Episode 534: Jim Reviews Double Or Nothing & King Of The Ring

Like the midnight and the rock'n'roller He's in a fight for wrestling solar Using a racket and some mind controller He's Jim Cornet

The keys to the future held by the past And with Tag T partner Bariah at last He sends this message out by podcast He's Jim Cornet

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 back from the apocalypse edition of the Jim Cornette Experience, where we're going to talk about everything that's gone on in the world since I've been cut off from it.

And I got a lot of problems with you people today.

Today, it's the king of the ring versus double or nothing.

Guess who won?

And joining me in all this and more.

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

Co-hostU, the Prince of Podcasting, the burgemeister of broadcasting the count of conversation the great brian last

aloha jim a pleasure to be here once again for another show where i don't know how we're going to do it with there's so much and uh

but we're here again omnibus season who knew Yeah,

you know, those came before we even knew that I was going to be incommunicado and

running from the devil, trying to save my soul over the past few days.

So, thankfully, we had some programming out, and we got the update out where I called in from apparently Apollo 11 circling the moon.

The way it sounded, boy, it sounds great when I'm on the phone.

But anyway,

for those of you who might not know, I was without power due to the severe storms, high winds, tornadic activity, and other types of Mother Nature's mayhem that circulated in the Louisville, Kentucky area on Sunday noonish.

And

at that point, there were 60,000 people without power.

Now

there are up to five fatalities in the overall region,

mostly from trees falling on fucking people,

because it was hell out there is what it was.

But anyway,

so we did the update to let people know I was going to be without power.

And this was, we recorded that Monday noonish.

Brian, at that point, I didn't know when we were going to get power back, as I said, 60,000 people or whatever down at that point.

Electric company with the

automatic recording on, basically saying, you know, yeah, we know.

Yeah, we'll get to you.

And then Monday afternoon, we heard that, oh, yes, they've now estimated that everyone will have power by Wednesday night at midnight.

And

so at that point, I've already called the

yard fellows that mow my yard and told them, hey,

get the trailer over here because you ain't going to be, you know, we got all kinds of shit laid around.

It's good, you're going to need a saw.

And a couple guys, you know, come over when you can.

They were over at seven o'clock at night, Brian, with a trailer because everybody else had had the same idea, made the same call.

The trailer, when they pulled up, it already looked like the Grinch's sled about to go up Mount Crumpet.

I'm like, how the fuck did the police not pull you over on any kind of road you took to get?

And they're starting to put my stuff on there.

And they're up there jumping up and down on it.

And they got the big stuff.

They had to have a saw, and they got the big stuff with the leaves and everything.

And all the smaller stuff, anything under five feet or whatever they've piled under the goddamn trees.

And they're out of here.

And then Monday night, we had another big

barbecue out in the backyard because that was the only way we could cook.

And also, now we're thinking, well, all this food, I just got my beautiful ground sirloin for world-famous meatloaf, the whole nine yards.

Because now we're thinking this food is going to melt, and I'm not going to make

my meatloaf with the ground beef that I had gotten and blah, blah, blah.

So we're just barbecuing everything.

So I stuff myself.

And then I'm thinking, well, there's nothing else to do but go to sleep.

And Stacey, she can't plug her CPAP machine in.

So she can't sleep

leaning all the way back because there's that, you know, pesky little thing of stopping breathing.

So she's down in, and the recliner couch, I got no recliner in my house that will recline because they're all power.

They're all electric.

I mean, what the fuck?

We don't realize, Brian, how much we depend on this for our everyday activities.

And for all of you assholes out there who say, well, get a generator.

You got enough money.

There it is.

And Brian, you're one of those assholes.

Well, no, no, no, I'm not saying I'm one of those assholes, although I may be, but I hear it from a lot of the other assholes.

Just tell Jim to get a generator.

Why haven't you told them to get a generator?

Well, and you have, and here's what I told you, because it's never that easy.

It's not easy being me.

I've checked into the generators.

They would run off my propane tank.

We don't have the gas lines out here and we can't run off electric.

That's kind of a hat on a hat, right?

So it would run off my propane tank, it or they, however many might be needed.

I don't care.

I'd do it tomorrow.

But

because of the plans that we've been trying to make to construct either a one-car garage or some type of construction apparatus to put Stacy's antique car that she inherited from her father in, which would require extending the driveway slightly to where it would have to go, because I'm not going to put it in the fucking front yard, at which to a point

that doing this and extending the driveway and doing the blah, blah, blah, and all this other stuff, and architect and/or goddamn contractor or contractors and electric people and etc., I would also have to move the propane tank, which is buried.

So then it becomes a goddamn thing that I ain't had time for yet.

And if I put a generator in now connected to the propane tank, I'm going to have to move, then I'm going to have to move the propane tank.

I'm going to have to move the generator too.

You understand this, Brian, when I explained it to you.

I mean, I understand that this is your issue.

I don't understand the whole issue.

Well, it's an issue.

Because I ain't got time to find people to come out here to goddamn do simple work.

And when I do find them, it takes months to get them out here.

You can't tell me the Monroes don't deal with propane.

You can't tell me they don't sniff propane.

I'm going to tell you that I'm not going to rely on the Monroes to install anything explosive on my property.

Can you argue with that?

You've seen a picture of the Monroes.

You have insurance for a reason.

Yeah, well, and my family.

What might be left of them would collect it then?

Anyway, back to this shit.

So I'm going to go to bed Monday night.

And Stacey's going to sit up and I'm going to go lay down because my back, it feels better when I lay down.

And now Harley is confused because she's used to sleeping in the bed, but she's like, where's mommy?

Well, if she's downstairs with mommy, she don't understand all this other activity.

So I'm trying to nod off.

And just when I nod off, she wants to go downstairs.

Okay, boom.

Come back upstairs.

It's stuffy upstairs.

And I goddamn open the windows because it got 80-something degrees on Monday.

And so I opened the windows, gets a nice breeze coming in.

And as I open one of the bedroom windows, I see that the windstorm has blown a limb,

not big enough to break the window, but it's gone right through the screen.

And there's a hole bigger than my fist in the window screen.

And I thought, well, now, God, I like to have the window open, Brian, so I can get the fresh air.

and hear the birds twinkling.

But now I'm thinking, well, some bird could fly in this or some bug or whatever.

Now I'm going to have to have that fixed.

But, you know, what's the odds anything's going to happen tonight?

I'm going to bed.

So I'm laying there reading by my battery-operated lantern light until I get sleepy.

I'm going to nod off here and I turn the light off, and it's pitch black, and it's dead silent.

I roll over, but I think, well, I am kind of comfortable.

And right then, some kind of goddamn bug flies in and lands on my naked shoulder right next to my head.

And I came out of the, goddammit, Jesus Christ, come out of the goddamn bed, swinging and a kicking and flowing the covers around.

And I hit the lantern light and I grabbed my flashlight and I'm looking around and it's one of those fucking shield bugs that's been everywhere for the past few years.

Stink bugs?

The stink bug, yeah, but they look like a shield.

There's all kinds of stink bugs, but these are the shield bugs.

I think shield bugs are stink bugs.

Yes, but there's more kinds of stink bugs than just ones shaped like shields.

So you're talking shield stink bugs instead of just a regular old stink bug.

And those shield stink bugs are especially nasty looking.

The SSBs.

That was my nickname in the shields.

The shield stink bugs.

Shield stink bug.

So anyway,

I grab the goddamn Kleenex and I grab this goddamn bug and I fucking scrunch it and I throw it out the goddamn hole in the fucking screen window.

But now I'm not only fucking, I'm awake now because I hate that kind of shit, a darker, but also

now the bedroom is spoiled for me, right?

And it's, it's, it's hot upstairs, but all the beds are upstairs where it's hot and stuffy.

And now I don't feel good about leaving the window, but I'm going to go down in the TV room in the lowest part where it's cool.

And I take two blankets and I lay them down on the goddamn floor.

And I fucking get my pillow and I lay it there.

And I get my lantern because now I'm awake.

I'm going to read again.

And by now, it's fucking 3.30 going on four o'clock in the morning.

And

right as I think, I'm going to go finally go to sleep.

And I turn the lantern off.

And I roll over and I go, ah.

And I just think, this has been like WC Fields and it's a gift doing the porch routine, just trying to get a night's sleep.

And suddenly, guess what happened, Brian?

I know what happened.

The power came back on, Brian.

All of a sudden, all the lights are on and shit's powering up.

And I'm like what the fuck?

And now I have to go around the house turning off all this shit and making sure everything's still working.

And

my computer here that you don't care about me as a friend.

You just worry about the state of my computer and the internet for your own selfish business reasons.

So now I'm thinking, is that blown up?

And I come up here and I

reset that whole thing.

And then I'm now, okay, now we got the power.

Thank God.

Now

I find out that the only thing that we ain't got is the air conditioning in the office.

It ain't come back on.

The power surge has blown the air conditioning in the office.

And I'm, what the fuck?

Now it's fucking, it's five o'clock in the morning, and I have somebody coming at eight o'clock to locate the water line in the front of my property from the road because we're fixing to plant,

I don't know,

18 or 20 fucking trees and giant green bushes of various kinds along the fence row.

And so now I'll just, I've got to stay up because now I've got to call the fucking air conditioning service people.

And I got to, goddamn, the water locators are coming.

And then the storm window people that it's taken me two months to get out here to restore my original windows at the west end of the house that my father put in in the 50s and give me some new storm windows to protect them.

There's a very specialized field that only a few people, they're coming at 11 o'clock.

I got all this.

And then the waterline locating guy comes in at 8, and he can't just, goddamn, just take a fucking metal detector.

There's a variety of apparatuses.

He's got to check into my back spigots.

There's some kind of PVC associated with all this stuff.

It won't show up.

Then the storm window people come two hours early, and they're fucking prying aluminum off the round of the side of my windows.

And then here comes the yard mowers to mow the yard,

almost running down and killing the goddamn water line locating gentlemen in the process.

It's a goddamn madhouse.

And I can't get rid of all those people for it was three, four, five hours.

And I've had no sleep.

And then

I, again,

because I couldn't record the AEW presentation

Sunday night because the DVR box had no power to it,

you had to arrange for me in surreptitious fashion

a link in which I could watch this thing after the fact, because I'd already paid for it and didn't get it.

But I couldn't bear that.

I said, I'm going to warm up every goddamn piece of leftover meat that we've barbecued and stick it down my neck, and I'm going to go to bed.

And that's what I did at about seven o'clock on Tuesday night and slept for 12 hours straight

and then got up and watched AEW.

Can you tell why I'm pissed off?

I could tell why you're pissed off, yes.

And the worst part of that experience was the watching of the AEW.

Oh, come on.

Are you going to get a refund from the cable company?

Oh, no, you ain't.

Well, you ain't heard the rest of it yet.

Because I'm thinking as I get up at 7 fucking 30 on goddamn Wednesday morning, just a number of hours ago.

Where we can finally record this show, talk about these things, satisfy the people that are demanding.

They're at our throats for all this programming while I'm going through hell with gasoline britches on.

And I think, you know, the last thing I want to do is watch this on my computer, on the link that you provided, because

it's a what?

It's a 20-inch screen.

I got to sit here in my fucking, the same desk I'm going to be in for four hours doing this show.

For four hours watching this stuff, I can't get more than three feet away from it because I won't be able to see it, but I can't hear it anyway, unless I've I've got my headset on, which only has a fucking four-foot cord

and have to go through this, or it's on the streaming.

I say it's on the streaming,

and I'll get Stacy to fend.

She gets on the bleacher report, right?

And orders it on the bleacher report in the bedroom where I can lay stretched out in comfort

and watch a real television.

I know that the fast forward is dodgy, but but I'll try to muddle through it, right?

So now I bought this fucking thing twice.

Ain't seen it yet.

But then not only is the fast forward dodgy,

as Davey Boyd would say, it's dodgy,

it's non-existent.

Well, I won't put it that it's not that it's non-existent, it's that it almost completely is malfunctional.

Sometimes you hit fast forward, you get a little counter at the bottom, and it will fast forward in four second increments.

And then, but you can't tell what's going on because there's no on-screen pay.

And then you hit it again,

and sometimes you try to fast forward, it just goes to a black screen, or sometimes it does nothing at all.

Sometimes you can get a counter at the bottom, sometimes you can't.

It's goddamn, sometimes it buffers, it doesn't know what to do.

And I thought, motherfucker, I suffered through what it was, the first hour of this show having to watch every,

well, not watch every second, but

listen to or experience or sit there while every second happened.

Well, the first hour was maybe the best hour.

Well, you can imagine my consternation then when I got to the end of this thing.

When it got to the pockets match, I said, oh, hell no.

So now I've paid for it twice.

I come back up here and get on the fucking bootleg link that you provided me through your various sources.

I did not provide you with anything.

Something came in and it ended up on your desk and I don't know anything else about it.

You passed the bus.

Something came into you and you said, I'm not touching this.

I'm passing it on to Cornette.

I'm going to continue to pass it along.

I'm going to continue to pass that along and I had nothing to do with anything.

This Cornette character you speak of.

I don't know anything about this.

Yeah, well, anyway, so I came back up here and I sat through the rest of it because at least I could fast forward

parts of this fucking fiasco.

And

we're going to talk about all that.

We'll do it in chronological order.

We'll start with Friday, we'll go to Saturday, we'll go to Sunday,

and then I will bid everyone adieu.

But that's

just so we can get caught up and move forward with our life and figure out exactly when we're going to turn around and do another one of these shows.

But I am offended, Brian,

as a professional in the industry that nobody

has thought about putting a fucking butterfly net over Tony Kahn's head,

putting him in a goddamn long-sleeved overcoat and sticking him in a rubber room at the puzzle factory so he can think about how he has managed to spend a couple of hundred million dollars of his father's money to get to where we got to

Sunday night.

Well, who's going to do that?

One of the people he's paying?

No, I think some kind of state authority should step in at this point.

Don't you, when someone is a danger to themselves or others, exhibiting erratic behavior,

doing things in public that are completely illogical and certainly, if not criminal, bordering on the reckless endangerment side, as well as just being a goddamn complete batshit fucking nut.

He's goddamn as screwy as goddamn pet raccoon, as crazy as a rainbow trout in a car wash.

I could go on.

Somebody, doesn't his father need to step in and commit?

Usually it's the son.

that has to step in and say, dad, you've lost your mind.

You flip your wig.

You've lost the plot.

We've got to put you away.

No, now it's going to be the father.

Well, that'll be a big change because so far it's just been throwing money at Tony and letting him do whatever he wants.

It's a child's playground at this point where

he has found

either the most self-indulgent, indie-level,

criminally outlaw-minded mud mud-show goofs that are just allowed to,

in their own way, masturbate themselves in front of ever-dwindling crowds for their own amusement,

or

the occasional real professional and established veteran that is willing to, instead of working a burdensome schedule, if they have the opportunity, work a burdensome schedule and give away their intellectual property, blah, blah, blah, or come down here and risk their lives once or twice a month to take a billionaire's fucking money and

go along with it.

And that's

unfortunately pretty much where we're at because nobody, I mean, the one thing I did see when power came back on and I got back on the Twitter machine

was everybody go, what?

It was a universal, what the fuck?

What the fuck is this?

How,

who's going to justify this now?

On any level, on a level of ridiculous dangerousness,

you don't care whether your people are literally set on fire, put through fucking glass, whatever the case, or from a case of a standpoint of professionalism,

where is it just

You're letting these children do this shit because they think they're video game characters.

And nobody's,

you can't say nobody's in charge.

There's somebody in charge, and he's been swept up in

the fun of it all.

You know, what's fucking $25, $50 million here and there?

As long as I get to play with these cool guys.

And it's an exhibition of both irresponsibility, unprofessionalism, complete inanity,

lack of, it's not good as a program.

It's not good.

Both the narrative as

a

creatively written program is nonsense.

And

this thing was shot like the fucking cameraman was in a goddamn Mixmaster.

They can't plan things.

If they plan them, they're not executing them from a production standpoint.

It looks like a goddamn mishmash.

This was,

it was every

professionals in the business 30 years ago, worst nightmare of what would happen if all these indie goofs running their hometowns on their birthdays actually got television anybody would see.

So you said we were going to go in chronological order and then you just went on a rant about Tony Kahn's management of AEW.

What's causing all this?

I'm going on a rant because that is why I'm in the state of mind and the mood that I'm in right now.

Because you just,

it's

fiscal irresponsibility bordering on criminality to just

throw people's money, throw somebody's money at these people and at this drek.

What's the criminality part?

This somewhere, there ought to be some kind of guy.

This is a producer's like type of thing, isn't it?

Is this a God?

Is this springtime for Hitler revisited?

Where he's planned all along that this is going to be garbage and it's going to cost a fortune?

Is he revenge on his father in some kind of way or he's bilking?

I don't know, but

this has to be intentionally bad or somebody's ribbing him or what the fuck is going on?

Well, again, we're not going to talk about this.

They're going to plaster all this other stuff.

What are they going to follow this with?

Wednesday Night Dynamite.

Back to where we have been all along.

Are they going to blow somebody up?

Hand grenade up the ass, pull the pin,

draw circles around the ring, and wherever the guts land, whoever gets in the 100-point ring is the new AEW champion?

I think they're going to wait until they have a healthier roster before they start blowing people up again.

All right.

Well, let's back up.

I just wanted to register that point.

People think that I'm not goddamn.

I was in a pretty good mood after I'd seen SmackDown and King of the Ring.

Easy to digest.

The important things happened.

Nobody that I'm aware of was,

you know, hospitalized.

You know what we are starting to see a little bit of?

I have to bring it up to you right now.

Yes.

Jim is being paid by WWE.

That's why you say nice things about their program is because they're paying you is something I've seen people say.

No, I don't even, thanks to the peacock deal, I don't even get a royalty check from them anymore.

Many other people don't as well.

But no, it's actually just because they're well, except for

the refrigerator.

I'm surprised she didn't hospitalize everybody she worked with, but otherwise they're professionals presenting a a professionally done program in front of huge audiences with incredible network quality footage of people who are stars and fans who are jumping up and down because of those people, not because they're seeing

miscellaneous goddamn human beings run over with a fucking steamship.

So that's that's a couple of points there.

But we can go into a few of them because a few of of them were involved in the smackdown which was friday night may 24th it seems an eternity ago now

in the before times

the pre

no electricity days

i mean what they've even

here's the thing the vince mcmahon kevin dunn era brian

had

rhinocera is that what we decided the plural was of rhinoceroses

Had rhinoceros and penguins or whatever flying out of Matt Riddle's ass.

Remember that?

Of course.

Well, this new

regime,

after they got rid of Vince and his fucking bucktooth crony Kevin Dunn, they have giant golden eagles landing on the dome of the arena in fucking Saudi Arabia with an aerial drone shot of same.

The special effects now are better than King Kong on this fucking program.

Did you catch the giant golden eagle, the symbol of Saudi Arabia?

Because they're all flying high like eagles over there.

Well, because this is all a paid commercial for Saudi Arabia is what it really is.

Yes, and the key word is paid.

They're paying through the fucking teeth for this shit.

If they were already getting $50 or $55 million a show, what did they get for fucking King of the Ring and a live network broadcast into the unsuspecting homes of the brainless Americans who can be easily led to believe that we are actually nice people over here as a government, not a citizenry?

Anyway,

and now we also know that both of the winners of the King and Queen of the Ring

will get title shots at SummerSlam.

What do you think of that?

I think it's great because that way you've got another

situation where you can build for two months instead of Royal Rumble to WrestleMania, it's king and queen of the ring to SummerSlam.

And why not?

It's not overdoing it to do it twice a year.

It's interesting how many guaranteed shots there are now.

Win the Rumble.

Win King of the Ring,

get the Money in the Bank briefcase.

There's multiple ways to to slide into the main programmer into a title match.

And they're still different.

And at the same time,

it does have ways to elevate people.

So you like it.

I like it.

Do you not like it?

I like it.

Hey, listen, we got to see two promotions do it in a week.

So it's a

trendy thing.

We'll get to that.

But apparently, a lot of people thought it was a good idea.

And we don't want to spoil it.

But

anyway, so the first match, though, the the Queen of the Rings semifinal.

This was in Saudi Arabia.

So we had Bianca in a bodysuit taking on the refrigerator in a deflated parade balloon.

They're covered from

neck to ankle and foot.

Well, the feet are covered.

Are they allowed to go barefoot?

Could a, could a, can a woman, is a woman legally allowed to be barefoot in public in Saudi Arabia?

That was not rhetorical.

Yeah, Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

I know a lot of fans were in an uproar because I think it was a photo on social media of maybe it was Bianca and Jade at a beach in Saudi Arabia and the idea that no one who actually lives, no women who actually live in Saudi Arabia would be able to do what they were doing.

You can't go to the beach over there either.

Or they can't.

Their citizenry can't.

I don't know exactly what the rules are, but by all accounts, it's very much a male-dominated culture, and the women don't have many rights.

Well, and this is what happens when people place an irrational level of goddamn importance on religion and their various ancient fucking teachings from when people thought leeches was cutting-edge medical technology.

But I digress.

And also, they got new commentators.

Did you see this?

Fubar, Makafakalube, and Slapco Fudd were gone.

They had two new guys, Jude Bon Jovi and Fazil Mugwomp.

I think Fubar and Slapco have been gone a while, though.

Well, nobody told me.

Well, I don't believe anyone's found the remains.

It's Saudi Arabia.

You never know.

Hey, you know.

Bone saw.

Can we, if anybody finds enough to identify, can we get updates on Fubar and Slapco?

Anyway, did you ever hear they asked Natalie Wood if she wanted to take a shower on the boat she said no i'll just wash up on shore not only is that an awful joke but the timing all these years later to come up with a natal well it just it reminded me with the disapp the disappearance of foobar

do you think she was murdered do you think oh he murdered her you know something went on i don't we don't have time to subreference but that was That smelled like a goddamn donkey's ass.

Anyway,

Bianca versus nia jack yes

and here's the first thing i'm going to make an editorial comment about today is with nia jax i'm about to say this fat ugly bitch whoa but no her

because

no bianca's got the bad leg that the refrigerator was working in the match and blah blah blah and they build it where bianca gets gets her up on her shoulders for a finish, but her leg collapses, quote unquote.

She kind of dropped her backwards and fell forwards, But I wouldn't want that load of shit on top of me either.

But then this giant overstuffed recliner couch with legs jumps up and drops all of her weight back first on Bianca.

Not the Sinton or Swanton, but wouldn't they just jump up and land on a motherfucker?

dropped all her weight back first on her boom and she looked she was selling facially very believably.

And then she drags her over and gives her a bonsai drop that looked worse.

It was, did you see this at all?

I did.

And maybe the bonsai drop the next night took away a little bit of the steam from the night before.

But well, yeah, that's where I'm going to be editorializing and commentating on that one too.

But no, this fuck this fucking fat bitch.

I guarantee you that she would do me that way or anybody that was going to stand up for themselves one time, and elsewhere, there'd be some goddamn issue.

If they didn't want to handle it at the office, somebody'd handle it in a fucking locker room.

That's ridiculous.

And it's not necessary.

And it wasn't needed if she can't work

the shit.

Anybody can come in and say, Here, let me just fucking hit you as hard as I can, or throw you down in various ways as hard as I can, or land on you.

Fuck.

Fat fucking douchebag.

Anyway.

I have not heard you rant about a wrestler like you have her.

No, this is way too much.

And again, these aren't fucking, you're not talking about Road Warrior Hawk or Dr.

Death Steve Williams.

These are 120, 130-pound fucking women.

That's an internal injury.

Ribs, you've got, that will fuck your back up too, even if you're laying on your back because of the unnatural, goddamn,

the unnatural, unnaturalness of it that suddenly 300 whatever pounds this fucking buffalo weighs

is coming crashing into your midsection or on your chest or whatever the fuck no

no

and i don't know why somebody wouldn't be talking to if because she's the rocks cousin for the same reason she has a job and that she won queen of the ring hey i had one of the rocks cousins in obw i can't remember what his fucking name was now but i told him he was the shits because he was the shits

That was 25 fucking years ago.

You also had Rocky Johnson in OVW.

That didn't work out so well.

When we told the office that he was the shits, actually, to be quite honest with you, too,

because he was.

Well, you've got to call the shits the shits.

And I don't care who somebody,

no, if anybody had done this

level of unprotected fat ass dropping on somebody, especially a woman in any promotion I've ever been involved in, they would be spoken to about it.

And if they didn't do it anymore, we're all good.

And if they did do it again, their fat ass would be in the car out the door.

Jesus.

Anyway,

so they had a six-man tag team of the Prophets and LA Night and Waller and Theory and Carmelo that came out of the Waller effect.

And I don't know what the fuck.

And you know, I like Waller, obviously, a whole lot more than you because you completely don't like him, but I don't mind him.

He grew on me.

The biggest issue is his character is kind of like a Kfabe version of, like, if you said to a wrestling promoter, create a Logan Paul-like character who's just like an annoying social media twat.

This might be it.

So he's kind of playing a character based on someone who's really there who's better as a wrestler than anyone else.

I don't get the Logan Paul either, though, because Logan Paul is so good at everything.

Whereas Waller is, no,

he has a nondescript look, a fucking goofy, nerdy haircut, a bad physique.

He's annoying in an annoying way.

And he can't, in my opinion, work a goddamn lick.

And I've given up watching Theory because of Waller.

And

then they put Hayes in there with them.

And poor L.A.

Knight, how did he go from goddamn title matches and whatever the fuck to wallering in this goddamn cesspool of mid-cardism?

And then did you see

that Ford was going to splash Waller and beat him with a splash off the top rope where he goes like 25 feet in the air, right?

Well, Waller sees that Ford is about to land with both of his knees in Waller's nuts, and he raised his knees like you would when you see that your nuts are about to be you fucking scrunch up, right?

And it was a goddamn splash off the top, knees to knees.

Boom.

And then he just covered Waller and pinned him anyway.

But I'm surprised they didn't break both their fucking, all four of their fucking, whatever the math is on their legs on a something like that.

So

then, what I thought was the high point of the evening's festivities,

Cody came to the ring and he gets huge chance, right?

Big, the crowd.

And think about this.

The American nightmare.

I guess that's bad.

The American nightmare sounds like American carnage or some kind of anti-American propaganda, but he's red, white, and blue and everything.

And the people in Saudi Arabia love him.

Maybe we're doing some good, you know, with these.

people over because the average people I'm sure are normal over there.

It's just whoever's running that fucking joint.

So he's about to speak, and then Logan Paul interrupts, and he talks his way to the ring.

And the story being that he gave his brass knuckles to Adam Cole or Michael Cole, and he promised he won't use them.

And he's going to, he's a man of his word.

Word is his bond.

And Cody call, he's, he's blistering him.

with the fact that he is an outsider.

He's calling him a cosplayer, if you will, was one of the terms he used.

Imposter syndrome.

And he said, we know that you've got another set of knuckles.

As a matter of fact, why don't we have one of the referees check you, Logan Paul, see if you've got anything.

And humming, humming, humming, humming.

We'll do Cody first.

And Logan Paul is great.

Check every crevice of him.

And then the referee checks.

Logan Paul and finds a set of knucks in his pocket.

And then he's like, these are my brother's pants.

It was like it was pulled over on fucking cops.

And he's just brilliant.

And

he can go from being the arrogant, overbearing asshole to the cowardly, backpedaling weasel when he knows how to switch fucking emotions.

And then Cody fired up, did a babyface promo just as good as Logan Paul's heel promo was.

And it was great.

And

as, and I wrote at the time, as long as they've got segments like this on their television programs in the WWE,

where these people come off as stars, the performances are good and believable.

It's not

chaos and video game violent madness or

people reciting goddamn

either scripted things in their head or

stuff that people has told them to say with no emotion.

That's why AEW looks like cable access.

And it's only going to widen out as they rely more on indie-minded people over there trying to appeal to the audience they've got left because they failed at getting the wider audience that eats this shit up and doesn't care whether this is the only thing they see in two hours.

You see where I'm going with this?

There is a pretty wide, whatever you want want to say dichotomy right now between what wwe is producing how it looks how it comes across and what aew

is producing and how it comes across for the biggest time since aew has existed there really is a break between number one and number two and it feels like it when you watch the show

and you know that's unfortunately

you know, kind of the way it probably was always going to be, but they could have made a more valiant effort over there down

in

AEW All Friends Land.

Anyway, we're going to finish up.

Go ahead.

Let me just say about this segment.

I continue what I've been saying.

Logan Paul is my favorite guy in WWE.

He's so good at everything he does, even the minor stuff.

I mean, this is right out of Memphis.

Search the guy to find the weapon.

I saw Eddie Gilbert do this in Global in 92

with Bruce Pritchard as his manager, as a matter of fact.

So this is nothing new, but it came off perfectly.

It was done really well.

Logan Paul never slips.

Facial reactions, what he says, demeanor, body language, let alone everything he does in a match.

He never slips.

He's my favorite guy in the company.

And

it's amazing that you can tell.

Was he a fan as a kid or has he been cognizant of it, you know, since he's been in the in the big time of the social media world or what the fuck because he's just got he's got the the instinct psychologically of what you do when you're a heel etc

i don't know

but anyway we also got bodysuit bailey and covered up chelsea

and uh a little more drama with the bloodline in that

paulee is telling you know was telling solo that Tonga Loa

wasn't there because he couldn't cross the border.

Well, I guess get into the country, but

you can't just cross the border from somewhere to Saudi Arabia anyway, can you?

I mean,

from America,

they don't take too kindly to people who cross the border.

They don't take refugees.

They don't take too kindly to any outsiders coming into their country.

Well, but he's dangerous.

And Paul's saying these people, you are very dangerous that you're bringing into the bloodline.

They're dangerous people, dangerous, dangerous.

And Solo says, hey, until Roman comes back, I'm in charge.

And then Tomatonga comes in and kind of tells Paul off, and there's tension.

What in the world is going to happen?

It's good tension.

It's good drama.

Everyone's dying to see when Roman Reigns comes back what's going to happen.

Solo's continuing to tease the ridiculous idea that he's talking to Roman.

And Heyman,

we're finally getting to see this role of Heyman we've never seen before.

Just the

vulnerable Paul.

The vulnerable.

He's so vulnerable.

But he's been great.

And

he always looks older when Roman's not there.

No, it's obviously a strategic thing.

When Roman's not there, the hair gets grayer.

The skin gets more pale, not pale, gray, grayish, I guess.

That's from lack of circulation.

And actually, the embalming fluid probably also tends to give him some somewhat of a pallor.

But yeah, you're right.

I like this stuff.

I mean, it's got to pay off sooner rather than later.

It can't be Roman's gone until SummerSlam.

I mean, he's got to come back at some point, but we'll see.

I just want one goddamn Samoan.

There's one specific Samoan I want.

They won't give him to me.

We've seen every other Samoan in Samoa, but the one Samoan I want, give me just the one Samoan and my home,

stop.

Truly glow.

You're in a bad mood today, remember?

Stop singing.

Well,

I'm thinking about my Samoan.

He's not your Samoan.

My Samoan.

Oh, my little pity one.

A pity one.

When you do it.

Listen, let me stop you here, Doug Steiger.

Let me ask you this.

How big of a number do you think it's going to do on SmackDown under the assumption it'll be there when Roman Reigns returns and they announce it in events?

Well, but now,

I've said before, I think that they ought to be trying to pull something

or something.

Something needs to be happening, some major turning point in the bloodline and whoever they're fucking with at the time.

And maybe they've done something to Paul or maybe they haven't, depending on where it's going and let Roman show up and let the people lose their minds and fucking see that goddamn reaction.

That would be kind of like a Paul E.

old ECW surprise that he then did to death to a point where everybody expected a surprise on every show.

And it, you know, then it, man, but that would be a fucking pop to have Roman come back and declare

who's with him and who's again him somehow.

I don't, but I don't know where they're going.

They're doing a good job with it.

Who am I to say?

Would you like to go to the main event?

Yes.

Well, in that case, let's skip the rest of this shit.

No,

the main event was the King of the Ring qualifying match between Randy Orton and Tomatonga.

And

honestly, it was kind of a foregone conclusion at this point because of who the opposition was.

We weren't going to see Gunther and Tomatonga.

That would one of those

markish type dream matches that an inexperienced booker would make because, oh, we've never had that before, and it would fucking mean nothing for business and potentially hurt one or the other of two of your big fucking heel

fucking spots.

So, no, we knew, but they made it make sense also because,

you know, they gave Toma Tonga

a competitive, you know, match with Orton to try to, again, elevate him because, as we mentioned, he's still the fucking new guy.

Even if he's impressive, blah, blah, blah.

He's still the new guy, Orton's an icon.

And especially here, where

they don't just see Randy Orton all the fucking time.

He got a superstar reaction.

And

Orton's maybe the best main event worker in the business now because he gets the most out of everything.

That's the Rip Rogers in him.

And

he's not killing himself.

And he's in all the fucking main events and doing everything

that needs to be done.

And the people are going crazy.

So anyway,

boom, boom, boom.

They finally,

he fucking solo popped up and he got pickled and Tomatonga got a little schoolboy at a two count, and then Orton hit the RKO out of nowhere, big pop, one, two, three.

And then they tried to get a little heap back on Orton and Owens hits or hit the ring and Owen, Kevin Owens hit the ring and saved

Orton to keep that their friends and boom.

And that's easy to digest, easy to understand, and logically

progresses everything along instead of, you know, bringing a Zamboni into the ring and cluttering the whole goddamn thing up.

And people loved it.

Well, that was SmackDown for the people in Saudi Arabia from WWE.

And do we even know, again,

I know, well, that's been several days now.

So what were the ratings?

Did this show

do a good rating?

Hold on.

I have not looked.

So let me.

Well,

you know, while I will explain why I'm asking that question, nobody risked their goddamn life except for the people that fucked up a couple of the moves and anybody that worked with refrigerator jacks, but there was no unprofessionalism.

Nobody was hospitalized.

Nobody was busted open hard way.

Nobody was set on fire.

Nobody was thrown through various pieces of furniture and almost impaled.

And they probably had, I would say, either

three or potentially three and a half times as many people watch this program on television as the Wednesday night offering, the top offering from the other company, where a death is imminent.

Have you found the information yet?

SmackDown, May 2nd on Fox, 8 to 10 p.m.

On average, 2,147,000 viewers.

Almost exactly three times what 700,000 is, which is what they got the last couple weeks on fucking Wednesday night.

And

it was shot like a goddamn network production in a

big building.

It's not the friendliest looking building over there in Saudi Arabia for television or for it's not camera friendly.

It looks like they're in a giant spaceship hangar, which may be what they're using that thing for.

When they don't have an event in it, they're hiding their space program in it.

Hey, AEW Rampage, May 24th

on TNT.

It was a preempted airing, 6 to 7 p.m.

as WrestleNama.

So no one, hold on a preempted airing.

And let me just make this point again.

It's like government intelligence and jumbo shrimp.

It doesn't make sense together.

If you're preempted, you don't air at all.

If you air at a different time,

you are a differently scheduled airing.

Well, Friday from 6 to 7 p.m.,

on average, 222,000 viewers.

The lowest total viewership for Rampage in the show's history.

And there were two episodes with a lower key demo number, which was a 0.08.

So next time.

When do they get to hash marks?

As soon as the new renewal comes in.

And collision, just to get everything out there?

Yes, yes,

lay it all on the table.

Let it all hang out.

The day before the pay-per-view, saturday may 25th on tbs 8 to 10 p.m on tbs not tnt

on average 415 000 viewers

so 415 and 222 is 637

and what'd they do 713

Last Wednesday, that sounds like a number I remember.

7-11, 7.13, something like that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well,

now you've just thrown all kinds of 637 and i remember a one and i think it may have been a three but it could have been another one but well god damn it six hold on thinking thinking straightly 637 and 713

would be 13 would be of 13 one

1,350,000 people.

They still need another week of dynamite to get to one episode of SmackDown.

All righty.

That was the ratings report, the off-dynamite ratings report.

You know, at this point, ladies and gentlemen, I'll tell you what.

I know that most normal people, their appetites would have been ruined.

Ruined, I say, by what they had just seen.

But no.

No, mine was not because I'm a hardy individual, but also because I love steak.

And Father's Day is coming up, and little Harley Quinn has already ordered me my shipment arrived of the Omaha steaks just the other day and we almost lost them because of the power outage but thankfully they arrive not only frozen in their in hermetically sealed wrappers with the the dry ice which is another one of those hat on a hat type of phrases And they were frozen and we put them in the freezer and they stayed for the two days just gorgeous and succulent and lovely and juicy and flavorful and aromatic.

Well, you can't smell them when they're hermetically sealed and frozen.

But once you cook them, they smell like a million dollars.

Actually, no, have you ever smelled money, Brian?

You really hold it up under your nose, it stinks.

So these things smell good.

The point is, Father's Day, did I mention?

is right around the corner.

And what do you give to dad or to the man in your life that has potentially everything besides penicillin?

You give him food that he can consume off the grill.

So put a smile on the big guy's face and bring that cattle byproduct right to him, courtesy of the hand-selected gift packages, starting at just $89 over at Omahasteaks.com.

When you use the promo code JCE,

which is important to remember, you're going to get an additional discount on top of that.

Now you're almost talking free cow and free pig and free barnyard animal processed, packaged and ready to go right in front of you where you can put heat, fire, the essence of life on it, and let it sizzle until it becomes aromatic and then chew on it and swallow it like a savage.

You can pick from premium proteins like the juicy pork chops, the air-chilled chicken, or the beefy burgers.

And you know, Bri, you know what you like.

You like their big

throbbing wieners, don't you?

I like their frank footers.

Their frankfooters, Mr.

Pervert.

I don't know where you're going with this, but they have delicious jumbo franks that I highly recommend.

Throw them on the grill.

They are delicious.

There you go.

And then

you could put the franks with some beans and you'll love their franken beans.

Go to omahasteaks.com right now and use the promo code JCE to get an exclusive savings, a discount over and above the already reasonably priced food products that you will be purchasing for a memorable experience for Father's Day for the man in your life, whether he is procreated with you, whether he's shooting blanks, whatever the case, whether you're just friends and getting an occasional on a side, whatever, just give him some meat.

Who are you selling this?

Give him the meat this time.

For all of the women out there who want to recognize the man in their life, or potentially men who want to recognize them.

Why don't we talk about the men who want to recognize their fathers?

That's usually a good way to start talking about Father's Day.

You want to get your dad something nice?

What about it?

Well, let me tell you something, Daddy.

That's right, mama, brother.

I'll tell you, brother Jack Daddy.

So, regardless, and you know, women like

steak too.

They've got the bacon-wrapped fillets.

Those are succulent and juicy and tender and delectifying.

So he just, it doesn't have to be for Father's Day.

Get your wife a goddamn steak.

What are you, a prick out there?

Think that you're supposed to get all the presents on Father's Day?

Get your wife or girlfriend or daughter or niece or

other cousin, female cousin.

Get some women some steaks and things.

Future fathers.

And future father.

Well, run.

Run.

Run.

What do you run from being a future father?

Oh, stop.

I've been able to avoid it up until now.

Oh, you were saying as the name of the organization.

No,

if you have avoided becoming a father up until now, the finger hadn't been put on you.

You have not been adjudicated the loser in a DNA test, then you've escaped until now.

Get the fuck out of here.

Anyway, but if you're already a father, you're going to get some steak on Father's Day.

That's right.

And where can they get that steak, Jim?

They can go to omahasteaks.com and use the promo code JCE for, again, reasonably priced purchases with an additional discount because we know you on all these gourmet gift packages.

And boy, howdy, what about the sides?

And they got steakhouse fries are back.

We got some of the steakhouse fries.

I haven't had those yet.

How are they?

Have you had them?

Were they not in your box they're in my box I just haven't cooked them yet oh well they're goddamn good is what they are that's about the only way you can say it they're just they're just lip smacking good I had that's the first thing that I ate on the last box use ketchup

use ketchup with your fries right oh come on

what are you a savage I can say that either way

you're some kind of plebeian ketchup what do you got the taste buds of an eight-year-old you don't use ketchup with french fries?

Well, now if you're talking about the seasoned steak fries, then you got to dip them in a little ranch dressing.

Because they're aside unto themselves.

When you're just talking about some kind of cheap french fries at a ball game, I guess you could stick them in some ketchup, beaver.

I don't think it's cleaver.

I don't think there's anything wrong with ketchup.

I think it's a...

requirement for french fries and it's a requirement to get your food somehow now.

It takes.

Taste everything we're saying.

Yes, it's ketchup is a gateway condiment at best.

It'll lead you to the hard stuff, but it's pretty much a goddamn

basic fucking condiment.

Yeah, look at me.

I started with ketchup, now I'm snorting horseradish.

Well, see,

you got to take the steps.

You got to ever increase.

You go to ranch dressing, you go to the Russian dressing, you go to the horseradish, you go to the various types of spicy dips.

Chick-fil-A sauce is what I understand a lot of the the poor people are using these days when they can't afford the high-quality stuff you get on the street corner.

That is good stuff.

And of course, you could use any of this good stuff that's legally available in your grocery store for your Omaha steaks, burgers, fries, hot dogs, or jumbo franks as we call them.

And of course, hot dogs.

Steaks.

Yes.

Tell them, Jim.

Use the promo code JCE in order to make yourself happy and heavy and contented and full.

That's right.

Make yourself happy with Omaha steaks.

A happy will make you a happy.

Omahasteaks.com promo code JCE, Brian.

Well, Brian, I guess we ought to leave the Omaha steaks and giddy up on over to the King of the Ring.

That's right.

Because

it was a rip snorter.

It certainly was.

King and queen of the ring.

King and queen of the ring.

And

once again,

yes, they had a somewhat,

I want to say virgin audience, but you know what, an audience that, oh, we get two shows a year or whatever.

They're rabid.

They're there.

But they still, they didn't beat it up.

They didn't go out and be marks for themselves and say, well, since these people are going to scream for everything, we're going to give them five hours.

We're going to fucking do everything we know what what to fucking do.

They do a good professional show in three hours that your ass doesn't go to sleep when you're sitting there live and your brain doesn't go to sleep when you're watching it on television.

And they've got just enough matches to interest everybody.

They don't have to do the mega blowout.

pay-per-view card anymore because all of this is paid for.

They're making tens and hundreds of millions millions of dollars with this shit.

And they're not going to let anybody go out there and do stupid shit where somebody is paralyzed or,

you know, fucking mutilated on their television.

It's professionally shot, professionally performed for the most part, and it's only getting better.

Now that they've got Vince, and as I mentioned him before, that bucktooth crony of his, Kevin Dunn,

out of there because Vince lost his mind and Kevin never had one.

And

the difference is startling to me.

Go ahead.

A couple of things.

One, to the listeners, there are some modulation issues that we're dealing with.

We're trying to do our best to get our head wrapped around it right now.

I apologize.

I'm trying to get a service call from Spectrum if we could ever keep our electricity over here long enough.

Go ahead.

But, Jim, this is now the second rant you've done on this episode.

You know, the first one kind of just ended up being about Tony and what's going on with AEW.

Now Now it's about the production.

Is it just because of you watching the back-to-back pay-per-views?

It was a

that hard.

Well, especially having the AEW would be the second one.

It's like, oh, goddamn, now I'm down on almost everything.

But

I mean, there were issues with this program.

The first match was Becky Lynch and Liv Morgan.

Becky's wearing a tuxedo and Liv's wearing a scuba suit.

Because again, as I referenced earlier, we should take a second to recognize the damage that religious fanatics can do to their societies and make laws about what

not even people, but just one section of people can wear out in public and rest their delusional caveman bullshit.

And it didn't help because in these outfits, it looked like two drunk actresses fighting at an awards show.

And

the news has been out that Becky Lynch's contract is up and she's taking some time off.

And I know some people, oh, she's going, hey, she's not going to go to AEW because as an old friend of mine used to say, she's got a bird's nest on the ground here.

She's one of the biggest stars in the biggest company and she's probably making all the money she needs.

She's not going to fuck that up.

And Seth is still there also doing the same thing.

But

so the best person they can think of to put the belt on off Becky Lynch is Liv Morgan.

Could they not come up with an eighth-grade girls junior high school cheerleading championship belt she could wear?

Oh, it's it's

any female high school cheerleader would look like the barbarian next to Liv Morgan physically, and her acting skills would alienate Ed Wood.

So, but that's what happened with the help from Dominic.

Dominic is mad at Liv for hurting Rhea Ripley.

So when Becky's got the arm bar on Liv and is about to make her quit,

and Dominic appears at ringside, Becky gets up distracted, watching Dominic.

And then Becky and Liv have a double knockout, and Dominic slides the chair in and draws the referee.

But Liv gives Becky a kind of a sloppy DDT on the chair, and then the move off the ropes, boom, one, two, three.

So

defend Liv Morgan to me, you dirty,

dirty, stinking women's wrestling fan.

I like good women's wrestling.

I don't have a problem with Liv Morgan.

I actually think she's all right.

I don't think she's as small as you say.

There are definitely women that are smaller.

Becky's a lot skinnier.

Yeah, but at least she can talk and she's got some oomph to her.

I think

I actually haven't minded this new character they're trying to do for Liv Morgan, and now she's seducing Dominic,

which can't make mommy happy when she returns.

So I didn't have a big problem with it.

And as far as Becky Lynch and her contract, her husband just re-signed, I think I read.

I can't imagine she would even consider going anywhere else.

No, she's got a kid now.

She might just say, oh, what the fuck?

I'll just take a year off or whatever.

Who knows?

But I don't think we're going to

see her.

Well, I was about to say her versus a page, but no, she's already

nullified anyway.

Her versus whoever the top AEW woman would be by the next several months or whatever, she'd show up there, but she's not.

Anyway, then we moved on to the Intercontinental Title Three-way with Gable versus Reed versus Sami Zayn,

who came out dressed like Lawrence of Arabia.

Now, Sammy went from refusing to go to Saudi Arabia to now coming out and dressing as a native and being embraced by that.

And I know it's because

their religion was mad at his religion until something happened where they all got mad at another religion, I think.

Somebody explained it to me one time.

No, I don't know.

It could be all that or it could just be money.

Well, you know, know, he's a old Sammy.

He is a,

he wears his heart on his sleeve and he is a feeling type of individual.

But the people,

he's the most popular guy on a fucking show.

So

the point is

there anyone else in WWE on the roster who

is open about being a Muslim?

I'm not that anyone's hiding it, but I'm just anyone who actually talks about it.

He's someone who has talked about it.

So for

people over there, it's a big deal for him to be on the, I mean, MVP, I believe, but he wasn't on the show, obviously, but right, you can understand why.

But the point is, the people like him so much,

he hadn't converted to any other religion.

So,

it's all hogwash.

It's just who the who are they mad at at the moment?

This is a what the fuck,

or is the government mad at him, but the people are fine with him?

Well, that's always been the biggest problem in the Middle East.

Exactly.

People, the ranking file people could all live together and coexist and have no problems.

It's the people that are the leaders who

use propaganda, who drum up hatred because it's a necessary thing to keep yourself in power and take all the money of the people.

Those are the ones who have problems with other countries and other religions and other people and start wars.

Well, and you've just described the fucking United States starting January of 2025.

If President pig shit cons the rest of these fucking suckers again and wins our election,

then we'll be one of those countries you're just goddamn describing.

Well, back to Saudi Arabia.

And then think about this.

Who's going to be the babyfaces this time?

The United States saved the world in World War II from the evil of the fucking Nazi Germany and the goddamn other fucking now.

Who's going to save the world from the United States, Russia, and China, who are going to be the only other countries that can can stomach associating with us if that fucking criminal pig gets elected again.

So then,

Britain, start arming yourself now.

Canada, somebody needs to fucking step up because somebody's going to have to kick our ass in four or five years.

Anyway, back to Saudi Arabia at the present time.

So.

This,

it was a three-way.

You can't describe it.

There's no continuity, but the crowd was going batshit.

And all three of these guys can work.

They do good things.

They don't overdo most of it.

And, you know, but at the same time, Bronson Reed, who I liked at the start, but he seemed to be in the way of this.

The issue that we care about is Sammy and Gable.

Reed never gets a promo anymore, never gets really any big wins.

He comes out and splashes people ever so often.

He does good shit.

He could be a monster heel, but they haven't done that yet.

So,

you know, that was what this was.

But as far as wrestling action goes, you know, it was fine.

And then they told the story, which was

Gable got...

you know, got up in Otis' face telling him interfere when Bronson Reed was vulnerable and then when Sammy was vulnerable.

Otis didn't want to hit Sammy, but all this was in front of the referee because it's no DQ, right?

So finally, Gable holds Sammy, and Otis won't swing.

And then Gable chews him out, and the match just stops.

While Gable's yelling at Otis, and then he slaps him.

And he holds Sammy, and Otis swings, but Sammy ducks, and Otis levels Gable.

And then Sammy hits kick on Bronson Reed, one, two, three.

Yay, yay, the people love Sammy.

But so Bronson Reed was there just to get beat.

But the issue that everybody wants to see is Sammy and

Gable.

And is Sammy going to try to talk

Otis away from Gable

so he can see the light?

But at least we know exactly what's going on and who's on whose side.

Have we ever seen Bronson Reed win a match?

Well, we say every once in a while he beats nobody with the splash, but as far as in any kind of

major situation, no,

he's not been there.

And he can't talk for himself, apparently, because we've heard him in the past, and it wasn't good because he was trying to talk politely.

He's a big, goddamn

ruffian.

He ought to sound like it.

But, you know, if he had a manager or something,

boom.

But that's, you know, so that was what it was, but it wasn't bad.

Now that I've seen real bad, I have a new respect for it.

Did you enjoy

the VTR of the WWE female talent at the Women in Sports panel

in Saudi Arabia with their female athletes where everybody, all of their local female professional athletes were wearing beekeeper outfits.

What the fuck is the matter with these people?

Again, it's one thing

to run a show in another land.

It's another thing to be paid to be a propaganda machine and to be part of what is an attempt to legitimize Saudi Arabia on the world stage.

for sports and entertainment,

while everyone takes that money and overlooks the conditions of a lot of the people there.

Again, it's just, it looks, but I'll tell you, the one good thing about this, if somebody came out with a goddamn Playboy magazine that was only as risque as it was in 1957, they'd make $100 million in that country.

Because if they don't even get to see people's earlobes and fucking ankles.

That person would be dragged through the streets.

That person would be dragged through the streets and killed.

i bet you 97 of the population would carry that person through the streets on their shoulders no they wouldn't because 97 will be afraid of the two percent at the top and the one percent that's minding their own business you know what about if that 97 just said y'all you prince

saudi cum lately or whatever your goddamn name is and your brother

magna cum laude

and fuck all y'all we're taking this place over so we can all get some pussy And they could kick the ass out of those fucking 3%.

Start a goddamn overthrow of your government over there, Saudi Arabia.

Hold on, no, no, no.

No, no, no, no.

You can't.

You can't.

You can't call for the overthrow of somebody else's government?

That would not be a good idea.

That may be all sorts of problems with

all sorts of State Departments.

Well, in that case, if we're still on the air, goddamn, go over there and throw rocks through their windows then.

Like Ernest T.

Bass.

But there's a reason why, you know, other than Israel, there are no democracies over there.

It's a part of the world where democracies have never really had an opportunity.

And the people in charge certainly don't want to change that.

If you're a king or a prince, if you are an Ayatollah, whatever it may be,

a queen, the queen of Jordan I see on TV a lot.

You don't want that to change.

You don't want all of a sudden, okay, we're going to get rid of the monarch.

We're going to let people vote and decide their own rules.

Yeah, the fucking answer to, well, who died and made you king?

My father.

Well, fuck your father and fuck you.

Yeah.

We've talked more Middle East politics in this review so far.

Well, now I'm going to talk of some more politics right now.

The politics of slapping a goddamn bitch that's reckless with people's bodies.

Because here came, speaking of queens, the queen of the ring final, refrigerator jacks against lyric Valedictorian.

You say her name.

I don't have it in front of me, so I'm trying to do it based on what's in my head.

It's Lyra

Valkyria.

Not Valkyrie.

I'm not worried for it.

Valkyrie.

Well, it's very curious how she got that name.

And do you think any fucking 11-year-olds are going to be able to pronounce that?

Anyway,

she came out in a black bird suit with an eight-foot wingspan.

And then here came the

deflated parade balloon that is the refrigerator.

And so the finish of this thing, again, I'm not going to

dignify the match because it was what a plowboy Frazier working with a newcomer that nobody's seen before.

So there's no way that poor old Lyria

is going to look good in this because this thing is immobile.

But they're doing the deal where Jax is on the buckle as going for the bonsai, but Lyria tries to powerbomb her off.

And

this is what I wrote.

In capital letters, by the way, the fat, fucking, careless, dangerous bitch

just landed all the weight of her giant ass on this girl's stomach.

Fuck this douchebag.

Somebody needs to beat her ass.

There may need to be some edits for YouTube, ladies and gentlemen, some bleeps here and there.

If you're wondering what was said, go download the podcast.

But, you know, for anyone who thinks I'm mad at the rock, we have found someone who Jim is mad at.

No, this is unnecessary.

I mean, you could have fucking caved that girl's rib cage in and punctured her goddamn lung.

Unless visually, Jax only weighs 160 pounds.

And just because all of it is goddamn blubber that doesn't weigh as much as muscle, it's ridiculously deceiving.

No, fuck, that was too much weight to land on this poor girl.

And I know the firmness quotient of the WWE rings in the corner.

Fuck that.

There's no need for that.

And if somebody's talking to her and she's still doing it,

then in that case,

I think she needs fired.

It looked like Yokozuna doing a bonsai drop on a jobber he was mad at.

Yes, and he only did a couple of those in a number of years in the company.

And I was there for most of his matches.

And that first one that everybody likes to replay was...

I believe that was before I got there, but it was because the guy in some way pissed off Fuji.

And you don't piss off Mr.

Fuji.

But no, this is several times in a week with his fucking

Will to Beast.

And then she did a promo after that.

It's like they put Sable's brain inside a sperm whale.

It's just drone monotonistic.

And I'm going to do this to you.

The fuck.

Well, now they have their

queen of the ring now have their King Mabel moment.

And now the problem is, is because they get title matches, it's not bad in the case of the men's division, but now we've got to look at the refrigerator, potentially hospitalize, paralyze,

mortalize

whoever the champion will be at that point.

Who are the champions?

Liv Morgan and who?

Oh, wouldn't that be great?

Liv Morgan versus the refrigerator.

You know what?

Liv Morgan would kill refrigerator Jax.

She'd get stuck in her throat and choke her to death.

Who is the other one?

I don't know who the other one is.

I can't remember anymore.

I can't remember.

I don't care anymore.

I don't care who wins that belt.

I never did.

That's the way I've always felt.

Get out of my way.

Pass me by.

Whatever the fuck.

What do you think?

Whatever the fuck, yes.

What do you think, Brian Last?

The over and under is on the number of internal injuries that the refrigerator is going to cause during her stint as the queen of the ring.

You know, the old over-under.

Is it going to be four broken ribs?

More than that, or less than that?

Is it going to be one ruptured spleen?

More of that?

Is it going to be seven spinal fusion surgeries?

More of that or less of that?

What do you think?

Boy, just based on what she did to Lyra Valkyria, Valkaria, whatever her name is, it doesn't matter.

It looked like she squashed her ribs.

That poor girl.

She probably wants to show she's a good team player.

She's happening to be on the main roster.

Sure, I'll take it.

Fucking internal organs all burst at the same time.

Yes.

But I'm telling you, we can make some money on this.

We go to DraftKings, our official partners of the NBA friends, because if they're taking, if they're taking the wagers, if they're taking the over the under,

over the under, if they're taking the over-under

on a variety of items like that, how many ribs do you have in the human body?

What do you got?

You got 12 ribs, six on each side?

Oh, look at you, Mr.

Goddamn biologist.

Oh, no, no, I'm sorry.

I was getting a flood of emails.

I'm a very busy, busy man.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying?

All sorts of things just in front of me.

Then you are exactly the fucking person I want playing against me on the new DraftKings Pick Six app because you don't know shit from apple butter.

I know.

I'll kick your ass on the DraftKings Pick Six app.

Well, I'm telling you right now, if you go and download it right now, that new DraftKings Pick Six app, and you can find a way on there to tell me whether or not that Refrigerator Jax is going to break more or less than...

a dozen ribs in a human body, then you might win some money.

But if you can't, you won't.

But you can talk about the NBA.

They're going to put the belt on her.

They're going to put the belt on.

Listen, The Rock came back, tried to stuff himself into a WrestleMania main event.

Look at what happened there.

Okay, then

gave himself a belt during Muhammad Ali's induction and then inducted his grandmother as the main eventer into the Hall of Fame.

The final person they inducted this year.

And then all of a sudden, his daughter's all over NXT TV.

i'm sure she's a wonderful

should be on tv you can go right now and download the new draft kings pick six app and you can do the over and under on how many sperm cells is the rock gonna freeze right now cryogenically so that they can be hatched and become wwe hall of famers in 2058

Three or more or less.

Doesn't matter.

He'll lie about it and say it was the first time he did it every time he does it.

Well, and if, you know, as a matter of fact, if that was the first time he did it and he was able to save that, then you could have a number one

numbered graded sperm cell from the first sperm that the rock ever emitted.

And that would be a collector's item.

But we couldn't sell that on the new DraftKings Pick 6 app right now

using the code JCE for a chance at huge cash prizes.

No.

We couldn't.

I don't think so.

We couldn't do that at all.

Let's get back to the NBA.

They're still playing.

That's right.

They're crushing, from what I understand, they're crushing dynamite.

And their ratings are also down.

And they're going to crush dynamite.

And then TBS is going to, TNT is going to lose the NBA.

And then

there's going to be a lot of changes made.

But rebounds, points, assists, and more.

All those statistics on the table to pick between two and six players and choose if they have more or less of those various things that they have.

Huge cash prizes is in big print here.

So you can potentially win some of those.

Download the new DraftKings Pick Six app right now.

Use the code JCE,

and the crown will be yours.

That's right.

And in fact, usually that is where the trigger is.

Yes, I was waiting for.

Yeah, I was getting it.

I say the crown is yours.

and then hold on suddenly pismo comes in with this goddamn

drivel he's got jerome come on in come on in jerome hold on jerome is gonna bring it all home momentarily

he's getting slower these days well you know sometimes he's not prepared here he comes call 1-800 gambler 18 and over in most eligible states age varies by jurisdiction eligibility restrictions apply pick six not available in all states including but not limited limited to connecticut and new york for up-to-date list of states visit dkng.co slash pick six states void where prohibited see terms at pick six dot draft kings com slash promos

well there it is that says it pretty plainly and and cohesively and concisely doesn't it speaking of bring it on home bring it to jerome are you a fan of bow diddley at all

of course and the bow diddly beat that's right of course i am oh bow diddley that that basically is the basis of all modern rock and roll music.

Well, that's based.

You know what?

Lyrically, it's the basis of all hip-hop in terms of bragging about yourself and making it all about yourself and talking about yourself.

Well, and besides that, it's the basis of all Tom Boogaloo Shaft, Superstar Billy Graham, American Dream Dusty Rhodes, and on and on interviews, not to mention the Dream Machine Troy Graham.

That's right.

That was Bo Diddley lines.

Well, you can know Diddly, or you can know plenty about sports with DraftKings.

One more time, what's that promo code?

Let's get out of here.

I thought we were done with that.

JCE.

All right.

Once the Jerome finishes, we're usually on to different items.

Well, back to Saudi Arabia.

Oh, Bo Diddley.

Now we come to the King of the Ring final.

And this honestly may have been my favorite thing of the weekend

because

it actually looked the most like a professional wrestling match of anything that took place on either program, to be honest with you.

Two grown adult men, pro wrestlers, tough tie-ups, aggression,

great fundamentals, not rushing, the crowd going nuts.

Gunther versus Randy Orton for the King of the Ring final.

A perfect match is not possible.

And I'm not saying this was anywhere close to perfect, but

it kind of was, even though it wasn't the most exciting match of the weekend,

it was the closest thing to a perfect match of the weekend because a perfect pro wrestling match would be something

that primarily the crowd went nuts for outside the ring and the seats while inside the ring,

it would be going all the way through with nothing looking phony or not showing obvious cooperation that slapped you in the face or doing something

that made no sense just because you can do that move.

It's not a million moves and it's not broken furniture everywhere.

It's can you go start to finish

working a contest that

people

you can see through anything with a microscope, but that reasonably

tells a story with no obvious cooperation and and get the people,

and they did.

Can you disagree with my diagram of what the goal of this thing is to do to begin with,

this thing of ours?

I agree with what you said.

I agree with this match, and I'm not as crazy about Randy Orton's matches as you or typically anyone in the business is.

You know, as a fan, I don't appreciate it to the same level, but I thought this was a great match.

Well, it's just that you can

to the professional trained eye, I guess,

great actors appreciate great actors, or great surgeons can say, oh, look, he didn't nick the fucking hydraulics to the penis there, or whatever.

So, people in the business, you can

just the

he takes the basic things of the business, but he makes everything make something

or mean something, whether the facial expression or the move that's taken or given, or the

when to pick the people up and give them the drop on the table, and when to slow them down and get a chin lock because they can't go crazy forever, or they won't have enough breath left to go crazy when you want them to go crazy.

That type of thing.

And Gunther, I said this before, you know, he

is a Gunther is a perfect wrestler in that he never does anything that he shouldn't do.

If he was the person that he is purported to be,

this is the way he would work and react and wrestle and

Zabada.

And you had Randy selling like Ricky Morton fighting from underneath and his pained facials.

And you had Gunther even, he at one point went for a splash off the top and bobbled with his foot, but still hit it.

And then Orton, for the first time that I can remember on this run,

hit an RKO, but he couldn't

cover.

He couldn't capitalize.

He crawled over, but Gunther had rolled away.

So even the RKO

couldn't put Gunther away.

I mean, they were really building the thing.

And then finally, they built to the fucking table drops.

And that fucking thing wasn't going to break.

And then again,

Orton

slipped a crab and hit an RKO and then got a two count.

And that's the, again, the first time anybody's kicked out, much less the first time that it

didn't work, right?

And then

boom, boom, boom, Orton's shocked, like, what the fuck?

And Gunther got the crick, the crick, the quick crucifix roll-up, one, two, three,

and

they made it all the way to the finish before they had a fuck up because Orton's shoulders were down when the referee started counting it.

That was the finish, but in some way, his weight overbalanced, his shoulder was up.

The referee just counted anyway.

But you could see it on the camera shot, and then you could actually see,

you know, on

they tried to stay away from it on the replay, but you could tell.

So,

I mean,

shit like that happens.

You can't, I know people are going to say, well, how the fuck didn't he know his shoulder wasn't down?

You can, goddamn, when you're cranked up upside down with your arms behind you like that and your weight goes over, you can, something can be raised without you knowing it.

So

I don't think it was Orton's fault just as much as gravity, but they did come back later on in the show and have Triple H acknowledge it and that the referee's decision is final.

But one would think that he said that Gunther or that Orton would want another shot against Gunther.

But that's

the only mistake they really made in this fucking thing.

And it was two men, two stars, two distinct personalities fighting for something

in an athletic contest that you could get lost in and you could take the ride with them instead of these children and their toys.

So, I mean, that match would have worked in any territory, I think, in any

era, don't you?

I think so.

Good match.

And, you know, Guther is one of the very few people you could say from almost the moment he got onto the main roster, they have not fucked up anything with his shooting.

He is strong.

You forget that he lost the Intercontinental Belt, yet you remember that he held that belt forever.

And now he's about to get set up for a title match.

Is it going to be him and Cody?

Yeah.

Or is it going to be him and,

you know, they teased on Monday night, him and whoever is the champion at that point, Priest or McIntyre.

But him and Cody's the intriguing one with a build.

Yeah, that's the one I want to see.

I mean, they may go the other way just because they don't want to beat Gunther.

And I'm not.

I'm not rooting for Gunther to do any jobs except to Cody because I'd like to see the match.

I think it would draw money.

I think they could get a fucking trilogy out of something with Gunther and Cody.

The promos and the matches would be good enough and strong enough that they could do that to

stretch out to WrestleMania next year on the main pay-per-views.

And,

you know, and then hopefully the Rock will come back and do the right thing.

You know, we'll see.

But anyway, I applaud them for the match.

Let me ask you this.

Cody Rhodes recently did an interview I saw quoted in a few places saying that he needs a good old classic manager.

Also,

Arne Anderson,

even though I think we talked about this a while ago, he just announced that he has left AEW officially.

Ah.

Do you think Cody's going to ask to have Arne as his manager again?

Should he have a manager, and does Cody need a manager?

Well, and a lot of people tweeted me that because, oh, look,

I didn't see the context of the entire interview that that line was taken from.

So I didn't know whether he was even

just joshing like he told a story about something to say, maybe that's what I need to do or whatever.

It will not be me, for those of you who asked on Twitter, to your question, will it be Arne?

You know, the problem is, is that the last time we saw Arne,

he was heavier than he used to be.

And I don't, as a baby face, I don't think

there is something for him to do that makes him indispensable.

Now, do they introduce him

for a short-term thing, a la of what we try to do with Jose Litherio and Sean Michaels, but Sean

didn't really like Jose and didn't like the idea and buried the whole thing.

But do the people want want to sympathize or get sympathy on

Arne Anderson in this day and age?

I'm not sure.

I think

maybe there might be something more to it as a heel, but also if we were all a little younger,

I don't know that it would fit with Cody right now.

As a person to give advice on an intermittent basis, there may be something there.

Well, what do you think?

Do you see?

No, I mean, that's the problem.

We saw it.

We saw it in AEW, and I have no doubt that WWE would do it better and have it on TV better.

But still, Arn was a babyface manager whispering things in Cody's ear, holding a clipboard, and losing his balance.

And

again, unless you're doing the Jose Litherio thing, like you just said, I don't see much point to it.

You do have to wonder if Arne's going to be back in the WWE fold, though.

You know, AEW, real quick, I'll just say this, because it came out this week too, Mark Henry.

His contract expired.

So for the first time now, we're getting to the point where veterans that were hired not necessarily to be wrestlers are having their contracts come up and are leaving the company.

Well,

here's the thing in this case.

Why would you, and I,

I like both guys and certainly as talents in the past, but why would you re-sign either one of those guys to a contract making any legitimate amount of money, considering that we haven't seen either one of them in months and months and months and months?

But they're still getting paid regularly every week.

Do they do anything?

And we just don't see it.

I don't know about that.

So

Tony has

hired a bunch of new people

that has made big news for all the money he's supposedly paid, O Cody and Mercedes and

BMW and whatever.

So he's got to save something somewhere.

What are these people even doing?

Maybe they like the idea.

Yeah, Tony, just send me a check every week and I'll never see any of you.

I'll never leave my house or do anything.

But they can't expect that forever if that's what they've been doing.

Hey, I'm seeing another report here, actually, as we are recording.

This is on the Wrestling Observer newsletter site.

Jake Hager's AEW contract has reportedly expired.

Oh, thank God.

So it's interesting, though, if you think about Arne Anderson, Mark Henry, and Jake Hager, especially Hager as an active wrestler who was there as a buddy of Jericho's.

That may be, I don't want to put a number on it, but that's probably a significant savings right there.

Those three salaries based on what Tony pays people.

What is seven figures a year?

I was going to say that's over a million a year.

I stopped myself because I'm trying to.

Think out loud.

I know what a few of the agents there have gotten.

So I have a range for Arne.

I could put a range for Mark Henry and Hager.

I'm sure he got a very nice steel to start.

He ought to be tied inside a fucking electric range and fucking baked.

I'm just glad we never have to see him again.

He may have been the worst former shooter in the history of wrestling that I've seen so far.

Anyway, are you ready for the main event of King of the Ring

in Saudi Arabia?

Yes, and I was looking forward to it the day of too.

The WWE title Logan Paul against Cody Rhodes, the American Nightmare.

And they had the Saudis singing the song.

So I said, music is a universal language.

It brings all of us together.

And

while I said that Orton and Gunther was the

the best wrestling match from a wrestling match standpoint of the weekend,

this was the most exciting.

And those two can be different things if you have

ability to think beneath the surface.

And Logan Paul is a prodigy.

He's still green a little bit, though.

He's still got a bobble every now and then.

And there were some things here that were more modern in nature, but this was the most exciting match of the weekend.

And as I said, Orton and Gunther was the

best, the best executed wrestling match of the weekend.

Hey, if I can ask you a quick question, because we have both raved about Logan Paul since he first showed up, and he continues to impress.

Some listeners or some, just, I guess, WWE fans I've seen on Twitter say, how could you praise him so much?

He rehearses his matches in advance.

He practices his matches.

I don't know how true that is, but...

If that is true, does that make it even more impressive in a way that he's able to do it so it doesn't look like that

well for one thing that i promise you they're not rehearsing those matches either in their entirety or at full fucking speed

because cody wouldn't go for it and the office would not allow one of their top guys to do this in front of no people it

There's a difference between rehearsing and walking through.

And Ronda Rousey, because he is new and different and obviously, especially on this last run, didn't give a shit, didn't want to be there.

We've heard that confirmed from inside and nobody was particularly happy to have to deal with her.

But rehearsing, I can see Cody and Logan Paul spending several days in a warehouse or several days at developmental or somewhere going out early that day and walking through it in terms of you do this and that and the other.

They're not taking all those bumps multiple times they're not executing all those moves

and

so yes i would

there's it's a great art to being able to call a match on in the ring on the fly but you can't expect logan paul due to the way he got in the business and the

number of matches he's had to do that But what is amazing is that his aptitude,

the most important part is he's a personality.

He can talk, he's a star, he gets over,

and he's an incredible athlete who can mimic these moves.

And you put him in with a good worker who can lead the match, Cody Rhodes,

and he looks very polished.

And that's the essence of the wrestling business.

You find an attraction and you figure out a way to get a good match out of him.

But Logan Paul, because of the

level that he's

taken to this at,

both physical and the verbal aspect and

the mental, the way to think about it, and know kind of instinctively what to do, he's probably the best example

that I can think of of taking somebody from either another sport or another field of endeavor and turning them into a wrestler that can draw money and have matches of this quality, whether rehearsed or not.

Can you think of somebody else that's been better, quicker?

I mean, the only people that really are on that list are guys like Kurt Angle,

but I think Logan Paul is exceptional.

Logan Paul is better at this point than Kurt Angle was because I was working with Kurt when

he'd had six months and a year worth of matches and his promos weren't at Logan Paul's level.

Well, the other thing, too, is Logan Paul is only 29 years old.

You think about people who were main eventing during the Monday Night Wars and both companies, they were guys in their late 30s.

He still has a way to go.

He still has a ways to go, and he's getting better.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, so anyway, I think that

the rehearsal thing at.

Try to find somebody else out there.

Rehearse them for six fucking weeks and see if they can pull this off.

But anyway, they had a good match.

They did a lot of modern stuff.

They had the cutter on the desk.

They,

you know, got the big two counts.

But

the thing that it was on Twitter, and I know you had to have seen it, but

the most amazing thing of this match to me was the 360-plus degree jib shot of Logan Paul splash off the top rope through the desk on Cody.

Yeah.

I was, I mean, this is, this is art now.

It's cinema.

I don't even know.

You can't, can you have that artistic a shot in basketball or football?

Is this

something that, I mean, they're, they're going to be getting the best camera and production people that just want to do,

you know, an homage to their profession by going and doing this type of art with their goddamn television now.

Yeah, other athletes can't set up their high spots with the cameramen.

Well, there you go.

But now we've so this is going to be a place where you're going to get the best and brightest of the Carl Fruns of the camera world.

But no, he climbs up to the top.

They've got the jib ready to go.

It spins completely around him.

You see all the sides of the arena.

And then back to where it started in time for him to do the splash onto the desk.

Holy shit.

And then he rolls Cody and gets a two count.

Okay, so, so

but goddamn, but I wrote P.S.

Fuck Kevin Dunn.

Can you imagine them trying that?

The camera would have probably fucking knocked one of them out.

Anyway, they did a ref bump, and so Cody could hit

a finish, but the referee was down and there was no count.

And then

Logan Paul hit Cody with a nutshot and got the brass knucks out, but that's where the

special guest ring announcer Saudi Arabian celebrity fellow tripped Logan Paul.

And he was involved in one of the shows there last year.

I can't remember.

He's a big comedian or something.

Apparently, they allow certain people to laugh in that country.

At least they got that going for him.

Is it allowable for a woman to laugh?

In a crowded room?

I don't know.

But I guess it's required if it's a man telling a joke.

They have to, whether it's funny or not.

I don't know.

But anyway, Logan Paul kicks him off, but then swings at Cody.

But Cody blocks it and says, I'm Cody Rhodes, bitch,

and hits him with three crossroads: one, two, three.

And this, again, great finish.

Gunther and Orton, the best match.

This was the most exciting match.

It was still under 25 minutes, bell-to-bell.

And the total pay-per-view was two hours and 50 minutes.

Professional,

slick,

not amateurish, and unending, and never relenting.

I'm sorry.

I have to be honest.

And we talked about how the WWE sucked, in the words of our friend MJF, Donkey Dicks,

when Vince was doing all his screwy shit and L.A.

Knight was the head of a male modeling agency.

But they have turned this shit around, and

it's still not what wrestling I like,

but it goddamn doesn't insult anybody's intelligence or the profession.

And it's not, it's making a fortune.

And they're not killing themselves to do it.

I can't, you know, I'd love to pick this modern shit apart.

And it's still fairly boring.

But, you know, all the things that I said also apply that are good about it, too.

All right.

And that was King of the Ring and Queen of the Ring.

King and Queen of the Ring, in fact.

Yes, the King of the Ring and the Queen of the Ring.

The King and the Queen of the Ring.

And you know what you ought to do, Brian, don't you?

What I should do right now?

Everybody should do right now is get on their telephone and call somebody

and tell them.

That the big, bad, nasty, all-friends wrestling promotion is going down to defeat at the hands of the giants of the industry, the WWE.

That's what you ought to do.

You ought to call somebody and tell them.

Or maybe you ought to call the authorities and report Tony Khan.

Child Protective Services could come and take Tony away from Shad.

Shad's obviously,

he's tortured Tony mentally in some kind of way.

So they could use the telephone

to report to the authority.

You could use your telephone to stay in touch with your loved ones.

You can use your telephone as a lifeline to the outside world when you don't have electricity.

You can use your telephone, Brian, for a variety of things, but you know what it's going to do, don't you?

I'll tell you what it's going to do, because you might not know.

It's going to cost you through the ass.

That's what it's going to do.

All these phone plans, with the talking and the texting and the dataing, well, they charge a fortune, except for our friends at Men Mobile.

They don't charge a fortune.

They charge a pittance, Brian.

A mere bag of shells, $15 a month.

What else can you name that is so important to your life and livelihood, to your existence on this planet that you can get for $15 a month, Brian?

Netflix?

How much is that now?

But now that's only one network.

You can't call people on Netflix.

You can only watch them and you can't tell them what to do.

If you've got a Mint Mobile plan, you can call people and tell them what to do.

See there?

And those phone lines don't charge near as much per minute as they used to, where you call people and tell them what to do.

But you're starting out at 15 bucks a month with Mint Mobile on the three-month plan, $15, $30, $45.

See, 15 times 3 is $45.

That's That's what three months will cost you.

$15 a month.

But you're getting unlimited amounts of the things that people get cell phones for.

The talking and the texting and the high-speed dataing.

You've got all that going for you.

And

they're not going to say, now, wait a minute.

We've made a mistake here.

You talked on the phone way too much.

We're going to charge you $162 instead of $15.

They're not going to do that because it's unlimited, Brian.

You know what unlimited means, don't you?

That means there's no limit on it.

No limit.

You can talk all day and then talk a little longer.

Talk all night and talk a little stronger.

That's what you can do with Mint Mobile.

And you want to know where you can go to get this, Brian.

I know

you're salivating to find out.

Let me just tell me.

I want to know.

Just say it, man.

Say it.

You go to mintmobile.com/slash JCE.

very important slashing JCE,

and you're going to get three months of unlimited wireless planning, even plotting for $15 a month, mintmobile.com slash JCE,

and you can cut your wireless bill to $15 a month because some people are taking these coat hangers and just

cutting their own throats because they're spending so much money.

But now you can cut the wires around your wireless bill,

If that makes any sense.

Did that make sense?

Makes no sense whatsoever.

Well, it makes no sense to spend too much money for your phone.

$15 a month

at Munt Mobile.

That's right.

Yes.

Yes, this month or any month and Mint Mobile.

This month or any month, ladies and gentlemen, go to mintmobile.com slash JCE.

And that $45 upfront payment obviously is required because if you're trying to save money and get shit this cheap, you're obviously a fly-by-the-night fucking hustler who will probably run out on this.

So $45 upfront payment required.

That's $15 a month for new customers on the first three-month plan only.

Speeds slower above 40 GB on the unlimited plan.

Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply, but you can see Mint Mobile for all those details.

And then just give them your 15 bucks and shut up.

That's right.

Mint Mobile, promo code JCE.

That's what I just said.

What in the world is going on, by the way, over there at the Arcadian Vanguard Network this week?

Are you still doing programs even though I've had no electricity?

We are still doing programs every single day.

There is something going up.

On the Arcadian Vanguard Podcast Network, get information about all the shows on Twitter at Super Podcasts or on Facebook at facebook.com slash Arcadian Vanguard.

Of course, The Wrestling News.

Each and every day, get your wrestling news for free directly from the WrestlingNews.com or download Arcadian Vanguard's The Wrestling News, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

No opinion, no conjecture, no clickbait, no paywall, just the wrestling news.

Also, want to make mention of shut up and wrestle with Brian Solomon.

He recently had a tremendous two-part look at his interview with Roddy Piper from 2006.

Hear that today and so much more.

Suawpod.com, Oak for Shut Up and Wrestle with Brian Solomon, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

And of course, the 605 Super Podcast, the

Mothership.

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

Have you heard the Sue the Shooter segment on the Funniest Moments Volume 3 Omnibus?

Hear more comedy like that on the 605 Super Podcast, the mothership!

It's still going.

Can you hear that?

Yes, just faintly.

All right, well, the time that we have all waited for has finally come because we get to talk about this so that then we can forget it for the rest of of our lives.

I prefaced earlier in this program with my thoughts on this pay-per-view event.

Brian, while I preface this again, can you look up and see what was on the hour and a half long pre-show that we didn't see

before this four and a half, a four-hour and 32-minute pay-per-view that we did see?

And I got to give it to the people in Las Vegas or wherever they came from,

wherever they converged upon the poor city of Las Vegas, Sin City, from

whatever points they came from, they lapped this shit up.

They loved a lot of it.

Then they sat slackjawed and watched some other parts of it, but they stayed to the end just for

endurance alone.

You got to give the crowd something because how do you sit through

six straight hours of car wrecks and chaos and mayhem involving people in a lot of cases you obviously don't give a shit about

because you don't peep when they come out, but when they nearly die,

you react.

How can you sit through this for six fucking hours?

And they were real hot early.

And again, they had some good action, but, you know, you brought it up with WWE before.

If you're screaming non-stop, eventually that stops.

I mean, we never saw a Beatles concert at the height of Beatle Mania go longer than like a half hour, 45 minutes.

And then they didn't need to.

They didn't need to.

And they were gone, and no one heard them anyway.

And here,

you know, the fans are really hot and really into it.

This is an AEW audience.

They drew a nice house, but they fucking blew their load within the first hour.

And then they just didn't want to leave and go home to their wife.

But now, hold on.

Then they still, if I have a good point there.

But if it's Danielson,

at the end of the show, they were still reacting to shit and they reacted to near death of anybody because I think that's what it's a race car audience now.

They want to see somebody hit the wall.

But if it's a personality that they really like and respect, they will still react to things that they do.

But otherwise, they just want to see

the meaningless video game shit.

And that's what limits them

to not only this audience that they've got right now, but probably less in the future.

Because

how many times can you see people literally almost die, be set on fire,

and then be injured and be out of action?

What are you following this shit with?

It's insane.

The first thing that's going to be.

They never follow it with story.

They never follow it with good story as part of the problem.

So people like the matches.

People want to see the car crash of the anarchy in the arena match, no matter who's in it.

They just want to see that shit show.

Yes, and you can only show people so much shit before they need some new shit to look at.

And

where are you going to go?

You asked about the pre-show or the buy-in, as they call it.

I actually did see these matches.

I had them on mute, but I had them on in the background.

Deanna Perazzo defeated Thunder Rosa 10 minutes and 15 seconds.

And the acclaimed and Billy Gunn defeated the Cage of Agony, which I guess is what they call it when Brian Cage teams up with the Gates of Agony.

Oh, God.

11 minutes, 45 seconds.

I saw Max Caster's promo.

He grew a mustache, and he now calls himself the greatest wrestler of all time.

Okay,

good babyface moves there, both of them.

And that was the buy-in.

That was the thing.

Well, how did they make that last an hour and a half?

Well, no, there was also a lot of Renee and RJ and Jeff Jarrett in a panel or on a panel discussing how great the event was going to be.

They were the Todd Pettingle and Stephanie Wyand and Jeff Jarrett of AEW.

All right.

Well, then the first official match on the actual pay-per-view was the National Intercontinental Drift Championship,

where Will Ostrich gets to beat Roddy Strong so he can have a belt now because they spent a lot of money on Will, so he's got to have a belt.

And Don Fallus was on color.

And

again, you can't,

they worked hard.

Roderick Strong might be the best in-ring guy on the roster, just performing wrestling, but his booking,

and the people love Will,

and that's going to happen until the booking makes it too confusing if it's not already for him to draw any kind of money.

You got the top heel manager on color, Don Fallus, but he's managing

or usually manages or is supposed to be the manager of the babyface.

And he's wondering why the heel seconds, Tabin and Bennett, are allowed to be at ringside for Roddy, who's the heel in this match.

And they still still have never explained any of this.

Why is it happening?

And the opening move, they almost killed Ostrich

because

they go to fight the first match of the night.

They go to fight on the floor within minutes, seconds.

And then suddenly they just draw the referee and Tavin and Bennett jump in.

And they get

Will up on, I guess it was Bennett's shoulders.

And Tavin rolls in the ring and hits the ropes next to the referee whose back is turned,

and then dives or tries to dive

over the top rope.

They were going to give Will

the Road Warriors doomsday device as an interference spot over the top rope on the floor.

But Tavin got stuck on the top rope and came short.

Ostrich went with the bump like he was going to take it anyway.

So

he managed to give himself the move and

because it was all fucked up, he landed on his fucking face,

head and face, on the floor.

And you knew he landed in that general area, but you weren't exactly sure because the way it was shot, it wasn't a clear view of him hitting the ground.

So you didn't know how fucked up his neck could be.

Well, the announcers in front of him, Tony, exclaimed like he thought that he had just broken his neck.

And then it said, I thought he just broke his neck.

Which is what made me think he was fine as soon as I heard Shivani say that.

Well, I thought he just broke his neck.

It was close.

What the fuck?

Why would you do that for an interference spot?

Why was he supposed to get back up and win the match?

What the fuck?

Again, a minute and a half, two minutes into a match, however early it was.

It was the beginning of the match.

Yes.

And then they have some more matches, and then Tabin and Bennett draw the referee again.

And Wardlow comes in and grabs Will and is going to give him a power bomb.

And the referee turned around and saw him about to pick him up and just stopped him and told him, You got to leave.

That's not a DQ.

For once, this wasn't even a no-DQ match.

So then

he kicks the fucking Wardlow out and the referee is going to eject all the heels and it gives Ostrich an excuse to dive off the top rope and do a spinning

pike position thing on everybody.

And then they started having a match again.

And then it was like two video game characters where they would just do big moves and

nobody would sell anything.

It looked good.

It looked athletic, but nobody was registering anything for more than five seconds, and it just went back and forth with no

logical continuity.

And then they had

the first of the match, they had the big floor fight, then they almost killed the guy with the Stooges' interference.

And then later in the match, they were doing rope breaks.

So

big strikes and kicks back and forth.

Nobody bumped.

And then

while Roddy was upset, was

Roddy was having the referee check him

for some reason, you know, because he was down and had taken a bump.

Suddenly, he's finally selling.

And Will was upset for some reason that the guy that he had been trying to kick the shit out of for 20 minutes is now down and injured.

And then Don was telling Will to use the tiger driver on him.

Why wouldn't he just go over and try to cover him since the referee is trying to determine whether he's still conscious or not?

Because this is a new version of the sympathetic baby face like Adam Page.

Oh, fuck.

Will Ospreay is a killer.

He's a grinder.

He's someone who goes out there and gets it.

However, he also fears for the mortality of his opponent.

Well, while Don's telling him to use the tiger driver,

Will goes over and grabs him in it, but he won't pick him up and do it.

So suddenly, Roddy, who was unconscious and being checked to whether he could continue

after he was picked up and grabbed in this hold,

suddenly gave Will three big moves at 100 miles an hour and got a two count.

And I wrote, this is ridiculous.

And then instantly, Ostrich is back at 100%.

And he hits two moves on Roddy, one, two, three.

It was a mess.

They worked hard.

They hit each other hard.

Will almost died, but it was a mess of a match.

No psychology, no continuity, no,

what the fuck.

It looked like a video game.

It was the shits.

And this was one of the better matches.

I thought it was the best match on the show, actually.

Yeah.

I thought it was really good.

Again, they did everything.

They kicked out of everything.

They sold nothing, including apparent decapitation.

But for,

I guess, that kind of match, this is a great main event match.

It just so happens it was the opening match.

And the crowd was never as hot as they were for this and the thing after it, the rest of the night.

They had moments, but in terms of consistently just being up for something,

So that says something about their energy early, but it may also say something about Osprey.

Osprey's connecting.

Whatever you think about his work, he's connecting with those fans on his promos and his attitude and everything else.

Then why won't Tony help him?

Because he doesn't know how to and he doesn't want to admit that he doesn't know how to.

Don Callis has to know that this is Drek.

He's been in the business 25 years.

Why is he managing this guy?

Why did he fight all of Don's other guys and then it go nowhere?

Why is any of this taking place?

He's a babyface.

Make him a babyface.

Get him away from the manager.

What the fuck is going on?

Best match of the night.

It certainly was.

So then,

suddenly, Adam Cole's music played.

And he walked to the ring, not looking any heavier or any tanner.

And he wears jeans so tight that you can tell that his legs look like chicken wings without steroids or growth hormones i mean for the chickens

you know where it says cage-free no steroids no growth hormones i prefer chickens that die of old age well you're getting a goddamn skinny ass fucking scrawny wing is what you're getting

and he did a heel interview

And he held up the devil's mask and he promised when he was 100%, they're going to to have to give the devil his due.

So they're not going to even let people forget about that fiasco

and how disappointed they were when it was resolved.

Go ahead.

I think this was their way of getting past that entire thing.

As opposed to ignoring it, it was blowing it off in one thing.

And as soon as he pulled out the devil mask, or the devil's mask, I guess, it was pretty obvious what was about to happen.

Well,

and I know that they

blew it off whether they know it or not at the end of this.

I don't trust Tony to know that they did.

But they have a blackout, and then a video pops up, which apparently was, I guess, MJF's trophy room in some rented home somewhere, because it looked like there was only the things that they'd specifically put in there to show on camera that could show that anyone lived there.

And the lights came back on, and MJF's music played, and he came out and got a big pop.

And they chanted MJF, and they chanted, holy shit.

And then when Adam Cole was

quivering and shaking, they chanted at him, you fucked up.

And they did the deal where they had the face off, and Adam Cole wanted a hug.

And

MJF's like, hey, you got to be kidding me.

But then he thinks about it.

And then he hugs Adam Cole, and then he kicks him into balls and gives him a brain buster.

And then MJF takes the microphone and he cuts a little promo over the top of Adam Cole and he says, Somebody gets this shit stain out of my ring.

He's using our material here.

Is that an issue?

Is that a trademark issue for you?

And no, I'll let him have it because this whole show deserves that designation.

And then the security helped Adam Cole out.

So

if they felt like

just to tie the story up, even though it's been almost six months, that they needed to have MJF

drop Adam Cole on his head and have him carried out just to get even okay.

But I just wish that they hadn't had to remind anybody of this stuff.

Again, MJF's been off TV.

We haven't seen Adam Cole on TV in a while either, and he's still healing.

And reportedly, he's still not cleared, although he did take a bump here.

So it really makes you wonder what's going on.

Well, but he didn't.

Here's the thing.

He took a ball kick, which anybody can take, and he took a brain buster, which if it's given right, anybody can take.

He didn't have to put any stress on the broken ankle or broken foot.

And MJF is relatively safe from what we hear.

Yes, he wasn't risking any kind of concussion there because it was MJF and he wasn't going to be stupid.

But we haven't seen him on TV.

So they bring him out all of a sudden for this to blow it off.

Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying because Cole is obviously nowhere near ready, but they had to bring him back so that MJF could beat him up and drop him on his head and then take the devil mask and,

you know, drop an elbow on it like Ric Flair.

I wish Tony put this level of commitment into detail in any of his other stories.

The shit that we want to forget about, it would be better if everybody just moved on past.

He'll remind you all day long.

But the shit that you might need to remind somebody about, that gets lost for months.

But MJF, he did a great promo, MJF.

He had good lines.

I don't need a New Japan or a Vince McMahon to make MJF.

MJF made MJF.

And Adam Cole woke me up.

And there's going to be no more ha-ha, no more friendship, kangaroo kicks, and bullshit.

Not love, but hate, hate, hate.

He was trying to promise a reset, what we've talked about

for however long since this happened when they ruined him last year,

that this smiling, happy MJF with the friends couldn't be sustained and it was a mistake, and they were going to have to rectify it.

And now they've come to that

come to Jesus moment.

The chickens have come home to roost, whatever the fuck.

And he's basically,

it was what

Jerry Lawler got over as a heel in Memphis the first time so strong when he switched babyface,

he was automatically over.

But after a year of Lawler being babyface, then the people were like, but now he gets beat and he doesn't cheat as much because you have to be a babyface.

So he would start cutting promos.

The old king is coming back this Monday night.

You're going to see the old Jerry.

And he would throw fire at somebody or he would do something heinous like the old Lawler would do, but he'd do it to the heel that deserved it.

This is kind of a magnified example of that where MJF has had to reset himself because of the way they tore him down on television.

And now he's had a break.

And if he gets away from this,

and maybe he's gotten his new deal that he can call his own shots, because if Tony gets a hold of him again,

you can't do unlimited resets, but this one might work.

But

you know what he said?

When he said, it's not my fault that all your favorites compared to me

suck a big old bag of donkey dicks, the people chanted donkey dicks.

And then finally, he said, well, my contract status, and he showed on his leg, on his calf, a new AEW tattoo

and a poker chip with AEW on it saying, always bet on yourself.

But, of course,

it is also in a place that will be covered anytime he wears a wrestling boot.

So when he goes to the WWE,

he doesn't have to worry about it.

And he said, I'm not fucking leaving.

So he's done this to himself.

I don't know.

The idea of a reset is a tough.

You know, doing a reset is different than coming out and announcing it.

You know, actually, just coming out there and being, you know, the classic MJF or a new version of MJF is different than saying, all right,

enough of everything you've seen for the last year.

Now everything is going to go back to the way it used to be.

You know, we'll see.

They need him

more than ever.

They need him.

And traditionally, he is someone who moves numbers.

Pay-per-view buys, TV ratings,

even merch merch when they turned him babyface finally.

So everything he does has succeeded for them.

It's a smaller audience.

The audience is not willing to give AEW the benefit of the doubt as much anymore,

but they really needed him here.

You know, again, the tattoo thing, it's interesting.

Who said bet on yourself?

Was that what Triple H said to Cody?

Is that what the story is?

I didn't even delve that deep in it.

I just thought he was telling Tony Khan, hey, look, I got your fucking company name tattooed on my leg.

Well, I think that is what it is.

And again, you know, what a heel move when he exposes it again in five years and all of a sudden it's a different logo.

I mean, it'll happen.

At least it wasn't on his neck on the bright side.

At least he didn't put it on his neck.

You see, he's a smart guy.

But, you know, everyone's happy he's going to be back and everyone's afraid he's going to get sucked into.

We used to call it the Jericho vortex, but now it's just the vortex of Tony's booking.

Well, who's he going to work with to draw any money?

Him and Osprey is something I would be very interested in seeing.

I don't know if I'm really that into him and Swerve right now.

I'm not into Swerve and anyone right now.

They killed my enthusiasm for Swerve.

He's a heel again.

Him and Moxley donkey.

He is?

MJF?

Oh, I thought you meant Swerve.

No, MJF's a heel again.

So other baby faces.

Moxley's kind of a baby face.

He's a heel again that can get people to chant donkey dicks.

So again, here's going to be another popular heel.

But again, the other problem is who is the promo for?

Again, that's a rabid AEW audience there, and the pay-per-view audience is smaller than the amount of people watching the TV show,

just because that's how pay-per-view works.

But this is like almost a promo for a smart audience.

I'm not going anywhere.

You know, the average person just knows he was on that show and he was off that show.

Yeah.

You know, they don't know anything about any of this stuff.

So it's another AEW rah-rah speech hidden in the middle of a promo.

They're always looking like they're on the defensive, even here, where MJF had the Bobby Ewing the last year, where he had to come out and denounce everything.

He had to do the Ric Flair beating up his outfit.

He started elbow dropping the mask.

He was trying very hard to convince people that the shitty way that they saw him presented the last time he was there was a thing of the past.

And

that's the, he knew he was talking to the smartest audience because that's who's going to get the pay-per-view and the most die-hard audience.

And they're the ones that they probably did the most damage to MJF in front of by the way he was presented.

Silly and stupid.

We shall see.

Yeah, because he's now going to be a heel in a company with Jericho doing his disingenuous heel act,

the Bucks doing their disingenuous heel act,

the House of Black doing their magic act.

Look at the other heels in that company and then try to figure out what babyfaces he's going to work with.

Well, but I mean, Ostrich is still a heel because he's managed in the heel group of the top heel manager.

He's just popular.

Swerve.

Still has a manager and was a baby violating heel, but they just liked him.

So now MJF is going to be one of the heels they like rather than one of the heels they're fucking bored by.

They'll probably give us a starter feud.

That's what they did after the last time he had to kind of denounce his last year after the Jericho feud.

You're right.

It started with

Hillman Jr.

and then Darby.

Like it kept growing from there.

He won't start with an Osprey.

He'll have to work to get there one or two feuds.

He'll probably take someone on the roster and and try to elevate him first.

If I had to guess based on track record, that's what I would guess.

Well, boy, you'd need a lot of helium to elevate some of these son of a bitches.

Action Andready.

So, the next match on this program was a six-man tag with the Gunboys and Light Switch White against Pac, Penthouse, and Felix.

And

I'm sorry, this was six guys doing tumbling and flips and six ways and sloppy shit.

And I was having problems with the fast forward, as you know, anyway.

And I was just seeing this unending, repetitive horseshit.

So I will say that the gunboys work their asses off and have a lot of potential and should have

a WWE future unless somehow the...

Their father may have pissed them off.

If they got to get away from here and these sloppy assholes they have to work with, or they're never going to get any better.

And that's, and Juice came out and interfered, and the heels won.

So at least Juice is back.

Did I miss anything here?

Well, you know, Osprey had a good long match.

I was like 20-something minutes.

The MJF return went a little while.

So that's like two matches in a row.

It was time for a weed break.

So I

missed the start of this, but I saw the Juice return, which, you know, again, it was two big returns back to back.

MJF and Juice.

Three, Cole.

Was it Cole's return or was it a one-off thing to blow off the feud?

Is what I'm wondering.

Well, but he returned because the definition of a return is, you've been gone, motherfucker.

Now I haven't seen you in a while.

It was just like his debut where they had him come out.

And then two minutes later, Danielson came out.

You forgot all about his debut.

What are we talking about here?

Juice is back.

Yeah, Juice is back.

The juice is back, baby.

I wish they would separate him from this and just use him as a...

They have no one as a single.

Everyone is part of a clique or a group or a faction.

This has been a problem forever, but especially now where no one's a defined babyface or heel.

They need just singles wrestlers going after one of the 35 singles championships.

Well,

continuing on, because we better, because there's a lot more.

Serena Deeb and Tony Storm.

Did you watch past the part where Serena Deeb had tied Tony Storm up with her in a ball with her arms, her own arms and her own legs were intertwined and left her alone and she was acting like she couldn't get out?

And she's the babyface.

And she's the babyface.

Because Serena

outlasted a near-career life-threatening medical situation and came back to be the heel against this fucking

batship crazy

girl with goddamn a manager and a another stooge along with her she's the babyface serena gave her flag or whatever it was to some kid at ringside at the start of the match that's what a base does yeah

she's giving kids presents but then

don't fucking god damn it

Tony Storm hit a pile driver off the second rope on her

and then didn't even cover her,

picked her up again and gave her a regular pile driver and then covered her one, two, three.

Isn't that the textbook definition of following a shooting with a stabbing?

Well, she's very thorough,

like any good killer.

She gave her a pile driver off the second rope and then didn't even cover, just picks her up and pile drives her.

It's girls.

It's fucking girls.

So what?

I mean, look, we already saw this with the girls.

We saw Orange Cassidy, no sell a pile driver on the steel steps a couple weeks ago.

Are you trying to say Orange Cassidy is a girl because, guy, you've just turned me off a woman?

My point is, after Tony brought up that the pile driver is a dastardly move, no one has sold the pile driver no matter where in the building it is in weeks, let alone maybe ever an AEW.

Well, by cracky, Tony's still the champion of one of the girls' divisions here or whatever the fuck.

And then.

What happens to the TBS title and the TNT title if they leave Warner Brothers?

Well, then they change their name.

But is one of them still for the girls and one of them for the guys?

Who's going to be the YouTube champion when Warner Brothers don't want to give them the money they want?

They want to give them less instead of what they've been getting and Tony gets his panties and awards and we'll just do our own show on YouTube.

They already have a YouTube champion.

It's called the Ring of Honor Champion.

Well, there you go.

That's going to be the most valuable guy in a company.

So, anyway, then they had Trent versus Pockets, and I'm sorry.

This is a four and a half hour show.

They ran over their pay-per-view window.

They had a four and a half hour pay-per-view window.

They ran over that to the point where, as you mentioned to me before we went on the air, Brian, the replay afterwards on the pay-per-view channel started in the middle of the fucking Roddy match because they were into the next goddamn window of time.

They had a joint in progress.

They couldn't do this in four and a half hours, and they believed that anybody wanted to see Trent against Pockets on this thing.

You know, the big change in AEW

was when Tony went from horizontal to vertical.

Do you think maybe he should go to upside down?

I think he ought to go six feet under.

Oh, come on.

See, now you took it too far.

That's way.

All right, we're joking around.

Three feet then.

Just three feet.

Three feet.

Three feet.

A good hard rain will wash him into the creek.

What is...

So then.

And then a creek, so it's on your property that this is happening.

Hold on.

Well, it could be.

Just put him on the side of the fucking hill somewhere.

You see, they almost sold, well, almost sold.

Because of some bullshit thing, Graceland was almost put up for auction last week.

Well, yes, and they're having a, you know,

it's a problem there because not only is Elvis buried there, but also isn't Lisa Marie buried there or

no, the wife, or the wife.

Lisa Marie's still alive.

No, Lisa Marie's dead.

Priscilla's still alive.

Well, goddamn, how did that happen?

That happened a while ago, but Lisa Marie.

It seems like it'd be the other way around, but Lisa Marie's buried there, and I think Elvis's parents are buried there.

And Elvis's grandson, Lisa Marie's son, is buried there as well.

Well, holy!

And Priscilla's still kicking.

She's had a lot of surgery.

Boy, I tell you what,

she may have done some voodoo, too.

But Emma, so you can't just sell people's grave sites, can you?

How do you buy a can you buy a cemetery and turn it into a goddamn strip mall?

Can you buy a cemetery and turn it into a museum?

The museum of death.

Can you display?

You can't display the

bodies.

You would have to.

Well, nevertheless.

Of course not.

That's just sick.

Well,

that's just sick.

Who would ever come up with something like that?

Anyway, for the FTW title, it was Hook versus Shapupi versus Jericho.

And within the first two minutes of the match, Hook was pulling out a table.

They've learned nothing from Eddie Kingston, as we'll get to in a second.

Eddie Kingston, on a fucking stupid New Japan show in front of a few thousand people, takes a suplex on a table and breaks his leg and blows his knee.

And so they decided, oh, it's a good idea.

We'll have 15 people go through 15 tables on this show.

Why was Shapupi even in this?

Why was he in this?

Because he's part of the big mix now.

So Jericho pulled out a bag of dice and sprinkled them everywhere so they could suplex him over and over into them.

And that can't be comfortable.

And then they started throwing the dice at him, and they were bouncing off him into the crowd.

You could hear them

pegging the announcer's desk.

Somebody could get their eye put out.

If there were any smart individuals in this crowd, there would be a lawsuit for some kind of fucking lost vision

in Las Vegas, for fuck's sake.

Can you imagine going to see Cirque D.

Soleil and the

trapeze artist Tennessee flies off and hits you in the mush?

And then they got Kendo Sticks and beat on Jericho.

I wrote, why am I watching this garbage?

Shapupi pulled out a table and put it in the ring.

There's two hours and 45 minutes left in this fucking fiasco and i zipped ahead to the finish

which was that hook got a choke on jericho and big bill saved

and got on hook in front of referee aubrey ed who was helpless as usual because it's no dq

and then hook suplexed big bill off the apron of the ring threw a table on the floor and

if big bill had landed

with his head six inches to the right, the table legs would have impaled his face.

That was scary.

I watched that several times, and someone put it on Twitter as a clip that you watch over and over again.

I've never seen anyone land that close to being impaled.

Well, because

the legs of the thing are not going to break.

The legs, theoretically, if you hit it just right and the furniture decides to cooperate with you and you hit it in the middle, the legs spread out at the bottom, but in this case, they were a little bit farther over to one end.

And the way it broke, the legs were standing up straight.

And again, his face went right by him, about six inches.

So it would have a certain brain damage, I would think, if nothing else.

But he's fine.

Anyway, so Jericho got the walls on Shapupi,

and Shapupi turned it into almost a figure four.

But then Hook got the choke, and then a ninja

jumped in the ring in black pants, black sweatshirt, black hood

with a garbage can and beat up shapupi and beat up hook both and then unmasked.

And it was Brian Keith,

not the actor who played Uncle Bill in Family Affair, but the bounty hunter Brian Keith.

And then Hook beat him up and shit canned him, but Jericho put the garbage can over Hook's head and pinned him one, two, three.

And I wrote, this is

almost makes me feel bad and embarrassed for Tony because he's trying to fix what he's fucked up about the booking by doing twice as much of it.

Every match on this show,

completely overbooked, as the kids say.

Too confusing, too much, too many twists, too many turns.

If Tony is doing these finishes, he's an idiot.

And if he's letting the wrestlers do these finishes, he's a bigger idiot because they're sabotaging his company.

Because if you let all these egotistical, think-they're stars, fucking assholes that ain't over and ain't smart do everything they want to do,

this is what you end up with and you got nowhere to go.

Jericho's like if Randy the Ram had that necro butcher match, but it wasn't for money, it was just to prove himself to someone.

Yes,

except Mickey Rourke was in better physical condition when he shot that movie.

So, and then

we were two hours into this thing,

and guess what happened then?

It was the plumber versus take a shit,

and this wasn't for the IWGP title.

This was if Take a shit

was to beat Moxley, he'd get a title shot, right?

It's Tony's favorite thing, and I don't think he realizes how counterproductive it is and how it's almost a turnoff at this point, the Eliminator match.

You get to wrestle the chance.

It's a non-title match where if you win, you get a title match.

But it's called an eliminator match, and it's been used so often that it means nothing as a term.

And besides that,

we had something like it in Ring of Honor with a proving ground match, which there was an element of

common sense to it.

As if you

were given a match against a recognized champion in the company,

you didn't have to win.

If you beat them, you would definitely get a title match.

But if they couldn't beat you in 10 minutes, you'd get a title match.

Then you've got something to

prove, right?

With this, it's just, well, if you've already, if you just beat him,

then why wouldn't you just give him a title match and let him win?

Because it's fake, phony, mark booking.

I don't know.

Anyway.

This was more of what they usually do, except Moxley had his left arm taped up and tried to wrestle with one arm when he can't really wrestle with two arms.

So that one arm became like an incredible Hulk strength arm where he could just do anything with the one arm, even though he had the one arm taped up.

Well, yes.

And again, it was his right arm.

I'm sure his right arm is stronger than his left arm because that's what he jacks off with.

And Moxley does dives.

Why?

I have no idea why.

But finally, this is, again, this is their finish.

Take a shit, goes out and gets a couple of chairs out from under the ring and throws them into the ring.

And the referee is Knox, the corpse ref.

So he just calmly picks the chairs up and turns his back and puts them out the other side.

But then, since they have to do more shit

behind his back and it didn't take him long enough, after he puts them out, then he starts pointing to the people he's giving them to,

telling them what to do with them, right?

And just turning his back.

And Take a Shit slides in with a third chair, but Moxley jumps up and curb stomps him on the chair while the referee is not turning around until Moxley slides the chair out.

And then

Moxley gets him in the double-arm DDT and the referee turns around one, two, three.

Did I miss anything about the burial, the

booking Malfeasance done against our boy, Take a shit, who now literally is just mired into shit.

I really liked Akesta, and I was,

I can't say I was looking forward to seeing the match.

I was looking forward to seeing him wrestle, but it turns into a Moxley match, and his matches are terrible.

You can call the spots right now for whatever the next match will be.

He is the worst wrestler in the world.

It's amazing.

There are some people that really think he's good.

I go into every one of his matches thinking, let me try to have an open mind.

Let me try to see it.

And every time I'm like, this guy sucks.

So yeah, Moxley sucks.

Takesh just being wasted.

You can understand why he's doing promos or doing interviews in the Japanese press talking about not liking his experience in America so far.

I don't blame him.

But speaking of not liking someone's experience, now we get to the part of the program where they have

they've done it again.

They've managed to hospitalize one of their top names

for the TNT title match.

And what they said was going to be a barbed wire cage.

It turned out to be a cage

like a regular cage, but with barbed wire wrapped around certain parts of it.

And for some reason.

They started the match with two tables and two chairs laying in the ring inside the cage between

Edge and Malachi Black.

I was trying to zip through the entrances to get some of this thing over with.

Did they ever explain why furniture was laying in the ring?

Just to save time, so the guys didn't have to go into the ring and get it themselves.

All right.

Well, within the first two minutes, Edge had opened Malachi Black up with barbed wire and they had used the chairs to whack each other with the chairs, and then they ignored them.

Here's the thing:

Edge is a great person.

He's a great guy and a great talent.

He's had a wonderful career.

He can work.

He can talk,

but he's not either setting an example or teaching any of these guys anything.

When he, instead of

instead of teaching them what not to do

and giving them matches with him that whether he puts them over or not that elevate them in the ring and their talent and teach some kind of timing and experience or whatever.

He's just doing the same stupid shit that they're doing.

But he's 50 years old and he's giving them the idea that this is shit that they ought to fucking be doing.

And

a 50-year-old Hall of Fame talent doing garbage matches in a vanity project promotion is sad whether he means well or not

but nobody is gonna what what did he teach anybody here how to break your own leg

because that's what he did

but first they had a garbage match

malachi black gets a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat

and instead of just

drawing back and hitting him with the fucking thing and winning the match one, two, three, he takes a baseball bat and rakes the barbed wire across Edge's head.

And then Edge gets the bat and hits him with a gut shot,

at least, but then a supposed head shot.

And then he's raking the barbed wire across Malakab.

And then he throws the bat away to set up a table.

If you're fighting a guy and you're beating him with a bat, why would you throw the bat away to set up a table?

And then he hit him with a chair and put him on the table and started climbing the cage.

But Malachi Black got up after being hit several times with a baseball bat and crotched Edge.

And then Malachi powerbombed Edge, threw a table off the top rope

and got a two count.

And so I fast-forwarded some.

And I stop again.

And at this point

Edge has put Malachi Black on the table and tied him onto it with barbed wire so he couldn't move and he climbed to the top of a 15-foot cage

and came off with an elbow drop and broke his own leg and got a two count

well you need to talk about the way he landed with that elbow drop he land i mean

of all the ways i thought he was going to land when he did the leap he landed in the worst possible i didn't think he would land that way well yes but well he couldn't do a splash because the fucking idiot laying on the table had barbed wire on top of him

and what so his plan was to jump off the top of the cage and land feet first his his plan apparently was that he thought that he could jump off and land and put his feet under him enough to break some fall where he could fucking the elbow drop

where he'd only be risking his fucking arm instead of his whole goddamn body and face landing on the barbed wire.

The elbow drop would still break the table, is what I got from it.

He thought that somehow

I don't, he didn't mean to just jump 15 feet and land with most of his weight on his feet first and then,

but the point being, he finished the match

and he's since revealed on Twitter and etc.

that he broke it.

What is the bone in the lower leg?

The tibia.

Tibia.

And,

yeah, and he's going to have surgery of some kind and blah, blah, blah.

But in the meantime, the match is still going on.

So

then

they went back and forth, and Malachi Black is...

pulls a piece of the cage off and starts hitting Edge with it, knocks Edge through the cage door so they can go out on the floor.

But then, as they're on the floor, and Edge has speared, Malachi Black, here come Brody King and Buddy.

They started to say Brody King and Buddy Lee, Brody King and Buddy, what is his name?

Matthews.

And they stand next to Malachi Black like they're going to menace Edge, and then they both go and turn and stand next to Edge.

And Malachi Black starts begging off like, oh, no, no.

And then they turn around and beat up Edge.

What was that?

The fuck, why is Edge standing there in the middle of it?

Oh, you guys are going to join me all of a sudden?

I've never dreamed.

I don't understand because it happened so quick and it teased a lot very quickly.

And then they immediately turned on Edge.

Why?

Why?

That's the thing.

You're looking at Edge like a veteran who should be teaching these guys, not like what he really is.

And I don't mean this in a negative way, we're all fans, but he's a mark.

He's a mark for, he said it in that promo where he came out defending AEW after the punk thing, where he said, I grew up in Canada seeing all sorts of wrestling.

You got to love all sorts of wrestling.

He's that guy.

And he wants to do all these bucket list things in there.

And

again,

the booking, I mean, the judgment day turned on.

Everyone turns on him.

I mean, this guy can't.

Shit, these guys turned on him after 30 seconds.

So then they threw him in the ring.

And they threw more barbed wire in the ring.

And they beat Edge up three-on-one while the referee stood there watching Slackjawed.

And they put barbed wire around his head, so the crown of thorns type of thing for the religious imagery.

For those of you who give a shit about that kind of shit.

Yeah, for those of you up on Dark Side of the Ring, where they just pointed out what a disaster this was in ECW with the Sandman and Raven.

Here you go.

But then they never got that far because all of a sudden,

music and red lighting and gangrel came through the mat,

not only from underneath the ring, but through the mat and DDT'd the heels.

And then when that was finished happening, Malachi Black kicked him in the fucking face and knocked him out.

But then Edge speared Malachi Black and put the wire around Malachi Black's face and got kind of a cross face on him.

And Malachi Black passed out and I was ready to join him.

Because we were three hours into this fucking thing and it wasn't,

the end was not in sight.

But now, so now Edge is going to be out for how many months is that going to be?

For what, for what?

I haven't seen a time frame, have you?

No, but I mean,

when you break your leg and you're 50 years old and you are a professional athlete,

it's.

And here's the other problem, TNT title.

Are we now going to get an interim champion?

Are we going to get another tournament?

Are we going to get...

I'm thinking of battle royal.

Do you think Tony would go battle royal over tournament?

He loves tournaments.

Well, we can't let the prestigious TNT title be vacant for too long.

But the thing is, it was, I mean, everything's unnecessary nowadays, but it was an unnecessary spot.

It didn't look good.

I think if you thought it out well, you would think this doesn't, this won't look good.

And then he hurts himself, and everyone hurts himself doing stupid stuff.

We talked about everyone breaking their legs, jumping into barricades.

He broke his leg jumping off a, he jumped off a cage with nothing to break his fall, but his leg.

And then he broke it.

Yes, not the fall, but the leg.

That had to be 15 feet.

Every bit that was higher than.

That was a big cage.

Think about this.

That was higher than the scaffold match drop because the scaffold was 24 feet off the ground.

Three feet for the ring, there's 21 feet.

And a grown adult hanging underneath it, that would put your feet at about 13 feet off the ground, right?

How old were you in 86?

25.

He's double that doing that.

And from farther.

Yeah.

But now let's not even do it like that because then people are going to, oh,

don't compare Cornette's athleticism at 25 with Edge's at 50.

But we neither one should have been doing it.

But at least I had nowhere to go but up after I went down.

He's got nowhere to go but down after he went down

because his condition is not going to get better from here.

Anyway,

would you like to move along?

Let's move along.

There's a few more matches still.

I think there's a triple main event to come.

Oh, boy.

Mercedes Moon and Willow Nightingale

finally popped up three hours into this fucking fiasco.

And

again, I want to, okay, Mercedes, impress me.

Show me why you're worth all that money.

I'm going to try to watch this with an open mind, as you say.

Every time I watch, Willow is the one who gets over with me.

Willow is young, is obviously not as high-priced.

Well, and I say young, it's not like Mercedes is a senior citizen, but she's been around a while in the business.

Willow is young and new and fresh.

She looks like she has some personality.

Her work is pretty good.

She's the one that gets over with me.

And I mean, again, she's a full-fledged babyface, and Mercedes was working

as a full-fledged heel, including running on the bicycle, staying away from Willow.

But

while I admit that Mercedes is not as bad in the ring as I thought she would be, given how bad her promos are,

but to me, this was one of the ones where

It looks like Willow is the one they ought to be trying to push and

Mercedes is the one that is there to get her over.

But it was the other way around.

What am I missing about Mercedes that is jaw-droppingly impressive?

She is good in the ring.

Again, she is a smaller woman,

but she's good in the ring, and she was presented as a star on WWE-TV since they started presenting women seriously on that show.

So

she comes here with that star power.

And

how is she good in the ring?

I like the meteor.

It looks risky for both people.

I don't know how I would give it or take it.

So that's very nice.

But I don't see anything with her promos or anything else.

I watch the scrum afterwards.

And, you know, she's the CEO because she'll be sitting courtside at the Lakers, or not the Lakers, the Celtics game.

And I don't think she could do a good promo, but she's

the work, the match.

they did a spot where mercedes shoved statlander and statlander and stokely were arguing with the referee and willow behind with no referee to to count hit the doctor bomb and finally referee turns gets a two count

willow's finish there looked great

and then mercedes gets willow up on her back and goes for her finish and they fell in a fucking heap together

nobody there but no move was done.

And then Mercedes covers her one, two, three.

She can't even hit her fucking finish.

And then she celebrates with the belt and does a stripper dance while CEO chants play on the PA system.

And then we're not done with the booking

because then

Mercedes the heel leaves and then Stokely, the heel manager of the babyface girl, is yelling at Willow.

But Statlander, the babyface friend of the babyface champion, shoves down the heel manager.

And Statlander goes to help Willow out of the ring and up the ramp, and then turns around and clotheslined her

and then did something else to her and left her laying and walked out with the guy that she just shoved on his ass

before she helped the girl out so she could turn on her on the floor instead of in the ring.

What?

Yeah, CEO is going to definitely be the well, it already is the most annoying chant in wrestling.

Swerves house or whose house, Swerves House, over and over again is pretty annoying, too.

Everything's annoying me.

But what the over-bookingness,

everything, these are months of angles that could play out on television that are happening in every fucking match.

What the fuck?

It's like he just told everybody, Gwatten,

do your own shit.

It doesn't matter if it fits with the rest of our program.

Do as much or as little

of anything as you might want.

Well, the other problem is we don't know what the hell's going on booking-wise in the world of Kayfabe, unless they've done stuff on other shows.

Stokely was a heel manager.

That was on Ring of Honor, that was all of a sudden with Statlander and Willow, who were friends, both from the island.

And

now he's the heel manager against Willow, who Statlander just turned on her.

Yeah.

Okay.

So three and a half hours in, we now come to the AEW World Championship match with Christian Cage and his family of Stooges challenging Swerve, and Prince Nana's back in his corner.

So we got that going for us.

And thankfully, they started slow

and they tried to do a little wrestling and kudos to them for it.

But to prop me, what can two guys with bare hands trying to have a wrestling match do five hours into this fiasco, right?

So within a couple of minutes, they're on the floor.

And

they can both work, and Cage won't let Swerve devolve into all the breakdancing and aggressive parkour that he does when he's with another person of that ilk.

So Swerve was good here.

But at this point,

a legitimate wrestling match is out of place because is it possible

to seriously critique the acting in a single scene of a six-hour German Bukaki compilation?

Even if

about four and a half hours in, you see a guy and the way he's talking, you're like, wow, I'd watch him on television.

Does it really matter?

How have you had the goddamn stamina to stay for that much, right?

To begin to see it in the first place.

They do different shit than what we've seen from the rest of this nights.

And Christian is a good leader.

And,

you know, but again,

They kind of got crazy.

Swerve gave Christian a vertical suplex on the floor and started setting up stairs where they were going to do a stunt.

And poor Paul Turner, the referee, screaming, no, this isn't needed.

And I thought, he's right.

This is not needed.

They had people at one point, and I'm thinking, just go into the fucking finish, right?

But more fighting on the floor in the apron.

And Christian tried a suplex onto the stairs, but it was blocked.

And then Swerve dove at him, but he moved and Swerve flew headfirst into the stairs.

And then

Nick Plain gave Swerve the Cody cutter on the floor, and Christian hit his finish on him in the ring and got a two count.

And I wish at some point they would have started chanting, overbooking,

overbooking.

So Nana comes out and chases Nick off with a lead pipe.

Christian clears off the announced desk.

Swerve gives Christian the double stomp on the desk, which looked great.

There were a lot of things in here that looked good, but nothing hurts anybody anymore.

Christian went for a spear.

Swerve hit a kick and hit another kick

and went to the top and gave him the double stomp and then hit another kick and pinned him one, two, three.

And we were four hours into this show.

I hate to gloss over the world title match, but by that point,

what the fuck, besides the fact there was nothing left to do, everything they did was fine.

But also, I'm goddamn tired of watching people fall down.

What more can we say?

I've been sick of this feud.

I just hope it's over.

Well,

I don't know.

I think he still has to get even with Nick Wayne's mom.

She's got the most heat, and she's the biggest member of the group.

Propping my eyelids open with thumbtacks and fucking toothpicks,

I was able to watch the last match on

this marathon event.

Assholes in the arena.

The Lollipop Guild versus Team AEW.

So let's just give these people's names because we want to make sure we know who was responsible for this.

You had Maddie and Nikki, the Buckaroos,

you had their friend O Cody,

and then their other friend, Jungle Jackoff.

And they were taking on

the formerly best tag team in the world, now reduced to flunkies, FTR,

and Brian Danielson, who the people still love no matter what kind of shit he's in.

And bless his little pee piggin' heart, Darby Allen has come back from the dead because Kingston was hurt.

And

so Darby was wearing a face mask to protect his broken nose, but the face mask had thumbtacks on it.

Because we can't be allowed to forget for a second that all these guys dream

of being indie mud show jackoffs instead of major superstars on television.

So thumbtacks, because it's cool.

During

the last member of the heel team's entrance, which was Jungle Jack off, the babyfaces just attacked everybody on the floor,

except for Darby, because his music was playing, and then he just ran in and joined it with the face mask.

And then the music kept playing when the heels took over.

And then

at the same time as this is supposed to be the top angle in the company and all the main event people in a violent match and a violent feud,

the buckaroos have to do their comedy to make sure that nobody takes anything seriously.

So Maddie gets on the microphone and says, cut the music and play a banger, our new theme music.

And they start playing that.

And some people are fight.

It's a sloppy fight on the floor.

And some people are fighting and some are walking.

And then Brian says, turn that shit off

and play the greatest theme music ever.

And then they play the final countdown that Tony paid however much money

to play on it.

While the fight continues, they're in the stands.

It's not lit.

The cameras can't catch half of it.

Some guys are in the breezeway, some are in the people.

It's

at one point they did a four box

to show four different groups of action, but they had two different shots of the same two guys

in two of the boxes.

And Darby did a coffin drop off the bleachers onto some guys.

And the song was great and the people were loving it and they were waving their arms and they're singing along.

But meanwhile,

as soon as they,

Maddie then gets the fucking microphone again and tells them to cut that music because we're over budget and it's costing too much,

when the music cuts off,

it's just a sloppy fucking fight and the people start chanting, we want music, we want music.

I said earlier, this is the biggest mess I've ever seen as a match or a television product

because they couldn't follow it.

They couldn't shoot it.

It was a mess.

And it was a slow, sloppy fight everywhere but the ring.

And then Jack Off and Darby go to

the back parking lot and fight in a tub of ice water and use a fake lead pipe.

And that Danielson goes for a dive on O'Cody, but O Cody

swings a chair at him and missed him.

And he was flying at him.

How did he fucking miss him?

And then one of the Jacksons had to go grab a chair and hit him with it to make up for it.

And then back in the parking lot,

Jungle Jackoff drives a big

like bread delivery truck with this painted scapegoat into a pile of trash and wooden pallets that we are supposed to be led to believe that Darby was under.

even though we never saw that happen.

The announcers are speculating about it.

And then Jungle Jackoff is knocked out in the front seat.

And come to find out later, of course, the secret was out

apparently hours after the show was over.

He was knocked out so he could be prepared for his return.

More on this in a minute.

Then O'Cody was moving around like a senior citizen, beating up FTR by himself.

Stoop-shouldered, shouldered, no physique, lack of charisma,

pale fucking

fishy body,

broken down,

shitty haircut.

Jesus Christ, I thought you hated Nia Jax.

Oh, Cody's even worried.

He's not hurting.

He can't, his shit couldn't hurt anybody.

It's so weak.

He could jump up and down on me with both feet and I wouldn't notice it.

So then Darby staggers back to the ring, apparently from being run over by a truck,

and fights O Cody and gets two counts on him.

But then the buckaroos powerbomb him onto a bunch of chairs and drag him to the stage and put him on the elevating platform that they make their entrance on.

And they're telling production

by yelling into the camera, take him down, take him down.

And the production people, they're playing the music or cutting the music when they say, and they do the thing where they take him down on the elevator.

There are logic holes, plot holes, whatever you want to call them, in this thing

big enough to goddamn get Tony Khan's fucking checkbook through.

Yeah, there's the biggest one, Tony Khan.

They establish he's sitting at gorilla.

He's running production.

How come he let all this happen?

Yes, he's paying everybody.

He's paying the fucking elevator guy.

He can't say, Don't do that.

So then they all fight in the back, and they beat Danielson up, and Spike Powell drive him on a poker chip, a big wooden poker chip.

I mean, and then

O'Cody put Cash Wheeler through a table immediately after Nikki dove off the tunnel and put Dax through a table.

And then Jungle Jackoff wanders into Gorilla and sees Tony sitting there at the goddamn, at the monitor.

So again,

who is telling who how to produce this show?

And then Jack Off grabs Tony and starts dragging him out.

And you can also tell that somehow old Jungle Boy

looks like he's come through a goddamn bucket of Vaseline.

He's shining.

All of him is shining.

Well, he had been thrown into an ice bucket earlier.

No, he's shining with fucking thick goddamn shit on him.

He ain't wet.

He's greasy.

And I'm not talking about the normal grease either that he has on him.

And as well as the normal cheesiness.

So then all of a sudden they cut to a shot on the stage and there's everybody doing nothing.

Heels and baby faces kind of waiting for what they're supposed to see next.

And the announcers are saying, Well, where is Tony and Perry?

Where are they?

Well, they couldn't do anything until Darby came out with the flamethrower.

And then here comes Jungle Jack off, dragging Tony.

And

as he pushes Tony down on the stage, and we'll talk about what happened to Tony later because at least it wasn't on camera.

But he shoves Tony Khan down on the stage, does Jungle Jack off, and Darby

takes the flamethrower and lights him on fire.

They put the stuntman movie gel on him so that it supposedly doesn't burn your skin within a certain amount of time.

And

they lighted him on fire with a flamethrower.

And then suddenly there's Maddie and Nikki with the goddamn fire extinguishers putting him out.

Can you imagine

anybody stupid enough not only to be the lid on fire, but to have the Jackson boys be the ones to stand by to save you?

You knew something was coming when, I don't know what you thought, but those fire extinguishers really stood out when all of a sudden they were there at the side of the stage.

Well, yes.

It looked like they were goddamn, you know, ready for the fucking fires after the San Francisco earthquake.

They were going to set the whole building on fire.

They were prepared.

And

then the crew jumps on him with towels, putting him the rest of the way out.

Well, then the Buckaroos and Darby go to the ring

and do some shit.

And Darby kicks O'Cody in the balls, and Coffin drops

also in the nuts,

right on his fucking dick.

Coffin dropped him.

And the Bucs made the save.

And then the Bucs call to the ceiling for a hook.

And they lower a hook with a rope.

Whoever's in production, go ahead.

Can I say something here?

Because I don't know if you saw it.

I think it may have been on the pre-show, but it was the first thing I thought about here.

They had Dr.

Martha Hart

on this show.

Oh, no.

To announce the Owen Hart tournament for men and women coming up.

Because what they said, and they made sure to note that

Tony and her talked about it in December, but the winners of the two tournaments will get title shots at Wembley Stadium.

Oh, yeah, well, I forgot to mention that earlier because it's just coincidental that they say that just days, that one day after Triple H announces that for King of the Ring getting the title matches at SummerSlam.

But they talked about it in December.

My point, though, is Dr.

Martha Hart is there.

In the building while they're going to hang a goddamn wrestler.

While guys who are not trained rig professionals or whatever the fuck you need to be are operating this thing, hanging this guy upside down.

Even though it wasn't terribly high up, it was high enough that he could have broken his neck.

Well, it was high up enough that he was upside down and immobilized.

And if something had happened and he'd have dropped on his head from 10 feet, wouldn't that pretty much break your neck?

He wasn't able to catch himself.

He was all tied up and hooked and everything.

If you're going to have Martha Hart on these shows, don't do things like that.

That seems in pretty bad taste.

Well, besides that, then

they lower the hook, but before they hang him,

the crowd is just staring while they're tying his legs together.

But then FTR makes a comeback on him, but then Maddie hits Dax with a chair, and the chair exploded

again.

For what?

It's like the exploding tennis shoe they had with him.

For what?

And then they got a little more

slow heat on Darby until Ocody put a sleeve of thumbtacks on his arm and hit cash with the weakest clothesline I've ever seen.

And then Ocody pulls out a shoebox of these new ridiculous fruit loop-looking fucking shoes in all kinds of neon colors that the buckaroos are trying to goddamn pedal.

And they've got thumbtacks on the soles of them.

And

they put the shoes on, and then Matt tells the production to raise Darby upside down like the pinata so they can double super kick him with the thumbtack shoes.

Brian, I know a lot of people are thinking I'm now lying.

Am I lying about any of this?

No, all of this happened multiple times in the middle of this brawl.

The Bucs just started giving stage commands.

And then they went to kick Danielson, but Danielson grabbed the shoe and pulled off one of the tack shoes and hit the bucks with it and then kicked them a bunch and then stomped them

and then gave them chair shots.

And then

the fans start shanting, please help Darby,

please help, because he's just hanging there.

And then after all this, the buckaroos stop Danielson and give him the knee lift

and Jungle Jack off comes back in from being set on fire.

And as Danielson is crawling over to help Darby or try to help Darby,

Jungle Jackoff runs over and hits him with a knee lift and pins him.

The guy who got set on fire came back to win the match.

This right here,

and everybody involved in it, and Tony Kahn, who was involved in it, are the reasons why AEW will never get better.

It will never turn a profit.

It will never get a mainstream audience.

It will continue to lose viewers instead of gaining viewers.

And it will continue to be a place

where people go to spend most of their time collecting a check for being hurt.

and operated on.

It was embarrassing to anybody who's ever been a professional in this industry and gave a shit about it.

And it took four and a half hours, four hours and 32 minutes for them to get finished with this fucking drek.

I don't know what else to say.

Everybody involved in this should be ashamed of themselves if they willingly went along with it.

And if they were forced to because a member of their family was being held hostage,

I'll let them off with a warning.

I don't think anyone's embarrassed.

I think when you go to work with AEW and go to work with those specific people, you kind of take on the young Bucks ethos, which is do whatever you want.

Anyone who criticizes what you do or tells you to think about it a different way, they are the enemy.

They are wrong.

And

this is what you get.

We've had now a few anarchy in the arenas.

The crowds get smaller and smaller, and they got a nice crowd here for this.

I believe it was smaller than the previous time they had been there.

But it's good for what they've been doing lately.

And again, they're doubling down on the stuff with the Bucs.

The Bucs were on the NBA show the other day giving out custom championship belts to the host of the show, from what I understand.

Can you imagine when they are introduced on a mainstream television show as any kind of professional wrestlers, what people sitting at home go, what the fuck?

It looks like a Saturday Night Live skit.

It looks like two of the guys on on Saturday Night Live put on some facial hair, glued it to their face, and are pretending to be wrestlers.

The Sammy Hagar impersonator from Madison Square Garden back in 1986.

That's a very good reference there.

And then Jack Perry.

It's important to note, whatever you think of Jack Perry and his stupid decisions and his stupid attitude, and even before that, we know stories about.

Jungle Stooge.

I mean, there's other things.

Yes.

He's a little weasel who goes crying to his fucking big brothers.

Whether that's all there or not, the fact that Tony Khan saw this guy, rumor has it,

doing this gimmick, the scapegoat, on a New Japan show in Chicago, and was like, oh my God, I can't believe how great this is.

And now they gave him the win here.

There's another example of investing time, energy, push, wins, and Danielson will lose to anyone.

So it's not really that big a deal at this point.

But still, Jack Perry,

he's tiny.

He's not convincing.

He is not only tiny and not convincing,

it's embarrassing.

Because he's unconvincing doesn't cover it.

He's obviously like the other two playing wrestler,

acting like something he's not.

They envision themselves as something they are not.

They were helped along in this delusion and some element of mass hypnosis for the general public by the little bubble of indie fans that they had for a while.

That never fads never last.

And

the elite was the hula hoop and the pet rock.

And the only one that it lasted with was Tony Khan.

And now it's five years past its fucking expiration date.

And he's still stuck with these morons as the stars of his company, which is, again,

you could have predicted this five years ago, which is why I did.

Who he was sold on getting into business with was going to be

one half of his downfall, Tony's, and the other half was going to be he thought he could do this shit

despite never having done it before and now has proven he can't.

He can write checks.

And his dad can make a lot of money.

And as long as they want to spend it,

then they'll be around.

But this is not good.

It's getting worse.

And nobody can claim differently.

And,

you know, they said, like you said, they said the video game was going to be the difference maker in profit and loss.

And the video game, and now I guess now you can play it for free on certain streaming services.

Is this what I'm hearing?

In June, PlayStation has a program, PlayStation Plus, where each month you get free games.

Usually they're not brand new games.

They're games that have been out for a while, they've exhausted their run.

I've gotten some great games, I'm a subscriber, I'm gonna be able to get Fight Forever finally without paying for it.

And Fight Forever is now there.

This comes off us seeing that it was being sold for $3 and $3

discount bin at Walmart.

That was after we saw it was $10,

which was after it was $30.

I think it launched at $60,

and there's no one playing the game online.

And so now the rights renewal, So they're expecting a TV network that doesn't live and die with wrestling, doesn't have to, if they're willing to give up the NBA because it's too much money

and other people are willing to pay more,

then they're certainly willing to give up wrestling if they can't get it for the price they want.

And

does anybody is are these people stupid enough to think, I'm talking about the AEW fans, that, well, they didn't get the NBA, so now they'll give that that NBA money to Tony.

No, just you can buy the best hooker on fucking Bourbon Street for $5,000 doesn't mean you're going to give a goddamn crack or in a trailer the same five grand.

So

when the, when the rights fee comes in, Yeah, we'll just keep the same deal or maybe a small increase or maybe we'll give you less because your ratings are down.

Then like I said before, what's he going to do?

Say, well, fuck you.

I'll just put it on YouTube.

Because who else is interested in wrestling these days when it's not the number one wrestling?

And the numbers for the program that exists on a major network are going down.

How does that call for a raise?

Well, real quick before we wrap things up, and that was AEW double or nothing, but Jim.

It certainly was.

I'm sorry with my attitude today, but having a sit-through, especially over the past couple of days, and then having to spend four and a half hours of my time on that,

I was somewhat verklimped.

But, Jim, it has come out now.

We're talking about the rights renewal for AEW.

Brandon Thurston tweeted this out.

This is from Puck's Matt Bologna.

I believe he's a sports media reporter of some renown or not.

Who knows?

But here's what he said.

Quote, I'm told the exclusive window closes in July, and AEW leader Tony Khan is said to be disappointed with the offer currently on the table.

Khan also surely knows that Zaz, David Zazlov, losing the NBA would give AEW more leverage, even though the money to re-up AEW is a mere drop in the NBA bucket.

If the window closes without a deal, others could swoop in for those rights, as Comcast has done with the NBA.

Extra awkward because Warner Brothers Discovery is said to own a stake in the league.

I'm not sure how alluring AEW would be to another platform, especially since only non-WWE partners could bid.

But the wrestling shows still do okay on the Turner networks.

It's reliable programming, and a rival suitor could further push Zasloff into hot water in his cable carriage deals.

I don't see a lot of other comparable

or very many or any other comparable networks with comparable exposure and brand name and cachet in the industry wanting not only the distant second wrestling promotion, but also to want that shit on their airwaves, the barbed wire and the blood and the goofiness and the amateurishness.

See, the thing is,

Tony Tony Khan right now is a pretty fair deal.

Because of that deal and because of, well, not really because of that deal.

It's a very good deal.

Because of the expenditures, because of things like the video game, because the guys making six figures and barely being used or seven figures.

Or their value has been completely minimized.

Yeah, I mean, the Bucs are making seven figures.

Are they worth it?

No.

But they're getting it.

There's lots of other guys getting a lot of money.

Yeah, what you're saying is they could be profitable now if this was run like a business with just the money they're getting.

Right, which gets into this thing because the problem is Tony Kahn set this up in everyone's mind.

From Dave Meltzer on down, from the very beginning of AEW, we got this deal because this is valuable real estate and we intend to get a big rights renewal, massive rights renewal,

when the time comes.

And that's where we are right now.

Can you imagine if you went into a bar and you saw the hottest girl you've ever seen.

And in your head, you're like, man, I got to find a way to go talk to her and get her to want to get to know me.

You don't then go to her friends and go, hey, I'm going to fuck the shit out of your friend.

I plan on fucking the shit out of her.

It'll take me a little while, but I'm going to fuck the shit out of her.

No.

That's why Tony announcing all this out loud from the beginning was stupid.

Because AEW has a fair deal right now.

When you hear that tony's not happy about the deal we'll address that in a moment

it's because he thinks he deserves a major rights increase and he doesn't because he decided that it was going to happen

just like from the start he decided that he was going to take over and vince was a flunky was a

you know a mere pittance that this was going to be the greatest wrestling of all time and he knew how to do this he was convinced and you could try to present any kind of number you can to you know fancy things up.

Look at how good we do it here.

Look at how good we do there.

But key demo's down.

Overall numbers down.

Overall number keeps shrinking.

Key demo is catching up to the overall number.

Dynamite's catching up to collision,

which is catching up to rampage,

which is catching up to test patterns.

I agree with what this guy who, Matt Baloney, who was quoted here, said.

I think he's full of baloney.

It's cheap programming.

It's reliable, cheap programming.

If If you could deal with the content, you're not paying very much to have it on your air every week.

Problem is, Tony can't be profitable unless he gets a big rights increase.

And again, at that point, it's important to note, we're still basing everything we know around what Tony lets people know.

It's a private company.

We don't know what the numbers really are.

Tony likes to make everything sound a lot better than it really is.

But

what have you seen that would cause them to get a rights increase?

And if they lose the NBA, the NBA is the kind of thing that networks or streaming services or whatever will lose money on because of having the NBA and everything that does.

It's a rainmaker.

It brings people into the door.

If you lose that, yeah, they've got more money.

First of all, that's the sports division, not the entertainment division.

And who knows what happens

to the future of that sports division without the NBA?

It's not like the network's just like, okay, the NBA's gone.

We got a few billion dollars.

How could we spend it across the network?

They might not have that few billion dollars because the NBA is big enough to affect the carriage fees that the networks get from the cable systems, but AEW is not.

So if TBS is worth $5 ahead because they got the NBA, maybe without it, they're worth $4 a head.

These are made-up numbers, but you see where I'm going.

And then that means that they...

They are paying less money out because they don't have the NBA, but they're taking less money in because they don't have have the NBA.

And it's important to note, everyone's assuming that TNT's out, that Warner Brothers Discovery is out, that the NBA is going to go to a streaming service, they can have a deal somewhere else.

That's not done yet.

That's not official.

But a lot of people saying it.

But if they come back in and they have to pay even more than they expected to to keep the NBA because it's that important, like you said, you just gave incredible, valid reasons.

Who knows how much extra money there'll be at that point?

It's not like it's going to be, okay, we're paying more for the NBA.

so now there's more for you, too.

No, that's

now we're paying more for the same thing that we had, that we have to have, so we got to cut back on some of the frivolous expenditures.

AEW has nothing but frivolous expenditures, and they could be profitable right now, and they're not for their own, for Tony Khan's roster reasons.

Does that mean that Tony Khan is a roster farian?

If they want to continue and not lose as much money as they've been losing

they need to somehow get that company into some sort of realistic financial setting because you're not going to get a massive increase multiple times over

you'll be lucky if you get i don't want to i don't want to put a number on it but you're not going to get a big increase

You're not going to get the video game to all of a sudden do well.

It's now being given away for free.

Wait a minute.

If that way, if a lot of people discover how much fun it is because they can play it for free, won't they go out and spend $30 or $40 on it?

On what?

The game they already have for free?

Yeah.

Yeah, no.

They'll have to wait for the next game to come out, which will never come out because why would they ever do another fucking game?

And at this rate, it would be Boston's third album anyway.

It'd take five years.

So that's the point.

And, you know, again, too, you look at Ring of Honor.

Tony never got a TV deal for Ring of Honor.

He says it was because he was loyal to TBS.

It seems to be a one-sided thing.

They didn't say, hey, you bought this Ring of Honor.

You better not put it anywhere.

That's not what we've heard.

Tony wanted to be loyal to them and not put it anywhere, which is a nice way of saying he didn't have anywhere to really put it.

Although I did hear they turned down, didn't they turn down,

where's NXP going?

CW.

Channel 11.

Yeah.

WB.

That's right.

Whatever it is these days.

I mean, can you imagine they may have just, if they'd have gotten on CW, they would have probably just pissed off another network into not wanting another wrestling program because, however much we take to task the AEW program, it's the big brother of the Ring of Honor program that also Tony's responsible for.

So it would be the same bad wrestling with even smaller names.

Well, Jim,

that network would not be happy.

Go ahead.

Jim, I have a report here from the Wrestling Observer newsletter site.

AEW denies disappointment with first WBG-TV rights renewal offer by Josh Nason.

AEW has denied a Monday night report from Puck that the first offer made by WBD towards a new TV rights deal was disappointing.

According to Dave Meltzer, AEW sources have told him that the first offer was not disappointing to Tony Khan.

I wonder what sources those are.

That source, but that the two sides have yet to reach any deal.

Negotiations for both TV and streaming are ongoing with WBD and not TNT Sports.

The puck report from longtime Hollywood insider Matt Baloney,

then it goes into what it said here.

He also reported that WBD head David Zasloff and TNT Sports Head Luis Silberwasser

want to keep all three AEW shows.

After the reporting came out, it was pointed out by some online that Bologna is longtime friends with WWE CEO Nick Khan.

Uh-oh.

And that Bologna has had Khan on his podcast before,

leading some to believe it was a planted piece.

WWE met with WBD.

Either that or that means he's got a lot of inside information.

That means that's what Tony said.

If that's here, after the source already said, Tony wasn't disappointed at all.

And all of a sudden the other source was Tony, who's completely paranoid by anyone who's ever had any relationship with Nick Khan.

We saw that with what's his name, Ariel Hawami.

All of a sudden, he's had him on his podcast before, leading some to believe it was a planted piece.

WWE met with WBD during their TV rights negotiations, which Tony Khan said was part of sports when asked about it.

Their current deal is believed to expire at the end of this year.

Well,

anybody that knows Nick Khan

it probably has more inside information than most jack-offs because Nick Kahn, I would assume, in his position, knows everything

that there needs to be known about any major television moves of wrestling promotions anywhere, don't you?

As soon as as goddamn things are said in confidence among these high muckety-muck television executives.

I think if you go back, I guess, at least 15 years, Nick Kahn is probably as knowledgeable as anyone in the field about not just wrestling but any sports television deals media deals anything before wwe he was an agent he represented a lot of people and agents know what other agents are doing they have to stay in touch with the marketplace so he may know more than anyone about the tv landscape and again he's still in the field he's still out there and We've heard him openly mock Tony Khan, who's just a few years younger than him, just like

three or four years younger than him, and they called him the kid.

The kid.

But he put over his dad.

He said, his dad is a real nice guy, but the kid, you know, we don't take him seriously.

Well, you can't.

You can't.

These are big-time fucking people in the WWE hierarchy now, major Hollywood fucking movers and shakers and executives and successful business people.

And you've got

fucking

hippity hop down here having his spasms and hugging people.

They can't take it seriously.

And they see

that sooner or later this thing, this thing could bankrupt Shad Khan if it was allowed to go on long enough.

And they know that it won't be.

Because as much as he loves his son, he's not going to be living in a box under the overpass for the sake of Tony having a wrestling company.

I don't think he has to worry about that.

He makes a lot of money from that patent, don't he?

Well, that's sooner or later.

You can't tell me that he's making

more money right now than Tony is losing.

I'm sure he's got a big bank account and I'm sure he makes a lot of money, but can he be making it as fast as Tony is losing it over the last four or five years?

Multiple times over, yes.

Good lord, for a car bumper?

One that everyone who was going to sell that kind of car would ever need to use, yeah.

And you couldn't try to get around it because he has the patent.

You know what?

I ought to invent.

And then since that time, he bought every sporting team that his son had any interest in.

And look at how that's gone.

I ought to invent something that people can't do without.

Well, easier said than done.

You have any ideas?

Well,

I just had the idea to do it.

So I'll have to get back with you on what I'm actually going to do.

But it'll be something that everybody needs.

Well, we will see if David Zazlov gets back to us on what he needs to do.

But this is your show.

Let me turn it back over to you.

Well, in that case, folks, we're going to be back in a few days with the start of our regular programming again.

And we're sorry for the delay.

And anybody really upset about it can put your lips together and attach them to my big fat white ass.

Because I've had a lot of problems lately.

All right.

At least you're not asking them to blow you again like you did a few weeks ago.

Well, they can kiss my ass or they can balloo me.

They've got the option.

They can pick either or.

I'm not greedy.

I don't want both,

but otherwise, until then, when we come back for the drive-through,

thank you, fuck you, bye-bye, everybody.

Get the experience,

get the experience of Jim Connet

of Jim Connet

of Jim Connet.