The Show for April 29, 2026: Future of First Fridays, schizophrenia study and more

Downtown Phoenix’s First Fridays are changing after violence and gunshots rocked the art walk. We’ll have a roundtable on the future of Roosevelt Row’s signature event. Plus, how researchers found new genes linked to schizophrenia by looking somewhere new.

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.

Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm Lauren Gilger. Coming up, a round table discussion on the future of First Fridays after violence has rocked the signature downtown Phoenix event. And a new AI platform from ASU has some professors upset. But first, state lawmakers are at odds with our Democratic governor over how to spend the shrinking state budget. Cuts need to be made, but the budget proposed by GOP members of the Legislature this week added up to $800 million less than what Governor Katie Hobbs had proposed. The Republican plan includes a across-the-board 5% cut to just about every state agency, including adding new eligibility requirements to food stamp benefits and Arizona’s Medicaid program. Republicans say it will save the state $180 million and weed out fraud in government programs, but the governor has already vetoed new restrictions like this. And it comes at a time when a record number of people have been dropped from SNAP, Arizona’s food stamp program, to the tune of more than 450,000 Arizonans at last count. More than half of those are children. KJZZ’s CAMRYN Sanchez is covering it all for our politics desk and she joins me now in studio to tell us more. Good morning, CAMRYN.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, so CAMRYN, let's start with these massive losses to the state's SNAP program. 450,000 people sounds like a lot of people.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, especially since we had about 900,000 people before that, so we’re talking about roughly half the folks getting slashed and that’s just now. The number is still climbing.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So there, this is I understand bigger losses to a food stamp program in our state than any other state has seen even though we’re all kind of doing this because of conformity to this this HR1, the big beautiful bill so-called.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Right. And that’s what’s so especially weird about it. So HR1, which passed last summer in the federal Congress, said that we had to change the SNAP process and they want us to bring our error rate down. Arizona, which is something that the governor says DES, which is our state Department of Economic Security, which administers the SNAP program, is already in the process of doing. But whatever DES is doing is is different from what all of the other states are doing because we’ve cut way more people way more quickly.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. Okay. So these are—what do we know about what’s leading to this? What have they told you?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Well, DES has said they’re just doing what they had to do to conform with federal law and that they’re not doing anything beyond that. And they’re also saying, well, we’re understaffed, we’re overloading, you know, we’re we’re dealing with this backlog. They acknowledge that there is a large backlog of folks who are saying that they have issues with the program. Um, but from folks we’ve spoken to who have been trying to get their benefits, especially people who have been on SNAP for a really long time, they’ve said, well, no, you know, I’m still eligible and I’m bringing all of my correct documents and things to DES, but I’m no longer able to complete the application process because they won’t answer the phone or their system lags or it doesn’t work and then I get rejected and now I’m hungry and my family is struggling. And it’s not because of waste, fraud and abuse, which is ostensibly what this was also supposed to get rid of.

LAUREN GILGER: And we should say you talked to those folks in line at the food bank, right?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, I did. I’ve spoken to those folks in a couple of places, but the food bank was one of them and everybody actually said the exact same thing, which is rare when I’m talking to a group of people. Um, but yeah, one after the other, everyone who said that they had tried applying for SNAP said that the process had gotten harder and or that their benefits had been taken away.

LAUREN GILGER: Mm. Okay, now Republican lawmakers are proposing new eligibility requirements more than already exist or came down from the federal level. What kind of impact could this have?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, they’re slipping that into this proposed GOP state budget and these are bills that came to Governor Hobbs in separate bill form earlier in the year which she already killed. Um, there’s two things there. Partly she’s saying, well, it’s not necessary because DES is already doing what they’re supposed to be doing, so we don’t need to add on to that. And second of all, they want to go like beyond what the federal law has required. So, for example, the federal uh changes say we have to have our error rate down to 6%. Um, the federal bill puts penalties on that, but the state legislation that’s proposed by Republicans would bring it down to 3%. So that’s even stricter. And they’re saying we need to do things even harder. Have people check in even more frequently, apply even more often, meet even, you know, the strongest possible work requirements, everything. And Hobbs is saying no.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. As you said, she has already vetoed legislation like this. Do we anticipate that to happening again or is this sort of a jumping off point to negotiate over what a budget might look like if they come to the middle?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I mean, the fact that they’ve snuck in a lot of things in this budget that she’s already vetoed and not just in this portion makes me think that it’s not going to be popular with her, although we’ve gotten mixed messaging from Republicans. They say, well, this is a budget that has bipartisan gains, it’s not just a starting off point, we really do think that this can pass, we’re not just, you know, going through the motions of putting it up. But I mean, I there’s not been any enthusiasm from Democrats. It passed yesterday out of committee on party lines. Every single Democrat voted no and there were some pretty nasty conversation too where they basically said, well, we don’t need you and we don’t care what you think.

LAUREN GILGER: The GOP plan here though and and the governor’s plan to some extent are trying to address a real problem, right? That we do need to cut spending. The state is facing a budget deficit.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, this is not the year where people are going to get to pay for their pet projects. The budget, you know, either way we’re going to have tax cuts. Democrats want a certain portion of tax cuts and Republicans want full what’s called tax conformity, which means that we have to find a way to pay for that stuff and there’s not going to be a lot of new revenue. So they’re looking at ways to slash and um one of those ways is agency cuts. So that means, for example, DES, the program that administers SNAP, would be taking a cut to their budget.

LAUREN GILGER: As they’re saying they’re facing this big backlog.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yes.

LAUREN GILGER: Uh, Republican lawmakers, what do they want to do with this 180 million in spending that they say they’ll they’ll save here?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I mean, largely it is to pay for those tax cuts. So the tax cuts would cost a lot and that 180 million number is just for the first um fiscal year I believe it’s fiscal year 2028. So it’s a variety of things. They’re also looking to cut other programs. They want to cut funding to the Commerce Authority, they want to cut tax incentives for solar um and that hodgepodge of all of those cuts put together will pay for tax cuts.

LAUREN GILGER: We mentioned that they want 5% across the board cuts to just about every state agency, but not all. Which ones would be spared?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It’s the ones they consider to be essential for public safety. So that’s the Department of Public Safety, obviously, the Department of uh Child Safety and the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So the one thing that the Legislature has to do every year, the only thing they have to do right is pass a budget. What do you think this proposed budget from the Republicans and how it compares with the governor’s proposed budget earlier on—what do you think that says about how far this will take to get a budget passed?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I mean, this whole thing of like going through the process of they have their budget and she has her budget, we did this last year. Last year was actually awful because they made us go through like two or three iterations of the budget before they finally passed something and then there was threats of another budget. Anyway, that was exhausting. I think this year, you know, everyone knows this is their fourth year dealing with Hobbs, this is the fourth year in a divided government, they know what they have to do. They’re going to get there eventually. And the fact that they don’t have extra money to play with this year actually in some ways makes it easier because people are not going to die on the hill of their special project. So I think we’re actually, you know, maybe even a little bit closer than we were last year, but still not at the finish line.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. Well, we will watch and see what happens. KJZZ’s CAMRYN Sanchez with our politics desk. CAMRYN, thanks as always.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: First Friday art walks have been a staple of downtown Phoenix for decades since the 1980s when a small group of artists started the event as an answer to Old Town Scottsdale’s blockbuster art walks.

First Fridays became a huge success story for downtown Phoenix — a downtown Phoenix that was often a ghost town after 5:00 p.m. And as First Fridays have grown, downtown Phoenix has transformed from something of an urban wasteland to the thriving core of a growing city.

But now organizers are pulling back. In recent years, the event has ballooned and lately it’s been plagued by violence—from fights to gunfire.

Starting this First Friday, the Roosevelt Row [Community Development Corporation] announced it will no longer be closing down streets where vendors have traditionally set up tables and sold their wares for the “foreseeable future.”

It’s a moment of reevaluation for First Friday, Roosevelt Row and downtown Phoenix as a whole. And this morning we’re going to talk about it with one of the founders of the Roosevelt Row CDC, Greg Esser. Greg, thanks for being here.

GREG ESSER: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: And Jessie Demaree, a musician, community organizer, a second-generation Phoenician. Glad to have you here, Jessie.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Thank you. Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, so Greg, I want to start with you and this recent decision from the CDC, from organizers to stop closing down the streets. It sounds like this has been a long time coming, but tell us what led up to this decision.

GREG ESSER: It’s again, I think as you implied, a decision that’s been a long time coming. And this is a moment of reevaluation — basically taking a beat; reevaluating; getting stakeholder, resident, vendor input; and really evaluating what the best course is moving forward.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. There was a shooting nearby a First Friday, there have been fights that have broken out. I know last year Phoenix police were out there talking about enforcing juvenile curfews. Like, what’s it started to look like?

GREG ESSER: Crowds attract all kinds of people. There are bad elements, and a few bad apples can spoil the apple cart. I think that’s part of what’s happened here, but it’s not the only thing that’s happened here.

As you mentioned, the context has changed significantly. And when we started street closures back in 2005-2006, 60% of the land in this neighborhood was vacant. There was nothing.

LAUREN GILGER: Sixty percent? Wow.

GREG ESSER: It was literally a wasteland. And now we’re — 3rd Street and Roosevelt is the most densely populated residential intersection in the state of Arizona. That’s a lot of residents that are negatively impacted by a street closure at the end of the work week. And so that’s a new constituency that also has to be considered in evaluating the way the event moves forward.

LAUREN GILGEROK. All right. We’ll get into more of this in a minute, more about the changes that are being made and why.

But I want to first kind of step back and take maybe a broad view of First Friday. I want to look at the history of this. Like Jessie, I know you remember First Fridays kind of from the very beginning when you were a teenager, right?

JESSIE DEMAREE: Well, yeah. They started in the late ’80s and ’90s, but I started hanging out in the Roosevelt, like downtown Phoenix arts district as we called it in like 2002, like as soon as I could drive I was hanging out down there.

And I was asked if I would just go on First Friday, and I didn’t really quite get it. I was just taking it all in as like a young teen, seeing fire artists and muralists and like street taggers and people busking along the streets, maybe pop into Modified [Arts].

But like what Greg was saying, yeah, we had a lot of space to play with. It was not — I didn’t see it as a wasteland. I saw it as like a big playground where we could express ourselves and just just have fun uninhibited in a way.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And at the time, Greg, like downtown Phoenix, as you mentioned, 60% of Roosevelt Row being vacant is kind of wild if you drive down it now.

But think about what downtown Phoenix was like back then in the late ’80s, early ’90s when First Fridays were really getting underway. Like it was a ghost town after 5 o’clock when everyone left work, right?

GREG ESSER: Literally downtown Phoenix was one of the top results if you Googled ghost towns in Arizona back in 2012. So, yeah. It’s changed significantly.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you Jessie about your memories of of downtown Phoenix then. Like when you went down there, did you feel like “Man oh man, this is — there’s not much going on”?

JESSIE DEMAREE: No, not really. I mean, no. I’ve always been a nightlife person, and what was really interesting for me is like the quality of people that were down there, and we were kind of excited that people were considering it a place where you wouldn’t want to go.

We used to go to maybe Scottsdale or something for the night,or Tempe even. So the fact that most people didn’t have their eyes on it yet, like artists and developers eventually had their eyes on the downtown area, but for me it didn’t feel so dead.

It was great to be able to just like meet people and not be inundated with so many loud sound systems. And our friends would drive around in a truck in the — and this was before the road closures, right? So you’d see like people, whole bands in the back of a truck like the Madcaps driving around and circling the space, you know?

And then another band, Joe Willie Smith and all of his Metropophobobia people, once that place closed, like they would just do their sound sculptures out in the dirt lot that is now the [Roosevelt Point apartments].

LAUREN GILGER: Space to play with, though, like you said.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just to drive it home. It didn’t ever really feel dead, especially on the weekends. But I was in school. I wasn’t there like on a Monday night or something. It was Fridays, you know? Thursday, Friday, Saturday were on.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. But it sounds like because downtown Phoenix wasn’t so developed, Greg, like it was this space for the underground to kind of take control, and that’s kind of the origins of First Friday. It was a little weird.

GREG ESSER: It was an empty canvas. We used to joke that you could pitch a tent in the middle of Roosevelt and be able to camp overnight. And that’s not far from the truth.

And that empty canvas, those buildings that were planned to be demolished created an opportunity, a transitory opportunity for artists to come in and invent things that wouldn’t have been affordable in almost any other context. And so these incredible performances, a quarter-acre installation, all kinds of interventions that sort of transformed the urban landscape through the hands and minds of artists really was the opportunity that was organic, thriving — and it was always evolving and changing.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So let’s talk about First Fridays and how they have changed. They really have grown just exponentially. And that happened, I think, probably in the first couple of decades of this event. It started to be less underground, started to be more mainstream, maybe a little bigger.

Greg, when you think about the rise of First Friday, do you think it sort of mirrors the rise of downtown Phoenix and sort of people moving in, development coming in? Did it come faster than you expected?

GREG ESSER: It came actually much faster in spite of a recession and in spite of COVID. There were a lot of impacts that sort of shifted the evolution, but it did change much faster, I think, than anyone originally anticipated.

LAUREN GILGER: What did that look like from your point of view, Jessie? Like the change that came, the prices going up? Gentrification is a word that comes to mind.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Yeah. And like when I was hanging out downtown at the beginning, it was also like not totally concentrated on Roosevelt. It was like Central and Madison before America West Arena was built and like BOB was built which, like, whatever they’re called now. Who knows?

But I went away to NAU and I would come back, and it was a really interesting perspective because I wasn’t there every weekend. So I’d come home every few months and I’m like “Whoa. First Friday’s like getting bigger.”

So it’s like watching your niece or nephew grow up where it’s like whoa, you know? They just keep jumping back, like jumping to get bigger and bigger exponentially. So it was kind of a place eventually where I just didn’t want to be. I was troubled with trying to get down there, and the things that I wanted to see, all the places that were near and dear to me were starting to close or be demolished or they’re selling the spot to get out of there as fast as they can.

So I found myself hanging elsewhere. I would hang downtown on like third Fridays. Jerusafunk would play there every third Friday. I even remember like an early rivalry of like “Oh, the musicians are clogging up too much of the artist space now. We need to have second Saturdays for the musicians and First Fridays for the artists.”

And so over the years it just like I saw it grow but from afar, from a distance. Like I said, I was already over it.

LAUREN GILGER: You were already over it.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Yeah. I feel like a hipster saying that, but you know.

LAUREN GILGER: It’s OK. It’s OK. Go ahead, Greg.

GREG ESSER: The event was really designed in the early days to draw people into the neighborhood to support the new small businesses that were starting, whether it was Fate, whether it was Modified Arts, whether it was Carly’s — really the first restaurant to open in the neighborhood — because they didn’t have the traffic, they didn’t have the residential population to keep their doors open. And a lot of those businesses made their money on First Fridays.

But even back then, the vision was always a 365, 24/7 urban walkable community. Dense, diverse, walkable were the kinds of things that we wanted to see evolve in the neighborhood.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right. We’re going to head to a break now. When we come back, we’ll talk about the changes coming to First Friday starting this week and the future of this signature event. Greg, Jessie, thanks so much. We’ll be right back after the break.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, research breakthroughs are leading scientists closer to understanding schizophrenia and the genes linked to the disorder.

AYMAN FANOUS: I mean, if you look at the European studies in the past, they’ve basically given us roughly 280 genetic regions where there’s probably a gene. And we’ve identified 100 more when we’ve included these African ancestry populations as well.

LAUREN GILGER: We’ll hear the results of the largest schizophrenia gene study to include people with Black or African ancestry. But first, we’re back with more of our roundtable discussion on First Fridays, which will not look the same if you head downtown.

Organizers will no longer be closing down Roosevelt Street for the event, which means there won’t be vendors lined up along the blocks selling art and all kinds of other things. It’s in response to violence that’s been escalating in recent months as the monthly event has gotten more crowded and what organizers recently described as “ugly.” I’m joined by artist and community organizer Jessie Demaree. Good morning.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: And Roosevelt Row CDC founder Greg Esser this morning. And Greg, I want to go back to you here. I outlined kind of the changes that are coming for First Fridays there.

Tell us why do you think that Roosevelt Row leaders had to make this decision? We said it was a long time coming, but it sounds like there were other factors than just the sort of escalating fights and things like that that started to break out. It sounds like it was a neighborhood reaction as well.

GREG ESSER: That’s absolutely true. And I will preface this by saying this is not the first time we’ve gone through a cycle where the police department has wanted to focus all of the activity on Roosevelt Street just by virtue of management and resources required to provide safety for a crowd of this size.

We initially started as a small sort of dispersed number of block closures, and that drew a crowd into downtown. In order to ensure safety, law enforcement then required more staffing, more resources, and they believed that the better solution was to close Roosevelt Street, which we did around 2010.

And there was a huge negative backlash from the surrounding neighborhoods, from the community. And one of the outcomes of that was the Pie Social, to sort of heal all of the wounds that came from this very divisive discussion more than a decade ago about closing Roosevelt versus leaving First Fridays more organic event that connects a lot of different things.

And we’ve always viewed Roosevelt Row as the connective tissue between other assets in the downtown community, not as something that you draw a box around. So we’re really making connections to the rest of the community.

And those things are continuing to grow. There’s new art space on Van Buren and 24th Street. There’s new activity in the Arizona Center. There are new markets there. There’s new activity in a lot of other places. Grand Avenue has been an important arts district and area where activity continues to thrive and grow.

And so we end up having more arts activity all the time rather than just once a month. And ironically, we’ve trained people to think about coming downtown one time a month. They should think about coming down all the time, and that’s really our goal.

LAUREN GILGER: So that’s an interesting kind of byproduct of of getting First Fridays to be so successful. Now people only come down for that.

GREG ESSER: Right. And we want people all the time and there’s always something to experience.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us more about the backlash you got when you first started closing down Roosevelt Row. What did neighbors not like about that? What did people not like about it?

GREG ESSER: It drew people to a single location, and it really sort of siphoned off activity from other areas in the downtown. And that was not our intent, but that was a byproduct of having to put everybody into one place.

That also drove our costs as the organizer up. We had to pay a lot more in order to provide that single location. We had to increase rates for people to participate, and that resulted in a lot of people who were the founders and early artists not being able to afford to participate anymore.

And we’re going through that same kind of cycle again. The costs that a Roosevelt closure versus an organic event requires aren’t sustainable with the business model that sort of established the initial creation of space for artists to sell work during the event.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Jessie, what’s your reaction to this change, to no longer closing down streets? What do you hope it might lead to?

JESSIE DEMAREE: I would hope it leads to discussions with the artists that have been there the whole time. I would really love to see — whether or not it’s somebody coming to the Evans-Churchill board for the voice of all of the the artists, or if there’s like sort of a town hall panel kind of discussion — to really get back to the roots of it so that they could guide everybody to a new vision of what First Friday could be or just what a a healthy arts district could look like in this sprawling city.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. It’s a very sprawling city.

JESSIE DEMAREE: It’s very sprawling, and that’s really interesting to know about the police wanting to concentrate the corralling everybody in because that actually feels like a really great way for kids to organize and and group together.

But yeah, I would like to see other places be able to blossom around Melrose and places on Central, or we just need to get back to places allowing space for artists to grow. Like when we were in the last few months of the closure, I work at My Space and it’s a gallery sound incubator right next to the old Carly’s. It’s part of John’s spot.

People would just walk by because I think the brand or the aesthetic of First Friday turned into something that even a gallery seemed unnatural. So people wouldn’t really want to walk into a space, but that’s how I remembered it.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting because it started with galleries and artists.

JESSIE DEMAREE: It started, yeah. It started like houses turning into galleries and you’d be able to walk in and get some crackers and wine or something and like meet the artists.

LAUREN GILGER: Lots of boxed wine.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Lots and lots of boxed wine. So I guess I feel unaffected in a way because um it’ll My Space will still be there. More spaces need to um pop up. And I think it won’t be the end of it. There will be other places and other options in the future for us to gather and celebrate art.

LAUREN GILGER: What do you think when you hear that, Greg? It sounds like from Jessie’s point of view and from many of the artists’ points of view who have been there a long time that like First Friday lost its soul almost, and this maybe could bring it back to its roots?

GREG ESSER: Local media’s been predicting the demise of First Friday for as long as I’ve been involved, for decades.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s true.

GREG ESSER: And every time there’s a change, it’s predicted to be the end of First Friday. And I want to clarify there’s a distinction between the street closure and First Friday. If I could take something off the calendar it would be Mondays, not First Fridays.

But First Friday will always be an event in downtown Phoenix and it will continue to evolve without a street closure or with a street closure. And we’re interested in really focusing on that arts identity, which is a unique character element of Roosevelt Row.

So how do we serve artists? How do we serve the new residents that are now part of this? We’ve got a huge uh population of renters, so they’re transitory residents in the neighborhood. What are their needs? And this transition is another listening moment.

So Roosevelt Row CDC, the Evans-Churchill Community Association are both spending a lot of time doing stakeholder meetings, listening to people, partnering with Downtown Phoenix Inc. and looking holistically with Artlink — who’s the sort of founder and organizer of First Friday as an event, which is now a statewide organization — looking at how all of these things sort of work together and continue to foster the arts, serve residents, best serve stakeholders.

And that includes the vendors who have been a part of this event again for decades, many of them. How do we best serve all of those needs in a way that makes the most people happy?

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. But there are big challenges in that, right? Like artists can’t afford to live on Roosevelt Row anymore. There are very few galleries or craft spaces left. I mean, what’s your reaction to that Jessie?

JESSIE DEMAREE: Oh my gosh. Well, we’re always — we’re a very resilient group of people. We find ways. We relocate.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean I guess the question is how can First Friday, Roosevelt Row be more about supporting the arts, creating a true arts district, because it is — as you said, Greg — the cultural touchstone of this place. Those artists and that presence matter. But what do you do when they can’t afford to be there?

JESSIE DEMAREE: Rent caps. Rent caps. Rent control.

LAUREN GILGER: Go ahead.

GREG ESSER: The reason artists first buy started buying buildings along Roosevelt and along Grand Avenue is because they were displaced for the construction of the basketball arena and for the baseball field. Those were warehouses that were torn down, displacing artists. They realized in Phoenix that ownership was one of the ways to have a voice in how the city evolved.

And that happened along Grand Avenue and Roosevelt. But now again, they’re buying in new locations and that activity’s continuing, it’s just not in the same locations anymore. There’s a show up right now in Miami at Miami Art Works, which is a group of artists that used to be on Roosevelt and migrated to Miami (Arizona).

So that activity’s continuing. It doesn’t have the same central force as it did for a period of time on Roosevelt Street, but that’s now got a more dispersed and more permanent presence in the DNA of Roosevelt than it had when the land was mostly vacant 20 years ago.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting. Right. And it’s kind of the way, right Jessie, that cities go. Like they grow, they evolve, and the artists kind of get there first, figure it out, and then go find the new place when they are done.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Absolutely. Michael and Joanna 23 started small with Thought Crime and then they got kicked out of that space because it was being demolished. And they went to Firehouse, and then that space was demolished.

And then the resilience is truly extraordinary and just really inspirational for a lot of artists that then they moved out to Miami and bought up a lot of the downtown and kept recreating — just like a Phoenix, you know? Just keep reimagining and rebuilding, relocating. I see I see a lot of really good possibilities, but it’s going to happen within the community that I feel safe with, the artists.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. I think that’s a good place to end it. That is artist and community organizer Jessie Demaree and Roosevelt Row CDC founder, artist as well, Greg Esser. Thank you both for being here. Appreciate it.

JESSIE DEMAREE: Thanks so much.

GREG ESSER: Thank you so much.

LAUREN GILGER: Atomic is a new ASU platform that creates AI-generated versions of ASU faculty's lectures, cutting down often long videos to short clips for quicker learning. The idea is to give students personalized learning modules tailored to their schedule. But our next guest reports many ASU professors are disturbed by the way their lectures are being chopped up and used out of context and they were blindsided by the platform's launch. Sam Cole is co-founder of 404 Media where she covers the internet and AI and she's on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Sam.

SAM COLE: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: So tell us how this is supposed to work. It’s in beta now, we should say.

SAM COLE: Yeah, so just from the the little bit of testing that I’ve done and hearing from faculty that have tested this out also, what you do is you kind of prompt like you would ChatGPT. So you open up the ASU Atomic platform, it says "What do you want to learn about today?" and in my case I said "I want to learn about ethics in AI." So I typed in ethics in AI and it asked me how much time do you have to learn about this, what’s your level, what do you want to learn, how quickly, things like that. And then it creates it generates a customized uh "learning module" for each person who’s using the platform. Um and then from there you get sections and readings and videos and all that stuff.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So the the videos in particular are coming from it sounds like longer versions of ASU professors' lectures on on various topics?

SAM COLE: Yeah, so as far as I can tell, it’s coming from Canvas videos, so Canvas is obviously the learning management system that ASU uses, um and professors upload lectures to Canvas that students can then watch later or during class, uh whatever case it may be. Um, and the lectures are long and in context of the class. So you know, you might take like an hour-long lecture that’s a very complex topic, obviously in my case I was testing ethics, that’s a very complex issue in general, especially in AI. So it’s taking those really long lectures and then turning it into 40-second to two-minute snippets uh where I assume the platform is, you know, finding oh this professor mentioned the definition of AI even though maybe the class was about film, uh the professor mentioned AI, so they snippet out 40 seconds where the professor defines AI and then plug it into this learning module and then from there it generates text based on what that snippet said. Um so it’s taking complicated things.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And that’s an actual example that you found in the module that it created for you? Like a film class and a like a 30-second or 40-second clip about AI?

SAM COLE: Yeah, exactly.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So tell us about what the professors that you spoke with had to say. It sounds like this started for you with a post someone posted on BlueSky?

SAM COLE: Yes, so Chris Hanlon, who is a US literature professor at ASU, posted about this on BlueSky and I think on Facebook talking about how ASU had rolled out this new thing called Atomic and that the faculty that he had spoken to had not heard of this before, he had never heard of it. He logged on to it and was like "Oh, this is my face, these are my lectures, these are my colleagues' lectures." Uh as far as I can tell, most faculty hadn’t heard about it or weren’t aware of it being developed before Friday, so a couple days ago. Um, and one uh one scholar that I talked to said, you know, "I hadn’t heard about this until you emailed me about it." And then I was walking through the phone on the phone with them saying here’s how your lecture was used in this AI program and they were horrified. Um so most people just hadn’t heard about it until Professor Hanlon had mentioned it online, but then especially um in the last few days where it kind of gained some more traction.

LAUREN GILGER: So some tension around the rollout for some of these professors you spoke with. Are they also concerned about sort of their intellectual material, their their original ideas? I mean do they own those to begin with I guess if they’re posted on Canvas?

SAM COLE: So it’s tough because when you work at a university a lot of your work is owned by that university and you know, the university might have intellectual property rights to your work, but it doesn’t have exclusive rights in a lot of cases. So even if ASU does own and as far as I can tell it does own the content that goes up on Canvas, and if you’re employed by ASU obviously they have a right to that content, but um what was concerning was the the total lack of context and credit and further reading even, ways for learners to follow up on that content. So in a way it’s like they they own—ASU might own that content, but it’s stripping the ownership of the thoughts and the preparation that went into that content from the people who created it, which would be the professors and the faculty. So it is an ownership issue, but it’s also the the fact that the faculty that I talked to were saying, you know, "I’m not trying to be compensated for this, although that would be amazing because professors are not paid enough in general across the country but, you know, it’s not about uh credit and compensation, it’s about uh reflecting the thought and the time that I put into creating these materials for my students because I care about them, uh then you know stripped and cannibalized and chopped up into slop for AI is very concerning for these scholars." So I think that’s that’s the really the issue for a lot of folks.

LAUREN GILGER: This comes Sam as AI is really kind of upending education in a lot of ways. Like whether it’s at the university level or or down the line, but I think ASU in general has been really positive about AI and its potential in education. It sounds like that’s what the goal is of creating a platform like this. Tell us about that kind of context in which this is happening.

SAM COLE: Yeah, so I mean, AI is obviously something that’s being pushed into or embraced by, however you want to look at it, institutions and organizations and industries regardless. It’s academia’s dealing with this, um you know, there’re tons of different industries, my industry, journalism, is is dealing with how to grappling with how to use AI and if to use AI. So I think that’s the context that ASU is trying to keep up with, they’re saying, you know, "We don’t want to be behind on AI innovation and AI-powered tools and we want to be able to offer these things to what is essentially a public product." It’s like I was signing up for it, it’s $5 a month after a free trial, it’s not for students or ASU community, it’s for the public. Um so they’re trying to stay ahead so to speak for for the sake of staying ahead. But it’s not actually something that’s providing value in a way that reflects ASU’s actual quality education. Um it’s it’s definitely what’s being produced is not not good honestly, it’s pretty bad content and full of errors. So um even if it was like a good product, I think it would be questionable but the fact that it’s a bad product and rolled out pretty uh, you know, halfway is just even more concerning.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Well we’ll leave it there for now. Sam Cole, co-founder of 404 Media joining us to talk about this story. Sam, thank you for coming on, appreciate it.

SAM COLE: Thank you so much.

LAUREN GILGER: And KJZZ reached out to ASU for comment, received this response quote: "A pilot launch of the program began in April, the pilot explores how ASU can use existing digital content in new ways to reach learners beyond those enrolled in degree programs."

Researchers have found more than 100 new genes that they believe are linked to schizophrenia. And part of the reason they found them, according to our next guest, is that they looked in different places than they’ve looked before. Ayman Fanous is Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix and at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix. He was part of this study conducted at more than a dozen schools. He spoke with my co-host Mark Brodie about the findings and what they mean. And they started with what he and his colleagues were specifically looking for.

AYMAN FANOUS: So, basically, if you look at the history of genetics in the last 100 plus years, even in the last, you know, 20 to 30 years, the vast majority of studies have been in European ancestry populations, say in Europe and the United States. They have really not covered populations in other parts of the world, almost at all, including in Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc.

So, one of the issues there is, can we generalize findings from European ancestry populations? And it's certainly no surprise that this kind of disparity in studying has been taking place. I mean, certainly these countries are much richer governments, etc., etc., that can spend a lot more money on science than, say, countries in Africa and Asia.

But the question again is, can we generalize the findings in European ancestry populations to other ethnic groups? And that answer — that question really has remained unanswered for quite some time now. And the reason that's an important question is, you know, the question ultimately comes down to: Are we looking at the same disorders biologically in European ancestry populations as we are in other populations?

MARK BRODIE: Well, so having done this research now, do you feel better equipped to answer the question about whether you can make that generalization?

AYMAN FANOUS: Yes, absolutely. We've taken a number of approaches in the last few years. Most importantly, we've recruited a lot more African ancestry patients. And, you know, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, I'd say going back maybe 10, 15 years. And if you look at the history of genetics in psychiatric disorders, it goes back much further than that. And one of the reasons we've been able to do that is that we've been able to recruit patients for very large what we call biobanks.

And one of the most important biobanks here in the United States is the — one that's built by the Department of Veterans Affairs. So this has allowed us to have a much larger collection of patients with all kinds of different disorders — not just schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, but hypertension, diabetes, etc., etc. And it's given us a much better opportunity to study pretty much all disorders in other ancestries.

So we've been able to collect to date what would be the largest study of African ancestry, as well as other ancestries as well — African ancestry patients with schizophrenia, and to try to understand sort of the genetic basis of schizophrenia in this large database, and try to see if it extends to the European ancestry population as well. In other words, are the results that we're seeing in one ethnic group, namely the African ancestry group, are they more or less the same as we're seeing in the European group? Are these disorders more or less the same biologically across these ethnic groups?

MARK BRODIE: Well, and am I right that among other things what you found is that there're more than 100 genetic links to schizophrenia that maybe you hadn't known about just based on the European studies?

AYMAN FANOUS: Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you look at the European studies in the past, they've basically given us roughly, you know, 280 genetic regions where there's probably a gene. So let's just say for simplicity's sake, they've identified 280 genes, more or less. And we've identified 100 more, including when we've included these African ancestry populations as well. So it's been very impactful in terms of getting us to a larger number of genes, getting us to a larger number of biological processes.

And one of the other important things that's happened in — in this study is that because these two populations have very different histories — one of course, as we know, the African population is — is the original human population, and so you've got a — a very diverse population in the African ancestry. And consequently, the genetics, the genome, is much more diverse in the African population. So one of the really beneficial impacts of that is that you're able to identify the location of genes in a much more precise way. In other words, let's just say you have a gene is a needle in a haystack.

When you include multiple ancestries, because of the great diversity, you get much more precision, so you get a needle in a much smaller haystack. And it allows us to more precisely identify which genes are actually involved and even, maybe even more importantly, which variations in the gene, which mutations are causing a particular protein to not function properly and therefore a particular cell not to function properly, namely a neuron. So this study has been beneficial in two important ways. Firstly, to increase the number of genes that we are confident that have an impact in schizophrenia, and secondly, to actually narrow the regions where we think those genes are.

MARK BRODIE: Does this have potential practical implications for something like, for example, diagnosing schizophrenia or treating schizophrenia or maybe even at some point trying to prevent it from showing its symptoms?

AYMAN FANOUS: Yes, I believe so. I mean, we're certainly quite a ways off from any of those possibilities, but, you know, in terms of diagnosis, now that we have a much larger number of genes that we can actually assay, we can test, you know, it would be possible, to I believe, have more predictive power to determine who is at higher risk of getting the illness.

And perhaps if we had that information, we might be able to intervene earlier, such as maybe starting people on lower doses, low doses of medication when they have early symptoms, things like that. In terms of treatment, we're now able to identify many more pathways where we might be able to have drugs that basically target these genes and might sort of intervene in the processes that lead to schizophrenia. So there might be greater drug discovery possibilities.

MARK BRODIE: It sounds like what you're saying is there are more potential ways to get at the disease now with these extra links.

AYMAN FANOUS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, a lot of work needs to be done to identify, you know, ways we might be able to intervene and, you know, there's lots of different aspects of that work that will need to take place, but that definitely opens the door much wider.

MARK BRODIE: Is it possible that there are still more links out there that we just haven't found yet?

AYMAN FANOUS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, schizophrenia, like many what we call, you know, common disorders, is very polygenic, meaning that it's not like one gene that causes the illness, as you would see in, say, cystic fibrosis. You know, it's more likely that it's like hundreds of genes, and whether it's, you know, 3 or 400 or 7 or 800, we don't really know. So that work is ongoing, but I think we're getting closer and closer to, you know, finding out.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Ayman, thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.

AYMAN FANOUS: Thank you, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: Ayman Fanous is chair of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Phoenix and at Banner University Medicine Center in Phoenix.

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 to follow us on Instagram, we are @KJZZTheShow there and you can sign up for our newsletter—it is called Radioheads and in it find out what we're up to, check out some of our favorite segments you might have missed each week. It is a good read in your inbox, I promise. You can sign up at theshow.kjzz.org. The Show was produced by Sativa Petersen, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton, as well as Bruce Drummond. Sky Schaudt is our digital editor, Chad Snow is our news director. The Show was created by Jon Hoban and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. For Mark Brodie, I’m Lauren Gilger. Thanks for joining us.