The Show for June 15, 2026: Traffic tickets for self-driving cars, Native agriculture and more

California officials will soon be able to cite autonomous vehicles for traffic violations. How will that work, and could it happen here? Plus, the surprising economic impact of Indigenous agriculture in Arizona.

Transcript

UNDERWRITER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, 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.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, California will soon be able to cite driverless cars, how that’ll work and whether AVs in Arizona could get tickets.

GILGER: And we’ll hear the next edition in our series Second Acts with a husband and wife team who kept a downtown Phoenix restaurant alive after its chef’s death.

BRODIE: But first, state lawmakers wrapped up their 2026 session early Saturday morning. Adjournment came about a day after they approved a budget for the new fiscal year, but not before a lot of back and forth over Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, basically school vouchers. Howie Fischer was at the capitol for all of it. After catching up on some sleep, he joins me now to talk about what happened in the waning hours of the session. Good morning, Howie. Hopefully you’re well-caffeinated.

HOWARD FISCHER: Well-caffeinated, all caught up on my sleep, just trying to keep my microphone from melting in the heat.

MARK BRODIE: Oh, well that would be a good thing to do.

So, OK, so the Legislature wrapped up about 4, almost 5 o'clock Saturday morning. But in the hours leading up to it, there were these reports that the House speaker and the Arizona Education Association, the teachers’ union, were working on some kind of deal over ESAs.

What was that about?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, the House Speaker, Steve Montenegro, is, I think, terrified that the initiative that’s being placed on the ballot by the Arizona Education Association, Save Our Schools, will pass. And while he recognizes that perhaps there need to be things to curb some of the more bizarre purchases, the things that have been reported on like lingerie and jewelry and trips to Disneyland, what he didn’t want were things like an absolute $150,000 cap on parents. These are the folks who probably were sending their kids already to private and parochial schools and now can get $7,400 vouchers.

So he said, as you point out, "Let’s make a deal." The problem became, and we can get into some of the specifics, that he worked with the Arizona Education Association, apparently not with Save Our Schools, which is part of the initiative.

And all of this was occurring without the Democrats, who, while they’re in the minority of the Legislature, are the key supporters of some of these things, and knowing that all the Republicans probably wouldn’t go along.

And it blew up on him. And all of this comes down to the fact that we’re still fighting what started out in 2012 as a nice idea for students and has just ballooned.

MARK BRODIE: Right, well it started off, as we’ve talked about, for a particular group of students, and sort of over time, it has evolved to include more students, and now it involves all students.

HOWARD FISCHER: Exactly. Remember, in 2012, the whole purpose was there are some students who had some special needs that probably couldn’t be met in public schools. So it would tell parents, "Tell you what, we’re going to give you some money. You can take that money and send your kid to a certain school who might be able to deal with issues like autism or something else that’s harder for a school district."

Well, we all knew at the time that this was the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent, and it has been that way. It now includes the students of military families, it now includes foster children, it now includes children on reservations, it now includes students who are going to schools rated D and F. And then in 2022, under Doug Ducey, they said, "We’re going to have universal vouchers." And then anybody can get a voucher. They’re about $7,400, $7,500 a year now. And they can take them where they want. They can use them for private schools, they can use them for parochial schools.

And what’s been problematic in terms of the spending is they can use it for homeschooling. And at this point, I think the Education Association said, "Look, this is taking now $1 billion a year out of the budget." Remember, this started in 2022 with 12,000 students. Now we’ve got over 100,000 in there. And the fear was that somehow this was going to continue to drain public education. So hence the initiative, and hence the efforts to kill it.

MARK BRODIE: So Howie, what was actually in the deal that Steve Montenegro, the House speaker and the AEA came up with before the Senate defeated it?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, it started off with the issue of that, "Well, maybe we do need some constraints. Maybe we do need an actual list of what can’t be purchased." Now, it’s important to remember that wasn’t much of an offer given that, theoretically, if you look at the actual laws, you can only use this for legitimate education expenses.

Now what’s happened is people have decided, "Well, I need to take my kid to that trip to Tokyo to teach them about international law. I need to go ahead and get a nice car so they can do driver training." And then there were the things that, again, the lingerie. I’m not sure where the lingerie fitted in. Perhaps there was some home ec program that somebody said that they needed.

And all of that, so Speaker Montenegro said, "We’ll make a list. You can’t have that kind of stuff." We’ll also put a limit on how much kids can carry forward going to college. Because one of the issues that has come up is, while this was meant for helping the kids to go to school now, there’s a little loophole in there that says if you’re not using it all, you can bank it. And this is particularly important for homeschooled children because they can say, "Well, we’ll just buy our curriculum on our own and we will take our $7,400, $7,500, or larger for students with special needs, and we’ll bank it for 12 years and then we can pay for college." And so he agreed to put in a cap in there of $24,000, basically, of how much you can carry forward.

The AEA said, "OK, that’s fine," because they also knew that while they probably have enough signatures right now to get the ballot, it’s going to be a very expensive campaign going forward. They would have to fight against another, I would call a sort of a sham reform by a group called Fortify Arizona that Betsy DeVos is sponsoring. And there’s no guarantee that it would be approved. And I think they thought it was a decent deal.

Obviously, it would have been nice for the Democrats to say, "If you’d included us." And also there’s a belief, I think, by a lot of the folks in the Save Our Schools, which is the grassroots organization, "You could have done better. Perhaps some money for Proposition 123. Perhaps, why did you even put in that they can carry cash forward?"

And so the whole thing just started to fall apart in the late hours. And then what happened was this poison pill, and that’s really crucial. ... Because the lawmakers said, "OK, if you don’t take our deal, we’re going to find a way to kill your whole initiative without even having to go to the ballot."

So they put something on the ballot that says if the children of military families who are, again, eligible, lose some of their benefits, like the ability to carry that cash forward in any future initiative, anything past after Nov. 1, the entire measure that does that, not just that part, the entire measure is constitutionally voided.

And remember, they were doing this as a constitutional measure and the AEA initiative was statutory. Constitution in general trumps statutory. And so what they ended up putting on the ballot is a poison pill, that if you find this nice-sounding thing to go ahead and help the children of military families — nobody wants to hurt the children of military families — you go ahead and you effectively kill the entire initiative reform and we’re back to ground zero.

MARK BRODIE: So Howie, very briefly before we let you go, does it seem as though that provision, that ballot measure, might be subject to a legal challenge before November?

HOWARD FISCHER: Well, this is a little trickier because of the fact that people could say, "Well, it’s not constitutional to kill something else." But again, they crafted it as a constitutional amendment. So does the Supreme Court say, "No, you can’t do that kind of two-step for lack of a better word"?

I think there will be a challenge to it. What the court will do, you can lose a lot of money betting on what the Supreme Court will do with any particular ballot measure. I have seen them go from the extreme position of things don’t have more than one subject because there are two things some people would want, some people don’t want, to is it part of a larger whole and therefore we’ll let it go to the ballot.

A lot of lawyers are going to be spending a lot of time and a lot of money on this.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, we’ll see what happens. That is Howie Fischer with Capital Media Services. Howie, thanks as always.

HOWARD FISCHER: Glad to be here.

BRODIE: California officials will be able to cite autonomous vehicles for traffic violations starting on July 1. Right now, they’re only able to give tickets to human drivers. The change comes as a result of a law approved in 2024 and generally requires AVs to have a way for police officers, firefighters, or other first responders to communicate with a human if the vehicle is doing something illegal or they need the vehicle to be doing something other than what it’s doing. Former California State Assemblymember Phil Ting sponsored the new law. He says he first started seeing AVs testing in his San Francisco neighborhood six or seven years ago, first with a person inside, then without one, and then as full-fledged robotaxis.

PHIL TING: And what we saw in San Francisco was a number of issues. We saw autonomous vehicles not knowing how to handle a live fire situation. So firefighters had blocked off the road, and you saw vehicles going into those areas.

I had a colleague, a state senator’s daughter was in a autonomous vehicle when the vehicle went into a live police situation, meaning the police were trying to block off the area. And so we just saw these situations where the vehicles were still learning what areas not to enter. And there was really no way for law enforcement or public safety to engage with these vehicles.

Obviously, you couldn’t tell people to pull over, couldn’t tell them what to do. There was no way to contact central dispatch, all of that. And so we worked on a bill to really find a statewide method to provide accountability to the autonomous vehicles, but also find a way that made sense.

At first, we were just simply going to allow the vehicles to be cited, just like you and I are cited if we violate something of the vehicle code. What we found out is the courts also didn’t really know how to handle them. So we needed to figure out a new way of doing it.

It made sense that DMV in our state regulates the autonomous vehicles, meaning before the autonomous vehicles can operate, they have to go through DMV, get licensing, get certification, get permitting. And then if there’s issues, then DMV can unilaterally pull the permit.

So when Cruise ran over a woman, dragged a woman, and then they were not forthright about all the circumstances leading up to that, their license to operate in California was pulled. And so DMV has that sole authority.

So it made sense that DMV, being the regulatory body, was the agency that really should have the citation authority as well. And so we set up a process where DMV, that that notification would happen at the local officer level, but DMV would be getting that information instantly, and then DMV would be setting up a process on how to handle the citations with the company so that they could take corrective action.

MARK BRODIE: This is such an interesting situation because we hear so often about technology sort of moving faster than policy can move. And as you referenced, this is not something that anyone had had to try to create policy for before.

What were the conversations like between you and your colleagues and maybe even the industry in terms of: How do we go about doing this? Because you were doing it for the first time.

TING: Well, what’s interesting is I think there’s an acknowledgment that there were issues going on that needed to be addressed and that there needed to be some way to communicate with the cars. And so we set up a process where that the car companies would have a way to talk to the vehicles, should a police officer or firefighter have to talk to the vehicles, that there is a way to have two-way communication with the human back in central dispatch.

So we set up that process, that was very important so that people could pull over or law enforcement could tell a car to pull over and stop and immediately have that car sort of taken over. We also wanted to make sure that DMV ... was getting the information they needed to properly regulate the companies.

BRODIE: So you mentioned conversations with the companies, the autonomous vehicle companies. Were they generally on board with this? ... Do they understand the need to cite when traffic laws are violated?

TING: Absolutely, and they needed to know that they needed to have some process to really engage with public safety and law enforcement.

BRODIE: So I wonder if part of the goal here is when an autonomous vehicle, a Waymo or a Cruise or any vehicle, goes into a situation that it shouldn’t or breaks the law in some way, is part of the goal to get the company to maybe work on the software ... to make sure that those cars know they shouldn’t do it?

TING: Absolutely, that’s the number one goal, right? Because it’s not like they’re programmed to, ironically, you see the autonomous vehicles, they’re the only ones going the speed limit because they’re programmed to not go above the speed limit, right? So they don’t go above the speed limit. They’re going 25 miles an hour or 35 miles an hour, whatever the limit is, that’s what they are. They’re not programmed to go 10 miles over the limit.

And so absolutely, that was the whole point was to take corrective action, which is why the companies worked with me, because they knew the alternative could have been a ban. And they also knew the alternative could have been the Wild West where every local jurisdiction would start to try to govern these cars differently.

BRODIE: It’s an interesting point you make about how the cars are programmed to obviously go the speed limit. They stop at red lights, they stop at stop signs. They’re not texting or drinking or anything.

TING: And they pull over, like all the Uber drivers don’t pull over, even if they should pull over to pick up a passenger, they just park in the middle of the street, which drives me a little crazy. And yet the Waymos ... are programmed, "Hey, you pull over to find an open spot so you’re out of traffic."

BRODIE: Yeah. Well, so I wonder then if the situations — and you alluded to this at the very beginning — the situations that this is really meant for are sort of unusual situations, things you don’t come across every day that an autonomous vehicle might just not have any idea how to handle.

TING: Well, I would say I don’t know that they’re unusual situations because having firefighters block off a road or having police officers do that, they’re happening every single day, right? So it’s not like this is a natural disaster. They are just not the most common occurrences. And so the cars didn’t have the proper programming, proper protocol. And so in essence, I think there wasn’t a lot of thought paid to how these cars were going to interact with other human beings around the vehicles.

BRODIE: So in that kind of situation where a firefighter or police officer needs an autonomous vehicle to not be there, is there a way for them to get the vehicle to move? Do they just write down the license plate and contact DMV?

TING: ... No, the way the bill was written is, no ... the deal in the bill was, which is in there, that they’re supposed to set up some two-way communication so that the officers can immediately engage with the vehicles and engage with a human being, so that they can tell the vehicles to get out of that area.

BRODIE: OK. Is it your expectation that after some amount of time that the companies will have programmed their vehicles to address all of these situations and police officers won’t have to keep citing?

TING: It’s not a matter of over a certain amount of time. My expectation is once it is brought to their attention, that they are taking immediate corrective action. And that if they’re not, then DMV is going to be tracking that and making sure that they take corrective action. And if they don’t, they’re going to get their license revoked. That’s my expectation, just like — it’s no different than if you don’t take corrective action in terms of your driving ability, at some point you get your license revoked.

BRODIE: Right. But I guess in terms of, you mentioned how at least some of these situations were things that maybe the programmers hadn’t quite conceived of yet when they were writing the software. So I would imagine that over time, there will be just fewer and fewer of those situations arising.

TING: Absolutely. My expectation is, yeah, once they can put that into the program, they’ll be adaptable. And the nice thing is they’ll be adaptable across the fleet. It’s not like they have 1,000 drivers and they have to train 1,000 drivers. Once the program is put in place, it should work across their entire fleet.

BRODIE: Right. Have you had conversations with policymakers in other states about this?

TING: I have not.

BRODIE: So a place like Arizona, which obviously also has a lot of autonomous vehicles, they haven’t reached out to you or anything?

TING: Nobody has. Yeah.

BRODIE: Are you surprised by that?

TING: No, not really. I think there’s a lot of hesitation to be — I think it’s kind of ironic. Most states follow California, but very rarely do they want to admit that they’re following California.

BRODIE: All right, we’ll have to leave it there. That is Phil Ting, a former member of the California State Assembly. Phil, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

TING: Thanks, Mark. Appreciate the interview.

GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, when the chef and founder of a beloved Valley restaurant passed away, a local married couple decided to go from regulars to co-owners.

KATHRYN COHEN: The restaurant was always our favorite restaurant. We would bring our kids here. I don’t know, I just — something about it just felt so right. This is a gem in downtown Phoenix, this historic house. I couldn’t sleep. I just thought about it all night.

BRODIE: We’ll hear their story as our series Second Acts continues.

GILGER: But first, a new study out of the University of Arizona measures the scale and economic output of tribal agriculture in our state. And it’s big. U of A professor and dry Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson co-authored the study and found American Indians operate 62% of farms in the state and manage more than 80% of the state’s total agricultural land to the tune of 20 million acres. But as Kotutwa Johnson told me, it’s a seriously under-researched area.

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: I think it’s part of our system and how we look at American Indians in this country. We don’t really know what their history was. But our history here in Arizona with the tribes in Arizona, a majority of them have a deep agricultural history that goes way back even 10,000 years.

And so we’re not really at the forefront thought of what I would call industrial agriculture, which is primary source of agriculture in Arizona, where you have a lot of cotton farms, alfalfa farms, things like that.

So I think that’s one of the reasons why it kind of misses the boat. I think also a lot of the people see casinos in this state, they don’t see the agricultural exploits that are happening on the ground. And so there’s little attention given to that.

LAUREN GILGER: Sixty-two percent of all the farms in the state operated by Native Americans, 81% of the state’s total agricultural land, tribal land. This is a massive footprint. And I wonder, how did we not know this before? Were you surprised by these results?

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: I was very surprised, but it’s not too surprising because tribes, the 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona, sit on about a quarter of the acreage of land in Arizona. So that’s pretty much what it is.

But like I said, I don’t think people really understand the agricultural imprint and footprint that we have here in Arizona and have since almost like to say time immemorial. We’ve got canal infrastructure that was basically built upon existing Hohokam agriculture that was done before the state was even founded and the country was founded.

A Hopi farmer is using ancient practices to grow crops — with no irrigation

Lauren Gilger

In the West, ongoing drought and drier future are forcing us all to think about how we use water differently. One farmer up in northern Arizona is using ancient practices to grow food.

Listen

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. We see the evidence of that right here in the Valley and our biggest city here.

I mean so this connects to what you do, right? You’re a Hopi dry farmer. I’ve been out to your farm on the reservation, interviewed you about your work there, and watched how you do this kind of amazing thing growing this crop with almost no water sometimes, whatever comes down from the sky. And it’s got this long cultural history that it is rooted to.

So, I mean obviously that’s part of your motivation here and part of what you’re trying to do with not just this study, but with your entire body of work, right?

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: Yes. Yes, it is. My big body of work is called the revitalization of the American Indian food system. And why is that so important? Because you have one reservation here that has about an 80% diabetic rate, which is the biggest in the globe, and you also have another one, which I saw congressional testimony on, that the life expectancy rate is only 52 years old.

So you combine those two factors in the health of the people, it’s one of the reasons why I like this study because it brings all the data necessary so that we can maybe get a bigger pot of the pie. Not necessarily all for economic gain, but turn the health numbers of our people around so that they have a long life expectancy rate and not such high rates of diabetes and heart disease.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And you’re debunking this idea that tribal agriculture or, I guess, tribal economy in general is not having any kind of economic impact on the state. It’s, in fact, having a very big one, it seems.

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: Yes, it is. And I think that’s one of the things that, the Farm Bureau first kind of brought attention to some of these numbers, and they’re a very good outfit.

But the state’s Department of Agriculture also should pay attention to this, because when we talk about money, we heard about there’s a $3 billion agricultural industry in Yuma, but there’s also a couple of tribes down there where a lot of those revenues may or may not be generated from.

And so it’s just kind of looking at the whole thing in its totality. And I think we’re here now and we’ve always been here. And it’s just sometimes we need a little bit more recognition than what we’re currently receiving for our agricultural adventures.

LAUREN GILGER: Talk about economic output because the numbers here are pretty stark. You’ve got $753.3 million in total output in terms of economic output, almost 4,000 jobs related to this.

What does this look like? A lot of this is small-scale farms?

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: A lot of this is small-scale farms, some of it’s big-scale farms with industrial agriculture. But it’s basically all the inputs of it and all the value-addedness that comes from that that makes, these are estimates that were based off of 2022 census.

Michael Kohutwa Johnson

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So I would imagine in my mind that those numbers keep going up only because we see a lot of our own land that was once used for agriculture that’s not owned by the tribe going into more urban settings and starting to be developed on in a big way.

And so I’m just trying to figure out how we can get a bigger footprint and also collaborate with those people who would like to farm but just don’t have the opportunity because they’re having to pay an enormous amount of money to have water brought to their fields.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So water is definitely a part of this. When you look toward the future of Native American agriculture in the state, it looks like you’re anticipating it to be an even bigger part of the pie. Does that have to do with big ag? Does that have to do with tribal water rights?

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: Well, a lot of it has to do with tribal water rights. Tribal water rights under one of the agreements, some of the tribes in southern Arizona are actually allowed 60% of the CAP. They’re allowed to utilize that much, but they don’t.

I think it’s more about what farmers can do and cannot do with a limited amount of water supply, especially now that we have the Lower and Upper basin negotiating for new allocations and new water rights that’s well under way.

A lot of this tribal land is also leased to non-Indians where they’re free to do a lot of agricultural techniques without really having studies done on what types of things they’re putting in our soils. Because part of my work is that we need to look at these soils, because I feel like when I was going out to the different reservations looking at their distribution centers, food distribution centers, I didn’t see hardly any of their own Native products on those shelves in there.

And so we all know that these Native products like the 60-day corn ... the tepary beans that Ramona has, are very healthy for the tribal members, very nutrient-dense. But we need to make sure that we plant these on those soils that can benefit the type of plants those are to bring nutritional value and nutritional health to the people of whose land these crops were originally raised on.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting. So you’re saying a lot of this is tribal land leased out to big agriculture companies that might be growing things that are rough on the land and maybe thirsty crops.

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: Yeah, that are rough on the land. You have some places I know they probably have at least 20, 30 years of alfalfa production, cotton production. And so those are heavy water users.

And so we’re trying to figure out ways to collaborate. ... I have a vision where the tribes start leasing a lot of their land to small farmers who want to get started, and because some of the water rights would come with that. And I think we can do that, then they could dictate policy through different agricultural codes that would allow them to actually have some economic benefit, because if you’re raising organic products on reservations, you can sell those things to like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. And even contribute to some of the health and nutrition of those urban schools that are around that reservation. So you can also, because of the way the regulations are written, you can also do the value-addedness of these crops.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s quite a vision you’re laying out there. So the study, you say, you want it to serve as a baseline going forward. What do you hope for the future in terms of research in this area?

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: Well, it’s not so much the research, it’s just more the participation. Whether you know this or not, we have this thing called the Federally Recognized Tribal Extension Program. It’s a four-year program every year that allows us to put tribal agricultural extension agents, kind of like my job, on the various reservations. But we only have five out of the 22. And these people are key in order to start like community gardens, to help find the needs of the tribe, to start programs that would help with tribal agriculture.

But I would sure like to find a way that the state could step in and also allocate funds because look how much we’re helping the state, not only our agricultural revenues, but our gaming revenues, and water that we’re helping with municipalities that are paying near to nothing for accessing tribal water.

So we need to figure out a best way to not only help their community, but also help the tribal community in the end. And I think that’s the most important thing.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a dry Hopi farmer, co-author on this study, as well as assistant professor and cooperative extension specialist of Indigenous resilience at the University of Arizona, joining us. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it very much.

MICHAEL KOTUTWA JOHNSON: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie.

MARK BRODIE: A lab at ASU is allowing students to get some experience working with telescopes on a specific mission.

The Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS, is a small telescope — about the size of a cereal box. It’s monitoring the ultraviolet levels of a type of star. Danny Jacobs is a Professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

DANNY JACOBS: What we’re trying to do is to look at enough different stars in this type to be able to make predictions for any other of that star type. So it doesn’t even matter if these particular stars have planets — we just want to see the ones that are kind of representative of the galaxy. Because there’s so many in the galaxy.

It’s just like doing a survey of people out in the world — you don’t call literally everybody to ask them their politics opinions. You call like a hundred and just make sure you ask different people. So, that’s what we’re doing.

MARK BRODIE: Jacobs says the most common situation for a habitable planet is for it to be right next to a star that’s flaring all the time. That’s the kind of thing this team is looking for: staring at what are called M dwarf stars and counting the number and size of flares.

DANNY JACOBS: The goal is to monitor the most common kind of star in the galaxy. The most common kind of star is also gonna be the star that’s most likely to have a planet, because if you just take planets and you scatter them around all the stars, it’s gonna be the most common kind of star. And the most common kind of star is an M dwarf star — it’s much smaller and redder and cooler than our star — it’s very different than our star.

MARK BRODIE: Jacobs says ASU has invested in small satellites by building a CubeSat lab called the Interplanetary lab. He says to think of it as training aerospace company that’s staffed by students and run and managed by faculty.

One of those students is senior Josh Sink, a mechanical engineering major. I met up with him in the lab recently, and asked about a typical day there.

JOSH SINK: Typically with my schedule, I’ll come in here earlier off the morning, right? So 9:00 a.m., we’ll probably have a contact with the satellite closer to about 9:30, 10 a.m.

So I’ll show up at 9. We make sure all operation stations are ready to go, right? All of our setup checklists are complete. And then we will then operate the satellite from about 9 to about noon.

BRODIE: And when you say operate the satellite, you’re sending it commands to do something, right?

SINK: Yes, yes. So quick example is we’ll establish a connection, right? In this connection, we’ll go ahead and gather information. We are led by a flight director, so the flight director will then take us through a planned activity for the day. And this activity was briefed beforehand.

So we’ll do things such as send sequences. These are commands that essentially tell the spacecraft what to do later. So if we’re observing or we’re testing or whatever it is we’re doing, we’ll send those out. And then we also got to gather a lot of information from all the observations that we take.

BRODIE: Now you mentioned that you’re measuring UV levels. What is that telling you? What are you looking for by measuring the amount of UV in a particular place?

SINK: A lot of this, we’re calibrating. We’re working on it. In a more general sense, what the UV tells us is if there is a chance of a habitable zone for planets outside our solar system.

BRODIE: So you’re looking for life, some form of life outside of Earth?

SINK: Well, we’re looking for a piece of that puzzle. So there’s a lot of things that can determine that. UV radiation is the harmful things that can — it’s kind of like when you get a sunburn, that’s your UV radiation, right? So if the UV levels are far too high, obviously there is no chance for habitable zone there.

BRODIE: So it sounds like you’re both ruling places out and also ruling the possibility of a place in. Like if the UV levels are too high, you can say, "Well, we’re not going to find anything here."

SINK: Yeah. A lot of this is on our science team. So we’re kind of the bridge between that. So we’ll take a look at all of this data later on and then, yeah, we can kind of look at — we’ve got a list of targets. So we’ll use some as calibration, and then we’ll also look at some new things and compare with some data. So yeah.

BRODIE: What have you learned by doing this? Not necessarily just about sort of the data and what it is telling you, but maybe what have you learned about things that might interest you or about yourself or about sort of the universe more broadly?

SINK: Yeah, there’s there’s so many things that I’ve learned from this project. I think the realm of satellites in general, I really didn’t understand and the potential for science. So if our little toaster that’s out in space with a telescope is able to contribute to something as big as like looking for habitable planets and things like that, I think it really put in perspective like how cool science really is and how cool space is.

And on the technical side of things, I’ve learned a whole lot of data this, satellite that, right? But I think the absolute coolest thing is just the potential for what we can actually do out there.

BRODIE: Now I would imagine you’re somebody who was inclined to think science is pretty cool to begin with, right? You’re a mechanical engineering student. You’re not somebody who’s coming in from a non-scientific background. But was it difficult to sort of take that background and do something that is at least somewhat different than what you had been doing?

SINK: I would say yeah, there’s definitely a learning curve. You learn a lot of new things. So mechanical engineer’s a lot more techie, right? You learn about physics and science things revolving, like structures and stuff like that.

But once you start looking at science missions kind of like this, which really doesn’t have much to do with mechanical engineering, there’s there’s a lot to learn. You pick up a lot of terms from people nearby. It’s such a big bucket of knowledge. It’s pretty cool.

BRODIE: Has this changed what you think you might want to do when you graduate? Working here?

SINK: Potentially. I think what has changed mostly is I really want to do space. So before, I was a little unsure. I wanted to get involved on campus. I found the lab, ended up getting hired. But now it’s kind of locked it in for me. Whatever is in space that I got to do or find, that’s what I want to do.

BRODIE: What does it meant for you to be able to do this kind of work as an undergrad?

SINK: It it means a lot. It really does. I was really kind of confused on what I wanted to do, right? I knew I wanted to do engineering, but I didn’t know what. But this opportunity to work on SPARCS, it really kind of paved the way for what I want to do with with my time, you know? So that that means a lot having a passion.

BRODIE: So what is it like when you’re all sitting at those computers back there and you’re working on a mission or something? Can you sort of take me into what it what it’s like, what it feels like, what the mood is like in the room when that’s happening?

SINK: Yeah, I think I can give you a great example of our first contact. So it’s pretty typical for sometimes like you try to connect to your satellite and you get nothing, right?

So you don’t necessarily know exactly where it’s at when it’s uh when it gets launched and deployed. We don’t know exactly where it’s at. We get kind of a general idea. So based off of that, we’ll try and connect to it and the room is it’s silent, right? We have our comms on. Our flight director is making a couple call outs, right?

BRODIE: You’re all on the headsets?

SINK: All on the headsets, yes. So we’ll get things like our elevation, right? So our dish is going to point and track this thing. So as it’s pointing, we’re getting just small callout elevations, right?

We have something called acquisition of signal and loss of signal. This determines how long we’re on contact with the satellite. So we’re getting time counts down to the end. We’re waiting. It’s quiet. And we’re waiting to get that signal.

And then [SNAPS FINGERS] just like that, you get the signal. All of your dashboards, they light up like a Christmas tree and then the guy responsible for watching that says, "We have acquisition of signal." And it’s that moment right there, especially on day one, was was really something just kind of out of a movie because we’re talking to something in space. So that kind of atmosphere in itself, it’s it’s exhilarating.

BRODIE: That sounds so nerve-wracking waiting to get that signal that, OK, we’re good, we can we can do this now.

SINK: Yeah, the suspense is pretty real.

BRODIE: Josh Sink is a senior and a mechanical engineering major at ASU. He also works in the Interplanetary Lab there.

GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And now it’s time for the next edition of our series here on The Show about Arizonans who have started over, turned a new leaf, started a fresh chapter maybe midway through life, maybe in retirement, maybe just as they’re getting going.

It’s called Second Acts. And today, let’s meet a husband-and-wife team who took over a beloved downtown Phoenix restaurant after its founder and chef passed away of ovarian cancer.

GREGORY COHEN: I actually met her through selling wine to her when she owned a previous restaurant. And I could tell in the first 5, 10 minutes meeting her that we were going to hit it up. We got along super well, we had similar interests. She also spoke French and Italian, and just a she was just a wonderful, beautiful, most one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met in my life.

LAUREN GILGER: To Kathryn and Gregory Cohen, Farish House was a special place run by a very special woman, Lori Hassler. And they were just regulars.

KATHRYN COHEN: The restaurant was always our favorite restaurant. We would bring our kids here in high school, and our daughter, it was her favorite restaurant.

LAUREN GILGER: But, after Hassler’s passing, Gregory took her husband out for lunch.

GREGORY COHEN: I asked him how things were going with the restaurant, if he had any buyers, and he said he had he had a few, but they all wanted to gut the place and it wasn’t exactly what he was looking for.

And I, and I kind of joked with him, half-jokingly telling him, "Oh, that’s funny because Kathryn and I always dreamed of having a restaurant and if it was, it’d be like in an old house, it’d be European comfort food," which is exactly what this is.

And and he suggested, he goes, "Well, why don’t you guys buy it then?" And I kind of laughed at him, and I said I said, "No, I don’t think so, but thank you for offering. It’s flattering."

And that night I went home and she, Kathryn’s usually the very sensible, level-headed one, and I’m I react a lot on my emotions, and I’m a bit impulsive. And I told her about our conversation, and she got really quiet. The next morning she woke up and she goes, "Why don’t you why don’t you call him and see what he has to offer?"

LAUREN GILGER: At first, it seemed crazy but then, Kathryn got to thinking — She had never worked in a restaurant, she’d spent her career in HR. But, Gregory, who’s originally from France, had some experience in the industry as a beer and wine distributor.

And, she told me, she just had a feeling.

KATHRYN COHEN: I don’t know, I just — something about it just felt so right. This is a gem in downtown Phoenix, this historic house, it just was one of those things that you think about that if we passed up this opportunity, would we regret it?

So that was top of mind for me, and I couldn’t sleep. I just thought about it all night. And we just thought this might be something we can do as a family. Both of our kids are in their early 20s and it’s something we could do with them, and just something we could be proud of in our last career phase.

LAUREN GILGER: Last career phrase, right. I mean but that’s quite a jump for your last career phase, right?

So what did you think, Gregory, then when your very sensible wife said, "You know, maybe we should think about this"?

GREGORY COHEN: I was a little shocked, but I was really happy. And, and like she said, it was like the last of our career phase, but it was really something that it was like — it, exactly like Catherine said, if we didn't do it, it felt like something that we would regret if we didn't do it. I was, I was thrilled, and I was so excited for the opportunity. It's been so invigorating and just I can't go, I can't say enough of what a great experience this is, it's been so far.

And really, it's been that way in a large way, and it is scary to open a restaurant, but Lori did such a great job of setting up this restaurant and staffing it. A lot of our staff have been here since day one, they've been here for seven years, and they take ownership of the restaurant. It, it is scary to buy a, to buy a restaurant, to run a restaurant, but when you have such a great foundation already, it made the transition so much easier than a lot of people imagine.

I had so many friends and colleagues from the industry tell me, "What are you doing? You're crazy. You know better, you know how crazy restaurant is." And I had some that were very encouraging, like the folks at Far Away, but it was definitely it was one of those things where I just it felt right. It just, I just felt like I, I had to do it.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and I wonder if from your point of view, because you'd been working with restaurants in your career for so long, had you watched restaurant owners for years and like, you know, some come and go and they fail and they make it and they struggle — had you always kind of wanted to try it yourself and be like, "I could do this better"?

GREGORY COHEN: It's always been in the back of our mind. I mean, and that's, and that's why it, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

LAUREN GILGER: So let me ask you about Lori's legacy here, right? Because did, did you change anything? I mean, have you just sort of taken it and said, "We would like this to never be different"?

KATHRYN COHEN: It was our favorite restaurant, so we thought it was perfect the way it is. We have so many customers that come in here and just thank us for stepping in, keeping it the same. We will eventually make our mark on it, you know, see where we can add an influence a little bit, but Gregory grew up with this European comfort food, so all of the food on the menu is things that he grew up with, and it just feels right.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you about the day-to-day, because I mean, like you said, you were on Zoom calls all day on your computer before this, you were working on the outside of the industry in a very different capacity.

When you're, you know, in this small old house, right, every day working with the small staff trying to keep this thing going, what's the the kind of like level of stress been like?

GREGORY COHEN: It's, it's ebbed and flowed, as you can imagine. Like, it could be really stressful at times, it could not be as stressful as you think, but it's all the time exciting and fun. Like, even it it sometimes it makes me wonder about myself and wonder what kind of person I am that I enjoy so much a lot of that stress and that that chaos, but I do, and it make — I thrive in it.

And it really it's been very empowering and energizing, and it's been and I'm just so happy to be able to do it. I look forward to coming to work every day. And this is like we were saying, this is an older home, and that was something we always liked being together is entertaining people at home, and this is kind of what we do — we're entertaining people at our home.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean it’s quite a leap. Like what do you say to other people who might be thinking about this or thinking wishing they could do something incredibly different in their lives, you know, even in the kind of final career chapter of their lives and say like, "I can’t do that, that’s too much of a risk"?

KATHRYN COHEN: I’m, I’ve always been one of those people that are overthinking everything. For some reason, when it feels right, I didn’t overthink it. I think it was just that gut feeling that we need to do this.

Honestly, the plan was for me to keep my current job that I had, I was at a company for 22 years, I loved what I did, but it was a little bit forced second act. I was laid off and it was five days before we took ownership in November. So I just, you know, embraced it and figured that’s how life was supposed to happen for me, and jumped right in and I just felt like all the stars have aligned.

LAUREN GILGER: Have there been surprising moments for you in particular coming from such a different field?

KATHRYN COHEN: I, I think what’s surprising is we’ve, we’ve been working a lot of hours. We wake up in the morning, we’re talking about work, all day long there’s planning. Then we come to the restaurant at night, we’re working, we go home, we debrief, we sit around the the fire pit in our courtyard, maybe have a glass of wine and debrief with our daughter who’s working with us a lot.

So it feels like we are working so many hours, yet it doesn’t feel like we’re work at all. I think that’s the most surprising.

LAUREN GILGER: What’s your favorite dish on the menu? What’s your favorite thing to eat here?

GREGORY COHEN: That is so that’s so hard to say. I’d say the cassoulet is probably it’s up there for me. The bouillabaisse is up there for me, the raclette is I mean, there’s so many different things. It just depends on the day. It’s, it’s hard to say, really is.

KATHRYN COHEN: My favorite’s the short ribs, that’s one thing I just never really cooked at home, so I enjoy it here. And our fingerling potatoes are pretty spectacular.

LAUREN GILGER: Making me hungry. All right. Kathryn and Gregory Cohen, thank you both so much for having me, and congratulations.

KATHRYN COHEN: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

GREGORY COHEN: Thank you very much for having us.

LAUREN GILGER: That was the latest edition in our ongoing series here on The Show, Second Acts. If you know someone who’s entered their second act in an interesting way, send us an note. We are at [email protected].

BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.