The Show for Sept. 10, 2026: The Meta settlement and kids; Mexican gray wolves and more

Meta and many states, including Arizona, recently reached a settlement that aims to protect kids from the harms of social media. Why one expert doesn’t think it’ll have the desired effect. Plus, why Mexican gray wolves could be removed from the endangered species list.

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.

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

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

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, the only manager charged in the Zipps Sports Grill raids earlier this year wonders, why him?

MARK BRODIE: And Phoenix’s new shade plan is ambitious, but is it enough to cool our hot city?

LAUREN GILGER: But first, Mesa Democrat Lorena Austin is the first nonbinary Chicana legislator in the country. They are an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. They support housing reform, access to higher education, funding free school lunches, and more progressive causes. And according to some conservative political activists, they are supporting Republican Andy Biggs for governor. Turning Point activists Mary Ann Mendoza and Matt Whitmire posted images on social media over the weekend showing Rep. Austin putting up a campaign sign that reads “Democrats for Biggs” and thanking them for their support of the conservative Republican gubernatorial nominee. It didn’t take long for folks to start questioning those images, and our own Wayne Schutsky ran them through an AI detector and found they’re deepfakes. He joins me now with more. Good morning, Wayne.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: This seemed a little fishy from the start, Wayne. What did you notice about these images that seemed a little off?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Right away, I was questioning the images. Not just because I don’t care how progressive or moderate a lawmaker is down at the Legislature, all the Democrats are pretty lined up behind Gov. Katie Hobbs. So that was the first tick-off. But also, I’ve seen Rep. Austin a lot down at the Legislature, and something like her tattoos didn’t match the individual or fake individual in this photo that was supposedly them. Those were just alarm bells. So, like you mentioned, I ran it through Deepfake Detector, which is one of these platforms that you run these images through, and they try and detect, they look for telltale signs that they were created by AI. They’re not foolproof, but a lot of studies have shown that with photos, they’re pretty accurate, and it gave it a 100% rating as created by AI.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. OK, so you reached out to Rep. Austin, and they confirmed they never posted, never posed for these photos. What was their response?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Kind of bewildered. They just thought it was kind of odd. But then basically, Rep. Austin just said that it appeared to be an example of an issue that the Biggs campaign is having, which is trying to appeal to moderates and independents, which polling has shown Gov. Hobbs is having more success with. So they said maybe they turned to one of the more progressive legislators in the Legislature to try and help them with that.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So that’s another question here. Is it odd, Wayne, that they chose this particular representative to include in this deepfake? They are one of the most progressive lawmakers at the Capitol.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah. From a political perspective, it is. Rep. Austin has been very outspoken anti the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown or so, something like that, for instance, which Congressman Biggs has been very supportive of. It’s just very obvious that this person didn’t align. Some of it could just be geography. They chose the legislator in their area. Mary Ann Mendoza has run in this district or this community before, and Matt Whitmire has worked on some campaigns in the East Valley before. So it could have just been they picked the Democrat closest to them.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us more about these two conservative activists here.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: So one of them, Mary Ann Mendoza, she’s run for office before unsuccessfully for the Legislature. Some folks might remember her name because she was actually pulled off of the speaking slot at the RNC back in 2020 after she shared some antisemitic QAnon-related type posts on Twitter. So that kind of is where her name has come up in the past. She’s the mother of a police officer who was killed in a car accident with an undocumented immigrant, and that’s kind of why she had that speaking slot in the first place. Matt Whitmire, there’s not as much more information about him, but he has posted quite a bit about doing work with Turning Point on various political campaigns, including that failed effort to take over the SRP board earlier this year.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Those posts have been deleted since. Has Turning Point had anything to say about this, Wayne?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Turning Point and Mary Ann Mendoza, neither of them responded to me. I know that Mendoza did give a statement to the Arizona Republic basically saying, “Oh, it was all a joke and journalists don’t get it.” But I mean, there are bigger ramifications here potentially beyond being a joke. So…

LAUREN GILGER: What about the Biggs campaign? Any comment there?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Basically just saying, “This had nothing to do with us.” Though it’s pretty short and sweet.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. But this comes, Wayne, as the Biggs campaign is not looking at very good numbers. The polling right now shows that he’s trailing Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs quite a bit.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah. And it comes as you’ve seen Katie Hobbs, which she had in her last campaign as well, roll out a Republicans for Hobbs slate of very real people, a lot of former elected officials and obviously her lieutenant governor candidate is a former Republican himself. So yeah, so it looked like maybe an opportunity to try and do something for the Biggs campaign along the same lines, but again, the campaign says it had nothing to do with it, and it looks like these are Turning Point-affiliated people. There are some of these signs out there that appear to have been paid for by Turning Point’s PAC, so it does seem like this is a Turning Point-centered effort.

LAUREN GILGER: Wayne, is this legal, posting deepfake AI images like this?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: So we have a few laws passed in 2024 that were meant to crack down on this type of thing. So, yeah, so legal, they’re kind of more civil penalties, but one would give Rep. Austin the opportunity to go to court and basically get a judgment where a judge would declare officially that this is not Rep. Austin, and they could use that on campaign stuff. It’s supposed to stop this type of activity within 90 days of an election. And then there’s a separate law that if someone does this type of activity campaign-related, they could incur a fine of basically $10 a day for as long as they leave it up. So there’s a few different laws looking at this.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so potential action there. How common though could this become, or is this now, Wayne? Should we expect AI to play a role, AI images like this, deepfakes like this, to pop up in politics and in campaigns more in the future?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Oh, 100%. I mean, we’ve seen it throughout the campaign season in commercials and things like that. The difference is is those are disclosed, right? And so that’s it, so, but we’ve seen candidates even using it to put their opponents into their ads and things like that. And as far as the fake stuff, I mean, going all the way back to ’24 when these laws were passed, if my memory serves, it was done in response to this nationwide issue where there were these robocalls supposedly from former President Biden that I think were telling, trying to encourage New Hampshire voters not to go to the polls. So I think that was one of the impetuses for one of these laws. So I think, yeah, as AI just becomes more and more advanced and harder to detect, I would imagine we’ll continue seeing this type of thing.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, lots to watch for. KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky joining us from our politics desk. Wayne, thanks a lot.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, thank you.

MARK BRODIE: Back in January, federal immigration agents raided each of the 14 Zipps Sports Grill locations across the Valley. They were looking for undocumented workers and ended up arresting dozens of them. But now, nine months later, only one manager has been charged in connection with the hiring of undocumented immigrants. He spent time in detention and is awaiting deportation. As my next guest explains, that manager doesn’t understand why nobody else has been charged, especially since he told investigators that higher-ups at the company knew about what was going on there.

Richard Ruelas with the Arizona Republic spoke with this manager, and he’s here now to tell us about what he had to say. Richard, good morning.

RICHARD RUELAS: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So let’s go back to January when these raids were going on. What was sort of the mood and the tenor in the Valley?

RICHARD RUELAS: People were on tenterhooks. There was an activist network that responded quickly as soon as they heard raids were there. Protesters showed up. I was outside the Mill Avenue location. There were Republic reporters and photographers at the Park Central location because people feared this was going to be the start of something, that it starts with Zipps and then they’re going to go to other restaurants, hotels, whatever, later.

It ended up not being that, but there were very tense moments outside these Zipps locations as this was taking place.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So tell us about the manager with whom you spoke. Who is he, and what was his role?

RICHARD RUELAS: His name is Diego Gonzalez-Rosales. He came here at the age of 17, 20 years ago, and told us he quickly, a couple days later, got a job at Zipps showing no identity, just signed a document, because that’s what the law allowed back then, or you didn’t have to show an ID and run through E-Verify.

And he worked at Zipps for 20 years. He said through his hustle and hard work, he was given higher and higher jobs, promoted, and last year took the job overseeing all of the kitchen operations in every Zipps location, which included some preliminary hiring questions as new applicants came in.

MARK BRODIE: And it seems as though that’s sort of where he got into trouble, based on what he told investigators and what he told you?

RICHARD RUELAS: Correct. He said everyone that he interviewed, everyone who essentially worked in the Zipps kitchen was, like him, a Spanish speaker and probably in the country illegally. He said virtually all of them were.

But he did that first interview in Spanish. He would ask the person where they lived, he would assign them to the Zipps location nearest there, and tell them go see the general manager and show up with your identity documents. He said sometimes he or another kitchen manager would help translate and help the person fill out the forms.

He did have, at least he admitted this on one occasion, on his phone, he had a picture of someone’s driver’s license and Social Security number. He didn’t exactly explain to us or authorities why he had those images, but when a person named Gato, who was applying, was having trouble getting through the verification system, he told him use this name and number. So he ended up pleading guilty to that.

At least a couple other Zipps workers said that something similar happened to them from Diego, that he gave them a name and number to use.

MARK BRODIE: And it’s worth remembering that with E-Verify, which is the law in Arizona that you have to use, it just matches a name to a Social Security number or some other identification number. It doesn’t necessarily say that the person providing that is the person to whom the identity belongs.

RICHARD RUELAS: Right. I mean, you show someone a driver’s license, it’s supposed to be you, you know, there’s a photo on it. And the thought when E-Verify was passed was, I mean, before, you just had to attest you, this was your Social. People were working under the number 000-00-0000. So obviously fake Socials that were not valid were getting through.

This was supposed to really cut down on that, but as one lawmaker told me who was instrumental in passing it, they didn’t realize how many names and numbers were floating around out there that people could use. There became a black market for someone’s full identity.

MARK BRODIE: Right. So as this manager told you, he seems like he was pretty upfront with investigators. He didn’t really hide that much about, if anything, about what was going on and his role in it. Is that fair?

RICHARD RUELAS: It is fair. I should also mention Zipps is telling us they did, they do not engage in anything illegal, they follow all the regulations and laws. Diego though said he gave a roadmap to authorities, named names, told them how they could find, told them anecdotes about what was going on. These cases are hard to prove, and Zipps also told us that they were told, Zipps was told the investigation is over and there will be no more criminal prosecutions.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has not confirmed that to us, but according to Zipps, this case is done with no one else facing charges other than this man and three other kitchen workers who were accused of just using someone else’s name.

MARK BRODIE: And Diego’s testimony and what he said to you was that higher-ups knew that this was happening, knew that people were using identities that were not theirs, that were here in this country not legally working in their restaurants. Zipps is denying all that?

RICHARD RUELAS: Zipps is denying all of that. And Diego was, you know, he sort of said in a way that like, “Oh, just everybody knows.” He did, according to a court document, a sealed court document that we were able to review, he did tell more specific anecdotes to authorities.

But like, one anecdote, he was supposed to, someone was supposed to park for entry into a Zipps location, and the manager asked Diego, “Am I supposed to use the person’s real name or the name they’re working under?” Anecdotes like that, which he said should have let management know, you know, should have been a clue that management knew what was going on in their kitchens.

MARK BRODIE: How’s he feeling about the fact that he is the only, like he’s basically the highest-up person at this company who was charged with anything here?

RICHARD RUELAS: Yeah, he told us he feels like he’s taking the fall for the entire company. Why me? Why am I the only one facing trouble? Twenty years, from the age of 17, 20 years in this country, he did not want to go back to Mexico. He hadn’t been back. He built a life here. He became, outside of the documents, an Arizonan, an American. He enjoyed hiking and enjoyed traveling to Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Twenty years at one company, and he thought they would have, he thought, done more to fight for him.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, we’ll have to leave it there. Richard Ruelas with the Arizona Republic. Richard, thank you.

RICHARD RUELAS: 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. Coming up, Meta’s $17 billion settlement mandates new guardrails for kids, but will this make social media a safer place?

MARK BRODIE: But first, President Trump has signed an executive order that could lead to Mexican gray wolves being removed from the endangered species list. The order instructs the Interior secretary to decide within 90 days if the species has recovered enough to be delisted. The wolves were reintroduced to Arizona and New Mexico in the late ’90s and have been controversial. Ranchers say the wolves kill their cattle and have applauded the executive order. Conservationists, meanwhile, argue there are only a little more than 300 Mexican gray wolves and that they continue to need protection.

Cyndi Tuell is the Arizona-New Mexico director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit environmental conservation group, and she is with me now to talk more about this. Cyndi, good morning.

CYNDI TUELL: Morning, Mark. Thanks for having me on today.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So your group is not in favor of this. Why do you think the wolves continue to need federal protection?

CYNDI TUELL: Well, if you look at the facts on the ground, there’s over 2 million cows in the area where the Mexican gray wolves live, and there’s only just over 300 wolves. So there’s far more livestock than wolves, and the wolves are actually having a very, very small impact on the cow population in Arizona and New Mexico, and a very, very small impact on the livestock industry in New Mexico. No one denies that cows can be eaten by wolves on occasion, but most of the time that problem can be addressed by better management from livestock operators.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a number in mind that you have for how many wolves there should be before you say, “OK, this species is good, we can maybe take them off the list”?

CYNDI TUELL: Yeah, I mean we definitely think there should be a lot more wolves on the ground before consideration to take the wolves off the endangered species list. And also the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is part of the federal government, has identified some numbers. We think those numbers are too low, but what they are is that the U.S. population of Mexican gray wolves should average about 320 wolves or more over a four-year period.

And then also the genetic diversity of the wolf population needs to be sufficient to make sure that they can survive over the long term. And again, we think that number’s too low. We are fighting with the federal government about that number, but that’s what the government says right now. And currently, with 317 documented wolves in the wild, we’re not at that number, and we certainly haven’t been at that number for the last four years.

MARK BRODIE: Where do we stand in terms of that genetic diversity that would allow the wolves to be able to survive on their own?

CYNDI TUELL: I’m sorry, I missed the first part of your question.

MARK BRODIE: I was asking where we are in terms of the genetic diversity you were talking about to allow the species to really be OK on its own.

CYNDI TUELL: So the genetic diversity is a concern for us. I don’t have the specific data on that information, but remember that we started with just seven founding wolves for this entire population. Wolves were wiped off the map by the federal government at the behest of the livestock industry, and the recovery program resulted in reintroducing those wolves back on the ground in 1998. So from those seven wolves, we have some wolves in captivity, some on the ground, and we need all seven of those wolves’ genetic diversity represented in both of those populations, the wild and the captive population.

Because the federal government has taken Mexican gray wolves and either removed them and put them back in captivity or killed them because of livestock operators’ requests, that has reduced some of the most important genetics out in the wild. So because the federal government is already doing what the ranchers are asking them to do, which is kill or remove wolves from the wild, the genetic diversity is lower.

If we let the wild wolves do what they do, which is repopulate on their own, stop removing them and stop killing them when they do things like eat the animals that are on the land, the genetic diversity will improve. We also need to start having Mexican gray wolf families released from captivity into the wild, get those genes that are stuck in captivity and put them on the land and let those wolves reproduce naturally. That would be the best solution.

MARK BRODIE: What do you think the end result will be if the Interior secretary decides in a few months that the wolves can and should be delisted?

CYNDI TUELL: Well, I thought it was really interesting that President Trump was willing to show how little he knew about what his own government is doing by issuing this executive order. You know, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Game and Fish Department both put out statements and letters in July of this year saying that they were going to start looking at whether or not the wolf warranted delisting or downlisting.

So this process was already started, and what President Trump’s executive order did was kind of meaningless. I think it was just political theater. So I think as the process moves forward, the science and the data are going to show that the Mexican gray wolf is not even close to being ready to be downlisted or delisted. The numbers on the ground and the genetics just don’t support a change in the level of protection they need.

MARK BRODIE: All right, well we’ll have to leave it there. That is Cyndi Tuell, the Arizona-New Mexico director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit environmental conservation group. Cyndi, thanks so much.

CYNDI TUELL: Thank you very much, Mark.

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

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Our next guest this morning says Phoenix could be a model for climate change instead of a victim of it. Greg Kats is the founder of Smart Surfaces Coalition, and he told me he got involved in this work because the billions being invested in these problems weren’t working.

GREG KATS: Despite billions in foundation funding, cities over the last 20 years have gone hotter, darker, more unequal, higher electricity bills, more prone to flooding, larger contributions to climate.

LAUREN GILGER: So he came up with the term “smart surfaces” to describe a set of solutions that solve for both extreme heat as well as extreme rain events. They fund cities like Phoenix to help change their trajectory in terms of heat.

And they were a big part of developing Phoenix’s latest shade plan, dubbed the Shade Phoenix Plan. It’s a five-year, $60 million plan to add 27,000 new trees and 550 new shade structures, particularly in low-income parts of the city over the next decade or so.

They say a combination of trees, reflective roofs, and roads, as well as green stormwater infrastructure, could save our city $3 billion over the next several decades and help us get cooler as the rest of the world is heating up. I spoke with Kats more about it and the possibilities for a quickly heating city like ours.

GREG KATS: If you were in Phoenix 100 years ago, you would see a number of these solutions. You would see reflective surfaces, you would see porous surfaces, you’d see shading of windows, you’d see use of thermal mass, and AC came in, we forgot all about it. So in some sense, this is a reversion to common sense.

What’s smart for a city is to really think about all the surfaces of the city, the full range of solutions, and how you deploy those in a very intelligent, intentional way to get the biggest heat reduction, biggest flood risk reduction, and that in turn has a lot of other benefits, health and aesthetics and, you know, well-being, livability.

LAUREN GILGER: What’s a cool roof, for example?

GREG KATS: A cool roof is a sort of widely used term for a reflective roof. So if you fly over an average American city, it absorbs about 80% of incoming sunlight, and it can mean that the building is hotter so you’re using AC, or it radiates that heat back out and heats the city up.

So the average American city is 5 to 8 degrees hotter because it’s covered in dark and impervious surfaces. And interestingly, that heat is not equally distributed. Low-income neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods tend to be 10, 12 degrees hotter. This is one of the great structural inequalities in the country, that if you’re from a poorer family, you’re going to have to raise kids in environments that are 10 to 15 degrees hotter outdoors and less shade, and that’s tough for kids.

LAUREN GILGER: So it’s interesting, you’re talking about the idea on rooftops. I’ve heard about it many times on roads. I always think this when they’re putting down black tar on roads here, why, right? Like, we’ve had lots of talk about and testing of cool pavements in the Valley. It seems to be a solution, but maybe not a perfect one. Porous pavements, another idea here. It sounds like roads are another big sort of opportunity.

GREG KATS: Absolutely. The average road and parking lot is asphalt, and when that’s laid down, that absorbs 90% of the sunlight. So in the afternoons in Phoenix, that’ll get to 160 degrees. You fry an egg at 158. So these are places where if you fall down, you literally get second- and third-degree burns.

We’ve been working with a number of cities to support them in adopting much more reflective surfaces so that the light is bounced back into space, it doesn’t get as hot, and because it doesn’t get as hot, you don’t get the expansion-contraction, so it actually lasts longer. So it’s a cost-savings measure for the city if they’re able to think about it on a life-cycle basis rather than a first-cost basis.

LAUREN GILGER: Interesting. So let’s talk about the Shade Phoenix Plan. This is a five-year, $60 million roadmap to kind of address some of these big-picture issues in terms of heating in the city. I know you were involved in creating this here. Talk first for us, Greg, just about some of the unique challenges facing Phoenix in particular, not just because, you know, we’re the fastest heating city in the country, the hottest big city in the country, and it’s getting hotter, but also because, you know, we don’t have a lot of big trees. We’re in this desert environment.

GREG KATS: Yeah, it’s a particular challenge. The shade plan itself will cool the city in measurable ways. It’s smart because it’s got multiple different solutions and not just one. It’s smart because it’s thinking about where people walk and where people are outdoors and concentrating cooling solutions and shade solutions to provide protection to where people, you know, actually work or walk or play. So all of that is really smart.

Taking a step back, the analysis we’ve done indicates that a moderately aggressive citywide smart surface strategy — and by smart surfaces, we mean reflective, porous and green — can cool the city about 2.7 degrees, but up to 4.6 degrees in low-income neighborhoods.

And one of the most appealing aspects of this strategy is it would cut electricity bills over the next 30 years by about $2.1 billion. So that’s about $6,000 per household, and that’s a significant savings at a time when there’s a lot of concern over rising electricity bills.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. That’s a lot of money and a lot of investment. I mean, I have to ask, like, how much of this is just shade though? Like, should we be thinking about some of these other ideas that you and I just talked about? Like, you know, can you put in enough trees in enough areas or cover enough unshaded bus stops to really cool the city in a significant way?

GREG KATS: The most efficient cooling, a lot of it comes from making surfaces much more reflective. That’s easiest to do on low-sloped roofs, so commercial roofs, there’s a lot of those in Phoenix. Roads and parking lots can be made more reflective, and kind of when you do the sort of technical analysis on it and the cost-benefit analysis, it actually ends up saving the city quite a lot of money.

You absolutely want to do trees, it’s a great strategy. When you think about trees, how much does it cost to water them? Which is pretty expensive. Well, why is it expensive? Well, because on the times when you do have rainfall, that water runs off the city rather than going into the ground. It goes somewhere else.

But if you create more porous surfaces, the water goes into the ground, you have a higher water table, the trees can sustain themselves with less additional feeding. So it’s an example of the sort of systems benefits of having an integrated, full approach.

LAUREN GILGER: So $60 million, five-year plan here. It’s a big investment, but how do you measure success?

GREG KATS: Yeah, it’s a great question. Trees are tough to quantify the benefits for, because so much of it is psychological and a sense of well-being, a sense of safety. The benefits are somewhat complicated, but they certainly include things like lower air-conditioning bills, sort of health benefits.

So if you think about heat, the hotter it is, the more low-level ozone you have, and so more smog, and that has respiratory impacts, especially for children and elderly, and you can quantify that. You’ve got reduced 911 and 311 calls, so the cost to the city of dispatch services for those go down. Phoenix is a tourist town, and, you know, tourism really suffers when it gets too hot.

So in the cities we work with, a dozen big cities, so Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, those cities, like Phoenix, can all get on a pathway where they can cool 4, 5 degrees. So rest of the world’s getting hotter, Phoenix is getting cooler, that’s a very powerful story for a city to tell, you know, to its kids and to investors, companies that want to move in, and to tourists.

LAUREN GILGER: How long might something like that take, and how much more investment than this initial $60 million plan?

GREG KATS: Ten years, you could really transform the city. A lot of this does not have cost to the city. So take roofs, for example. If you require that roofs be more reflective, because there are products out there that are more reflective and they don’t cost any more, so going through the City Council or having a mayor do an executive order or doing a code change doesn’t cost anything.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So last thing I want to ask you, Greg, is just how Phoenix compares to other major cities, not just in the U.S., but around the world, in terms of, you know, really addressing the problem of this era, which is heat and climate change?

GREG KATS: Because of the extreme heat, the risks I will say for Phoenix are very large. There was a recent study indicating a heat wave in Phoenix that combines with electricity power failures would result in over 10,000 deaths. So there’s a structural risk in Phoenix which a lot of other cities don’t have.

I would say Phoenix is on a path already that makes it a leader. Imagine being able to say, “The world’s getting hotter, we’re not getting hotter.” Or “The world’s getting hotter, we’re going to not only not get hotter, we’re going to get cooler.”

LAUREN GILGER: OK, leave it there. Greg Kats, CEO of Smart Surfaces Coalition, joining us. Greg, thank you so much for coming on The Show. Appreciate it very much.

GREG KATS: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, let me take you back now a few years for our next segment this morning to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris and a breakout breakdancing performance. Breakout, that is, in all the wrong ways.

[REACTION MONTAGE PLAYS]

SPEAKER 1: I’ve seen this one where people compare her to like a golden retriever, like rolling around in the grass.

SPEAKER 2: Oh. This looks like an imitation of breakdancing mixed with like interpretive dance. What the ...?

SPEAKER 3: It’s very different, yes?

[END OF MONTAGE]

LAUREN GILGER: They are, of course, talking about Rachael Gunn, better known as Raygun, the Australian academic who somehow ended up competing for her home country in the Olympics’ first breakdancing competition and failing pretty badly. Raygun’s notoriously bad performance became a global meme that started out as funny and then turned pretty hateful. And now, Netflix is out with a new documentary all about her: “Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly,” it’s called.

And our next guest this morning says the internet dialogue around it and Raygun herself reveals a lot about us, our culture of participation trophies and if we really can do anything we put our minds to. Amanda Kehrberg is The Show’s very own pop culture expert, a Ph.D. student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She studies digital culture. Good morning, Amanda.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Good morning, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so remind us about Raygun. Why did this become such a thing? Like, how bad was it?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: It was so bad. She did not get a single vote from a single judge.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: She did the sprinkler. She did indeed roll around on the floor like a golden retriever. It was just, it was such a terrible, terrible example of the art of breakdancing.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And in the first Olympics.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yes.

LAUREN GILGER: Yes. It was the first time this was ever in the Olympics, too.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yes, the first time and possibly the only time. Yeah. Oh my gosh, yeah. What else did she do? She ends up on her hind legs kind of like a kangaroo at the end. I mean, there were so many moments of it that just went viral, became sort of jokey dances, became a meme that you would throw into, you know, anything that would cause …

LAUREN GILGER: It was a pretty popular 2024 Halloween costume, right?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it was probably the biggest meme to come out of the Olympics that year, and there were a lot. The Paris Summer Olympics had the Turkish shooter, had so many memes that then went on to become Halloween costumes.

But I think what we saw with this was not just an example of that kind of humor that we see spread across social media and that kind of joy and community building, but also just really, really, really extreme bullying and hateful rhetoric targeted at one individual.

And when we talk about the ethical ramifications of digital media and this just extremely fast spread globally of information, what that does to an individual when it’s pointed at an individual can be extremely scary. And that’s a conversation we’ve had in digital media for 20 years at least now. What does it look like to be globally shamed, and how do we have those conversations about systems and issues without focusing it in on one specific person?

LAUREN GILGER: Well, and this is exactly what is focused on in this new Netflix documentary about Raygun where they kind of tell her story behind the whole thing. It’s part of this “Untold” series. The reviews of this though are mixed, too, right?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Absolutely. Yeah, and they raise a lot of incredibly good points about how the documentary, by focusing and centering Raygun’s story, it’s telling one aspect of this broader narrative, but it’s not talking about what was she doing there to begin with. It’s not talking about breakdancing as an art form and a dance and its roots in hip-hop, its roots in Black culture, specifically starting in the Bronx in the 1970s.

And that’s another thing that I would point to. This is characteristic of digital media. Digital media platforms decontextualize art, they decontextualize discourse, they decontextualize all of these things. And what happens when you take something out of its context and then this sort of culture vulture, cultural appropriation conversations, that you assume then it’s yours, it’s something you can mix and mash up and do as you see fit. And there was a lot of very, very apt criticism of that.

And I think also about what that meant in terms of that being one of the main things we talked about after the Olympics. And we see that with the Winter Olympics, too. You know, we have incredible stories that we came away with of triumph in a sport, someone like Alysa Liu in figure skating, but we also have Boopgate, which made an absolute mockery of curling.

So there are a lot of, yeah, really, really important conversations there again about how digital media filter our access to the world and what we do with the way that we can mix and mash things up and feel like they belong to us.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So one of the things that stands out to me about Raygun’s story in particular is that it sort of gets at this idea of the participation trophy, right? And there’s a political divide there, there’s a sort of a criticism of coddling a generation, right? And this is a generational divide, too. Like there’s a scene in the documentary where she gets a most improved trophy, right?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yes. Yes, that one definitely hit home for me as someone who got multiple most improved trophies. I was most improved in cheerleading, I was most improved in swimming, which was never a commentary on how good I was at the end, as it was how bad I was at the beginning. And you’ll note, I do neither of those things professionally on the world stage now, as I ought.

But yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve seen, I think particularly because of the thematic focus where this documentary put its time, that’s one of the major conversations that’s come out on social media is people talking about participation trophies again, people talking about toxic positivity.

And as you said, yeah, it’s so funny how throughout at least the last century, so many of our conversations about generational divides and political divides turn on this idea of who was too coddled, who was told they could do anything, who got soft, who had it hard, who walked five miles in the snow uphill every day to school versus, yeah, who showed up and got a participation trophy for doing precious little.

LAUREN GILGER: But it does raise the question of how she ended up there. There’s also this conversation, I think, in this narrative, Amanda, about surveillance culture, right? About like what it’s like to grow up in a world in which you know that literally everything you do could end up on a world stage.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: It’s so scary, and I know as Millennials, we had a very different experience of this. Yeah, we were in the trenches before we really understood what the war was.

And I think, so there are a lot of studies coming out about this right now that Gen Z, 55% said they were too afraid to be cringe to really share their authentic emotions, including enthusiasm. How much do we want people to show enthusiasm? I mean, it’s sad. 73% said they were too afraid of being recorded to dance in public.

LAUREN GILGER: To dance in public.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yeah, yeah. And so like I think that that’s one kind of thread and commentary that comes out of this is like we need to find ways to kind of celebrate the joy of just being cringey and not feeling this overwhelming surveillance state.

Now, that does not mean go to the Olympics. That does not mean compete and take up space where you shouldn’t be. That’s a different conversation.

LAUREN GILGER: Absolutely. All right, last minute for you here. I want to ask about AI and, you know, like this idea that tools like ChatGPT will really, you know, make you feel pretty good about yourself, right? Like there’s got to be a cultural impact of that.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, absolutely. Way, way, way too sycophantic, and that is such a serious problem. That of course is a structural thing to keep you engaged, but they’re so much more likely than a human to tell you what you want to hear. And that, a new study from Stanford found, can diminish prosocial behaviors because it’s just telling you act however you want.

Now, I will say when I watched this, because Raygun’s husband is sort of a ChatGPT himself, right? He tells her everything she wants to hear. My boyfriend looked at me and said, “Oh, I love you like that.” And so my best friend said my boyfriend is the helium in my balloon and she’s the little sandbag tied at the bottom. And I think we all need that. We can’t just have ChatGPT helium, but we can’t have too big of a sandbag either.

LAUREN GILGER: We need both, we need both. All right, that is Amanda Kehrberg, a Ph.D. student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She studies digital culture. Amanda, thank you as always, 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. The settlement between Meta and most states, including Arizona, announced last month will lead to the company paying $17 billion to the states over a decade and making changes the states say will make kids safer on Meta platforms, including Instagram and Facebook. Among the changes the tech giant will make: a time limit of two hours for kids younger than 18, a ban on showing the number of likes a post gets from other minors, and nighttime and school-day blocks on notifications.

But my next guest doesn’t think those changes will really have the desired effect. Kathryn Modecki is a professor at the Kids Research Institute Australia and the University of Western Australia. She acknowledges the efforts of those who worked to make the settlement happen, but isn’t sure it’ll end up making Meta accountable. Modecki joins me to talk more about this, and Kathryn, do we actually know what we’re hoping for when it comes to kids and social media?

KATHRYN MODECKI: It’s so nice to hear that question being phrased that way, because I don’t know that that is how the zeitgeist is sort of framing this, and this is what’s so challenging. So if you think about sort of the celebratory response that you can see around the settlement, sort of like we’re going to make young people safe, right? And this is based on, to some degree, this assumption that just being on social media is linked to poor mental health. So that is not what the science says. The science tells us that the effects are null to very small, and they can go in either direction, positive or negative. Time itself, in particular, is not a good metric for this. But, and that there are some benefits for certain young people, they cope, they find social connection, they find identity, and at the same time, all of these things are true, there are harms on social media, and those harms tend to, we believe, be found particularly for kids already at risk. So if you look at it from that way, and then look at sort of these cosmetic, I’m going to call them cosmetic-level changes being addressed, it’s hard to see how that’s actually going to change the things we’re worried about.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so when you talk about time not necessarily being a good predictor of what the effects on kids will be of being on social media, you obviously are working in Australia, which has banned social media for kids. Does that not seem like the right approach then, either?

KATHRYN MODECKI: Well, you know, if we step back and say, what’s our goal? And if our goal is to make social media use safer, right, reduce perceived harm that is happening for kids, if we step back and said that’s our goal, you know, we could argue, and I would argue, that the goal should be A, to make this cleaner for everyone, not just whether you’re under 16 or under 18, but for everyone, right? And then let’s talk about this content that is getting pushed through that social media companies have ultimate authority over this. None of these two responses, whether you’re talking about the social media ban or you’re talking about this lawsuit, none, they’re not dealing with that. They’re sort of saying, we think this is a risky pool, we’re going to sort of try and put this boundary around it and that’ll hopefully sort it, as opposed to saying, wait a minute, we’re all swimming in this pool, why are we allowing it to be full of muck?

MARK BRODIE: Well, it kind of sounds like what you’re saying is we’re basically saying to kids with this Meta settlement that, OK, here’s something that’s really bad for you, we’re going to still allow you to do that thing that’s really bad for you, but for less time, and thinking, OK, well that’s going to solve all the problems, as opposed to trying to make the thing itself less bad.

KATHRYN MODECKI: Yes, but let me, let me sort of augment, but say it’s not necessarily really bad for you. OK. So on a whole, for lots of kids, it’s not bad, and but for other kids it is. And for those kids who are most at risk, those are going to be the kids least likely to have a parent that’s going to somehow come in and figure out these parent, these controls that are being put in, opt in, opt out. So if you were to ask me, what would I in an ideal world see, these wouldn’t be sort of opt-out features, right? But it would also be about what kids are being exposed to. So let me give you an example, sleep. So our research shows, other people’s research shows, late-night phone use is reduced, late-night, you know, poor sleep, which leads to sort of raising concerns around mental health. So that’s a sleep issue. So we can already go on to a phone and make changes about when our child can be on that phone. We can take a phone out of the room. And so it’s fairly cosmetic to say two hours, you know, at a time or can’t use the phone at night. That’s a cosmetic-level change for Meta, as opposed to saying, well, what are the features that makes anyone, including a young person, want to stay up and scroll for hours, right? And that would actually be helpful for everyone. And so across sort of each of these things, you see that they’re, they’re sort of saying they’re going to do, you know, I’ve said it in a Nature interview, I’ll say it here, to my mind, Meta is defining what the harm is, saying how they’re going to fix this supposed harm, right? And yet the underlying issues aren’t being addressed.

MARK BRODIE: Do you have any reason to think that some of those underlying issues will be addressed by social media companies? Like, can you envision a scenario where they would try to, you know, moderate some of the content or change the algorithms? It seems like if anything, they’re going in the other direction.

KATHRYN MODECKI: That’s a very good point. So you’re right, like content moderation, you know, has gone down and things of that sort. So the way I could see that happening is if we think of any other business model, so, you know, you can tell from my accent, I’m from the U.S. You know, think of another company or another area of business where we allow them to define the harm, we allow them to define the risk, we allow them to sort of decide on the solution, and they’re the ones who then verify that they’ve made that effort. So when you look at this, this Meta settlement, they just have to show they’ve put this effort in. They don’t have to show that it’s worked in any way. So I think, yes, I can envision it if we sort of flip the script here a bit and said, wait a minute, why are the companies dictating these terms? You know, in an ideal world, why don’t we have a third-party purveyor or organization who’s determining that these features are safe before they’re allowed to be deployed?

MARK BRODIE: Well, so I guess then, in the near term then, is it just kind of on parents to try to be on this as much as they can be?

KATHRYN MODECKI: This is the problem. So, you know, if we look at Meta, we’ve now left it to caregivers and parents to sort of figure out the features that are now being offered to them, which again are not the features that as researchers we would be putting forward by any means, right? And determine if they’re going to be helpful or harmful to their child, as opposed to the company itself doing this. So, yes, I mean, again, I’ve reviewed over 200 studies with my colleagues across the board internationally, across socioeconomic status, different families, and it’s so important to realize that families are so diverse, they have so many stressors in their life, financial and otherwise, they have access to sort of different understanding about the digital space, and so you just, you know, hit the nail on the head. The idea that we’re laying this on caregivers and parents to figure out and somehow be their protectors and mediate this is hugely problematic.

MARK BRODIE: Well, I guess the other issue to consider here is that if there’s one thing that kids are good at, it’s finding ways to do things that they have specifically been told not to do, right?

KATHRYN MODECKI: Right. So that’s exactly, so I’m a developmental psychologist, I study adolescence, I have for 15 years, we actually stream data directly from young people’s phones, and this is what makes it complicated. This is where we started learning about the ways young people make use of social media for coping with stress, for finding information, all of these beneficial ways. They’re clever. And to your point, part of adolescence is finding autonomy, it is defining yourself outside of your parental rules, that is normal, that is normative. So, yes, we would absolutely expect it to be developmentally normative to do what we call workarounds often, right? And so to your point, you know, the reality of adolescence mandate, the reality of what parents’ experience is and their capacity, it is hard to see this effort making a meaningful difference in terms of reducing the risks that we’ve been concerned about.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Kathryn Modecki, a professor at the Kids Research Institute Australia and the University of Western Australia. Kathryn, thanks so much for the conversation. I appreciate it.

KATHRYN MODECKI: Thanks, Mark.

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 John 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.