Gas prices have been sitting at more than four dollars a gallon in Arizona for a little while now. What could that mean for the EV market here? Plus, therapists are noticing a new trend: political anxiety.
Transcript
LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I’m Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix, I’m Mark Brodie.
LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, as Arizonans consider electric vehicles, are higher gas prices or the elimination of federal incentives more of a factor?
MARK BRODIE: And Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap got a win in his ongoing court battle with the Board of Supervisors over who gets to control elections here.
LAUREN GILGER: But first, it has been a record dry winter across the West. And it’s making an already bad situation on the Colorado River even worse. If water levels get any lower, Lake Powell and the dam that holds it back could be in dire straits. So now, the federal government is stepping in to prop up water levels, but as KJZZ’s Alex Hager reports, it could be a band-aid solution to a much bigger problem. And Alex joins us now in studio to explain. Hi there, Alex.
ALEX HAGER: Good morning, it’s good to be here.
LAUREN GILGER: Good to have you. So, what’s the situation on Lake Powell right now after this really dry winter? Kind of a worst-case scenario almost.
ALEX HAGER: Well, right now water levels there are forecast to drop to dangerously low levels as soon as this summer. And when I say dangerous, that means we would start to see some of the infrastructure in Glen Canyon Dam, which is up in Page, Arizona, start to fail. So water levels are on track right now to drop below the intakes for the hydropower turbines that sit inside the dam. That means it would become difficult or impossible to spin them and make electricity for five million people across seven states. If water drops a little bit further than that, it might not be able to pass through the dam at all. We are already looking at, you know, if it falls below that hydropower intake, it could only travel through this little-used set of backup pipes. We don’t know that it could carry enough water through. You start to have all of these problems. So we are seeing some actions to prevent that from happening now.
LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So tell us about those actions. This is the federal government sort of taking control of at least this aspect of it. What are they going to do?
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. The federal government is stepping in. It is kicking into action something of an emergency backup plan. It’s been done before, but it is definitely a backup plan. And they’re going to shuffle some water around. There is another big reservoir up in Utah and Wyoming called Flaming Gorge, and they’re going to release extra water from Flaming Gorge, send it down the Colorado River to help fill up Lake Powell. At the same time, they’re going to start tightening the tap on Lake Powell, meaning that less water comes out of it. That water will—less of it will flow into the Grand Canyon downstream to Lake Mead and downstream to us.
LAUREN GILGER: So everybody gets less?
ALEX HAGER: It’s not necessarily that everybody gets less, it’s that less is coming out. So we’re having less in our reservoirs but not necessarily less in our taps.
LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So what does this mean for Phoenix, for cities in the Valley, for farmers around the state who use a lot of this water?
ALEX HAGER: This specific measure does not necessarily mean that we are going to get less water here in Arizona. However, at the same time, separately, there is another process going on that will determine how much less water we’ll have to take. That is a little bit of a bigger conversation, but right now we are looking at a federal proposal for cutbacks to help give more of a long-term solution to these dropping reservoir levels. Those cutbacks right now are disproportionately focused at the Central Arizona Project. That’s the canal that brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas. The leaders of the Central Arizona Project said that those cuts could be devastating. We are looking at places that would have significant reductions to the amount of Colorado River water they get every year. That’s cities and towns right here in the Valley, and a lot of them are scrambling right now to make sure that they have the backup plans in place to keep water flowing. Like tapping into groundwater or leaning a little harder on the Salt and Verde Rivers, which supply water separately.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Okay, so those are the kind of bigger conversations that are going on right now. In terms of what the feds just did yesterday or announced yesterday, what’s the reaction been like on the upper basin level? Like, they have to, as you said, release a bunch of water from their reservoirs.
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. Well, the big thing to know is that this move is being made against the backdrop of really tense negotiations between the lower basin states, Arizona, Nevada, California, and the upper basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico. And they have been at odds for a long time. For decades, right now they’re in the middle of really tense negotiations. So anything that kind of puts a thumb on the scale in either direction is going to add tension. And that’s what happened here. So the upper basin said basically we don’t want you taking water from within our borders and sending it down to go prop up Lake Powell. It is likely that the federal government is allowed to do that to shuffle that water around. It’s a little murky as to exactly the details and there is you know there is the potential that someone could take legal action over that. Right now it looks like they won’t, but the upper basin said hey look we don’t like it and we want you to put all of that water back when you’re done. However, it is not necessarily clear that there will be water to put back because there is not a lot of extra water to go around throughout the region.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. What water, right? Okay. So, you talked to some experts about these moves from the feds and they are calling it a band-aid. What do they have to say about this?
ALEX HAGER: That’s right. One person I interviewed said this is like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. The big problem here is that we have an imbalance in the amount of water that is in the Colorado River and the amount of water that we are taking out of the Colorado River. This is not the problem. This is the the situation we’re seeing at Lake Powell is the symptom of a much larger disease in Colorado River water use and that is the fact that mother nature is putting less in. The river is getting hotter and drier due to climate change and humans have not done enough to rein in their demand on the river. Cities, farms, and industry across the West from Wyoming to San Diego are using more than the river is willing to provide. So this is a small short-term fix to keep that dam running to keep Lake Powell operating as normal while we look at bigger solutions for figuring out how to correct that imbalance.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. And you mentioned those ongoing negotiations and how tense they are. What does the timeline look like on that? Like, we’re getting pretty close, right?
ALEX HAGER: The clock is ticking and that ticking is getting louder, Lauren. Right now the negotiations are at a standstill. They basically have been for more than a year but if we don’t see a plan soon, basically sometime this summer before October is kind of the deadline we’re looking at here, it is likely that the federal government could step in impose its own plan on the states and have a big messy court battle because that’s unlikely to make anyone happy. It is still in the hands of those seven states that use the Colorado River to come up with a solution to put their heads together to agree on ways to share the pain of region-wide cutbacks but so far they have not shown willingness to do that.
LAUREN GILGER: Not yet. Okay. KJZZ’s Alex Hager. Thanks so much.
ALEX HAGER: Thank you.
MARK BRODIE: Gas prices in Arizona continue to sit above the national average. AAA Arizona says a gallon of regular unleaded today goes for 4.57. That’s compared to 4.02 a gallon nationally. And while prices are down a bit over the past few days, they’re still a dime higher than a month ago and more than a dollar higher than last year at this time. That’s led to a lot of conversation about whether this might lead more drivers to think about buying electric vehicles, even as federal tax credits end. With me to talk more about this is John Heckman, a professor of practice at ASU and co-founder of the Transportation Electrification Activator. That’s a consortium of utilities, cities, businesses, and NGOs. And John, how would you describe the state of the EV market right now in Arizona?
JOHN HECKMAN: I would say that maybe we’re at a plateau point. It’s something that has been growing for quite some time, and I would say the growth is continuing but it’s at a slower pace. And so electrification, it’s a part of a long transition, you know. We’re talking about something that’s maybe 10 to 20 years is what it’s going to take and maybe we’re halfway through that. But it is continuing forward, but it has definitely taken a bit of a step backwards as some of the federal policy changes have happened.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah. How much of this comes down to sort of the economics and subsidies that are available both to buyers potential buyers of EVs and the rest of the infrastructure?
JOHN HECKMAN: Yeah, I think most vehicle purchases are economic decisions, you know. Very few of us are in a situation where we can just buy something on a whim. And so people are thinking that through pretty carefully. And there was this federal tax incentive that was bringing a lot of people into the consideration of an EV that perhaps were not thinking about it before that. And so taking that away has changed the calculus. What you see from the actual statistics of percentage of new car sales that are electric, it did dip a little bit in 2025, but it’s actually starting to come back. It has been growing for the past, you know, 10 years plus as far as the percentage that are electric. It is still growing, it’s growing perhaps at a slower rate.
MARK BRODIE: Will that continue do you think absent any other federal or state intervention?
JOHN HECKMAN: I totally think so. Yeah. I think that fundamentally incentives are always, you know, interesting and they can help or hurt depending upon your perspective on it. But really we’re talking about really important products that are really important part of people’s lives, and they make very careful decisions around those. And the manufacturers need to make products which are compelling and people really want to buy at a price that they can afford. That’s what’s going to drive this. And really you are seeing that more than anything else. Lots of great models out there, lots of really interesting ones that are coming out, and the prices are actually been coming down.
MARK BRODIE: It’s interesting because so many of the headlines have been auto-makers sort of moving away from EVs and maybe doing more hybrids or maybe more standard internal combustion engines. It sounds like what you’re saying is that there are still new models coming out and prices are coming down even though there are some automakers who are not following through on maybe the plans they had for EVs.
JOHN HECKMAN: Yeah, I think the narrative changed. Up into 2024, the narrative was that we are doing everything we can to bring out an electrified transportation system as soon as possible. And now we are back more to I guess what I would call a more natural innovation curve, a natural technology curve. And so you’re still seeing new models, but maybe some of the efforts that the manufacturers were doing to try to keep up with that narrative, people are stepping back and saying well let’s make sure that this is right for us. Let’s make sure that electric vehicles are an option amongst other technologies. I think that’s where we are right now.
MARK BRODIE: When you say the transition might take 10 or 20 years, what do you think it looks like at the end of that?
JOHN HECKMAN: Underneath this transition, why am I so confident that this is something that is happening. There is a fundamental efficiency that is going on here where if you compare an EV that is powered by renewable energy, so solar energy, versus an internal combustion gas car. You’re talking about 5 to 8 times greater efficiency as far as energy that is getting to the wheels of that car. And efficiency like that, you know if you go to engineering school you’ll learn about efficiency, but it translates into money. And so this is a fundamentally lower cost mode of transportation. Also one that has a lot of upsides, a lot of fun to drive, a really great integration with technology, and so at the end of the day I think that fossil fuel internal combustion will be a very small fraction of the market, you know, perhaps 10 years from now. But they’re incredibly good at what they do, and there’s there’s lots of situations, a lot of again the word use case, that are really performed incredibly well by an internal combustion vehicle and it’ll be quite some time before the electric vehicles can do those. And so I think they will be a part of our economy for a long time.
MARK BRODIE: So, in terms of the transition, you talked about having enough models and having them at price points, I’m wondering about the actual infrastructure, right? Like if you are somebody who needs to charge your vehicle you know at work or you know along the highway because you’re driving from Phoenix to San Diego or LA or something, where are we on that?
JOHN HECKMAN: Yeah, it’s a really important part of it and it’s something that is new compared to a gas-powered transportation system. You know we we had to build out the system of gasoline stations a hundred years ago and now we’re having to build out that system for charging. It is being built out quite quickly but it’s still not quickly enough in certain areas. But like in 2025 we had three times as much publicly available chargers installed as 2024. So the pace is increasing substantially.
MARK BRODIE: Do you see a bump in interest in EVs at a time like this when gas is approaching or at $5 a gallon?
JOHN HECKMAN: I think yes. We said vehicles are economic components of our lives and so when the price of fuel goes up we think about well geez how can we deal with this. Electricity is not for free but electricity is something that you have some ability to influence. The price of electricity is really around time and when you’re using that. And that’s something that many people have the ability to influence when they charge and that’s a way for you to have a substantially lower cost to fuel an EV compared to an internal combustion car.
MARK BRODIE: Does that calculus change at all though with energy prices continuing to rise as well and concerns about like do we have enough energy for all this stuff we’re doing in this city?
JOHN HECKMAN: Yeah, and if you think about the electrical grid itself, you know transportation electrification is one component of this overall electrification trend. And we also live in a state that is incredibly fast growing, we have a population growth, we got a lot of new industries coming in. And so there is a lot of demand on our electrical grid. And I think our utilities are very focused on this space. Again the utilities are focused on time, total load but also time of load or time of demand. And so that’s one of the reasons that they think of EVs as a beneficial load is because it’s something that can shift its time.
MARK BRODIE: Is that to say that it really only becomes a problem if people are trying to charge their electric vehicles at like 4:00 in the afternoon in July?
JOHN HECKMAN: Exactly right. Exactly right. And in fact you already are seeing some changes into the price plans for that.
MARK BRODIE: You mentioned that the valley and Arizona have kind of hit this plateau where there’s growth but it’s slower growth than what it was before. How does that compare to other places? Like either you know sort of other cities and states sort of in our neighborhood or the rest of the country?
JOHN HECKMAN: Arizona is first of all, it’s in the top 10 of states in the US as far as the percentage of new cars sold that are electric. And that is for a state Arizona that is not what’s called a ZEV state, a zero emission vehicle state. That’s the California law. And so most if not all the other states that are in that top 10 have some very specific regulatory driver that’s pushing in that direction. So that’s showing that the demand is here. People are asking for that. And so you’re seeing maybe about 10% of new vehicle sales here in Arizona are electric and that’s a little bit ahead of the national average.
MARK BRODIE: All right. That is John Heckman, a professor of practice at ASU and co-founder of the Transportation Electrification Activator. John, thanks so much.
JOHN HECKMAN: Thanks for having me.
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is the show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.
MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up from the desert landscape to its rich multicultural history, Arizona has been a fertile ground for those in need of artistic inspiration.
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ: The way that these cultures all interact with the with the US majority white culture, just produced a lot of really interesting generative tensions and you know places to sort of think about the way that history continues to sort of cycle in and out of our present moment.
LAUREN GILGER: Well hear what inspires one Tucson-based poet and educator.
MARK BRODIE: But first, embattled Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap got a legal win last week. A judge said the Board of Supervisors should not have taken away computer specialists from the Recorder’s Office, an important detail in the ongoing fight between Heap and the Board over who gets to control what parts of county elections. The decision comes after our next guest this morning got a hold of some emails that raised serious questions about Heap’s involvement with federal officials as they investigate the 2020 and 2022 elections and seek Arizona voter information. Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat and she is in studio now to tell us more. Good morning, Sasha.
SASHA HUPKA: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
MARK BRODIE: Thanks for coming in. Okay, so let’s begin with this news of the judge’s decision. This is a win for Heap?
SASHA HUPKA: This is. On the technical side at least it definitely is a win for Heap. I think you saw that there were certain areas that the judge sort of sidestepped or carved out in favor of the board, in particular some of their budgetary authority. But definitely on the technical side, this is a win.
MARK BRODIE: Tell us a little bit about the details. What did the judge find here?
SASHA HUPKA: So the biggest thing that I think maybe people will most immediately sort of understand because a lot of this is about the minutia of election administration, right? But I would say the biggest thing for Heap is that he gets to take back some of his IT staff that under the version of the agreement that former recorder Stephen Richer signed with the board in 2024 he didn’t have. They took that and they put it under the board. That now has to go back with him. I think that the agreement also kind of on the more statutory level, it clarifies where everybody’s supposed to go. So everybody’s now going to their statutory corners, right? This ruling says if this law says the board or other officer in charge of elections, that means the legislature intended for this to be with the board unless they voluntarily agree to give it up. And vice versa, if it says the recorder or other officer in charge of elections, that means they intended it to be with the recorder.
MARK BRODIE: But what I actually think is the most interesting part about this whole ruling is not necessarily what it decides, it’s partly how it discusses the dispute to this point. It was scathing for the board.
SASHA HUPKA: There are parts of it where the judge talks about how he did not see at least within his courtroom that the board was willing to cooperate and how he felt that the recorder’s side was much more willing to cooperate. And that’s really interesting because from what we’ve seen publicly outside the courtroom the board kind of made this whole song and dance of forcing Heap in front of them to testify and their stated reasoning for that was that he wasn’t answering their questions. And so I think there’s a little bit of a disconnect between what you see in the judge’s ruling in this dispute versus maybe what we’ve seen on the outside.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah. And I want to talk more about that in a moment. But remind us for a moment, Sasha, how this all began because this started before Heap came into office.
SASHA HUPKA: It did. So sort of the crux of this, right, is Richer and the board in October, November timeframe 2024, sort of right before the general election in 2024, they signed a new iteration of this agreement. Now this agreement has been around for a while, I believe the initial version was signed by Adrian Fontes back when he was the Maricopa County recorder, obviously he’s now Secretary of State. And so it’s sort of existed in some form or fashion and sort of been remodeled incrementally over the years. But they signed this agreement and when Heap came into office, he pretty immediately said I feel that my power has been wrongly taken from me. My power over elections. And I think it’s important to note on Heap too, at the same time as they were signing this agreement, right, Heap was campaigning for office, he had beaten Richer in the primary. And Heap was largely supported by allies of President Donald Trump who have cast doubt repeatedly on election results. So you could maybe call him an election skeptic or election denier adjacent. And so that’s sort of the crux of all of this is that fundamental disagreement but again I think it’s about more than just yeah the agreement itself it’s also about what it represents symbolically in this like time period that our country is in in democracy.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, it really does, it really does mean a lot right now. I want to turn to another big story that you had out recently about Heap and his potential cooperation at least communication with the Department of Justice which is investigating now Arizona’s past elections, also to do with these questions of election denialism. What did you find?
SASHA HUPKA: The emails were really revelatory. What we found was that Heap appeared to be or at least the email suggested that he was coordinating with the federal government. There were three main things in the email specifically, one was that there was a point within this correspondence and this documentation where he expressed support for the investigations into his own county’s elections, the efforts by the Trump administration to look into the 2020 election in Maricopa County, you saw the FBI subpoena documents from the Arizona Senate, you saw HSI which is an arm of DHS asking the Attorney General’s office for certain documents related to the 2020 election. And so he expressed support for that in this correspondence. The other thing is that he met with the district attorney for the state of Arizona, the top federal prosecutor in the state, and we don’t know what they talked about but the timing is really interesting because this came as the DOJ was threatening to sue the state to obtain its voter rolls and they ultimately later did. But right after that meeting, like within weeks after it, you see the DOJ suddenly send a litigation hold not only to the state but also to the county saying that they’re concerned that the county is going to delete records from 2020 and 2022, which was a concern that Heap had raised with the county just prior to that meeting that he had with that top federal prosecutor. And so you start to kind of get a picture right based on timing that this very heavily suggests he was coordinating.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah. Last 30 seconds then, bring this home for us Sasha. I mean like you said this raises a lot of questions about voter trust heading into an election that’s rapidly approaching.
SASHA HUPKA: I think voters have a right to know what their elected politicians are doing. And I think these emails shed a lot of light on that. I also think that you know with this ongoing fight and with a lot of the actions right you see maybe Heap taking with the feds and the feds taking in Maricopa County and in Arizona, you’re seeing federal interference potentially that really casts a lot of doubt around these elections and we’ve seen what the consequences of that were in 2020.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah. Okay. Sasha Hupka with Votebeat. Thank you so much.
SASHA HUPKA: Thank you.
LAUREN GILGER: In more than 15 years of counseling, Joshua Johnson has heard and counseled clients through a lot of complex emotions. But now more than ever, he says nearly all of his clients are expressing some version of political anxiety. It’s a subset encompassing all kinds of external uncertainties causing strife and in many cases, depression, from gas prices and economic uncertainty to the immediate danger of deportation. Johnson told me a lot of it stems from the fact that our politics are now one-and-one with our identities.
JOSHUA JOHNSON: It’s actually becoming quite common, especially since the last election. You know, we saw a lot of it prior to, so this is when households were splitting versus like who you’re voting for. Such as if you’re voting for Kamala or you’re voting for Trump, you know. When that happened, that divide happened, I started seeing clients coming in with different fears about well what do I do with my family member now that they’re voting for Trump and I don’t want to support them, right? Or on the other side of it, they’re voting for Kamala, like, and I don’t want to I don’t support them, you know. So that became the first divide. So I kind of call this as like a phase one, right? And then phase two started happening where I noticed where after Trump took office, people were worried about, oh my god, they’re going to activate all these rules, Project 2025, like all these things are going to happen like overnight. So people started kind of starting freaking out. Some people were celebrating because again, that’s who they voted for and that’s what they wanted was change. And then on the other side, you start seeing people feeling like, okay, well my goals were already struggling, now I don’t see them happening at all. So people are starting to regress almost because they’re becoming more afraid to be outside, especially now that we’re seeing ICE more present in, you know, public areas such as schools, airports, grocery stores, you know, stuff like that.
LAUREN GILGER: What’s phase three?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Phase three is where we’re currently in, which is, you know, isolation, fear of the unknown. As well as when you see that your friends have changed, you know. They’re like, well, what do I do with this? Because I I love them, I’ve been I’ve had this friend for like 20, 30 plus years for some people, or 10 plus years, and now I’m noticing that this person doesn’t support me as a person. Rather it’s because I’m a part of the LGBTQ as I jokingly say, LMNOP community because it’s changed so much over the years, rather if it’s from the color of my skin, rather if it’s even my educational background, you know. Those things I’m noticing as well that has happened. Do you feel safe? Do you feel that the person that you’re just even standing next to supports the same morals and causes than you do? And that’s becoming, you know, a problem too for most clients I’m seeing.
LAUREN GILGER: So it’s hitting relationships and it’s almost this like existential question of like politics being linked to identity it sounds like.
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Yep. Yep. Yep yep. That’s something too that I’m noticing where a lot of people are feeling as if like you know who I am has to be labeled by I’m black first I’m a Christian first maybe I’m then gay then I’m a you know a Republican voter. You know or it gets flipped around where I’m a Republican voter first, then I’m a black man, then I’m a Christian, then I identify as, you know, whatever my sexual orientation is.
LAUREN GILGER: So a lot of what people are telling you is is in reaction to this flood of change, right? Like traditional kind of norms being broken and the sort of political upheaval that we’ve seen and the divisiveness.
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Right. Yes absolutely absolutely. Well and I think a lot of it has to go with you know hey we used to have a rule book pretty much America had and you know things had to go in this certain order and now you know things are getting bypassed you know. So when that has occurred it is hard to just feel safe in your own backyard.
LAUREN GILGER: So in some ways my reaction to hearing all of this is like yes that makes sense. And in some ways I was thinking like you know life has always been hard. Like it’s not like life was easy for our great grandparents or the grandparents before them right. Like is it new in that sense or is it just the way that we receive this information has changed a lot as well?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: I think it’s a mixture of both. I think that now things are just so uncensored. And there’s a scary uncensoredness. Like you know I remember the days when politics were boring. Like you heard like one or two things on the news once in a blue moon. But like every day just feels like we’re in a ongoing episode of scandal.
LAUREN GILGER: It feels like there’s upheaval to people. I mean do you think a lot of this has to do with not just the political change like the pace of political change that we’ve seen which has been rapid, but the rapid pace at which we receive it? Like the the kind of onslaught of notifications and dings and updates and alerts and headlines and they may or may not be true, right?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Yep. And some things you know especially with certain devices so like I remember with Apple when I first upgraded my phone and the new Apple news app you know it was like well you know it automatically started giving me random alerts on certain things and I said no I didn’t ask for this.
LAUREN GILGER: I cannot have this.
JOSHUA JOHNSON: So I have I have changed those notifications which goes into like what people can have control of. You know and I think that’s something people have to start kind of like diving deeper into themselves is what do I have control of right now in this moment. Rather if it’s about like what I see on the internet, rather how I receive those messages, and the other piece about it is is that I think it’s important to also talk about is that we’re in a loneliness epidemic. And with that is people are not really connecting with people anymore because we’ve been taught now that people are scary.
LAUREN GILGER: I mean like pandemic taught?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Yep. Yep pandemic taught. Yep I love the way you worded that. Because again the reality of it is is that we became attached to these screens when the pandemic happened.
LAUREN GILGER: So it sounds like you hear a lot of fear from people. I mean I wonder how how different is this from regular depression? Like if you’re looking at political depression is it just the source that’s changed?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Yeah a mixture of it is definitely the source that’s changed. A lot of the components are still there such as you know being very tired, drained, right, emotional, and then of course everyone’s depression is different.
LAUREN GILGER: So what can we do Joshua? Like I mean what do you advise clients to do who come to you with this kind of political anxiety political depression that feels very motivated by and driven by these sort of things that are out of their control? Like we can’t control you know what the president’s doing, we can’t control what’s happening in the news. How do you cope with that?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: So you have to start really paying attention to what you have control of. What can I restructure in my life rather if it’s my finances, rather if it is being mindful about not doom scrolling.
LAUREN GILGER: Should we kind of log off? Should we not read every headline? Should we kind of disconnect from some of this constant political news in a way?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: I think it’s important to understand your capacity on things right. You know one of the biggest things that I know I recognize about myself is that I know I can go to the party but I can’t do the after party. Because if I do the after party I know how my body’s gonna feel I know how my mind is gonna feel and I’m always about giving and serving the best version of myself to everyone including myself first right. And so with that is understanding that you know what I’m hitting my limit and I need to just step back. And I think a lot of people have to practice that and be more in tune with themselves regarding that. Understanding your capacity helps save you from a lot of unnecessary drama that you don’t want to occur in your life.
LAUREN GILGER: Is that the line between sort of disconnecting in a healthy way and disconnecting entirely just being ignorant of what’s happening?
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Well I think that it’s about again understanding what is meaningful for you. At the end of the day even in relationships I even teach when I work with couples you have to put yourself first even in your relationship. There’s respectful ways of doing that. Maybe right now watching Fox News isn’t what’s best for me. The other day there was a lot of no king protests right. I know me, and I’m not one to go out there and protest right. But I am one to still provide healthy information. That’s that’s what I have control of right. Me doing this segment is providing healthy information. Everyone’s view of healthy looks different I think everyone just like some one’s right now is doing yoga somewhere or someone is doing weight lifting right. Both of them are exercises. But the person is doing what they feel like is best for them in that moment.
LAUREN GILGER: Maybe we need to turn inward a little bit here.
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Mm-hmm.
LAUREN GILGER: All right. We’ll leave it there. Joshua Johnson licensed social worker and therapist here in the Valley joining us to talk about political anxiety, political depression. Joshua thank you very much, I feel better.
JOSHUA JOHNSON: Absolutely, absolutely thank you, thank you I hope this helped.
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is the show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.
MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. There are ads throughout Chase Field, as there are through most MLB stadiums and arenas that house other sports. But one ad from one particular company is causing headaches for the Diamondbacks and a few other sports franchises. And it happened to have a prominent spot at Chase Field during a memorable time in recent D-backs history. Sam Blum is a staff writer at The Athletic covering Major League Baseball. He’s investigated this and joins me now to talk more about it. Sam, good morning.
SAM BLUM: Hi, are you there? Can you hear me?
MARK BRODIE: Hi, Sam. We can hear you now. So, this is all about a fro-yo company, is that right?
SAM BLUM: Yes, it’s a fro-yo company. Well, to some extent, it’s about a fro-yo company. Really, the story is about this one man, Steven Delaportas, who’s kind of had a long history of being sued—civil litigation, even criminal investigations against him—dating back decades. And he was the CEO, ran this—this company, and ultimately ran it very similarly to a lot of the businesses that he had run previously in his life and, you know, left kind of a trail of non-payment, lawsuits, and people’s lives who had been severely impacted.
MARK BRODIE: So, the company was called Crèmily, and it had, if folks here in the Valley remember, some pretty significant advertising around the pool at Chase Field. You write about how it had a very prominent spot when the Diamondbacks went to the World Series a couple of years ago. You know, all the players sort of jumped the fence in right center field, they hopped into the pool, and all you could see in the photos were these signs for Crèmily. And this was supposed to be a sort of French-style frozen yogurt company. Talk a little bit about this Steven Delaportas. He was brought in to run the company, and it sounds like they didn’t really make frozen yogurt at all in large numbers, did they?
SAM BLUM: No, they really didn’t. I mean, you know, they ultimately made, you know, were I think at different times attempting to create a formula, you know, secure business partners. This—this man basically schemed various farms across the country, most notably, I went to one in upstate New York called Ronnybrook Farms that had a, you know, basically a business partnership, five-year business partnership with Crèmily that they thought was going to turn them into the next Ben & Jerry’s. You know, this—this because the fro-yo was supposed to be sheep’s milk, it was supposed to be keto-friendly, it was supposed to be a little bit different. And, you know, that very similarly, payments stopped and it nearly ruined this family farm of over eight decades financially. So, yeah, I mean, Steven Delaportas, he was—it was a complicated business. I don’t think that they were ultimately making very much product, and as a result, in the ballpark at Chase Field, you know, you might have bought Crèmily, but it might have actually just been regular soft-serve ice cream. And that was the concern not just at Diamondbacks ballpark, it was at Angel Stadium as well in Southern California, the New York Mets had their Women’s Day sponsored by Crèmily, Madison Square Garden brought Crèmily in. If you look at the article, there are pictures of the entire—this iconic venue lit up with their logo. And it was just kind of an insane year and a half before this whole thing crashed and burned.
MARK BRODIE: So, Delaportas was brought in to run Crèmily by the company’s founder. And one of the things that I found so interesting about your reporting was that there seems to be this question of whether she was sort of duped like everybody else or if she was maybe complicit in what Delaportas was doing. Were you able to sort of get a sense for that based on the folks with whom you spoke?
SAM BLUM: I think it’s possible it’s a little bit of both. I think to some extent, you know, Kylie Schuyler—who’s the woman you’re referring to—she kind of has a history of more legitimate, you know, business practices. Her husband, Doug Hodge, was—spent time in prison for that Varsity Blues college admissions scandal. So there’s some, you know, connection to, I think, what you could argue is less than ideal activity. But ultimately, I think she was probably at least entering into this business with a legitimate concept. I mean, the whole idea was that every proceed, every dollar earned was going to be donated to women and girls globally, which was very vague, didn’t really mean much, but that was the initiative and I think that that aligns with her overall kind of way of operating and the things she’s done in her history. That being said, you know, once lawsuits came, once all these things started falling apart, she really didn’t separate herself, at least not in court documents, and, you know, not through our reporting, which we gave her numerous opportunities and asked this question to her and, you know, her representation kind of straight up. At no point did she distance herself from Steven and what Crèmily was doing.
MARK BRODIE: And we should point out, in addition to Kylie Schuyler, Delaportas, like basically nobody sort of associated with the company other than some of the employees was willing to talk to you about this.
SAM BLUM: Yeah, most—I mean, you know, really it was those two and then the rest of the company. I mean, there were other people like the lawyers who wouldn’t talk, and I think some of the other people who had, you know, kind of been high up who maybe still are in business with Steven wouldn’t talk to us. But, you know, for the most part, I would say a lot of people, you know, a lot of these employees were very eager to share their story. It was, for some people, it was like, you know, you talk to them and it’s like, man, that was just a weird time in my life. And for others, it’s really been very impactful for them. They had a hard time getting work, they’ve, you know, they’ve been asked in job interviews, like, isn’t that this, you know, isn’t that the scam basically? Like this is, you know, there’s a reputation among people in the food industry now I think and it—this could be impactful for certain people and, you know, it stinks for that reason. I mean, the Diamondbacks had a guy named Brendan Cunningham—this is mentioned in the story—who was, you know, basically led their marketing department. Crèmily hired Brendan to be a legitimate face of kind of what they were selling. And I don’t think Brendan ultimately, I believe he may have filed legal action against Steven at some point after the company collapsed, but, you know, he was basically supposed to be this—this kind of legitimate face that could go into Major League stadiums and sell the product. And I think that was kind of how they did this. They hired legitimate people who had good-paying jobs elsewhere, they offered them a lot of money, offered them stock options, things like that, and then it just never really paid out.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, interesting. All right, we’ll have to leave it there. That is a fascinating story written by Sam Blum, staff writer at The Athletic covering Major League Baseball. Sam, thanks so much.
SAM BLUM: Thank you very much, take care.
MARK BRODIE: The Southwest and its landscape have inspired a lot of artists and writers over the years. My next guest falls into that category. Raquel Gutierrez is a poet, essayist, writer, and educator based in Tucson. Their newest book is called Southwest Reconstruction. It’s their first book of poetry and draws inspiration from both the natural and human-made environment. I spoke with Gutierrez earlier and asked what they found interesting about writing a book of poetry.
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ: Well I’ve been writing poetry for several decades now and so I grew up in Los Angeles and poetry felt like it was all around me. It was something popular in cafe culture, sort of a pre-Starbucks era, and so you know in a sense it’s just a really fun snowball that happens when you’re just in a group of like-minded folks, people with similar activist and political commitments and other sort of creative led curiosities and inquiries. So yeah that was the thing that was the bug that bit me.
MARK BRODIE: Well so so many of the poems in this collection seem to be about place, and maybe specifically this place the southwestern US. I’m wondering if there’s something about the subject matter that maybe the medium do they go together in some way maybe better than it would in an essay or in some other form of writing. Writing about a place, and maybe this place, does poetry appeal to you for that subject matter?
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ: Yeah, you know, we’re in a really beautiful place here in Arizona and so, for me, I am really grateful to the locale here just because it lends itself to description. A lot of poetry, most lines of poetry are isolating an image, and any poet worth their salt is trying to create a thumbnail beautiful, thumbnail sized landscape on that line. And so for me, just traveling through the Southwest and traveling through Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and of course California and Texas, you know, I have the freeway imprinted on me as sort of a creative my creative vehicle literally rides on the freeway. And Los Angeles, you know, you’re I’m an asthmatic child of of the freeways, and so I’m very familiar with the way that these infrastructural beasts allow us to go from one place to another. And Arizona being a really powerful intersection of so many cultures coming together, Tohono O’odham, Pascua Yaqui, the Dine, Navajo Nation, the White Mountain Apache, and you know in the sense so many different indigenous groups. And then the long you know it’s an old old settlement, one of the oldest settlements of the Southwest of the West region. So in the sense that there’s you know this used to be the part of Mexico and so the way that these cultures all interact with the with the US majority white culture, just produced a lot of really interesting generative tensions and you know places to sort of think about the way that history continues to sort of cycle in and out of our present moment. And the way that these histories and these landscapes and sort of modes of progress around western expansionism through the freeway, through the railroad tracks, it just you know it just kicked up like a dust like a dust devil and created all of these wonderful sort of images to explore on the page.
MARK BRODIE: It’s so interesting to hear you talk about freeways like that because for a lot of writers they talk about for example like needing to get off the freeway to get sort of into a community to really find the story. You’re saying that you’re kind of inspired to write by the freeways themselves.
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ: Well I think if I look back to my life and I mine aspects of my own personal history as a child of Southern California I felt like I didn’t really have a choice I had to use the freeway. I had to be on the freeway it really contoured my existence as a younger person. But you’re absolutely right I think as writers and artists we need to sort of stay in place and have time and space and support to to make our work.
MARK BRODIE: I’m wondering like how it was for you when you first got here sort of finding your place in this place and maybe how that has informed your writing since.
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ: For sure. I used to call myself a Los Angeles nationalist and just felt like there was no place better than Los Angeles. Los Angeles has it all. And that may be true and Los Angeles is a great place but sometimes you have to leave something and see it through your rear-view mirror I don’t know. But being in Arizona I thought I was going to panic if I couldn’t live less than two hours from the ocean but you know the sky here is so expansive and it’s just as exciting in the sense that it also gives me a huge oceanic feeling that I get when I stare out into the Pacific. But yeah the desert is amazing the desert really is revelatory and refractive in these really powerful ways that I I was just seized by the by the beautiful power of the desert.
MARK BRODIE: Do you find that writing poetry about the desert helps you see the desert differently?
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean sometimes it’s that moment between like the natural world coming into contact with the concrete of modernity. Sometimes it’s so jarring. I remember on my path, my walking path that I take my dog out on every morning, for a while on the other side of this chain link fence there was this decomposing javelina and on the other side is Aviation Parkway. And just the jarring sort of juxtaposition, you know, it was it was something that just was a think was like a daily meditation on life and death every morning that year. But these moments that sort of stick to me, you know, or jump out at me like a cholla, it just it comes when it comes.
MARK BRODIE: Sure. All right, we’ll have to leave it there. That is Raquel Gutierrez, a writer, essayist, and poet based in Tucson, author of the collection of poems called Southwest Reconstruction. Raquel, really nice to talk to you. Thank you.
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ: Likewise, Mark, thank you.
LAUREN GILGER: All right, that’ll do it for today’s edition of the show. We will of course be back with you again tomorrow morning with much more. Don’t forget, sign up for the show’s weekly newsletter; it is called Radio Heads and is at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also follow us on Instagram; we are @kjzztheshow. For Mark Brodie, I’m Lauren Gilger. Thanks for joining us.
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