Episode 556: Fear & Loathing

Your global campaign just launched.

But wait, the logo's cropped.

The colors are off.

And did Legal clear that image?

When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through.

But not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

And commercially safe AI, powered by Firefly, lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent everywhere.

Learn more at adobe.com/slash go/slash express.

You're auditioning for AMDA College of the Performing Arts?

Yeah, and it's not just an audition.

I'm entering the ultimate talent competition.

What happens if you win?

A full scholarship, the chance to perform in NYC in front of thousands of people, and a life-changing college experience.

High schoolers, auditions are happening right now in your city, but spots are filling up fast.

Don't miss your shot.

Go to AMDA.edu to schedule your audition today.

That's amda.edu.

Like the midnight and the rock and roll.

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

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 the Jim Cornette Experience, where today, fear and loathing

in the WWE Writer's Room, who's Sue and Vince McMahon this week and all the latest grappling news.

And to join me in all this and so much more frivolity.

Hawaiian Brian, the podcasting lion, the king of the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, Mr.

Co-host to you.

He's the Hunter S.

Thompson of podcasting, the great Brian Last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

A pleasure to be here once again.

Of course, Hunter S.

Thompson was from Louisville, Kentucky, so maybe you're the Hunter S.

Thompson of Wrestling Podcasting.

No,

I'm the one with the loathing, and you're the one that should have the fear.

You're Dr.

Gonzo, I guess.

Oh, I'm on a gonzo your bongos, pal.

I'll tell you what.

You know what I'm saying?

Circus circus, where are we doing this?

You know what you have done to me, and I'm going to reveal to the people that I'm fucking, I'm about to pull my hair out

over the goddamn internet situation.

Somebody,

here's what you're blaming my headphones because, folks, I'll tell you right now, there is no sound coming out of one of the sides of my headset, my headphones,

only a little bit of sound coming out of the other side.

And

it's actually the one that the sound comes out of is my bad ear anyway, because you know I'm half deep.

And so I've had to turn my headphones around so they're not shaped for my head that way, and they're fucking about to fall off the back of my head.

And I've been driven through a goddamn procedure for the past nigh on 45 minutes.

It's made me want to put my fist through this fucking monitor and reboot.

This computer with my goddamn foot, but I'm afraid I'll break my toe.

What about electrocution?

You're not afraid of electrocution?

If I can kill this fucking thing by electrocuting it, I'll try that.

No, by yourself getting electrocuted, you stick with my monitor and all of a sudden

I'm going to take this son of a bitch with me.

But you laugh.

You are blaming my headphones, but this has coincided with a...

A website that will not be named maybe until later in the program when I get really pissed off.

You had me go go to this particular website.

No, for this particular website to research one of the

big breaking topics that we're going to talk about on today's program.

And doing that, it froze my fucking computer up and I couldn't get any, I couldn't get the goddamn shit off the screen.

And then finally it all went away and then I couldn't reconnect to anything.

And it took forever to click on enough things that would come up that I would be back on the goddamn interwebs.

And then

we discovered when we tried to get on and do this thing almost an hour ago

that when I tried to call you somehow, I could only hear, as I've mentioned, out of one side of the headset.

And I said,

it's the website that you sent me to that has poisoned my computer because it worked perfectly yesterday, hadn't been touched since then, except for that incident.

So I said, I'm going to restart my computer.

So I go, I get down and I fucking punch the goddamn button to turn the thing off because I know there's a way to do it on the screen, but I couldn't figure it fucking out.

So I just, I figure I'll just turn the goddamn thing off with the button, right?

It's got a power button on it.

And usually

When the power goes off and I have to turn it back on, that's the way I turn it back on.

And sometimes when I have to turn it off, that's the way I turn it off.

So I turn it off that way.

But then I couldn't get it to come back on.

I turned, try to turn it on about three or four times.

I'm like, oh, fuck, now it's fucking dead completely.

Then it turns back on.

Then it gives me the goddamn screen, and I got to do all the bullshit to get into the thing to where it reconfigurates and confabulates.

And the wheels are turning,

rolling down the river until finally you get all the shit back up to where you can click on shit again.

I didn't go over the people's heads with that description, did I, Brian?

Did I get too technical?

Rolling down the river?

No, I don't think so.

And it's taken, man.

It's this is frustrating.

And I'd like to know what you're going to do about it.

How are you going to compensate what I'm going to do about it?

What?

For poisoning my computer wherever you sit.

You sent me to this place to fucking read this shit.

And And that was the beginning of the troubles.

And now I can barely hear you to begin with.

Why am I screaming?

Because I can barely hear you.

Can you hear me?

I can hear you, Grandpa.

You're screaming at me.

I'm coughing at me.

My voice.

I'm losing my voice.

I'm out of breath because I can't hear you.

So I think you can't hear me.

It's like Jey Uso coming through the crowd right now.

You heard that.

No, listen.

Some of the show, I'm out of breath.

All kidding aside, it's not me, it's your computer.

Well, what?

No.

Yes.

Because

it was working fine until I went on that website.

And that website, clear as day, it said not responding and all that fucking screwy shit that fucking goes on.

For the record, the website.

was not any kind of nefarious website.

It was a nationally known news site.

Yeah, but it's not one that I ever get.

I had my news that I was reading up on that subject on another nationally known site.

But you all know we should look at the same thing.

My nationally known site was just popping up and down just fine.

How secure is your computer?

Are you up to date with your security settings?

Well,

security updates?

For what?

For security?

I've got the Express VPN.

They They take care of all that.

The guy comes in here a couple times a week.

It's not the way it works exactly.

Yeah, no,

he's got a big name plate.

It says Express VPN.

I'm certain I appreciate the mention, but this is not how they work on anything.

No.

Well, nevertheless, why are you trying to avoid the fact that you have now rendered me where I'm at at a handicap here on the audio here because you've done something to my computer with this half off-brand

news news site you had me go to there is a chance that the website caused computer issues on your computer for one reason or another that would have necessitated a restart which is what you did the headphones are a separate issue

yeah

yeah you hear out of one of the ears on there not the other one I think it's a wiring issue hold on wait a minute hold on I'm gonna

I will grip tightly I'm just

I was just making sure that I hadn't gone deaf and I was having some kind of stroke.

I can hear if I don't have the headphones on.

I can hear out of that ear.

So that's a good sign.

Can you hear this?

Everybody can hear that.

Hey, all right.

Music brings us together.

Anyway, well, speaking of bringing us together, before we go any further with the broadcast today, this probably, I can't keep track.

The days are blurring, but I believe this will be the last podcast that the folks hear my voice before the election.

And last week we covered quite a bit of ground, and I'm not even going to,

I'm going to be brief, number one, and number two, I'm not even going to talk to anybody who's made up their mind

because obviously I don't want to talk anybody out of voting for Kamala Harris.

And you can't reach, I've

just seeing Twitter after the last week, and I think everybody else would probably realize that too.

You can't reach the Trumpers anymore.

They have left the building.

They're not living in the real world.

They don't plan on moving back anytime soon.

These people are going to go to their graves, however old they are,

believing this fucking guy's horseshit.

And nothing's ever going to change.

Even history books will never change that in their minds.

But there are a segment, Brian, and you may have heard of them.

Have you heard, got feedback from the, they're all the same crowd?

Have you, have you,

they say the politicians, they're all the same.

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

I'm not going to vote because it doesn't matter because they're all the same.

Which is...

A ridiculous statement to begin with, but I tell you what, I won't even argue with anybody that feels that way on any of them except this one.

If you guys will agree to not even meet me in the middle, but meet me 90% on your side and just this time, they're not all the same.

Nobody can claim that they're the same.

And if you're not going to vote because you think they're all, just then meet me.

I'm all the way over nine out of 10 parts on your side.

Just meet me that far and say this time, I'll go vote to save the fucking world.

Because

I know that

a lot of people

around the world think, well, these Americans and their politics, they're fucking nuts.

And we are, obviously.

But they laugh at us and they shouldn't be laughing.

Because guess what, folks?

The president of the United States can not only fuck up the United States, he can fuck up the world.

And this guy is fucking way out of control.

So admit one time

they're not all the same because never in the 250-year history of the United States of America has a former president's chief of staff,

a four-star general,

come out and said,

He's unfit.

He's a fascist.

He is a danger, a clear and present danger to the country and should never be allowed near the Oval Office again.

And a dozen of

Trump's former administration officials have come out publicly and put their name to agreeing with the fucking guy.

That's never happened before, ever.

For good reason.

So, and these are four-star generals and people who

if if they say that this guy should not have the fucking codes and not be let in on the secrets publicly

attaching their names to it

then i think the whole world better listen and they better have their fingers crossed

and it's still half and half for some reason.

So

basically, we're going to find out two things.

Number one, can the United States of America's citizens live up to the responsibility that we have as the most powerful nation in the world by not fucking the world up?

And secondly,

and what Mama Cornet used to say whenever something

would happen in the world that this saying was applicable.

Just remember, there's more good people than there is bad people.

And I hope she was right.

We'll find out on Tuesday.

But anyway,

before

that Trump has potential chance to destroy the national and global economy, While you still got some money and you're going Christmas shopping, do it at jimcornet.com.

What kind of transition is that?

Before the end of the world, spend your money here.

What the hell is that?

Well, fuck,

we either ain't going to have it or we ain't going to need it for very long.

It's all coming to an end, so give it to me.

Well,

hey, I'll tell you what, fuck, if he loses, I'll give it all back.

Don't commit to that.

That's a bad business decision.

Don't commit to that.

Well, I could send him back in 40 coin.

Oh, no, no.

We're not legally allowed.

We went through this off air a while back with the attorneys.

We're not legally allowed to distribute, disperse, have anything to do with any sort of currency or bullshit currency such as corny coin.

So we got to go through the people at Mint Mobile and their subsidiary Mobile Mint.

Again,

that's another thing that's not real.

There's no mobile mint, or at least there's no mobile mint applied to Mint Mobile, who has nothing to do with this.

Well, then, then who had those printing plates and that green ink in the trunk of that 78 Oldsmobile?

That was Blackjack Mulligan.

Oh, okay.

I'm saying, you know, actually, he just, he got that payoff from an independent show.

I said, what'd you do?

Sell out the Orange Bowl?

It's $2 million.

But anyway, if you've got $2 million, then say, even if it's phony, send some of it to me.

I'll figure out something else to do with it.

But at jimcornet.com right now, the holiday sale is going on, including the last ever Jim Cornette action figure.

Once again, if things go the wrong way, I'll probably be outlawed and stuck into a gulag or a stylog or one of them law.

I'll have a log stuck in me.

So anyway, just help a brother out, as Tracy Smothers would say.

Do your Christmas shopping at jimcornet.com.

If you've already ordered a figure, we believe around about the time you're hearing this, the next seven to 10 days, everything, we should be through our backlog.

And remember, there's less waiting on a non-figure order because they're easier to process.

And the big weekly sales are coming up every week in November.

Another fine item is going to be on sale.

And if you've entered your email address on the homepage at jimcornet.com down to the bottom, you will get email notifications of how much money you can save on that week's particular feature item only

at from and with jimcornet.com.

now with Hotchkiss Featherbottom.

Soon the feature show used computer equipment.

Well,

you know how many pieces you think I could break this son of a bitch in

and just and include them.

Anybody who spends over $50, you get a hunk of my fucking former computer.

Why do you think that's the way to go?

I think maybe selling it as one piece, you can get a bigger amount of money.

You think breaking it up and not even selling it, but doing it as a giveaway?

Well, yeah, because I'd rather take a sledgehammer to this son of a bitch for all the fucking frustration and aggravation and prostration it has cost me

than actually have somebody buy it and pay me money for it.

I want at some point take a hammer to this thing.

Well, stay tuned, the gymcornet.com.

You never know what you'll find.

You never know what you'll get.

Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Clean up your skincare routine with primally pure natural skincare products, offering cleansers, moisturizers, and masks, plus deodorants and tallow-based items.

Organic, wild-crafted, and regeneratively grown whenever possible, Primale Pure's products contain no chemicals, fragrances, or fillers, just pure, clean beauty.

Head to PrimalePure.com.

That's P-R-I-M-A-L-L-Y-P-U-R-E.com and experience skincare that nourishes you within.

You never know what will happen, and you know what?

You never know what's going to happen in the wild world of the WWE.

all righty I guess Brian it's time that we get down to work here and talk a little bit about the wrestling now

and uh before we

actively talk about the wrestling that's been perpetrated let's talk about how the wrestling is created see that I'm a poet and don't know it but my feet show it because they're longfellas

there was an article in Rolling Stone of all places.

God damn it, is everybody now sold their soul for wrestling instead of rock rock and roll?

Wrestling gets and clicks more than rock and roll does.

Well, I guess that's true these days.

But anyway, they've done a story on the writer's room

in the WWE.

Apparently, they have their own room like Wally and Beaver.

I wonder if they're sleeping in bunk beds.

But the writer's room at the WWE, and specifically one

former writer person.

What were you going to say?

They didn't have a bunk bed.

Well, there's more writers than there was Wally and Beaver.

Well, that's true.

And how do you know what they were sleeping in when they were younger before they went on the air and went Hollywood?

They could have been sleeping in a chest of drawers.

That was them going Hollywood, having two beds?

Well, yeah.

All right.

Well, let's go back to that.

That was back in the 50s, you kept those kids in a compact area where you could keep an eye on them.

Well, let's go to the complete opposite of Hollywood, Stanford, Connecticut.

All right.

Anyway,

apparently there was a writer named Michael Leonardi

who is mentioned here.

A lot of the others are

just a former writer or, you know, unnamed people.

But

this guy, they lead off with him.

He was fired in 2016 and told by

an HR representative and the head writer at the time

that he was not fit for the role.

First of all, do we ever know who the actual head writer is?

Do they publicly admit that?

Well, again, things may be a little bit different now than they were under Vince McMahon, but in the past, you know, there were certain names that we knew.

Brian Gewertz, I believe would be one of them, right?

He was the head writer after Vince Russo and Ed Ferrero.

We knew their names.

They were.

I mean, there wasn't really a writing team then.

It was a smaller group of people.

And then after that, it became,

I think, you know, Vince McMahon convinced himself with all the success they had that, you know, we're making movies.

That old bullshit line.

And all of a sudden he had a team of writers who.

Yeah, but how many movies have 27 different writers?

Not many.

One guy wrote Rocky, right?

Stallone.

Yeah.

So

that's the point I was going to make as we get later on in this is they say there's a room of, you know, all these various writers.

What they're fucking writing, writing, I don't know.

But anyway,

that's the thing is it starts out with

this guy getting fired.

And he said, well, I'd gotten a promotion and a raise and positive feedback.

He'd been there for 10 months.

But then a week prior to his dismissal, he warranted us asked to sit on his face and then there was a big problem.

What?

Did you say sit or shit?

It's a WWE.

Anything could happen in the WWE.

Anything could happen.

Expect the unexpected.

I certainly wouldn't expect that.

But anyway,

he says a week prior to his dismissal, he was dressed down by the company's then CEO, Vince McMahon, for making a last-minute minor change to a script that he and the other wrestlers thought was racially insensitive.

And

other wrestlers, not other writers, other wrestlers.

Okay.

Yes, other wrestlers.

But then when it's,

I'm trying to see because this, this is a very long article, folks, and we're not going to read you everything, but I'm trying to see when they recount it in the body of the story.

Ah,

here is where it is explained at the body of the

article.

During the taping of a Monday Night Raw segment that aired on Martin Luther King Jr.

Day in 2016,

he was producing on the road with R-Truth, Titus O'Neill, and Mark Henry.

And Neville, Neville is now Pac, is he not?

A bastard, yeah.

Well, now we don't need to be vulgar about it.

But anyway, so as Leonardi described it, in a video he posted to LinkedIn this past February, so he put a video up about this on the internet.

For potential

people that hire him, I guess.

LinkedIn's where you go to try to find jobs and shit, don't you?

Well, then why is he talking about why he got fired?

Anyway, he said the script called for Neville to speak up and tell everyone else that he's got a dream too, and that dream is to win the Royal Rumble.

Referencing the civil rights leader's historic 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Leonardi says Neville told him he was uncomfortable delivering the line, and with a limited amount of time, there usually is, the bit was changed so that R-Truce said the line instead.

And Leonardo, Leonardo,

Mr.

DaVinci, no, Leonardi says his boss at the time, Dave Kapoor,

approved the change.

Kapoor could not be reached for comment, neither Neville and R-Truth either.

But anyway, after bringing the change to McMahon's attention, he says the boss became furious.

And following their confrontation, Leonardi was let go.

But a spokesperson for McMahon denied the account.

And

wait a minute, that's why the idea of him.

Wait a minute.

The quote from McMahon's spokesperson,

that's why the idea of him suggesting or approving the use of a famous Martin Luther King Jr.

quote for a punchline to be used by a white British character is so ridiculous.

It simply didn't happen.

So that.

Well, but there's more to the story because at the top, when they first started the story, again, it's in different parts of the Rolling Stone article.

Here's what Leonardi said.

Vince McMahon turned to me and he said, so you didn't give me what I wanted?

Leonardi tells Rolling Stone.

I said, I understand.

I'm sorry.

We all went over it and felt good about it.

And we just made a small tweak.

And then he started just yelling at me.

It was such an intense moment.

I walked out with my tail between my legs.

So they're saying Vince didn't want it and the proof is in the pudding.

It wasn't on Vince's show.

And this guy's saying that was a writer's mutiny because they thought it was so racially insensitive, even pacted.

And Vince McMahon was upset about it not being used.

Well, but the

funny thing to me was two things.

Number one,

that of all the

blatantly outright offensive and horrible things, you know, he had people punt babies.

I mean, of all the things that Vince

had has done and said or had done and had said by people, that this guy was, you know, over this, right?

It wasn't that fucking extreme.

And secondly,

there is something, Martin Luther King Jr.

Day is a big deal to Vince McMahon.

And if you notice since, well, since the 90s, I don't know when they started doing it.

Every time that Monday Night Raw falls, well, falls on that day, it's always on a Monday, but there's a graphic every year.

And there's some type of recognition every year.

And I bet you this was a thing

like Vince got with other things where it was in his mind that this is exactly the thing that needed to be done for this thing that means

something to him.

And somebody changed it.

And whoa, boy, that ain't going to fucking fly with Vince McMahon.

However, it's an awful idea.

However, it's

an an awful idea.

Well, many of Vince's were.

But Pax said, I have a dream on Martin Luther King Day is a bad idea.

Anyway, you slice it.

Well,

or actually.

And he was a babyface, wasn't he?

I assume he's with these other babyfaces.

But point B, whether good, bad, or indifferent, putting those things together.

You know, they always say that Vince's personal ideas and his personal things or his pet, those are the things

that he cares the most about.

Or if he wanted to produce L.A.

Night as a fucking male model manager company, whatever the fuck, personally,

those are the ones that can get really fucked up or he can get really mad over is what he told somebody to do personally.

And this guy walked into it like a helicopter blade.

When you were working on the writing team, when you were helping book the show,

was there ever a point where vince

reacted in any negative way because the same reason here i didn't get what i wanted something like that someone else produced that was out of his hands that he saw the finished product and he was or something live that happened just something where he didn't get what he wanted oh yes um

you know well i mean all every show you know you would see him he would

have the pen and he'd throw the pen down or he'd look over the fucking glasses on his nose or whatever or roll his eyes if he's sitting at the the monitor watching.

I mean, that happened to some degree, you know, in every shad.

It happens to everybody that's producing a show in every show.

But here's the thing about the writer's room.

And before I even say this, let's go a little bit further to just pick some things out of here that

people are saying.

The majority of the writers asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution from the WWE, their former colleagues, colleagues and rabid wrestling fans.

Number one, what do they think?

They were a writer on the WWE television program five or 10 years ago for fucking six months, and they're going to put a hit out on them?

You'll never get out.

You're never out.

You're always in.

Fear of retribution if you're not currently in the...

If you're not currently in the wrestling business or wanting to be in the wrestling business again, and where would any of these writers go to stay in the fucking wrestling business?

Nobody else wants goddamn miscellaneous fucking TV writers.

But why would you be afraid of retribution?

What are rabid wrestling fans going to do if you're a faceless person with a name of John Smith?

Quoted in a Rolling Stone article.

How are the wrestling fans going to track you down and take a stick to you?

What is this the producer of General Hospital?

I'm just a fan.

You better not hire George.

But anyway, no, here's the cut.

One former writer tells Rolling Stone, WWE is a kingdom ruled by fear.

It is the motivating factor everywhere.

Fear.

No,

that's not something only writers have said.

That has been said a lot about the way Vince, especially in the later years, ruled WWE, that people walked on eggshells.

Right?

I mean, you've heard that before.

Yes.

And, you know, if, if,

again,

you don't want to get heat with the boss, right?

But I'm just talking about my experiences.

This is in, I know he's, he went nuts.

We established that.

But my experiences are nothing like any of this.

And I don't know what

I was in the writer's room.

And I say that because we were writing.

It was Vince's goddamn

dining room on the table.

But me and Vince and Bruce, or me and Vince and Bruce and Shitstain, or me and Vince and Bruce and Jim Ross.

And, you know, occasionally

somebody might wander in like Pat Patterson or, you know, whoever that would stop by.

Who just wandered in?

Oh, it's Pat Patterson.

Just wandering streets.

Pat wasn't writing the TV at that point, but he would stop by when a pay-per-view was coming up and we were talking about finishes or something.

Nevertheless, it was a group of between three and half a dozen people.

And there was no...

Even with us, except for me and Shitstain, I don't remember any outright yelling, like yelling, like, what the fuck?

I remember people getting,

you know, enthusiastic and saying, you know, oh, come on, you really mean you don't think if he punches him in the face with a fucking toilet seat, that's great, whatever, right?

But nobody was, nobody was mad, nobody was being personally belittled, nobody was scared of anything.

What the fuck?

Frustrated, yes, tired, yes, burnout, yes, mentally, ready to do anything else but yes all those things i have felt but not

scared or bullied

and so i don't know you think

wrestling people differently than he would treat generic writers well but hold on here where is it that uh he's got to they got to stand up

um

God damn, this is a long article.

I'm trying to.

With the six writers who used to work at WWE tell Rolling Stone, they regularly witnessed or were on a receiving end of verbal abuse.

The allegedly hostile conditions permeated not just the writer's room, but the company in general.

Everybody was getting yelled at all the time in the room.

It was more saying shit that was humiliating or mean

that was then couched as a joke, but it's a nasty joke.

Now

is somebody joking with somebody and they're just pissed off and they don't like it.

But the well, yeah, I mean, read the rest of the quote.

If you're being targeted in a room, nobody stands up for you, but that's because if they do, they will get the bullet in the head.

Bullet in the head, too.

You don't stick your head up out of the foxhole for anybody because nobody wants to take a bullet.

I don't.

Jesus.

Good lord.

I had no idea.

It was so intense.

Well, and that's the thing.

There's the

quote that I was talking about was, it's a deal where

the writers are told when Vince walks into the room, you've got to stand up.

And you said, and you said, well, maybe it's not, it's wrestling people that he doesn't talk to like that.

But no, number one,

I never stood up when Vince came in the fucking room and nobody ever told me to and nobody ever asked me to.

But I'm not even talking about the writer's room now.

I've seen Vince in the general production meetings.

I don't know how many, three in years,

we had two a fucking week, hundreds of production meetings with the

people that work at the studio

or the people that work in the office in Stanford, the old Titan Tower, but in different departments like marketing or somebody that's going to be there to

the event market reps that help sell the tickets and work with the buildings, regular employees, right?

I don't remember anybody giving Vince a standing ovation when he walked in a fucking room.

And

in many of those cases, I was walking in the room with Vince because I was stuck in the car with him and nobody fucking stood up for me either when I was buying Vince.

I don't know what

is going on here.

Well, according to the article here, well, actually, that's the way the paragraph begins.

According to the former WWE writers who spoke the Rolling Stone, the TV writers' room was unlike any other they'd experienced.

For one thing, the fact that McMahon himself, the CEO of a company of more than 800 people, regularly joined and supervised the small staff of writers.

Around 20 to 25 people.

A small staff of writers, around 20 to 25.

Depending on whether the show is being produced at headquarters or on the road.

Good lord.

There were also unconventional rules, including a formal dress.

Oh, wait a minute.

Hold on what you just said.

They thought that Vince McMahon was not going to be in charge of the booking of the WWE?

How did they make it after the first 24 hours

under that ridiculous assumption?

What the fuck?

There were also unconventional rules, including a formal dress code.

In a document detailing the dress code obtained by Rolling Stone, the company required men to wear suits and women to wear skirts, dresses, or pantsuits.

Okay,

hold on, hold on.

No blue jeans.

Well, I've talked about this at the production meeting or at the arena, at the building, from the time you go in the arena till the time you come out.

Yes, he wanted, well, he didn't want suits either, but shirts, pants, you know, a jacket.

There were no women on the writing team at that point, thankfully.

But any of the women that

worked in the studio, again, I mean, they wore what they wore, but I don't know.

I don't remember anybody dressing like they were going to a goddamn board meeting at the office to go to television when you were on the production crew.

But, but no,

when we were writing the show, and again, we were at Vince, Vince was wearing a goddamn sweatshirt and sweatpants with his fucking hair all sideways because he just worked out for two hours before we got there at nine o'clock in the morning.

So I was sweatpants and fucking t-shirting it even at that point.

But

at the office or at the building,

you know, he wants you to perk up a bit.

Well, let me continue here.

Okay, well, you can.

In addition, all employees were instructed to keep their shoes shined at all times.

Was that a rule when you were there?

Yeah,

I didn't have shoes you could shine.

I wore dress shoes for the first two months that I worked in the office, and with my flat feet, I got up in the morning and couldn't fucking put weight on them.

So I went and got...

a brand of Nike hiking boots that looked like black high-top leather

tennis shoes, and that's what I wore.

And I wore those for the next 15 fucking years.

They were comfy as fuck.

Do you think that's the reason there's the rules?

The Jim Cornette incidents where he went to the middle of the day.

Well, maybe, you know, maybe I caused this, but no, I've never, no, what I do.

What?

Okay.

I don't know.

I shall continue.

There were other policies the former writers say were atypical compared to entertainment industry standards.

The writers allege they were told not to sneeze in front of McMahon

because he saw it as a sign of weakness and to always push their chairs in when they got up from a table.

Well, now that's just good manners.

Yeah, it's just manners.

I don't know what the problem is.

Who's the jerk leaving their chair out?

That's what I want to know.

Yeah, you know, and we know about the sneezing thing.

Although, that was actually, I've had a cold and sneezed the fuck out of Vince McMahon one day, trying to fucking illustrate to him how miserable I was and see if he would tell me to go.

It was one of those deals where,

well, Courtet, you think you can make it?

I'll be okay, Vince.

Trying to get him to say, just go home, but he wouldn't be the first one to crack.

That's one of the more underrated Vince's completely insane stories.

The idea that, like, when he would sneeze in front of people, he would be like, oh, God damn it, I'm just getting mad at himself for

having a reaction that is involuntary.

That's part of humanity.

It's part of living.

He's nuts.

But anyway, I'll go back to this.

The writers say they were also instructed to stand whenever McMahon walked into the room and to sit down only after he took his seat.

I think they used to write for the Pope, didn't they?

Yeah, really.

Is this like Vince's courtroom fantasy?

What is this?

He's the judge.

And now, you know, somebody says, oh, they're taking up for Vince.

No, we're admitting that Vince McMahon is a very bizarre individual, but some of this stuff is not my experience, at least back in the day.

We have a quote from a Vince spokesperson many of the anonymous writers claims bear no resemblance to the reality of the writer's room vince never told people to stand up when he entered the room that's ludicrous

the former writers who spoke with rolling stones say that while they did not hear the directive from mcmahon himself they were instructed by their managers to follow this rule

do you think what do you think that vince thought when one one day out of the blue all of a sudden it had never happened before, and he walks in the fucking production meeting or whatever, and the writers are in, and they all just stand up.

Do you think that maybe he was like, well, I don't want to hurt their feelings.

They're trying to show me respect.

So he let them keep doing it?

Again, I don't know.

Who are the managers?

Is Bruce Pritchard the manager?

Well, I don't know.

Or was he?

He was instructed by their managers.

We didn't have fucking managers, for one thing, when I was there.

Would J.R.,

the head of talent relations, would he have been managing us?

Most unorthodox of all was McMahon's direct say in the final scripts, the writers say.

Until he stepped down as CEO and chairman of the company two years ago, McMahon was closely involved in every single script.

No shit, Sherlock.

The former writers describe a process that was hardly collaborative.

Writers would pitch story ideas to lower-level supervisors and head writers.

And on days McMahon was in the room, directly to him.

They would sometimes produce multiple versions of scripts.

But ultimately, they say, McMahon changed storylines, even ones he previously approved, and entire scripts on the day of the taping.

He, quote, destroyed everything by the time we got to air.

Seemingly just to exert his dominance, one former writer says.

Again, please tell us something that we don't know.

What,

again, remember, I've called it the ceremonial turning in of the papers.

Okay, we spent Wednesday.

We talked about all these things.

We got, okay, now we do the formats and we fucking take them back.

Let's do this.

See, that can't be healthy for a writer.

The idea that you're constantly submitting things and even collaborating with the person in charge on the ideas.

And then like the day of, they're just like, fuck it.

We'll do something else every week.

And now, to be honest, sometimes it was because one of the,

you know, one of the main players

on the talent roster had some issue back in those days, whether it be.

attitude issue or substance issue or whatever the fuck, but most of the time it's just Vince.

Oh, well, let's do this.

And this guy will do this over here and blah, blah, blah.

It just changed everything.

another quote here it doesn't really matter what he said in that creative room or if he loved it at an earlier point it was still going to get torn up before the show

by the time monday rolled around and we were all in the production meeting something else was going to happen it almost felt like a joke Like we were just there to satisfy Vince's whims.

We were all Vince McMahon transcribers.

There you go.

That's it.

And that's the point I've been trying to make.

And I've used 18 million words over the course of the years, but that's the best description.

You don't take a job as the booker or even as a booker in the WWFE.

At least maybe.

Now you might, but then you didn't.

When Vince was around, you were a Vince McMahon transcriber.

You started with his murder mystery, with him figuring out who was getting killed and who the fucking perpetrator was.

And you filled in all the scenes where they used the fucking phone booth at the drugstore.

I think Vince enjoyed the manipulation.

He liked changing things.

He liked keeping people on their toes.

I genuinely felt like this isn't the benefit of the show or the storyline.

Vince just really enjoys making people squirm.

Okay, here they've gone too far.

Because no, it was always,

it's what Vince thinks will change will help the storyline or benefit the show.

And he's changed his mind again, and he knew he was omnipotent, but he wasn't making the show potentially worse or

just to make people squirm.

That was not happening.

It's just that he knew better than anybody else did, whether he did or not.

But still,

knowing how he dealt with people, you don't think he was dealing dealing with some of these writers and he enjoyed kind of fucking with them in a way well yeah and i think also a lot of this is these are

people who have apparently had normal jobs and or were kind of normal fucking boring people and

and they don't get the fucking

ribbage that goes on in the wrestling business i'm not even talking about

from vince but i just think if you know if if michael hayes or even bruce pritchard

or

anybody, I don't know who else is there that's ever actually been in the real wrestling business, are going to bust somebody's balls and they're not capable of coming back or don't feel comfortable with it because that's not what they did when they worked for

Exxon or whatever the fuck, I can say, yeah.

They probably wouldn't enjoy themselves.

But if you fucking fire back and do the same goddamn thing, people leave you a fucking lone or

they just continue to joust with you and you joust back with them.

But again, things are probably a lot different today and Vince is a lot different today or today, the last 10 years or so than when you were there.

Here's another example.

Well, this is coming up, yes.

Writers say it was commonplace to wait around the Stamford office late into the night for McMahon to show up to their scheduled meetings about that week's scripts.

One former writer says they would often wait.

for hours and you wouldn't know why you were waiting.

The writers claim meetings sometimes did not start until midnight and did not wrap until two,

three, or four in the morning.

See, this

and Vince McMahon's spokesperson basically confirmed it and said this is part of working in the entertainment industry.

Long hours, crazy days, but that's very different than you and what you experienced.

Well, yeah, and this is what surprises me because,

yes, Vince could be late if he was already in another meeting or on the phone with somebody.

I've talked about a million times.

You'd be sitting around waiting for him to get off the fucking phone, but you had already started.

He wanted you there at nine o'clock in the morning on Wednesday

and at his house.

And as I've mentioned in Connecticut, that required you to leave from where I lived, 40 miles away, at about 7 o'clock.

Two hours on that goddamn miserable highway.

You missed the Merritt Parkway?

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

I'd like to

like to fucking miss it for the rest of my life.

But anyway, if when I would roll in about 920, I would get the goddamn glasses on the end of the nose and the fucking look at the watch or whatever.

And I guess that's fucking traffic.

It's insane.

You people live here on purpose.

What the fuck?

But, you know, no.

And yes, that was his house.

But.

If you showed up for a goddamn meeting at the fucking office 15 minutes minutes late, he would go, he was going to be sitting there at the head of the table or wherever he was.

The meeting was happening, and you were going to wither and die at the glance that he gave you on the way in.

And you know, another big difference between what this story's talking about and when you were there, Linda.

Linda was around.

Yes, but

goddamn, again, the production meetings.

I have a feeling if you had had had to yourself and you were five minutes away from the building in a car

vince would let you the upholstery rather than stop to be late to the production meeting because it was my own company can't be late to my own meeting the and he was an early morning guy all these things started in the morning We we had were at the studio in some cases till midnight, but that's because we were doing a live television broadcast,

like the voiceovers for the show.

Remember, I've talked about that, how to make it more topical.

When Raw was first transitioning to live every week,

they would have the show taped, but we would do the commentary live in the studio on the feed.

And that way we could talk about what happened that day.

Big fucking whoopty shit, I know, but they were convinced that made a difference.

So we'd be at the office all goddamn day,

and then we'd go over to the studio and wait for nine o'clock to roll around

so we would be but he would have been working the whole day he never started at midnight because he'd been working since seven o'clock that morning so i don't know what the is going on here now

it wasn't just mcmahon who was the problem the former writers say One former writer says that while they didn't have any negative experiences with McMahon directly, they thought the other writers in the room who were in positions of power could be bullies, motivated by fear of upsetting McMahon and losing their jobs.

Those who demonstrated this type of loyalty to McMahon tended to be avid fans of wrestling who spent their careers inside the world of WWE,

the writers say.

Well, now

that's interesting.

Avid fans of wrestling or is that Bruce?

I don't think you could call either Bruce or Michael Hayes avid fans of wrestling first and foremost, but instead of, you know, veterans or professionals or whatever.

Are they talking about, was there a section of the writers that were actually fans of the business and another section like that Alexandra Pepperday

that had never fucking seen wrestling before and didn't know shit from Apple Butter about what it was about?

and there was a divide there i can see that

but again

bullying amongst the writers in the writer's room because they're jealous of the other fucking guy or whatever well there's too many of them for one thing

and secondly

who is this scared of losing a job that's apparently this miserable Well, speaking of that term miserable, let me continue on about the miserable people in charge.

Okay.

Those people were the most miserable people I've ever worked with.

But that's where a lot of them had worked their whole professional lives.

And that's the only game in town.

They didn't know what it was like working on a regular television show.

One former writer claims they witnessed a colleague in a leadership position tell another writer, something to the extent of, I wish your dad pulled out and came on your mom's tits instead of having you.

That sounds like Michael Hayes.

That sounds like a Michael Hayes.

And if you responded, well, he was saving the good shit for your mother.

What the fuck?

It's god damn it.

Yeah, that's the thing.

To something like that, you respond.

You jab them back.

It's words.

Come on.

This was like good old boys locker room talk.

The former writer says.

The more somebody was promoted and the closer they got to the innermost circle,

the more volatile it got.

And the more you dealt with some of those good old boys.

That's absolutely Michael Hayes and Bruce and

maybe someone else we're not thinking of.

I'm trying to think of who is a legitimate wrestling personality that has ever actually been in the real business and is on the writing team.

In the WWE, because the producers

that used to be wrestlers, they don't get in the writer's room, do they?

I don't think so.

So we're not considered writers.

What are the jokes on us then with Stephanie?

One of the writers compares the WWE writer's room culture to a mafia style of leadership in which if you do one thing, you're pissing off three other people who are higher up than you who are going to chew you out and get angry and seek revenge.

But I couldn't understand what the hell was going on because nobody made eye contact, nobody talked to you.

It was so odd.

Everybody's scared, and the only laughs are at someone else's expense.

Everybody is emotionally shut down because of the verbal beating that they take and the humiliation.

I mean, Vince pushed me in his swimming pool one time.

Is that considered bullying?

But that's happened.

Everybody got pushed in the pool, but only once, once you had your

dip in the pool, you know, then it was on to other people.

Didn't Shane get Vince?

Shane got Vince one time, yes, I think.

But, and see, that's the thing.

They had a routine that they would work people with.

Like Bruce got me because we were sitting out by the pool one day, and I can't remember how it came up or how he presented it, but Bruce was dead serious that there was something,

Vince had had something written on the bottom of the pool that coincided with some fucking big show or something.

I said, I don't see anything.

He said, No,

if you look close, it's right in the middle.

And I'm like, I don't see it.

And that's how they get you to get closer to the fucking pool and they shove you in or whatever.

But

I don't, I

again,

why is everybody so scared if they're so miserable?

And I'm saying, hey, you know what?

Fire me.

Because I'll tell you what, I was treated the best

and,

you know, pretty much acknowledged in my complaints the times that I said, you know what?

I can be fucking back in Tennessee in 12 hours.

Tell me now so that I can gas up my car.

The famous thing where you yelled at Kevin Dunn in the meeting.

Yes.

And told him about his teeth, which caused him to later cry.

Yes.

Vince was there when that happened, right?

Yeah.

I mean, this is an example of a writer's room, technically.

Are you in calling it?

No, that was a production meeting.

Okay, but there is an example of something Vince is supervising, and there is some sort of like how did he react as it was happening in real time?

Well, remember, as I said, it everybody that was in the room, and it would have been me and Bruce and Shit Stain would have been there, and Vince, and I think Shane was there, Kevin Dunn,

Jim Ross,

a couple people from the studio, a couple more people.

The only one that didn't start smiling when I first said it was J.R.

because he knew that I was mad from the start.

Everybody else thought I was going to bust into some entertaining something.

But then when I finished standing up and uttered the words, I will drag you over this desk and beat the fuck out of you, then everybody's expression soured.

But nobody had any time to say anything because

that's when I fucking closed up my fucking shit shit and threw it in my goddamn briefcase and said, if anybody wants to talk about the wrestling show, I'll be in my room.

You guys continue on and fucking left.

And then

they let me stew.

And then,

as I've recounted before, Vince,

you know what?

What did he say to you?

That's kind of my point.

Well, that's, I'm trying to think the next day

because I know that he, he, he, I'm trying to, to say that he wanted me to apologize to Kevin Dunn, but that was at his house the, you know, following Wednesday or whatever.

But maybe it was at the show then, but I

didn't.

The point being, I didn't speak to Kevin Dunn.

That was a Saturday night.

The pay-per-view was on a Sunday night.

We did TV, I believe, on a Monday.

That may have been before we were doing live TV every week.

So we might have done a taping on Tuesday also.

But when we got back to Stamford,

Vince arranged it where Kevin Dunn could come over to his house so that we, me and Kevin, could sit there privately and I could tell him I was sorry for insulting his teeth.

Oh, I never realized.

I never realized it happened at the house.

I thought you guys ended up meeting at the office.

No.

He had Kevin come over to the fucking house.

And the way that, again, Vince's Jedi mind tricks, I wanted to apologize to this motherfucker like I wanted to cut my right fucking arm off.

But Vince said, he's important to the company.

He's been here a long time and he's very sensitive.

And you've hurt his feelings.

I said, well, he fucking hurt mine too.

But nevertheless, if it means this much to everybody,

I'll apologize.

So I was going to go through the fucking motions, which I kind of still did,

until the fucker started crying and talking to me about how the kids used to make fun of his teeth when he was in school.

But then I was thinking, you make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This was before the stock deal.

You make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, get your fucking teeth fixed.

But nevertheless,

but no, that's, you know, that was pretty much in my experience of being there for three years, the most

heated or

aggressive that any meeting ever fucking got

and you know and again i was never i never felt scared frustrated fed up pissed off burnt out all of those things

but scared of reprisals i'm not sure what the fuck's going on here yeah i mean the only reprisal is you're fired i mean really early that's it they're not going to follow you home and kill you

well that that's what they said They're already ex-employees, scared of retribution.

Of what?

They got a hitman on call.

Is that what Howie the mailroom guy is doing now?

Go to this guy's house, kick the shit out of him.

Yeah, I'm afraid of retribution because Vince McMahon and his good reputation will call someone up and say that I was the problem.

Yeah.

But anyway, would you like to delve into the former female writers' comments?

Oh, let me get to that.

This is, again, it's a lot of stuff here and it's all very long.

Here it is.

Women in the WWE writers' room face specific challenges.

Of the former writers who spoke with Rolling Stone, the women say they felt othered

and became hyper-aware of their gender because of how they were treated by male writers.

One former writer.

Okay, if they already don't know which gender they are and that they're the other gender from the other gender that's opposite them, then I'm not sure.

That is funny word

became hyper-aware.

You know, I always knew I was a girl, but now I'm super aware that I'm a girl.

One former writer says people would comment on her outfits and touch her in ways that felt unnecessary,

even though the behaviors weren't explicitly sexual.

She says that Swami will bark.

She says it felt like a means of controlling her in a way that didn't happen to the men in the writer's room.

Here's a quote.

They would touch me where they would have me come closer to them.

They would pull me by my waist to come somewhere or move closer to them.

I'm just super aware that it's kind of close to my butt.

And most people don't touch me by the waist ever.

I thought,

this is strange.

And I have to say, she's not wrong.

Well, yeah, that, yeah.

And again, especially if it's Bruce or Michael Hayes that we're talking about again.

And it's creaky, too.

And if you were Bruce, would you want to touch Michael Hayes by the waist or anything else?

But

okay, again, there were no women writers, but there were women working in the production department in the studio.

Jennifer Goode was a producer there for years.

She was at all the major meetings.

handled a lot of the shows.

I don't remember anybody

ever steering her around the room by her waist.

So

maybe this person should have said something about that person,

because,

you know, that doesn't sound kosher to me.

Well, I will continue here with this.

Two former writers tell Rolling Stone they took their complaints to human resources.

One was subsequently fired from her position.

a decision she interpreted as retaliation.

According to former writers, enough female writers complained about their treatment to WWE HR in 2020.

That leadership held a Zoom meeting they referred to as a woman's forum,

in which the affected writers were encouraged to collectively air their grievances.

One former writer says she grew emotional when she told everyone in the meeting that she didn't feel safe with her co-workers.

But the other writers are her.

Another woman who attended the meeting says the leadership staffers there were dismissive of women's claims.

They did it just to appease us, but they didn't take it seriously at all.

By the way, that's 2020.

In terms of all the Vince and Janelle Grant stuff, that's right in the midst of it, isn't it?

It would seem to be.

So in terms of culture, that in terms of the culture around Vince and Vince's enablers and everything else,

you would have to think that's that's kind of like almost the end of this

kind of shit, this period of whatever the fuck was going on, grabbing women by the waist

to move them.

Move here.

What the fuck is that?

You know, again,

I don't know what they started doing up there,

but at the same time,

here,

continuing on, and I'll make this point.

They say, oh, you know,

one male senior staffer said,

come see me if you have a problem.

You people are acting like middle schoolers, whatever.

There may be an element of all of this in there, but one former writer who says they have a history dealing with anxiety also says their mental health was impacted by their time working at WWE.

They say they were allegedly driven to having crippling panic attacks because of the job.

But when they brought the concerns to HR and nobody ever followed up or took any course of action,

that maybe that's because you need to not do this job.

If you are having a crippling attack because of the job you are doing, but the

descriptioners, you're kind of getting yelled at.

You don't.

And I know I have a hard time, and I'm trying to sympathize with the writers.

And you shouldn't be being steered around by your waist.

But

a lot of these people are talking about, well, the wrestling culture and the good old boy network and blah, blah, blah.

They obviously don't have any,

they don't have any motivation for being in the wrestling business.

They got a job with the WWE because they're TV writers and they want to write a TV show.

So if they're not in love with the business and under its spell, why are they putting up with this?

And part of the problem with the product is that there are so many people that they have allowed to become writers that have never seen a goddamn wrestling show before.

And I've been in contact with a few of those in my time.

And you know, the other side, the good old boys and the writer, the wrestling people,

feel the same way about the writers.

What a bunch of fucking nitwits.

So that's what they've done.

The company, if anything,

has put two completely different

kinds of groups of people in the same room and expect them to work together.

And the regular TV writers think that the wrestling people are crazy,

but the wrestling people think the TV writers are fucking idiots because they don't know anything about wrestling.

On the other hand, if it's Bruce or Michael Hayes that we're talking about who are saying

you're all acting like middle schoolers if they go to HR trying to talk them out of going to HR or come see me if you have a problem one former writer alleges which is such bullshit because he's part of the problem too he enabled Vince with everything that he did

you know it was a

really unhealthy you know a really unhealthy last several years of Vince McMahon's run

and uh

you know the other thing is this is coming out now you would have to say this is not currently reflective of what's going on there in WWE.

So it's kind of we're talking about almost like a dead company or, you know, a different regime.

It's a different world altogether right now with WWE.

Well, yeah.

And, you know, again,

it was different when I was there, and it's different now that Vince is not there.

But I just, I don't see how things got to this point that people are walking down the hallway like, oh, shit, somebody's going to fire me or yell at me.

You know,

there was none of that.

Again, everybody was always scared of Vince, but scared of Vince like you're normally scared of pissing a boss off, not like

he's Don Corleone.

And I think this is a combination of

some people in that company apparently went fucking berserk when they became publicly traded.

And a lot of these people don't need to be in the wrestling business.

Both of these things can be true.

Tatalia's a pimp.

What I didn't know until now was it was Triple H all along.

Well, there it is, the topsy-turby world of the writer's room under Vince McMahon.

Although, again, some of his enablers are still in the company.

And Vince does still own stock.

So it always makes you have to question.

If he does still have a voice in the room, if the people that were his voice in the room are still there.

But that was that story.

That was that story.

And I'll tell you what, by cracky,

if you want to tell other people what the story is, you need a good phone plan, Brian.

Yes, you do.

Yes, you do.

You need to tell anybody anything.

You need a good phone plan.

And Brian, guess what I got?

You got a good phone plan?

I got a good phone plan.

It's about time.

Mint Mobil's phone plan, $15 a month.

It's the cheapest in town.

It's not only the cheapest in town, it's the cheapest in the country.

Now,

they may have one on the Arctic Circle that's cheaper than Mint Mobile's $15 a month phone plan.

But who the fuck are you going to call in the Arctic Circle?

An explorer.

Admiral Peary, maybe.

Or a cute little penguin.

But if you are down anywhere below the Arctic Circle in this world and you want a great premium wireless plan that gives you high-speed data, unlimited talk and text, the nation's largest 5G network, and you can use your own phone, then go to mintmobile.com right now because they got the deal.

As we mentioned, $15 a month when you get the three-month plans, that's $45, but that's just mathematics.

And

you will be able to call anybody, text anybody.

As a matter of fact, I understand that you can not only call or text anybody, but Brian, now

they can call and text you.

Well, yes, of course.

Well, you say it, of course, like everybody's plan is like that.

Well, with Mint Mobile, everyone's plan is like that.

Well, with Mint Mobile, but not with everybody.

That's why you should be with some of these other people.

That's the point.

As a matter of fact, one of the other companies has a deal where you can only make phone calls on Tuesdays.

That sucks.

Well, yeah, think about the rest of the week.

If your house catches on fire on a Wednesday morning, you're going to have to wait six days to call a fire department.

You don't want to do that, do you?

It doesn't seem reasonable at all.

Well, that's why you need to get Mint Mobile to be reasonable.

So ditch the overpriced wireless, ditch the

substandard performance and the subpar technology and go with the real winners.

The Mint Mobile.

And that is at mintmobile.com/slash JCE is how you get that $15 a month deal.

Three months, $45, $15 a month, mintmobile.com slash JCE.

And then, boy, just sit back and start texting people.

Just text them at red.

Just send them pictures.

No.

Pictures.

No, we've discussed this.

Do not just randomly send people stuff.

No, just send everybody shit.

Exactly.

No.

You could stop with no.

Send some guy down the street a picture of your backyard.

Why?

It won't cost you anything and maybe he'll he'll get jealous.

Well, that son of a bitch has a better looking backyard than I do.

Then you start problems.

Again, that doesn't help anyone.

Mind your own business, folks, with a good phone plan.

If that surly son of a bitch walks down the street, then you can use the Mint Mobile phone plan to call the police to have him locked up.

See?

What if he's got a pretty quick surly strut?

Well, in that case, dial 911.

Because that's free too at Mint Mobile.

What if he does the surly shuffle?

Well, then just beat him in the the head with the phone and call it a day.

But even if you do that, you'd still have the great phone plan.

You'd still have the great phone plan, just a phone with a dent in it.

So, anyway, nevertheless, folks, go right now to mintmobile.com slash JCE for all of your mobile phone needs, your unlimited plan where you can do anything unlimitedly.

You'll have no limits put on you.

You'll be one of the no-limit soldiers.

Mintmobile.com/slash JCE.

Of course,

a $45 upfront payment is required, equivalent to $15 a month.

New customers on first three-month plan only.

Speed slower above 40 GB on unlimited plan.

Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply.

See Mint Mobile for details.

And then start texting people at random.

Go to Kroger.

Ask people that are shopping.

Don't do any of this.

What their phone number is.

Well, to ask them what their phone number is.

Tell them, you know, it's free for you to send text and pictures and things like that to people.

So you want to send them some pictures of your grandkids.

And they'll give you their phone numbers and you can do that.

No, this is all ill-advised.

Ladies and gentlemen, get a great phone plan.

Talk to your friends, your family, make new friends the old-fashioned way and don't bomb anyone with stuff that they don't want on their text message

page, whatever the hell.

Don't do it.

Only thing you should do is get Mint Mobile one more time without any adding,

no opinion, no conjecture, just the news.

What's that promo code, Jim?

And no paywall.

Mintmobile.com/slash JCE.

Well, Brian, now we got to talk about something that's not as entertaining as the writer's complaints, which is the new lawsuit filed.

against Vince McMahon, Linda McMahon, the WWE, and

parent company TKO Group Holdings.

And there's been a lot of coverage of this.

We're looking at articles from the New York Post, articles from CNN.

But basically,

the

five former ringboys claim they were exploited and sexually abused during their time working for the wrestling giant, while scandal-scarred ex-CEO Vince McMahon did nothing to stop it.

According to the New York Post, the men who were underage boys at the time of the alleged abuse filed suit anonymously at a Maryland court against McMahon 79, his wife Linda, and WWE parent company TKO Group Holdings.

But

I've seen in another report, they're suing WWE and TKO.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that's the way I thought I saw it, too.

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, it's the same thing.

We're suing another arm of the same medusa

the thing that makes it a little different is obviously vince and linda mcmahon were in charge when it happened they ran the wwe

when it happened this all happened under the wwe's auspices however tko didn't even exist

at that time that's that's the first thing i was going to ask you how i can understand

how they can sue vince and linda and there's more than enough evidence to support that

and i can understand maybe how they could sue the WWE because it's the entity,

the entity that exists today is kind of the entity that was existing then.

But

to sue TKO is sort of like

if

I go and buy a bakery from a guy and start running the bakery, and then

somebody...

30 years later comes to me, hey, the guy that used to run this bakery used to take me in a back room and do whatever and fuck you i'm suing you how does that work

i don't know and obviously we'll find out as this you know one way or another as this takes place but

you know this

is this another case of somebody's got a good case and a bad lawyer are they leaving themselves open for a loophole here i i don't know enough to say that and uh you know based on what we know so far i don't know if we could say that but You don't want to say anything bad about any lawyers unless you know who they are first.

Well, no, because we really don't know.

I mean, this all comes back to Mel Phillips.

It's not like this is an unknown thing.

When this story came out that these lawsuits were about to happen, it wasn't like it's out of left field.

Like, this is stuff we've been hearing about publicly since 1991, 1992.

Yeah.

So it's not like this is an unknown thing.

For those who don't know, Mel Phillips was a massive wrestling fan.

He was actually WFIA Fan of the Year.

Was he really?

In like 73 or 74, yeah.

Thank goodness he predated my involvement in the organization.

Fan of the year.

And, you know, he had friends who were the inside wrestling fans of the day.

And then he somehow infiltrated the WWWF, specifically on those Philadelphia shows.

He was the ring announcer at the Spectrum.

He was a ring attendant.

He apparently was helping organize the boys that would build the rings.

And one thing that comes out in this latest round of Ring Boy stories is that Vince and Linden knew he had an issue with young boys, and they fired him over it, and then they rehired him.

And then brought him back.

Now, he wasn't an employee.

You know, this goes to the whole employee independent contractor thing.

He only worked for them.

And he was their ring announcer, and he was on TV on Wrestling Challenge.

Like, he wasn't an unknown face, but he wasn't an employee.

Well, and not only did he ring announce, like you said, the Philly house shows and some TV, but apparently he traveled to some of these northeast towns and

was in some way or another supervising or responsible for ring boys.

We'll talk about that concept even in a second.

who would help set up the ring in these various towns and he would drive them or transport them to these towns.

He would have them stay in the hotel room with him or in the hotels where he was staying and where I guess the wrestlers stayed.

And

obviously, they have pictures here in the New York Post of some of the things that he's accused of wrestling with these kids.

And,

you know, he was furnished with a private locker room.

I don't think he was furnished with one.

I think that he would just go and find a goddamn room in the building somewhere that nobody else wanted, and that's what he would use.

But,

you know, we've heard that, yes, these things happened with this guy.

Nobody is really disputing that.

That I've heard maybe the company is now.

But

this article cites Vince McMahon telling Phil Mushnick

in the 1980s that he and his wife knew that Phillips had a quote peculiar and unnatural interest in boys.

And during a TV interview in 1993, Linda McMahon admitted that Phillips had a foot fetish, which was a running joke in the WWE.

The McMahons actually fired Phillips in 1988 amid sexual abuse allegations, but within six weeks, they rehired him, warning him to steer clear from the kids.

At a time where WWE, more than any other time in its history, was marketing itself to kids.

Yes.

And they say that the five plaintiffs met Phillips between 1981 and 1984.

So this is even before the

expansion.

And,

you know, as you said, this really didn't start becoming a thing that got talked about publicly till the early 90s.

So that, but this was going on for some fucking period of time.

But anyway, and, you know, we won't get into the rubbing the feet on the crotches and you know, the various accusations, but this guy was a fucking weirdo.

And but the same stories, he'd do something, drop the kid off at home and give him money,

and/or he would get him drunk and then get him front-row seats or whatever, and then drop him off and give him money.

But

again, the point is:

how can you sue

TKO

for

their part in buying a company 40 years after this took place?

I think this, wouldn't this have to be a Vince and Linda?

Because she's on the record talking about it.

Even WWE, because Vince and Linda were executives of WWE.

So, I mean, you could sue WWE and the two top executives because of their enabling of it, their whatever it may be.

But WWE could be sued too.

But TKO,

just because they own WWE now, that seems like a bit of a

stretch.

Bit of a stretch.

But here's what's not a stretch is

why did this kind of shit ever go on?

You asked me earlier before we went on the air.

Well, was this, did they have ring boys elsewhere?

Yeah, because you never hear about it.

You only hear about it with WWE and the Ring Boy scandal.

Yes.

And, you know, WWE had referees putting up rings.

Ringboys, I guess, were helping them or just doing it themselves under Mel Phillips at that time.

But what about everywhere else?

Like, who was putting up the ring and were there Ringboys?

Well, that's the thing is

this as a concept didn't exist anywhere else in fucking wrestling.

The idea.

that the Stooge ring announcer would have autonomy to just recruit a bunch of underage kids and bring them to the show and put them to work, setting up the ring and giving them tickets or seats or all this.

I have never heard of any setup like this in any other wrestling promotion in the goddamn world.

And that's why even when I first started hearing about it, you know, in the 90s of the Donahue shows or whatever, I'm like, what the?

How did this even become a thing?

Because

why would you want small underage boys to be carrying fucking 500-pound fucking steel ring posts or giant 20-foot fucking,

you know, one-battos, lumber, or

the framework of the ring?

Or just the responsibility of putting up the ring that everyone's going to be working in?

Yeah, the responsibility of that.

Why would you transport these people from out of town?

What were their parents doing?

And oh, you're going to go with this fucking shady-looking guy out to Poughkeepsie.

But

no,

in every territory, things were different in terms of the ring set up.

And I can tell you in the Tennessee territory,

the regular towns, Memphis, Louisville, Evansville, Nashville,

the towns that were run every week, They had their own ring in the building.

Instead of hauling one,

you know, up and down the road and setting it up every week.

You knew you were going to be there every week.

There was a ring in the building.

And in Louisville, it was the Louisville Gardens maintenance crew, old Alvin, and, you know, some guys that he would find that would set up the ring before the boys even got there.

And now,

I saw him a few times.

The guys he had helping him, and they were

way long years away from seeing the sunny side of under 18

because it's heavy, fucking metal and steel and lumber.

And the idea was you wanted guys that could fucking help you.

And in Evansville, same thing.

Some people with the,

oh, goddamn it.

What was the sponsor over the VFW Post or whoever the, because in Indiana, you had to have a

sponsor of an athletic event or a boxing wrestling thing that was with a civic organization.

On the spot shows, it depended on who was running the, who was promoting the show.

But Buddy Wayne and not the

Northwest Buddy Wayne that has family members in AEW, but the Memphis wrestler and promoter from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s Buddy Wayne.

When he would promote a show, he had his own spot show ring.

and his own truck and his own trailer.

And either he'd have a couple guys from Memphis that did it with him regularly that would ride up there with him, or

the only time I ever saw any underage people putting up the ring was when his sons were doing it.

I think he had Aubrey out there and he's like four, but you know, what fuck?

It's a family business.

So,

no.

And I mean, any other territory I can think of, Mid-South Wrestling.

There's a lot more towns.

They still had rings in a lot of those buildings that they were in all the time.

But you had

usually a crusty old son of a bitch that had a truck and a trailer,

and they drove it.

And they usually had helpers.

And you, okay, the ring crew is 200 bucks or whatever the fuck.

But and no, no promoter wanted his ring crew guy coming up saying, hey, I need a couple of tickets for these kids that no, tell them sit out in the fucking general admission seats.

We're not sold out.

We're not putting them at ringside.

What

yeah, the ring announcer is trying to bring miscellaneous ring boys into the locker room to meet the boys.

That wouldn't have fucking flown.

Much less him having his own fucking room.

Yeah, the whole thing of him having his own dressing room is a bit, if that's true in any way, that's fucking odd.

Well, no, again, that could have been a fucking broom closet in the arena.

Because, I mean, even some of the guys that really need a dressing room sometimes wrestle or dress in a broom closet in the arena.

What about like, maybe I'm remembering this wrong.

You will know.

Wasn't it like Bobby Eaton, the story that like he first got in like helping set up the ring?

Yes.

And that's another thing

that kids sometimes would hang around

the back of the arena.

trying to run errands or something to get in if they couldn't afford to get in.

And Bobby, big kid, when he was 15, still six feet tall, 200 pounds or whatever, yeah, you can carry some shit.

Okay,

we'll let you in to watch the matches if you help us put the ring up.

And that wasn't unusual, but at the same time,

this was in a high school gym where everybody was in probably the same locker room.

You couldn't have privacy and ease type of situations, and nobody was trying.

You know,

I don't understand why this became a thing that was even allowed in this company to begin with when that certainly didn't go on anywhere else and there

you asked me earlier also well were there boys hanging around pat malone had boys in memphis you know what he did he's hey boy come here he'd see some kids i mean they could be nine years old he didn't matter boy come here

Take these 10 magazines, go out and sell them, bring me the money back, I'll give you a dollar.

If Pat Malone was like 80 years old and you do a fuck with Pat Malone and he wasn't going to be diddling any kids, right?

But that's how the kids got to see the fucking matches if they sold their 10 programs or 10 magazines or whatever and brought him the money back.

But this is just insane.

I've never been

in a territory, I didn't work everywhere.

But I've never been in a territory where they wanted to bring small children in from out of town to help set up the fucking ring

and it was never attempted or brought up or pitched in any way as far as i know so again to go back to the lawsuit with vince and linda again as the whatever vince was at that time the ceo of wwe or wwf titan sports actually

yeah and linda eventually took over that role when vince got into legal trouble but she had a top position before then

why did they put up with this guy and rehire him?

You know, there's no good excuse for it.

Terry Garvin, you know, also was accused of fucking around with Ringboys or trying to.

You know, that's where the whole Tom Cole thing started.

Yeah.

It was Terry Garvin.

And I believe it was Terry Garvin.

See, here's the thing.

They don't have Vince and Linda saying these things between 1981 and 1984.

They have them saying these things in the late 80s, early 90s.

And I'm thinking,

because they did rely on terry garvin for stuff and we know what terry garvin was doing

and i'm apparently we know what mel phillips was doing i'm thinking did they

did they being vince and linda

did they were they just unaware of what the fuck was going on nor give a shit about the ring or the ring setup or they got other fish to fry or other things going on and then

They start finding out about it and they go, ah, shit.

Fuck.

You know, tell this guy to get the fuck out of here.

And then he begs to Garvin and Garvin maybe come back and said, I'll bring him back.

He'll be okay.

And then all the shit hits the fan.

But I don't know.

They went into business together.

I saw the business cards once.

After they got fired by WWE, Garvin was an employee, I believe.

Oh, actually, I don't even know if that's the case.

He was an agent.

He was a producer, but I don't know what his, I don't remember exactly.

But him and.

Mel Phillips got fired.

And like, they started another wrestling company.

It didn't do anything.

Like in New England.

Yeah, they did something in New England.

I saw the business cards one day.

But see, that's the thing.

You know,

in hindsight, when Gorilla Monsoon would make the joke, well, he went behind him.

He must have gone to the Terry Garvin School of Defense or School of Self-Defense.

And it looks bad.

Everybody knew about Terry, but nobody knew.

Well, I won't say nobody.

Everybody knew about Terry Garvin, but not a lot of people knew about what Terry Garvin and Mel Phillips were doing with these kids.

But that's the thing, too.

Terry Garvin wasn't just...

Terry Garvin would sexually harass wrestlers as well as kids.

With Mel Phillips, there's never been like a wrestler that said that Mel Phillips tried to do anything.

I don't think Mel Phillips had the fucking

guts for that one.

But anyway, the point is that now that they've made all these jokes and they've said these things, Vince and Linda, they've buried themselves because whether they knew when it was going on or whether they found out later on and just didn't do enough to fucking put an end to it until they had to,

they pretty much buried themselves.

Not only with the, they have pictures of Mel Phillips with these ring boys wrestling and ring boys holding belts.

And,

you know, again, these kids are not anybody that you would want to try to have carry a ring post.

It's just, it's a complete bullshit scam.

So I think they're fucked.

And according to this, Phillips would strike up conversations with boys outside of the arenas before WWE events, and he would cruise their neighborhoods carrying WWE championship belts before inviting them to events.

Then the sick man would abuse them, sometimes traveling with the kids to events in different states.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

And staying with them in hotel rooms.

That's the thing.

You know, he was a fucking whacked-out pedophile that they knew about, got rid of, and then rehired.

It's just, that's the thing that's the most questionable.

There's no good reason for it.

And then what?

Turn the blind dog.

It's not like this guy was fucking, you know, Michael Buffer or something as a ring announcer and, you know, is indispensable to the company.

He was a shitty ring announcer, too.

And he was there another three years and he was still abusing boys during that period of time.

It wasn't like he's like, okay, I'm reformed now.

No, I mean, they still shouldn't have rehired him, but they did.

I mean, that's the thing that gets me.

Why would they rehire this guy?

It ended up costing them a lot in bad publicity.

In a lot of respects, they got away with everything, but it hurt the company for a while.

And you would have to know that it would hurt the company if you brought the guy back.

And they still did it.

It's so weird that they did.

And I just, again, I started thinking about if

the same situation was to present its head

in Louisville, Kentucky with Christine Charrett around,

my God, I never saw her get violent, but she would have run this guy out of the building in 15 minutes, much less 10 years with a goddamn stick in her hand.

And

she would have let everybody know from Jerry to Lawler to anybody that would listen that that person was never to be around the fucking building again.

But yeah, no, Ring Boys didn't, again,

kids that wanted to get in the back,

that were hanging around the back of the building, whether it be a high school gym in Tullahoma, Tennessee, or

the Memphis Mid-South Coliseum.

Yeah, you know,

sell some programs, bring me the money back, and I'll let you watch the matches, Or occasionally on a spot show where there's going to be a couple hundred people there and they got one,

you know, one stooge helper for the ring guy and he wants some help.

Yeah, I'll let you in.

You can see the matches.

They've carried this ring post.

But as far as an organized recruiting system or people traveling back and forth, what the fuck?

No.

Because no promoter would have paid them.

And if they were doing it for free, riding around with this guy from whoever or from wherever, somebody would have asked about it.

So, when did the referee start putting up the rings for WWF or WWE?

You know, I well, I don't know for sure when that would have started because I was surprised.

When I got there in 1993, that was the deal.

Every referee, except for Earl Hebner and Timmy White, who had seniority,

and, you know, they were the top main event referees.

Everybody else was part of the ring crew.

They drove the ring truck.

They helped set up the ring.

And I was like, fuck a company this big, and the referees have to do double duty and are not only putting the ring up, but are driving this fucking truck hundreds of miles from place to place.

That's odd.

But maybe that's what they came up with after their previous system was so obviously a fucking failure.

But no,

every territory had guys with a pickup truck and a trailer or an old U-Haul truck or something, and they had their own.

Oh, yeah.

I met the guy in Smoky Mountain Fan Week who was the genius behind Smoky Mountain, according to him.

What was his name?

Harold?

Oh, Harold Varner.

He was really the guy.

He knew everything about Smoky Mountain wrestling.

Yeah.

He and D-Lo Brown were quite good friends when they were riding in a truck together.

Oh, boy.

But that's the thing: some fucking redneck with a couple of Stooges

in a fucking truck.

It's going to either that or the actual promoter of the spot show himself.

Paul Morton, Ricky's father, used to haul rings.

But it was, it was, again, it was always somebody that was involved with the promotion and or their regular Stooge helpers that they gave 25 bucks to or 50 bucks to or whatever the thing was to come right up to this town and fucking set up this ring.

And then, well, and then in modern years, it's become the wrestlers instead of

hey, kids hanging around the back door.

If you want to get in, see the matches, help set the ring up.

It's hey, wrestlers, you're lucky to be booked on the show, so set the ring up first and try to earn your money.

And now it's hey, kids, hanging around here at the back.

You want to work?

Yeah, yeah.

Now you got a mask, Mel Phillips would be getting getting them on the TV to do jobs now.

But anyway,

I'm thinking Vince better be glad he got that $2 billion.

And I don't know how Linda's fixed these days.

I assume she's fairly well off, but they might,

if this lawyer has anything going on at all, they might need

some fucking money.

But I don't see how they're going to get away with TKO being involved in this when they bought a a company 35 years after it took place.

That's the only other question I have is just about the timeframe because obviously what happened to these kids is awful and there should be, you know, someone's got to pay.

But this is 35 years ago, you know, and give or take, you know, even longer.

I mean, the kids who met him in the early 80s, we're talking 40 years ago.

You know, that's the only thing I don't know if that.

Why did they wait this long, right?

Either that or they waited so long that there's only so much that could be done.

I mean, Mel Phillips has been dead for over a decade.

Terry Garvin's been dead for a while.

You know what I mean?

Like, there's only Vince McMahon is a shell of himself from what we've seen publicly.

But that shell has $2 billion hanging around his neck.

But yeah,

you can't say, well, they just did it now that TKO owns it because there's money there now because the WWE has been a billion-dollar company for a while.

Did they pass a law in New York?

One of those laws that the

statue of limitations, as some people say, has run out?

Well, do we know where this took place?

I don't remember.

Did it get filed in New York in this lawsuit?

Well, hold on.

Let's go back up to the top and see if they gave us this.

It was written up in the New York Post.

CNN says Baltimore, for the byline, at least.

Well, you know know what they were doing filed in baltimore county maryland yes because remember they were doing tv production

in a post-production editing etc in baltimore at that time period and so they happened to start the new studio that's right they did it there until 88.

Well, and now, of course, the New York Post has frozen my screen, so I can't move anything and I can't get out of this.

Well, this will be interesting, and it's another, I guess, another egg in the Vince McMahon film Mushnik feud basket.

We'll see where this goes next.

But that's the

Ring Boy story.

We'll follow up on this whenever there's something.

Well, I'm not going to refer to any more of this particular website either, as well, because you know what you did to me earlier

in the day, Brian, before the program, I'm not going to forget about that.

If it hadn't been for our friends at Express VPN that I mentioned earlier, why this pirate website that you sent me to could have come through the walls and taken over

all of my being here.

See, you should have used ExpressVPN.

It was your problem.

Well, no, I've got Express VPN.

They protected me from being hacked and encrypted and

glossed over and fucking smashed and...

tunneled and et cetera, all the things that people do.

But,

you know, you can't go to these off-brand websites.

And now that's a whole nother thing.

But I'll tell you,

you know what doing, going without Express VPN is like?

It's like leaving your door unlocked when you leave your house.

You're not protecting your things.

It's like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop or wine bar or

local dive tavern.

It's like leaving your kids with the nearest stranger.

It's like walking down the street wearing only women's underwear.

What are these examples?

I guess it's not like that.

Yeah, not really.

Well, but if you do the other things, you're probably more likely to do that.

But going online with that Express VPN

is like doing all those things.

You're not being protected.

You're not being secure.

You're not being safe.

That's why they say,

do you know what the Express VPN says?

They say that hackers can make up to $1,000 a person selling personal information on the dark web.

You,

Brian Last, and each one of your minions there at Last Manor could be worth $1,000 a piece.

With as many kids as you got, they could come up with fucking $10 or $12,000.

I'm sure I'm worth a lot more than that.

Well,

that's on the black market now.

You know, you do have to mark these things.

I'm sure you could get $2,500 retail.

What about on the green market?

Well, on the green market, you're going to have to install solar panels first.

But it doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack somebody.

But once you've got Express VPN on the case, it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years, one billion years,

to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.

So you got to have a dedicated son of a bitch that is willing to work a billion years to make $1,000.

I think we can all agree with that, can't we, Brian?

No,

we can all agree with what?

Well, we can all agree that you'd be a complete, just blithering idiot to work a billion years to make $1,000.

You can't live a billion years.

So the whole example is that.

You can't live on $1,000 either.

So

it proved my point.

There was some woman in the paper today.

She's 107 years old.

She has a horn growing out of her head.

Well, what does that have to do with being encrypted on the internet?

I'm saying you're not going to live to be a billion.

Imagine how many horns you'd have.

I don't think, I think you could have those things removed at a regular interval by a qualified plastic surgeon.

And as a matter of fact, if you do, then ExpressVPN will protect your information from being outed as an ex-horned person that was de-hornified and is no longer horny.

That's not what they do.

They don't deal with the horny.

Let's get back to what they do, ExpressVPN.

Well, a lot of people on the internet are horny, I'll have you know.

But folks, it works on all your devices, phones, laptops, tablets, and more.

So you can stay secure.

You can carry some of these things around with you.

You know, the portable things that you see people in the coffee shops.

A lot of people mention coffee shops.

You see people on these things, the screens and everything that they carry around with them.

It works on them too.

And they're out there in public.

You're just waving those around in in front of god and everybody so lord knows that needs some protection what if you have pictures of your nether regions as a screensaver on your device when you're sitting at the coffee shop just idly sipping an espresso and there's wally and the beaver out there for all to see why would someone have their own genitalia as their screensaver well maybe they're proud of it not even someone else is their own Well, you never know.

It depends on what they look like.

Or tell the person sitting next to you.

No, excuse me, don't worry.

It's mine.

Well, yeah, I think that's the polite thing to say.

Otherwise, they'll think you're weird.

But ExpressVPN is rated number one by top-tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

If you've ever been on The Verge, you'll know that they're number one.

And so, at any rate, right now, folks, secure your online data today

by visiting expressvpn.com/slash JCE.

That is exp r e s s v p n

dot com slash jce you're going to get an extra three months free

so how much would it cost you to hire a bodyguard for three months you're going to be protected for three months for free if you use the slash of jce expressvpn dot com slash jce

and of course as i told you brian earlier i got the custom service where the guy comes over a couple times a week and he fiddles with the connections on my internet.

He makes sure that everything's plugged in tight.

And he takes a

large light and he looks behind the computer, make sure everything's okay there.

And then there's

a series of exercises that I have to go through where he wants to make sure that nothing, no signal has come from the computer to invade my body.

Of course, I'm doing this naked because we're in the sauna.

But

it's a whole thorough thing.

You did tell me this before, and as I told you before, that person is not from ExpressVPN.

He's got it written right across his shirt and Sharpie.

Express Express VPN.

I'm thinking maybe it's someone else or

you got some other problems.

But Express VPress VPN, ladies and gentlemen, don't worry about anyone coming to your house.

That's one of the things that they promise.

Well, they won't be able to find you.

One more time, promo code Jim.

Expressvpn.com/slash JCE.

When the lows of bipolar depression feel dark, caplita is a chance to let in the light.

Capillita, lumeteparone, is available by prescription only and can be taken alone or with lithium or Velproate.

Unlike some medicines that only treat bipolar one, Capillita is proven to deliver significant symptom relief from both bipolar one and two depression.

And in clinical trials, movement disorders and weight gain were not common.

Caplita can cause serious side effects.

Call your doctor about sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away.

Antidepressants may increase these risks in young adults.

Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke.

Caplita is not approved for dementia-related psychosis or for people under 18.

Report fever, stiff muscles, or confusion, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrollable muscle movements, which may be permanent.

High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal.

Monitoring is recommended.

These aren't all the serious side effects.

Most common side effects include sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, and dry mouth.

Ask your doctor about capillita.

Visit capillita.com or call 888-252-4824.

All righty.

Anyway, should we get to the wrestling on the television?

The wrestling on the television.

They've been saying that for about 70 years now.

Well, and it's about time we got to it then.

This show's been going on like 70 years now.

Yeah, I agree.

What?

This particular podcast.

It seems like, well, I still, I can't hear you, sonny.

Can you speak up?

Good Lord.

This is, you know, this is going to throw my equilibrium off, only being able to hear in one side of

my head, one, one ear of

my head.

An ear, is that a phrase, an ear of your head?

Keep going.

This is going well.

Well, I'm just trying to explain that you, that's why I'm off.

I'm Verklimped, as Howard Finkel would say, because I can only hear in one side of my head.

All right.

Well, let's use both sides of your head and your left and right turn indicators and let's talk about the wrestling on TV.

Yes, SmackDown, October 25th.

See, I went off microphone and actually sneezed.

You didn't even know that was happening.

On October 25th, they were in Brooklyn, New York.

That's up around your neck of the woods.

Indeed?

Is this the, was this the Barclays Center I've heard so much about?

It was indeed the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, yes.

And they had had 12,000 or more, I believe they claimed.

Do we have any reason to doubt them these days?

They pretty much are doing these types of crowds.

I don't have the numbers in front of me.

I can get them, but usually they do really well in New York and they're really hot right now.

So, yeah, I'm pretty sure that

it looked pretty good.

Just so when

we get to your show later on this week, we can talk about

Tony Kahn's very, very bad week.

Cedar Rapids.

Anyway, on SmackDown,

they did the thing where everybody walked in and then Orton

came

into Guerrilla

and basically, you know,

where we left it last week was that he's going to have to go over Nick Aldous's head because Aldous can't make the match between Orton and Kevin Owens.

So Orton goes to the ring, makes big entrance, and he says he's been trying to get Owens, but for some reason he's off limits.

So Triple H, come on down.

You're the next contestant on Can They Talk Us to Death?

He says, if I didn't know better, I would say that you're protecting Kevin Owens.

And then they play Triple H's music, and

out he comes as an executive.

I wonder if they ever,

if they ever do something with Nick Kahn, you think they'll give him music, Brian?

No.

I can't imagine him coming out to.

Unless it's like just generic WWE music.

I think they got to give him a theme song.

Like every few years, a random babyface would get the theme music to the young stallions.

What about if it...

No, they can license music now.

They can spend money.

What about Don't Call Us, We'll Call You by Sugar Loaf?

That would be perfect.

Think about the lyrics.

Really?

Think about the lyrics.

Anyway, so here comes Triple H.

And he didn't want to do this in public, but since you never show up to work on time, Randy,

I'm not protecting anybody.

I'm doing my job.

And Randy persists in this line of,

you know, of discussion with Triple H where, you know, he, Triple H trying to say, look, the match isn't going to happen.

No, no, no, it's.

And finally, they get hotter.

You're protecting Kevin Owens.

And Triple H says, I'm not protecting Kevin Owens.

I'm protecting you.

And

did you feel like that people particularly were worried about fucking

when they did that big revelation, right?

Was anybody worried about Orton in this situation?

On the face of it, no, probably, but but that's why Triple H had to explain it.

And to the best of whatever he said here.

Well, I know, but I'm thinking that because

it didn't seem like, you know, they were more like, ooh, how dare you say that to him, right?

Then

it seemed like I'd like to see Orton and Triple H after that, Boyd.

I want to see Orton and Owens.

Anyway, Triple H says,

Owens has always been about business and he's got no friends, but he trusted you and Cody and he let his guard down.

He liked and trusted you guys, and he thinks you turned on him.

So

we're almost going into the, at least they're doing it in a professional way, but we're almost going into the whose friends are you that AEW's been doing for five years.

Do you think they're starting to do their own shit just to draw with it, just to show AEW up?

I don't know.

I mean, it's not exactly the, you know, you were my friend.

I want you to be my friend.

I wanted a hug.

You didn't hug me.

Whatever the hell's going on over there.

You You know, the idea that Owens is saying the Triple H, the boss, that Cody and Randy turned on him,

it kind of gives him a little bit of a nutty edge right now.

Because how the hell did they turn on him?

A nutty edge.

It sounded like you've been to a wine tasting, and it has

a hint of garlic and a nutty finish.

With him, it's a hint of mildew.

You still get a nutty finish, though.

But anyway,

so Triple H is saying, he's not the same guy, and I don't want to put him in the ring with you because you've been out 18 months with your bad back, and you've come back, and I just got you back, and I don't want to lose you.

And again, I think, God, there's Randy Orton's six foot, it looks like he's grown taller, too, but six, three, four,

280.

Jacked, and there's fucking Owens, not as tubby as he used to be, but

you know, there's Owens, right?

If you left pudding sitting out in the sun, it might form in the same shape as his physique.

Yeah, because of Orton's height, he's one of the more physically imposing guys on the roster.

So, but maybe they think, well, Owens

could potentially bring in a hand grenade or run him over with some type of SUV, but

Anyway, Orton says, hey, I didn't ask for Paul Levesque.

I asked for Triple H, the game.

What would you do?

And then Orton makes the big pitch,

the big sales pitch, give it to me.

And the people want it.

And actually,

this was done

excellently, if you accept a preposterous premise.

That was very alliterative.

In that once they started, Orton made the pitch and Triple H is thinking about it and the crowd is cheering.

Let them fight.

Let them fight.

And the way that they built this, they got the people into

the idea of Orton versus Owens more by the time they finish this thing than they probably would have been beforehand.

And finally, Triple H says, I hope to God you know what you're asking for because you've got it.

Protect yourself at all times.

Like fucking Owens is Mike Tyson.

Yeah, because even he like said there during the thing, he's like, he wanted, when he came here, he wanted to be called a prize fighter.

And all I'm thinking is, did anyone say you're not a prize fighter?

You're not in any respect of the word a prize fighter.

Well, the thing is, that's so ironic because Kevin Owens, whether you like him or not, and this is not even an insult to people, depending on your mode of thinking,

Kevin Steen was one of the more indie-minded guys that ever got onto that roster.

And so the idea that he's only about business, and

at least the guy was trying to talk me into letting a motherfucker dive off the balcony on him,

you know, in front of 600 people.

So the idea that he's only about, you know, Orton's the one that's all about business

and

getting the most out of the least, prolonging the career, making the most money, selling the most tickets, having

the little things of the art.

He's the one that's about business.

He's the prize fighter.

Owens would do this with fucking Sami Zayn in a goddamn flatbed truck moving down the highway just for fun.

He's not the prize fighter, he's the Booker fighter.

But

that's not a slight at Booker T for anybody who just wandered in this place accidentally and is not with it.

And that's not a shot at hunter.

And I don't mean this hunter.

I mean the other hunter that was booked.

The booker hunter.

Anyway, so that was good.

What are your thoughts on that being okay and or good?

I thought it was all right.

It was a good wrestling segment on the show in between the matches that, for the most part, most people probably aren't really invested in, but who knows, actually.

I'm not.

I know that.

Well, no.

I like these kind of segments.

You know, and that's the thing is that, you know, you wait for the...

I don't know about doing the match at Saudi Arabia, that's probably my biggest problem with the whole thing.

Well, I mean,

I guess they're loading Saudi Arabia up more, Saudi Arabia up,

Arabia up.

They're loading up the card in Saudi Arabia

more than we thought they might for a sold show, but then again, they sold it for 50 million fucking dollars.

So, I guess you know, let them drop the cow over there.

But anyway,

that's where I

was going with this program here that we're discussing is that that's the thing.

It's kind of like the bookends

of

the first hour is the big talking segments, and then you get the main event with

usually the main event people fighting each other in an unauthorized fashion at the end of the show.

And the rest of the stuff in the middle is kind of

to be in the middle of it.

such as andre and carmelo with la night as referee and they were they're tied three and three

and we haven't gone into detail on any of them so we ain't going to go into detail on this one let me just say one thing about it i've enjoyed some of their stuff some of their matches uh when i say some of the ones i've actually watched

this was the worst finish i've ever seen on one of these matches there's no i don't care how over la night is there's no excuse for this finish

well that This was the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever seen.

Everyone's invested into seven matches, and this is how it ends.

That's the thing is that

this was not

who was it, Magnum TA and Nikita Koloff, U.S.

title, best of seven, or whatever.

This was six previously fine, technically fine wrestling matches between

a couple people that I ain't particularly fucking interested in, right?

And now, and again, and for whatever reason, L.A.

Knight has been

intertwined with these two,

you know, which

it's got to, sooner or later, it's going to affect L.A.

Knight's over if he doesn't work with people that are over.

I don't know why he's, you know, being asked to be drugged through the fucking,

you know, the salad bar here.

But anyway, the the finish that you of which you speak, oh great Brian Last,

is

what was it?

How did they they hit

Carmelo hit L.A.

Knight with a super kick when he was trying to hit Andre because they did kind of a tipsy-turvy thing.

And L.A.

Knight goes to the floor and Carmelo hits something sloppy and covers the guy.

And then L.A.

Knight pulls Carmelo off the cover and throws him over the fucking announce desk.

And then Andre gets mad at L.A.

Knight, and L.A.

Knight gives him the BFT.

And here comes Carmelo, and he gives him the BFT.

And then he goes down and rings the bell and cuts the promo and declares himself the winner.

And

of the best of seven.

And now, here's the thing.

I love the deal

for the finish of a match where, and of course, then LA Knight leaves and in the back, Nick Aldus tells, well, it's going to be a triple threat match at Crown Jewel.

So great.

Again, now he's stuck in with these two fucking schmoes.

And,

you know, and it's a three-way match that is never any good anyways.

Now it's going to be worse.

But nevertheless,

for just a TV match, if they were building to a three-way already

that was a cute finish and because he's the biggest star i don't mind him beating up both of them and just doing that because we're going to keep the fucking guy over

but as you said brian for a best of seven series where

for the people who

have liked that kind of thing that's the kind of thing those people have liked

They've sat through this for six fucking weeks and now on week seven, they've spent, and this is what they got, right?

And oh, by the way, they're going to have a triple threat.

Well,

do they still have

the trip winning the triple threat is not the same as beating this other guy.

So you've gone this far.

It's it's like kissing your sister, and she's not even topless.

A draw, three and three.

I don't know what the hell that means, but well, you never heard that old expression.

I have not heard that old expression.

No.

Where'd you hear that?

What do you mean?

Everybody used to say it

down around the schoolyard.

This finish was astoundingly awful.

The idea that the babyface referee declares himself the winner.

Even some of the fans there, like some of them popping, you could see them like, what?

What are we popping for?

Well, but which one of these other smooth is supposed to be the babyface anyway?

Well, I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you about that, but someone has to win the fucking match.

You can't have the referee announce that he's the winner.

Well, God, who would know better than him?

He knows all the rules.

That's a dangerous precedent.

Can other referees do that?

Just stand on the commentator's desk and announce they won the match.

Hey, I guarantee you, if it was possible for a referee to win a match and he wasn't wrestling, Thomas Marlin in the Tennessee territory would have found a way to fucking do it in 1972.

But yeah, that's what's happening now at the Crown Jewel.

Boy, do you think those guys in those fucking tuxedos and goddamn Mr.

Bones outfits are carrying that giant case with that massive fucking

trophy style belt that for the Crown Jewel Champ?

They're going to be happy when this thing is over with and they don't have to lug that thing in and out of elevators, aren't they?

Yeah, I mean, they're making a big deal out of it.

They're showing the class that they're showing this title as opposed to all the other titles that are thrown in bags and the bags are thrown around and everything.

So they're really paying attention to this?

Well, they've gone from, once again, like you said, sometimes they're just popped in a bag and thrown in your bag, but they've gone from that to handling it like it's a Faberge egg.

I mean, who's going to wear that thing, by the way?

Are they going to have to hydraulically support whoever wins it to put it around their waist for a picture?

Do you have to use it again after the pay-per-view?

Or is it just you win it at the pay-per-view, you send it home?

well i don't they both already have titles i mean it's not like a thing as a rib they gotta say oh you gotta take it with you you know you gotta have it on tv you gotta show everybody what you got right

they did that to roger smith and donny bass in memphis in 1983 they made the assassins world tag team champions but they didn't have a set of belts handy so they had these giant six-foot fucking trophies

And there would, and I think Donnie had to carry them around most of the time, but they'd be sticking out the window of his fucking back seat of his fucking car, these two six-foot fucking trophies.

And then they dropped him to the Fabs, and the Fabs, they just left him somewhere so they wouldn't have to carry him around.

And then they had Naomi versus Candy LaRue.

Your thoughts?

No thoughts.

Didn't watch.

Okey-dokey.

So now it was the time for the time.

It was the time.

So now it was time for the nine o'clock hour, the bewitching hour to strike for Cody to make his entrance.

And he came out to the ring and he was ready for all the people to go, whoa,

when Gunther's music interrupted it and they didn't get there.

Whoa.

And out came Gunther.

So now they can just...

Cody can just walk out to the ring and fuck it.

They've seen enough of him.

Let's send Gunther out there.

And they do the promo.

And again, that belt is gigantic and ugly to me.

It's too much.

It's too large.

It's too,

whatever the fuck it is, it's too.

What do you think?

You're an old belt aficionado.

Is that too much of a good thing?

Yeah, maybe the Saudis requested green.

We don't know.

But I mean, besides the green, fuck.

It's a gigantic eyesore.

Yeah, you'd have to be six foot five to fucking put it on and it not cover up your chin and your nuts.

So anyway, Gunther says, So, Cody, what do you want to talk about?

And Cody says, it's obvious.

Why do you think you're going to leave Crown Jewel as champion?

And Gunther says, well, let's talk about you first.

And then it got long.

And

I mean, you know, know, Cody was born a small black child in a log cabin.

And what, I mean, they just,

it's, you know, it was a long story that Gunther was telling.

He won WrestleMania for the legacy of Dusty.

He said, hey, give me the Cena schedule.

Cody, you always make things more dramatic than they are.

Said Mr.

Pot to Mr.

Kettle.

And, but all Gunther wants to win the thing for is to live up to himself and the magnitude of him, right?

But Cody, what's your real reason why?

And then Cody, well, that's the dumbest question anybody ever asked me.

And

he went into a dissertation, and I wrote, they're speaking well and saying nothing of note.

Cody put the fans over, gave them their woe, talked about how much harder he works than Gunther.

And

they just, they put in the time.

It's going to be a big match in Saudi Arabia on PACAC.

And so they put the time in to talk about it.

And then Gunther said Cody was gutless.

And Cody said, well, I've got the guts to take the first shot.

And boom.

And they had a fight.

And Kaiser came in and they beat up Cody.

And then Orton came in and the heels bailed.

And then Orton picked the belt up and handed it to Cody.

So

I didn't feel the earth move under my feet.

I didn't see the sky tumbling down, tumbling down.

But they spoke well, but they said nothing.

What do you think?

I mean, it was all right.

I think Guther's really good in these situations.

I think Cody's going to talk himself into being booed pretty soon.

He's not talking

at the level that people, he's talking above people, but not in a real way.

He's starting to get too fancy.

And there's no reason to.

And this is what happened in AEW.

And I said it early on.

He's going to turn himself heel without turning heel because the fans, it's going to be impossible to cheer for him.

And there are...

More restraints, there are better controls here for booking than AEW.

However,

you know, at some point, if he keeps talking like this and not connecting, while there are people like Roman Reigns that people are really getting behind, he's going to have a problem to be a top babyface.

Well, and

and

Bob Baxter, well, oh, good, good Lord.

I don't think that far, but I can see what I can see what you're saying

is that he's almost he's

it's kind of like a an oral,

verbal version of,

you know, just because you do, you can do all those moves doesn't mean you should.

Just because he knows a lot of these words doesn't mean he should use them, does it?

Sometimes.

It's not just the words, it's the way he delivers them.

It's his body mannerisms.

It feels very practiced.

If you watch him, it seems like a guy who did this promo in the mirror.

Gunther doesn't have that.

Gunther seems like a smartass who's who's out there willing to say anything, even if it's in like the WWE way.

Cody seems rehearsed and he's speaking unnaturally.

He's going to be a well-dressed Moxley if he keeps saying nothing.

Oh,

I don't think it's gone that far.

But

Gunther, and plus it works for Gunther that English is his second language because he's allowed to

misspeak a little bit and it's part of the charm, right?

With

Cody, he is being a bit,

as you said, you know, polished.

It's almost like, my name is Rhodes, Cody Rhodes.

Anyway,

that's what went on there.

But then,

big news.

Brian, big news.

They were shaking some stuff up.

What I thought was going to be kind of an okay

Motor City Machine Guns Alex Shelley and Chris Sabin match with Tommaso Ciampa and

our friend old Johnny Sameface

turned into a pretty goddamn rabble-rousing angle, did it not, over the course that you didn't really see coming?

I asked you when the Motor City Machine Guns made their debut and they got a big pop, and obviously a lot of fans were really interested in them coming up or coming up, coming to WWE.

I said, what does this say about the way WWE sees tag teams right now?

And how is this different than what they've done before?

And here we are, week two.

And they've really done something where, you know, again, they didn't win the titles without help, but still, it's the titles from the main event heels.

I mean, they've done as they've done more with the Motor City Machine Guns than any other tag team that's come in in a long time that I can remember.

Well, and part of it is,

again, as Abdullah the Butcher used to say, timing is every, when the time is right,

Shelly and Sabin have showed up.

Boy, that's a lot of S's, but they've showed up at a time where,

yes, not only is competition in the tag team field somewhat lackluster, and

even though

they're challenged size-wise, that's not as big of a drawback as it used to be 15 years ago.

And they're in tremendous shape.

So they don't just look like children.

But also the time that

they've come into this thing, because it's brilliant the way that they've woven them in,

where the bloodline cost

Jey Uso his title, so Jay was able to immediately turn around and cost the bloodline a title.

And at the same time, the only people that need to get beat was the Tongas because we've established that's who you need to beat in that group.

And it ties into the main event angle and it gave them a tremendous boost.

Again, this is booking that benefits multiple participants in it and in multiple stories.

This is not.

Shelly and Sabin, I don't think, are now, maybe they will be with the Tongas programmed regularly, but it's not like they're going to be members of the team in the war games or whatever the fuck, the Survivor Series, whatever's coming up, where there's going to be multiple men teams.

They just got the rub.

But they got the rub and they got involved.

And they can work now with the Tongas, who can also be involved with the other guys of the other bloodline and the blah, blah, blah.

So

again, this is shit that

Watts or Dusty used to do, where

you had multiple programs where you could book a match between two entities and it was already

you'd done something on television to make something out of it.

However,

I would still love to watch Champa work sometime on television without this garden gnome

partner of his.

But anyway.

And the tag team match, again, Shelly and Saba, they've been together for so long and they actually

became a tag team and trained and were trained when people followed the rules so they know how to do it.

Like they did a blind tag correctly, hand to hand

on a headlock shootoff behind the guy's back perfectly.

And then Gargano and Champa

do one minutes afterwards is completely fucking wrong and illegal, the backslap, right?

So it's that five-year gap or whatever in the middle of these guys' generations,

you know, that makes the difference between whether they do it right and whether they give a shit, whether they do it right or not.

And anyway,

they had a match that I liked.

Shelly and Saban's teamwork, it felt very rushed, and I think it probably was.

They were probably trying to do

maybe a few too many things

in this segment because they were, you know, had to save time for the end, obviously.

But it just,

it didn't seem like that

they didn't have a long set of heat and then a big comeback.

They didn't really take time with this.

They run through some stuff.

And finally, they hit old Johnny with the

neck breaker and splash off the top combination one, two, three.

And, you know, again, it was rushed and there's no like

really clear heel baby face dynamic here but they looked very good and then

shit started to happen but before we talk about that Brian any comments on the business so far no they look good and the fancy minded them so far and they've been used well they haven't been made to look like fools yet so so

they haven't had time to do that yet but we still can have faith no um

but no, I think they might be going to do it right because at this point, boom,

they play the music and here comes the bloodline.

And they go to the break on that because, like, you're thinking, what's going to happen?

So, when they come back from the break,

the Motor City machine guns are still in the ring, but now Nick Aldiss is there, and the bloodline's there, and the fans are chanting OTC,

OTC.

And by the way, there's a pest control company around here, and I see their trucks go by with an OTC and a dead bug.

But anyway, the fans are booing the shit out of Solo.

And when he tells them to acknowledge him, they

boo him even more.

But here's where the.

Obviously, the Tongas are the tag team champions.

That Shelly and Sabin had won this match.

They won the shot at a tag team title match anytime, whatever.

But here they

gave

Shelly and Saban an interview.

But

I would assume at this stage of the game that they weren't just going into business for themselves on what they said and that they were requested to say this.

But it, to me, it was too heelish and it made them come off as

if people want to say, you fucking idiot

to the babyfaces when

Sabin talked and just confidently said, well,

let me introduce, we're the Motor City Machine Guns, and

now we're the number one contenders.

And anytime that you're ready to hand the belts over to us, we'll face you anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

And that

turned it to me to the psychology of the goofy little job guy

heel almost saying that to the babyface.

Do you see what I'm saying?

Not really, actually.

Would it have been better if Shelly and Saban, either one, had said,

we're the Motor City machine guns and we worked long and we worked hard to get this spot.

And

you guys may be on top of the world, but we will take you on anywhere and we'll give you the damnest fight of your life because our goal

is those tag team belts.

Instead of, oh, whenever you're ready to, because it's the fucking bloodline.

Do they walk up to goddamn Brock Lester and say, hey, Brock, whenever you're fucking feeling froggy, lace your boots up and I'll put a ham sandwich on your back and starve you to death?

Would you have sympathy for that fucking guy when he got his ass handed to him?

Well, I don't think it was that bad, but what you said for them was better than what they said.

I agree with that.

Well, at least now, see, again, you prove my point.

What point?

lost track?

I lost track of what it was, but you proved it.

So, anyway, and Solo made fun of him.

Then, Solo even said, You want to make an impact?

And they all got a little tickle at that.

How about right now?

And then Aldous said, No, no, now, wait a minute.

They're not,

I don't want this to happen unless they're 100%.

They've just had a match.

And Shelly says, No, this was correct for babyface psychology.

No, we'll do it.

While we got the chance, we'll do it.

And the fans cheered and all disagreed.

So, again, I just thought that they were having Sabin

be a little too cocky, like, you know, well, he's just going to come in and waltz over these motherfuckers.

And that was not a realistic appraisal of the situation until other people get involved.

So, as Bobby Eaton, you say, well, you got a frog in your pocket?

See, that proves my point, too.

So, then.

What point does that prove?

You can't talk tough if you only got a frog in your pocket.

So then, for the tag team title, they add the Tongas, Tama and Loa, Tonga, Loa.

They both should have the same last name.

But now, anyway, we'll go over it later.

Against the Motor City Machine Guns.

And they go into a four-way and they go to the break in like 30 seconds.

I'm like, Newman, what the fuck stay with this?

So they get, finally they come back.

And of course, it's almost the end of the show.

So they're moving at a pace.

And they get some heat on Shelly.

And then the Tongas miss a double splashy thingy.

And a hooded figure jumps on Solo at ringside.

And it's Jimmy Uso.

And then Jimmy super kicks Jacob and Solo stops him.

And they're going to get Jimmy down, but Roman's music plays.

And here comes Roman out and gets a big pop.

And he Superman punches Jacob in the owl way or whatever.

And Jimmy gets on Solo, and Roman gets on Jacob.

And guess what they did, Brian?

They fought off.

They fought off.

Do you have a problem with it?

It was a good fight off, but they still fought off.

But it was necessary for what they tried to do?

Or

justify it?

Well,

it was fairly necessary, but they're starting to get a little busy.

I'm afraid that there's multiple hats being worn here.

But nevertheless, the people are liking it.

So, who am I?

It's not for me to say.

So, as they fought off,

then the match is still going on.

So, Shelly tags Saban, and Sabin makes a comeback.

But Tama of the Tongas pulls the referee in front of Saban and they squash him.

And then Loa

kind of hits a spinebuster on Sabin, and the Tongas immediately go out and get chairs.

Because why wouldn't you, since the referee is down?

But there's another hooded figure at Ringside.

Do they sell these hoodies at the merchandise stand?

I don't know.

They have them at Nemo's Army Navy store.

I don't know where else they have them.

Well, I think they ought to sell them at the merchandise stand.

I guarantee you they will sell a ton of them because everybody will know if I put this on, I can just hop the rail and they'll let me.

But this hooded figure is Yeet.

It's Yeet now.

Boom.

And super kick and chair shot and spear on

Tongaloa.

And then the machine guns hit their finish again on him.

Boom.

One, two, three.

And they're the new champions.

And they did cook with that.

And it was a great deal.

and an upset.

And

as you said earlier, it put a lot of spotlight on

the new kids in town.

And then,

since Jay is in the ring and Jimmy comes to the ring and they hug, and there's a big pop for that.

Ah, they're back together.

And then Roman is staring in the entranceway, staring at what's going on in the ring,

and we fade to black.

What a production.

So

we're forming the

bloodline to, reforming, I should say,

the bloodline to face the Bizarro bloodline.

Now with machine guns.

And, you know, we keep hearing that there are other family members that have been signed.

So you kind of wait for them to be introduced into this.

You wait for Heyman to return.

You wait for The Rock to return and have something to do with this.

There's a lot going on.

It's been years now of us talking about the bloodline like this.

I know.

We were saying it like a year and a half ago.

How much longer can they keep this going like this?

But, you know, now a lot more family members may start stretching it.

I think

in the extended family, there's a few that they could.

You know, Ava, maybe it's time for Ava to go on vacation or a three-hour tour on a boat somewhere or whatever.

But that's the extended family.

If you were the rock, why would you even want her on TV?

Like, I understand wanting to to hook up your kid, but

to

have them do something that they're obviously not

in any way

good at,

talented.

I didn't, I just wanted to kind of say good at.

That would cover it, you know.

Be like, kind of like, ah, no,

ain't Fanny, don't, uh, don't sing.

Well, but anyway, that was SmackDown.

You know, would you like to hear Aunt Fanny sing?

No, no, not now, no.

You would.

Well, I tell you, you know, she was great when she sang far, far away, but nevertheless, if you want to hear any kind of music, you know what you need to do, Brian.

You need to get the Raycon Everyday Wireless Earbuds.

And it's not even

limited to music.

You can listen to podcasts.

You can listen to talk radio.

You can listen to.

the sounds of the earth, the nature sounds, the swishing and and the, you know, the winds and the surf and the beach and all that stuff, the things that people listen to when they go to bed, you can stick these things in your ears and you'll hear that all night.

But if you, unfortunately, they've found in studies that if you listen to the waves crashing on the beach all night, you're going to piss the bed 75% of the time.

So just bear that in mind.

Have you found that, Brian?

I was part of their survey.

I have no idea what you're talking about so uh nope if you listen all night in your sleep to the waves crashing onto the beach you there's a 75 chance you're going to piss the bed

you didn't know that was scientifically proved

i don't know how scientific that is but why don't we talk about raycon well it was a non-clinical survey so that means you know those people weren't sick But nevertheless, they've got a deal.

And here's what they're doing.

You've heard of Black Friday.

You've heard of Cyber Monday.

Well, this is Raycon Everyday.

Right now, we're going to get you hooked up with a deal where you're going to get 30%

off site-wide.

It's an amazing offer.

Everything that you want to buy, you will take 30% off of the entire total of this thing, which means you're going to save 30% of your money.

And with that extra money that you have, they're just basically going to write you a checkout for 30% of whatever you spend that's what they're doing where you could go and spend that 30 percent on something else and you'll still be even it's amazing how they've done this bookkeeping but the raycon everyday earbuds come with the active noise cancellation the 32 hour battery life

the amazing vibrant colors to match any skin tones you don't have just white or black sticking out of your ears

because the ink is black the page is white but together we learn to read and write and when they mix those colors up

you can't see them because they're sticking in your ear and they look like your skin and 30 off did i tell you about that brian

you've you indeed you've gone to sleep on me indeed you told us about 30 off Yes, and Raycon offers a 30-day happiness guarantee.

So whatever you would like to listen to, I'd like to listen to you and both of my ears.

I'm going to start pairing up the everyday earbuds with our sound apparatus instead of these dad gum headphones I've got on where I can only hear out of one side of them.

Well, folks, don't have that problem.

If you can't hear, and that's another thing.

If you can't hear, you put the raycons in and just turn them up all the way and you'll be able to hear them.

Even if you're stone cold deef,

just turn them up all the way and

it'll rattle something around in there.

But go to buyraycon.com slash JCE today.

That's B-U-Y-R-A-Y-C-O-N

dot com slash JCE today,

and you're going to get up to 30% off site-wide.

Do it right now before you forget about it.

Put us on pause and then come back to us.

Put up to 30% off site-wide.

How much more can they do for people?

They're doing plenty, and you can get, once again, a great deal, 30% off site-wide with Raycon one more time.

What's that promo code?

Well, it's up to 30% off.

What's that promo code, Jim?

Go to buyraycon.com slash JCE today, right now,

any minute.

Up to 30% off site-wide on whatever you want on their very wide site.

you're going to get up to 30% off.

With Raycon.

Yes, that's who I was talking about.

Well, now that we've established all that, Brian, what in the world is going on in the Arcadian Vanguard Network production house this week?

Another fine week of programs.

I feel like I hear noise in the background now.

I may have to clean that up.

You can get all the information on all the shows on Twitter at Superpodcast or on Facebook.

Facebook.com/slash Arcadian Vanguard every day.

get your news.

Get your wrestling news for free.

No clickbait, no paywall, just the wrestling news from thewrestlingnews.com, wherever you find your favorite podcast.

No opinion, no conjecture, just the actual news, ma'am.

Thewrestlingnews.com.

Also, want to make mention of...

Have you ever thought of starting a podcast called your favorite podcast?

Because then whenever anybody looked up where they would find their favorite podcast,

that would be the first thing that popped up.

That's an interesting thought.

We will talk about off-air, I assume.

But also want to make mention of some real world news.

Jim, they just announced Terry Garr has passed away.

What?

No.

Yes.

How?

Well, you're going to argue with me now?

How old was she?

Oh, that's not on the screen currently.

That was on the screen before, but I forgot what it was.

Well, that's well, at any age, that's terrible.

Terry Garr, I said, not Terry Bull.

No,

now, or Terry Boulder or Terry Balea.

You must have an enormous schwansticker.

Well, I hate to hear that in the middle of your announcements of your shows.

Well, we always try to bring you the Terry Garr.

We always try to bring you the latest news.

And of course, I want to make mention of some of the other shows on your Arcadia Vanguard podcast network.

Is Terry Garr on any of them?

Not that I'm aware of, but you know.

Well, you've lost your chance now.

Well, I want to make mention of a couple of appearances that recently were made on shows by Greg Klein talking about the junkyard dog and Morris Siegel and why they should be in a hall of fame.

You can hear shut up and wrestle with Brian Solomon at SUAWPod.com or wherever you find your favorite podcast.

And stick to wrestling with John McAdam.

He was on both shows.

Hear the discussion.

See if you agree or disagree with those shows.

That's at mcadampod.com.

And of course, the 605 Super Podcast.

The

Mothership.

Thank you, ma'am.

Go through the archive.

605.

She screamed for a long time there.

605pod.com, wherever you find your favorite podcast, The Mothership.

That's the first time you've ever said those words before.

And you know, it wasn't that bad in one ear.

That's the first time.

You've said those words before.

Your statements today, they're going in one ear, but they're not coming out the other.

But they're just going in the one ear.

Because of my audio problems.

They'll get stuck in your head.

That's what I want.

Well, it's rattling around now like a BB in a boxcar.

But anyway, speaking of

big color, bigger savings.

It's Sherwin-Williams' biggest super sale.

Get 40% off paints and stains October 17th through the 27th with prices starting at $29.39.

Whether you're refreshing your interior or exterior, we've got the colors to bring your vision to life.

And with delivery, getting everything to your door is easier than ever.

Shop online to have it delivered or visit your neighborhood Sherwin-Williams store.

Click the banner to learn more.

Retail sales only, some exclusions apply, sea store for details.

Delivery available on qualifying orders.

Speaking of box cars, you know,

now I see this brand new big old state-of-the-art arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Hershey, fucking Pennsylvania.

Who would have thought?

Now they'll build an arena anywhere.

I'm not trying to alienate our...

Our friends and fans, the people, the cult of Cornet members in and around the Hershey area.

But when I think of, you remember I've told you about the Hushypock Arena.

As Davey Boy would say, oh, that fucking Hushypock.

Does that sound like Davey Boy?

No.

Fucking Ushy Pock.

See, that sounds more like you.

No, not at all.

You're going to argue with me again.

Well, that's what he'd say.

You can't deny that.

He'd say the fucking Hushy Pock, because it was a shithole.

Now they got this big, brand new building.

How many people did they have in Hershey, Pennsylvania?

Brian, do you have that information or can that be obtained from Thurston Howell III?

Do we have him on a ticker?

No, we do not have anything or not.

We don't have anyone on a ticker, but hold on.

I'll see what I can find out.

Well, they were in the, whatever the new building is called.

I was just amazed that it wasn't the Ushi Parker because Hershey Park Arena

was the arena in Hershey Park, the amusement park

where that old man Hershey built to celebrate his success in the chocolate industry.

And they have this five-star hotel, the Hershey Hotel.

And they have all these attractions that you can go and see.

You know, you can have your children, I think, up to the age of 12 or 14 drowned in a vat of chocolate and wrapped in gold wrapping paper.

And they've got the road that leads to it, the Hershey Highway.

It's an amazing complex up there, but the old arena.

There's an amazing complex going on here, that's for sure.

Yeah.

So have you had time to find out the crowd?

According to this, according to WrestleTicks, the giant center, Hershey, Pennsylvania, as of yesterday, but this isn't the final number,

7,763 tickets distributed.

The setup was 8,266.

So they drew about 8,000 people in Ashy, Pennsylvania.

In fucking Ashy.

Ashy.

What wrestler liked chocolate?

He wasn't even there.

What wrestler liked chocolate the most?

Oh, good Lord.

I would have to rack my brains to think of a chocolate fanatic in the wrestling.

I probably ate more candy than anybody I was around in those days, but

that's because of my superior digestive system and amazing genetics that I was able to still maintain an amazing physique.

Anyway, speaking of amazing physiques, Jey Uso gets his cardio when he does his entrance.

Boy, they did it to him again.

He comes from the outside, the opening shot,

down the fucking stairs.

Everybody's yeetin and waving.

And by the time he gets in the ring, you can tell it's good that he can only say

like three or four, he blurts out three or four words and they'll go yeet.

So he has time to breathe in.

and then I want a title, yeet.

And then I beat his ass, yeet,

because that's all he's got to win for after he goes through this whole thing.

And basically, he just said,

I lost the Intercontinental title, so I cost them the tag team title.

And now I want to talk to one specific oos, and boom, and Jimmy Uso's music plays, and out he comes.

And Jimmy thanks Jay

and says, We need to be together

because they ain't the ones.

And then Jay says, well, we not the ones either.

And that is a quote.

We not the ones either.

Because a lot of people don't think it'd be like it is, but it do.

But then,

Brian, did you listen closely to this or did you kind of zone out with the yeeting?

Because it seemed to me that Jay cut kind of a confusing promo.

You couldn't tell whether he's happy with Jimmy or not.

through this middle part here.

Yeah, I mean, I thought, you know, he was acting like he was still kind of mad, but it was also apparent that he was going to forgive him in his own unique way.

Well, and the fans started chanting Uso,

and basically, that's the thing: is that there's still some tension here.

It wasn't the...

the you know the the most succinct of promos

but uh jimmy tells jay to come to SmackDown to talk to Roman.

And Jay says that he will be there.

And once that they got that bit of news out, here came the tongas.

And they jumped them.

But the Usos were fending off the Tongas until Solo sent Jacob in.

And then they beat him up a little bit and they tied Jimmy up in the ropes and they were going to

bash Jay's head in with the

ass in the face and the chair and the

ass in the face and the chair and the

we could make a children's song out of that.

No, we can't.

Well, you could pitch in too and came out.

I will not have anything to do with this song.

No.

Do they like the ass in the face and the chair in the ring?

Must be a southern thing.

Anyway, the ass in the face or the chair and the thing in the ring?

Either or.

And the skies up above.

In the chapel of love.

Let me tell you about the program.

Okay, okay, okay.

Okay.

Okay, but anyway, so what happened was Jay clocked Jacob in the face with the chair and the Usos cleared the ring.

And we were nearly 20 minutes into the program by the time that this whole thing resolved itself.

That's my comments on that.

Yeah, I mean, it was good storyline stuff.

They both got the intensity down.

They're over, so they could say nothing, and it seems to work.

I'm just thinking of any other television show that I've ever been on in my life.

They would be screaming if to say

what needed to be said, if the guys took 20 fucking minutes to get that accomplished.

And Raw's only two hours now, but they're still milking.

They're utterly milking the cow for everything they get.

And who can blame them?

They're swimming in money.

They're building a money bin, a Scrooge McDuck money bin right next to

the mountain where they keep the tapes in the fucking cave.

Did you hear about this?

I have not heard of it.

This has been proven.

They're building a money bin.

Proven.

It's been proven.

Well, everybody else gets to believe what they want to believe.

Why can't I believe some bat shit nuts stuff?

Speaking of being batshit nuts, Seamus wrestled Ludwig Kaiser.

And by the time that was over, we were 35 minutes into this program.

But we were ready for another installment of As the Bloodline Turns

because the Usos, Jimmy and Jay, were together when they saw Sami Zayn.

And Jay hugs him, and Jay, my

dog, my blood,

my

brethren.

But Jimmy was not happy to see Sammy, but Sammy wanted to talk to Jay alone and Jimmy took off.

And then Sammy asked Jay if he was really going to make up with Roman.

And Sammy tried to talk Jay out of making up with Roman because he shouldn't trust Roman or Solo.

And he told Jay he shouldn't get involved because he's his own man now.

But Jay told Sammy

that you don't understand because you're not family.

So now, this is obviously, there's still some ill will here.

And I'll tell you what, that's Sammy Zane.

He doesn't forget very easily.

What are you trying to say?

I'm trying to say that there's going to be something going on here.

Hey, listen, Owens

has all of a sudden gotten kooky and and turned on his friends.

Well, we'll see.

Well, but nevertheless, here's another great wrestling segment.

And then they put a match in a ring.

And ah, fuck.

It was Zelina versus Ivy Nile.

So I just went and grabbed a VHS of Darlene Dagmar versus Diamond Lil and watched that until the

bloodline came back on the screen.

And it was the Usos in the back.

And Jimmy asked Jay, how'd it go with Sammy?

And Jay says, hey, when you left, he stepped up

and he's kind of shaming Jay, so, or shaming Jimmy, rather.

So Jimmy says, all right,

I'll go find Sammy and I'll go talk to Sammy.

They need to get Leslie Nielsen back looking for the Undertaker, apparently.

But anyway, this thing is going on throughout the show.

Should we go now to the nine o'clock hour, Brian?

Because that's where we were.

That's all we got in this program, an hour into it.

Are you detecting a pattern here?

Yes, let's go to nine o'clock.

Seth Franklin Rollins comes to the ring.

He's back to being a visionary and a revolutionary.

And he's never stationary.

And he's hunting monsters because Bronson Reed is a monster, but so is Seth Rollins.

He says, so am I

because Bronson Reed has reminded him of what he's capable of and he likes it.

Does that mean he's reminded him he's capable of dressing like a normal human being?

But nevertheless, Bronson Reed interrupted on the screen and says, well, I promised I wouldn't come in there and get in a fight with you tonight, but I'm out here on the parking lot.

If you want to come out here, well, come on.

And Seth goes out in the parking lot, and the camera follows him.

And Adam Pierce is trying to stop him.

And he blows past there.

They get in a fight.

And

Seth gives Bronson Reed the curb stomp on a car hood

and then rolls off of it and starts cutting a promo to the camera.

But in the background, you see Reed gets up

and there's more fight.

And they go into the back of a

production truck.

So just a big empty, you know, not a flatbed, but a giant like a U-Haul truck.

And they have more fight.

And then

Bronson Reed picks Seth up and gives him the Death Valley driver out of the back of the truck through

at least four tables side by side and end to end

that had been covered with a giant black sheet

and had some cardboard boxes set on them, apparently for just such an occasion.

And could there potentially have been a hint of crash pad underneath that, Brian?

But and then and then boom, and there they were.

So

that's it.

Why did they have the fucking whole giant thing set up and dressed with a tablecloth out in the middle of the parking lot?

But everybody got to see him take a big bump.

Catering's really gotten out of control.

I know.

Well,

that was the kids' table out there.

They couldn't seat everybody.

Anyway.

What do you think of the whole idea?

We can't do anything there.

Come out to the parking lot.

Well, that's kind of egregiously exploiting a loophole that I'm sure

that Adam Pierce never intended when he got Bronson Reed the heels solemn word that he wasn't going to do anything wrong.

So we can't fault management in any of this.

And why is he taking Bronson Reed's word on anything?

Well, that's why I'm, you know, he's a nice boy.

That's what his mother always said.

You're such a Mr.

Nice Guy.

If you can't believe Mr.

Nice Guy, who can you believe, Brian?

Anyway.

So then they had a three-way tag team match with Mysterio and Dragon Lee and the New Day and the the Viking War Raider Machine experience,

and the Vikings won it.

But now we get back to the bloodline, because in the back,

Jimmy Uso is still looking for Sammy so he can talk to him.

And as he's looking around, he sees something, and then Jay comes in and says, hey, you talk to Sammy?

And Jimmy's like, shh.

And he points through the fence and the camera zooms in and out in the the parking lot,

there is Sami Zayn standing there talking to solo.

And Jimmy said, I told you so.

And Jay said,

Yeet.

Is it, again,

in a serious moment, could he not say yeet?

Could he maybe just hang his head in shame?

But now, what do you think Sammy's Sammy's talking to Solo about?

Probably the Middle East,

I guess.

I don't know.

I have no idea.

No, no, because Solo comes from the South Pacific.

Sammy is a pacifist as a character who wants everyone to be friends, although this is wrestling.

He's probably trying to talk Solo into

could it be healing the family up?

Could it be?

I don't know.

What do you think?

Family healing.

Because when I get that feeling, I want family healing.

Got to, got to.

If I hear you sing, I want some of that Marvin Gay family healing.

Well,

regardless of whether you want my healing or gay healing or anything else, I think that Sammy

is, as you're right, he's going to be found to be innocent.

He's going to be trying to be the peacemaker, but I bet you that Jimmy ain't going to believe it.

And then we were ready for the main event.

Brian, you're ready for the main event.

Oh, yeah.

As you will recall, Dominic had to wrestle and defeat a

former world champion to be the number one or to get in the number one contender spotter.

He's trying to climb the ladder to the world title.

And this was just pulled out of the blue.

Next week, he'll face a former world champion.

It turns out to be Damian Priest.

Wouldn't you know who won the pony?

And this started, they didn't have much time on the show.

It was basically

Dominic beat their Dominic.

Damian Priest beat the shit out of Dominic

through the majority of the match, as he should in the way that they're presented.

And then suddenly, at the end of the thing, Liv and Raquel come out and draw the referee, and JD and Carlito

attack Damien,

and he levels both of them with a chair numerous times, multiple shots.

And then just as he's finished beating them into powder, Dominic rolled him up from behind and got a one, two, three.

And then fucking priest pulls Dominic back in and gives him a razor's edge.

And then he starts to leave, but he goes back and he wears him out with a chair about five or six times.

And then he walks off, but he goes back in and he grabs Carlito Carlito and chokeslams him and then chokeslams Dominic.

And then he stood up and said, Well, I guess I'm done.

So

technically, they got Dominic past the hurdle there,

but they pretty much had Damian Priest beat up

every male member of the Judgment Day except for Finn Balor.

I'm not sure.

He was there earlier backstage.

Maybe he didn't want to come out and get beat up either.

And that was the main event.

Well, that was Raw.

I see you.

You were full of fucking righteous indignation on a number of things that happened in this match.

You would like to go over them in detail.

Is that correct?

There was nothing that happened on Raw.

Other than the Bloodline stuff, which is all drama-based.

There's nothing that was happening on Raw.

Drama-based.

I need some drama mean

after a good segment of Raw there.

But anyway, that's the Raw program.

That's our program.

That's everybody's program for this time of this week and this episode.

Is that correct?

That is correct.

Wrap it up.

Well, now you're giving me orders.

Okay, folks, come back when we'll take our time on Brian's program, the drive-thru in just a couple of days.

And then back here next week.

Hopefully still at a free country on the Jim Cornette experience.

Until then, thank you.

Fuck you.

Please go out and vote.

Bye-bye, everybody.

Get the experience.

Get the experience of Jim Cornette.