Guests - Jay Foard, Elijah Norton, Lisa Von Geldern
Jay Foard: The Reading Crisis and a Novel Built to Fix It
Jay Foard, author of Rustling of the Sycamore and a writer focused on resilience, personal growth, and purpose, returned to the show to talk about a crisis he's been spearheading research into: why young readers have stopped reading. The numbers he cited were stark. Roughly 95% of children and young adults use social media, and 64% report regular exposure to negative content that he said is directly linked to rising depression rates. "Those algorithms that drive that content are basically based on things that are sensationalized that have an emotional response," Foard said, framing the platforms themselves — not just their content — as the underlying problem.
His prescription centers on reading as a fundamentally different cognitive activity than scrolling. "Reading is care to building, it's story building. There's historical reference and context. There's a lot more emotional depth," he said, arguing that books force the brain to generate its own imagery and meaning rather than receiving it pre-packaged the way video and social content do. He pointed to research showing that children who are read to from a young age are dramatically more likely to become lifelong readers themselves, and cited a study finding that kindergarteners whose parents read to them regularly enter school with hundreds of thousands more words of vocabulary exposure than peers who weren't read to.
Foard's practical advice for parents centered on physical separation between phones and reading time. "You almost have to have a degree of separation," he said, recommending phones be kept out of the bedroom or another room entirely during a dedicated reading block, since notification pings undermine sustained attention even when a teenager is technically holding a book. He paired that behavioral fix with a content fix: writing the kind of book reluctant readers would actually want to finish. "That's why I put this book together," he said of Rustling of the Sycamore, describing it as action-adventure with a strong family focus, religious faith, gender-specific role models, and military themes meant to invite critical thinking. "I love for the readers to have to put themselves in their place and think, what would I do in that situation?"
The novel's plot follows a Florida family separated when the father, who works in intelligence, is overseas when war breaks out and all communications go down. Foard described a teenage Marine character with battlefield survival skills who encounters a young South Korean girl unfamiliar with basic survival tasks, and built the story around what happens when modern conveniences disappear entirely. "The world goes quiet," he said, describing a scene where the family's oldest son sits in silence with no cars, no boats, no phones, no television — an experience Foard said is almost unimaginable to a generation raised on constant connectivity.
Foard drew directly on personal history for the book's themes, citing his own family's military lineage — a Marine father, a Vietnam veteran father-in-law, and a World War II veteran grandfather — and his years living abroad in Thailand, South Korea, and Latin America. He recounted being struck by South Korea's reading culture, describing weekend scenes along Seoul's Han River where libraries set up books, chairs, and lighting along the riverbank specifically so residents could come read outdoors. "All of his South Korea friends were readers," he said of his son's experience there, contrasting it with the habits of friends back in the U.S.
He connected the book's themes of hopelessness and faith to his own life, recalling a moment when his then-17-year-old son was struck by a car and nearly died. "In that moment, I had nothing," he said. "The only thing I could do was pray to God and beg, literally beg." He argued that critical thinking and resilience — the ability to face a crisis without being able to simply look up an answer — are exactly what's missing from a generation raised with constant digital scaffolding, and tied that absence to a broader erosion of historical literacy, noting most young adults know little about what American POWs endured in World War II or Vietnam despite those sacrifices underwriting freedoms they take for granted today.
Rustling of the Sycamore is available on Amazon under Foard's name.
The Day's News: Federal Court, Ballots in the Mail, and a Disturbing Drug Statistic
Winn opened and closed the show with updates from her own day in federal court in Phoenix, where she spent six hours fighting a case over whether uniformed law enforcement and military personnel can vote in uniform without it being treated as voter intimidation. The judge took the matter under advisement, with a ruling expected sometime next week rather than immediately.
She used the moment to remind listeners that ballots were mailed out the day before, urging anyone who cares about the direction of Tucson and Pima County to treat the upcoming July primary as the real point of leverage. "The only way to change what you don't like is to change the people that are in office," she said. She previewed the rollout of Pima County's mobile voting center — which will move between locations throughout early voting — and reiterated the importance of poll observers, noting the county now has more than 600 precinct committee members on the Republican side standing ready to help voters navigate the process.
Winn flagged a specific statistic she called deeply concerning: while drug deaths have declined nationally, Arizona's drug deaths are up 21%. "That means that there's a criminal element that is working in our community, and they're not being deterred," she said, posing the question of why existing law enforcement resources — county sheriffs, city police, and other agencies — haven't been able to reverse the local trend, and framing the answer as ultimately a question of who voters choose to put in charge.
Elijah Norton: A Treasurer's Race Built on Experience, Not Attacks
Elijah Norton, candidate for Arizona State Treasurer, opened by addressing an attack ad from his primary opponent depicting him in a cartoon resembling Richie Rich — mocking his business success. "Are we not supposed to be successful anymore?" Norton said, framing the ad as a sign of desperation from a campaign that's trailing badly. "I have not attacked my opponent at all. In fact, I'm not going to waste a single dollar attacking her because she's behind in the polls by double digits."
Norton challenged his opponent's claim to uniquely possess both public and private sector experience, pointing out that her primary credential — a seat on the State Board of Education — is one vote among six or seven members on a board focused mainly on educator discipline and standards, not budget management. He drew a sharp contrast with his own background: founder of a global insurance organization managing more than $100 million in claims reserves under conservative investment guidelines, a business he said generates roughly half a billion dollars in annual revenue. "She doesn't have any experience managing two nickels," he said.
He cited three debates — one televised, two before Republican legislative district and party gatherings — in which he said he won every straw poll decisively, attributing his opponent's increasingly attack-oriented campaign to frustration over those results. He was particularly critical of a position she's taken publicly: that the treasurer's role should function essentially as a "glorified HR manager," delegating investment authority to unelected bureaucrats. "I think that is the most asinine political position I've ever heard," Norton said. "If that's the case, why do we even have an elected treasurer?"
On the substance of the job, Norton framed Arizona's $32 billion treasury as too consequential to entrust to someone without financial management experience. He cited a recent state auditor general finding — roughly eight or nine weeks prior to the broadcast — of a $68 million accounting discrepancy between the treasurer's office's 2024 financial statements and what was reported to the Department of Administration, which the office reportedly dismissed as a rounding error representing less than 1% of total assets under management. "It's only 68 million, Elijah," Winn said pointedly. "Why do you have a problem with that?" Norton's response: in his own business, unreconciled financials of that scale could cost him his operating licenses across multiple jurisdictions, and the treasurer's office should be held to no lower a standard. He cited the Santa Cruz County treasurer's $30 million embezzlement scheme — undiscovered for 20 years before finally being caught in 2024 — as evidence the state's audit infrastructure needs a comprehensive historical overhaul, not just point-in-time fixes.
Norton credited his record as Arizona Republican Party treasurer from 2023 to 2025 with helping deliver President Trump's reelection in the state, citing the party's highest vote total of any swing state and expanded legislative majorities during his tenure. He said he produced the party's first audited financial statements in a decade, uncovering that the party spent only 6% of its budget on direct voter contact in 2022 — a figure that rose to 72% by 2024 under improved financial discipline, numbers he said were later used effectively against a former state party executive director who unsuccessfully ran for chair. He also recounted his role, alongside Senate President Warren Petersen and Senator J.D. Mesnard, in defeating the confirmation of Barbara Richardson, Governor Katie Hobbs's nominee for insurance commissioner, whom Norton said had attempted to implement race-based insurance premiums and previously clashed with his own business in Nevada. Richardson's rejection by floor vote made her the first insurance commissioner fired by a state legislature in roughly a century, an outcome Norton called one of his proudest political fights.
Norton extended his critique to Governor Hobbs more broadly, arguing Arizona has been in mild economic decline over the past three and a half years primarily due to her spending priorities, while crediting Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Steve Montenegro with preventing more serious damage despite divided government. "We would be bankrupt by now if we did not have a Republican legislature," he said, while also flagging unconfirmed allegations that Hobbs has spent funds outside the bounds of legislative appropriation.
Looking to November, Norton argued his fundraising advantage — he described having amassed a substantial war chest — makes him the only candidate capable of competing seriously against Democratic nominee Nick Mansour, a former CEO of Arizona College of Nursing with some private equity background. He noted Arizona hasn't elected a Democrat to the treasurer's office since 1967, and argued his opponent's weak fundraising performance signals she would struggle to extend that streak into November even if she won the primary. "It's not about messaging," Norton said. "It's about being able to deliver the results for the citizens of Arizona."
Lisa Von Geldern: Parental Rights, Homeschooling, and a Warning From Abroad
Lisa Von Geldern of the John Birch Society returned to the show to discuss a story she'd flagged to Winn: a Brazilian homeschooling family facing legal jeopardy for opting their children out of public education, a situation Von Geldern connected to a much older and better-documented pattern in Germany, where homeschooling has been illegal since roughly 1919. She described a specific case from around 2003 in which a German family was arrested for homeschooling and later attempted to emigrate to the United States, only to be blocked — in her telling, partly because the German government did not want their departure to demonstrate to other families that emigration was a viable path to escaping state-mandated schooling. "They didn't want them to show other people that, you know what, we love our kids so much we're willing to move away from our homeland," she said.
Von Geldern framed the issue as a matter of natural rights that predate government and are rooted, in her view, in both constitutional and biblical tradition. "Our natural rights come from God," she said. "The proper order of things is that the parents are to educate the children and raise them up in the way that you want them to go." She argued the same instinct to centralize control over children's upbringing shows up domestically in disputes over gender-related issues in custody and family law, citing a case she said she encountered roughly two to three years ago involving grandparents who lost custody of a granddaughter after the child, around age 11 or 12, expressed a wish to identify differently, and described the family's difficulty later regaining custody.
She connected current fights over Arizona's Education Savings Account program to this broader framework, arguing that ESA funding mechanisms increasingly require families to comply with state-defined educational standards as a condition of eligibility — what she called "the camel's nose of government into the tent of homeschooling." Her position was that ESAs should remain optional rather than mandatory, preserving the right to homeschool entirely independent of state oversight for families who choose not to participate in the program at all. She described the John Birch Society's affiliated Freedom Project Academy as one model for fully independent, constitutionally and Christian-grounded homeschooling, structured to give families flexibility — citing touring musicians who educate their children on the road as one example of households the model serves well.
Von Geldern was critical of what she described as a broader cultural shift away from parental authority and toward shared communal responsibility for children's upbringing, citing the "it takes a village" framework as functionally giving non-parents a stake in decisions that should belong exclusively to parents. "The real stakeholder is the person getting up in the middle of the night when they're sick," she said. "No one else has a stakehold in that child." She argued that public education, in its modern form, was originally designed to produce compliant workers rather than independent thinkers, and tied current curriculum disputes — common core math, whole-word reading instruction in place of phonics — to that same underlying goal of fostering dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
Winn shared her own family's experience pulling a daughter out of public school in seventh grade after learning a classmate had taught her something Winn considered far outside age-appropriate boundaries, framing the decision as a clear case of parents drawing a line the government had no business crossing. Both Winn and Von Geldern closed by reinforcing the same underlying point: that decisions about a child's moral and educational upbringing belong to parents first, ahead of school boards, government agencies, or peer pressure from a wider community claiming a stake in how children are raised.
A Closing Reflection: Lisa Von Geldern on Perspective and Gratitude
Before closing the show, Lisa Von Geldern shared the story of Robert Taylor, author of Paralyzed to Powerful, whom she described as one of her personal heroes. Taylor, a UC Berkeley student and competitive rugby player, suffered a broken neck during a national playoff match when an opposing player's illegal hold collapsed a scrum on top of him. After nearly a year of rehabilitation at Craig Hospital in Colorado — funded substantially through a GoFundMe campaign Von Geldern said she personally contributed to — Taylor walked at his college graduation using a walker, has since married, and is expecting his second child. He now works as a motivational speaker, addressing corporate audiences and graduating classes about discipline, perseverance, and forgiveness — Taylor has spoken publicly about forgiving the player whose hold caused his injury.
Von Geldern cited Taylor's personal catchphrase as a touchstone she returns to often: "Compared to what?" — a question meant to put everyday complaints in perspective against genuine life-and-death stakes. "If it's not life and death and it doesn't rise up to that level, and if you look at everything through that lens, so many problems just go away," she said. Winn responded enthusiastically to the idea of bringing Taylor onto the show directly in a future episode, calling his story exactly the kind of perspective her audience needs amid the daily grind of political coverage.