The Show for April 4, 2026: Groundwater ruling, Mormon wrestlers and more

A judge has ruled the Arizona water department cannot stop developers from building based on a change in how it evaluates groundwater. Find out what that decision could mean for housing — and water — in the Valley. Plus, the Mormon Giant and the history of the LDS Church through the lens of professional wrestling.

Transcript

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

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, what a judge’s ruling in a case about groundwater could mean for the future of both water and housing in the Valley.

LAUREN GILGER: And we’ll learn about the "Mormon Giant" and the history of professional wrestlers with LDS gimmicks. But first, at least 15 Mexican nationals have died either during ICE enforcement actions or while in the agency’s custody, and Mexican officials aren’t happy about it.

As my next guest has reported, the country’s Foreign Ministry has called ICE detention centers "incompatible with human rights standards". And Mexico’s president has called on consulates across the U.S. to check in on detention facilities more frequently. With me now to talk more about all this is KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky from our Hermosillo Bureau. Nina, good morning.

NINA KRAVINSKY: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So, what is the situation? What are we seeing in terms of Mexican nationals and their interactions with ICE?

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, definitely. So, you know, first I think I should say that deaths in ICE detention this year are at a high. You know, they’re at least 16 people total, not just, you know, Mexican nationals. And if they continue at this rate, those deaths will outpace last year’s more than 20-year record of deaths in ICE detention.

Experts say that that increase in deaths interestingly also outpaces the increase of people in detention, which of course has been pretty sizable since Trump’s inauguration this year. And you know, I think it’s important when we’re talking about this to talk about the conditions, of course, inside ICE detention facilities.

A recent deportee that I just spoke with last week in Nogales, Sonora—he’d just been deported from Phoenix—and he spent two months in this Arizona detention facility in Florence where he was detained for a while. And he said that conditions were pretty bad. It was dirty and overcrowded.

And one expert that I spoke to said that, you know, migrants in ICE detention these days have less redress for poor treatment than they used to. There are fewer people that they can go to to complain about poor conditions. So, you know, the Trump administration did last year cut positions that used to provide oversight for immigration detention.

MARK BRODIE: So Nina, you have reported that Mexican officials are pretty unhappy about this situation. What are they saying and what might they be able to actually do?

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, so, you know, just in these past two weeks, as you mentioned, ICE has reported very recent deaths in its facilities. One was, like you said, a Mexican national who died in a Louisiana detention facility. He’s one of at least 15 people who have died this year.

And you know, Mexico’s government has had some pretty strong words at the very least about this. You know, they’ve invoked human rights concerns. And Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has said, like you said, she would ask her consulates in the U.S. to do more consular visits to ICE detention centers.

And Mexico is also calling on U.S. authorities to conduct their own investigations of each of these deaths. You know, Mexico is really trying to pull on sort of these diplomatic levers to try to enact some sort of change. But obviously, ICE detentions are something that’s happening in another country, in another foreign sovereign nation.

And so the amount that they can do is relatively limited in terms of sort of actual actionable measures. But certainly Mexico and Mexican officials on a high level seem to be taking these ICE deaths pretty seriously and trying to speak pretty strongly about them from within the bounds of their own country.

MARK BRODIE: Nina, what are you hearing from Mexican officials here in Arizona specifically?

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, so I spoke to the Consul General in Phoenix, and he told me that his consulate in particular wants U.S. authorities to do a thorough investigation of two Mexican nationals who died in Arizona ICE facilities last year, or in Arizona ICE detention.

He called the deaths of these two men unnecessary. One was a 32-year-old man who’d spent much of his life in Flagstaff and graduated high school there. And ICE said at the time of his death that the cause of that death was unknown and under investigation. His family, though, says he likely died from complications from COVID and that he didn’t receive necessary medical attention.

MARK BRODIE: So Nina, there’s some pretty interesting political implications of all this for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. It seems like she kind of has to walk this tightrope when it comes to dealing with President Trump and his administration. What are folks in Mexico, maybe on this side of the border as well, saying about that?

NINA KRAVINSKY: Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s exactly right. She’s been on this fine line since really she came into office in fall of 2024 and sort of immediately had to start speaking to, either directly or through the media, then President-elect Donald Trump.

And you know, she’s always trying to sort of be firm but also not provoke President Trump. And you know, Mexico does have a lot to lose when it comes to its relationship with the U.S. That’s something that people are definitely worried about. Just this week, trade representatives from the United States were in Mexico City to talk about this upcoming review of the USMCA trade deal.

That’s the trade pact, you know, that binds the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. And Mexico and the U.S. are economically dependent on each other in a lot of ways. You know, Mexico’s economy would definitely suffer if that trade agreement were to fall apart.

But on the topic of ICE deaths, Sheinbaum has been pretty firm. Like we’ve said, you know, she said after the death the other week in Louisiana that Mexico would do everything possible to protect its citizens in the United States.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, that is KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky from our Hermosillo Bureau. Nina, thanks as always. Really appreciate it.

NINA KRAVINSKY: Thank you, Mark.

LAUREN GILGER: And now let's turn to a story about a Valley trauma surgeon who is headed to trial on felony charges that could put him behind bars for decades. It all began late one summer night in 2022, when a man was poking around Kris Johnson's front door.

He went outside with a gun and saw floodlights from two vehicles blocking the entrance to his neighborhood, and he fired what he calls a "warning shot" in the air. He ended up shot in the leg by police and facing prison time.

But despite the court asking prosecutors to offer a plea deal to keep Johnson out of prison, top Maricopa County Attorney's Office officials won't offer anything less than 5-10 years behind bars. And it's all raising questions about Arizona's self-defense laws and how they're carried out. ABC15 investigative reporter David Biscobing broke the story and he's on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Dave.

DAVID BISCOBING: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay, so walk us through what happened that night. Like, why did Kris Johnson fire a shot into the air?

DAVID BISCOBING: I'm going to keep this as brief as I can because we've done this very long, complicated story. But in short, it's 11:00 p.m. at night. They live in this area on the edge of the Valley, in the edge of Phoenix, that's pretty rural. There is no walk-through, drive-through type of traffic.

His wife is up late—she's a probation officer at the time—she's working on reports in her kitchen, and they notice, hear, she notices and hears a strange man at their front door. And through the doorbell camera and what she could see through their kind of frosted glass door, looked like he was trying to look for a way in.

And he's looking underneath pots, maybe for a key, he's kind of meandering around the front of the house. She runs, goes, gets her husband. She calls 911. He then takes her gun and he—they don't see him at the front door anymore.

So he goes out to his backyard and to the side of his house to see, make sure he's not trying to get in another way. And that's where down the block he sees these floodlights, right? And so very bright, very dark neighborhood, you cannot see.

I've been out there. There's no streetlights, you can't see more than, you know, 20 yards ahead of yourself. And so these are blinding lights. You cannot make out what's happening in front of you. He does the biggest mistake, he says, of his life—something he admits was wrong—and he fires off a warning shot into the air.

In return he hears, you know, "Show me your hands or I will shoot you." There are nine shots fired in his direction as he's sprinting away. And no time did the police identify themselves as police. They didn't have their emergency red and blue lights flashing.

And he is, you know, shot in the leg. And so then it takes them, he runs back to his house. It takes quite a bit of time for them to figure out what happened. And now he's facing these charges.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. Okay. So let's talk about the prosecution of Johnson, David. Like, this case has taken four years to get to trial. The indictment was thrown out twice and the judge in the case has said he doesn't think Johnson should end up in prison because of this. What has he said?

DAVID BISCOBING: Well, that's the judge after this came back for a third time to attempt to get these charges to stick because there were problems with the indictment and the prosecutors and police not telling a grand jury about self-defense laws properly, which is why it got thrown out twice.

The judge was like, "Hey, this is not the typical person we want to see put in prison. Like, I don't want this to be anywhere close to prison. Please come up with a resolution." And the County Attorney's Office, up in and including the County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, won't budge. They won't offer anything less than five to 10. And so that is where we're at and why we're very much looking at the possibility of trial.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So you also spoke with a criminal justice expert from John Jay College of Criminal Justice about this case. What did he have to say?

DAVID BISCOBING: He really just doesn't see how there's justice in this case at all. He sees fault on everyone's side, right? He's like, the doctor should have stayed in his house. That's, in his words, your castle. That's where you remain. He made a mistake.

But he also says the police not identifying themselves really contributed to the "quote" chaos of that night. And he goes, "Where's the intent here?" Right? "Like, where's the intent of charging this doctor with aggravated assault? This was not meant to, you know, harm police, so why are we treating them as if they're these major victims and that requires prison time? What is the benefit of putting this man in prison to society?"

That's his big take. So he sees fault everywhere, where everyone should really just take a deep breath and move on rather than trying to punish this surgeon for what is just a terrible round of mistakes by everyone involved.

LAUREN GILGER: So Johnson is claiming self-defense as you said. What do you think this case says about Arizona's self-defense laws, how they've been carried out here?

DAVID BISCOBING: I think that it says a couple things. One, that there's a lot of confusion for the public about what counts as self-defense, right? Leaving your house and firing off that warning shot, in a way that kind of negates some of the self-defense claims according to some of the legal experts I've spoken to. So that's an issue, right?

And so it's understanding what it is you're allowed to do. But then also, there's a lot of questions about, you know, the idea that what is fair? Right? We saw in the prison, the former prison director Charles Ryan's case, he got in an armed standoff with police and, you know, he pointed a weapon at SWAT officers and he was given just straight probation by the same County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, who said he was probably too drunk to really mean it, right, at the time.

And so there's a lot of questions from a lot of people on all ends of the spectrum here about fairness, kind of justice, and, you know, what counts and what doesn't and how this is all being applied.

LAUREN GILGER: What has the Maricopa County Attorney's Office or the County Attorney herself had to say about this case?

DAVID BISCOBING: They don't want to discuss this case. They say it's because it's ongoing, and you know, that's going to be their standard response. I've been a little surprised at basically the terseness and kind of the—condescending's maybe not the right word—but the nature and the professionalism of their response.

We've sent very detailed, very straightforward just, you know, facts that we intend to report and, you know, our story's very long, very in-depth, included way more information than they've ever presented to a grand jury or even to a preliminary hearing on this.

And they told us, "Well, you apparently—we're not going to comment but, you know, apparently the facts have been misrepresented to you." We asked, "What facts have been misrepresented?" They just ignored that entirely. They won't even send any statements that they'll attribute to a specific official.

So no one even wants to put their names on the stuff that they do send. So this has all been kind of telling just kind of the lack of the normal level of professionalism that should exist in trying to get some answers whether they intend to comment, you know, or not.

LAUREN GILGER: Last minute here, Dave. What response, if any, have you gotten from Phoenix PD?

DAVID BISCOBING: Well, Phoenix PD, this is an interesting aspect of it. They again say because this is ongoing they won't comment on it. Of course they do comment on it when it initially happens and their initial version of events was that this doctor essentially got into a gunfight with these officers, which is not actually what happened.

But they won't comment. But they did say their Critical Incident Review Board approved of this, found the officers within policy. But as I followed up on that, I'm now learning that the Critical Incident Review Board that they use to kind of, you know, use as like, oh we really take a deep look at these things—they don't even take votes.

This is just something I need to investigate further. They just kind of reach some sort of consensus without voting, and so there's—that's something I'm digging into and I can probably promise you that there's going to be more reporting as that relates to this case and many others going forward.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. We'll leave it there for now. More to come. ABC15's David Biscobing joining us. Thanks so much.

DAVID BISCOBING: Thank you so much.

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, an academic uses wrestling devices to map public perception of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

DAVID WALKER: He would come in and he would say, you know, "Are there Mormon brethren among us? You know, fellows, I come to do the faith, honor and justice," and then he would proceed, you know, to do something bad. Oh, so he would just get, you know, booed vociferously and including by the Mormons in the audience.

LAUREN GILGER: We'll hear more about the "Mormon Giant," Brother Jonathan, and the LDS Church.

MARK BRODIE: But first, a state judge ruled this week that the Arizona Department of Water Resources illegally changed how it evaluates whether there's enough groundwater to build new homes in parts of the Valley.

The decision is a win for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, which had sued. State law requires builders in certain parts of the state, including the Phoenix area, to prove there's an assured 100-year water supply for houses being built there.

But shortly after Governor Katie Hobbs took office, she released a report showing the Phoenix Active Management Area was short of that. Those numbers led to a pause in building new homes in parts of the Valley.

With me now to talk about the ruling and its potential impact is Kathleen Ferris, senior research fellow at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU's Morrison Institute for Public Policy. She was also instrumental in crafting the 1980 Groundwater Management Act. Kathy, good morning.

KATHLEEN FERRIS: Good morning. How are you?

MARK BRODIE: I'm doing all right, thanks. So, I'm curious just to sort of get your response to this, to this ruling here.

KATHLEEN FERRIS: Well, how much time do I have? No. So here's the thing. The case goes to the very heart of Arizona's assured water supply requirement and its preservation. And so let's back up for a minute. This has been a requirement of Arizona's law for 45 years now.

And when groundwater is involved, the applicant for an assured water supply determination must show that its proposed pumping of groundwater over 100 years will not exceed a certain depth to water and will not impact existing users of groundwater.

For decades, the department relied on computer models to make this determination. But those models have improved over the years. And in 1923 [sic], the department found that the groundwater in the greater Phoenix area was even more interconnected and that pumping of groundwater for new subdivisions would create a shortage of groundwater over the next 100 years for existing users. Hence, Governor Hobbs declared a moratorium on granting new certificates of assured water supply.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. Well, I was going to say like, do you think that, you know, the homebuilders were basically saying, "Look, this is—we have a housing crisis here, especially in the Phoenix metro area. You know, Governor and administration, you're telling us we can't build homes for people in this area." How do you balance those two things, you know, especially when, you know, homes tend to use less water than other uses like, you know, things like agriculture?

KATHLEEN FERRIS: So backing up, the Home Builders Association and the Goldwater Institute are talking about homes on raw desert land. They're not talking about homes that would be put on retired agricultural land. They want to build on vast swaths of desert land that have never had any groundwater use.

So this is a new use. And also, what's more important? Is a water supply for the home, for the homes that are already here, for the people that are already here, for the investments that have already been made, more important than building new homes?

I would say yes. I would say that we have to make that determination, especially, especially now that we're seeing shortages of Colorado River water, and we know that our water providers in this Valley are going to need to rely more and more on groundwater.

MARK BRODIE: We should note the State Department of Water Resources has suggested that it will appeal this ruling. And I'm wondering if you think that there's anything that they can say that might get an appeals court or maybe if it goes to the State Supreme Court to see this differently than this, this first judge saw?

KATHLEEN FERRIS: Well, absolutely I do. I totally disagree with Judge Blaney's reasoning and analysis. There is nothing new in what the department is doing. The department is following assured water supply rules that have been in effect for 20 years or more.

And the court's decision ignores—it's an assault on science. It's an assault on ADWR's long-standing practices. It moves us back to when it was legal to put in a well and pump as much water as you wanted even if you impacted your neighbor, to the days when the person with the most money and the deepest well wins.

So I think the department is on firm ground here. They have not changed their practices, they have just applied the science that has developed over the years and what their model has showed to the situation on the ground.

And we cannot, we cannot allow developers to build hundreds of thousands of new homes served with groundwater when we already have a problem with our groundwater supplies and when we have shortages of Colorado River water impending.

MARK BRODIE: The Hobbs administration has been touting its alternative system for getting a certificate for an assured 100-year water supply. Let's assume for a moment, I know you hope this is not the case, but let's assume for a moment that this ruling stands. How does—like does that mean that the alternative program, what happens to that if homebuilders maybe seems like maybe they wouldn't need that anymore?

KATHLEEN FERRIS: Well, I think that's true. And you and I know that when that alternative program was being discussed, the lobbyist for the Home Builders Association basically said, "This isn't going to do us any good," because they don't want to build on those ag lands. They want to build these vast master-planned communities out in the pristine desert.

MARK BRODIE: So you think it would like the alternative program maybe just would slide away in a sense?

KATHLEEN FERRIS: I think it wouldn't be as popular, I will tell you that. And you know, I really think that if this decision is allowed to stand, it may be the death knell of the assured water supply requirement.

You know, Tom Buschatzke, the director of the department, put it best. What is at stake is the ability of the state to protect the Arizonans that are here today by ensuring that their water supplies don't run out or water levels fall to alarming depths due to new groundwater pumping. This decision would really put a dent, a big dent, like breaking the dam of the assured water supply requirement.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, we'll have to leave it there. That is Kathleen Ferris, senior research fellow at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU's Morrison Institute for Public Policy. Kathy, thanks as always.

KATHLEEN FERRIS: Thanks, Mark.

LAUREN GILGER: Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos is under pressure on a lot of fronts right now, from his handling of the investigation into the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie to withholding disciplinary measures in his past on his resume.

The headlines keep getting worse for the embattled sheriff. Just a few weeks ago, the Pima County Deputies Union held a no-confidence vote in him. About half of members said they want him to resign. And now the ACLU of Arizona is suing the Pima County Sheriff's Department for records related to its dealings with federal immigration authorities.

Nanos has said his department does not work with immigration enforcement, but some records the ACLU has already received show instances in which Pima Sheriff's deputies seem to be alerting them. They would make a traffic stop, for example, and then Border Patrol agents would arrive on the scene.

John Mitchell, immigrants' rights attorney for the ACLU of Arizona, said up until the spring of last year, the department had a policy of tracking records like this. But then they seemed to have abruptly stopped doing it. I spoke with him more about the case and the context in which it's happening.

JOHN MITCHELL: As far as we knew at the time, these were isolated incidents, but we did go into the publicly posted policies of the Pima County Sheriff's Department and saw that there was a policy requirement to track communications between the deputies and what they call federal immigration authorities.

We later learned that they just interpreted "federal immigration authorities" to mean Border Patrol; to our knowledge, we don't have any records of them tracking communications with ICE. But we did uncover a set of records that indicate when and for what purpose Pima County Sheriff's deputies will call Border Patrol, and those records stopped somewhat abruptly in 2024, despite the policy continuing up until the point at which we had requested the records.

Very shortly, I'd say just about a week after we sent our records request, the Pima County Sheriff's Department quietly changed their policy to no longer require this tracking. So that sort of pricked our ears a bit. We continued with what now has been ongoing litigation.

LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So you're suing for the release of those documents in light of that change that seems to have happened. You've already obtained some documents from PCSO related to incidents that seem to have resulted in some interaction with federal immigration authorities. You said not particularly with ICE, but with Border Patrol. What do those records show? It looks like there are some cases in which you see the Sheriff's Office call Border Patrol?

JOHN MITCHELL: Yes, absolutely. That's not in question. In general, it's hard to categorize or say overarching findings about such a broad number of records, a large number of records over such a broad timeframe.

Of course, you know, you can't say that every single instance is constitutionally problematic or potentially unlawful. Of course, there are just thousands upon thousands of interactions and reports and data points. So we are trying to sort of narrow down what we see as the most concerning interactions between Pima County Sheriff's deputies and federal immigration authorities.

As of now, you know, we've gotten some incident reports, and it's important to keep in mind that incident reports are by nature one-sided accounts. They're written by the deputy who's involved. They are subjective in that sense, so we take them with a grain of salt there.

But what we have seen about the interactions between Sheriff's deputies and Border Patrol is that in some instances, they appear to violate constitutional bounds of keeping somebody in a law enforcement encounter for the purpose of having Border Patrol come in and investigate their immigration status. Of course, we can't say what the constitutionality is of a given encounter without trying to understand the fuller picture. This is records litigation, right? It's not about the constitutionality of these stops, but it is a pattern.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. It's what's available to the public, yeah.

JOHN MITCHELL: Exactly.

LAUREN GILGER: So let me ask you about why now? Right? Like as you're digging up these records, this obviously comes at a moment in which we're seeing, you know, increased immigration enforcement around the country from the Trump administration. We're seeing a real ramping up of agreements between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities. These 287(g) agreements have really exploded in the last year or so.

The Pima County Sheriff's Office does not have that kind of agreement. The Sheriff, Chris Nanos, has said, "You know, we do not enforce immigration law, we're not interested in your immigration status." I wonder why now in terms of the ACLU looking into these kinds of incidents and patterns?

JOHN MITCHELL: Yeah, well, that's chief concern for us—to ensure that in a broader sense, public officials are held accountable to their constituents. When a sheriff touts their agency's commitment to non-cooperation, you know, in one isolated sense, it means they don't enforce immigration law, right? They can't arrest someone for a suspected lack of status.

But in our view, it also means they would not call Border Patrol just because they're unsure of someone's immigration status. And certainly that they would not call Border Patrol to the scene of, I think in one incident report, just a description of people who are not of the United States without any further context.

So the incident reports we've got in this litigation are quite concerning in that sense to see that not only do the Sheriff's deputies appear to have called Border Patrol in situations where they did not need to, but they also called Border Patrol to essentially in situations that were somewhat ambiguous at the time.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Lots to watch for. John Mitchell, immigrants' rights attorney for the ACLU of Arizona, joining us. John, thank you for coming on. I appreciate you taking the time.

JOHN MITCHELL: Thank you so much for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: We also reached out to Sheriff Chris Nanos about this litigation. His department told us the Sheriff does not comment on pending litigation.

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

MARK BRODIE: And I'm Mark Brodie. A conference today in Phoenix aims to bring together people and organizations that can drive innovation in women's health and healthcare.

The Femtech Summit is part of an effort to bring parity to healthcare. Studies from firms like Deloitte and McKinsey point out that a majority of health research focuses on men's bodies. A few years back, The Show reported on a lack of sports medicine and healthcare research more broadly focusing on females.

Sidnee Peck is co-founder of Femtech AZ, which is putting on the conference. I spoke with her earlier, and we started with what exactly Femtech refers to.

SIDNEE PECK: Femtech is, in the way we use it—so in fairness, it's used differently across the world. It is for women's health innovation. So this is across the board: women's bodies work differently than men's.

So this includes our brains, our bones, our hearts, our limbs, our joints, and anything that addresses a women's health problem with an innovation in that space, we put under the umbrella of Femtech.

MARK BRODIE: So would this potentially also include things like cancer research or neurological research that is done sort of generally but tends to focus more on men's bodies and brains as opposed to women's?

SIDNEE PECK: Absolutely. So you hit on a key point, which is that 4% of medical research is done on women's bodies. And only 6% of R&D. So you can imagine most medical solutions today are built based on the male physiology.

And luckily, somebody decided to study the woman's body, which, there's reasons they weren't studied for a long time. But we learned that the entire body operates differently, and because of our unique hormones and the way we respond to things, we do need to take a step back and go through almost every intervention on a woman's body.

MARK BRODIE: What kinds of things are you finding so far in terms of differences that maybe you wouldn't have thought about?

SIDNEE PECK: So my co-founder, Dr. Mitzi Krockover, would be the expert on this one. I'm more on the business side. I won't make any medical claims. But one example that we like to use is heart attack symptoms.

So if you've watched a movie in America, you know what it looks like when a man is having a heart attack: the grabbing of the arm or the chest. In women, it might be more subtle, like fatigue or just general achiness.

And again, not a medical provider, but just that difference, that the way a heart attack looks for a woman than it does for a man, just that simple education and then different interventions there could save more women's lives because we don't notice it.

MARK BRODIE: So you mentioned that one of the things you're working on is devices and technology to help women's health, women's bodies, both physical and mental health. Do you need to have that research done first, though, to sort of know what kind of specific technology might be most useful?

SIDNEE PECK: Absolutely. So the role that Femtech AZ as an organization is playing is bringing the ecosystem together. So we built Femtech AZ because we saw the gaps—these 4% and 6%. We see the huge opportunity.

We are 50% of the population. We're in pain 25% more of our lives than men. And we have money to spend, which is a very strong economic driver to do this. And we noticed that in Arizona, we have this whole pipeline starting with research to really build women's health innovation here.

So our role is a convener. So we bring all these groups together as an ecosystem to help advance women's health innovation, and that does start at the research end. So we have strong medical schools, and those are typically going to be your square-one starting point for identifying the key issues and using research to drive innovation and then it's going to move all the way through the innovation pipeline.

MARK BRODIE: What to you are some of those key issues? Like, what are some of the areas of study and areas of innovation that would be most beneficial?

SIDNEE PECK: I mean, all of them. Yeah. So I would say some of the things that are very hot right now—excuse the pun—menopause and perimenopause are having their moment.

And as you can imagine, when you look at it through a business lens, a lot of female leaders step back or leave the workforce in moments of menopause transition because their symptoms are confusing, they didn't understand why they were tired, why they were feeling, you know, all the frozen shoulder, all these additional pains, because we didn't understand it.

And so I think perimenopause and menopause are going to be huge for the workforce, for general understanding for women. But frankly, we're discovering—I learn a new article every day that has something new.

I won't remember the person or the name properly, but they just opened a center for research for women's performance under the Women's Soccer National League because the way women's joints heal is different than the way men's joints heal.

So everything is a baby step until it's a huge leap, and I would say it's across the entire body—mental health, physical health, and our entire systems—that there's still opportunity to study and build.

MARK BRODIE: How big of a slice of health innovation in general is this? Specifically looking at women's health, women's bodies, you know, both physical and mental health?

SIDNEE PECK: Like in the marketplace?

MARK BRODIE: Yeah.

SIDNEE PECK: McKinsey has done multiple studies on this in partnership with the World Economic Forum. They released an estimate that it would be worth—if we started answering all the gaps in the continuum of care—it would be worth a trillion dollars annually globally by 2040.

And so that's imagine us ramping up our systems to be able to serve all these needs every year, adding a trillion dollars into the market simply by saying, "Ah, we took all this entire medical system over here, and now we're looking at it for these different bodies."

MARK BRODIE: Is that in terms of like the research and the development of products, but also as you referenced earlier, being able to keep women in the workforce for longer and helping them overcome injuries and not cost the healthcare system additional money?

SIDNEE PECK: It is. It's all of these things. They have a really great report—anyone can find it easily by Googling "McKinsey Women's Health Innovation Report"—and there's a lot of different slices.

So they look at the impact on just providing the care, 50 billion in the U.S. I think it was about 300 billion for the impact on the workforce for women going through menopause. So it's just those who are directly providing care—clinicians, hospitals, directly providing care to women; those who are women in the workforce and all the businesses that employ women, which is almost all of us; and the entire global impact of this industry.

MARK BRODIE: So you referenced getting this ramped up. What will it take to do that in Arizona?

SIDNEE PECK: Yeah, you know, we've gotten a lot of great interest and early partnerships. We started this effort a little over a year ago. We spent 2025 on kind of an awareness roadshow. So the conversation started happening. That started bringing up some of the gaps that we were seeing.

For example, there was a study that we reference: Arizona ranks 40th in women's health outcomes and 46th in access and affordability for care for women. So highlighting these issues in Arizona, calling the key leaders together.

So it's already starting to happen. We are just continuing to host more events that bring innovators and our ecosystem together, and we'll be bringing a lot of these key leaders together at our Leadership Summit.

Not only is it sometimes difficult to pitch women's health innovation ideas to a group of men whose bodies don't experience these things, but it can also be one layer harder if the founder happens to also be female.

And so this is a key area where we can really equip our founders and our investors to say, "Hey, here's how we're both going to come together to understand the huge opportunity here and not get caught in the thought that there's a nuance around the female body." This is just another market opportunity.

MARK BRODIE: One of the things that you'll be doing at a summit that's coming up is releasing a working on a blueprint. What do you hope to achieve with that?

SIDNEE PECK: Sure. So this is the beginnings of what we are calling the "Blueprint for Women's Health Innovation in Arizona." And what we're in: Phase 1, which is identifying the gaps. And we're really diving in to say where can we improve and then we're going to start to discuss this with some of our key leaders in the ecosystem next week and say, "Here are the gaps. Now who's ready to step up and how can we start to really drive closing some of these gaps and drive accountability to advance women's health innovation in the state?"

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Sydney Peck, co-founder of Femtech AZ. Sydney, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

SIDNEE PECK: 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. Don Leo Jonathan was better known as the "Mormon Giant," a second-generation professional wrestler in the mid-20th century. And he was quite literally giant: he stood at 6 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed more than 300 pounds.

The "Mormon" part of his moniker he inherited from his father, a wrestler who went by Brother Jonathan and played off of Mormon stereotypes to get boos from the crowd.

DAVID WALKER: So he had an oversized Book of Mormon that he would hit you with. He started carrying around a 7-foot rattlesnake onto whose head he grafted a fake horn to make it look more menacing, and which he described as the snake from the Garden of Eden. He would bring women around and introduce them as among his wives.

LAUREN GILGER: That's David Walker, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. He tells the whole story of the "Mormon Giant" and his father in a new live documentary that he'll be performing at ASU tonight.

And he told me the "Mormon Giant" was coming to fame as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was becoming more mainstream. And it all reveals a lot about how religion and entertainment influence and reflect each other. I spoke with Walker more about wrestling, religion, the "Mormon Giant," and Brother Jonathan.

DAVID WALKER: He would dress in the sort of the attire of a 19th-century Mormon missionary to play a sort of old-school Mormon missionary precisely again at this moment of the church's turn towards a respectability politics.

He was playing its shadow side, and he did so precisely to get the boos of the crowd. He would come in and he would say, you know, "Are there Mormon brethren among us? You know, fellows, I come to do the faith, honor and justice," and then he would proceed, you know, to do something bad. Oh, so he would just get, you know, booed vociferously and including by the Mormons in the audience who loved to sort of see this own part of their tradition that had been sort of swept under the rug represented in this particular way, either to sort of live vicariously through its continued representation or to just cheer when it just has its, you know, snot beat out of it.

LAUREN GILGER: So he played the villain in the wrestling scheme, which has always got a good villain, right? But it sounds like it was a little different when it came to his son, who became known as the "Mormon Giant." Like, he was a little, it sounds like, ambivalent about his moniker?

DAVID WALKER: Yeah, absolutely. So when Don Leo Jonathan—Don Leo Heaton was his birth name, but he took on his father's ring name, Brother Jonathan, to Don Leo Jonathan, and then started becoming known as the "Mormon Giant."

And he first sort of didn't know what to do with the moniker. It was a way of him sort of inheriting and being brought up into the sport by his dad, but he not only wanted to get away from his dad's legacy but also had a sort of ambivalent feel about being called endlessly the "Mormon Giant," too.

He sort of embraced that moniker, he learned how to roll with it, but he found two things: first, that he had an ambivalent relationship to the church, too, and he wanted to be known beyond that. But also, frankly, that the church itself in the 1950s and '60s context of its own cultural mainstreaming and indeed sort of international growth was known differently in different times and places.

And thus also the "Mormon Giant" moniker played differently in different times and places. Sometimes it would mark him as a heel, sometimes as a hero, sometimes it played sort of ambivalently or, you know, neutrally. And so I'm trying to tell also the history of the church itself by way of the way that that gimmick was both sort of thrust upon people but also the way that it either played or did not play in different times and places.

And thus again to sort of map these gimmicks alongside and as a way to understand the reception of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself in the 20th century.

LAUREN GILGER: That's fascinating. I want to back up for a minute, David, and talk about the way that you present this. Right? It's very innovative and sort of, I guess, genre-busting in terms of academia. You're calling it a "live documentary" and there's music involved, you're narrating the whole thing live, it's on a screen but you're in the room. How does this work?

DAVID WALKER: Yeah, so when I started this project, I started working on a documentary component. I worked on actually a number of different outputs: both a written component, a sort of lecture component, and then a documentary component.

Eventually, I sort of pushed pause on the documentary component and pulled a lot of those materials into this sort of live presentation. So what I do is I deliver what would otherwise be sort of the voiceover of a documentary along with these sort of clips that I've edited to that purpose that have their own soundtrack or their own audio as people themselves give their own histories of wrestling or the church itself or give a sort of theory of religion.

I interact with them, and then I have all of this sort of production live-soundtracked by a good friend and extraordinary musician named Tim Albro. So this is, I mean, it's a different mode of academic presentation. I wanted to keep it as an academic presentation and indeed sort of own my own status as an academic, as a professor of this material, but also play with genre and form a little bit in a way that I hope also gives us the opportunity to think more critically not only about the forms and the presentations and the performances of scholarship but also indeed the way that wrestling itself has its own presentational theories and cultural dynamics and think of a way of being able to sort of mimic as metaphor the one to the other in order to comment a little bit more on both.

LAUREN GILGER: What kind of reaction have you gotten? Like, I mean, you're doing this live documentary at universities, you know, it sounds like around the country. Are people excited about this, especially in academia, when it feels and looks a little different?

DAVID WALKER: Yeah, I mean, to use a wrestling term, it's been getting over pretty well. And it has been getting over differently in front of different audiences, too, and that's been really fun to track with.

So we'll riff a little bit differently if we're speaking at Brigham Young University than we will at a bookstore in Santa Barbara. I don't change the argument in front of any of these audiences, whether they be sort of institute groups from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself or, again, sort of different audiences in a bookstore in California.

But really, I find that the stories, they resonate. They resonate with different groups in different ways. Latter-day Saints themselves often sort of appreciate some of the stories about church leadership at a particular time, a particular transitional moment in the church itself called "correlation"—a movement during the 1950s and '60s led largely by the church president and prophet named David O. McKay to really sort of standardize the aesthetics of the church and really sort of push a certain respectability politics as well at that time.

Church audiences will learn, for instance, that David O. McKay was actually a closet wrestling fan—a huge wrestling fan. And he loved actually some of the work, the cultural work, that these, even these Mormon heels did because he understood what wrestling was all about. He understood that it was a "sport" in quotes that proceeds through portraying certain stereotypes and ideals that it simultaneously questions as such.

So even though these folks are playing like bad Mormon stereotypes, they're also doing so in a space that's specifically designed to invite questions about whether that stereotype is really real and thus whether things might be otherwise.

So he realized, not only in a sort of all-press-can-be-good-press kind of way, but also in a very like smart ritual theorist kind of way, that this could be a space to really sort of play out these ideas and get people talking.

LAUREN GILGER: That's fascinating. All right, we'll leave it there for now. David Walker, writer, narrator, executive producer of "The Mormon Giant: Wrestling with Religion in 20th Century America." He's also an associate professor of religious studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. David, thanks so much for coming on. This is fascinating stuff.

DAVID WALKER: My pleasure. Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: And that’ll do it for this Thursday edition of The Show. Thanks as always for getting in the ring with us here to find out what’s going on around the Valley and around the state. Thank you very much.

LAUREN GILGER: That was nice. You can always follow us on Instagram. We are @KJZZTheShow. If you’d like to subscribe to our weekly newsletter—it’s a great read—you can sign up. It’s called Radio Heads at theshow.kjzz.org.

MARK BRODIE: For Lauren Gilger, I’m Mark Brodie here in Phoenix. Have a terrific rest of your day. Hope to have you right back here tomorrow.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman.