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- [00:00]
Mark Raimondi
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Monday, July 28, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and I have found the worst job in the world. Has a nice title, looks good on a business card, but it's not a job you want. The Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Company Director. Yes, this was referenced in an article in the New York Times. Tehran is at risk of running out of water within weeks. After a five year drought and decades of mismanagement, a water crisis is battering Iran. Among the many things literally battering Iran. Now you don't want to be the Tehran Director. The Tehran Province Director of Water and Wastewater. First of all, you're running out of the water. Second of all, this decades long argument you've been having to separate those two divisions, it's just plainly going nowhere. The Ayatollah does not care. And third of all, you're high enough in the org chart that maybe you're going to get targeted as a possible nuclear scientist by the next Israeli strike. It's just all downside to be the Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Company Director. I feel very sorry for the Iranians, the regular workaday Iranians. I would have to say that the country would be better off. They are not taking my advice. I just checked. The Ayatollah does not think I'm sufficiently read in on Shia theology, so they're not taking my advice. But I do think maybe they would do well to save the $1.6 billion a year it is estimated they spend funding proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis. Maybe put some of that money into water. Or if that's not a good enough argument for you, Instead of the 1 to 2 billion a year, how about the $500 billion they've wasted thus far pursuing a nuclear WE program. But with the Iranians and worldwide jihad, they have an all but unquenchable thirst, as is the case with the literal circumstances of the daily lives of their people. On the show today in the spiel omg, it's the omb. Russell Vogt, OMB Director, was on Face the Nation. And we'll make him face up to some of his bolder claims. But first, with the passing of the Hulkster, Hulk Hogan, I bring to you an interview I conducted before we even knew the Hulkster was sick. And it was about a turn, a heel turn, if you will, that Hulk Hogan took in the 1990s. And I do think, even if you're not a wrestling fan, which I have to say I am not a bit of an appreciator of the subculture, but not a fan. Even if you're not a fan like me, there are still many overlaps and lessons with the broader culture. The nihilism of the 90s, wearing the black hat and some of the. And we'll get into this in the Peska plus segment, some of the actual jargon that comes right from wrestling. We'll explain to you what it is and then you'll be able to apply it to say, the Trump administration and say, oh my God, that's what's going on. So it's Mark Raimondi, author of say hello to the Bad Guys. How Professional Wrestling's New World Order Changed America. I will now bring you a segment about professional wrestling because I know you asked for it. The new book by Mark Raimondi is called say hello to the Bad Guys. It's about how professional wrestling's new world order. You ready for this claim? Changed America. He gets there in the book. Now don't worry. There's a lot about, oh, how the jobber was engaged in a rib that was covered in the dirt sheets. You don't have to know about all that. We're going to talk about the zeitgeist. We're going to talk about the new World order and how it augured and reflected actually a new world order. Mark, welcome to the gist.
- [04:08]
Mark Raimondi
Very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [04:10]
Mike Pesca
Now I'll say I'm not a wrestling guy, but I am in my early 50s, which means that WrestleMania and Hulk Hogan and Hulkamania running wild. Uh, quite the pandemic in the 80s unavoidable. And I kind of either lost interest or it just wasn't in front of me as a non 12 year old in years later. But I was vaguely aware there was something called the New World Order. And Hulk Hogan turned bad. He was still. Hulk Hogan was this huge, was this more huge for the culture than I was realizing in the 90s.
- [04:41]
Mark Raimondi
It sure felt that way. I mean I was 11 years old when that happened in 1996. And I, I remember vividly watching that and then being at a day camp the next day in. I'm from Queens, I was in Bayside, Queens. And I remember everyone talking about this like it was the talk, it was the water cooler conversation of the day, of the week, of the month. It was something that really kind of went viral before viral was a thing because Hulk Hogan was a household name. He was, he was the American hero. He was the he was the face of professional wrestling. Right. He was the biggest star in the history of the industry. And at that point, and he had always been, at least as people knew him, as one of the biggest stars, a good guy. He was the hero. He was the all American guy beating up the evil foreign adversaries. That was the entire 80s and early 90s, right.
- [05:31]
Mike Pesca
That was the whole cheek. Your Nikolai Volkov.
- [05:34]
Mark Raimondi
Exactly.
- [05:35]
Mike Pesca
Of course, if there was a, if there was a global adversary to the U.S. i believe the Iron Sheik even changed perhaps from Iranian to Iraqi or the other way.
- [05:44]
Mark Raimondi
Yes.
- [05:45]
Mike Pesca
Just to align with whoever our adversaries were.
- [05:47]
Mark Raimondi
Correct, correct. And. And that was what Hulk Hogan did for 10 years.
- [05:50]
Mike Pesca
And then, thank God, can you imagine, can you imagine the nation's defense without the Hulkamaniac running wild and his advice to eat your vitamins, which later actually maybe caused one of the splits, but go ahead.
- [06:02]
Mark Raimondi
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and just, you know, him turning bad was just kind of like a cultural touchstone at that point because he was such an important person, you know, in the mainstream. He was doing movies. I mean, none of them were really any good, but he was doing movies, he was well known, you know, TV series and so forth. And it was, it was a big.
- [06:19]
Mike Pesca
Deal before Hulk Hogan, before this change. And we're going to get to the Vitamin Slash steroid scandal. How big was what was then called wwf, now wwe?
- [06:32]
Mark Raimondi
WWF was the promotion, the company that took wrestling into somewhat of the mainstream in the 80s with WrestleMania 1. It was something that was, you know, it became part of pop culture. It was like the name brand. Right. Of pro wrestling. Like most people equated professional wrestling with the wwf, almost using it as like the catch all name for that. And it still is today, right? WWE is still that way today. Or people use that over pro wrestling. So it was, it was the big company, it was the number one. It was, it was making good money. And you know, Vince McMahon was the promoter, the owner of it. And.
- [07:09]
Mike Pesca
Well, how big. Can you give us a sense of how big their pay per views did versus actual prize fights? How big their TV ratings were versus, I don't know, Saturday Night Live. I know that one weekend a month they didn't run snl, they ran wrestling.
- [07:24]
Mark Raimondi
Correct. Yeah. So in the, in the 80s, after WrestleMania 1 and WrestleMania 1 was watched by more than a million people, you know, on closed circuit television, which was, you know, a big deal for something that was still thought very much as like a niche product. Right. And it grew from there. And then, you know, Hogan versus Andre the Giant at WrestleMania 3 was massive. And they had a rematch on Saturday night's main event, the. The aforementioned on. On NBC Live. And it did over 33 million people, over 33 million viewers watch that on regular television. And that was just massive. That was the biggest wrestling audience in the history of, of, you know, wrestling on television. And it was, you know, it was doing well, you know, it's not. Wrestling was, was big, but it wasn't like, you know, blockbuster movie big or, you know, Seinfeld big. Right. Or, or, you know, er, big right in that, in that time period. But it was still certainly something that, you know, broke out of being a niche product and became kind of more of a mainstream thing.
- [08:21]
Mike Pesca
Right. So then a big turning point was this steroid scandal. And it really is what caused the rift and everything in your book. Give us the background of that.
- [08:31]
Mark Raimondi
Yeah, it was, it was like a domino that, that kind of led to the rest of them falling. So in the early 90s, the feds busted a doctor out of Pennsylvania. His name was George Zaharian, and he was the, he was actually the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission doctor. And what that meant is, I mean, if you're familiar with that, you know, with, with combat sports, they are regulated by state athletic commissions. And he happened to be like the physician for Pennsylvania, all of combat sports, boxing. At that time, Pennsylvania regulated professional wrestling, even though it's not a real sport. Right. It's a pseudo sport. It's a, it's a, it's a theater, but they regulated it. So Zahorian was the guy that was there ringside for all of the WWF matches in Pennsylvania and he got busted for distributing steroids. And through that case, the feds found out that steroids were running rampant through pro wrestling through the wwf, and they were able to then bring a case against the WWF and Vince McMahon specifically for the distribution and also the encouragement of using steroids. Like, hey, you're not going to become a top star in the WWF unless you're taking these steroids. That's what they are accusing Vince McMahon of doing. So that was a, so that was a big thing in the early 90s where it was. It was the United States versus Vince McMahon and they were trying to go after him for, you know, distributing steroids to his wrestlers.
- [09:54]
Mike Pesca
And so your book opens pretty early on with Hulk Hogan denying this falsely to Arsenio hall in a friendly conversation that he regretted. And that sowed the seeds for Hulk Hogan's split with Vince McMahon. Why? Because Vince McMahon thought Hulk Hogan sold Him out or what?
- [10:16]
Mark Raimondi
So the feds had it in the paperwork that Hulk Hogan was one of the clients of Dr. George Zahorian. He was getting steroids from Zahorian. So they went to Hulk Hogan and they said, hey, look, we'll give you immunity from doing this stuff if you give us testimony against the WWF and Vince McMahon. So they were trying to flip Hulk Hogan, and Hulk Hogan agreed to do it. He agreed to speak, you know, to testify on behalf of the prosecution against Vince McMahon. So when that got out that that was gonna happen, that created a pretty obvious rift between the promoter and his biggest star, right? The guy that had. That had been carrying the company and the guy that built the company and mean, they built the company together. So when that happened, they stopped talking to each other. And the case, the. The trial went on. It went to trial, and it ended up being a huge nothing burger. Hulk Hogan actually did not say anything against Vince man of the wwf. He admitted his own steroid use, but he did not say that Vince McMahon encouraged the use of him or. Or distributed to him. So after all that, after that kind of split, it ended up being nothing. And Vince, man one, he was acquitted in that case.
- [11:23]
Mike Pesca
Did Hogan actually proffer a plea agreement, agree to turn states? Because when you do that, you spell out for prosecutors what your guilt was and what you're going to say. Or was it more informal than all of that?
- [11:36]
Mark Raimondi
It was informal because they never brought anything against Hogan after that. Maybe they didn't have the goods or maybe, you know, it's a little bit unclear, It's a little murky, you know, now especially like in the world of pro wrestling where, you know, these folks have a tendency to tell stories, right, and tell tales. But. But the. But what happened was Hogan did not really say anything against McMahon. McMahon was acquitted, but that rift was still there. That. That was a real issue between the two of them where Hogan was still testifying for the feds against McMahon. And it led to. It led to Hulk Hogan leaving the WWF ultimately, you know, really shortly after.
- [12:14]
Mike Pesca
A bad mistake by McMahon. Hogan was still a star, right? Did McMahon say loyal is everything? Or did McMahon convince himself that Hogan is washed and his Persona of this really healthy eat your vitamins guy is now ruined that he's admitted to steroids?
- [12:31]
Mark Raimondi
It was. It was definitely a little bit of both. But Vince Mann did believe that Hulk Hogan's run at the top of the industry was kind of over. And for example, in 1990, even before this happened, there was a match at WrestleMania. It was Hulk Hogan versus the Ultimate Warrior. And the plan McMahon's plan was the Ultimate Warrior to win that match and become the champion. And that's what happened. So he was already kind of trying to have Hogan pass the torch to someone else. The Ultimate Warrior did not work out as a top star, and the belt did end up going back to Hogan and he became the face of the company again. But after the steroid trial, it was pretty much McMahon washing his hands of Hogan, feeling like, all right, you know, we're paying him a lot of money. He's not drawing the money to up or us the way that he used to.
- [13:13]
Mike Pesca
We.
- [13:13]
Mark Raimondi
We can. We can let him go somewhere else or let him do whatever.
- [13:17]
Mike Pesca
And so that Plan Hogan versus Ultimate Warrior, they were both good guys, right? Or what's called baby faces.
- [13:23]
Mark Raimondi
They were both baby faces. Yep.
- [13:25]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. In order to get that orchestrated, one of them had to turn bad, and it was supposed to be Hogan, right?
- [13:30]
Mark Raimondi
Well, neither of them turned bad. It was, it was the way they build it was because the Ultimate Warrior was the Intercontinental Champion and Hogan was the heavyweight champion. So it was like a title versus title storyline. It wasn't like a grudge. Right. So it was. It was kind of like a mutual respect type of storyline. It wasn't like, you know, this guy's bad, this guy is good.
- [13:47]
Mike Pesca
Now, that didn't get fan. That doesn't get fans going, does it? Well, people want anger and animosity.
- [13:53]
Mark Raimondi
And usually I would say yes, but because of, because of how big both of those stars both were at that time in 90, it was massive. I mean, it sold out the, you know, in Toronto, the Skydome. It was, it was a big deal. But Hogan did want to turn heel after that, after the loss to the warrior. But McMahon did not let him do that. He wanted to go bad and, and. And turn on the Warrior and kind of. You know, there's a term in wrestling called getting your heat back. Like, you lose the match, but then you come in and you beat the hell out of the guy after the match. That's called getting your heat back. And that's kind of what Hogan wanted to do.
- [14:24]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, you could. You want to get your heat back while staying strong. There's a term in wrestling for everything.
- [14:28]
Mark Raimondi
Exactly.
- [14:29]
Mike Pesca
The dirt sheets being one.
- [14:30]
Mark Raimondi
And by the way, all those terms, they all apply to real life, too. You can use them in real life very easily.
- [14:36]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. In political analysis, I often hear clever people saying it's a work which is, you know, it's staged, it's for effect. But what's the opposite of a work, a shoot? It's a shoot which is when you do an interview and you mean what you say. That's okay. That's interesting.
- [14:51]
Mark Raimondi
That's right.
- [14:51]
Mike Pesca
So when he goes to. There was you document the song and dance between him and this very interesting guy that maybe the other central character, Eric Bischoff, who runs the wcw. Is the idea to turn Hogan bad early and did Hogan, because he did embrace it once with wwf. Did he fight it? Did he embrace it? Who saw the value in turning Hogan bad?
- [15:16]
Mark Raimondi
Yeah. So he goes to wcw, right? Hogan, right. Hogan goes to wcw. He signs with very much a second rate promotion, right? And it didn't even really like. I don't think Vince McMahon even blinked when Hogan signed there because it was like, they're never going to be as big as the wwf. Wwe, they're the king, you know, WWE is the king. So Hogan goes there and things start off well in WW. Business is good, but it plateaus, right? The Hulkamania creation 85 was not as big in 94 and 95, right. As it was a decade earlier. So Eric Bischoff, who was the promoter, he was basically Vince McMahon for WCW. He was the promoter of WCW. He had the idea of like, we need to mix this up. We need to do something different, right? Hulk Hogan is still a big star, but what can we do different? Let's turn him bad, right? So he goes to his home, this is in 95, and he goes to his home in Tampa and he. And he gives his best pitch to Hogan. Hey, I think, I think this would be really great for business, for the company, for you. And Hogan basically threw him out of his house. He was basically like, you know, you don't know what this is like, you know, you can't, you don't know what it's like being in my shoes as the hero, you know, get out of here. Forget it. So that was the first, that was like the initial conversation. And you know, for Hogan, you understand his point of view, right? Because in wrestling historically, the good guys are the ones who sell the most of the merchandise, right? They make the most money. They're the biggest stars, the good guys. They're the ones that get the movie roles, right? Which he was getting. They're the ones who, even if it.
- [16:39]
Mike Pesca
Is three ninjas or whatever, whatever, you.
- [16:41]
Mark Raimondi
Know, they're the ones that do all the charity work, right? The signings. And that's how they, you know, they make a lot of, you know, kind of, you know, Secondary money from that.
- [16:49]
Mike Pesca
He was Hulk Hogan. He doesn't want to become the Iron Sheik. Absolutely.
- [16:53]
Mark Raimondi
Exactly. Especially like when his generation, he was always the one beating the bad guy. So he didn't want to be the bad guy getting beat. Right. You know, because the hero is the one that wins in the end. So he said, no, I'm not. I'm not doing it.
- [17:04]
Mike Pesca
But on the other hand, he did agree to it, or he was open to it with the WWF era. Right?
- [17:11]
Mark Raimondi
He was. And I think that if it was. If it was on his own terms, I think if he. If he had, you know, he saw kind of a plan, at least in his head after the Ultimate Warrior loss to, you know, get his heat back and become heel and then have like a run as a heel. But at that moment in wcw, he was, you know, he was the face of the company, and he was not responding to anyone trying to take his spot, that the Ultimate Warrior was basically, you know, the guy that was going to take his spot. And in ww, he felt very secure as the number one guy. There was no one. There was no one there that could touch him.
- [17:43]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So there's very interesting stuff about the psychology and the strategy and, you know, Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan has made many mistakes that you document. He immediately acknowledged that he made a mistake with that Arsenio hall interview where he didn't admit steroids. He made a mistake kicking, it would turn out kicking Eric Bischoff out of his home when he said he's going to turn bad. So it's not like this guy has steered a clear path and had a clear eye on what made him successful. He probably got one or two big things right. The Hulk Hogan Persona, certainly not, as you document, just being the technically best wrestler, but he's good at the other things that wrestling needs. But he failed to see either where the zeitgeist was going, where the appetites of the public were, or maybe he failed to see how Bischoff was specifically putting together the bad guy angle to his new or newly invigorated WCW enterprise, which was it. Did Bischoff has this have this insight saying, look, it's not just healing Babyface, it's this whole new thing, and we're going to call it the New World Order. And they're all going to wear black and they're all going to have a special logo and it's going to be branding and it's going to take advantage of the anti hero trend in society. Was that Bischoff's plan From the beginning. And he had more vision than Hogan did.
- [19:06]
Mark Raimondi
That's a great question. So it definitely was. A lot of it was Bischoff's. I don't want to say it was his plan plan, because it was a little bit more nebulous than like a straight up, you know, written plan. I would call it more of a vision. Eric Bischoff's vision. And, and let me explain to you why, why I feel that way. So before the NWO even became a thing, Right. Like you mentioned, Bischoff wanted to turn Hogan heel. So that was kind of a vision that he had. Right. Then they, they started this primetime show on Monday nights that went right up against the WWF against Raw. And the first thing that he did on the debut episode of Nitro, the show that WCW had, was he had a surprise debut of a wrestler named Lex Luger. Now, Lex Luger just days earlier was on the WWF roster. There was some kind of a clerical mistake in the WWF office and they didn't realize that his contract was expiring. Well, Bischoff got wind of that and signed Les Luger right out from under the wwf. Debuted him right away on the first episode of Nitro. So that was a major coup right off the bat. Then what Bischoff started to do was Raw WWF show was taped most of the time, right. Nitro was live. So Bischoff, who was the play by play announcer, would go on the live Nitro and read out the results of the taped Raw on Nitro, saying, hey, don't even bother flipping the channel over to the, you know, to the other guys. We already know what happened on that show. This guy beat this guy. And that was something that was never done before right. In, in wrestling history. And man, did it make the WWF mad.
- [20:36]
Mike Pesca
And sure, you can imagine. I mean, this is like before Game of Thrones errors to tell what. Yeah, the who's dying in that episode. It could certainly hurt ratings. But let me interrupt.
- [20:48]
Mark Raimondi
Yeah.
- [20:48]
Mike Pesca
You can't steal a character and this is a central part in a lawsuit. So Lex Luger couldn't come over. Well, I think that's right. It certainly was true with another big guy named Razor Ramon couldn't come over as that character per se. But was he just a normal.
- [21:03]
Mark Raimondi
He did because he, he was Lex Luger in the wwf, but he was Lex Luger in WWE even before that.
- [21:09]
Mike Pesca
Oh, so he owned the let Luger. That's not his real name.
- [21:12]
Mark Raimondi
That's not his. That's not his real name, but he owns that.
- [21:14]
Mike Pesca
Not that his name. Got to go. Lex.
- [21:17]
Mark Raimondi
Yeah.
- [21:17]
Mike Pesca
Larry Luger. Okay, so he's a. He's an exception where he maybe owned the intellectual property, but in general, you can't. But my question is, can you give away results or is that just a violation of a norm in wrestling versus a law or a tort.
- [21:34]
Mark Raimondi
Violation of a norm? You know, but not necessarily a legal thing. But yeah, but Bischoff was taking risks that might have been, you know, a legal gray area quite a bit. So I don't think he even cared. And then another thing that really, really, really intensified this rivalry between the two promotions was when WCW signed the former WWF women's champion. Her name was Alondra Blaze in the wwf. She was Medusa in wcw. She comes on, you know, the WCW show again, going up against WWF on Monday nights, and she takes the title belts from the WWF and throws it in the garbage. And again, that was another kind of, like, shot across the bow in this wrestling.
- [22:13]
Mike Pesca
Also very subtle. It's all very subtle.
- [22:16]
Mark Raimondi
Wrestling is not subtle. It's. It's, you know, it beats you over the head like a sledgehammer sometimes. Literally. Right?
- [22:21]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [22:22]
Mark Raimondi
Yeah, but those were.
- [22:23]
Mike Pesca
And there's like a half dozen anecdotes, a guy about guys who look like they got hit by chairs and were really mad because they got hit by chairs.
- [22:29]
Mark Raimondi
But all this was a precursor to, like, what Bischoff's vision was for, like, a different kind of wrestling. Something a lot more brash, a lot more irreverent, more for adults, not for kids.
- [22:39]
Mike Pesca
And we'll bring you more. If you're a Pesca plus subscriber, go to Mike pesca.substack.com and the more will include this moment.
- [22:49]
Mark Raimondi
There's so many parallels, as you mentioned, between politics and wrestling, and I think so many of these terms, like, you know, working yourself into a shoot, can be applied in both ways because, you know, breaking down the fourth wall, too, in politics, you get more credit for maybe. Oh, he's. He says things that other people won't say.
- [23:04]
Mike Pesca
So to find out what a work is, what a shoot is, and what turning the work into a shoot and turning the shoot into a work might say about, say, politics today. Subscribe to Pesca plus at subscribe.mike pesca.com Add free bonus episodes, support the show, learn about wrestling and sadly, the society that you've been living in for these last few decades, kids. And now the spiel Russell Vogt, who might not, technically speaking, believe in your right to, was on Face the Nation yesterday it was a very good interview. Margaret Brennan put him through his paces. It's like that guy had an answer for everything. Facility with the camera may be the top virtue in the Trump firmament, second only to subservience to Trump. Brennan pretty adeptly, given the time she had peppered him with questions about his questionable spending cuts. And then votes said this.
- [24:06]
Russell Vogt
I mean, $2 million for injecting dogs with cocaine that the NIH spent money on. $75,000 for Harvard to study blowing lizards off of trees with leaf blowers. That's the kind of waste that we've seen at the nih. And that's not even getting to the extent to which the NIH was weaponized against the American people over the last several years with regard to funding gain of function research that caused the pandemic.
- [24:31]
Mike Pesca
Right, let's take them in order. First of all, cocaine dog. We have located him. He is currently living in a sober living kennel in El Segundo. You may know him from his past exploits. In the 80s, he spuds McKenzie, Bud Light's original party animal. But now, after several ayahuasca retreats and a commitment to mindfulness, he's cut ties with most of his former Harvard classmates, except, oddly, Jared Kushner. And he's clean. Okay, so I got the real study. It's not Spuds. Evaluation of the interaction between cocaine administered orally and cocaine administered intravenously to conscious radio telemetry instrumented Beagle dogs. So this experiment costs 1.13 million. Not the 2 million. I guess they found some others or just made it up. But it did really involve beagles being strapped into jackets and then injected with cocaine. Some of the Beagles reportedly had delusions of fighting the Red Baron. But, I mean, what, are you going to not use little jackets? You're going to just let them squirm around? We're talking about cocaine injections. Can't leave that to chance. The study reported that once injected, the Beagles began to get very productive. Four of them even broke off to record a groundbreaking soft rock song cycle full of lyrical barbs and interpersonal tensions. And the members broke up. You probably know them. Snoopwood, Mack. But seriously, the real answer of all this is that the study was testing a drug designed to interrupt the effects of cocaine, acute cocaine use. In the year the study took place, 91,799Americans died from drug overdoses, and most were from opioids. But 19,447 of those overdoses involved cocaine. And before you give A drug designed to treat a stimulant use disorder to people who by definition may do cocaine while on that drug. You would like to know that the combination of the intervention and the cocaine won't kill the people. So before testing it on people, you test it on animals like dogs. It all seems kind of sensible. Describing it the way voted also seems not new. Government officials from William Proxmire on down have always described spending they don't like in max maximally ridiculous terms. Same with the $75,000 to blow tree lizards off of trees with leaf blowers. I ask you, what are you going to use your breath? But this experiment was a little less lifesaving. It was more out of curiosity. And hurricanes. And if you're saying, all right, look, the taxpayers spent the $75,000. Can you give me the results? Here they are. The lizards clung to trees in winds up to 102 mph but faltered out 108 mph like a batter against an Aroldis Chapman fastball. All right, so 75,000 I will admit for something that doesn't save anyone's life, but just let you learn a bit about tree lizards. It seems like, I guess a lot of money. Not to the government, but it is $75,000. Another way to look at it is it's only a third of the $221,000 earned by Mr. Russell vote, which I might not love paying either. In any case, no tree lizards were harmed in the crafting of his argument. Except the ones with shorter toe pads and four legs. They were blown off trees. Oh, and as far as that claim about gain of function research causing the virus, I'll just give you the rundown as we know it. CIA leans towards the lab origin hypothesis of the virus with low confidence. Department of Energy lab leak is also more likely, low confidence. FBI lab leak more likely, moderate confidence. But the National Intelligence Council and the cdc, the much sailed cdc, they say natural origin is more likely. So it is a questionable claim. It's not settled. Even though vote expressed it with the certainty of a coked up tree lizard. It's highly contested and also is true that even if the virus operated in a lab to get to gain of function research funded by the NIH as the cause of that virus is a huge stretch. It took me what I don't know. Have you been timing it five minutes to get to all that information? It took me a whole afternoon to research that claim, those claims and vet the data. And it wasn't even the most important assertion that he made, among others, that Jerome Powell caused inflation, that the administration actually wants to reduce the deficit. And then there was this one.
- [28:59]
Russell Vogt
Preschool Development Grants doesn't actually go to preschoolers. It goes to the curriculum for putting CRT into the school system for people as young children as young as 4 years old.
- [29:10]
Mike Pesca
So I looked into that too. There is no evidence that Preschool Development Grants taught crt. And by the way, I'm not using the argument that old saw that CRT is a graduate level framework. You can't teach four year old crt. I understand. I don't know how open I am, but I definitely understand the broader, more reasonable critique that certain curricula may include concepts that are influenced by the CRT ideas you teach the teachers or may include concepts that incorporate what CRT believes. There are cases of school material that I could read to you that would probably make the average American wince or at least squirm a little bit at the jargon. But the Trump administration doesn't even bother doing this. They just issue a blanket. They got some letters they don't like. And these letters are justification. At least if you're asked on a Sunday morning show justification to eliminate whatever they want to eliminate. Crt D, E, I B O B. That last one's a Bigelon blow. There's no fact checking in this kind of interview because credibility is not a substance flying around in the ether that you could grab and measure. It's not a natural element. There is no credibility counter in some basement in France where we calibrate the world's credibility. It's extrinsic, not intrinsic. It's whatever the listener or the believer wants it to be. So I still operate with the idea that this should be a credible news show or that we should have credible news outlets and those outlets should react to an official in a moment of untruth and say that is untrue and issue a challenge. And that should matter. But I realize it is increasingly an antiquated notion. So why do I keep doing it? Well, to act as if. Because you can only try to say that Margaret Brennan did a good job and when others do a less good job, they should be held to account. I still think you can put truth out there and you could put clarification out there and someone somewhere might hear it. Because think about the alternative, which is either just accepting this wholesale or believing in a cult or going the other direction, vibing in the opposite way with a vague belief that doesn't need filling in or backing up just to believe that those guys are the bad guys. That's not really very useful or deep either. Most Americans, 90%, are going to cling to their beliefs under any circumstances. But then there's that 10% or won't. And they're not always the same 10%. Look at the polls. People do change their minds. And I do think that stronger, more fact based beliefs are easier to cling to. Like a lizard in a wind up to 108 miles per hour. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Astrid Green is our social media coordinator. Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Michelle Pesca is out there dying the grass. I think you know what I mean. Oomproo G? Peru Dupru and thanks for listening.