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.

Florida Southwestern State College has deployed an “AI gun detection and intelligent situational awareness solutions” across its four campuses, using their existing camera systems. We talk with one of the founders of the company that makes the system, called ZeroEyes, as well as FSW’s Chief Operating Officer and its Chief of Police.

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 Horizon 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.

Janet Mtali discovered her passion for radio when she was invited to host a children’s show on TWR Malawi when she was still in high school. Since then, she has worked her way up and is now its National Director. Mtali is one of 25 Mandela Fellowship for Young African Leaders participants who are in Southwest Florida for the 2024 Leadership Institute being hosted by Florida Gulf Coast University. We meet her today to talk about the work she does and the Mandela Fellowship experience.

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.