Overtime – Episode #648: Bob Costas, Coleman Hughes, Caitlin Flanagan

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Moss.

Okay, here we are.

CNN.

Here's our final.

He is the author of the new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

Coleman Hughes is over here.

She's a staff writer at the Atlantic, Caitlin.

Right again, and you all know CNN contributor and 29 time-winning broadcaster with MLB and TNT.

Bob Costas is over here.

Okay.

First one is for you, Bob.

With the allegations against Vince McMahon,

now he's the head of the...

WWE used to be the WWF.

World Wrestling.

Right, World Wrestling Entertainment.

Entertainment.

It better be because it's not real.

Yeah.

Well, you know, part of the reason they labeled it that way was so that the various state governments wouldn't subject those athletes or performers to drug testing, to performance dancing drug testing.

Because they're all on social media.

Yeah, they basically conceded that these are scripted matches.

They don't like to blare that out to their fans, some of whom actually think it's real.

But

as the long-ago wrestling trainer, Bobby the Brain-Heenan, said to me, there's only two things that concern me about wrestling fans: they can vote and they can breed.

Well,

Bob,

my core audience is wrestling fans.

All right.

Well, anyway, the question is, would the allegations against Vince McMahon, oh, yes, now he's, for people who don't know, I read this in the paper, some really, I mean, like Weinstein-level stuff.

Or worse.

Worse.

Worse than Weinstein level.

Sex trafficking,

sexual abuse.

We'll see how this plays out.

Would they have been overlooked for so long had he been working in an industry like Hollywood instead of sports?

Well,

you just brought up a name that would refute that, at least until recently.

I think the difference is that if you talk about something like that, it's not covered in the same way as baseball, football, basketball would be covered.

You don't have a press corps that's covering them and holding them to account.

But

they operate on their own.

Netflix just gave

WWE, is it now?

Yeah.

A $5 billion deal.

Oh, really?

It has a television audience.

It's one of the few things that we have.

$5 billion?

I would guess so.

But knowing Netflix makes it a lot more difficult.

But usually, like a deal like that,

usually gets stopped when a guy like this is attached to it.

And if he's ahead of it, it could be.

Okay.

Or someone else takes over and the basic product is appealing to enough of an audience that they roll on.

All right.

For Coleman, is the woke kindergarten controversy in San Francisco an example of DEI running amok in schools?

Well, first of all, we'll have to explain what the woke kindergarten controversy is.

Yeah, so the woke kindergarten controversy is at a school in San Francisco that is majority Hispanic.

That is to say, two-thirds of these kids are speaking Spanish at home.

They need to be taught the basics, English, math, et cetera.

That school decided, instead of focusing on those things, to hire an organization called Woke Kindergarten, pay them a quarter million dollars over.

Literally called it Woke Kindergarten.

Literally called it.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, you're.

I thought that was the name that the guy who wrote the article gave it.

That was their name.

The comedy is a lot of fun.

They're owning it.

Okay, Got it.

Owning it.

Owning it.

Wealth kindergarten.

Self-awareness is a wonderful thing.

It really is.

Boy, kids

start them too young, huh?

And

rather predictably, what happened is that their math and reading scores have been declining for several years.

And

it's become yet another example of...

precisely the opposite priorities that typical normal Americans want, which is we want to send our kids to school to learn the basics as we decline worldwide, not to be taught why math is racist, for instance.

And

the final thing I'll say,

I think.

What about six?

That number, I always say

a little bit suspicious, right?

I think that the basic problem with wokeness,

One of the basic problems is that it views kids as somehow inherently racist and the racism needs to be hammered out of them in some way.

When the reality is that, among all the kids, the problems kids have, for instance, being selfish and needing to learn to share, racism is not one of them.

So,

really, in the same way we want to protect a child's sexual innocence for as long as possible, we should want to preserve that racially innocent mindset for as long as possible, not hammer these ideas innocently.

Okay.

Caitlin, as an educator, what do you think of Dartmouth announcing it will bring back the SAT as a

requirement for all the kids?

Now, if people don't know, all eight Ivy Leagues got rid of the SAT in the name of equity about, I don't know, three or four years ago.

And now Dartmouth is saying

no.

Through the red flag.

I can tell you, it's absolutely true that all over the country, people don't realize this, there are kids who didn't have an access to go to a good secondary school or their parents moved a lot or there's family's chaos.

And they'll pop up with these great scores individually.

And these are the kids that, you know, they can, the old idea is you could test into certain schools.

You should be able to test into the University of California.

And it was a tremendous benefit to kids who had every disadvantage along the way.

And now, and the other thing is, we don't want to admit this, and it's irrelevant for well-off kids, but the SAT truly is the best single predictor of can the kid get through the school?

Is he or she going to show up and say, Yeah, I can do this coursework.

Maybe I'm not as wealthy as the others or gifted in sports or whatever, but I'm not having problems here.

I'm moving through the curriculum.

And you can't lie on it.

I read that 60% of college applicants admit they lie about some part of their application.

Right.

You can't lie in the SAT.

Well, unless you're Felicity Huffman.

But that's not the SAT.

Yeah, that's.

It's the ACT, I think.

All right.

All right.

For everybody, is there any merit in Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin?

I guess that was...

I read

that Putin went on for a half hour.

The first question.

He just gave him a history lesson, an erroneous.

It's reprehensible.

That he would even do it.

Well, I mean, we...

interviewers have done that.

I mean, I remember Mike Wallace with the Ayatollah.

Of course, but under the kind of rules of engagement that that interview was conducted and with a certain

acquiescing lens through which Tucker put the answer.

Right, I mean, Tucker has already been part of Putin's propaganda apparatus for a few years now.

Yeah.

It would have been like if Mike Wallace had been on in Iran for three years.

Right.

Hey,

that's the difference.

I have to imagine if for some reason you were interviewing Putin and he started going on about how Poland was to blame for World War II, you would say, hold on a second, Vlad.

And you would give people...

Tucker just lets him go on with basic historical facts that

that's what he said that Poland was well yeah he held Poland responsible for

for being attacked by Hitler correct yeah yeah yeah I would definitely flag that

for For whatever it's worth, I mean,

when the Olympics,

were they doing this interview on the ground floor or was it up by a window?

For whatever it's worth, when the Olympics were in Sochi, Russia in 2014,

we requested for many months prior to and during the Games, whether it would be me or someone from NBC News, and Putin turned that down flatly.

Right.

So he wasn't going to sit.

I didn't have a pink eye.

Yes, he did.

That's right.

That's right.

A whole cloak and dagger operation that Putin and the KGB obviously undertook just to screw me up.

I knew it.

I knew that.

Yeah.

And you know, people to this day, they'll say, conversational icebreaker occasionally.

Bob, you remember that time you had pink eye at the Olympics?

No, I don't recall.

Refresh my memory.

A hundred million people with memes all over the internet and ridiculous, untrue theories as to how I contracted.

I have no idea.

Remind me again what that was.

But now we can say it.

Yes, yes.

You still don't know why you got it?

I don't.

I honestly don't.

Okay.

All right.

What do you think?

Dirty tricks.

What do you think that the government is now banning Eugenia,

Tavium, and Extendimax?

Well, I have a lot of feelings about Eugenia, Tavi, Mendy Max.

What are you talking about?

What is that?

They're weed killers.

Oh.

I want to know what they did to us and why they sound like boner poo.

They do.

The last one does.

The last one does.

All right.

Thank you.

We're ran out of time.

Thank you, CNN.

We'll see you next week.

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