Episode 596: Streaming

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Like a midnight and the rock and roller.

He's in a fight for wrestling solar using a racket and some mind controller.

He's Jim Cornette.

The keys to the future, held by the past.

And with Tag T partner Barion Last, he sends this message out by podcast.

He's Jim Cornette.

Well, he's never fake a phoner.

He never backs down from a fight.

He never wins the pony.

Cause his mama raised him right.

It's time

to prepare

your mind.

Get the experience.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornette.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome to another thrill-packed edition of the Jim Cornette Experience.

I, of course, am Jim Cournette, and where, oh, where has my TV wrestling gone?

Oh, where, oh, where can it be?

We're going to try to figure it out today.

We're going to draw you some diagrams.

Stick around.

You may learn something.

And joining me.

For all this and more, Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr.

Co-Host to you.

He's the sweet Paulie Purebread of podcasting.

Be great, Brian.

Last, everybody.

Hello, Hajim, the Simon Barr Sinister of this podcast.

A pleasure to be here once again.

Another Action Pack show.

We'll see where we go.

I didn't think you wanted to be the bad guy.

Simon Barrison.

I knew you wanted to be the bad guy.

I knew you wanted to be.

Are you trying to control the weather to take over the world?

To

whatever else that Simon Barr Sinister would do before the call would go out from far and near

for underdogs.

And we could we get underdog.

Oh, the other night the Dick Van Dyke episode was on where he was running for political office against Wally Cox.

And

I showed my uh son, I was like, that's underdog.

He's like, what?

That's the listen to his voice.

That's underdog.

He didn't believe me.

You know, that's how Gary Jester got in show business.

He was Wally Cox's stunt double.

Is that right?

That must be my boy.

I liked him so much.

Well, my boy, you know, they got along well in Atlanta

in the penthouse years.

I got a news update for you.

We got the news going on down here.

I told you about it originally on the show we did a few days ago, Brian, about the man with the head, the man that cut the head off the.

The other man who was his father and then brought it to his mother.

Oh, this again?

There's more about this?

Well, Well, there's more of this because now come to find out.

Well, and for the people who may have missed the previous program, over here in southern Indiana the other day,

this young man who now that we've seen him on television, when they've hauled him into court, he looks like Pauly Shore 30 years ago if he was homeless and confused.

And this guy went to his father's house and killed his father and

decapitulated his father's head off his body and left the body there, which you're always supposed to, from what I've been told by the hunters, you're always supposed to, if you kill something, you're supposed to use all of the carcass.

But he left his father's body there.

That's what you heard from the hunters?

That's what I've heard from the hunters.

And

then he took the bag or took the head and put it in a bag.

It wasn't a duffel bag.

Come find out.

It was apparently just a regular old grocery plastic bag with the two little handle dinghies on it.

And he took the head of his father over to his mother's house and he walked in and he said, Hi, mom, I've killed my father because he's the most evil man in the world.

Here's his head.

And a four-hour

SWAT team standoff then followed that, and then he came out.

But remember, I said it was not too far from the Featherbottoms estate.

The news update, one of them is is it was his hotchkiss featherbottoms father-in-law's street

that this guy showed up with the head in the bag at

and that's why they shut everything down hotchkiss was turned away from a bank they they didn't know the extent of what was going on they had two

apparently independent crime scenes where

We found a fucking guy's body.

He's got no head.

Wait a minute.

This son of bitch over here has got a head.

Shut everything down.

Hotchkiss walks up to the bank.

They lock the door in front of him.

So, no, we're closed.

Who's this a SWAT?

I'm sure he's used to that.

I'm sure he's used to that.

Well, then normally they wait till they pick him up on camera.

But in this case, they would just, you know, and so in.

Everybody had to just shelter in place there until they determined all the heads were in the right places with the bodies, and the perpetrators had been

put under some type of custody.

And

now the guy's in court is

they're thinking about sending him to a mental evaluation.

What I believe the last word I heard was they're thinking about.

They're thinking that might be a good idea.

And his lawyer was saying, yeah, right now, because see, he's in jail.

He's bashing his head into the concrete floor,

Blyon, Blyon.

That's what he's doing.

He's blashing his head, Blyon, into the floor

and busting himself open.

And then they'll stitch him up.

And then he's ripping the stitches out.

So

they're going to send him somewhere where people can keep an eye on him.

What a heel.

Well, it's a good way to get out of jail and into the hospital, but this.

This is the most unintimidating looking motherfucker.

That's the problem.

This guy would not make an intimidating

car parking attendant, right?

He would just be walking down the street.

You wouldn't look at this guy sideways, twice, just a putz of a human.

And he's walking around with fucking heads in a bag.

Well, not plural, but a head.

But I don't know if he's done this before.

We've got to track down the fucking missing head list.

But what the fuck

the fucker

are you supposed to say?

You're supposed to be scared of the big scary scary people, but here's this motherfucker

over here with a head and a fucking Walmart bag.

Well, they say it's never who you suspect,

but we need to get

everybody, it's got to be somebody.

Think about that now.

Can you disprove me?

If you suspect everybody, then it has to be somebody.

So you're suspecting the right person eventually.

All right, well, this is being local news.

That was the local news.

He said

his lawyer said he's not really a danger to the community, more of himself.

I don't know how he got to drop on his dad.

I'm sorry.

Let's get it right to you're never going to see the fucking street ever again.

Cutting people's heads off, the lawyer says he's more a danger to himself.

I don't know if he keeps back this when he first

showed the footage of him walking in court on the news.

I was like, what the fuck?

He looks like with the goddamn mutants in the outer limits where his brain was growing at a, because I later found out it's because he smashed his head against the floor.

I don't think this guy's going to be, oh, no, he's got a, he got a big old Duke Myers fucking head.

It's a five head, not a four head.

And I was like, does this, did they, did they take it out on him?

What the fuck?

Is he wanted somebody else's head to have a normal head?

What is behind this?

And then they said it was because he was bashing his head into the concrete cell floor.

So, I don't think he's going to be

seeing straight much longer anyway.

A nice girlfriend could have fixed all this, but he's gone in a different path.

Well, I don't what he would look silly if he'd had his girlfriend's head in a bag.

That's not what I meant, but let's get away from decapitation.

Well, let's go to national news.

Have you heard about the big national controversy now sweeping America?

Folks beyond our borders.

Yes, us silly Americans have done it again.

The big problem facing the world today, have you seen this, Brian?

Cracker Barrel is changing its logo.

Did you hear about this?

Yeah, I saw it.

And I know it's a big issue for a lot of people.

I think I've been to Cracker Barrel maybe once in my entire life, so it's not a big issue for me, but

obviously, this is a hot button issue right now in the country.

Well, I'll tell you how hot.

I've been to Cracker Barrel many, many times i'm a confirmed cracker barrel

consumer veteran of many years

and the story is for people who may not know about this is that cracker bits it's an old country store fashion themed

casual dining

I don't know, dining may be a little too glorious.

I like the food, but it's a casual place.

You go in and sit down.

You get the old southern cooking or a facsimile thereof for very reasonable prices.

And you get to buy a bunch of junk in the gift shop on the way out.

And for years, they have had a logo of like a barrel, the cracker barrel.

In the old country stores, they had crackers in a barrel.

Just live with it.

Just assume that that's a fact, kids.

I don't have time to go into details.

And it says cracker barrel.

And then they've got a guy sitting on a rocking chair, which they have rocking chairs for sale, porch rockers, the old wooden ones, out on the goddamn front of the thing.

And there's a guy sitting there in a rocking chair and it says cracker barrel in the barrel.

And now they have made a change.

They're just going to have a barrel that says cracker barrel.

But here's the thing, Brian.

I've been going for all these years.

And I know that

I can see the cracker barrel sign from a mile away because it's the orange barrel and there's some orange and it says Cracker Barrel.

But once that my head and mind has absorbed that it says Cracker Barrel,

it was not until everybody started freaking out over it that they called my attention to it that I even knew that there was an old man in a rocking chair sitting next to that.

It just faded into me.

I see Cracker Barrel.

I go.

But you were only looking at the barrel, not the cracker.

I was looking at what the goddamn sign said so I'd know where it was instead of worrying about what their goddamn artsy fartsy logo was.

It was kind of

mushy and well, mushy and ill-conceived and didn't really stand out anyway.

But that's the thing.

Now,

all the crackpots and the shit kickers in the world,

the burning issue that they've got is that they took the orange guy out of the logo.

That's why the country is in the shape it's in.

We ain't got no old man rocking rocking in a chair and a cracker barrel logo.

Watch out, Wendy.

Wendy's naked.

You know what?

Watch out, Wendy.

Watch out.

They need to slut Wendy out.

Oh, I don't know if I would say it like that.

No, no,

they need to turn Wendy's into a hamburger hooters.

That's what that's about.

After they've fucked up the patties.

And they fucked up the whole decor and the motif and they fucked up the french fries and they fucked up everything else they've ever done.

After I loved them for so many years, and I was

scorned and spurned, or skurned and sporned.

The least they can do is slut Wendy out.

We want hoovers in short shorts and low-cut tops bringing us our burgers.

The Heart Attack Grill had the right motif.

We want boobs and burgers,

and we'll like it.

I think there's money left on the table that there's no burger place, like with a separate,

like almost like a motel where you could take a nap right after attached to it.

They wouldn't even have to do that.

They could just have the modify the booth slightly to kick back like recliners, and everybody could go ahead and catch a few Z's right there.

So, what do you eat at Cracker Brown?

Sometimes with the burger sitting on their chest.

So, what do you eat at Cracker Brows?

Like mashed potatoes and bread?

Like, like, oh, we got cornbread.

Potatoes and bread.

We got red cornbread here.

And we got

apple sides.

What do they have there?

No, it's you've got the full country breakfast experience if you want it.

The fried eggs and the bacon and the sausage and the hash browns and the fucking pancakes and the waffles and the syrups and things.

I always get the chicken fried chicken with the

gravy on top, the sawmill gravy, i believe as they call it

and the as long as they don't change the hash brown casserole recipe i don't give a what their

logo looks like

or the the chicken fried steak or the pot roast or the

heaping side vegetables of things and such that sounds like that sounds like a good deal the heaping side of vegetables and such yes yes things of that nature

and did i mention the hash brown casserole but the one thing they're doing, I'm actually not happy about, but as I said, as long as it's the same food, I could get over it.

Instead of having all the old implements and the tools and the signs and the farm things hanging on the walls, now they showed the new design where everything's kind of lined up evenly in little frames or whatever.

And it just, it looks, it looks like the commissary at a courthouse.

Yeah.

And I don't like that.

Whether it's fast food or any national restaurant chain, it's like they've all lost their character.

Everything is just stale.

Well,

now are you talking about the food or the ambiance?

I was talking about the ambiance.

I mean, we'll get to the food.

I've never been to some of these places that you frequent.

Well,

that's why you have such poor taste in food because you don't go to the cracker barrel often enough.

What about your recent trip to Outback Steakhouse?

Is that still the same milieu as it had 15 years ago, 20 years ago when you would go?

Outback is very consistent, very consistent.

And again, you know, they may have changed the goddamn art on the walls or whatever, but as long as the food is

still the same thing, then I'm not going to object or whatever.

But they don't say good day, mate, as much as they used to.

All right.

This is your show.

Thank God.

This is your.

Oh, well, the way you were just asking me questions, I thought it was yours.

I was waiting for you to do something.

All right.

You know what?

And here's another thing.

I'll tell you what.

Oh, no.

You always find problems when I have happiness.

You should have seen a scene last night.

We looked out the back window, and there was the two daddy deer, and the mama deer, and the two little deer.

And now they're getting bigger.

They're growing.

And they were grazing out under the redbud tree.

And we pitched them some apples.

And Peg Bundy, the the mama deer

she took the apples and thanked us with her little paw movements and everything

and then they just roamed around the backyard and lazed in the grass and and just a peaceful wildlife and tranquility i actually had a nice happy moment there which you always take the piss out of when I'm praising the beauty and majesty of my wildlife.

Well, you don't own it.

Well, I'm sort of adopting them.

It's sort of like a,

what do they call it?

Common law parentage.

How would you deal with a competitive?

If you just decided to coexist.

How would you deal if you had a neighbor who wanted to feed them just a little bit more than you did and kept trying to get them to their property and away from you?

Well, no, they don't stay 24 hours a day.

They wander around.

There's several expansive properties and then the woods over behind that.

And so they, but they know to come here for a pleasant and protected meal and a nice lounging around and

the apples.

Did I mention the apples?

All right.

How do you like these apples?

Yeah.

Well, how do you like them apples?

All right.

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Before we get started

on anything else, I've got a pen here

and I got a piece of paper.

And I want you to try to help me work out how the hell, where the hell, hell, who the hell,

that we can watch all the WWE's programming at now.

Because for the last couple of shows, I've been saying, well, they're changing this and that over here and this to there and this fucking streaming and blah, blah, blah.

And now they've just made another announcement that they've apparently just told Peacock to get fucked.

And that they've purposely added, well, this was not the only purpose.

I'm sure part of the purpose was they made millions of dollars on these other things too.

But they added the premium live events to

their schedule this year so they could get out of the peacock deal early.

And now,

starting next month, all the big shows are going to be on the ESPN app

that only

came into existence less than 24 hours ago, I believe, as we sit here right now.

What?

Yeah, there's a lot there to go over.

I guess the big point is AEW is just on Macs, and that makes it easy to remember.

And their pay-per-views are.

They're on TNT as well and fucking TBS and those various things also.

Now, WWE,

if we're talking about an average month, let's say.

Let's start with Monday, Monday Night Raw, easy.

That's on Netflix.

Okay, hold on.

I'm going to write these these things down and I'm going to ask you a couple of questions.

Now, Raw is on Netflix, and we have every reason to believe it's going to be there at least for a little while, right?

I believe they signed a 10-year deal, but maybe they could do like a month worth of RAWs to get out of that deal early or something.

And who owns Netflix?

Who is the big

multi-millionaire billion-dollar conglomerate that owns Netflix?

I believe it is a publicly traded company.

But it's just by itself.

I said it's not owned by goddamn TKO or F you.

They wish

they wish.

They're just Netflix, it's a big old thing all by itself.

That's right.

Okay, then now they got the SmackDown.

Where's SmackDown going to be?

Before we get to SmackDown, don't you want to get to Tuesday night?

I forgot about Tuesday.

As you always do, Tuesday night, NXT on the CW.

And the CW, and that's actual real television.

Who owns the CW these days?

Great question.

Let's find out.

Google that thing right now.

That's funny.

Here we go.

Hold on.

It started out as the WB network, and then it was the fucking

the other network that had a C in it somehow.

I can't even remember now.

It was 20 years ago.

And then they combined to be the CW network.

75% of the CW network is owned by the nexstar media group

and the remaining percentages are owned by paramount skydance corporation warner brothers discovery

and uh oh that's it they each own warner brothers discovery and paramount skydance each have 12.5 ownership so warner brothers discovery that that is the aew uh uh bird's nest on the ground owns 12% of the network that airs in xt Hmm.

And also the Paramount People and Skydance, they've got a lot of stuff these days.

And whoever the fuck Nextstar Media is.

That's CBS.

That's yeah, CBS.

So they Nextstar has

a lot of it and they got a lot of money.

Nextstar is an American publicly traded company with headquarters in Irving, Texas, Midtown Manhattan, and Chicago.

It is the largest television station owner in the United States, owning 197 television stations.

Jesus Christ.

Most of which are affiliated with the four major U.S.

television networks, My Network TV, and markets as large as New York and as small as San Antonio, Texas.

It also operates its own stations owned by certain affiliates, such as Mission Broadcasting and Vaughan Media, under local marketing agreements to satisfy existing regulations set in place by the FCC.

They own WGN.

Good God.

god okay and by the 197 markets antenna tv

antenna tv so that they're everywhere in some fashion or another but when i used to follow this there were only like 220 something television markets in the united states so they're

probably everywhere but wolf whistle fucking alabama Well, they're bigger than Sinclair?

That's what that's what that's.

Yes, by a lot.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that was Tuesday.

That's right.

Now, what about Fridays?

SmackDown.

Of course, we'll see what happens, but we probably should mention TNA on Thursday.

That's on Axis, which is owned by the company that owns TNA, but they are actively looking for a deal right now.

And why wouldn't you think that WWE isn't right there helping them out?

Because they're so compassionate for little small wrestling organizations trying to get a break.

You do what we say, we help you, as long as you do what we say.

But let's get now to Friday, SmackDown.

SmackDown,

the other of the shows that I've got, the Raw and SmackDown that I try to, or no, don't try to, but am allegedly supposed to keep an eye on every week.

Where is this going now?

Oh, it is currently on the USA Network as part of NBC Universal.

And

I don't know.

I got to check how long.

Who owns NBC Universal?

Comcast.

Comcast.

There's another player in there.

They're a big player.

Player.

Player.

But now

there's also

every once in a while, Saturday night's main event.

That's right.

And usually that is network television.

NBC.

Boom, boom, boom.

Now

they're not going to be on network television or any kind of goddamn broadcast television at all anymore, is what I'm hearing.

Effective, apparently, immediately.

Apparently, the ratings did so well for the Goldberg retirement that they decided to book head-to-head with AEW's biggest pay-per-view of all time, or one of them in terms of buys,

that they will now be on Peacock.

I believe this will be the first time that Saturday Night's Man Event wouldn't be, it was on NBC for years, Fox for a couple of years, and then brought back on NBC.

But now it'll be on Peacock, obviously, satisfying Peacock in the sense that they have everything else being yanked away from them at the present moment.

At least they'll get this.

So

they've screwed Peacock over sabad

and taken all their shit away from him.

They said, here, you could have our Saturday Nights Mate events four times a year, and now they ain't on network TV anymore.

And this means

that John Cena's retirement show in December is going to stream on Peacock.

How the mighty have fallen.

So who owns Peacock?

NBC Universal Comcast.

The other fucking guys

that, what else do they own?

USA Network.

USA Network.

They own USA.

I'm trying to draw these numbers or these arrows here.

So

they pissed off

the people at Peacock and then give them something to make up for it.

But the people at Peacock that they pissed off also own the USA network, or not the people at Peacock, but the people that own Peacock

own the USA network that SmackDown is their last major

television program that's even on goddamn cable.

But wait,

there's more, Brian, because the pay-per-views,

which literally, and

you know, even 20 years after pay-per-view became a thing, I would see people write it out as pay-per-view, like P-A-P-E-R-V-I-E-W.

Why?

That makes no sense.

Because they don't understand what the fuck they're talking about.

That's why.

Pay-per-view.

But

we used to pay per view.

And it was easy.

We would pay and then we would view.

And again, now I can't watch fucking, I can't watch pay-per-view on fucking television in Louisville now anyway, because I've got spectrum and they have no more pay-per-view channel.

So we're going to talk about that in a minute about this.

AEW fiasco coming up this weekend.

I'm trying to get Stacy to load up something on the TV.

I can watch this thing on.

But the premium live events, the former pay-per-views, the big shows, WrestleMania, Royal Robins, blah, blah, blah.

They had announced that they were going to be going to the new

ESPN gimmick

early next year, whatever, when his deal with Peacock was up.

Now they've said, you know what?

Since we did two nights of WrestleMania for the past couple of years and two nights of SummerSlam and added the women's pay-per-view,

we gave Peacock all the big shows that we said we'd give them.

So now next month, we're just doing this over here.

It just became an existing entity

on August 21st.

We're sitting here on August 22nd talking about it.

What is they call it?

The ESPN app thing

what is this thing called oh i forget the exact name because they just changed it it was uh they're directed to consumer product

was it unlimited was it espn unlimited is hold on let me check i'm trying to find

any notes that i have here that says what the thing is called

I see it called the new ESPN app.

I don't know why you're looking at that.

They don't even know what the fuck the thing is called yet.

And we've got four weeks to start

to establish this and get this so we can watch the premium live events from now on until the end of time.

And that's on

who owns ESPN, regardless of whether it's plus or minus or app or whatever.

ESPN traditionally was a major moneymaker for Disney.

They're owned by Disney, ABC, Disney.

Jesus Christ, who gets me in ABC?

Why isn't the Tiffany network, CBS, getting involved in this?

Well, they own.

Oh, I forgot.

They are.

Paramount and Skydance.

And yeah.

You know, Jim, you're also forgetting AAA,

whose big events have been streaming on YouTube.

Well, where are they going to stream now?

Potentially still YouTube.

We'll find out.

Oh, well.

So you mean the same place that I've been missing them up until now, I can continue to miss them without having to worry about getting any different information.

What I mean is WWE, that's exactly right.

But also WWE

can put a AAA event up on YouTube and just let anyone in just to try to get attention or steal someone else's attention, whatever it is.

They can just throw something up.

They don't even have to worry about any of these big streaming platforms.

Well, now, what about the existing pay-per-views, the catalog, as they say in the business, the back catalog, all the big shows, the pay-per-views,

all the mini television series and things and such that they have produced and presented to us and put up on the network and then later on on, I guess, on the cock to some degree.

Where does that stuff go?

I believe it's going to be on Peacock at least until next year.

And then

we'll see.

Peacock would obviously have an option to bid for it and try to keep it.

It may be an attractive package for others.

A lot of people presume YouTube.

Who knows?

And again, it could be one of these things like the pay-per-views, where there's one deal for North America and another deal for the rest of the world, because the pay-per-views, I believe, are on Netflix everywhere else, aren't they?

I don't know.

I believe so.

So, if we had a good VPN,

we could just go join Netflix in another country and watch all this stuff.

This is getting to be a pain in my ass.

I'm telling you that right now.

I know, in all seriousness, and people are saying, oh, Cardio, you're so old and you can't, you learn to use streaming and blah, blah, blah.

I just think it's a fucking pain in the ass and much less convenient than the old-fashioned way of doing things.

But

have we just illustrated that if you were a

die-hard, ardent WWE fan,

that

you still have to keep a list of where you can now watch their programs?

It's so confusing, and things are moving around to such an extent.

And

not only your point, Brian,

that they're dealing with CBS, ABC, NBC,

and pretty much everybody but

who owns Fox these days?

One of these other companies that owns somebody else?

Fox owns Fox, though.

Okay, well, then

if they don't want a fucking wrestling program,

then you're pretty much shut out of the big networks and all these other conglomerations.

It's ridiculous.

And there's no way to know.

Some of this stuff may just go away with a corporate whim.

They're all way too big to be concerned about, oh, we're going to lose wrestling.

Are any of these people in

a state of business where if they lost wrestling, it would make their stock go down and cause dire consequences in their company, Brian?

Well, I think it's one of those things where when you make a deal with WWE, it looks really good.

ESPN is banking on wrestling fans right now.

They're launching the app right this second.

And coincidentally enough, WWE is free just around the corner.

They're launching it with WWE

because they're relying on those fans being there.

You have to wonder what Netflix feels.

They had a big launch in January.

The Rocks showed up.

I think it was like over 5 million viewers, maybe six.

I forget exactly what it was.

It was, I believe it was six.

It ain't that anymore.

And again, I know we're in the middle of summer and the bookings cooled off.

And this, I mean, there's always a pay-per-view right around the corner.

But the TV has not been very good.

Those numbers aren't as high as they were.

When Netflix gets to year five, year six of this deal, are they going to be happy?

Do you have faith that Triple H is going to have another hot streak as a booker or two or three to get you there?

There'll be hot things that get more viewers or new viewers?

They're selling the wrestling audience everywhere.

We have this audience.

They are obsessed with our content.

They'll consume all of it.

They make deals across the board.

Now they have to deliver the audience.

And

again, that's not, you know, it's the same as just writing two wrestlers in the main event and presuming the business it'll do and that no one will get hurt.

It's a gamble.

And we'll see what happens.

They're also burning out their audience.

It's not even just old fuddy duddies like you who don't understand the streaming or anything.

Even if you do, and you start adding it up, if you're going with the idea that the average young person today, they're not even cutting the cord.

They've never had cable.

Everything's on their phone or their computer or their iPad or their tablet, whatever it may be.

Good lord, don't worry.

Everyone has Netflix.

Everyone has Netflix.

So, right, so that's right there.

Raw is available if anyone wants it.

Not everyone has broadcast TV.

So even NXT right there, unless it has a streaming component, and I don't know, actually, I've never looked into it.

That's not necessarily available to everyone until it's clipped and put up on YouTube or something.

YouTube available to anyone, anywhere.

And then you look at USA Network, SmackDown, same thing.

If these people don't have cable, what good is SmackDown being on cable?

But there are people who watch cable.

It's an older audience, and you're giving them a substandard show.

So you're killing that audience.

And then,

again, the idea of pay-per-view.

or closed circuit or whatever it has been in the past is a little different with today's

younger people.

You know, they get their big pay-per-view events aren't big boxing events.

It's, you know, Jake Paul having a fake boxing match with a celebrity or whatever it may be.

It's more about the bullshit factor than the actual athletic prowess or anything.

Are they going to be so into the WWE pay-per-views that they're going to get the ZSPN app for $30 a month?

Because if they don't have cable and they don't, then there's no chance they'll get it for free.

Only some people do.

You get it for free right now.

I don't.

They still have to make a deal.

You don't even know what the name of it is.

Well, exactly.

And that's good because who wants to pay $30 to some nameless thing you don't understand?

But we don't get it for free here.

So I would have to actually subscribe on top of my ESPN bundle with my cable, which is where ESPN makes all their money.

I would have to do it over a year, all these services, all these ways.

If you're going with the idea that wrestling fans are obsessed with your content and they want to watch everything, you're making them spend so much money.

And that's before they go to a live event.

We've heard from a number of people, and not that this is necessarily the place to tie this in, but people who love WWE.

And they went to an event in a relatively small town.

I forget where it was.

It may have been Kentucky or Tennessee.

And WWE returned a year later and the ticket prices were like double.

Like it was like hundreds of dollars for ringside.

And I know they have perks they include like VIP and you get to.

ask dumb questions to the wrestlers while they sit on the apron and act like they want to be there.

Well, yeah, they ought to include a hand job at some of those prices.

But everything right now is just grab every dollar you can as long as you can.

And it's not necessarily a fan-friendly thing, whether it's how much money you have to spend or just the process of trying to find the content.

In some cases,

it becomes easier to just wait for things to appear on YouTube after the fact.

I saw somebody on

probably Twitter, whatever the fuck, say.

that the Austin and McMahon was so successful because everybody had a boss they wanted to punch and give the stunner to, like Austin did to McMahon, an evil boss.

And now the only people that can afford to go to see the WWE are the evil bosses.

And

there's an element of that.

But here's the thing: it's

again,

they're getting all this money guaranteed so they could give two flying shits in that respect, although they have to keep up appearances and you know the stock price can't fall and all that stuff.

But

it's just a larger, magnified, exponentially version of what Christine Jarrett used to say: wrestling fans are creatures of habit.

And

in the territory days, even the people who came every week for years without missing a show at a stretch,

if the TV changed time or especially station,

but even if the regular station just instead of noon on Saturday, it's four o'clock on Saturday.

Even if you told some people,

they still didn't get it and they didn't see it.

And that hurt your house in the long run,

or not in the long, but that hurt your house when that happened.

And

the same thing if promoters switched buildings for whatever reason.

Anything that

changed the pattern, the habit in these people's lives that they figured wrestling around,

it still would hurt.

And, you know, so the casual people just completely fucking would be lost in the dust.

And

over a short period of time, they're changing the way that everybody and the and the day or the time or the fucking cost or whatever

of how they're watching all of this shit.

And they're going to fuck around and lose lose people

that just don't want to go through it.

That's just from experience, just my small little fucking offering.

And again, a lot of those things where you said wrestling fans are creatures of habit, a lot of those habits went away.

Weekly live shows or semi-regular live shows in towns, those are gone.

Regular TV on broadcast TV, for the most part, that's completely gone.

Yeah.

Apologies to women of wrestling or anything.

Cable TV, that's now gone.

Yeah, yeah.

And

with every one of these gones,

we've lost people.

We've lost volume of people that watch wrestling.

Not that they could do it,

because every one of these deals is for programming.

It's for original content.

But would it be more valuable to a company like WWE if you had like one show or two shows and you just aired those on every single one of these things?

As opposed to having so many different shows, so many different people, if you just had like one batch of stuff to pound into people's head,

heads, I guess I should say.

Do you think that'd be more valuable?

Well,

no, because

for one thing, people aren't going to pay that much money if they're getting basically something that everybody else can see everywhere.

You know, so it wouldn't be possible to do that anyway.

But then, no, because then you would just be,

you'd be flooding them with the same shit over and over.

Every time they got a chance to watch wrestling, they would have probably have seen,

if they were really devoted, what already what your fucking show owner seen it somewhere else.

And remember, we just talked the other day about

At one point in time in Louisville, they had two television shows.

They had Jerry Jarrett's and then one of Gulis's tapes because they had TV on two different stations.

So they would, it was still a lot of the same wrestlers and they could have the local promo segments, right?

But I remember at one point, Nick just

was trying to get Steve Kovak over as his top babyface.

He was a fine worker and a nice fellow, but he was short,

stocky, uncharismatic, and

it wasn't a Memphis crew, right?

And I swear to God,

three or four different times over the course of like a three or four month period, they aired the goddamn Steve Kovac special show where it was like him in three or four different matches.

And I was like, I

would turn it off by that point.

I would turn off a wrestling show.

So, no.

You can't just do one or two shows and put them on multiple outlets, or that

not only overexposes but dilutes

impact that you're, it's not like an infomercial where people are going to pick up the phone and call right now before midnight or whatever.

It's just,

and that's the thing is there's never been a model like this, and I don't know how long they can fucking keep it up,

where people will pay them this insane amount of money, or corporations will pay them this insane amount of money when they're just jerking the programs back and forth onto these other platforms, and it's just

disruptive and

expensive for the biggest fans.

And

what about the partners?

Well, but it also puts the other fans in a forest.

It's like you're, you're,

you know, I might not even be able to find this fucking program I want to watch and all these other fucking programs.

And what about their partners?

You know, this Peacock thing where they're leaving, obviously their catalog is still there.

The Saturday night's main event will be moved there.

Do you think Peacock's happy about this?

We signed a deal with you guys until 2026.

All of a sudden, you announced a flash of new premium live events.

You got out of your deal early.

Again, coincidentally,

right around the same time this ESPN thing is launching, ESPN.

I'm pretty sure NickCon has placed a lot of executives there over the years, maybe a lot of shows and a lot of talent.

So you may not be happy about that.

So, at a certain point, with WWE's whole thing of

we have all these viewers, we'll bring them to you.

You may not want to do business with someone if their reputation is they're going to sign a deal with you and then immediately want to renegotiate and get out of the deal if they can get more money somewhere else.

And boy, they must think their fans, the WWE must think that their fans are some kind of whoers.

Well, they'll just go willy-nilly any old stream that'll piss their way,

Just

spreading themselves out prostate all across the floor for every streaming service and Tom, Dick, and Harriet comes along.

I think not.

We've got to have some kind of morals, don't we?

In the wrestling business?

Well, that may.

And speaking, by the way,

that may be a problem.

Speaking, by the way, of the morals and the wrestling business and the whole nine yards,

now that ESPN is in bed, so to speak, with TKO, WWE, et cetera,

they've apparently taken down their AEW section,

which is kind of like

Newsweek magazine taking down their

Moscow section or something.

They're not journalism anymore.

They're just a branch of the entertainment of sports now, correct?

And that's really what ESPN has been for a long time.

The coverage is dependent up who they're they're working with.

NFL gets more coverage than anyone else when they're working with the NFL.

When it's the NBA, the NBA gets all the coverage.

Baseball got fucked with coverage.

And now baseball is no longer going to be with the ESPN.

You know, we'll see what happens with the playoffs and stuff.

AEW, this is

part of the problem.

It's not just the partners, but it's what comes with it.

They're going to get shut out of the mainstream discussion.

Unless someone dies on one of their events,

ESPN may not pay any attention to AEW going forward unless someone dies, unless they draw 100,000 people again, unless just something miraculous happens and it can't be avoided.

And it's mainstream news.

Miraculous doesn't may fit the last one of the examples.

You know,

it'd be miraculous if somebody'd be miraculous every time somebody doesn't break their neck.

You know, I saw that Dave Meltzer wrote something, and I remember the name Josh Gross.

He was an old MMA reporter.

He did a book about Anoki versus Muhammad Ali.

When ESPN did their deal with UFC years ago, they fired him because Dana White had problems with him.

And all of a sudden, the independent reporter who asked tough questions was gone.

And ESPN worked with the UFC for a number of years.

So it shouldn't be surprised that ESPN got rid of AEW.

I don't know if it helps or hurts AEW, to be quite honest with you.

People weren't discovering them through that.

Well, yeah, I was going to say, do you think anybody thinks, I need the latest AEW news?

I'll check out ESPN.

Never.

So I don't think it helps or hurts AEW one way or another, but it definitely has the appearance of things.

Well, anyway, speaking of appearances, one more thing before we move on to another subject.

They're appearing like they're going to do an AEW pay-per-view this weekend.

And

can anybody out there?

Well, I don't know whether they'll hear my voice that I'm speaking now before this show at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon.

But I.

Is that what it is, Stacey?

I didn't even realize it.

Yes, one o'clock.

Because

they're in Londinium.

Lord Fogg will be presiding.

Stace can figure out how to order it.

But do I just, can I then just go on to this channel or whatever the fuck, this Prime video thing and watch it any old time?

Or do I have to be sitting there specifically when it's happening and I can never see it again?

Or how does this work with streaming of these things?

Well, again, I think you should look at this as a nice, sunny Sunday with wrestling in the afternoon.

Watch as much as you can live.

From what I gather, I've been looking into this because you've mentioned this before.

How am I going to watch this?

And I didn't have an answer.

I know you can get them through YouTube where you pay for it there.

Amazon Prime has it.

And from what I read, you can access a stream or a replay fairly quickly without any specific time time being listed after the broken oh thank god all right

so at the very least it doesn't ruin my whole sunday afternoon i mean we're talking about players before who's in the field remember amazon's still out there obviously they're doing this with aew but this isn't like you know we have a big deal with aw this is like we're we'll sell their events and we'll take our cuts

but amazon's still out there and they have a lot of original content and

you know they're trying to make prime a big thing for everyone

so there's still a lot of players out there.

Yeah.

Who's supposed to...

Wasn't Max supposed to do something with the AEW pay-per-views?

It hasn't happened.

But they don't?

It hasn't happened.

Apparently not a high priority.

AEW right now is fighting a lawsuit.

Not to go too deep into this at the moment because I don't have the info in front of me, but it's the Jon Moxley lawsuit, I believe, where...

He hits.

Oh, yes, from the cameraman that was put into a fucking head halo by the vicious treatment that he received.

Well, apparently they're fighting.

By the hands of

that demented killer and public menace, John Mox.

See, I'm just trying to

keep fair here.

Go ahead.

But apparently, AEW is fighting an attempt by the other side to have them reveal who owns them.

You know, who is actually the partners in Beatnik?

With Tony Khan, we presume his sister, set up by their dad.

Where does Warner Brothers Discovery fit in if they own 10%?

Is that outside?

Are they partners with Beatnik?

Do they own a piece of Beatnik?

And again, if Warner Brothers Discovery

really owns a piece of anything with AEW, why aren't the pay-per-views on Macs?

Why don't they just put Ring of Honor content somewhere?

More content.

I mean, there's a lot of questions.

It's almost like all of Tony's eggs are in the Warner Brothers Discovery basket.

At the same time, WWE.

Do you think that's because his balls are in their pocket?

I don't know.

But the problem is, while that's happening, WWE is buying up all the other baskets.

There's going to be nowhere else to go if Warner Brothers discovered.

If David Zaslov leaves and the next person comes in and just says, I hate wrestling, why are we doing this?

Put the Big Bang Theory on for two hours.

That changes everything.

They're going to lose their basket.

Oh my God.

Well,

therein lies the problem is you don't know what you've got till it's gone, Brian.

You can't trust that people aren't going to take things away from you these days.

You're watching a favorite show on television and it's gone.

And the whole daggum channel could be gone.

And the network, you got to run everything yourself, Brian.

You have to own everything.

You have to follow your dreams.

You have to be the boss so that you can control your destiny.

And that starts by starting your own business, doesn't it, Brian?

You know that.

We've both taken those steps.

You got to start your own business before you could be the master of your own destiny.

And I think I could speak for Brian in saying that both of us have been masters of our domain for quite some time now, and you can do the same thing with our friends at Shopify.

Would you concur with that, Brian?

Good Lord, my ears are ringing now.

Folks, Shopify is the commerce commerce platform behind 10% of all the e-commerce in the United States.

And think about this.

How often have you laid in bed at midnight scrolling through some website, hitting the button to add to your cart the thing that you've been looking for?

And you know, that button's purple.

It's the Shop Pay button.

And people all over the world are fingering that button just like you are.

So if you're tired of staying up late at night, fingering other people instead of letting other people finger you.

Let's not use that.

No, let's.

Sid, you need to set up your store with your dreams

so that you can be the one being fingered late at night by people laying in bed with nothing to do.

That's not how we're going to call it.

It's not fingering.

It's thinking and scrolling and using your finger to press the buttons you need.

And the right button is the button for you and for your business.

Of course our friends at Shopify are wonderful partners for our online store we trust them they've done great work for us and they could do that for you very simply a great deal first time uh buyers triers try it today jim try it to buy it and buy it try it You're just, Brian, you're all verclimped because of the success that we've had with our purple shop pay button.

We've all we've been raking in that money, ka ching,

our purple shop pay button on the shirts that we feature here on the the various programs.

And and well, the folks with their dreams, they now you can't sell our shirts.

We won't let you do that, but you can sell your shirts.

So if you've ever wanted to put your your face on a shirt and sell it to people,

I've seen some of you.

You might ought to figure out some other attribute on your body to put on a shirt to sell it to people.

But nevertheless,

if you want to sell something to somebody,

then Shopify is going to give you the leg up

from day one with hundreds of beautiful ready-to-go templates to express your style.

They'll tackle all the important tasks from inventory to payments to analytics.

And analytics are very important in business.

You need to know where all the anals are going in your ticks.

And you can spread the word with built-in marketing and email tools to find and keep new customers.

shopify will do a dossier on each potential customer and find out damaging information about them

and then they you will use those as tools to keep those people customers no or you're gonna spread the word a pleasant thought everyone wants a partner that is willing to get down to the mattresses with you but that's not what will happen jim no the mattress spot is later we're not talking about that right now jim you hear that noise you know that can only mean one thing it's time to make sure we get that information out there for the listeners about this great deal with our friends at Shopify.

Well, if you want to see less carts being abandoned, folks, and that's another thing.

There's too many carts in the United States being abandoned.

They have feelings too.

It's time for you to head over to Shopify.

Cha-ching.

Say where you'll hear that kind of sound like that.

That's the one I'm talking about.

And sign up for your $1 a month trial period to start selling today.

Shopify.com/slash JCE

is where you're going for your $1 a month trial period.

Boom.

You get that trial period.

They put you on trial.

If you come out a free man and not go into the local hoos gal,

then for a dollar a month, they're going to work for you.

They're going to make you a fortune.

And you're going to hear bells and whistles and sirens and everything.

Yeah,

shopify.com/slash JCE.

Did you hear that sound?

That's the sound of

money

of some description, possibly being put into a blind man's cup.

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, Shopify.com slash JCE.

All right, Brian.

Well, I guess

we've got to address the latest controversies concerning Hulk Hogan.

He's

he's still in the news and there's still stuff going on.

Is this going to become,

I don't even know, conspiracy theories or whatever.

He's already

being the victim of at least two different types of malpractices, according to certain people, because

they said he was the victim of medical malpractice

in one of his last surgeries that cut a nerve that could have contributed to his death.

And then Brooke is out

saying that

the professionals that were responding to him have called or contacted her and say, oh, you ought to seen the body cam footage

of us going to get him, I guess, and taking him to the hospital.

What the fuck is going on now?

Yeah, this has all been kind of crazy.

You know, it just comes on the heels.

I was reading an old interview with Ray Manzerich about Jim Morrison.

He's like, one day he got a phone call from the manager.

He's like, hey, by the way, Jim's dead.

We had a funeral the other day.

So, what do you mean, Jim's dead?

What do you mean?

Where are you guys?

Who paid for this?

Anything?

And he kept saying, like, no one saw the body.

But all of a sudden, we all just heard he was dead.

No one could explain what happened.

I remember Morris Levy, the famous, infamous founder and owner of Roulette Records, a major player in music and publishing for a number of years.

A large figure in the movie, in the book Hitmen.

That's right.

His promotion guy, Herb Rosen, was someone who, when I first started in the music business, took me under his wing.

And I just remember Herbie saying, and he he was half joking, but he always talked about Australia and no one saw the body.

So it's like, you know, there's enough of a thing there.

With Hogan,

when it came out, we were told a heart attack,

which again, anything could be, anything could prompt a heart attack, but we knew that it wasn't really a secret that he was definitely dealing with a lot of medical issues.

So it made you question exactly what caused the heart attack.

If he was going through treatments for other things and dealing with other ailments,

where'd the heart attack come from?

And you say Brooke Hogan's been talking about this.

I have found it fascinating that she has been so out in the open about this.

And it seems like the questions she's asking are the ones that,

you know, the answers are starting to come in.

I saw an interview with her on Bubba the Love Sponge.

I ended up watching that.

They hadn't spoken in whatever, 12 years, 13 years.

And she, she doesn't just come out and say what it is, but she seems to think that the people around her dad made bad decisions.

She was worried about him, maybe more than he was.

She cared, and she was involved in all the medical stuff.

So she's like the expert

more than anyone else, more than Hogan's wife of the last couple of years.

She's the expert in the health of Hulk Hogan and his health history.

And she's kind of been sounding the alarm that something was going on for a while before she knew about the footage.

Well, and again, going back to the medical malpractice part, I guess they're saying that the operation severed, as I again said, some kind of nerve.

Apparently, it's connected to the diaphragm and controls breathing,

is what

the report said from an occupational therapist at Hulk's house when he stopped breathing.

So

there was some type of medical or medical adjacent people on the scene when this happened.

But then back to Brooke,

she's saying that completely different thing that

people that were responding to this have called her like, oh, I don't want to be quoted, but boy, you ought to look at the body camera footage.

and how do they get to it

you you would almost hope that there was something nefarious with a family member that you would get that call but how do they find you

well that's a good question i mean she's well public people are sometimes often harder to get a hold of but if it was a call you but yeah she needed to get a see the body camera footage and get a hold of the 911 tapes

because they supposedly contain information that could potentially shed enough light to change the narrative everyone's been hearing.

What the fuck?

Is this

all a conspiracy theory to keep everybody in the news and the estate will be worth $500 million?

Or

is there a bunch of fucking chicanery going on around here?

Well, I guess the first thing is the estate, it sounds like, has a lawsuit against this doctor, whoever severed the nerve.

How does that happen?

You hate hearing hearing about that.

Well, and also

apparently Brooke at the time she made a statement didn't know whether he'd been cremated or whether it was going to happen or what apparently now

the last thing that I saw was he's not been cremated.

They are going to have an autopsy.

And but the wife won't tell the daughter anything.

And

there you go.

Happy fam.

Hogan knows best.

I mean,

you don't want to laugh about people's, you know, miserable family relations, but Gemini Christ,

this is just ridiculous.

So what do you think, Brian?

Well, here's Brooke Hogan's statement.

Here's all I know.

So stop speculating.

Stop asking.

I've also informed my brother of all of this information.

who is boots on the ground with everything.

Fact, I've 100% gotten legit calls from professionals, from police officers, to nurses that were supposedly with my dad on the day of his death, telling me, and that's in caps, I need to see body cam footage and I need to get a hold of the 911 tapes because they supposedly contain information that could potentially shed enough light to change the narrative

everyone's been hearing.

Those same professionals felt so passionately about what they witnessed, they have continued to contact me and push me to find specific answers to this very day.

One would think they might call the police then if there was something that shady going on, but go ahead.

They are quite literally putting their careers at risk because they feel so compelled to do the right thing.

So, I mean, again, if there was a nerve issue,

because if they're saying that the nerve affects affects the diaphragm affects breathing and that all makes sense

but that wouldn't have any that wouldn't be

on the body cam yeah exactly oh my god i see it with my body cam he's got a damaged nerve what no there's two

different screwy things going on here is the first screwy thing

the the damaged nerve being floated as a cover story to cover up for the second screwy thing?

Who knows?

Because it's screwy.

Yeah, what's on that?

What could be on that tape?

I mean, who was with him?

His wife?

An occupational therapist was there.

Yeah.

The 911 respondent.

What occupation was he therapy?

Therapying therapy?

Make me a construction worker.

Yeah.

He could be a double-knot spy.

Get me a double-knot spy therapist.

I just wondered what occupation the man on his deathbed would be studying for.

Why was Vince driving so fast?

What was Vince up to that day?

If Vince McMahon had died that morning,

and he could have in that car crash on the Merritt Parkway.

Yeah.

Imagine you want to talk about conspiracies.

If Vince McMahon was killed in a crazy accident and that news broke, and then two hours later, it broke that Hulk Hogan suddenly is dropped dead.

That'd be like the biggest conspiracy theory in wrestling history.

That would the matter, anti-matter explosion would just blow up the internet.

But

again,

if they do have an autopsy,

And especially since his daughter is speaking so publicly at this point, one would think that the wife would want the daughter to know what actually happened.

So she'd shut the fuck up if nothing else, maybe.

Unless the wife is the wife is on that video acting like a nut.

Yeah.

Seriously.

They come in or they come in the room and the wife has the pillow over his face.

Oh, hello.

I didn't know you were here.

We don't know.

The point is, there's a malpractice suit, it sounds like, from the estate against this doctor whose negligence may have led to the death of Hulk Hogan.

But that wouldn't be crazy stuff on, that wouldn't be like, I'm putting my life at risk.

Get the 911 tapes, get the video, get it all, I got to go.

Like, that's where it's like, what could be on the video?

Is it, you know,

I don't want to presume anything, but this is one of the most anticipated videos that Hulk Hogan has been involved in in quite some time.

Man, if this video gets out there, he'll be the biggest star surveillance video ever.

No one will ever be able to surpass that.

And do you think it's going to be something so heinous that it will turn him completely babyface posthumously?

Oh my God, I can't believe they did that to him.

He's so, oh, I love him.

Who else was there?

Was Jimmy Hart there?

Oh, come on now, Pooh Poo.

What if he got on his megaphone and sort of like, come on, Hulk, come on.

Come on, Hulk.

Kick up, kick up.

Pooh-poo doesn't have any knowledge of any nefarious dealings going on.

While we're talking about Hogan, let's get it all out here.

Did you see that Missy Beefcake got ejected from the funeral for calling Linda Hogan the C-word and Brian Blair had her thrown out?

No.

Yeah, for real.

You didn't see this?

No.

Hold on.

Let me pull up the story.

Someone said this to me.

And I figured you would have seen it.

And ladies and gentlemen, if you're a viewer of Dark Side of the Ring, Missy Beefcake is apparently the wife slash manager of Brutus Beefcake.

And Missy is quite a piece of of cake in her own right.

Well, Jim, I'm seeing stuff here.

Apparently, Brian Blair has claimed that Missy was ejected from the service, like I said, calling Linda Hogan the C-word.

Missy Beefcake is denying that.

She put out a statement saying, was not, that's in caps, thrown out.

Linda attacked Brutus and put her hand in my face.

Wait, what?

She was yelling.

Are we talking?

Are we talking a physical attack or is she just coming up yelling?

I'm talking the funeral.

This is happening at the funeral.

Well,

they're all insane.

Yes, they're all insane.

So I just was not thrown out.

Linda attacked Brutus and put her hand in my face.

She was yelling for security.

When security got to us, they said, take your seat.

It's okay.

We will handle Linda.

The security in the Tampa Bay cemetery business is on first name basis with Linda and how crazy she is.

Well, then this may explain her other side.

And then Brutus had a panic attack and we went outside to get air.

He was unable to go back in.

So they weren't ejected.

It's just she was told, sit down, we'll take care of Linda.

And then Brutus had a panic attack.

Good lord.

What a zoo.

Again,

a funeral.

How do you get thrown out of a funeral?

I read something the other day, too, that Matt Riddle went to the funeral and his hair is now like red.

And the quote I read, it was from Matt Riddle.

It was like Shane McMahon walked up to him and sarcastically said, nice hair.

And Matt Riddle was like, go fuck yourself.

Like, what a funeral this must have been.

I wish I was there.

Everyone's feuding with everyone.

It's like a weird wrestling soap opera.

Ejections.

Have you ever been to a funeral where someone was ejected?

I've never, I haven't been to a ton of funerals, but I've never seen an ejection.

Who doesn't?

Well,

I believe we've talked about it before.

I've been to like six funerals in my entire life.

I've seen dejected, but not ejected.

And I haven't seen a lot of people cussing each other

at those particular functions.

But maybe I just happened to drop in on the few where that doesn't happen.

And Brian Blair is the one who said that Missy Beefcake got ejected.

Brian Blair was the one Brutus was partying with when the parasailing accident happened.

It all ties together.

It's crazy.

You'd think some of these people would have moved to a different state.

They don't seem to mix well.

Well, we'll see what more.

I'm fascinated to know what could be on these videos because the malpractice thing is being thrown out there, but that can't be what is on the video.

It can't be, oh my God, his nerve.

That ain't it.

There's something.

That Brooke Hogan's being led to believe is on that video.

One would think it would have to somebody was there.

There was some evidence of some

mistreatment or, you know, something was amiss

that you could see on camera or that you could hear on the 911 tapes or that you could piece together from both of same.

And

that still leaves a wide, wide spot open for interpretation.

Well, we'll see what happens.

You know, Hulkamania lives forever.

He's immortal, and we'll be talking about him obviously for a lot more uh segments in the future because it keeps happening well wait till abraham zapruder brings the film in and we'll go over that

i guess we ought to go over another film

that

We used to think that the AEW television program had crummy booking and was overly indulgent to the indie wrestlers.

So they decided, we'll show you some crummy booking and overindulgency to the indie wrestlers.

And Brian, this has turned into,

I don't know what you can call it.

It's incomprehensible.

It's like

if you had a wrestling party when you were a teenager and all of your friends came over and everybody decided they just play wrestling

and they just do shit and everybody runs into other people's thing and

they'd, oh, it'd be cool if we did this.

And

it's a, can you keep track of what happens on this program without taking notes?

I take notes and I still can't remember what happened at the top of the segment.

By the time they get to the 21st person that comes out and does something.

It's just a bunch of people running around fucking doing shit, isn't it?

Well, there's a lot of the same people running around doing it.

Some of the people that get over just disappear off TV like the Hurt Syndicate.

They appear like in a backstage vignette for a minute.

But they're doubling and tripling down on everything that appeals to their most hardcore core base.

And I don't know if that resonates with everyone.

The show is not fun to watch.

You know, sometimes there's a lot of stuff happening and then other times things are happening for a very long time, and it just takes forever.

It's uh, I don't think it's very good.

I think it's actually been a really bad show for a while.

It's just there's more action now in terms of like craziness.

And that, you know, again, we'll talk about the

murder angle.

I don't know what you want to call it, the attempted murder angle, but I'm not a fan of that kind of stuff.

That's not necessarily people running around.

That's just creative that I find insulting as a wrestling fan because it's too over the top, it's too preposterous.

Well, and I mean, it's

if it's not even done well in any,

no matter how you view this,

if it's not, if you're viewing it as drama, film noir, murder mystery, comedy, whatever, it's not done well because it's not done believably and it's not done, it's not acted.

professionally and it's not goddamn written professionally and it's not shot professionally.

So regardless of whether you're just being mad because it's bad wrestling,

what is it supposed to be good of?

We'll talk about it.

They were in Glasgow.

They actually had two people that were over like God on this program and neither one of them could wrestle or one of them has one more match for he can't wrestle.

At the top of the program, Brian Danielson comes out and makes an entrance and the whole crowd yeses.

And

he's going to do color commentary because he's had to obviously retire.

And then here comes Will Osprey.

And he's his home turf, his home United Kingdom, whatever.

I know he's not particularly from Scotland,

but he's over there

with that crowd.

And he gets in a ring and barely tells them that he ain't gonna be able to wrestle past Sunday either.

So he didn't really tell them that.

Between the echo of the PA Mike

and his accent

and the voice and the fact that he was talking quickly,

yes, I know all those folks over there understood him.

I got about 50% of it, but he told a story about his first trip to Scotland and ended it with something something about sausage rolls that got a big pop.

Did you follow that trip with him as he told that long rollicking story?

Again, the PA, the audio is pretty bad here, but also he kept like alluding to

you.

You expected him to say, I have to get neck surgery.

I'm going to be gone for a while.

And he kept alluding to it and almost getting there.

And then he would like to take a step back and get a pop.

Well, that's not.

He didn't even, you know, that's the thing.

He

alluded to everything.

He said, this has been the worst week of my life.

I got news last week.

I'm scared.

I'm terrified.

I'm like, is he pregnant now?

And he said, no, here's

so.

Here's the truth.

I'm not cleared for Forbidden Door.

But it's a lights out unsanctioned match.

AEW is not responsible.

So it's all on me.

So I'm going to wrestle.

And I'm aware of the risk.

What risk?

He hasn't told us what the problem is.

If there's a chance that I can't beat Will Osprey after Sunday, I know I'm going to leave it all in the ring.

And me and the other four clowns, whoever the fuck is in this 10-man cage match, are going to beat the Death Riders

before they take a scalpel to me.

For what?

That's when Moxley's music starts, and he's got to come in all the way from the parking lot.

So they're going to waste all kinds of time.

That's when

Sock Face and the announcers kind of jumped in

to explain that he was getting neck surgery, but not even really

explaining that.

So before we go to the rest of the promo, my question is:

did he just assume that everybody knew

or he just fumbled telling everybody?

Which one do you suppose?

I'm not sure

because he kind of alluded to things in the last promo we saw with him and then he never said anything there either.

I don't know if it's supposed to be just fans who understand online buzz that he has a bad neck.

If he has a bad neck, why would he be, why would it be like, okay, the doc says I could have one more crazy cage match before surgery?

Well, no, that's the thing.

He really does have a bad neck, and he's really going to get surgery, but he's really also going to have this fucking goofy 10-man cage match.

And by the way, here are the teams.

Let's see how many of these people are full-time AEW wrestlers: the Golden Lovers of Kenny Omega and Kode Abushi,

teaming with Will Ospreay,

Darby Allen, and Hiroshi Tanahashi

versus the Death Riders of Claudio and Moxley, the Young Bucks, a freaking frack, and Gabe Kidd.

Well, we're going to get to Tanahashi in a second because my God.

Good lord.

Wild Bull Curry at 80

looked like fucking Tiger Mask next to this fucking guy.

But

Moxley gets in the ring and they go face to face and nothing happens.

And there's Claudio and there's old Wheeler, and

they get up on the apron.

And

he said, why don't you moxley, do it yourself?

And then suddenly,

here comes Kevin Knight and a Hong Kong Fuye and they slide in the ring to no reaction whatsoever.

And they start having a sloppy fake fight.

It looks embarrassing.

And then

they play music, and here comes Tanahashi.

And now the people pop.

And the heels just stand there.

And Tanahashi,

he comes down the ramp with his gut bouncing and limped to the ring like he was crippled.

And the heels had to run into him and bounce off of him.

And then they rang the bell to start a six-man tag match.

So this Tanahashi is one of the people in the 10-man cage

Zabada, is what you're saying.

Yes, representing New Japan.

Not very well, apparently.

I started, it was Dick the Boozer, Claudio, and Useless against Spitball and Kevin Knight and his Tanahashi.

And they rang the bell.

We're already 15 minutes in the program with all this other foolishness.

And Tanahashi started out moving like he was in a body cast.

And

you're never going to believe this, Brian.

Well, I know you saw it.

You probably still couldn't believe it.

He and Moxley got in the middle and they started trading the lightest, fakest forearms ever.

Even Claudio was barely touching him.

They were treating him like he was a Fabergé egg.

Will his body parts fall apart if somebody was to body slam him?

What?

So, after Tanahashi got out of the ring, I skipped to the finish because Jesus Christ,

apparently, Gabe Kidd

and a bunch of guys that I've never heard of,

I've never even heard him say these names on his television show.

They came out and interfered by

stopping Tanahashi from,

if he was going to to do it like he did it later, from falling off the top rope.

And the fans didn't care, and then nothing happened.

They all just stood on the floor while the match went on.

But then Osprey, who had kidnapped Marina Schaefer away from ringside earlier in the match, brings out a body bag

with somebody in it.

And all the kids did some dives and Grandpa Tanahashi fell off the top rope on Wheeler 123.

But then all eight of the heels, the people in the match and the fucking unknown people on the floor jumped in and started kicking the shit out of the three baby faces in the ring.

But Osprey

didn't go to help them because he was standing there holding the fucking bag with the body in it.

So then the buckaroos came out from behind Osprey

and double super kicked him.

and he goes down with the bag.

But then Roderick Strong and Kyle O'Reilly attacked the Buckaroos and they fought off.

And we didn't see them again.

Because now

Moxley and Claudio and Useless got the bag to get Marina out of the bag.

And when they opened it up, it was Darby.

And Osprey and Darby start fighting the heels with Samoa Joe and Hobbs and Shapupi

out to help them.

And everybody had a fake fight through the crowd, through the arena, into the back

that wouldn't stop and kept going

with most of the people in the street closed.

So you couldn't tell who anybody was back there anyway.

And it was dark.

But they had to kill time so that Darby could get to the top of the

balcony area and coffin drop everybody in this 14 or 15 man pack.

But he did it in the dark with no lights so you could barely see it.

And then everybody left.

What the fuck?

Was this the biggest mess in

the history of television?

This looked like some Russo shit in TNA.

Who even started this fucking thing?

The osprey, I'm going to have to leave for a while, promo, is what started it.

And then it's amazing when you have a segment with the worst batch of baby faces ever.

And then you realize it's the worst batch of heels ever.

Like, it's just, there's no star power.

It's not very good.

And, you know, Tanahashi

or Takahashi or, you know, anyone who appears on this show.

No, I'm saying anyone.

No, it's Tanahashi, but there also is a Takahashi.

Anyone who appears on this show,

it's like they've been doing Forbidden Door for a while.

They keep getting the older guys who are broken down.

If you notice, there's no young talent coming out of New Japan that anyone wants to see.

They just had Takeshita go over there.

Where'd Tankashit go?

He just went over there.

He won their G1.

Why have we been seeing him at this

Easy?

A potato with arms and legs, just an immobile, funny-looking fuck, or Suzuki, or this Tanahashi, or the other Takahashi, or all these people that look like they can't fucking breathe, much less wrestle.

But they've got

our boy Take,

and they send him to Japan.

Keep these motherfuckers and bring him back.

Could and Okada,

they could make him the captain of the steamship to ship all these son of a bitches back home.

Boring, overpaid, fucking lackadaisical, blase son of a bitch.

We'll see what happens.

That was the first of the, it's now an AEW thing, the rolling segment.

One thing rolls right into the next, rolls right into the next commercial break.

Well, when they came back from the commercial break by cracky, it was time for Tony Schiavone

to bring out Edge and Christian Cage.

And he brought out Edge, and the fans love to sing over there.

They They sang his song even when they cut his song and they were still singing it.

And then Christian Cage comes out and he starts to heal the crowd.

And Edge shuts him up.

And these people love us.

But you are what you are, you're an asshole.

So now the story is that Edge knows Christian is an asshole, but sometimes you need an asshole.

And at least he's my asshole.

And when Christian went to find himself, he found out that he was perfect and he doesn't need to change anything.

At least it's different, Brian.

You can't say this one's been done before.

Any of this turn or the

angles for the turn or the participants of the turn.

So Edge and Christian aren't on the same page, but they are writing in the same book.

And Edge

promised him, and so he promises Edge

that Edge is going to help him with Nick and Pip,

and then he's going to help Edge with FTR.

And he gives Edge his word and shakes his hand.

He's going to be the best partner that Edge ever had.

And the crowd pops when they shake hands because they want to see him back together.

And then here comes, and now, this whole goddamn convoluted deal

that, again, you could buy.

And we said we wouldn't mind seeing at one point a reunion of Edge and Christian against FTR.

You're thinking that on this program and with this roster, that'd probably be one of the more attractive things you could see.

And that's what they wanted too.

That's what FTR and Cope have really wanted.

But then you throw Nick Plain and the mother and Pip and all this other parsley into the thing.

And now it's confusing.

Well, now that they've done all that, when Pip and Mama Wayne come out,

they're letting her speak now.

Good lord.

She introduced a video on the screen of Nick on crutches reciting a memorized statement.

in a very menacing and threatening fashion.

And basically he broke his fucking foot.

And they wouldn't be doing this if he really didn't have a broken foot.

No, I'm out of forbidden door.

I'm out of this angle.

Now, Penn, another one of these fucking guys does something, fucking breaks something in the middle of the goddamn deal.

And now he's out of the pay-per-view.

But he said,

If I would have been able to show up this weekend, I would have finished you off.

And then he says, I'm always one step ahead and he delivers it like this fucking juvenile delinquent is lex goddamn luther right

but then they play music

and now you have a video of a mad scientist laboratory a mad doctor with a goddamn medieval looking hypodermic needle and he shoots something and blah, blah, blah.

And on the table that pops up and doesn't Undertaker sit sit up is Dino Douche.

Our old friend Dino Douche.

Aka Luchasaurus.

I believe it is his Christian name.

Well, no, because it's Kill Switch, but they were chanting Luchasaurus because the fans here forgot that they changed his name.

So this goddamn egghead is back.

And what

again, he looks like a million dollars that he, in the early days was responsible for many of the rottener matches because he don't know what the fuck he's doing.

Apparently, he never figured it out.

But he's back and he comes out and chokeslams Edge

and stares at Christian because they used to be aligned and then they had the breakup.

And that's where the fans chanted Luchasaurus, by the way.

Did they have a breakup?

Or did he just get hurt?

Well, he never came back.

They had the goddamn, the awkward relationship where he was bullying Dino

or whatever the fuck they did.

But when you think about this,

here comes the guy.

He hits the ring.

He chokeslams the only legitimate babyface involved in this whole deal.

And the people are chanting his name.

But then he turns around and he chokeslams Christian Cage right on his fucking shoulder.

What the?

This fucking guy is rotten.

His timing, his psychology, his execution,

and he thinks he's a goddamn horror movie star.

I bet his time off has done nothing for

the smoothness of his performance.

There are fans who think that it was Jack Perry's arm in the video.

Preparing the hypodermic needle to bring Luchasaurus back to life.

Hey, I'm not saying that there might not be a possibility that you could get some video of Jack Perry preparing a hypodermic needle, but I don't think he'd be shoving it in somebody else's arm.

Well, again, we're not going to make any presumptions or I don't know what you're alluding to there.

We haven't seen anything about that.

Well, he's the guy that came out and set a motherfucker on fire.

Wouldn't he?

Or was he the guy that got set on fire?

Didn't he set somebody on fire too?

They're all on the marijuana pills, all these young, young people.

Well, wait a minute.

Where was the fire?

Was there a fire incident?

Who did it?

And who was that?

Yeah, he got set.

That's right.

He got set on fire.

By who?

I can't remember.

Somebody with a flamethrower.

Was it Darby?

It sounds like something he'd do.

Oh, maybe, maybe.

Cody got lit on fire in the early days.

Remember, he had all that crap on his back and could notice it.

Hey, what's on Cody's back?

Oh, it's in flames.

Yeah.

But no, this was with the flamethrower, the way people are supposed to do it.

And also here, that's something else.

We actually

make notes on this shit and go over this shit, and we can't remember who flamethrower Jack Perry.

So, Nick Wayne's mom's going over to England and he stays home

apparently.

Well, you know, mom's not out.

You know, she got the

got somebody to watch the kids.

She can go out there.

Oh, boy,

merry old England.

You know how England swings like a pendulum do.

Well, I'm sure, Jim, after all that swinging, you may need a good night's rest.

I swear to God, I was about to tell you how tired I was.

I was about this time, I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open.

And I'll tell you what.

It's times like that.

At the end of the day, when you've had a long, hard day and you've watched a lot of stupid people do shit and you just want to lay down somewhere comfortable and just forget about your troubles, forget about your cares, lay your worries on the old doorstep and just fucking just dive onto a helix mattress.

And that's, and you can, now they have mattresses from Helix with diving boards.

If you want to get in your

exercise at the same time, they've got the eight foot and the 12 foot.

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and you just come right off of that diving board into the Helix mattress where it's like landing in a cloud.

Again, it's a good thing.

And it goes poof.

It's a poofy, nice idea, but it is not a realistic idea.

Certainly not sold by Helix, but what they do sell, Jim, are great mattresses.

We have them here at Last Manor.

We are big fans of Helix.

I know you have them over there.

Yes.

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I have them here often.

They come over for dinner sometimes.

Every once in a while, just stop by for a sandwich.

But folks, if if you've got any problems with sleeping, you sleep hot, you sleep cold, you sleep, you're achy and you go snoring, back pain,

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That's apnea.

Sleep apnea, if you got sleep apnea.

Because most of the time when people get gonorrhea, 80 or 90% of the time they're awake.

We're not talking gonorrhea.

We're talking sleep apnea, but we're not really talking that.

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See?

Again,

let's focus on what we can.

Definitely see and let alone feel.

I tell you, I always had problems sleeping with my watch on because I toss and turn in the middle of the night.

And every once in a while, I'd slap myself right in the forehead with that big old watch.

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All right.

Well, this

remains on the show.

Well, I didn't expect you to play the music there.

I just thought we would segue on into other things.

I know what you're going to say, Brian.

You're going to say,

who won the final match of the tag team tournament to get the tag team championship shot at Forbidden Door?

That's the question you're going to ask me, wasn't it?

Yeah, of course.

I mean, that's a big match.

The tag titles coming up.

Another great, big match.

Another great big match.

Well, it came down to FTR against Bandito and Brody King to see who would face Bobby Lashley and Shelton Benjamin, the Hurts Syndicate for the tag team title at Forbidden Door.

And again, why is the door so forbidden?

Everybody's come through it.

It's not like you've gone to the old Indian burial ground and you've never returned.

Everybody's come through that door, gone back, come back.

It's like a revolving forbidden door.

There's nobody else that's still forbidden that can come through it, is there?

For New Japan, it hasn't been good people go through that door.

They never come back.

Well, they never, they always come back on this show, the one that I'm watching.

They're here all the fucking time.

I don't care what they do over there.

They can go about their business.

So,

what this was was another match where, bless them, bless them for their effort.

But FTR wants to have the greatest tag tag team match of all time every time.

And they never give thought to the fact that their opponents can't pull it off and it gets too complicated and it gets sloppy or it gets lost or they're two steps behind.

And they try to cooperate with all the stupid shit that their various opponents do.

In this case, Bandito.

with his,

I don't know what the fuck the fucking deal is where he just rolls over people and does handstands and back and whatever.

But it was a 30-minute draw, not to spoil anything, 30-minute time limit draw.

Brody King got color.

He got juice because that's the thing that he does best.

And Bandito

did a lot of screwy shit because that's what he does best.

And FTR.

can't

set up a match to the level of their opponent and make them look good without trying to make them look so good that they end up making them look worse than they usually do.

Does that make sense to you?

It makes sense to me, but you're the biggest expert on tag team wrestling I know.

So when you say it, it really matters.

Well, I mean, it's

they caught the lightning in the bottle with Jay White and Juice Robinson.

And Bandito and Brody King, neither one is Jay White or Juice Robinson.

And

Jay and Juice were an experienced tag team from Japan or whatever, and they knew enough of each other that,

yes, they pulled it off, but here with everybody, it's just this

just excessive over and over, and too complicated, and too many swerves and false finishes, and bells and whistles.

And then they set up the 30-minute draw so that the very last move at the bell was cash diving through a fucking table on the floor.

Crash, ding, Ding, ding, ding.

What the fuck?

It used to be, oh my God, the team that we wanted to win almost won in the small package, but he just the bell rang.

Now it's just, oh, we got one more piece of furniture in

before we had to quit.

And then within 30 seconds, Tony Kahn had sent word.

to the girl ring announcer,

Lois Lane, whatever her name is,

that now both teams will face the Hurts Syndicate in a three-way at the pay-per-view.

Well, at least they came up with a novel way to settle this.

And they sent Bobby Lashley and Sheldon Benjamin out with music to stare at these people.

So now we get three-way.

Last month, the tag title match was a three-way.

Why don't they just book a handicap match with four of their regular guys against Lashley and Benjamin?

Then it would be even and it'd still be a regular match.

They just want to get the belts off Lashley and Benjamin.

And Lashley and Benjamin are probably saying, How are we going to do that?

And their best way is, How about we pin someone else?

These guys come in, they get over, they get the fans interested.

They have professional matches for once on this program.

And Tony was completely unable

to get any

tag team over to face them for the belts that anybody thought could legitimately give them an issue

and was expecting them to work with these fucking underneath children that they obviously was like, what the fuck?

We got over.

We did our job.

Why do you want us to try to get these fucking clowns over that aren't ready for this shit?

Remember that he thought it was a good idea, Tony, did to put him against Knight and Spitball.

The fuck it just accentuated how weak Knight and Spitball were.

I'm still,

I'm gobsmacked they dropped the ball on them, the Hurt Syndicate.

I'm gobsmacked they've cut the deal off with MJF and dropped that whole thing because they obviously didn't know where the fuck it was going.

So, anyway,

that was what happened there with those people.

What were we talking about?

The tag title match coming up.

Oh, yes, going to be a three-way.

And then they bring Adam Page to the ring.

And I wrote, Jesus, now this douchebag is going to talk.

And he's mad that MJF jumped him in the parking lot last week.

It could have been worse.

He could have burned your house down.

And then he called MJF out, but he knew that he wouldn't come out because he's a coward.

And then he did another one of his fake tough guy promos.

And when he was done, then they played MJF's music and MJF didn't come out.

And then the music stopped.

But then Tony Schiavone at Ringside.

He goes, wait a minute,

he's listening to his headset.

There's a message.

MJF has got a cameraman in the back,

and he's got a message for you.

And if you leave the ring before he finishes his message, something bad will happen.

Yeah, we'll have to watch the rest of this segment.

You know the best thing about this segment, Brian?

Did you notice the best thing about the segment?

No.

was the fine Cordettes Collectibles customer that was standing behind Tony Schiavone with the I'm a Jim Cornette guy t-shirt on.

And he didn't move.

He didn't move a muscle.

And they couldn't apparently figure out a way to shoot Tony any other way.

But then MJF comes up on the screen and

remember I've said it before, you can never seem like you can never praise anybody, Brian, or recognize anybody's talent or say that they might have something special that they don't eventually do something to disappoint you and just fucking just make you think, why the fuck did I ever goddamn say anything good about it?

If he was forced to do this, I apologize.

If he did it on purpose, he's not as smart as I thought he was.

But MJF is there with Ricochet and two job guys, whatever their fucking names are.

And they had kidnapped Mark Briscoe and tied him to a chair and gagged him.

Now, this is about the third or fourth person in the course of the run of this program that has been kidnapped and tied up, taken away, and held for ransom, tied to a chair and gagged, right?

So it's not even groundbreaking there.

But now, MJF cuts the promo and says, well,

you got to stand there and listen to me.

And if you don't do the three things I want you to do,

then he takes a gas can and pours gasoline

over the top of Mark Briscoe, who apparently has been put in a medically induced coma because he's not even selling.

He just, he's unconscious.

If he was unconscious that long,

chances are he would have fucking flatlined without some goddamn defibrillator.

He pours gas over Mark Briscoe's head and says,

I'm going to set him on fire.

And he's got the lighter.

I'm going to set him on fire

unless you agree that our match on Sunday, the title can change hands on disqualification or count out.

And I don't have to use my contract to get the title match.

Now you're just giving it to me anyway.

Or I'm going to set this guy on fire

in this fake skit.

With this fake gasoline,

with this fake bullshit that I'm saying about this fake match we're going to have.

In a fit of he's going to, yes, an American citizen is going to immolate another American citizen in a foreign country.

Can you imagine the paperwork alone?

Nobody'd be able to figure out how to fill out those forms.

What the fuck?

The carnage over at Carnaby Street.

I don't know what these people are making me do.

There's a killer on the King's Road.

There's a killer on the road.

His body's frying like a toad.

Cause we set him on fire.

Cause the situation's dire.

My pay-per-view is sagging and I'm really lagging.

My business is dead.

So anyway,

He gave Paige the count of five to agree to these things.

Paige said okay at four.

So apparently

he had to to think a minute about how enamored he was of Mark Briscoe.

And so, okay, so now they took back, he didn't need to go the devil.

The devil didn't need to goddamn flip out and get mad and say, okay, execute the contract because now they take it back the next week and the title can change by disqualification or count out.

And they probably ain't going to change the belt anyway.

They're just trying to make people think Paige is in jeopardy.

To be honest, if they did a real good job of convincing people that somebody would beat Paige,

they'd probably get a good buy rate.

But

are they all on that kratom that we've been hearing about?

That they think this is good television?

Who is this for?

Like I said, it wasn't scary if you were going for a cool, violent reservoir dogs vibe.

Like they could have cut his ear off.

But it's not funny, nor is it scary,

nor is it cool because it's all so obviously silly and fake.

So, what, and why would MJF, who has proven himself to be a student of the business and kind of understands what

guys have done in the past to get over what works and what doesn't, or what's stupid, he just,

I mean, he's one of the few people they have left that anybody gives a shit about, and they've wiped their feet on that to the point where

it's not the same as it used to be with him.

And there's no, there's no direction to this, and no direction, home,

with these complete unknowns,

like a big old fat bone.

So there's not a single fan who saw this who thought that MJF was going to light him on fire.

Okay, you know what?

Goddamn,

maybe he should have done it.

Maybe he should have just lit Mark Briscoe on fire to prove him wrong.

Well, he didn't.

I guess that's the point.

Yeah.

Well,

I have not been crazy about the MJF Adam Page build.

Where Adam Page suckered MJF into making bad decisions by attacking his feelings.

And then MJF threatened to burn someone

seemingly to death, I would assume.

I don't know what you hope for when you light someone.

I said, well, yeah, no,

if you'd only wanted to hurt him, you would have like poured a little gas in his lap or on his feet or something.

But no, he went over the head straight down.

Is this a problem going forward where because he blitzorbs childhood house on fire, now like whenever you want to do something with him, it has to involve fire?

Well, at least they're telling long-term storytelling here.

See, it's always connected.

But it's just again, this is the WWE doesn't need to fuck with them.

They're doing a good enough job on their own.

Why would you, again, I ask, what audience is this silly, stupid, fake shit for?

Just to laugh at them?

People got enough problems, they don't need to tune in a television program program just to laugh at how amateurish and bad it is.

I assume they can find some comedies that would make them laugh in a more productive fashion.

Who is this supposed to get excited?

How exciting was this when you're laughing like, look at these dumb fucks with their fake fucking gasoline.

And

they're, they're,

They're in a war.

They hope that it's hopeless.

They can't possibly win it, but they refuse to even put up a good fight and just be serious.

It's just, we're going to take this fucking guy for his money and just do the shit that we like to do that's fun.

And ha,

look at this.

How about if we set him on fire, act like we're going to?

What about a baseball bat with spikes in it?

That'd be fucking hilarious.

And they just get away with it.

And it doesn't change their business for positive or negative because there is that core group that wants to for whatever reason watch broken down japanese people and silly frail pale looking americans fake fight

there you have it by the way there's about another half an hour left in the show but i

i really don't know what they might have done

that would top threatening to fucking

set the guy on fire.

So I bowed out at this point.

I'd about had enough.

I figured I got the flavor of the thing.

Did I miss anything?

Well, we'll discuss that, I guess, with the ratings momentarily, but they had a big women's match.

So, so I didn't miss anything.

Which more than likely, we weren't going to watch or evaluate.

So, I don't know if you missed much, but that was AEW Dynamite.

Jim, let's get to the ratings.

Well, hold on here a second.

Now, we've told people what there's no use in watching or paying attention to because it's all silly and fake and stupid.

What can they do with their extra time this week?

Might they even be able to

listen to a program on the Arcadian Vanguard network?

Well, thank you very much.

That's the most professional setup for a pug I think we've ever had here on the show, and I appreciate it.

So, tell them what fucking programs you got going on on that louse-ridden network.

We got it's not louse-ridden.

Get the fuck out of here.

We got great fucking shows on the fucking network, Arcadian Vanguard.

Get information about all the shows on Twitter at Super Podcasts or on Facebook.

Facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard.

Of course, each and every day, get your wrestling news for free.

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This is an awful plug.

Ladies and gentlemen, we also want to make mention of Stick the Wrestling with John McAdam.

Another great look at 1985 in the WWF, McAdamPod.com or look for the show wherever you find your shows.

And of course, Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, the best of volume three.

Here, great moments with lots of great stars having great talks.

SUAWPod.com or Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, wherever you find your favorite podcast and the 605 Super Podcast, The Mothership.

Jesus Christ, he's disabled by sound effects, folks.

Go through the archive, 605pod.com, available wherever you find your favorite podcast, The Mothership.

How come this fancy damn sound filter we got won't filter out that bellowing of yours, you bellicose bumpkin?

All right, Dr.

Smith, I see that you've arrived late into the show.

All right.

Well, what kind of of a pain in my back was these ratings this week?

This past week, AEW Dynamite on TBS,

August 20th, 2025, 8 to 10.06 p.m.

On average, watched by 565,000 viewers.

Oh, good God.

The lowest total viewership for Dynamite since April 23rd.

Of course, there was big competition.

There was?

Well, I saw Dave Meltzer quoted the Little League World Series was on.

Oh, come on.

What?

The Little League World Series, where the top children baseball player, well, actually, best team, not the players, but it's the World Series of the best Little League players.

I can understand the Little League World Series possibly being competition as far as pulling people off the AEW roster,

but I can't believe that it would be competition as far as taking viewers away.

The Little Leaguers.

Dynamite was number seven for cable on the night in the key demo.

Number one was South Park.

Well, that's no surprise either.

And it was brilliant.

But do you think?

But when's that?

That's 10 o'clock, right?

But that's 10 o'clock.

So that would have affected the last six minutes.

But do you think that for once they could have realized, my God, this is a horrible television wrestling program and just not watched it.

Well, let's see what the quarter numbers tell us.

The quarterly numbers is quarters filled with numbers.

These were compiled by WrestleNomics, AEW Dynamite, August 20th, 2025 on TBS.

Quarter one,

8 to 8:15 p.m.

The Will Ospreay, Death Riders, Jet Speed, Hiroshi Tanahashi Live Angle,

645,000 viewers.

Okay, so they started way down from where they normally start to begin with.

And last week, when they got the big pop over 700, didn't they start with eight, 800 and something?

So

this time people just said, well, hell.

Well, hell continues into quarter two.

8.15, 8.30 p.m.

Tanahashi and Jet Speed versus the Death Riders.

With picture and picture.

The post-match with Bullet Club War Dogs.

Oh, that's who they are.

Who is that?

Who are these people?

What are their even individual names?

I didn't recognize a goddamn one.

Well, the Bullet Club War Dogs, Will Ospreay, Darby Allen, the Young Bucks, and the Ops.

573,000 viewers.

Wow.

So that was...

Slim pickings to begin with, and then they lost another 65, 72,000 people.

They have to stay fairly consistent from this point to even make their average.

Well, we go to quarter three: 8:30 to 8:45 p.m.

And ad break, the Adam Copeland Christian Cage Matriarchy live angle,

566,000 viewers.

Oh, good.

Edge and Christian reunite as a tag team and lose 7,000 viewers.

You can have the greatest talent in the world, and if they go out and they're in the middle of a shit show,

you can't overcome that.

Well, we go to quarter four,

8:45 to 9 p.m.

Mark Briscoe's backstage promo, an ad break, Ricochet, the gates of agony, and MJF's backstage angle, and the start of FTR versus Brodito,

547,000 viewers.

And there goes another 19,000.

And again, they got to get some back to make their average almost, don't they?

Well, let's see what happens here.

Quarter five, the big nine o'clock hour, nine to nine.15 p.m.

20-something more minutes of tag team tomfoolery.

The continuation of FTR versus Brodito with two rounds of picture and picture,

543,000 viewers.

Okay, and at least they're holding them.

Well, the hold continues, and the quarters.

They're holding the lowest number of the show so far.

It may be a stranglehold.

9:15.

They stop the bleeding.

9:15 to 9:30 p.m.

Continuation of FTR versus Brodito.

The post-match with the Hurt Syndicate.

The Okada Swerve Strickland video.

I missed that, thankfully.

And an ad break,

559,000 viewers.

So they got another

16,000.

Well, bless their little pea picking hearts.

We go to quarter seven, 9:30 to 9:45 p.m.

The Adam Page, MJF, Ricochet, Gates of Agony, live angle, aka the attempted murder of Mark Briscoe,

an ad break,

and then the Paige Ricochet Gates of Agony backstage angle,

529,000 viewers.

Ooh, and that's where they said, all right, this is ridiculous.

And we lost 30,000 and we're down.

We're only down 116,000 from the start because they started in the toilet already.

And we'll talk about the key demo number in a moment, but here is quarter eight, 9:45 to 10 p.m.

A reminder, six-minute overrun.

Athena

and Mercedes Monet

versus Alex Winsor

and Tony Storm with picture and picture

556,000 viewers.

They got something back.

Six-minute overrun, continuation of that match, and the post-match with Persephone, who we previously pronounced as Persephone, and everyone got mad.

560,000 viewers.

The key demo number, quarter one was 229,

and then it was 204,

218, 214, 202, 200, 203, 211, 205.

So that is, you'd almost think that's their base cable audience because that's about as low as that's steady across the board and low.

Well, it taken away the first quarter again because that's never indicative of what the program's going to do.

Every quarter from there on out was between 573 and 529.

So that's a 44,000 person very 573, 566, 547, 543, 559, 529, 556, and 560.

So we said they're, they're down to

around about 600,000 people, give or take on the week that will suffer through this.

And that number is every year they they lop off about another 100,000.

Because when they started, it was 900 and 800 and 700 and 600.

Now they're into fives.

We'll see.

They've got no more stars.

They got nobody they can bring in.

They nothing is,

there are no dream matches.

There's nothing interesting where you, I'd really like to see the big show with this guy versus this guy.

Every six months they wheel kenny omega out

that's a big moment still and then he disappears again off tv

it's

and now osprey again we have to because we we did so much talking real quick as we close up here we did so much talking about how he

bumbled not really telling anybody what's the matter with him

Thankfully, they're not going to put the fucking belt on him at Forbidden Door or that they didn't before now, because now he'll be out for who knows how long with neck surgery from doing

a lot of shit that was frankly unnecessary and probably falling through a lot of furniture.

So,

when they get a star, or they get a guy that can be one of their top guys, or their top guy,

either they run him off, he doesn't get along with the other people,

or he hurts himself and he runs his own self off, or they book him into goddamn oblivion.

And I don't see who's on the horizon that's going to change that.

So

the WWE, that's why I feel like they've picked now to go here.

We can pretty much powderize these some bitches right now

and be on our way and own everything.

What are they going to do about it?

They've run out of access to stars and the stars they have keep going down.

Well, that was AEW Dynamite.

It certainly was.

Is this the end of the program?

This is your show.

That's your decision.

Well, in that case, I'm going to make an executive decision.

Folks, we're coming back in a few days with the drive-through with some classic wrestling talk.

And we'll be back here next week on the experience, which will be longer if anything actually happens.

But until then,

and in between times, and in the meantime, thank you.

Fuck you, and bye-bye, everybody.

Get the experience,

get the experience of Jim Connet,

of Jim Connet,

of Jim Connet.