Supporters of an effort to get an amendment to Florida's constitution onto the 2026 ballot that would assure citizens a right to clean water are hoping to get a boost from Florida Sportsman Magazine Editor, Blair Wickstrom, in the magazine’s October issue. It will contain an editorial Call to Action seeking 900 volunteer petition gatherers to station themselves at voting sites around the state to collect signatures during early voting that begins on Oct. 21. The magazine did a similar call to action in 1991 that resulted in creating the Gill Net Ban amendment, which passed with 72% support during the 1994 election. We learn more about the amendment and what exactly it would do, and the issues it aims to address when it comes to regulatory agencies not doing enough to protect the environment.

We shine some light on a southwest Florida nonprofit that’s been working to make the lives of this area's seniors better for more than half a century. Founded in 1973, Senior Friendship Centers began in a small bungalow in Sarasota, and first began expanding when it began receiving federal funding to provide meals to older adults. Erin McLeod joined the organization as Director of Communications in 2004. It was her first job at a nonprofit and she says she immediately fell in love with the mission and has been there ever since, now as its CEO.

Tim Love spent his career in advertising, and he says there are correlations between the early days of that industry and mass media, and where we find ourselves today with our wide open and unregulated online world. He was Vice-Chairman of Omnicom Group, it’s a global advertising and marketing services company. But since retiring in 2013, he has focused his attention on our online world, and how, he says, it’s being openly used against us to sow division and uncertainty.

According to 2024 data from the American Medical Association, around 40% of physicians surveyed indicated they were likely to reduce their clinical hours in the next year. One in 5 physicians say they intend to leave the profession entirely within the next two years, with nearly 28% of doctors surveyed reporting dissatisfaction with their current healthcare jobs. Our guest left direct patient care behind in 2022 after practicing as a Gynecologic Oncology surgeon for just four years. Dr. Wilbur then embarked on a project to conduct a series of one-on-one interviews with doctors like herself who had either recently left practice, or were strongly considering doing so, to shine light on this growing trend and what factors were driving it. We talk with her about her new book that came out of those conversations, “The Doctor is No Longer In: Conversations with U.S. physicians.”

The 2010 Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court fundamentally changed U.S. campaign finance laws by saying that corporations, unions, and other organizations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, as long as the spending is independent and not directly coordinated with candidates or political parties. It allowed for the creation of Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to support or oppose candidates. We get an overview of the recent history of campaign finance rules and spending patterns, and learn what campaigns spend all of that money on.

While lots of research has been conducted on how being in space affects plant biology, no research had ever been done on exactly what the trip up into space does to a plant and its genes. That is, until last Thursday, when UF Space Biologist, Dr. Rob Ferl, loaded himself and some small tubes with plants in them that are specially designed to allow him to freeze their genes in place at specific times — which he did at certain points of the flight on the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. This process will allow him and his research team to see exactly how that transit up into space, and then back down again, causes the plants to turn certain genes on or off to adapt to that voyage. We talked with him just a few hours after he returned to Earth.

The United States has become increasingly polarized in recent years. New research published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace seeks to better understand what happens when democracies become ‘perniciously polarized’ — that’s when polarization has divided a society into two mutually antagonistic political camps, where each side sees the other as a threat to the country’s future. According to this research, polarization in the United States reached the level of pernicious in 2015 and remains so to this day.

When author and educator Carole Burns’ father Frank passed away earlier this year she found a small, simple notebook amongst his things that he’d carried with him during his time as a volunteer at the slough, where he’d led tours since 2001. She wrote an essay about finding that notebook and sent it our way, so we thought it would be a good reason to have a conversation about what the slough meant to her father, and what finding that notebook meant to her — and what the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve has meant, and means, to so many of the people who’ve visited it over the past nearly half-century.

Kratom is currently legal in the U.S. but a better scientific understanding is needed about its safety, efficacy, and potential therapeutic applications for opioid use disorder and withdrawal. The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture has awarded a $650,000 grant to University of Florida and its Institute of Food & Agricultural Science to study the kratom plant’s genome, gene expression and metabolites to try and get a better handle on how it affects the body, and help researchers begin to understand whether it could someday be used as a more formal way of addressing opioid addiction and withdrawal. We talk with one of the researchers to learn more.

When Dr. Nadine "Deanie" Singh founded Premier Mobil Health Services in 2018 as a mobile clinic operating out of an RV she bought with her own money on eBay. They serve uninsured and underinsured children, families and individuals at multiple locations across Lee County, as well as at a walk-in, bricks-and-mortar clinic in Fort Myers. Dr. Singh recently traveled to Boston to attend an executive education course for nonprofits at the Harvard Business School — which was supported by a scholarship from the Harvard Club of Naples — so we brought her into the studio to talk about her path that led to founding Premier Mobile Health Services, the work they do, and what she took away from her trip to Boston.