

Let's make this documentary. And of course, it's an important thing that there is more than one way to look at the ocean. And in science, we take that for granted, you know, we zoom out, we zoom in, we look at it from different places. We look at it through ecology and through chemistry and through physics. But of course, there are also different humans and different human perspectives on it. There is no reason we can't talk about those ideas about the ocean at the same time as talking about the sort of more hardcore science ideas, because fundamentally they all join up around the back. 

They're all ideas that you can interrogate. You don't have to agree with everything. You can look at the consequences or the evidence or the, you know, whatever it is. And you can say, oh, that's interesting. That has stimulated me to think about something differently or to question something I hadn't questioned before. Or maybe I just didn't agree with it at all. 

And I don't not very comfortable with that, whatever it is. But, you know, so she's brilliant, but featuring those voices shouldn't be so alien, I think. You know, they're all, they're just other voices that we need lots of voices. And these are valid voices in the conversation. So, you know, let's let's hear from everyone. That's a general approach. 

Tripp: I think it's very important actually to get indigenous perspectives because they've lived in connection with the ocean, with the land for so long. They have an earned perspective that sometimes Western scientists we've been dismissive of over time that we really should value it. I'm going to try to wrap up with a few more rapid fire type questions. The first is book recommendations. But I heard you on Book Shambles. And so on there you talked about A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Feathers by Melissa Stewart, the Earth by Richard Forte. What am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatlin, Hawaiki Rising by Sam Low, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Are there anything, is there anything you want to add to that list? 

Helen Czerski: So those are recommendations from a few years ago. So, yes, I think Fire Weather, that is brilliant. It won the Bayley Giffords two years ago, I think, and as a sort of interrogation of what burning fossil fuels both does to humanity and does to the environment. And he describes humanity as a cult, I think a cult of a trillion fires or something. It's brilliant, brilliant writing. 

So, yes, definitely that. I've just started a really good one. I can't remember the name of it. And it's over there, but that's no use. Let's see what else we've got. 

Tripp: You can always send it to me and I'll put it in the show notes, no worries. 

Helen Czerski: Yeah, I might be able to think of it. Basically, it's usually whatever I read last week. But there are some spectacularly good books out there. And the great thing about them is they're always more. I can send you a list. 

Tripp: Yeah, no worries. So what about for you? What's next? What are you most excited about exploring? 

Helen Czerski: Well, I have this ongoing radio series on BBC Radio 4, which is Rare Earth where we talk about climate and climate and environments. And we look at different topics every week. And it's a sort of conversational thing, but we have some brilliant guests and we really get into issues in the history and philosophy of various environmental problems. You know, optimism as well as pessimism. And that is also an exploration of ideas. So that's a kind of ongoing thing. 

I am starting to get going on another book, but finding time in the middle of term is always hard. Performances over the summer are always a festival. So science festivals in the UK and even music festivals now often let scientists in. So over the summer, I've got I'll be doing a series of things, especially a latitude in the summer that is a big cosmic shambles presence at latitude. So that's coming up. So yeah, a mixture of things. It's always all about the mixture. That's the fun thing. 

Tripp: Where can people find out more and support your work? 

Helen Czerski: I am on blue sky and mastodon on and threads and Instagram sort of in order of the amount of time I spend on them and LinkedIn. So all of those places. I have a website, HelenCzerski.net and the cosmic shambles website is always a good place to keep up on what all of the cosmic shambles people are doing. And Rare Earth has its website on the BBC webpage and all of the programs we've made and all of the topics we've made. And the one we made the week we're recording this is about shipping, actually. And it's really interesting if you think shipping is boring when it comes to climate and environment really, really isn't. And there's some massive decisions about to be made that will set the course for the future of shipping pun intended. And so yeah, all of that is on the BBC website. 

Tripp: Sounds awesome. I'll definitely check it out. All right. So I've been talking with Helen Czerski about her books Storm in a Teacup and most recently Blue Machine. There's still so much more to explore. We haven't even breached the surface of Helen's bubble. So please pick up our books, check out her website. And I want to just end by saying thank you. Thanks for being a champion for the ocean. I think you're helping more and more people build a personal connection to the ocean through your work, which is so important. So thank you. And I really appreciate your time. 

Helen Czerski: Thanks for having me on. 

Tripp: Hey, Tripp here. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, there are a few ways you can help us keep the conversation going. First, be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast. It really helps us connect with more listeners. 

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The Patreon is also a great place to get in touch and we'd love to hear from you. So what books would you like to hear us cover next? Remember, you can find show notes and all things book science, as well as everything else I'm working on at TrippCollins.com. Thanks for listening. I am Tripp Collins and this has been book science. Your invitation to think deeply, stay curious, get off the scroll and get out into the world. Take care.