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New legislation passed during the 2024 session modifies the rules by which the state commission, and local ethics boards, can operate. Critics say these changes will gut the effectiveness of the state commission and local boards. Supporters say the changes will prevent the state and local ethics boards from having to spend their time investigating politically motivated accusations. We dig into the details on Senate Bill 7014, which has yet to be signed by the governor, with two people who have spent their lives focusing on politics in Florida and its ethics system.

The Philadelphia A’s were the first Major League Baseball team to spring train in Fort Myers, beginning in 1925. Over the decades were followed by teams from Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Kansas City. The Minnesota Twins arrived in 1991, and the Boston Red Sox moved their spring training operations here two years later in 1993. We dig into the City of Palm’s rich baseball history with two men who just love digging into rich baseball history. They’ll be two of the presenters at the upcoming fundraiser for the Southwest Florida Historical Society called “What it was, was baseball. An evening of Fort Myers history as told through the prism of diamonds…baseball diamonds.”

Bertha Vasquez spent most of her career in the classroom teaching science to middle schoolers in Miami-Dade County. She’s a passionate advocate for the scientific method and the many ways it’s made life better for humanity. And she’s a strong believer in skepticism when it comes to understanding the world around us, especially when extraordinary claims are made. These days Ms. Vasquez has taken on the role of Director of Education at the The Center for Inquiry, and Director of its Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science. The CFI’s roots go back to the 1970s when Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and other critical thinkers began seeing the need to mitigate growing belief in pseudoscience and paranormal claims using rational means and methods.

Katherine Stewart is an investigative reporter and author whose work focuses on issues around religious liberty, politics, policy, and education. Her work appears in the New York Times op ed, on NBC, in the New Republic, and in the New York Review of Books. In her latest book, "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" Stewart lays out how the Religious Right in the United States has portrayed itself as a social movement focusing on cultural issues, but is actually a well-organized political movement that has evolved into a Christian nationalist movement that seeks to gain political power and to impose its vision on all of society.

Next month, Florida voters will decide whether to approve Amendment 4 to the state constitution. It is a response to SB 300, which was approved by Florida lawmakers last year. On Sunday, Oct. 27 the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greater Naples is hosting a “Forum on Four” community conversation to provide clarity on Amendment 4, and details on SB 300. It will be moderated by a woman who grew up in the Right to Life Movement but now hosts a podcast called “Right to Life” in which she’s been seeking clarity for herself and her listeners about these extremely complicated issues. We talk with the forum's moderator and two of its panelists.

The Midwest Food Bank was founded on a farm in Illinois in 2003 and has grown ever since, adding branches around the country including one that covers Florida. The Midwest Food Bank Florida branch opened in Fort Myers in 2014 and has been providing food to its more than 200 partner agencies ever since. These days they’re providing tens of thousands of meals every month. They pretty much runs on volunteers — they had about 2000 last year — and they only have six paid employees so they’re able to turn every dollar donated into 34 meals. We meet their new Executive Director to get to know him and better understand what they do.

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 Aug. 29, 2024 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 was founded with three branches of government which were designed to act as checks on each others’ authority, and the role of the head of the Executive Branch — the President — was intended to be that of a head of state who would be a unifying force that stayed above the partisan fray. But the role of the president has changed greatly since George Washington left office, and has evolved to become more of a party head who makes bold promises in order to gain and maintain support for their policy agenda. Our guest says this evolution has not strengthened the United States and in many ways has led to the deeply partisan divide we’re living through right now.

Technological advances have brought much good to the world. But as ways to communicate have diversified and led to anyone being able to get their message out to the entire world, it seems undeniable that society has taken a turn toward hyper-polarization and partisanship – and the number of people – especially young people who are experiencing mental health issues has increased and the trendline is heading in the wrong direction. Our guests are part of a cross-partisan political reform group comprised a wide range of people, from elected officials and national security experts to mental health professionals and technologists who are trying to encourage change and find ways to address the negative effects of our online world.

A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal opens with the story of a man who believed his 83-year-old mother was plotting to assassinate him. His conversational partner and sounding board — in that case ChatGPT — told him he wasn’t crazy and his instincts were sharp, and that vigilance was fully justified. Not long after the man killed his mother before taking his own life. This is an example of what’s been dubbed ‘AI Psychosis’ — that’s when people are if not encouraged to cause harm to themselves or others, at least are not discouraged to do so by chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, or others. We talk with its author, who is co-founder of a nonprofit that's creating tools and demos to help people understand AI systems on a visceral level.