The Show for Aug. 13, 2026: Ending Flock camera contracts, new Valley fever meds and more

Law enforcement agencies around the Valley are investigating officers’ misuse of Flock license plate tracking technology. Why one sheriff says he is getting rid of the AI cameras. Plus, a new medication is showing promise for some Valley fever patients.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: 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.

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, there’s a new Valley fever drug that’s shown some promising results so far.

MARK BRODIE: And it is monsoon season in Arizona, and storm chasers are crisscrossing the state in pursuit of the perfect shot of lightning.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, law enforcement agencies across the Valley are investigating officers’ misuse of Flock license plate tracking technology. In Goodyear, a police officer is under criminal investigation for potentially misusing the license plate reader system. In Apache Junction, an officer turned in his badge after using the system to try to track down his wife. And Chandler’s police chief said his department is investigating an employee related to the use of Flock.

Well, our next guest this morning says none of that happened in his department, but he decided not to renew Flock’s contract anyway. Ross Teeple is the sheriff in Pinal County. I spoke with him more about his decision.

ROSS TEEPLE: My concerns from a business standpoint was is the contract was getting ready to expire, and we had to notify them 45 days or more prior to the contract, or it would automatically renew. So that was one of the things. There was not enough time for me to get the answers to the questions that I had before we would have ran out of time to tell them we’re not going to renew.

LAUREN GILGER: You talked to the Board of Supervisors, I believe, about the capabilities of these Flock cameras in terms of doing more than reading license plates. What else can they do?

ROSS TEEPLE: Well, by Flock’s own writing, they say that they use artificial intelligence to create a digital fingerprint of a vehicle traveling down the roadway.

LAUREN GILGER: Are they recognizing faces? Are they live-streaming video? I mean, it sounds like what you’re concerned about is basically being able to track where your citizens are at all times.

ROSS TEEPLE: And what I’m concerned about is what technology is contained in the cameras that — I know what my deputies are using them for is lawful to run a license plate to see if it traveled down this roadway. The Supreme Court, that’s settled case law.

License plate readers are a great tool. We just used them last night. But I don’t know what capabilities the cameras have beyond the access that my deputies have. And once a company starts compiling a database, I have concerns of ... what that database is being used for.

LAUREN GILGER: Were you hearing concerns from people in the community about these cameras? I know many communities around the state, around the country have been, you know, debating these Flock cameras in particular because of questions about, you know, privacy and about where that data is being stored.

ROSS TEEPLE: Yes, ma’am. A lot of concerns. A lot of emails forwarded to me from the Pinal County Board of Supervisors. They would get emails from constituents, and I got emails directly to me with the citizens voicing a lot of concern. And I don’t know if you know, but I am for the people, and I listen to the people because they’re my employer.

LAUREN GILGER: I want to back up for a moment. You mentioned, you know, the sort of purported use of these cameras, the point of them to begin with, to read license plates. How does your department use that?

ROSS TEEPLE: Well, the best example I can give of that is an unfortunate incident that happened on Hunt Highway in Arizona Farms here recently. An aggressive driver pushed a young lady into oncoming traffic. She tragically lost her life. And human beings can be great witnesses, and sometimes we can be flawed witnesses. Everyone on scene reported what the vehicle looked like differently than what it actually was. My deputy was able to log onto the system, locate the suspect vehicle and take the suspect into custody.

LAUREN GILGER: Interesting. So you are not the first to say you’re getting rid of this technology. The Chandler Police Department is ending their contract with Flock. They said there was potential misuse of the information by an employee. We saw the same thing just happen with an officer in Apache Junction. He had to give up his badge. You say you know your officers have not misused this technology, but it does sound like you’re concerned about the potential for that.

ROSS TEEPLE: No. That was not a concern of mine in the decision-making process at all. My deputies are outstanding individuals, very ethical, and they were using it for what the Supreme Court says that we’re allowed to use it for.

LAUREN GILGER: Are there mechanisms in place in your department there to ensure that that’s the case? I mean, are there ways of checking and making sure that it is always or has always been used ethically?

ROSS TEEPLE: We have a very stringent LPR policy at the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office. It’s detailed out what it can be used for and the purposes for it.

LAUREN GILGER: What’s the reaction been like in your community there, Sheriff, to this decision to not renew this contract with Flock? As you said, you’d been getting a lot of concerns forwarded to you from the County Board of Supervisors. You’d heard from many people in the community about their concerns about this. Are people happy that you’re not going to have this anymore?

ROSS TEEPLE: Now, I’ve only been in office 18 months, and it’s a real honor to serve the citizens of Pinal County. I will tell you my decision has been extremely popular with the citizens, and it is by far the most nonpartisan thing that I’ve experienced, because I have had people from all walks of life stop me when I’m grocery shopping or I’ll be at public events thanking me for what I did.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it does seem to be an issue that crosses party lines entirely. What do folks say? I mean, thanking you, what are their concerns about this technology? Is it they know about that database? Are they concerned they’re being surveilled, essentially?

ROSS TEEPLE: Yes. That is their big concern is — I was taught in the academy when I went through the police academy that if I track someone electronically to the degree that if I did it in person, it would be considered harassment, then that’s a concern, and I have to get a warrant.

So if I followed you when you left your house and went to the grocery store and then followed you from the grocery store to your work and followed you all day long, you’d have a reasonable complaint that I’m harassing you. They’re worried about the fact that a private corporation is building a database where they can do that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Do we know, Sheriff, where this data is stored, for how long, who has access to it, things like that? It sounds like those are questions you were trying to get answers to.

ROSS TEEPLE: Yes, ma’am. And I definitely believe that not only the citizens of Pinal County, but of the United States want to know what’s where the data is stored and how it’s being used.

LAUREN GILGER: So in the age of AI — and this is the last question I have for you, with this kind of big-picture look at this, right? Like, we’re in this world in which, I mean, anybody can be recording anyone almost at any time. I think a lot of people assume that anything they’re doing is probably being recorded somewhere. I mean, do you think that these issues of data and privacy and security and surveillance for people are going to become more and more salient and more and more present for law enforcement like you?

ROSS TEEPLE: I think so. And I mean, if there’s one takeaway is AI is currently polling worse than Congress, so that’s got to tell you something.

LAUREN GILGER: It certainly does. All right, we’ll leave it there. Sheriff Ross Teeple joining us from Pinal County. Sheriff, thank you very much for coming back on The Show. Appreciate it.

ROSS TEEPLE: Thank you. I appreciate you getting the word out there and the information out there.

MARK BRODIE: State health officials say there have been more than 7,000 confirmed and probable cases of Valley fever so far this year. That number was close to 12,000 last year. A new study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine finds a new medication is proving to be effective in treating patients with a type of Valley fever called disseminated coccidioidomycosis.

With me to talk about this is John Galgiani, director of the Valley Fever Center for Excellence at the University of Arizona. John, who are these patients and what does this treatment look like?

JOHN GALGIANI: Sure. So there’s this new drug, not yet approved by the FDA, called Olorofim. And it actually has a spectrum of activity against a number of different exotic fungi, but it also has activity against the fungus that causes Valley fever. And the first study done with this was an international study, but here in Arizona and other places where cocci is a common disease, we used it for those patients.

And the patients to get into that study had to really be failing everything else that was available. It was essentially a salvage study. So there’s no randomized control here. It was simply people that weren’t doing well at everything we had available on the market already, and they were enrolled in this study.

And when we looked at the subset, and this is really work done by Dr. Fariba Donovan as the lead author on this multicenter study, she found and her colleagues with her found that these patients actually stabilized or in general got better on this treatment.

Now, it’s problematic because there was no comparison group, and so you have trouble. This is over time. There’s a lot of reasons to have trouble being sure what that means, but in fact, the patients got better on that treatment, really suggesting that it deserved more treatment trials than it had already.

MARK BRODIE: So do you consider this promising then as a treatment for at least for some Valley fever patients?

JOHN GALGIANI: Yes. ... The treatments we have today are not curative. Nothing cures this disease. Some of them help and they put the fungus to sleep, but that if the immune system doesn’t keep it under control, it comes back when you stop the drugs. So that people with cocci meningitis, for example, we recommend no matter how well you do to never stop treatment for the rest of your life.

So any new drugs have the potential that it can do better than that. And so we think that this drug, some of the preliminary data suggest it has that potential. We don’t know that yet. But that’s a possibility. But even if it was not any better, having another drug with an entirely different mechanism of action just expands the spectrum of options available to a clinician.

MARK BRODIE: So is it fair to say that one of the things that you are looking for next is to see how this drug would work on patients compared to a control group?

JOHN GALGIANI: Yes. Valley fever meningitis, it’s a special case because we have very strong historical evidence that if you aren’t treated at all, and we know that because there were no treatments till the 1960s, without treatment, it’s a lethal infection. So if you have a drug that gets people surviving, I think you don’t need a comparison group.

But for all the rest of the forms of Valley fever, it’s a little bit variable. So you would want to compare it. Now you wouldn’t the patients that have serious disease, you wouldn’t be able to do a placebo control, but you’d do some sort of a randomization where they’d either get olorofim, or whatever the new drug is, and compare it to standard therapy.

MARK BRODIE: So we’re talking about patients in studies who have been diagnosed with Valley fever. I know that the diagnosis is often sort of a challenge in and of itself. Where are we in terms of accurate and reliable testing for Valley fever?

JOHN GALGIANI: Well, for the most serious form, which fortunately is only a small percentage of patients, it’s pretty obvious. Those people may have delays, and they often do have delays, but eventually they get diagnosed because they have such damage to their bodies.

But for most people, they don’t have that kind of progressive infection. And for those patients, we do a very, very bad job of finding it. Some of those patients may never really have a serious illness, may not seek medical care, either because they can’t, because they can’t get off work, for example, or don’t have any money, or because they aren’t sick enough.

But for most people who seek care, there’s a huge delay in diagnosis, if they get diagnosed at all. In fact, there’s CDC information now that shows an average delay of 30 days for most people who get diagnosed with Valley fever and at a cost of $175 per day. So we could change that simply by having doctors doing more tests. And I think to get that to happen, it probably also means raising the awareness of everybody who lives here where this disease is so common.

MARK BRODIE: But I would imagine also that 30 days isn’t going to cut it, right? Like you go to the clinic for a flu test or a COVID test or a strep test, you know the result before you leave the exam room.

JOHN GALGIANI: That’s right. And unfortunately, the tests we have today are tests that go to a referral clinic. And so you don’t get the results back for two days at the fastest, and often much longer time lags. We’d love to have point-of-care tests, and there’s work being done in that direction as well.

MARK BRODIE: Is there also work on trying to figure out for folks who maybe are asymptomatic, because a lot of folks who have Valley fever never see symptoms. Like, is there a way to tell if you have been infected at some point in your life?

JOHN GALGIANI: Yes. We’ve actually for many years were doing skin tests for Valley fever. There is a test now available again, but in fact, it’s kind of cumbersome and is not being used very widely, and also has frequently some false negatives.

But we’ve been working on a test at the University of Arizona where we measure blood cells from a blood draw, simple blood draw, and we can find lymphocytes that show that we have memory to a past infection. And that is really a useful test. So we could do this without injecting something into your skin and tell you whether or not you whether you knew it or not had had Valley fever in the past.

And that would be really useful if you then need to have some sort of a therapy, for example, which is going to suppress your immune system, and it might inform whether or not that suppressive therapy is going to be risky to you or whether you can do it without any problem. So that’s a thing. And plus, with this test to tell whether or not you’ve had Valley fever in the past, we can use that to actually calculate what the risk is on average annually of getting Valley fever. And that’s very valuable to help with vaccine sample size estimate for doing the clinical trials to see if a vaccine works.

MARK BRODIE: So one of the things that every time you and I talk, you bring up this issue of awareness. You brought it up a little bit ago. What are you trying to do now? Like, you’ve been sort of beating this drum for years and years and years now, trying to tell people about Valley fever and teach patient, potential patients and physicians about Valley fever. Like, are those efforts working?

JOHN GALGIANI: They’re working in some places, but there’s a lot more to do. It’s not, unfortunately, widespread. And that’s I think partly because people who live here are not aware as they should be about this disease. I think that awareness of Valley fever is your best defense. There’s really no way to prevent inhaling a spore.

So knowing about it is probably the best single thing we can do. And I think for people to know about it, they’re going to start asking their doctors, "Don’t you think you should test me for Valley fever?" when they should be. And I think that’ll I think the medical community will respond and start doing it. I think it should be done a lot more frequently, even if you get a number of negatives. That’s better than missing that one positive a few times. So I’m fully in support of that.

MARK BRODIE: All right, John Galgiani, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

JOHN GALGIANI: Sure.

MARK BRODIE: John Galgiani is director of the Valley Fever Center for Excellence at the University of Arizona.

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

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: Monsoon storms are finally bringing us some rain this week, but our next guest this morning has been zig-zagging the state for weeks now, chasing the storms in hopes of capturing the perfect bolt of lightning, haboob, or supercell with her camera. Lori Grace Bailey is a professional photographer and storm chaser based in southern Arizona who has actually been struck by lightning, but not in the process of chasing a storm. I spoke with her more about it all.

Let’s begin with just like a a taste of what life is like this time of year for you, because it’s monsoon season. This is like when you are on high alert, right? What’s it like?

LORI GRACE BAILEY: Sure. I just have to admit, like, every single day is exhausting. But at the same time, you know, when you get to pursue your passion, you get it done, right? You pursue the things that you love, and you don’t get tired of doing the things you love.

LAUREN GILGER: So you are watching the radars, doing some meteorology in this, right? And literally just going where the storms are every day.

LORI GRACE BAILEY: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. It’s all about forecasting, targeting. You know, you need to have that dedication if you really want to get beautiful shots like that. You can wait for them to come to you, but I don’t know how many days, you know, you’re going to have to wait. And when they do come, they’re still spectacular. Every place in Arizona ends up with a spectacular shot. But I want to get more.

So I’m willing to drive the distance. Unfortunately, it sometimes it takes me to the Arizona-New Mexico state line, like it did the other day with that huge dust storm slash haboob that came across the highway. And got off the highway, shot it safely, and I got to provide some ground information, some ground truth to the National Weather Service as a trained severe storm spotter.

LAUREN GILGER: Let’s talk about how you got into storm chasing, because I know you’ve kind of had other lives, other careers, but you’ve always, it sounds like, loved the weather in a way. Like, this is part of your roots.

LORI GRACE BAILEY: Absolutely. You know, I grew up in El Paso, Texas, so not the same desert, the Chihuahuan Desert, but my mother would always take me to the park, you know, when she could. And we would just stare at the clouds, and my love for weather, my affinity for storms really happened back when I was a kid.

And not until like around 2015 when I started to realize, hey, I can point these really cool cameras at the sky and capture what we as Arizonans always have been watching with our own eyes, and to be able to capture that and share that with the world. People go, “I did not know that that’s what you could see in Arizona. I just thought it was dusty and hot.” And that’s farther from the truth.

LAUREN GILGER: So how do you prepare when you spot a storm on the radar and you start driving toward it? What do you bring? What are you getting ready for?

LORI GRACE BAILEY: You know, I’m trying to look at the weather models a few days out. I’m trying to figure out not only where I want to go, but the kind of shots that I’m after, because I’ve been doing this for so long, I just don’t want to get a a picture of a lightning bolt. I really want to capture the essence of Arizona.

And so I have a bucket list of shots that I’m trying to get. And so I will forgo a a decent storm to try and get that epic color, that sensational color that we see on a on a sunset storm. Every Arizonan knows what that looks like. Doesn’t always happen, but I’m always trying to to pick that forecast. And then I get out there and I just watch the storms.

LAUREN GILGER: There have got to be some kind of major risks involved in this. Like, have you ever come close to some pretty serious incidents, accidents, etc.?

LORI GRACE BAILEY: Absolutely, Lauren. You know, there is an inherent risk to storm chasing, and when friends or, you know, tour groups want to go out with us and and take a look at all of this stuff, you have to know the dangers. And unfortunately, I don’t want to see other people injured by this stuff. And and I mitigate risk, you know. As a as a former law enforcement officer, we learn about mitigating risks, and it’s it’s no different with storm chasing. And I know that I can bring that ground truth to also warn others as well.

My biggest fear isn’t the bolts of lightning, even though I’ve been struck by lightning. My biggest fear is actually the flooding, you know? Turn around, don’t drown. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I was safe, and as I was driving away from the storm, the next wash to my north or wherever was, you know, was full. And I just realized I was stuck kind of on an island until the storm until the waters passed. When that happens, it’s game over. Yeah, yeah, it’s game over.

I am not going to drive in that. It terrifies me. And so I want to avoid flooding. Of course, I want to avoid getting struck by lightning again. But I know that sounds crazy.

LAUREN GILGER: So, I mean, as you mentioned there, you have survived a lightning strike before, which is obviously incredibly rare, but wild. I mean, what do you remember of that? How do you think that’s impacted your desire to go out and capture images of lightning now? Like, there’s got to be a connection there, right?

LORI GRACE BAILEY: Yeah, so I, you know, I was on duty, actually, and I was outside, you know, during a thunderstorm and in the late-day monsoon. And a bolt hit the vehicle, I think, and I was standing outside of it. And the next thing I remember is a week, a minute later, another officer’s like telling me to get up and get to my car because I was at a different car, and and it’s pouring rain.

So I like to tell people when I tell the story, which has happened I’ve told the story a thousand times, but I tell them and I start off with it was a revolting experience, you know, bolts. Terrible joke, I know. Rimshot.

But all in all, I just remember it hurt a lot. I hurt a lot afterwards from all the soreness, and the short-term memory loss just really is debilitating, and you have to try to work around that.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s a crazy thing to have happened to you. So I have to ask, because your history’s in law enforcement, you’re a storm chaser now. I mean, do you think there’s something in your personality that sort of draws you to these kind of extreme careers?

LORI GRACE BAILEY: You know, I I think so. And I think that, you know, being in law enforcement, I think that there is an element of being an adrenaline junkie. So, you know, I think that that is true.

But you know, Lauren, something last night as I was driving home from probably one of my best shots ever near Sierra Vista, something called a bolt from the blue. You might want to go down that rabbit hole. Sometimes lightning strikes miles away from the parent storm. And I actually captured one of these because my camera happened to be shooting where it wasn’t supposed to be, and I still captured this bolt shooting way out of the storm, and it’s just such an incredible bucket-list to capture.

And on the way home, I was thinking, why am I still doing this? You know, and what I think it comes down to is that, you know, I’m a little older in life now, and I think it’s just the way that I’m trying to live my best life, you know? I really think that this challenge, it continues to challenge me, and I want to suck the marrow out of life, you know, because it’s just so short.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. I mean, so there must be something about lightning in particular that fascinates you, especially having been hit by it, right?

LORI GRACE BAILEY: Yeah, yeah. And it was, yeah, it was even beforehand. You know, there’s something that truly is sensational, and and it it’s almost magical when you’re standing out there and you see lightning. But beyond the lightning, it’s it’s that sunset, that Arizona sunset coupled with the Arizona skies, and then you do bring in that color, and then you couple that with a sunset storm. You know, it’s a chef’s kiss of photography.

So we have people all over the world that come to Arizona to chase the monsoon. I don’t know if you knew that, but there are hundreds of people that come here. And I have the privilege of living in what I call Monsoon Central, living in Rio Rico. We get that here.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about a favorite shot, a favorite moment, maybe this season in in shooting a monsoon. You talked about just a bucket-list item you just got the other day, but I’m looking at your Instagram feed here. There are so many.

LORI GRACE BAILEY: Yes, yes. Like I said, I captured that bolt from the blue yesterday. That has always been a bucket list, but there’s something they’re called transient luminous events, also known as TLEs. And here in southern Arizona, it’s a hidden secret that if you look at storms in Mexico, you know, those nights where it’s clear in Arizona, but you look down to the south and 1, 2, 300 miles away, you see the flickering of all these storms deep over the Sierra Madre Occidentals.

The best thing about that is you can use a a camera and point down there and actually capture something called a sprite or a blue jet. And these are essentially upward atmospheric lightning. And I’ve captured so many images of those. Those are also on my Instagram, a few of those.

And it’s just amazing to be able to be one of the few people in all of existence to have captured and seen something like that. So that’s always a bucket list, seeing those type of things.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, we’ll leave it there for now. I hope you have an amazing monsoon season. That is Lori Grace Bailey, a professional photographer and storm chaser, who lives in southern Arizona. Lori, thank you so much for coming on The Show. I really appreciate it.

LORI GRACE BAILEY: It’s been a pleasure, Lauren. Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware Ted Lasso, everyone’s favorite overly optimistic football coach, is back.

[AUDIO CLIP FROM TED LASSO]

TED LASSO: Let’s play a game. Everybody’s got to say what they’ve been up to the last couple of years. You only get 10 seconds, and you can’t say anything about work. All right, Higgins, go!

HIGGINS: Oh, caught you in mid-rib. That’s my bad.

TED LASSO: I’ll tell you what I’ll go first, OK? Let’s see, moved back home, loving life. My mom’s moving out of my childhood home. That’s a whole thing. And oh, Henry grew a foot. You know, in height, not a third one.

LAUREN GILGER: Not a third one. This time, he is back in Richmond, brought on board to coach their new women’s team, the Lady Greyhounds. The new season came as a welcome surprise to AFC Richmond fans — including me — after the show officially ended three years ago, one of all of our favorite COVID comfort watches alongside shows like “The Great British Bake Off.”

But how does this show read today in 2026? Here to give us her take is the show’s resident pop culture expert, Amanda Kehrberg. She’s a Ph.D. student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication who studies digital culture. Good morning, Amanda.

Good morning, Amanda.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Good morning, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so I have not seen the new season yet of “Ted Lasso,” so no spoilers. But I just have so many positive associations with Ted Lasso, Amanda. I cannot wait to watch this. What do you think? Is this the most positive show on TV today?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: I think it is, and I think we really needed it back, and that’s partly what made Jason Sudeikis actually bring it back was all of the fan attention over the years saying, like, “Hey, this was the kind of influence that we miss in our lives. This was the kind of escape from our daily lives that we really want back, the kinds of examples of people we want to be and lives we want to live and communities we want to build.”

And so I think it’s really, really exciting to have it back. Visually, at the moment it starts, you get these bold, saturated colors, you know, primary colors. Like everything about it is so bright and welcoming and exciting.

But I will warn you — and I think this helps it not feel so naive, I think. It’s difficult in the era we’re in now to bring back this just bubbly, positive character without us sort of distrusting him. And I think they transition well. The first episode, when we meet him again, has some moments of kind of denouement. Like if you remember the end of “The Graduate” that’s so famous where they keep the camera rolling and you see their faces start to fade.

LAUREN GILGER: Yep.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: There’s a moment like that in the premiere of this season. So you start to kind of see some cracks, some like at least sense of, ”OK, this is where we’re moving forward from. He’s back, but he’s still a real person.”

LAUREN GILGER: Right. I think that’s what “Ted Lasso” has always done so well, right? Like, it is a very positive and incredibly optimistic show that makes you feel good. But it’s also, it deals with some not-so-rosy things, and they come across like real people in a way.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Exactly. Yes, it deals with mental health. It deals with parenthood. It deals with divorce. So many things, also, that Jason Sudeikis was dealing with in real life. So it finds a way to talk about extremely serious, challenging issues with this kind of radical empathy and hope and joy that I think could teach all of us, frankly, in the way that we talk to each other online a thing or two.

LAUREN GILGER: Radical empathy. I like that. All right, so I want to talk about Ted Lasso’s version of masculinity, right? Like, he’s a football coach, soccer, whatever you want to call it. But he also deals with, like you said, mental health issues. He talks with a therapist in one of those seasons. He loves the people in his life very genuinely, right? How does this play into today’s sort of, I guess, looksmaxxing manosphere kind of realm?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: I know. I think I think that’s such a good question because there is so much content being made for young men and even kids today that is teaching them that masculinity needs to be this very traditional, dominant force. And not just that, but that the only real uh things of value that you can offer are how you look and then this sort of material wealth, and those are the things that you can bring to the table.

And Ted Lasso has such a different version of what masculinity can look like, that it can be this incredibly nuanced, human self that that can cry, that can have panic attacks, um that can inspire a room, you know, can can give the great Henry VIII speech or on the battlefield and and still then curl under the covers and and feel sad. It’s it can be all of these things.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, all of these things. OK, we have to talk about the the women’s sports part of this, right? Like, Ted’s back to coach the Lady Greyhounds. He’s got a new kind of prickly assistant coach who’s a woman. And this is familiar territory for the show’s star in real life, right, for Jason Sudeikis?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, yes. Yes, huge WNBA fan, has season tickets to the New York Liberty and became famous during Caitlin Clark’s rise at Iowa and then into the WNBA for being courtside a lot of the time, for wearing lots of Caitlin Clark and WNBA gear. Huge, huge fan of women’s sports, and I think that’s another reason why the show came back, because switching to this focus on women’s sports, I think, is something that he’s super passionate about.

The WNBA this year has had their most successful year yet, and I think, certainly, we could look to him as a celebrity who’s helped with that. So I think it’ll be interesting to see how this impacts the discourse around women’s sports.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, because we’re seeing kind of a big moment for it, not just the WNBA, but we have the Women’s World Cup coming up next year. I will say, the WNBA in particular has been a little vitriolic of late.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, yes.

LAUREN GILGER: A little less Ted Lasso.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: It really feels like that, and and any Mercury fan should know that because I think we’ve often been at the center of that controversy, particularly this summer when we had the flagrant foul against Alyssa Thomas after crashing into Caitlin Clark, this moment that just went viral, the [Sophie Cunningham] pointing memes.

And following that, then several members of Congress sent a letter to the WNBA commissioner about better protecting Caitlin Clark, about the kinds of physicality of the league. So there has been so much, I think as the audience has grown, discourse around so many politically polarized issues as they connect to the league, which is fair to say. I mean, there are intersections of incredibly important social issues with women’s sports.

And as much as that can be so powerful to get the opportunity to discuss, I think we need a nuanced discussion like I hope Ted Lasso will provide. And in the second episode, hey, they’ve already taken on feminism, so I don’t think they’re going to shy away.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, one one small preview there. Last quick question for you. So how do you think this new season of “Ted Lasso” might change the way we think about women’s sports, maybe shed some new light on it as, you know, it’s becoming very much in the spotlight in good and bad ways?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yes, yes. So the U.S. Women’s Soccer coach popularized the idea that men’s sports are cortisol and women’s sports are dopamine. And I think if we were going to say one thing about “Ted Lasso,” it’s a dopamine show. And I think that women’s sports lately, with the WNBA, sometimes haven’t, because of this sort of toxic discourse, hasn’t always felt like dopamine. So I hope that it brings that back, but also what it does what it does so well, which is human stories.

And I think as they tell the stories of these new women players on the team of the Lady Greyhounds and explore them in all of the intersecting issues, I think, hopefully, it will help us all better connect to human stories in women’s sports in day-to-day life, too.

LAUREN GILGER: You ended on an appropriately optimistic note, I think, Amanda, for a conversation about “Ted Lasso.”

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Now we’re cooking.

LAUREN GILGER: Amanda Kehrberg, Ph.D. student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Amanda, thank you as always. We appreciate it.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Thank you so much.

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

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. As the pennant races heat up across baseball, some people are looking beyond the playoffs and World Series. That’s because the current collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball owners and players ends on Dec. 1. And many observers are predicting the owners will lock the players out when that CBA expires.

There are a lot of areas of disagreement between the two sides, but the biggest one appears to be a salary cap. The owners want one, the players do not. And at least so far, neither side has been willing to budge on that, but the league has been trying to get fans on their side.

[AUDIO CLIP FROM MLB AD]

METS FAN: Like to see a little bit more parity, man. A little bit more competition.

CUBS FAN: Let’s give these young guys like a salary floor.

BLUE JAYS FAN: One hundred percent needs a salary cap. That’s the biggest issue in baseball right now.

MARK BRODIE: That’s from an ad that’s been running on MLB.tv and elsewhere. It’s part of a campaign called “Level the Playing Field.” It shows baseball fans explaining why they support a salary cap, arguing it would increase competition and parity, especially among the smaller-market teams.

Earlier, I talked about this approach with Evan Drellich, a senior writer at the Athletic, where he covers the business of Major League Baseball. And we started with whether it’s unusual for MLB to try to get its message across in this way.

EVAN DRELLICH: I am not aware of any past example of the league literally putting together a commercial to try to communicate with fans over what it wants to do in collective bargaining with the players union. It it certainly seems a new level uh of engagement and a new level of public relations campaigning to try to sway people to come over to to the league’s side.

And there’s been social media posts in the past, uh but this round of talks in baseball is shaping up to be potentially different and more contentious than we’ve seen before.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of talk about a potential lockout, maybe missing games next season. Is this seen as sort of a preemptive, "don’t blame us" kind of thing by MLB and the owners?

EVAN DRELLICH: You know, at the end of the day, collective bargaining is about the two parties at the table. Neither the league nor the players are ultimately looking out for fans above their own interest, and and I think that’s an important thing to understand. That said, the more public support you can have, the easier it might be to convince the other side to make the changes you want.

Uh, you know, how much of an influence public opinion will have on these talks is is really hard to say because at the end of the day, it’s all about whether players are going to be willing to miss games or owners are going to be willing to miss games uh in the instance where owners say, "We want a salary cap," which baseball uniquely does not have among professional sports, and the players continue to say, "No, we don’t want one."

Um, so you know, how much of an impact this ultimately has is is unclear, but uh they certainly, by the fact that they’re doing it, feel that there’s some ground to be gained, that that it doesn’t hurt to have fans on their side as they enter what could be a pretty ugly battle.

MARK BRODIE: Well, and when you listen to the messaging, I mean, I think you’d be hard-pressed, and you would know this far better than I, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find baseball fans in, let’s say, Cincinnati or Tampa or Pittsburgh who wouldn’t say, "Yeah, I’d love for my team to be able to spend what the Dodgers and the Yankees and the Mets spend."

EVAN DRELLICH: That’s right. I think the smaller markets, the smaller media markets, smaller cities that have less lucrative television deals, that have lower payrolls, you know, the fans there have I think for a long time sought a more even playing field. It is true that a salary cap would make things a little more fair. You really have to dive into some specifics to answer the question, well, how much more fair? How large an impact would this be? How many more playoff appearances would this mean, you know, for a team like the Pittsburgh Pirates?

And and the answers get they get hazier, and they’re really hotly contested once you once you really dive into it. But you have people who have for years seen the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, the three other major men’s sports leagues in the U.S., all have salary cap systems.

And it is certainly the case a lot of fans don’t fully understand the economics of it. These are not simple mechanisms, um, and and they take a lot of time and study to really understand the impacts, but at the end of the day, people see this in other leagues uh and look at baseball and say, "Well, we see it everywhere else. Why can’t we see it here?"

MARK BRODIE: Well, and I think to your point, I mean, basketball fans, for example, will see cities like San Antonio and Oklahoma City making the finals and thinking, "If I’m a Kansas City Royals fan, like why can’t that be us?"

EVAN DRELLICH: That’s right, and you know, there are dueling statistics between the players union and the league over what is the state of competitive balance in baseball. Baseball’s rather unique compared to the other sports in that it’s just more random. The the best teams in football really aren’t likely to lose uh, you know, in the in the early rounds of the playoffs. Does it happen sometimes? Sure.

But in baseball, the the easy example is a team like the New York Mets that spends a ton of money, hasn’t won a championship in 40 years here. And so, you know, how direct that correlation between winning and money is in baseball is something that’s been studied and and frankly fought over for a long time.

MARK BRODIE: So what are the players doing? Like, do they have some kind of messaging campaign? Are they trying to counter what the the MLB owners are doing in some way?

EVAN DRELLICH: The union has had more press conferences thus far. They are using social media just as the league is using social media. I am not aware of the players union taking out any dedicated commercial time at this at this point. That that seems to be a step that only MLB has taken. But both sides are trying to argue their messaging.

And the the players’ message is, look, there are ways to improve the sport. We want to change the way owners share money between themselves, which is something the league also wants to do, the owners also propose doing. The key difference is the players don’t want the hard limit on salary. They don’t want the capped labor cost.

And you know, it’s important to understand that all of these issues are ultimately economic issues. It is not as simple as, as much as we might like to think, what is best for the game of baseball? That’s just not the calculus that is applied when there are billions of dollars on the line.

MARK BRODIE: And what’s so interesting about that is, you know, when you watch the spots from MLB, they couch it in the, "Hey, we’re listening to the fans. You know, you wanted faster games, so we put in a pitch clock. You wanted, you know, these different different things, so, you know, we change the rules." But to your point, those are on-the-field issues. The labor stuff is almost entirely off-the-field economics stuff.

EVAN DRELLICH: I frankly think the "we listen to the fans" argument that MLB posits here falls falls apart pretty quickly with with pretty much just a cursory examination. For example, I think if you were to poll most fans, they would say, "You know what I’d really love? I’d love beer and hot dogs to to be $5 maximum at every baseball game." And you’re never going to see MLB taking out an ad campaign that says, you know, "We’re pushing a lower price." It’s about money, uh, and and I it’s unfortunate in that reality, but that is just like the outside world.

You know, and there’s a storyline separately here about just how much baseball has become a business in bold, capital, underscored letters. Um, it is it is about the money.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Evan Drellich, a senior writer for the Athletic. Evan, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

EVAN DRELLICH: Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: 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, 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.