The Show for Aug. 6, 2026: 50 years of the death penalty, keeping dust on the ground and more

Dust in the air can be a big problem in the Valley, as we saw earlier this week. How scientists hope to keep that dust on the ground. And, 50 years of the death penalty in America. How Arizona stands out.

Transcription

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ's original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona's largest non-profit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, Non-Profit For Arizona.bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I'm Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here's today's episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it's The Show on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I'm Lauren Gilger. Coming up, how Arizona is a bellwether for the national debate over the death penalty.

MARK BRODIE: And researchers are using both nature and science to try to keep dust from getting in the air.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, there's controversy brewing for one Corporation Commission candidate and Turning Point favorite, Ralph Heap. And now it's dragging in another mega-leader in the Arizona State Legislature, too. The big question is, who paid for Heap's campaign signs?

A complaint points out he only reported spending about $650 on signs — not nearly enough to pay for the at least 184 of them documented around the Valley. Our own Wayne Schutsky with KJZZ's Politics Desk has been covering it all and he joins me now in studio to tell us more. Good morning, Wayne.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so Heap is running as a Clean Elections candidate, right? Which means he agreed to forego money from big donors like PACs, corporations, donors like that, in exchange for public funding from the Arizona Clean Elections Commission. But now there are questions about him maybe taking other funding to pay for those unaccounted-for signs?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, so in addition to those 184 that were documented in a complaint, you know, he's a statewide candidate. I've seen plenty of his signs around the state when I've been traveling around doing some reporting. So yeah, signs typically cost — from some records I reviewed, invoices that candidates have been provided — they can cost anywhere from $20, $30 a sign up to $50 a sign, plus how much it costs to go install them.

So if you do the quick math there, $650 isn't going to get you much. You know, we're looking at thousands of dollars for the amount of signs we've seen out there. So yeah, the allegation is that someone paid for these signs. Who was it? Was it Heap's campaign and they didn't report it, or was it some outside person who paid for them on his behalf? Which again would have to be reported as what's called an in-kind contribution.

LAUREN GILGER: He asked Clean Elections to kind of let him withdraw as a Clean Elections candidate to raise money otherwise. They said no?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: That's correct. Yeah, he had this situation where he won't sign a required document in order to release that Clean Elections funding that he's qualified for. This is hundreds of thousands of dollars for his campaign. So instead he said, "Hey, just let me out, and I'll go back to being a regular candidate where I can go to those PACs, I can go to individual donors for larger amounts of money than is allowed under Clean Elections." But they came back to him and said, "No, sir."

Which really puts him in a financial pickle, I think is how I put it in a social media post, because that means he's not getting his Clean Elections money, but he's also barred from going out and doing a lot of that private fundraising. So he's kind of stuck in between a rock and a hard place at the moment.

LAUREN GILGER: So can't raise any money on either front right now?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Outside of these small donations that qualify under Clean Elections.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, OK. Tell us more, Wayne, about this complaint. It was filed by a fellow Republican, right?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, Lisa Everett, who's a West Valley Republican. She filed this complaint basically saying, "I've seen these signs all over the state, and how did he pay for them? I think Clean Elections should look into this."

They have purview to enforce campaign finance laws, both for participating and non-participating candidates. So yeah, she filed a complaint with them, later filed a complaint with the Secretary of State's Office, who also enforces some campaign finance laws, making very similar allegations.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. Now, one of his opponents in this race, sitting corporation commissioner and also a fellow Republican, Nick Myers, is also weighing in. Heap beat him in the primary by just two points. What did he have to say about this, Wayne?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: He basically said, "Yeah, the Clean Elections Commission needs to look into this because if the allegations are true, it gave him an unfair advantage."

Now, I know a lot of political consultants who would dispute the effectiveness of campaign signs on street corners. ... A lot of people think it's kind of a waste of money, it's not switching anyone's minds. But what Myers said is that this Corporation Commission, not a high-profile race, not a race a lot of people pay attention to, so name ID is key here. And so if you have — the more signs you have, the more times people might see your name as they're driving down the road and see, you know, Republican Nick Myers or Republican Ralph Heap. And so he said that gave him an advantage if in fact he was skirting the rules to get these signs up.

LAUREN GILGER: What's Heap saying about this? His attorney seemed to sort of play it down?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, his attorney basically said, "You know, this is a —" if the complaint is true, you know, he's not conceding that any of these allegations are true. But he said, "Even if they are, this is kind of commonplace. You know, it's just a campaign maybe getting out in front of its skis and getting some signs out there before they've reported it, but it's — there's nothing salacious here." You know, this can be resolved, downplaying that this is really a big deal.

LAUREN GILGER: Is it commonplace, Wayne?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: I mean, we do see questionable campaign finance reports and they typically do get resolved either via like an amended report before they rise to the level of a complaint. But in this case, we've seen Heap in various reports over the past year refile seven, eight times and still not disclose where these signs came from. So I'd say this one's a little bit different.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. I want to talk more about what Nick Myers had to say because he went beyond the issues with Heap and this election cycle. What did he say happened in his election four years ago?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: So during a Clean Elections hearing regarding some of the stuff involving Heap, he spoke during public comment and he basically said, "Some of this sounds like a situation I found myself in four years ago when I first ran for the Corporation Commission."

You know, Nick Myers is an incumbent, he's the current chairman of the commission. He accused both the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and Jake Hoffman of approaching him and saying, "You know, you can't get your signs out there because you don't have your Clean Elections money yet."

You know, for these candidates, sometimes that money doesn't come through until later in the primary cycle. And they were like, "Well, we have a few ideas about how you could do it. You know, you could — ... we could buy it for you and then once that money comes through, we, you know, fudge the numbers and backdate that and get reimbursed."

And he told me, "... I believe that was illegal, and so I said, 'No, sir, I'm not going to do that.'"

LAUREN GILGER: OK. What has Hoffman had to say about those allegations?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: They fully denied it. He called Nick Myers basically a sore loser because Hoffman

is backing Heap. He recruited him, he was involved in his campaign, so he basically said, "I didn't — he's making stuff up and I had nothing to do with that."

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so a lot still up in the air in terms of who might end up in what position on this Corporation Commission race right now, Wayne. What's next in all this? What are you watching for?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Well, I'm going to watch how this complaint plays out at the Corporation Commission and whether Ralph Heap ends up signing that document that I mentioned that would release his funding.

What that document asks him to do is affirm that under penalty of perjury that he did file all of his campaign finance reports and that they were accurate. And so it's notable that he is refusing to sign that document given all of the other allegations.

So I want to see how these complaints are playing out. I want to see whether he decides to stay in the race at all. You know ... he can't fundraise right now, so he could potentially drop out. We have a fast-approaching date where maybe he could be replaced on the ballot by Republicans. Because if he isn't, then we have one Republican, Kevin Thompson, running against two Democrats, which guarantees Democrats a pickup on the Corporation Commission.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, lots at play here. KJZZ's Wayne Schutsky with our Politics Desk. Wayne, thanks as always.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yep, thank you.

MARK BRODIE: The U.S. Education Department has sent a public letter to colleges and universities across the country asking a series of questions. Those questions include: How will your institution encourage intellectual pluralism in all its academic units? How will your institution ensure admissions decisions are based on merit, achievement, and your university's educational purpose? And how will you guarantee that unruly and violent protesters do not harass students or disrupt classes, research, public lectures, and campus operations?

This letter comes after the Trump administration offered a Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to a handful of schools, including the University of Arizona, last year.

With me to explain the purpose of this new letter and what might come of it is Francie Diep, senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Francie, good morning.

FRANCIE DIEP: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So what do we know about why the Trump administration sent this letter to basically—it sounds like pretty much every college and university across the country?

FRANCIE DIEP: Well, I talked with an official at the Education Department and he says this is part of a multi-pronged strategy to overhaul higher education in the U.S. It's no secret that the Trump administration thinks that American universities have a lot to fix, and this is just one of the ways they're trying to do that.

MARK BRODIE: Does the Education Department say that they are hoping that these questions will lead universities to make changes? Or is it, you know, there's a sense that, you know, the last one from last year was more of like a shaming or like a threat to cut funding, research funding? Is there anything like that on the table?

FRANCIE DIEP: There is no financial penalties or rewards for following this letter or not. That said, again, the same official I talked to from the Education Department, he's a deputy chief of staff there, did say they are hoping that this, like the other things that they're doing, will start big changes in the university to follow the goals that the Trump administration thinks are important for colleges.

MARK BRODIE: What are you hearing from folks associated with the schools? Like what are—what are universities' reactions to this?

FRANCIE DIEP: Yeah, that's a great question. I've been trying to talk with a bunch of people, including both the leaders of universities and sort of the faculty members who work there. There's a range of responses. You might be interested that Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, which reportedly was involved in helping shape this letter—President Crow said—I'm not going to remember his exact statement, but basically said something like, "This is a good opportunity for universities to talk about what they're doing and show their value to the American people."

The other end of the response spectrum, I would say, is, you know, that we have to look at the fact that over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has done a lot to—I think "attack" is a fair word—attack universities, and that this cannot be a good faith effort.

That said, I think there are a lot of people who are kind of waiting and seeing, trying to figure out how they feel about this. I think everybody in higher ed does feel better about this letter than they did about last year's compact because this letter is less prescriptive and because it does not specify clear financial consequences.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it's interesting. I mean, when the compact came out last year, a lot of folks at universities were saying that it was sort of infringing on academic freedom and was, you know, really kind of threatening universities. It's interesting that this does not seem to be generating that same reaction.

FRANCIE DIEP: It's not generating as much of that reaction, but it is still generating that response from at least some parts of the sector. So the American Association of University Professors, which is a sort of advocacy group for professors, put out a statement that was pretty strong against this letter. They want the letter to be withdrawn. They still feel like this is an infringement upon academic freedom.

I can give you an example of how that could happen or how somebody could see this letter as an infringement even though it has no like requirements or anything in it. So there's sort of seven broad principles in the letter. Generally, they're ones that feel kind of common sense. A lot of universities would probably say that they have the same values. The seventh one talks about how American universities should put Americans first. Again, great value, surely many colleges ascribe to that. That said, I would bet not every single college in the U.S. and not every single faculty member ascribes to that. For example, say you work in public health. Maybe you feel like your commitments are more to humanity in general than to America specifically, or you wouldn't want to prioritize Americans over others. So that's just one example. And in general, you know, I think there's a strong sense at a lot of universities that even if these values are good and we agree with them, they should come from us, not from the federal government.

MARK BRODIE: Ah. Do you have a sense of like what—how universities plan to respond? Like are they going to answer the questions or are they going to, as President Crow suggested, maybe like do a reflection and figure out maybe where they're falling short in some of these areas?

FRANCIE DIEP: Yeah, a few universities have basically indicated that they are going to respond. Crow's statement did sort of suggest that he would respond. The University of Kansas president has said in statements to the media that suggest again that they will also respond. A lot of it is like, "Oh, we'll talk to our campus community," which probably means consulting with some faculty members and then decide what we'll do.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Francie Diep, senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Francie, thanks so much.

FRANCIE DIEP: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It's The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, how one author's connection to Guyana inspired his latest story.

AFSHEEN FARHADI: From a young age, Jonestown and Jim Jones have always kind of figured into my understanding of myself and sort of colored the way I see the world.

MARK BRODIE: We'll hear about a new novel that explores untold family secrets.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, you might be surprised to learn that there was a time in American history when the death penalty was illegal everywhere. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all of the death penalty laws around the country violated the Constitution. They were essentially too arbitrary.

MAURICE CHAMMAH: Who gets the death penalty is really random. You know, a lot of people commit murder every year, really heinous crimes, but who is actually getting sentenced to death row and executed seemed to have no logic to it, right? One justice even said, "It's sort of like being struck by lightning," even among the class of people who commit murder.

LAUREN GILGER: That's Maurice Chammah, a staff writer for The Marshall Project. He and his colleagues are out with a look back at the death penalty 50 years after the Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976. And I spoke with him more about it.

MAURICE CHAMMAH: What really surprised me was how often the death penalty doesn't work in so far as the person who gets sentenced to death, you know, in a trial, the jury decides this person should go to death row, just how rarely that person ever actually gets executed. We found that it was roughly one in five people.

And far, far more people either spend, you know, decades on death row waiting out appeals and all kinds of different dysfunction in the system that just like makes time go by. And then a number of people, there are problems, mistakes in their trials. Sometimes they are potentially innocent and they're exonerated by a governor. Other times, you know, there's some problem like the defense lawyer let's say fell asleep, or there was racism that infected the jury selection. And for whatever reason, the courts throw out the death sentence, and in many of these cases prosecutors eventually give up and the person is resentenced to a sentence less than death.

So a lot of people who were once on death row are actually now just serving out life sentences. And the idea that a system would only work one out of five times, especially given just how expensive it can be, was a real eye-opener, I think, to us in terms of how broken the system is.

LAUREN GILGER: You also say 23 states have abolished the death penalty. That's almost half. I mean, that's a lot.

MAURICE CHAMMAH: That's right. That's right. It's right. We talk about the death penalty as an American institution, you know. You'll often see opponents say it's something America does alongside China and Saudi Arabia and Iran. But that's really actually only true of half of America.

Michigan, Minnesota, a lot of states have just gave it up decades or even more than a century ago, and it's really increasingly concentrated in a handful of states, the ones that you might think of, I'd say, like, you know, Texas and Florida and Arizona. But then it continues to live on in states that might be a little more surprising, like Ohio, a lot of purple states, too.

LAUREN GILGER: What does public opinion look like on this today, Maurice?

MAURICE CHAMMAH: The death penalty sits at just around 50%, you know, just above, just below, depending on what state you're in. And you've really seen a major shift where a lot of the big cities that used to be really supportive of the death penalty have really dropped away in support. They're electing, you know, district attorneys who say, "This isn't really in the interest of my public anymore."

And one way that that plays out really on the ground level — you know, it's one thing for Gallup or Pew to take a poll and get 50%, but it turns out when you go into court and you try to get 12 citizens who are just willing to give someone the death penalty, it's increasingly difficult.

Years ago I sat in a courtroom in Florida watching jury selection for a death penalty case. It was fascinating. And I watched — it was really hard to find 12 people who said, "Yeah, I'm willing to give somebody the death penalty," you know, even if they thought somebody deserved a really serious punishment.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, so that's become less common. That's interesting. So we mentioned many states, almost half in the country, have abolished the death penalty, but not of course here in Arizona. There was an execution here just a few months ago in May that went by with apparently very little incident. But we have seen other executions have issues more recently. And in the last decade or so, we've seen some what even some have called botched executions in Arizona, including this incredibly dramatic story of the 2014 execution of Joseph Wood.

I mean, how emblematic is the difficulty in getting the drugs, carrying out these executions in some kind of humane way that we've seen happen in Arizona? How does that look in the rest of the country?

MAURICE CHAMMAH: I think Arizona's a real bellwether state when it comes to the death penalty. It's politically purple. You have both Democrats and Republicans who have, you know, been in the governor seat, who are really key decision makers on whether to prioritize executions. But it turns out that around the country, it is hard for states, harder for states than ever really, to get pharmaceutical drugs to carry out executions. A lot of the big pharma companies have said they don't want their products used this way.

And so that sends certain states, like Texas for example, going to smaller, more obscure kind of mom-and-pop pharmacies to compound the drugs. There's a lot of secrecy around it. Sometimes there's stories of importing from other countries more or less legally, right? And then you see Arizona, like many states, starting to talk about other methods. I mean, we've now seen South Carolina carry out a few firing squad executions in the last few years. Nitrogen gas has become a method in Alabama.

And in Arizona, I think it perfectly encapsulates the national story, that you have, you know, critics of executions suggesting, well, maybe the firing squad is an option because lethal injection is not guaranteed to work, there's a high rate of botched executions. I also recall some years ago in Arizona a discussion about bringing back cyanide gas and there were sort of Jewish and Holocaust survivor groups who were very opposed to that. So I think the political debate you see around executions in Arizona kind of reflects the national picture pretty clearly.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So let me ask you lastly then, Maurice, about what the future of the death penalty might look like in this country going forward. As you say, it's still rare that it's carried out. Juries are sentencing people to death row less and less often. What does it look like?

MAURICE CHAMMAH: Well, I think you're going to see the death penalty increasingly concentrated in places where there's a lot of political will for it, maybe a very, very concentrated, conservative, pro-death penalty population, but also importantly, where there's money to carry it out.

So Arizona is actually a perfect illustration here. Maricopa County has been a real epicenter of death sentences over the last 50 years, but I remember years ago interviewing a prosecutor in Mohave County, which is very rural, and he said to me very bluntly, "We cannot afford the death penalty." You know, there's serious murders here sometimes, but it's going to cost more than a million dollars to my taxpayers and that is just too big a hit for this county.

So what you're going to see is the death penalty maybe only in increasingly red states, but also increasingly in just these particular counties where there's the tax base to support it. And I think that really raises the question about arbitrariness, going back to these debates that were happening in the '70s about the death penalty, you know. Is it too random? And increasingly today, it can feel like whether someone gets the death penalty has way more to do with where they happen to commit the crime, which side of a county line they were on, than the crime itself.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Maurice Chammah, staff writer for the Marshall Project, joining us with this look back at 50 years of the death penalty in America. Maurice, thank you for coming on. Thanks for your reporting. Appreciate it.

MAURICE CHAMMAH: Yeah, thanks for having me.

MARK BRODIE: Arizona's Paid Parent Caregiver program was created to provide relief to families of children with developmental disabilities who couldn't bring paid caregivers into their homes during the pandemic. The program continued after the world reopened, but federal funding was dramatically reduced. Now the state is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to parent caregivers. As KJZZ's Athena Ankrah and Amy Silverman report, a new audit concluded the agencies responsible failed to implement cost control measures required by state law. The agencies say there's more to the story. Athena Ankrah starts this report.

ATHENA ANKRAH: According to the audit, Arizona's Medicaid agency, AHCCCS, and the Division of Developmental Disabilities, or DDD, could have saved the state between $133 and $493 million in the most recent fiscal year if they had employed the cost-saving methods cemented in state law last summer.

AMY SILVERMAN: Some families call the program a lifesaver. Shawn Cutting's son Dominic, who has autism, was approved for DDD services when he was 3. Finding caregivers was a challenge.

SHAWN CUTTING: And I started finding different support groups and that is really how word-of-mouth—and then I was working at a gas station and a customer told me about where her daughter worked.

ATHENA ANKRAH: Cutting told KJZZ in January that she was able to quit her job at the gas station and provide care for her 7-year-old son full time.

SHAWN CUTTING: That's how I started my journey as a paid caregiver, is finding that company through her, because I was overwhelmed to know there was no help.

ATHENA ANKRAH: Like many other states, Arizona has long had a shortage of paid care providers. The demand became clear after the state extended pandemic-era approval to allow family members like Cutting to be paid to provide that care themselves. By 2025, spending had more than doubled in the prior fiscal year alone. Governor Katie Hobbs signed legislation to address that.

AMY SILVERMAN: Guardrails include a new assessment tool to determine how many paid service hours a child qualifies for. According to the state's audit released July 30th, many of those requirements still haven't been fulfilled. A 40-hour cap was set in 2024. In one week alone, auditors found 257 parents were paid for more than 40 hours of care.

ATHENA ANKRAH: The new assessment tool has still not been put into effect. Governor Hobbs paused that after outcry from parents who felt the new guidelines were unreasonable. That tool is being tweaked and is set to take effect on December 1st.

AMY SILVERMAN: Cynthia MacLuskie isn't surprised by the audit's findings.

CYNTHIA MACLUSKIE: Well, first of all, it's nice to be vindicated because for months and months now, we have been asking DDD about what exactly was happening and were they meeting those metrics that they were supposed to be meeting, and we were constantly being told it was going great, but it didn't seem like it was going great when I was talking to families and providers.

AMY SILVERMAN: MacLuskie is the advocacy director for the Autism Society of Greater Phoenix. She says that from the outset, many in the community raised questions about the program's sustainability.

CYNTHIA MACLUSKIE: Before this was rolled out, we had meetings, and there was many of us that said, "What are the guardrails? What is the plan? Does anybody not see that this is going to be a problem?" And the answer back from AHCCCS and DDD is, "It's going to be just fine, thank you." There were many of us that were like, "Oh my god, this is going to be a train wreck."

ATHENA ANKRAH: Jon Meyers, executive director of the Arizona Developmental Disabilities Planning Council, has reservations about the audit's findings.

JON MEYERS: They should have at least asked more questions before they made sort of overarching statements about how Arizona's program could be improved.

ATHENA ANKRAH: But the audit wasn't wrong about everything, Meyers adds.

JON MEYERS: I think what happened with Arizona's system was largely, if not entirely, a result of implementing the Parents as Paid Caregivers program incorrectly, not having good controls over it, not enforcing the rules that were spelled out.

AMY SILVERMAN: Governor Hobbs declined comment for this story. State legislator Matt Gress, a Scottsdale Republican who has been involved in discussions regarding the Paid Parent Caregiver program, did not respond to a request for comment.

Both AHCCCS and the Department of Economic Security, which oversees DDD, provided responses to auditors. Both say they can't comply with the assessment tool yet since the governor imposed delays.

ATHENA ANKRAH: AHCCCS argued the increased spending cited in the audit isn't only attributable to this program, but to other costly, widely used services like ABA therapy. The agency also said it has been moving toward a 40-hour cap and has valid reasons for continuing to pay some families more.

DES says it's been compliant with the law and is requiring parent caregivers to sign forms acknowledging the 40-hour limit.

For KJZZ News in Phoenix, I'm Athena Ankrah.

AMY SILVERMAN: And I'm Amy Silverman.

MARK BRODIE: You can read full statements from both AHCCCS and DES at kjzz.org.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it's The Show on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. Dust getting in the air can be a big problem in the desert, as we've seen this week, when heavy winds pick it up and create a moving wall of dust. But my next guest says dust storms aren't the only issue. Recurring lower levels of dust in the air also have implications for public health and aviation, among other things.

So researchers at Arizona's public universities have been looking into ways to keep dust on the ground, and not just by spraying it with water as you can often see at construction sites. Ferran Garcia-Pichel is one of those researchers. He's a professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences and the Biodesign Institute, where he researches microbiology and environmental microbiology. He says at some point, scientists realized microbial communities that live in the desert could be part of the solution, and as it turns out, he says, they can be a big part.

Garcia-Pichel joins me to talk more about his work, and Ferran, you're looking at these microbial communities and it seems you found there's a short-term solution and a longer-term solution?

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: So there is two routes to this idea. One is, it comes from our lab, and we've been working for many years on these communities, and if you look at the composition of the dust in the air, and you do a little bit of forensics or CSI by looking at the DNA that's in this dust, you can tell that all of the signal that you find in this dust comes from areas of the desert that are human-impacted. But the natural desert does not emit much at all. You can't hardly find any signatures from the things that are typical there. So that tells us the natural desert, the untouched desert, is impervious to erosion pretty much.

And so that's why making or trying to figure out how to return these natural communities called biocrusts to the top of the desert would be a solution to this problem. So when a field goes fallow, for example, if we could accelerate the return of these communities, we would solve the problem in a way that is not just effective, but it's also self-sustaining. These are living communities that every time that it rains, they grow a bit more and they recover.

MARK BRODIE: And you're not using more water to do it, right?

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Well, it just what comes from the air.

MARK BRODIE: Right.

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. So that was one leg. The other leg comes from the engineering sort of thing, side of things. And this is a methodology called EICP, which that was originally developed to self-restore concrete, but that found an application, various other applications. And this is based on adding a mixture of chemicals with a particular reaction that happens in there, that essentially makes also a crust, but it's a chemical crust.

And this is a chemical process, and we have developed it to apply to those fallow fields, and you can make a crust that's impervious, that makes the soil impervious to erosion within a day. So the idea of this project was, can we put A and B together and do a one-two punch approach? Really like think about this as reforestation.

MARK BRODIE: Mm-hmm.

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: But instead of using trees, we use microbes.

MARK BRODIE: Right. How easy or difficult would it be to scale that up? I mean, if you have a fallow field, we're talking about a lot of land here.

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Correct. And so this is a problem. And at this point, we were really pushing the envelope a bit. We had been doing sort of demonstration scale experiments, pilot experiments, sort of square-yard size, and it works. But this was already an issue for us. Can we scale it up to the acre scale? And each one of them has different problems associated with it, or with each.

For example, the chemical process, yes, it's a problem to have enough materials, but the delivery becomes a problem. For the biological restoration, the issue becomes, how do we get enough inoculum to put back? How do we develop effective nurseries or microbial nurseries, should I say, to get the inoculum?

MARK BRODIE: You have to grow it.

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: You have to grow it.

MARK BRODIE: So is it fair to say then that what you're finding is more applicable for fallow fields and keeping the dust on the ground than, for example, an active construction zone where people are going to be walking around and would presumably be stepping on and kicking up the biocrust that you'd be putting there anyway?

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. I think you're right in the logic of it. We can't say for sure because we haven't done construction sites. The research we've done is on these fallow fields. So anyway, we've been, you know, we've been at it for four years now, and we have made some progress, and we also have found out things that were not expected and so, which I think are important.

MARK BRODIE: Like what?

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: So for example, one of the things that we were surprised about was that in some cases the best thing to do to make the fallow field crust is do nothing. And that was very surprising to us.

MARK BRODIE: Just leave it be?

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Just leave it be. That's not what we're doing as a society, and I'll explain this. So we picked a site as a test site along I-10 in Pinal County, an area that's really prone to these episodes of high dust in the air. And one of the things we had to do because this was an experiment is we had to ask the farmer, "Please do not plow the field." And what happens was the soils crusted by themselves.

And so that turned then into, OK, so now we have a different approach to apply our eventually successful approaches. If we don't have to treat absolutely everything, but let's just go treat the soils that have low carbonate because they will not crust. So that sort of suddenly, we had a way of prioritizing.

MARK BRODIE: Oh, interesting. So you didn't have to do the whole field necessarily, for example, just the areas where there was a certain level.

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: More or less correct. The whole field is probably acting as one, but in terms of regional, there's soils that have high carbonate, soils that have — so we did a survey between here and Tucson, and we found out which soils are more prone to self-crusting, we don't need to touch this.

Now, the problem with not doing anything is that it's not possible, because farmers have also a mandate to plow to prevent the growth of weeds. So now we have a regulatory issue here because they are mandated by one agency to plow the field and prevent weeds from growing. From the other one, they are also mandated to keep the dust down. So as scientists, we cannot solve that.

MARK BRODIE: What does all this cost? Like, how feasible is it financially to, for example, in the areas where if you leave it, it's not just going to crust over on its own, to either grow or import a crust?

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. The actual cost will probably go down the bigger we go. However, it is not cheap. You need people, you need monitoring, but how much is the cost of public health? I don't have an answer for you at how much it would eventually cost, but it wouldn't be cheap.

MARK BRODIE: So for non-farm areas where there's a lot of dust, at least for the foreseeable future, is trying to tamp down the dust with water the answer? Like, are there other things that you're maybe looking into for construction sites, for example, or for the open desert?

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. For the open desert, if it's a pristine desert, you need nothing. It does not provide a lot of dust if it's open and untouched, so. If you're patient, even the agricultural fields, the construction sites, the natural crust, if you don't keep the human pressure on it, will eventually come back. 20 years?

MARK BRODIE: That's a long time, yeah.

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Are you willing to wait for 20 years? So that's the key. The intervention would make it a couple years.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Ferran Garcia-Pichel. He is a professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences and the Biodesign Institute. Ferran, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: It's my pleasure to talk about what I do. I love it.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It's The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I'm Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. An actor who grew up in Phoenix is forced to face both the truths and the untruths about his family in a new novel called "False Prophet." It follows the story of Jal as he works his way through dealing with the death of his mother, about whom it turns out Jal didn't know all that much.

The story also involves the Jonestown cult, which leader Jim Jones started in the U.S., but relocated to Guyana, where Jal's mom was from. That's the cult that inspired the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" when more than 900 of Jones' followers died in 1978 after drinking a poisoned drink.

Afsheen Farhadi is the author of "False Prophet." He also teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, and like Jal, he grew up in the Valley. He joins me to talk more about the novel, and Afsheen, where did the idea for the story come from?

AFSHEEN FARHADI: My mom's family is from Guyana and there isn't a ton of overlap between my life and Jal's, the main character of the novel. But one similarity is that he was also born and raised in Phoenix where when I was growing up at least, there wasn't really a big Guyanese presence. When my family told people they were from Guyana, people often thought they meant Ghana, or misheard and said "Ghana?" So in order to distinguish Guyana for them, my family would say, "Well, have you heard of Jonestown, Jim Jones, The Peoples Temple?" Often that did the trick and so it became this marker of Guyana, not just for these strangers, but for me.

So as weird as it might seem or sound, from a young age, Jonestown and Jim Jones have always kind of figured into my understanding of myself and sort of colored the way I see the world. And I think the novel started there with me wanting to explore what it is that's so compelling, perennially compelling about these cults. And I think one reason is because for most of us, we see evidence of cult-like behavior in various facets of our lives. You know, anytime—it's a bit of a reduction—but anytime people are kind of united in a in a single goal or mission, whether it's toxic or not, they are drinking, as I see it, from some sort of collective Kool-Aid.

MARK BRODIE: What was it like when you were growing up, you mentioned, you know, people had not heard of your home country, you mentioned Jonestown. Like, that seems like a tough thing to have the place you're from known for.

AFSHEEN FARHADI: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like I think for my family who is from Guyana, so my mom and her side of the family were born there, I was born in the U.S., it probably is this sort of this sort of thing that they had to kind of figure out how to deal with later in life, whereas for me, it was sort of my origin point for understanding what Guyana is and sort of understanding where it is and how it's seen by the rest of the world. I never really was turned off or or scared by the the kind of darker elements of it. I just kind of appreciated the fact that, you know, my culture felt so invisible to the people around me, and I had this reference point to kind of make it seen by them.

MARK BRODIE: That's so interesting. Well, so did that also sort of help guide your curiosity into why people are so drawn to cults in so many ways?

AFSHEEN FARHADI: Yeah, it definitely did. For this novel, I mean, the appeal of cults to the followers is of course very, very interesting, but the thing that I really focused on was the appeal of sort of becoming that type of figure for the would-be cult leader.

So sometimes people ask, is Jim Jones the antagonist of the novel? And I say, not necessarily. What is, is the thing that creates people like Jim Jones. So with Jones, like other dangerous narcissists and megalomaniacs throughout history, there's this common narrative you hear sometimes, like, if only Adolf Hitler had been admitted to art school. It's super reductive, but I do think there's some truth to it in that for these narcissists and and would-be false prophets, it seems to stem from this trauma or damage that they experience early in life that creates an absence that they later in life go to extreme measures to fill.

And thinking about that, that is a sort of, of course, extreme in the cases of like Jim Jones or or the way my novel is sort of handling it, but it is sort of a relatable struggle in that we all experience pains and traumas in childhood and throughout our lives that it's up to us to figure out how to deal with.

MARK BRODIE: Well, and it seems like, and please correct me if you think I'm wrong about this, that Jal kind of walks on both sides of that line, right? Like he's trying to find out about his mom, which seems like a very noble endeavor, but in the end, I don't want to give too much away, but like a lot of what he ends up talking about is not what actually happened.

AFSHEEN FARHADI: Absolutely. I mean, one of the—so I teach creative writing, obviously, and I tend to think of character in terms of craft. And so one question I've thought about is, is Jal an unreliable narrator? And I think, I mean, in a in a larger sense, I think, you know, anytime you have a first-person narrator, just like anytime you're listening to someone tell a story, there's always an aspect of unreliability, because people, and I think Jal really embodies this, people are flawed and they have blind spots. One of Jal's big problems as I see it is that he's sort of unable to accept the unsavory, difficult truths about his life, and instead, as the novel goes along, comes to rely on these sort of pleasant lies that he's telling.

MARK BRODIE: Well, that kind of behavior strikes me as not entirely dissimilar from what we often think of as someone who's leading a cult.

AFSHEEN FARHADI: Exactly. Yeah. And and someone who's leading a cult and then also the thing that kind of draws people to cults, which is it is this this narrative that is digestible in one sense and also uncomplicated in another sense, and and ultimately is a is a sort of utopian vision to to the believer.

MARK BRODIE: What I find so interesting about all that is that I would imagine it's not terribly uncommon for when a family member dies that, you know, somebody is not particularly close to or maybe has a lot of questions about, they kind of go on this quest, right, to try to figure out who was this person. Maybe who is this person before I knew them or, you know, in the case of a parent, like when they were a child, that kind of thing. But it seems like I would imagine in many cases the person actually wants to get to the truth and kind of embrace it as messy as it might be, which is not what Jal does, as you reference. He finds the truth and kind of doesn't like it, so he makes up something else.

AFSHEEN FARHADI: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a—and that's a very good point. Anytime someone dies, there is a there's a number of responses to it. One is this sudden desire to know them in a way that you perhaps didn't when they were alive. And the other is a sort of, as I see it anyway, it is a sort of re-remembering of this person.

MARK BRODIE: So other than the fact that you also spent time here in your childhood, any particular reason you chose to set this in Phoenix?

AFSHEEN FARHADI: Well, I wanted—so Jal is an actor. I don't know if we've mentioned that, but he lives in Hollywood, so he lives in California. And, and I did want that his mom and his childhood to be sort of near at hand, near-ish at hand, but also distant. And so growing up in Phoenix, you know, we always had this sense of how close California is, and—but then culturally, the two are very different. And so there was something about that proximity and that that that level of distance that I thought was was very interesting to me.

And also because Jal experiences what I did, which is there are these sort of cultural hotbeds of, you know, of Guyanese people, of the diaspora. Arizona and Phoenix in particular, at least when I was growing up, was not one of those places. And so I wanted Jal to kind of have that experience, too, where where he felt like that part of his identity was maybe a little unknown, a little invisible, and part of his impulse, I think, for telling this this lie is to sort of bring that part of him under the spotlight a little bit.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Afsheen Farhadi, a teacher of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. His new book is called "False Prophet." Afsheen, thank you so much.

AFSHEEN FARHADI: Thank you so much, Mark. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show's podcast. The Show is produced by Kaely Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban and 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.