Episode 420: Jim Reviews AEW Full Gear

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Stuff falling all over the place. Hello again, friends.

And you are our friends. Don't leave paperwork on top of your organ.
Welcome back to another edition of Jim Cornett's drive-thru right here on a wonderful fall day, almost winter.

May feel like it for some of you, but we have an action-packed show. Lots of big, big topics on a big, big show here today.
Big!

big.

I'm your host, the great Brian Last, and here he is, Mr. Big Stuff himself, Jim Cornett.
A Miss Big Shot, who do you think you are?

Brian, are you using your organ as one of those spike things like they used to over at the lunch counter at the Walgreens, where they just take the check and they stick it on the thing there?

That's why your paperwork messed up your organ plate. It started out,

it sounded more like a

cruising on Lake Havasoma version. It was a little slower.
It was almost like you were just reaching up from falling down and grabbing the keyboard to try to push yourself to your feet.

And then it perked up a little bit. And then you hit one note that came by like a rainbow bread truck careening around the corner and smashing into a goddamn group of orphans crossing the street.

You never really got it back after that. That's kind of my sound.

That's kind of my sound. I don't know who you are.
Who are you to ridicule my sound? The Kareening Truck Orphans

is the new name of that band, by the way. We are going to trademark that.
Can you trademark that? I know someone who can, but. Kareening Truck Orphans.

All right. Well, we'll see.
Maybe we can get a guest appearance from you on the album when we finally get in the studio. But here we are, Jim.
A big week. We have a big show.
Lots of things happening.

Oh, big, big, huge, big. I have just given up, as we'll talk about here a little bit later on.
I've given up on a general public, trying to recognize how these people,

what the matter is with the reading comprehension, is it a cognitive ability

to process the information that's playing out in front of you visually and audio-wise or on the written page? or the logic or lack thereof. A lot of people just don't get it.

That's what it is. That's the theme for today on this show.

That's right. Thanks for throwing it back to me, Jim.
Of course, yeah, well, Eddie Man, back to you, Brian.

It's going to be a fun episode today.

As I said at the top, you know, we have episodes where we say to ourselves, well, I guess we got some classic stuff we could talk about because there's not a lot happening.

And then there's episodes where there's too much happening, and we got to find a way to make it ram it all in. That's right.
And that's one of the episodes. Pack it all in.

We're going to pack this fudge as tightly as we can today. I wouldn't phrase it like that, but you know who packs things all the time? Hotchkiss Featherbottom from Corporal Collectibles.

I see what you did there. And I'm proud to announce, ladies and gentlemen, that as of right now,

as we sit here and speak right now, you're not going to hear it for a few days.

But Hotchkiss Featherbottom is coming over tomorrow to pick up everything that has been ordered, except we got 500 personalized books orders left to go.

And I expect to have a productive Thanksgiving weekend. And we might actually be caught up with everything that has been ordered to date,

at least in the mail by the first week of December or the end of the first week of December. And

if you order by Cyber Monday, you can't wait till Teddy Tuesday. You got to order by Cyber Monday.
A non-personalized Heroes and Friends by Jim Cornette, the best-selling new book.

If you're in the United States, you're going to still get that by Christmas.

Bless the little children at Christmas at jimcornet.com. And there's only about a 10-day turnaround now on the orders that do not require a personalized book.

But many people want to hold this, Brian, in their hand. It's like your organ when you hold it in your hand.

They want to hold this book in their hand and they want to see a personal message written across the states and the countries and around the globe from me to them and signed there.

And so that it takes a little longer. Does anyone say, Congratulations, Lil Pismo on your hernia surgery? You know, I told you somebody asked for that.

The example that I made on one of the shows was it was like to little pismo, congratulations on your bowel movement. And somebody asked for that personalization.

But I'm a customer, pleaser, Brian. You were going to say something or just speak.
Does anyone request no autograph? Like they just want a copy they're going to read and leave around.

They don't have to worry about protecting an autograph.

Twice so far out of about 3,500 copies of the book. Does anyone request you write like, don't smudge this?

Well, I'm no, that's kind of self-explanatory.

That is there. they might sometimes

there is a character limit for fuck's sake.

People were wanting me to write goddamn, especially on the action figures where there ain't a lot of room on the front, wanting me to write goddamn passages from Mark Twain and shit.

I don't fucking know.

And so Hotchkiss put a character limit on there because there is some.

It disfigures after a while if you just write all over anything, a picture, a fucking, whatever.

But what was your question? I think you answered it. Well, there you go.
See? There you go.

I'm a customer pleaser. JimCornad.com.
And yes, get other things for Christmas also. The non-book stuff we're getting out, turning out quicker.

That's right. And each and every day, we still have tons of members of the Cult of Cornet Facebook group posting their photos of the books arriving, of their inscription.

It's a popular holidays. You know what I haven't seen? I don't maybe is this a bad sign, Brian?

Everybody is so happy to get it and they take the picture and they shoot the picture out and they, oh, I've ordered it. I can't wait to get it.

And they have gotten it, but then they never review the fucking thing. Does anybody like, has anybody enjoyed it yet? They're just so thrilled.
Maybe

they're shocked into silence. I don't know.
I haven't had any bad review. Nobody said anything to me.

Good, bad, or indifferent. Well, get your copy today, jimcornet.com.

Jim, we have a whole lot going going on. You know, it's late November yet.
There's gardeners somewhere scooping up. Oh, Jesus Christ.
Pissing me off. It's pissing me off today.
You know what?

When the snow removal services in February start making the same noise, I'm thinking you're going to need to go for some kind of brain scan. I could deal with them.

I hope they come by. I could deal with them.
As I said before, we have an action-packed episode. We have a lot to get to.

The AEW pay-per-view was filled with with highlights that everyone wants to hear your thoughts on.

Why don't we start with Bret Hart?

That was a left turn at Albuquerque.

He wasn't on the AEW pay-per-view, but no, he was somewhere, someplace here lately. I've seen some of the comments and

we'll go ahead.

Well, Bret Hart, the hero we all need in these times, is on his I don't give a fuck anymore tour, tour, where he just says all these things, and you're just amazed that he's saying it so nonchalantly.

He apparently was in Montreal. Well,

to be fair, almost everything Brett says is nonchalantly. And that's not a knock.
That's just his demeanor. I want to say this was in Montreal.

It's for a podcast I'm not familiar with, the Johnny I Pro

show. I don't know if it's a wrestling show or just

whatever, but Bret Hart was asked about or was talking about. I don't know how this came up,

Sean Michaels and Vince McMahon. Again,

one of those topics that he gets asked about a lot because of Montreal and the famous problems, the fight backstage, Vince's role in everything. Well,

enumerate the fight where Brett knocked Vince out backstage or the fight where Brett's Sean backstage. There were a number of incidents.
So, I mean, just so we don't narrow anything down.

And over the years, and we'll talk about this after this clip,

we've heard various wrestlers at various times, usually people disgruntled with WWE, if we're going to be fair, but still they would say they didn't like the click.

And maybe there was something going on with Sean and Vince. But let me play this audio.
Again, it's from the Johnny I Pro Show.

Here's Bret Hart talking about Sean Michaels and Vince McMahon.

I think that Sean and Vince were sleeping with each other.

Well, let me stop it there real quick.

Do we need to elaborate? I mean, he leads.

Talk about, you know, I thought the greatest opening line in history was when George Carlin came out for one of his HBO specials and said, Did you ever notice that the people that are against abortion are the people you wouldn't want to fuck anyway?

Well, Brett may have been. And he just topped it.
He just topped it. That's God damn it.
Goes, do go on. Let's get more detail from Brett the Hitman Hardy.
Yes.

I honestly, I'm just telling you, I think I'm very close to the truth here.

Sean and Vince were lovers, and that's why

I'm being dead honest. And I'm telling you.

We all know what the eighth stands for.

When I look back, it's like, I got caught between two lovers.

You know, and I got

caught between two lovers, feeling like a fool. Vince and Sean have screwed me, they've broken all the rules.

Shafted and screwed over, and Sean was so envious and jealous of my position that he finally had to sleep with Vince to get it.

I tell you, I say all this with absolute,

I would say it to Sean if he was right here.

I would actually like to have Sean come clean and say, look,

we were lovers.

Because I'm sure they were.

I have an absolute 100%.

If I saw either Vince or Sean here, I would say I think you guys were lovers.

I love it.

Well, there it is, Jim.

Okay, first of all, that is the most entertaining verbally that Bret Hart has ever been in his his entire public career.

And the timing and the fucking delivery and the.

Now, as to,

you know, again, this is part of the issue. It's a long time ago we're talking about.
It's not like you didn't hear this back then because.

Although on its face, you would think that's kind of ridiculous. Well, but no, here's the thing.

I heard it more from the,

I can't say the internet. What was the precursor of the internet? Did they have the web TV then or whatever that was?

You heard it from the fans more than I actually heard it when I was around these two,

in their own way, miserable fucking people every goddamn week.

Could just

physically, logistically.

There was barely a point in time where it actually could have taken place physically and logistically

unless they were doing the now Sean and Sonny in the locker room

that's been documented but not Sean and Vince there were people we were around Vince 24 fucking hours a day

but nevertheless

point B not in his hotel room

in many cases Michaels was out on the road when Vince was in Connecticut and at the TV tapings

there was they would have had to have fucking done it at four o'clock in the morning behind a Coke machine in the middle of, I mean, it's ridiculous

for somebody not to have busted them at the time.

But nevertheless,

that's what I'm trying to say to you is I now that I've heard this.

Because what I was going to say when I had only read the comments that Brett made

was that, you know, when you,

when there's somebody that's incredibly accomplished and talented in their chosen field and has reached the pinnacle and made money and got a claim

and actually

says almost everything, you know, that you agree with. And then they just say something and just, and then the Martians landed.

And you're like, oh, fuck, why did you say that? Because now some people may think you're fucking nuts when you say other shit that is logical and commonsensical.

But now that I hear the delivery,

which got over goddamn to this live audience, wherever they may be,

I think he has some reason

for winding up,

as they would say across the pond, winding up

either Vince or Sean or both.

And it was just, it's just, that was an amazing fucking routine there, but I don't know that he can't

legitimately believe that is what I'm trying to say. But I don't want to bust up his fucking cafe.

Have other wrestlers believed that in the past?

You would all... I mean, I saw the Rogue Warrior say it in an interview in like 2002 or whatever it was.
But also, well, also, look at what other wrestlers have gone on record as believing since then.

In some cases, in many cases,

it all boils down to: I've said, why did he fucking put up with the goddamn thing?

But I think, in some kind of weird, the thing being Shawn Michaels,

in some kind of weird

Vince way,

that boyhood dream thing

was Vince seeing himself.

He was so fixated.

Oh, goddamn it.

He didn't have a.

Sean Michaels didn't exist when Vince was a boyhood and had a dream.

It was just a dream in the mind of boyhood Vince McMahon, maybe. Who knows? But as I've said before, whether it's just that it was

he was a pet

project

because he was convinced that goddamn Sean was, this was going to be the thing or whatever the fuck for about a year and a half, as I said.

But no,

either one of them, I just know. I just, I'm sorry.

See, it's something that I've always heard questioned because it always comes back to, and again, this is before we found out about the sexual perversions, you know, beyond the Rita Chatterton accusations.

We really didn't know too much about Vince McMahon,

what he was up to. But you would hear people say, Here's businessman Vince.

Why is he putting up with any shit at all, let alone on a continual basis from

the second worst drawing champion he had, a babyface who did not get over to a lot of guys. And that may be Vince's fault more than Sean's because Vince kind of turned it into a

different kind of deal that guys weren't going to get behind. But after all that, Sean is up on drugs

up shows walked out or was sent home on several occasions and didn't draw people kind of rewrite history about sean michaels because of his comeback in the 2000s but he wasn't a draw and dx didn't take off until he was gone i've never rewritten his history either but look at ultimate warrior Somebody just tweeted the contract the other day that Vince tried to give him

after what that last time, so he wouldn't go to fucking WCW and bomb out there, too. And he was going to get the biggest

pet projects,

whether the warrior fulfilled his bodybuilding dreams or Sean Michaels fulfilled Vince's

now apparent horrible self-image of being a

trashy abused kid from a fucking trailer park or whatever his goddamn mind fuck was now

in hindsight,

his pet project, he put up with all kinds of shit.

But I don't think he was blowing warrior either. Well, there's always been people who think that, but and also,

by the way, Michaels may have,

you know, beaten fucking Wilt Chamberlain for a number of women that he may have fucked around with on the road. But again,

a lot of the

guys in every territory since the dawn of time have tried to come up with the story to justify why that somebody has the spot they want or won't give them the spot they want

for years. A bunch of the guys in the Tennessee territory would have whispered to you, well, you know, Jerry Jarrett's really Roy Welch's son.
He had an affair with Teeny

until you go back and do the actual genealogical research, research, find out that both Jerry and his sister were born before

the teeny ever was involved with the wrestling industry or sold her first ticket at the shoe store. They already existed as people.

And it wasn't like she was going down to the wrestling matches.

So

that exists,

but at some point,

as I said,

you've got to look at, okay, I'd like to, but it's like another topic we're going to talk about here later on in the program.

People will believe the most preposterous shit because they want to, because they would love for that to be the truth. And also it's inside information or whatever.

And so they will believe preposterous shit.

And I am convinced again.

If Brett sounded like he was

that, I don't know how old Brett is. I don't want to age him, but a 60-something-year-old stroke victim meandering that, yeah, Vince and Sean, oh, they were lover.
But no, he was goddamn,

he was Carlin on stage there or some wonderful orator for a fucking snappy bit.

He's got to be winding those two, one or one or both of those two up.

And I heard that they've all made up in the past, but now you don't give a shit.

And I don't think that he and Sean are in the same social circles.

And I would put that on pay-per-view

to see him because I believe he would actually probably do it if he's goddamn,

you know, unless they're working a program together. He might very well fucking Brett say it to Sean's face.

And I would put that on pay-per-view and I would put down a large check for a front row seat just to see everybody's reactions to all of this. Maybe that's what this is.

Maybe the Saudis pay like a hundred million dollars to get Brett versus

at WrestleMania and Saudi Arabia. And this is the build

with Vince on a poll.

He may like that. Who knows? Well, if I can be serious, though, a serious question: do you think Triple H was fucking them too?

Oh, copy. Do you think it was like the three of them? Like, you know, just, hey, let's go back to the hotel.
We love the business so much.

Take off your pants.

Because why else? Because again, it's the other guy. Nothing else ever made sense.
Why did Triple H get the push he got when the fans didn't take to him? And then he was shoved down everyone's throat.

He was overpushed. Vince had a weird,

at a minimum, friendship connection with Sean and Triple H. And I think, especially

Triple H was Sean's friend. Triple H was a student of the game.
Triple H loved to work out.

Triple H knew exactly in what manner to appeal to all of Vince's interests as a talent after

the whole curtain call thing, when he got his wrist slapped, he is smart enough to lay back, realize the situation, and suck up to everybody for a fucking solid year or so.

And then there you go. Do you think Sean ever worried about making Bruce jealous?

I think Bruce was always the bridesmaid and never the bride. Did you ever see the footage of Vince McMahon giving Sean Michaels his Hall of Fame ring when he went into the Hall of Fame?

I don't recall it, to be honest with you. There's lots of footage like this.

You may have even seen it up close and in person when you were there for the Rock and Roll Express, where backstage, because he won't come out and he doesn't want people to mention him, Vince McMahon would present people with their ring and you have their little moment and they get a picture.

He presented it to Sean

and dare I say, it looked like two lovers embracing

and they were crying and they were like hugging. It just,

again, it's the Vince McMahon Hall of Fame of who he chose to put in this year. At least that's what it was for a long time.

But I don't know. I don't think Bret Hart did anything to kill these stories.
I think we're only going to.

You think they'll sue Bret Hart? I guess that's the next question.

Oh, I got to get into the discovery documents. Is there a way that we can,

can we somehow be party to that suit?

Can we recommend an attorney?

877-50-STEVE. Get even with Steve at newlawoffice.com.
But

that's the Brett Hart update. Yeah, I have another quote here.
Real quick, let's go to the. Well, yeah, because there was a couple.
See, here's the thing. I'd seen this in kind of reverse order.

Like, I'd seen like three

comments from Brett. And the first one was like, yeah.
And the second one i was like yeah that brett boy he tells it like it is and the third one is sean's bread or vince and i'm what

the

he's got a record of honesty i don't know we'll have to see what happens there but here's a quote this reminded me of you a little bit jim on today's wrestling bret hart said from the same interview with the what was it johnny i pro

i see guys throwing punches

And they open their hand at the last second and slap the guy.

Why don't you take 10 minutes and go down and have someone teach you how to throw a punch instead of throwing that embarrassment of a punch?

There you go.

That's something that any established professional who was looking at a tape with a fucking

young, up-and-coming, aspiring professional or somebody in school or whatever would fucking pick out of a goddamn video as sage professional advice.

And apparently he wasn't referring to Jey Uso here. He was referring to Seamus.

I'd never even noticed it was Seamus. I guess I don't pay that close of attention to his.

I was about to say, Seamus kind of, you know, light bends around him, really, where you don't see him even when he's there because of his paleness. But

a lot of them do it. And

he's right. And it looks silly.

And I don't know why that,

because I mean,

most of the guys

that were spent any time, let me qualify, most of the guys that spent any time at all in OVW

back in the day

did not throw an embarrassing punch because we took the time to teach them to do it right and show them why and why not and various. And nobody was ever

hard way at anybody, busting them open, knocking their teeth out, or throwing sissy slap punches.

It is not that fucking hard if you concentrate.

They work less than ever before and

they throw their punches worse than ever before. It's interesting.
Well, there it is, Jim. The Bret Hard update.
But now there was something else that he said also. Oh, what else?

Maybe I could look it up. And I'm trying to think of what it was.

Oh, God damn it. I saw another quote that he had.
Well, nevertheless, I said, check out the interview, ladies and gentlemen. It's too fake for me.
Modern wrestling.

That's it. I think that today's wrestlers are actors.
Most of them are actors pretending to be wrestlers. And, you know, they don't actually know how to wrestle.

And they don't even know what a headlock is.

He always thought wrestling needed to actually pretend to be wrestling. There's a quote.

That was the other thing that I heard that common sense, experienced veteran, professional opinion from a guy at a high level and nothing controversial about it that I can see.

And then he went to

an invincible sean.

Have you ever heard or even read something Bret Hart has said and said, that's completely erroneous? That's not true.

Let me go back through my mental files. You know, he wrote a book that was

sick. Yeah, great book.
It was also long enough to have been co-written by Tolstoy. So I'm trying to.
I believe it was called Beowulf 2.

I can't give a blanket statement that I agree with every word that was in Bret Hart's thousand-page book. And off the top of my head, somebody, some wise ass will point something out.

Well, he said this about you. You agree with that.

For the most part, besides being,

and I've said this before, I used to think during the time

god damn Brett's taking himself so seriously and then it became refreshing when he was the only one that was taking the business seriously

and

it's been entertaining that it's almost like a running punchline with and Bill Goldberg you know what do you want for lunch Brett

well not what Brett Bill Goldberg gave me when he concussed me

It's been entertaining because, you know, fuck, if a guy had kicked me in the head and cost me millions of dollars, I wouldn't let people forget it either.

But I didn't want him to become, you know, like the old guy trailing off,

like when Ron Wright had been drugged by Tammy Fitch. And I remember when me and Donnie were the Tennessee tag team champions.

But, you know, more often than not, I agree with.

what Brett says about the wrestling business. It's very logical.

He's a little dry because he's Canadian. Remember, I always say Owen was the only hilarious Canadian.

In wrestling.

Well, in wrestling. Okay.

But otherwise, you know, Brett was not always joshing in his delivery, but he kind of makes point.

But goddamn, that was great.

Well, we'll see what more can be found out about this. We'll see if anyone asked Shawn Michaels about this.
But Jim,

on the topic of Bret Hart and on the topic of

what he's saying here.

Yes. You have to wonder, Bret Hart,

you know, the nonchalantness,

the ease

that he has saying these things and even talking about people he doesn't like.

I wonder how much of that's because of the ease of knowing he's going to pay one fee and get access to all the WWE Premium Live events and special events by Saturday night's main event.

And, like the Survivor Series about to happen,

Bret Hart is in Canada, and not everyone has that luxury. And those of us here in the States, you may love where you live.
You may hate how much you have to pay for premium live events.

We have a way that you can pay less and for a moment, be Canadian in the right way from our friends at Surfshark.

Jesus Christ, that was a long way around your elbow to get to your wrist.

Folks, I'll tell you what, though, at Surf Shark, that's surf shark, as in you're surfing, and then suddenly a shark comes and eats you. Surfshark, VPN, and of course that's surfshark.com.

They can do all of what Brian just said in a fraction of the time. Because, you know, the Canadians, they love, they're friendly people.
They're very friendly, polite people.

And they don't go around just financially abusing their citizens with all these fancy damn streaming fees and stuff. And so they get a lot of shit we have to pay for.

And now we can not only team you up with some people that will get you

what you want for less than you're now paying for it, but we can save you money with them.

Brian, that's a double whammy, isn't it? We're double dipping there. We're saving them money on saving them money.
It's big time, time a big time deal for our big time listeners

because i'm in the big time big time and i know success is all mine

all mine and it can be all yours too folks because let me tell you here's the thing i thought you were doing peter gabriel for a second you took me by surprise where you went that was rick james baby i'm rick james

And you know who else can be Rick? You can be Rick James if you want.

You can be who you want to be and do go where you want to go.

You can be in bolivia if you want to be but we'll use canada for an example if you want to be in in canadia then that's that's just what you can tell them and they'll be none the wiser and if if you're old country ass just tell them you've gone to a convention but surf shark can then give you uh uh

access to all the things a canadian gets uh that uh we don't that we don't get uh that they don't pay for you know what i'm saying that's putting like the commercial-free WWE on Canadian Netflix.

That's right. That's the big one right there, because

you got to have Peacock right now. You got to have

Netflix. You got to have USA Network.
You got to have all these different things.

You got to have.

What's the other one? I'm thinking.

You got to have a lot of fucking time on your hands to find them all and get them. And money.

And money to spend. But

if you go to surfshark.com/slash surfshark.com/slash JCE and sign up, and not only will they protect your privacy, but they will give you access to live in places that you might want to live on a virtual sense.

And all you have to do is renounce your American citizenship. Well, no, no, no, no, fill out the papers, you don't have to.
They'll send it into the consulate. No, and then

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Well, Jim, speaking of teaming up and speaking of the Survivor Series, why don't we do a quick preview of the Survivor Series War Games coming up from San Diego, California this coming weekend, November 29th, 2025?

That is a Saturday as of this moment.

Jim, let's talk about this.

There is a bill before Congress to change that, right? It'll be then Thursday afternoon. I don't think Congress can get anything done that quickly, so I think we're safe.

Jim, this will be a Petco Park. This is a big event.
Let's go. And here's another thing.

How about the LA Olympic Auditorium or the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or New York's Madison Square Garden? Now we've come down to Petco Park.

It sounds literally like a field of rabbits and gerbils and ocelots

and all kinds of rodenting.

The badgers and the beavers and all the other things are just running around in Petco Park.

That's with birds. That's two straight segments of mentions of gerbils and rabbits, ladies and gentlemen.
Well, they were just, they were on my mind.

The little furry creatures can be running around in the park from Petco, not a goddamn sports arena or a stadium.

Well, Jim, as we are recording, and Monday Night Raw has not taken place yet, there's only four matches announced so far for this card. Good lord.
So let's go through this list here. So

again, we're swinging a pendulum from one extreme to the other.

The goddamn matches won't stop on one side, and they won't even start on the other side. You got to think they're going to add at least one, maybe two matches.

I think they were setting up maybe a multi-man, potentially Survivor Series match on

on SmackDown. But here's the card so far, Jim.
Yeah. For the Women's World Championship,

Stephanie Vaquer, the champion, versus Nikki Bella.

Oh, Jesus Christ. We haven't paid close attention to the last couple of weeks.
Where did she come from? Well, I know where she came from. Where's she been? I know where she's been.
Why is she back?

I assume you're talking about Nikki Bella? Yes. Who I must say, this is the best she's ever looked.
She's aged really well. Nikki Bella came back again as a baby face to help her friend.

I guess that was a compliment. Yeah, no, she looks great for her.
She aged really well. You wouldn't think she is the age she is.
She looks really good for her age. How old is she? I have no idea.

You don't reveal a lady's age. That's what they say.
Oh, for Christ's sake. Jim, we're trying to do a professional preview here.
All right.

All right. She returned to help Stephanie, but it was a ruse.
She actually turned on Stephanie. So now Nikki Bella's a heel.

Well, I gathered that point, but the point is, has she ever been any good? Have I seen a Bella match ever?

I mean, you must have. You've definitely seen them in Royal Rumbles.
I don't know if you've ever met for WrestleMania. I can't tell there.
WrestleMania, she worked with,

was it Becky Lynch?

I bet you I didn't watch that.

So I don't know.

All right.

I'm hopeful that Stephanie Vacker will retain

so that

she can build her

dominant streak coming up since

you and the rest of the fans seem to have taken to her.

So why does Nikki Bella need to come in and horn in on things?

Jim, for the Intercontinental Championship. Oh, you didn't make a prediction.
You said Stephanie Vaquer?

Well,

I hope that that's what happened, but I can't make a learned prediction because I don't know what they're doing and have little desire to learn.

For the Intercontinental Championship, the champion, John Cena

versus Dominic Mysterio.

Here we go.

Obviously, Cena, I think Cena is going to retain, and I think he's going to drop it to Gunther on his last match in December. What is it, December 13th?

I believe that's what they will do to maximize what time they have left with John. But this is going to be,

I would think, an excellent match, giving again

Cena's age, and he's not going to fucking fuck himself up before the last one this close, but it's going to be a great match. The people are going to go apeshit over it.

And Cena will retain

somehow, but I would think that Dominic will

come out

with some kind of bitch or some out

so he can still be the whiny little heel that he is.

This may be the highlight of the night.

Jim in a women's war games match,

which you have to watch because you have to compare it to what you just saw at Blood and Guts.

I don't think anything can compare to what I saw at Blood and Guts. Rhea Ripley,

EO Sky,

Alexa Bliss,

Charlotte Flair,

and A.J. Lee

versus Nia Jax,

Lash Legend, oh boy, the Kabuki Warriors of Asuka and Kyrie Sane,

and Becky Lynch.

Boy, if they'd have narrowed that down to a six-girl tag, I think that would be just

swell.

I mean,

here's the problem now. And look, individually, love Rhea Ripley.

Yes, EO Sky is wonderful. She's the genius of the sky, but Alexa Bliss is

very small, but they got Charlotte for some size. AJ Lee,

also very small, but it's her match back after she was the hottest thing of the summer. And apparently, from what I understand,

she sold more merchandise than anybody did.

Or Or

I started to say that the wrong way. She was in the top 10 merchandise sellers.
I don't know if it was in any order, the people that I saw.

But from one fucking match.

But boy,

we saw Lash Legend a few years back on NXT.

Brian, is it good news or bad news that we haven't seen her on the main roster, but she's been around for five years or more?

Well, she's on the main roster now. She's got size.
She's got presence.

She was rotten. Is she continuing to be rotten or is she better than rotten? Well, what better place to find out than the war games?

What better place to throw a wrestler and see if they've got what it takes than the war games?

But they got Becky on their side and she's a big star. So

All right, I know they're going to do this.

We're going to have dinner before we have dinner. So who's in the men's?

This may end up being better than the men's again.

Did you pick a winning team?

Oh,

that's what I was going to say is the problem is

a war games match or

some type of ultimate stipulation match like this

should always theoretically, logically, and

psychologically go to the baby face because good tromps over evil.

But now that they have these

gimmick matches at regular intervals on shows, instead of coming up with, oh, we haven't had one in three or four years, it's perfect to peak it in this match,

then

you can't have the babyfaces win every fucking time. Especially when there's two of them on one fucking show.

So

again, you know, it's always good for the babyfaces to triumph over evil before they just get the shit kicked out of them until people lose faith. But who knows where they're going?

Are they going for an

electrified cage next month?

Now with midgets, I have no idea.

The men's war games match, Jim, the final match so far for Survivor Series War Games.

CM Punk,

Cody Rhodes,

the Usos, comprised of Jay and Jimmy.

Well, who else are who else who's there?

And Roman Reigns

versus the Vision, comprised of Brown Breaker and Bronson Reed,

Logan Paul,

Drew McIntyre,

and Brock Lesnar with Paul Heyman.

Has there been award games with that many main eventers packed in it in WWE since they started doing it? I don't think so.

That's why I'm going to say is

this one is hard to call because you have a situation

where you really

You'd have to struggle to figure out which team to put over because of various reasons. And this is not the culmination of a long program amongst everybody.

There's some long-term,

Brock has dropped in like twice, right?

And otherwise, this hadn't been an ongoing thing with him. But at the same point,

if there is somebody that

was going to lose on the babyface side, you would think it would be one of the Usos, Usos, which is why you probably shouldn't do that because that's what everybody would think, and they just end up being flunkies.

But then, who

does the job on the heel side?

It would probably come down

to Bronson Reed, who's part of a package they're trying to push regularly.

You don't want to beat Drew McIntyre again

after he's been beaten beaten so many times already. This ain't the time to beat Brock.

And it depends on how they feel about Logan Paul.

So

this one is up in the air, too, because this is not

each of these guys can still have their own individual issues going on.

So it's not like it's the ultimate blow-off amongst all these people

as it would have been previously in normal war game setups back in the day.

So the answer is

that's a great fucking main event, which is another reason why I wouldn't have the goddamn girls do it first.

You think someone will turn on one of the baby fan? I'm trying to see who could turn. CM Punk ain't going to turn right now, you don't think.
Cody Rhodes wouldn't.

The Usos,

they're kind of just there right now. Roman a turning.
I guess we'll see what happens.

But that's Survivor Series War Games, Jim, four matches. But I do predict that Heyman will come off the top of the cage with a fucking frog splash.

Again, you hate to encourage... AI.
There are videos I saw just recently where I'm guessing someone said, generate me the biggest, fattest, sloppiest

like six, seven, six hundred-pound person to jump off the top of cages. And like, brings it collapsing and like landing in the fans.

It is horrible, and it's scary because it's AI, but I couldn't look away. I watched it like a hundred times.

Well, I'm glad to know that you're getting productive use out of your spare time, Brian. Well, that is the Survivor Series preview.

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Jim, why don't we talk about, before we get to the AEW pay-per-view, why don't we get to the pre-show first? The feud that broke out on Twitter over the last few days,

where apparently the high flyers in AEW have gone to war with Jim Cornette.

Well, it's not even.

This is what I was talking about when I said, I don't understand people's how they comprehend things and how they believe just stupid shit that they hear.

And it ought to be preposterous on the face of it.

But yet they just can't get it.

So the other day, the other day,

I looked at Twitter in the morning, as I'm wont to do, to check and see if I need to retweet any of our YouTube clips or whatever.

And there's this

video from this, whoever this site was.

And it's not anything to do with wrestling. It's one of the

like goofy home videos or wild things happening in traffic. You know what I'm saying, right? Videos.

And

it just happens to be

there's these people. There's like two or three people sitting on a couch in this big living room

in somebody's apartment somewhere. And these other two guys are

playing wrestling.

But the thing is, they're not, they're doing spinner rooney fucking DDTs. And this one kid is

getting fl he's taking full backdrops on the floor and flat back bumps on the floor.

Where one he'll spring back up like they do on TV, but one time he goes back and you could hear his head hit the floor and he turns over and lays there.

And they, right as the guy's saying, Hey, y'all right,

they cut the clip and then they're hitting him in the head with shit. And he's taking these bumps on the floor.
And then

suddenly they're out on the fucking deck

on the deck, like the two befores over the four before posts on the fucking deck. And they're doing power bombs on his guy.

Then they fling him off the porch

and he lands on cardboard. I shouldn't say porch, the deck, it's on the second story.

And they fling him out of that, and he lands on cardboard and spread out over the top of the poisoned ivy on the ground.

Then he

splashes out the fucking window on a guy or whatever.

But apparently, they couldn't,

they didn't have enough money for a table, so they just

use cardboard. And this big guy picks this other guy up, and they've got the cardboard laid out between two chairs.
And he chokeslams him through it, and he just goes right through to the floor.

It looks like it kills him.

And I'm not sure it didn't. I think that's where the fucking deal ends, right?

And that was the video, these fucking maniacs.

And

the quote on it was: these kids have no idea that

these are the fun memories that they're going to remember for the rest of their lives, or something like that.

And so it wasn't like there was any

a lot of the comments I saw said, oh my God, they're going to break the big screen TV.

Jesus Christ.

You know,

it wasn't any particular wrestling promotion. They're just these morons, right?

And I retweeted this clip and I said, imagine what fun that the orthopedic surgeons are going to have. Their memories will involve hours of surgery and massive bills.

which I didn't think was particularly inflammatory. Brian, would you say for any particular wrestling promotion?

There was no specificity made.

No, you're speaking specifically about what they're doing in this video, but it's not aligned with any company or anything. No.
About these underage minors attempting to paralyze themselves. Yes.

And so anyway, I tweet that out. And I think everybody will get a good chuckle out of it.

And then I come back about five hours later. I've been on the

been assigning books. And I come back and I'm while I'm in the office, I'm going to check the Twitter.
And I look, and there's thousands of fucking tweets. There's thousands of

I got like a couple of thousand of the little hearty things, right?

But then, and I got people responding to it and say, oh, Jesus Christ, what's the matter with these fucking people? They're all going to goddamn go to the hospital. That type of demeanor.

And then

all of the

people who don't follow me who you've never seen crawl out of the woodwork when they defend the the flippy do stuff were

enraged that i would

this is what the business has come to cordette you're gonna have to deal with it

the business has evolved what business Here's some fucking teenage jackoffs in their living room throwing people out of windows.

hasn't been to any business

what i do this is what the business has come to

so

anyway

they're saying that

that i'm just i'm out of touch i'm an old man i have to deal with the business has evolved but the business of the monkey business as dusty would say boy they were right next to the china cabinet too i just looked at that again on twitter and then there were people say you just hate fun

you just hate fun

you don't want anybody to have a good time

it seems like everybody's doing this to the same

guy although some a lot of this stuff is dark and they're all kids so you can't really tell but

This guy may not have fun for fucking long if he continues to give himself brain damage and misalign his spine and do this goofy shit

that these other people are laughing at him while they're doing to him.

And then there was people

besides the ones who were, I hate fun, and besides what this is what the business has come to. I said, oh, well, I wrestled in my backyard.
We all did that. You know, kids that age are indestructible.

No, they're fucking not.

You hear people, kids that are injured in goddamn sports incidents and paralyzed in sports incidents nationwide

is a disturbing fucking statistic but nevertheless

they say oh we did this they weren't looking at the i defy any of these motherfuckers to actually have allowed people to throw them off a second floor deck and take a flat back bump on cardboard on the ground.

They may have been backyard wrestling, Brian, but do you think that

99.3% of these people were doing it

at that extent or not? You see what I'm saying? I don't think so. I mean, a lot of us, when we're younger, have like wrestling matches in the backyard, the front yard, the basement.

That's what wrestling fans who are kids do.

But it wasn't like, hey, let's do, let's jump off the roof. No, we never did that.

And you saw this video also.

You can testify that this fucking kid's going to have some issue.

Just almost no way around it, a physical issue.

But besides that,

some of the people said we wrestled. Well, I did too.
I've told the stories. When I was a teenager, we had wrestling matches.

And you know what?

We stuck foreign objects in our trunks, tried to hide them from the referee, for the two spectators in attendance.

And hey, referee pulled my hair. You know, wrestling.

But also, no, there was a lot of stomping of the feet on the punches.

And headlock takeovers were

optional sometimes, but nobody was taking full fucking backdrops because we're on the goddamn floor.

What?

If we could recognize 50 years ago at the same age that we are not in what they, the wrestlers used to do this, therefore,

what the fuck? How stupid can you be? They don't play professional football on asphalt.

So

I can't identify with that mindset, except that these jackass stunt spot monkeys, as we'll get to shortly, have made

this a thing where it's some type of

badge of honor that you can physically destroy yourself with dreams of grandeur.

That it's palatable to these people that you can just do this in your backyard and then just walk into the goddamn national television scene for hundreds and thousands and millions of dollars because these fucking morons have, some of them have done it.

But then they also say,

well,

Mick Foley did it and the Hardys in it.

They overlook that Mick Foley, after he, as a teenager, jumped off his roof onto a mattress, actually went to a legitimate wrestling school, Dominic DiNucci's, and trained.

And it's in his book if they bother to read it.

Because what these people are doing here

is

because they said, well,

these are the other Twitter comments from these people. Well, they have to learn somewhere.
Well, they're learning to bump.

No, they're not learning to bump because the jackass next door is the one that's throwing them off the porch.

How is he conveying any wisdom? Here, jump.

The fuck?

I don't,

what are you saying? They've got to learn to bump. Once again, they have fostered the opinion in people that

this part of the population's mind

that you can just fling yourself off shit and then go be a wrestler. It's such a simpleton's, shallow, and superficial view of what the business is at a professional level that it's mind-numbing.

These people can't see fucking through it. But the problem is,

some of the marks in the business can't see through it.

And it,

again, and I'll say one more thing, and then we'll talk about a couple of people in specific that are marks in the business. But

Brian, remember they said

that's what the business has evolved into, Cornette. You're going to have to deal with it.
And I said, this doesn't really have anything to do with the fucking business.

TKO, the overlord

conglomerate

that owns the UFC and the WWE,

also owns the PBR, right, Brian? Not Pab's Blue Ribbon, but the professional bull riding people thing place. Yeah, right? That's right.

Okay.

We have now people making videos in their backyards and training in their basements and flinging themselves through tables and furniture doing the wrestling.

And there's people on Twitter that think, well, they've got to learn somewhere.

Is there also video? And they say, and the business has changed, just deal with it.

Is there video

of anybody, some fucking guy down in Shepherdsville, outside a fucking farm, climbing the fence, finding the fucking bull and trying to ride his ass and getting fucking gored and thrown up on the roof of the barn and people said well goddamn the bull riding business has changed

does it work that way too

no it does not

so what is it about this

so

I had tweeted that

yeah the surgeons are going to have a field day And then I gone about my business, came back, and all these comments. And I said, just because I, how did these people even see this? If

I, you know, they don't follow me and I didn't, you know, tag any fucking company or whatever, as the kids say.

And then I looked and saw that

independently of each other,

but apparently at almost the fucking same time,

Osprey,

I guess because he's on England time, whatever that may be over there.

Osprey had tweeted the same clip, not in response to me, had tweeted the same clip that I saw and scoffed at

with the phrase, I fully support this.

It's like,

have I ever mentioned to you how that I wouldn't be able to take me in the same room with a lot of these fucking guys?

It's like an instant opposite.

And I couldn't believe that. Here is again, that's like one of the professional bull riders

saying to the guy, to the guy, go, go jump the fence. Yeah, old fucking

old behemoth over there, try him.

Or it's like a movie stunt man saying, hey, kids,

here's great footage of people trying to set themselves on fire at home, and you can do it too.

Am I crazy in this?

And these are kids, they're teenagers.

I'll tell you why he said this, what I said to him, et cetera. But Brian, am I crazy in the thought that

professionals shouldn't actually be encouraging these people to go to this extent to fucking break their bodies up to imitate what they're seeing on television in a hostile environment not built for said activity?

You know, there's a reason after years, WWE began their programming with a a don't try this at home

thing, you know, there was a reason for it. And that was before things went to the level they're at now, especially with AEW specifically.
But then WWE eventually adapts and does that stuff too.

But that's from back then.

That's from wrestlers breaking their neck and the few cases you heard about kids doing wrestling things at home that made the news usually resulted in someone's death or just something bad.

Or don't hit people overhead. And this is still to to this day uh uncle dave and a whole bunch of them i can't believe they're still doing chair shots

and as i said give me a guy that knows how to give me a chair shot and i will take him a hundred times over letting any of these

even jump off the top rope on me

it's it they're they're crazy in weird ways but nevertheless your point

Well, I think that was my point right there. Oh, well, good.
Then I'll go back to my point.

So if I comb my hair right, nobody will notice it. So Osprey says, I fully support this.
And so I would, again, what's it? The quote tweet.

I quote tweeted him. I said, he says from his hospital bed after major surgery, kids keep trying this at home.

And that got another couple or 3,000 fucking little hearty thingies and got everybody fucking

stirred back up and everything. But I was gobsmacked at that.

And then

I,

at some point later on, because again, there's a time difference and I get on Twitter two, three times a day, maybe,

he had tweeted back and he

pays for the blue check so he can just, he wrote a manifesto. I zoned out on it.
Like many of his interviews, it was very wordy.

not cussing me, but defending his point.

And at one point he said, Well, Jim, as you know, you broke both of your legs falling off the scaffold.

And he said it with a straight face, like that actually happened.

I say said it with a straight face. He wrote it like that was a legitimate, acknowledged fact.
He thinks I broke both my legs.

But nevertheless, and if I could say something too, because every now and then when you hear someone get mad at your criticism of this stuff and they bring up the scaffold, it's almost like some of them think you took a bump.

Like

it wasn't Bubba was supposed to catch you, and you guys

Jim Cornette took this big bump off the scaffold, like, they don't even realize what it is.

Well, and or they say fell off the scaffold, and you know, because you weren't trained to take a bump properly.

No, the concept then was you just hang and drop to your fucking feet and try to make it look good from there. But it wasn't like to take a fucking bump

And I tore my ACL, obviously. This is one of the more oft-repeated played bumps in fucking history.
And we've told a story, but he thinks I broke both my legs. Both your legs.

And again,

it was attempting to do something on your own without relying on anyone else, at least. And you're landing still in the ring on a padded surface.

So there is, and it was, here's the problem I have have also,

which I'll get to with other numb nuts in a minute.

It was also on the biggest show of the year for fucking 10 grand at the 40 years ago, which I think we've established is about 30, 35 grand.

And blah, blah, blah. It wasn't, I'm being thrown off the fucking porch at home.
And it wasn't just an interchangeable thing in the middle of the show.

It specifically led to Starcade 86's videotape being like the best-selling one they ever had.

Well, tell Jimmy Crockett that and remind him because I wish I'd have got the check. But nevertheless,

where I was going with that was, I said, this guy is

saying this, and they fire back with,

or Osprey comes back with this long manifesto, and he thinks I broke both my legs.

And then he also attached,

he did the same thing.

He attached video over this dark

gym, I guess, somewhere. I believe it was him as a teenager.
I couldn't tell her. There was no lights, but somebody was dropping them on their fucking head on wrestling mats.

They didn't even have a ring.

His whole basic thing was, I came from where these kids are.

Exactly. That's why you've just had fucking neck fusion surgery.

And he said,

this is my first major surgery. What? I don't know what qualifies as major, but neck fusion when you're 30-something.

But nevertheless, that may be why that, unfortunately,

he's been a guy in Japan

and he's been a guy on British Independence

because he a freakish athlete who can do all the amazing flips that they've practiced and the moves.

But he was never

properly trained before he had self-trained.

So he didn't gather

what to do when, how to protect others and yourself, how to apply logic and psychology

to a match. You can get a chimpanzee

to imitate many of the

overly gymnastic moves

and with a high degree of perfection, I'm sure. But you can't teach the chimpanzee

how to have project the emotion of enjoying inflicting pain on the baby face or of being

in peril

as a baby face yourself or in

putting the chain of things together that plays on the people's emotions. That's past the chimpanzee.

That's how you go. That's why you go to wrestling school.
And

even the guys

that were self-trained,

like before we mentioned Mick.

I say self-trained because they say, well, they started in the backyard.

Mentioned Mick. Yeah, he went to Dominic DiNucci school.
They mentioned the Hardys.

Matt learned to work. Jeff never, Jeff's work was was always the shit, technically in the ring, but he was Jey Uso 25 years ago.
They just fucking loved him. He was a superstar.

And you work around that.

But technically, his work was always shit.

But all of these guys

were, to some extent,

whether they were self-trained or not, they were trained in terms of even on the job being in the ring with guys.

And whether they want to admit it or not, some do and some don't. Some were like, oh my God, it was a revelation when I went to wrestling school.

And others are like, oh, I knew everything.

Tony Khan employs most of them.

But that's the

issue there is that Osprey did this and he's just

now

with all of that athletic talent

gotten on national television in the United States two years ago after he's already tore his body up, because he never learned anything past this

performance thing they've got going on that they have convinced themselves in their modern indie wrestling little bubble is just going to appeal to everybody in the goddamn world.

And they're killing themselves and they're fusing their necks and they're doing who knows what to their fucking spines and brains.

And then, meanwhile, while that

Brian had gone on,

as I said, independently of each other, he, at this almost the same time as I had said, look at this stupid shit. He had said, oh, I love this.

I don't know exactly

when he got into it,

but old Ricochet,

he had to say something.

And as I'm trying to find, because I don't want to misquote, oh, here we go.

I figured out how to look this up.

Ah, he responded to me. I was picking on his friend Will Ostrich because then he responded to that.

And again, he's got to be the defender somehow of this clientele, but they don't feel the same way about him. More on that in a second.

But he says, well, didn't a bunch of the old school guys have knee and back and hip and neck and all other types of surgeries and injuries? Weren't Weren't they working smart?

You sound

he's he's a wordsmith here, ladies and gentlemen. He has cut me with his rapier-like wit.

You sound

dumb as shit.

I had to check and make sure it wasn't one of goddamn just the marks, but it's a pair he's got a little check mark. He claims to be Ricochet, and nobody would claim to be him if it wasn't him.

And then actually, everybody else did my work for me, really,

because

they jump in on him

and they call him a bald-headed, thin-skinned little bitch.

And his own Twitter people don't fucking like him.

He just has a negative

personality in almost every goddamn

circle here.

I mean, here's one.

That's cool. Your career is still a failure.

And everybody was bringing up, and rightfully so,

they worked 300 days a year and blah, blah, blah, and had to work smart. And it was an accumulation of injuries, you moron.

And of course, then some of the people came to his defense and said, well,

they all did drugs and did steroids and drank alcohol and cheated on their wives. I'm not sure how that has anything to do with your life expectancy, except if your wife has a fucking gun.

But they did all this and they all died. Is that what you want, Cornet?

What the fuck?

How is it some people have to defend?

foolish, stupid behavior by anonymous people

that they don't even know to the point where where that they will invite people to just

think they're stupid and tell them so on the fucking internet.

And

so I answered

instead of Ricochet, I think we should just call him

instead of Richard Shea, Dick, Dicoche,

old Dicochay.

But I, in answer to his statement, didn't they have a bunch of surgeries and injuries? Many did, Simpleton.

It came from taking bumps as pros and getting paid for them, not getting flung off

roofs into parking lots for free as children.

Like you and your trampoline friends who claim to be professionals, but are stealing money from a rich kid to put on your own jackass shows.

And then I think he said, you're still fucking dumb, or something that

Lumpy Rutherford may have said at one time.

But Brian, what are these people not getting about this? It's not even about the style of wrestling.

Because a lot of people were tweeting, you know, the thing where the point goes over the guy's head.

No,

you shouldn't be doing this

at that level of that much danger as children because you're going to end up paralyzed and then your fucking parents are going to have to feed you through a straw for the rest of your fucking life.

And it has nothing to do

with the wrestling business, but

because these marks for themselves, the ostriches and the ricochets and et cetera,

they encourage this behavior

because they were freakish athletes

in a way

that were able to do athletic things

that simulate whatever the fuck it is they simulate.

And they stuck it into wrestling and they found spots. In, as I said, in Osprey's case,

in Japan, they don't care about personality and whatever the fuck, they don't do promos.

Here's moves.

And

in England, the Indies, whatever, and he's a bruv. He's a bro.

Well, he's a bro over there, which is a bruv.

Because a bruv is a bruv, a bro.

But then with Ricochet, they made him a gimmick

in the middle-ish in the WWE, and then he probably became a pain in the ass, and they didn't want him anymore, whatever the case.

But

not everybody is going to be able to land on their feet most of the time when they do the flips. Some of them are going to be like this kid in the clip that was just getting brain damage.

Don't encourage that behavior. Encourage

taking the business seriously, finding a quality, competent trainer,

and letting them tell you what this fucking thing is about instead of being the train chimp.

That's my goddamn statement to the train chimp Ricochet

and the train chimp Osprey, who just had his neck fused, who endorses

children paralyzing themselves for Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.

And again, maybe not the two brightest guys. And I think most people realize that.

And they certainly love their style. But again, go back to any time in wrestling history.
If Bret Hart had had Twitter and tweeted out in the mid-90s, oh, great job with that pile driver.

You know, really do it good next time. Good, keep going.
I love seeing this.

Would have been fired.

And Tony should recognize that too. You shouldn't have your wrestlers encouraging your fans to wrestle the really dangerous style that these wrestlers have wrestled.

Ricochet hasn't been badly hurt yet. Osprey, it may be his first major surgery.
It won't be his last.

If he's going to come back and do the same stuff he did before, it won't be his last. Look at Omega.

Look at Kenny Omega. Look at the shape of Kenny Omega right now.
And Koda Ibushi and all these guys. There's a reckoning coming for a whole bunch of guys who work a specific style.

And the idea that any of them would encourage anyone else to do this without any training, just for

fun in a shitty video that's shot poorly, it's ridiculous.

Well, here, you know, who wasn't in that video?

Mom.

Where was mom? Because when mom comes home

and the kid is laying out in the backyard because somebody has flung him off the fucking porch and he's paralyzed,

mom is going to call Stephen P. New

at 87750 Steve

and sue somebody

that showed her her kid it was okay to do this

for fucking millions of dollars for his continued permanent medical care.

And whether,

as we know, in some cases, when there, whether there's a lot of validity to things or not,

sometimes when they know you got a billion dollars,

it's easier to just pay somebody to fucking go away than it is to goddamn go through the deal.

So what.

And speaking of a billion dollars, it's easy when you have a billionaire paying you more money than you're actually worth to go out and you know act flippant about this whole thing it's not as easy to cut a good promo actually cause people to tune in to see you cause people to spend money to buy tickets to see you all those other things that typically made a successful professional wrestler i'm and i'm separating ricochet a little bit from osprey here just because

Osprey, there could be something if he could stay healthy. Ricochet is just a clown.

And I think that's the way everyone I know sees him.

And that's okay. And you just said with Osprey, yes, that's from the first time I saw him until the more you see of him, the more you realize.
But

I've said out of the bunch that he signed, that Tony signed, you could make something out of him. You get something out of him.
He's got that boyish charm. He's got a nice physique.

He's amazingly athletic. He just.

He's allowed the freedom to talk as long as he wants, which is not his friend.

And this is the kind of shit he knows how to do to be a video game character in a wrestling match instead of channel the shit more wisely and do less of it so it means more.

And somebody, all right, less is more hearing that for

less in a lot of these matches would be more,

maybe 10 minutes less, but nevertheless,

he never was taught and trained by any

responsible mainstream professional that had drawn money in North America.

And this is the kind of

problem that I'm afraid our friend Kyle Felcher is going to fucking experience. He's going to end up in 10 years because he has

nobody to look up to over there.

And apparently,

if people do know that work there, they're not being listened to.

And he's going to end up in 10 years, having his neck fused and not be any more than a video game character wrestler when he could be in 20 years, Randy Orton.

So that is when I keep saying he's going to learn bad habits. He'll be the next Will Osprey.

Well, we shall see. We'll stay on top of this story, see if anyone else's mouth is off.
But Jim,

when you're a high flyer and you plan to take to the sky,

you don't want to take too much with you. You know what I mean? You want to fly light.
No, I don't know what you mean. Which one of these things would you? Oh, okay.
Now I know what you mean.

Jim, when you're jumping off that top rope into the beyond. You want to make sure you're not.
You want to have a metal plate on your ass.

You want to make sure you have all the things you need, but you don't want to take too much. You want to travel light.
You want to also be stylish.

And we're talking about a great wallet from our friends at Ridge.

That's right. What you want to do is you want to come off the top rope with a Ridge wallet in your back pocket, and you will just obliterate a son of a bitch.
Just land right on his face.

You will mush it into jelly. He will look like the elephant man's twin brother after being beaten with a club.
I wasn't talking about weaponry. I was talking about

the utilitarian need to make sure you have all of your ID, your credit cards, maybe other things. But

don't sell yourself short because you came up with something. Because I was thinking of the fighting star, because the Ridge wallet is so sleek and compact.

It's the game-changing wallet that is unique among the slim modern wallets.

You're not going to be sitting on a giant brick all day. where it's going to throw your spine out of alignment, even worse than if you'd have been thrown off somebody's porch.

And with the Ridge 2.0, it's even 10% lighter because every gram matters.

It holds your money, your cash got the cash straps, got the money clips, got the air tag attachment, and it holds, what, a dozen cards?

But at the same time, it's made out of aluminum and titanium and carbon fiber.

So talk about a carbon footprint. If you carry it in your back pocket, you'll have a carbon as print.

But that's not, no.

if i was thinking the fighting star because you could just swing a

bam and it's sticking somebody's neck but now you can put it in your back pocket you let's jump off the top rope and boom and you can squish somebody it's a perfect ass loading gimmick you can have a foreign object in your the ass of your tights it's got over a hundred thousand five star reviews and many people say that they put it in their ass pocket no one is saying that on somebody we get away from the club-ass inferno and get back to ridge Wallet?

And of course, it's not a weapon. It could be, but you're not going to think of it that way or use it that way, ladies and gentlemen.
It'll be a weapon.

Also, if you happen to be a young lady out, you know, in a shady neighborhood late at night by yourself, stick a couple of fingers in those cash straps and you can use it as a super brass knuckle.

Boom, you nail a son of a bitch in the nose with that. He'll be sniffing the other way for a week or so.
Make sure you're protecting.

That's why it's got 100,000 five-star reviews, The Ridge Wallet, because they punched a lot of people in the nose with it yes i don't know if that's why i think it's because it's so functional easy to use again travel light the days of the big fat wallet with everything in it those days are gone and buried over we're now in the ridge era and we have a great deal for the listeners and They've got the RFID blocking technology.

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That's not what you can trace them through their blood type. We were doing so well.
We were doing so well. That is not one of the functions or features of Ridge Wallet.
But no,

they're solving

96.

They're solving 96% of the crimes that way with the DNA from the blood. That's not happening.
No, that's not true. Let's stick to the truth.

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All right, we're back here on the big show.

Well, we can't say that. A show of

magnitude. Jim,

let's talk about a big event that just took place. Newark, New Jersey, the Prudential Center, AEW Full Gear 2025.

Quite a night.

Quite a night. And let's talk about this night.

Well,

Uncle Tony, as we've been mentioning, has seemed to have been

stuck in a time warp or a loop or just, he's hit the wall. He can't go any further.
He's going ran, ram, ram, ran, ran, ran, ran, ran, ran, ran, but

it is what it is and what it will be, brother.

They got 10,000 people. They haven't done that in quite a while.
It is the biggest metropolitan area in the country. What is it, Brian, up there now, about 15 million?

Something like that.

Or has Los Angeles, has Los Angeles surpassed you? no i think new york is still the biggest city

is that the best they've ever done in the new york area without mjf

i i haven't kept track of that specific statistic

but at at the same point now speaking without mjf

please don't come back

please don't come back what in the world would poor MJF have to suffer through now?

But nevertheless,

they did a pre-show, as they usually do, what do they call it now? The Tailgate brawl or whatever.

And I did not.

Well, go ahead. They did two pre-shows because they had Zero Hour, which was on Amazon.
Yes. And then the Tailgate show, which was on TNT, in place of an early start collision, I guess.

Well, yes, because that's what they're doing: they,

for whatever reason, they can't show the

TNT pre-show on Amazon, so they do a canned pre-show for Amazon, which is how I watch it. And we could watch it on TNT if we wanted to, but why the fuck would you want to?

Because we are about to tell you what they put on the pre-show.

And then you can determine for yourself if it was worth another hour of your time

when the pay-per-view itself was going to go almost four and a half hours. That zero hour is rough.
It's like the worst.

It's like if someone did Grammy coverage but couldn't get anywhere near the red carpet. It's like Chip Chatter in a bedazzled outfit with Renee, who like this is her prom,

and RJ who's happy to be on camera and just a rotating group of weirdos.

It's the worst pre-show. It's such a bad pre-show, but I think that's why I would have chosen the matches and that's why I did.

I ended up going to TNT to see the end of the pre-show, although some may say the beginning of the main show. The beginning of the main show.

It's seamless now. Actually, there's seams all over it.
It's stitched together like a ransom note. But

I was going to say the good thing about the zero hours, you didn't have to see the matches. So

they have a match later on in the actual main show where the winners get

a million dollars, Brian.

So naturally, on the pre-show, they have a match of four-way where the winners get $200,000.

Was there a need to put up $200,000? Which one of these Yahoos has gone broke? And in Storyline, needs them, or just

like work. It got introduced as a storyline thing, and now it's just random matches are for large sums of money.

Yes, when never before has those sums been mentioned, but now that's why I'm saying Tony's stuck. He's just, it's just.

But again, why would any of these motherfuckers be competing for $200,000? Max Caster and Anthony Bowens, who were the hottest team in the company, until they split them up and

did all the things they did. And we've only assumed that Caster just has heat with everybody and they're just punishing him.
Now they're back together on a pre-show

against Austin Gunn and Porge Robinson,

who won the thing, against Big Bill and Brian Keith, against the Outriggers.

200 grand.

But again, it's just redundancy repeated redundantly

that you're having a match for a large amount of money. One year later on, you're having a match for a large amount of money.
And it had nothing to do with this.

And then,

Brian, where is the

massive publicity, the mainstream cut-ins, the social media bombardment, the

incredible coverage of the crossover celebrity Dow of Big Boom AJ and his big

budgie fellow child

that he should be on these pay-per-view pre-shows? Or are they just doing it because he's a nice guy and they like seeing the fat kid do wrestling moves?

Let's be nice to the children involved in this. And of course, I believe he's from New Jersey, so there's a tie-in there.

If you're from New Jersey, usually you don't want to go to Newark, but he apparently went to Newark on this night. And again, they have a gimmick.
They have a shtick they do on TikTok.

My kids knew who they were. It didn't cause them to watch the wrestling show, but they knew who they were.

But that was also a while ago. I mean, they've been doing this.
It's not a fresh thing. It's kind of become a pre-show regular thing or semi-regular thing for is it two years now, a year and a half?

And okay, so Big Boom AJ is an adult who has trained to be a pro wrestler in the past. That's why they did this to begin with.
Okay, then.

But the

children, I'm not even talking about the small one, but they've got the teenage portly child

rolling and doing wrestling moves.

But the team is Boom and doom. Big boom AJ and QT Marshall.

Because AJ's name is Big Boom and QT Marshall's career is doomed, I guess. I don't know what.

Why is that boom and doom? I don't know. I don't know.
If you associate with QT Marshall, you are doomed. It's like a gypsy curse.

So they beat Rocky Romero and Trent. Trent.

And then Hook and Eddie Kingston apparently beat

Anthony Henry and J.D. Drake.

So you can put that result down on cage match or whatever.

And then they have the six-man tag.

It was Mystico,

Mascara, Dorada, and Neon

against it was supposed to be

Don Callis's family,

Chi-Chi-Chi-Chia,

and Take-A-Shit and Oboring.

But they do a deal where it starts on the pre-show, but Okada's not there yet. He hadn't showed up.

And then right before they start the pay-per-view,

Okada, this dip shit, shows up on a screen coming up in his car and gets out already dressed. And they're already having the match.
So when the pay-per-view comes on the air,

they blow off Pyro and Sockface is screaming, it's a Saturday, and you know what that means.

And there's a sloppy four-way going on

in the ring already, where one guy is hurt and couldn't start the match, and the other one didn't show up.

But then Okada's music plays. He walks boring.

He comes to the ring, and you're just, well, look at this

guy

he could stand in a subway

at five o'clock on a friday in tokyo and nobody would goddamn even bother to not bump into him

and so he comes in and the match comes to a stop

while he and take stare at each other

and there's old Hitchichi Chia trying to make peace between them because, oh, and he's being stagey.

And Okada gives Take the finger.

And then they suddenly start to match again and everybody starts flipping.

But then

they all got on the top rope and everything came to a halt because Mystico missed Mystico missed a cue.

Did you see that? Where they're...

They're trying to set up for double superplexes on the turnbuckles and they're up there and they're fucking stalling, and they're struggling.

And then finally, especially Tegashit just jumped down, and you can see on his face, he's like, Well, fuck this.

And then Mystico comes out,

and he supposedly had been hurt beforehand and couldn't join in the match. So

then they all started at 100 miles an hour again,

and you couldn't tell who was on offense or defense. And then

at one point, did you see where

Mystico got an arm bar on Tega shit and Okada saved it?

And then he started hitting take his own guy with the fake kitty shots to the back and picked him up and shit canned him out of the ring.

But he's not supposed to know that Okada just did that?

What the fuck is the matter with these people?

That wasn't rhetorical. Which people, specifically, the fans there or the wrestlers in the match?

How can you, just as a professional wrestler, say, okay, somebody is going to jump on my back and hit me a few times and then pick me up and throw me out of the ring?

It's my own partner, but I'm so stupid I can't figure it out.

But wait, there's more.

Then it was a three-on-two six-man,

but only two guys were ever in sight at one time

then

tega shit got back in and started working with o boring

moments after he hit and shit canned him but then they argued then

o boring accidentally clotheslined tega shit and then they all just left the ring and the three masked guys did all kinds of flips

And out of nowhere, Mystico armbarred Cha Chia and beat him.

and i just wrote scrambled eggs that was the the term that used to be used for a match that just went completely to pieces scrambled eggs

and they're milking this big confrontation that's eventually going to happen

between take and okada where he okada

puts half-ass effort into everything and bores us out of the building.

And Take shit is portrayed as being a shithead just stupid and just takes it with not even a goddamn

he bends his head over like oh i broke it up with my girlfriend

i this was one of my favorite things on the show

this i think was one of the best things on the show i laughed throughout this whole thing

When the fireworks and the pyro went off, just in the middle of the match, it was so fucking funny. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

And there were some fans that are like, yeah, the pay-per-view. The same match that was just happening is still happening.
That was funny. Mystico's music.

I've fallen in love with the ridiculousness of him coming out to an American crowd who don't know this thing or don't care about it and playing up to that music. I find that so entertaining.

Takeshta and Okada.

It's like they become mute. They just like walk close to each other and they can't can't say anything.
They just kind of look at each other, sometimes point, and then you get a middle finger. Well,

is it telepathy? Is it they're on a higher intellectual plane and they're sending all these vicious messages to each other through telepathy, just with mind force?

And Oki was going to say something and he stopped. God damn it.
That's more than they said. And that's the thing.
They don't even

thank you, Tiger Mom. They don't even move their lips.

It's like they're just pantomimists. And it's happened a few times.
If it was like one time, you're like, okay,

for whatever reason, they think this is how you build to a big moment.

It's several times where one does something, the other one stands up, they walk close to each other, and then they just look at each other like Larry David eyeing someone and curb your enthusiasm.

And if one of them's holding a belt, they hold that up. This whole thing was so ridiculous.
Hachichero playing the peacemaker.

So now you see like one of the heels like showing showing you that he's a good guy and he wants everyone to get along.

Can't we all just be friends? Neon or they pronounce it a different way, like Naoluma, whatever the hell they said. This whole thing, I love this.

This is one of my favorite things on the whole show just because I was entertained by

when I saw that they were still like doing the ring introductions and I look at the time, I'm like, they did this last pay-per-view, I think, with FTR.

Well, it was such a raging success, yeah, with old Hong Kong Fuy and his childhood friend.

They're going to do it all the time. So now there's not even a fucking, there's not even just an overrun.
Now there's a pre-run. Now you don't even know when the pay-per-view is going to start.

You don't know when it's going to end. Now you don't know when it's going to begin.
You just have to have your whole life on standby just in case. I double dog dare Tony Khan.

As Tony, as they used to say when I was a kid, you don't have a hair on your balls.

If you do not do this, I want you to redo the old Blackjack Bulligan, Kevin Sullivan thing, where they had a wild double juice fight in orlando at the eddie graham sports stadium and they fought out the back door into the parking lot and into the adjoining dark fucking swamp or field or whatever it was back there it was real dark yeah and the fans never saw him again and the next week The bell rings for the first match.

The guys go about five minutes and in the front door comes Mulligan and fucking Sullivan looking the same as they did the previous week.

They fought all the way around the state state and came back in the front door. Tony don't have a hair on his balls if he doesn't do that.

As I said, I thought that was one of the highlights of just the craziness of the pyro going off in the middle of the map, just giant pyro.

And just the fans don't know how to react because they're watching us.

They might be thinking there's some kind of goddamn incident happening here. Wait a minute, are we getting an alert on our phones? There seem to be explosives in the area.

It's not a professional show in terms of they want to think so far outside the box that they've lost track of what was supposed to be in the box to begin with.

And they do things because they can, as I've said before, but not in a while. Just because you can cut your own ear off doesn't mean you're Van Gogh.

But that may be a good segue to the second match, Brian. Cutting your own ear off and thinking you're Van Gogh.
We got Darby Allen.

Darby Allen and Pack.

Do you know

this match was probably

for 10 minutes or so, the only

thing that I saw all night in this program that really exhibited some kind of professionalism.

The rest of it was a mess, but

darby allen and pack can work they did wrestling

it was crisp it was quick

it wasn't rushed and it wasn't goddamn ludicrous gymnastics arm drags counters mad wrestling go-behinds headlock takeovers their

look good

they can do it

And then Pack

gave Darby Allen a full extended press slam off the apron, flat of his back on the fucking floor for a heat spot. Yeah.
Can I let's stop right there if you don't mind? Please. I wish they would have.

What an angle that could have been. Just a guy picking up a guy and throwing him like that.
I never saw anything like that as a wrestling fan growing up.

If someone did that and they made it like a big hospitalization thing, because why wouldn't you?

That's amazing. They did that and this match just kept going.
And that's kind of the tale of the entire night.

It kept going.

And again, yes, that's the thing where the heel would. Well,

again, that was an angle. People can look it up on YouTube.
In Memphis, Joe Leduc put Jerry Lawler over his head and fucking pitched him over the top rope.

And Lawler's idea was to go 10 feet and land in kind of a splash position on that big oak ringside table.

And the problem was Leduc only got him nine feet. He hit the edge of that table, took him up onto the concrete floor off of that, and torso muscle in his thigh.
I believe it was out for three weeks.

So whatever the fuck.

But

this was just, no, just again, you would do that to a baby face, then you would call the goddamn ambulance and you'd put him on a backboard, you'd take him out, and he would want to get even.

Or they could continue the match.

And then

Darby beat the count at eight, and then he was all taped up from where he'd been set on fire a week and a half ago. And he really did have burns because Pac rips all his tape off and show.

I mean, it wouldn't like he was goddamn disfigured, but he had, you know,

he's more on fire than I want to be.

And he worked on the burns, and then he shot Darby off. And And Darby took

a flying bump through the turnbuckle, through the buckles, to the floor.

And it was amazing. I mean, it made Ray Stevens look earthbound.
And I wrote, oh, my God, what a great bump for a count out loss.

And they kept going.

If you had done that.

Again, that bump, save it. And like I told Jericho that time,

bump over the top headfirst to the post or whatever. Save it for the big show when you need it and do it or the angle or whatever.

Then

Darby was back doing missile dropkicks off the top rope

to the floor where he took a worse bump than Pack did.

And then

Pack gives Darby a German suplex into the corner on his head, and Darby just jumps up and clotheslines Pack, and then they both sell forever.

How can you be thrown on your fucking head?

And then it slowed down because they were getting more heat on Darby, and badly it lost momentum.

I wrote, why don't they go home?

Because they've apparently got a set time they've got to fill, and they ran out of tricks.

And then

Pack misses a splash off the top rope. Darby gets a scorpion death lock.
Here comes Wheeler useless.

And he jumped into the, he got in the ring in front of the referee.

And Darby went over, put his hands on it. The referee didn't disqualify it.

He's just like, oh, don't do that.

And while the referee's telling Wheeler to get out, Pack got Darby's Sting Memorial black baseball bat

and hit him in the head with it and covered him one, two, three. So at least the baseball bat worked.

But they also had to hit him.

Brian, you always used to swing at balls in the playground like that, where you hold both ends of the bat and cover it with your hand. That kind of awkward swing.

Maybe if I'm playing pool drunk.

But that's usually why you don't hit most people with bats in the head because you can't work it. But But nevertheless, it was a good match by AEW standards.

Darby wasted a couple of great bumps that, as we mentioned, could have been maximized to make something.

But still, there wasn't furniture.

These guys are athletic. So by these standards, good match, rotten finish.

And the note that every time Darby's matches start to get over with me,

he does something in it to remind me that he's in a real life, a fucking moron.

But it wasn't going to get any better than this. I don't know.
What did you think?

I mean, I got to at a point where,

and it's happening all the time with his matches, and it ended up happening a lot on this show in general.

I kind of don't want to see Darby do everything he can to almost die.

And,

you know, the press slam spot,

that should have been it. And if it wasn't going to be it, you should have saved it for the end

because it looked incredible.

But fortunately, now we know it didn't hurt him at all because he was up doing shit minutes later.

And the biggest problem overall beyond anything else with Death Riders matches are guaranteed interference. And it happened here again.
And I feel like you get a collective groan when it happens.

It's the opening match, technically, of the pay-per-view, and it's with Darby. You got to figure there'll be something, but I feel like that kind of felt deflating

here.

Well, and

they, for whatever reason, they want to beat Darby with PAC, which I don't see, be honest with you. Darby's

still has that appeal.

So they had to give him an out,

but it wasn't enough that the goddamn guy used a baseball bat. The other guy had to come out because they can't figure out another way to distract a referee.
Or it just, it doesn't.

This is Tony's thing.

We're going to start with the match for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Then we're going to have a fucking TikTok celebrity.

Then we're going to have a match would blow off Pyro in the middle of it with a six-man tag with people joining in the middle.

Then we're going to have a single match where somebody runs out and somebody gets hit with a ball bat and nearly

hospitalized on several occasions.

And then let's follow that with a four-way women's tag team match where the

winning team will be able to pick the stipulation for the semifinal match in the women's tag team championship tournament.

Am I making that up, Brian? Stipulation, stipulations, stipulations. We got them all here at AEW.

Get you, stipulation. Get away from me, kid.
You bother me.

So this was

Marina Schaefer and Megan Brain,

Tony Storm and Mina Mellons, Julia Hart and Blue Sky. They are the sisters of sin.

And Willow Nightingale and Harley Cameron, the babes of wrath.

And it really, that was the stipulation.

It's already a four-way women's tag match. No disqualification, no count out.

Whoever wins this gets to pick the stipulation

for their semifinal tag team match in the women's turn. There has to be a stipulation for the semifinal match in the tag team.

He's hit the wall.

Brian, I don't know if you sat through this, but I set through, had to have to fast forward 20 minutes to get through it.

Did I miss anything of import? I mean, you know, I'm a red-blooded male. I like seeing a bunch of women with wedgies rolling around for a while.
And I was all right.

It was fine for what it was.

It was okay.

Yeah, yeah.

They're doing good. They found a button.

You got to give it a chance one of these days.

For if no other reason, there may be no one on the roster who could use your critique more than some of the women wrestlers in AEW in terms of what to do, how to do it, why to do it.

Nobody else listens. Why should I give it to them?

And the show is four and a half hours long. What? What? What are you laughing at? Please don't give it to them.

I'll give it to me, baby.

Give it to me, baby.

Well, that was the women's.

It's four and a half hours long, the show. We've got to try to save some of our lives.
Some, I'm not getting any younger.

And I had to watch this match, and it took a while.

The World Tag Team title match, Bandito and Burger King against FTR.

And

again,

I was prepared to like this until it just went just so fucking far.

Obviously, Dax and Cash now, even though

they're meaningless as far as draws now from what they were,

they're still excellent in-ring technicians. They've been booked into insensibility.

Brody King ain't bad.

For a guy that big,

he's just indie-looking, in my opinion, and just indie-minded, indie-looking blah. but he ain't bad and bandito can do some athletic shit his just his basics and his timing like most of the luchadors

suck donkey balls

so

well i'm trying to be as polite as i can be like most of the luchadors

well really that's you know

I'm just, that's what it is. They have rotten basics and the timing is off because they have a whole different different style in their native

land and in their native

profession.

But they got heat on Bandito and

then Bandito tried a double flapjack. They ran for him, but he didn't,

he didn't go up and back. He went up, tried to get under him and just boom.
And it looked like that

he hurt Dax when Dax landed on his elbow. They got a false tag to Brody King.
So the referee's putting him out. FTR gets some more heat.
Finally, Bandito hot tags Brody King

and he makes a big comeback. And Cannon balls them both in the corner.
And he looks stiff with his big ass flying around.

But then

they again, FTR's deal is they've got to put in so many twists and turns and so many fucking false finishes and so many.

Oh, you thought it was it, didn't you? That it won't stop.

When Brody King finally got that tag

and he's cooking, and then Dax

superplexed Brody, and Cash did the leap off the top with a splash, but Brody King catches him by the neck. So it killed the superplex.

He's not the Undertaker.

Then the baby faces double team Dax. The heels roll out.
Everything comes to a halt. I'm thinking, why didn't they go home after Brody King's comeback? They've still got 15 minutes, I guess.

And they did a spot where Brody King was going to dive on Dax, and Stokely was supposed to shove Dax out of the way. And Brody King would hit Stokely, but

Stokely went too far. Brody King went straight behind him.

Landed headfirst, and Stokely fell down too.

And laid there. Stokely laid there 15 minutes.
He never touched him.

And Brody King had broke his fucking neck. But why would you think Stokely was going to break Brody King's pole to begin with?

If I'd have been Stokely, I'd either go to what? Fuck you.

Come to think of it, that's probably why he pushed him too far.

What the fuck? Did you think Brody, when you saw it, and they never showed a replay of that live? Like you had to go back and do it yourself. Did you think Brody King got hurt?

Well,

he should have, but I'm, I mean, it's 50-50 with a lot of this stuff. I wasn't like, I'm convinced he's not getting back in, but at the same time, I was like, well, that didn't come together well.

But again,

what numb nuts would think that Stokely was going to be in any way able to be helpful in breaking his fall?

And like, if, like I said, if I was Stokely, I would have been there to begin with. Fucking 300-pound fat ass coming at me like a flying fucking bus.

So then

Dax and Bandito did a bunch of shit. And then FTR hit a powerbomb and a splash on Bandito and got a two-count.

Okay, that's fine. But seconds later,

Bandito, the guy that got powerbombed and splashed, is pressing cash over his head with one arm and throwing him onto Dax.

And he goes the top rope and dives on both of them. So

he's perfectly fine

after that powerbomb splash. Then

Bandito kicked the shit out of both of the heels.

And an FTR hit their shatter machine on him and got a two count. Brody King saved.
I'm like, Jesus.

And then Cash gets the title belt.

And he and Brody are having a tug of war with the belt while behind their back,

Bandito rolls Dax up

and gets a two count. When Dax kicks out, Bandito's coming toward him.
Cash jerked the belt from Brody King and hit Bandito over the head with it behind the referee's back. It was perfect.

Perfect timing. Perfect shot.
Looked great.

Cover. One, two, kick out.

What the fuck?

Why couldn't that be the goddamn finish?

They're still going. Then they gave Dax the shatter machine and got a two count.

And by this point,

I've lost interest.

FTR Spike Powell drove Brody King on the apron, and then double teamed Bandito and got another two count. And then Spike Powell drove Bandito and got another two count.

Now the fans are going bat shit, like, oh shit, he kicked out of that. Every move in tag team wrestling is being destroyed.

And then Bandito stood up and give FTR the double finger.

And then they gave him the shatter machine, beat him one, two, three.

New champions, way too long, way too complicated at the end. And

why is the referee just standing there watching the heels?

double team the guy, get a two count. Spike pile drive the guy, get a two count.

Shatter machine, give the two count while the other guy's dead on the floor.

That's my thoughts. Hey, 20-minute match.
Maybe it should have been like 12, if we're going to be fair.

You know, again, the fans got into it, but that's the reason you do nonstop near falls. It's the cheap pop era of wrestling.

Hey, we know we'll be able to get them to react to this, so let's just do it.

And you could argue what damage is done to everything from pack throwing, press slamming Darby to the floor to kicking out of everything. Again, Bandito's also a luchador, isn't he?

Like, if there's any place the tombstone pile driver or a spike pile driver or any of these things would mean something,

it would be there. And it was, again, just another two count.
And

when it's a match that has non-stop two counts on a card filled with non-stop two counts,

again, you get the fan reaction eventually because even they can't believe that it's still going on. Well, it's like the old 40 punches in the corner.

And they get with the first 10, and then you get past 15 toward 18, and then

they're like, what the fuck? And then when you go 28 to 30, then they start chuckling and they get with it again, and then they're roaring by 40.

But you only do that once a fucking year.

Well, FTR, new tag team champion, Stokely Hathaway was on the floor for the entirety of the remainder of the match. I thought Brody King broke his neck when they didn't show the replay.

I was like, oh, he broke his neck. But no, he got back out there.

Well, no, they didn't show the replay because Stokely had to lay there for the next 15 minutes and he never got touched.

Well, maybe one day Stokely will get touched. Apparently, this is a problem with Stokely.
But FTR, new tag team champions, three-time AEW tag team champions, Jim,

that is something to celebrate, regardless of what you think. It's a major world tag team championship.

Perhaps if Dax and Cash

or

anyone who loves them had a great picture frame where they can have photos of various title wins and title celebrations all throughout the years. even

some short videos of the pinfalls and the big celebrations. We know someone who can help them, our good friends, and they can help all the listeners, our good friends at Aura Frames.

That's right, because Aura Frames can do everything that you just said. They can show pictures, they can show video clips, they can slideshow you.
You can see

folks, let's say you're an old grandfather and you've got 18 grandchildren and you got some spread out around the country that you haven't even officially acknowledged, but you might be able to slip a picture of them in there somewhere.

But boom, your whole life could flash before your eyes every night.

Well, maybe if you're an older person, you might not want to look at it that way, but you could definitely see all the people in your life that you don't want to forget what they look like by next Tuesday when you see little Billy again.

Aura Frames is the perfect gift. And now it's the holidays, Brian.
You've heard about this, right?

The holidays are coming up. People give presents to each other.
That's right.

Well, now you know what to give because you can give thousands of presents with one gift. Because you get an aura frame, and we've talked about them.

Stacey's got them, her nephew, her mother, they're tossing the family pictures back and forth.

Or if you're just loved ones without being related, maybe a fiancé or a financier, whatever your relation.

You get them this frame and then boom, people can get their little code there and ship them the pictures into the frame from their phones. They can email them.
They can share them all over the place.

Put soundtracks on them. Maybe make fart noises behind grandma at the dinner table for hollow, especially if she's eating the beans.
Dub some fart noises over grandma, send that video.

It'll get over like crazy. We're not talking about America's funniest home videos.
We're talking about aura frames. I got to say that.
Well, now, can you imagine

if you come in your grandmother's living room and you sit down and there's all the fucking pictures pictures going by that you've sent her, and then there's a picture of her at the table eating beans, going,

it would have, I'm telling you, right. Why would you want to picture that? Well, because that it'll be funny,

folks. The aura frames have been featured in 495 gift guides during 2024 alone.
And boy, 2025 is shaping up. The number one digital picture frame by a lot of magazines, including Wirecutter and Wired.

I don't know why people in the telephone business and the cocaine addicts are having their own magazines, but also it's recommended by Good Morning America, The Today Show, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and many, many people that want to just give you pictures of themselves in some and revealing positions, possibly, and have you watch them on your credenza.

Takes about two minutes to set up. You've got control over who has access to your frame, although for a substantial fee, some of that information may be made available.

It just depends.

I'm trying to get the handle on this thing, Brian, because I'm going to get a bunch of people's codes and I'm going to start sending them all pictures of Phyllis Diller all at the same time.

Again, maybe not the best example or a sales point that anyone would want or use. Well, but

I'm having trouble because the Aura app lets you share photos more securely than with the email. See, I can't hack this thing yet.
I'm trying, though. I've got pictures of my Sphincter also.

And you can upload videos of up to 30 seconds long and your favorite live iPhone photos will play right on the frame. They've got a speaker.
It plays audio. Excellent high resolution.

Turns itself off at night. That's pretty cool.
When the lights go out, so does the frame. Yes, it's like you don't even have to put a blanket over it, like the parakeet's cage.

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Stacey was over at her mom's the other day, and guess what she saw? A picture of her great aunt

shaking hands with Bob Hope. Farting?

No.

Bob Hope,

Bob didn't fart. He was hard of hearing, though.
Shaking hands with Bob Hope during a World War War II USO

type of appearance. I got to tell you, Jim, promo code JCE, but let's get back to Newark, New Jersey.
Oh, I cut you off on that, didn't I? JCE, Newark, New Jersey, Jim.

AEW full gear is in full effect.

Well,

the casino gauntlet match was next for the National Heavyweight Championship.

And Brian, Brian, again,

did anybody? I know

Sheldon Benjamin and Bobby Lashley cooperated with this because at this point they were probably laughing to themselves.

We'll get paid to do this idiot's idea.

But nobody with a clue laid out any of this match.

Maybe they laid out some of it, but nobody was in charge of all of it.

This was the most ridiculous thing I I've ever seen.

It's a gauntlet match, but they actually come out and say the guys come out at random intervals, which was sometimes it was 45 seconds. It might be fucking two minutes.
We don't know.

And

it's another match where there is no disqualification.

Other people can come out and freely be involved because,

yeah.

And we're just going to send a bunch of random people out and not pay any attention

to how that most of them are going to have nothing to fucking do once they're out there.

So they start out with Shelton Benjamin and Bobby Lashley. And obviously, that is the anticipation.
And they had teased it once and then never promoted it.

that, you know,

it might be Lashley versus Benjamin. So then they win the matches.
They're the first two guys in.

And they kind of spar around and kind of like they're going to go for something.

It is kind of like they're starting to set up a little friendly shoot in a gym or whatever.

And before they actually really do anything but back up in a corner, the music plays and here comes Ricochet,

our little bald bitch friend.

with a microphone. Hey, come on, you guys got to fight.
We don't want any any of that wrestling crap. The last thing we want is wrestling on this wrestling show.

But that's what they could have done.

Bobby and Shelton both are high-level enough amateur wrestlers that if they'd have bothered to, not they being Shelton and Bobby, but if whoever came up with this fiasco

had bothered to say, hey.

How about for the first couple of minutes, you start out, you you don't really want to do it, but okay, you start to have the little friendly shoot and you lock up and you go down and you're working some amateur wrestling.

And then somebody,

it doesn't matter which one gets the goddamn sit-out. The other guy gets frustrated a little bit.
You hook it up a little bit more

and build that for two minutes where each guy gets away from each other a couple of times and just where they're starting to get testy with each other. And maybe that's when MVP might

get up on the apron and go, wait a minute, to get to people invested in this thing. And then Dickhead's music plays.

And then here he comes with the goddamn deal.

And at that point, while he's coming down the aisleway with the microphone, his Stooges, Tia Leone and Bishop Kahn,

they jump Lashley and Benjamin from behind. And Ricochet then beats MVP up in a fake way.
And you know, MVP can stretch the fucking guy.

And these Stooges that,

as I've mentioned,

I think Khan's the smaller one.

He's got some kind of potential.

The big ones, the shits, and

they physically beat

Lashley and Benjamin up, but they didn't do anything near to them what had been done to Darby Allen in the previous match or whatever.

But Shelton Benjamin and Bobby Lashley are going to lay there, Brian. I didn't go back to time it.
Would you say it was 15 minutes?

The match was at least 20,

maybe a little bit more. Yeah, I would say at least 15 minutes, yeah.

Okay, so the referees come out, get Ricochet Stooges out of there, and they help MVP to the back.

But Lashley and Benjamin just slide over to the railings out of kind of the immediate camera view and are going to lay there

without getting up for the next 10 to 15 minutes. Then here comes Claudio, and is this a mess already?

And then Garcia

and Herzegovina still lay in there. And this black hole of charisma, Garcia gets in and he's a heel, but he's beating up Ricochet.

And then

they've got a situation where they've got two heels beating up one heel, and the two baby faces.

There have been people in propofol-induced comas that came around on their own quicker.

Then

Pockets comes out. I'm like, good God, it gets worse.

And he wanders in and does comedy with Ricochet and botched a spot with Claudio.

And then here comes Wheeler again.

What the fuck?

Pockets is standing in the ring. Wheeler's wandering out.

Then they just three-on-one Pockets.

And I wrote, I swear to God, Shelton and Bobby are still laying on the floor.

And I'm so this,

when they're not using furniture and setting people on fire.

Now I know why they do all those things, because this is how they lay their matches out.

And then Kevin Kname out. At that point, I wanted to be unconscious with Lashley and Benjamin.

And then Roderick Strong.

And every time somebody comes out, they'll get in and do something, and then a bunch of people will just disappear.

And a couple of guys may do spots with each other.

Then here came fat ass Davis.

He is goddamn immense. His ass has its own gravitational pull.

And he's got a great pile driver, but it doesn't beat anybody. He used it twice.
They just got right back up and kept going.

And in Hong Kong Fuye,

is this a rib?

Has there ever been a douchier, more unlikable baby face?

And this

now they get

Spitball and Kevin Knight are partners like Lashley and Benjamin.

Lashley and Benjamin could have effectively, if they'd have structured it this way,

worked legitimate amateur wrestling and got people into it.

These two do a kung fu movie routine with each other

where they're hopping up and down like they're both barefoot and they're on a fucking hot frying pan and just at

back bends and fucking.

And then here comes Matt Menard. And for a minute, I said, Matt, who the fuck is Matt Menard? It's Mac Daddy.
Remember Mac Daddy? Of course.

He hadn't been on a show in three fucking years. From the Jericho Appreciation Society.
Apparently, he was Garcia's trainer or mentor. So we have him to blame.

And he and Garcia had a,

I can only describe it as a girl slap fight. And then they went to the floor and Garcia ran out of the building away from MacDaddy.

And at that point,

Claudio and fatass were in the ring and Shelton and Bobby woke up from their slumber like Rip Van fucking Winkle.

And they slid in the ring and beat everybody up.

They went from, oh, we've been unconscious for 15 minutes to, well, let's throw six people around.

And then they cornered Ricochet. And I thought, good, they'll kill him.
They'll just kill him dead.

And then everybody else did something. And Ricochet hit Kevin Knight with something.
And Ricochet beat him, beat Kevin Knight. So he's the new national champion.

This was one of the biggest messes I've ever seen perpetrated to Wrestling Ring.

And just endless

entrances of nobodies in a match that made no fucking sense whatsoever.

And that was one of the good matches.

No, it was

a bit of a shit show. Entertaining just because, again, you don't know who's going to come next.
You don't know when.

Because there's no set reason. The Royal Rumble in 89.

It was a big deal when I was a kid that it began with Axe and Smash. One and two were demolition.

And they didn't eliminate each other. They didn't hate each other.

But for a moment, they pounded the shit out of each other. And then the match continued.
We didn't get anything with last year.

Like you said, an amateur workout like you would have seen on Florida TV with those two. Yeah.
Would have been good.

And then somebody starts to lose the temper right before before they're interrupted you never want

here's the thing and i i know with the thing with demolition and that was their you know road warrior like type of personality but i believe you don't ever want

partners

fight punching each other in the face trying to do damage to each other If they're forced in a situation where they have to wrestle, it would be the

legitimate wrestling thing. And then

a temper would flare, but they would be interrupted. If they go too far,

then it just kills the credibility of the team. I'm sorry.
Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think about also Dory versus Terry.

And what was it, 80 or 81?

80, 81, 56 minutes. Yeah.

As part of the tournament, two babyfaces, no one turned. They were brothers.

They made it work somehow. Not saying it was the most exciting match of all time, but the concept.

What do you think of the national belt?

Obviously, taking its look from the classic 1980s national championship. Well, I don't care if it takes its look from the goddamn Hope Diamond.
It's ridiculous. The national champion, the

TNT champion, the fucking world champion, the interim fucking dip shit champion.

And he has the guys carry belts from other promotions.

And sometimes there's guys coming out with carrying two belts, and there's six-man belts. And

it's just silly. And it has diluted everything

to where you would have to think that only the most die-hard minority of the AEW fans would be able to, off the top of their head right now,

who holds all the belts in AEW? Don't even talk about Ring of Honor or any outside companies, New Japan, and don't even think about Mercedes's 13 belts or whatever it is.

Just who's the champions in this main company? How the

who's the TNT champion right now?

Oh, I do.

We ain't got to it yet. That's actually on the show.
I was trying to think of the champions in my head. That's right.
I know that because I've got it written down here in a few minutes, but

but that's it's just it's another belt because they're belt. Tony is a belt mark, and the the other guys are marks for having belts.

But would you like to talk about the guy who's a mark for himself, probably bigger than anybody in the company, Brian, at this point, old Dick the Boozer, our friend and colleague?

This is kind of where the show took a turn in a direction that I really didn't like.

Well, it's funny how it happens that way every time Moxley gets in the fucking ring.

A no-holds-barred match with Kyle O'Reilly and our friend Jon Moxley.

And I know you're going to say, well, wait a minute. The previous two, hold on, how many matches have had rules tonight? Wait a minute.
From

the opening six-man technically was not a no-DQ match, but only two guys joined it 10 minutes in.

Darby and PAC.

I don't believe was a no-DQ match, but they got away with a lot of shit. The four-way women's was no DQ.

The World Tag title wasn't no DQ, but by cracky, the goddamn casino gauntlet was. Now we've got a no-holds-bard match.

And at first, they, for a couple seconds, they tried wrestling like Darby and PAC did.

And Kyle O'Reilly is not bad at an MMA influence mat wrestling style, but

they couldn't do Darby and Pack.

They don't look physically as athletic. They weren't as sharp.
They weren't as crisp. They didn't do it as long.
And

Moxley can't do it at all. No bueno, as they say, about Moxley's pro wrestling basics.

They tried to grapple, but Moxley gets stretched in the amateur tournaments in Cincinnati. So

Moxley got a fork and stabbed O'Reilly in the head 15 times.

And imagine this. Kyle got color.

So now he's bleeding. He can't just stab him once.
He stabbed him 15 fucking times.

And now this highlights Moxley's tough guy work and attitude is he's committed to it, but it's so fake.

And he does such stupid, silly things. It's not like

evil or sadistic. It's jackassy and throwing a guy off the porch type of shit.

And the fans through this entire match, Brian, am I telling a lie?

They sat there and stared until somebody got stabbed with a fork, did something gross, or bit somebody that was bloody.

Yeah. That's when they popped, right? Pretty much.

And he stabbed him in the nipple with his fork.

And in between that, this was as exciting as dry rot because

that's all Moxley's about. And again, I've been a fan of Kyle's, but the time to

elevate him into a top spot was years ago when he first came in.

Instead of making him

a welcome mat and a fucking

throw rug that just gets beat all the time. And then years later, suddenly he's making the fucking former world champion that wouldn't ever do a job tap out.
Well, I,

he,

was Dean Ambrose's work, I may have asked you this before, was it as bad as Jon Moxley's is while he was there and they have some level of professional criteria?

Or is this just all degenerated now as part of his downhill spiral? You know, now that like all the camp counselors are dead.

Jon Moxley is just Jon Moxley unleashed. He was never good.
It used to drive me crazy because I would hear the comparisons to Terry Funk or Roddy Piper. And I was like, oh, I got to see this guy.

And I'd watch him and he sucks. And then I'd be, all right, maybe it was a bad night.
And I'd watch him again and he sucks. And he still sucks.
But now it's also disgusting.

It's bad ideas run amok.

Well,

they popped when Kyle stabbed Moxley with a fork. Then they went for about five miles an hour for a while.
And then O'Reilly just got a 10-foot chain out from under the ring and wrapped it around

Moxley. And Moxley wrapped it around Kyle and they just held double front face locks on each other.

And then,

I don't know what this was supposed to be. They each grabbed an end of the chain

and held onto it, but traded forearms with their bare arm.

And then O'Reilly stabbed Moxley's hand with a fork. I'm just looking at these notes.
Moxley got a chair and pillmanized O'Reilly's arm, stomped on it.

And, you know, so the United States, oh, his arm might be broken.

And then they rolled around a while, and O'Reilly got an ankle lock

on Moxley with the chain around his leg, which didn't matter really and didn't add any leverage to the thing. And Moxley tapped out.

And

the people do cheer anytime Moxley doesn't win for obvious reasons but this was the

the invincible world champion that just beat everybody for so long and suddenly after he loses the belt well now I'm going to tap out 18 times to Kyle O'Reilly of all people all of a sudden

I don't

And we were over two hours into the pay-per-view. There was another two plus hours to to go.

And they've already had, as I mentioned, several of the

anything goes, no holes barred. We've got chains, we got chairs, we got people coming in.
And they got two hours more of this to go.

But that's,

I'm happy for Kyle O'Reilly. Nice kid.
that they're using him better. Wish they had him from the start.

But I've never understood anything Moxley has done yet.

And what is his goddamn mission? What is the movie character that he's imitating or ripping off or what is going on with the thing?

Forky from Toy Story.

You know,

it's just bad. It's not good.
It's unnecessary. And Moxley always takes it too far.
And it's not just the fork. It's now the fork.
It's been a bunch of these different things.

On the positive side, Kyle O'Reilly went over.

Let's see how they book him coming out of this.

Tony Khan is notorious for being bad with following up on things. And Jon Moxley and the Death Riders are notorious for not letting feuds end.

So we'll see what happens next here, but

you know, the Moxley stuff, I guess I'll say it here.

I wish the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board governed wrestling. And this card, you know, I hate, I don't mean to sound like J.J.
Bins or anything, but this card was

as bloody a card, I think, as I've ever seen. To the point where there were pools of blood in multiple matches in the middle of the round.
Oh, no,

they've done way worse. I don't know.

This was, I think, too gruesome. You know, you remember the argument from Amanda Huber last time? I know better than to let my kids watch a Jon Moxley match at midnight.

If AEW is supposed to be for everyone, Tony, is it supposed to be that your kids can't watch the pay-per-views at all?

Because I just think it's gone too far, and this kind of triggered the beginning of the rest of the night, with the exception of the Young Bucks match and Mercedes.

Just everything I thought went too far. Yeah, the Hardley boys ain't going to get a lot of great Muda juice jobs.
But well, that's the thing. I'm not offended at the quantity of the blood.

I'm offended at the fact that none of it means anything anymore because they do it so many often, match after match after match. And

it's just, it's as meaningless as everything else now. It, you know, I'm more offended by the electrocutions and the flamethrowers and the people being flung off high precipices, especially when

there's a fake crash pad to make it even more stupid or whatever, rather than just the blood. It's just the blood just

Tony's stuck. He's hit the wall.
Every match has blood. Every match has, goddamn, is for money.
Every match has multiple people. Every match is for a belt.

This is what he's stuck on.

So the next match, believe it or not, I know you won't, for the TNT title that we were talking about a few minutes ago with Kyle Felcher and Mark Briscoe. Brian, this was no DQ.

Anything goes.

If Briscoe was going to lose, then he was going to have to join the family, or elsewhere, Kyle was going to lose the title. But then they added, no DQ.
Anything goes.

And here we go.

The first two minutes, they're on the floor. They've used the chair.
Briscoe hit him multiple times with a chair, gave him a brainbuster.

Or no, Kyle gave Briscoe the brain buster on a chair on the floor.

But seconds, and this isn't the first two minutes of the match, but seconds later, after taking a brainbuster on the chair on the floor, Mark pulls out a ladder and puts Kyle on the ladder and got back in the

ladder's tilted on the

barricade around the fans. That ladder was laying there.

That ladder was made out of tinfoil.

That I don't know what it was made out of, but I don't want to be flying over the top rope as Briscoe did over the top rope in a cannonball to land on the fucking ladder.

And then,

and Kyle beat him up with the ladder. They haven't been in the ring at that point in five fucking minutes.

And again, they've already done two or three hospitalization

angles.

And then Kyle threw another ladder in the ring. And Briscoe was bleeding like a stuck hog.

And he was beating on him with the ladder. So

I made notes. I'm going to try to find the finish.
This is unwatchable. I fast forward five minutes.

Kyle gives Mark Briscoe

a fucking,

he drove him through the table with a spear or body tackle or whatever, and then hit him with a powerbomb and got a two count.

So I fast-forwarded another four minutes. I stop, and there's another table in the ring, and a thousand thumbtacks are already on the mat.

And they were in the process of fighting on top of a 15-foot ladder,

where they then fell off and went through the table.

Where then Mark Briscoe

pulled out another table from underneath the ring, but this had coils of barbed wire duct tape to it.

And he couldn't get it in the ring because the leg folded out and he had to go and take forever. Finally got it in the ring.

But when Mark brings the barbed wire wrapped table in,

Kyle has gotten a screwdriver

and and kicked Mark in the balls and stabbed him in the head 10 times with the screwdriver and then started licking the blood off of him.

At that point, we were 20 minutes into the match. I said,

I can't do it anymore. And apparently, sometime later, Mark won the match and the TNT belt.

What did he use, a bazooka

or some type of,

I don't know,

guillotine-type apparatus with a sharp blade.

Yeah, again, it went further than it needed to for longer than it needed to, 25 minutes that match.

And it came on the heels of the Moxley match.

They did a no-DQ match after a no-holds-barred match.

You know, good for Mark Briscoe.

I hate the fact that this would in any way, and I don't think it does, but I think it could be presented that way, validate Tony's booking philosophy of bring guys in, beat them, just have everyone beat them, and it doesn't matter.

You just got to give him a little run, and it overtakes everything else.

He's tried that with Kyle O'Reilly, he's tried that with Mark Briscoe here now. Well, if it did work, his ratings would be up, and interest in these people would be

interested.

Yeah, and that's it. I'm happy for Mark Briscoe,

and uh,

yeah,

well, then, Brian, you know, we've got a problem on the roster. The former EVPs

who made a big deal a few years ago about having been signed for more money than any tag team ever, and they were EVPs making seven figures.

Well, suddenly, after they

did an angle where they pile drove their boss, but then they never followed up on that,

but they got

sideways with everybody, and they lost their EVP status. And apparently, they didn't save their money because within months after all of this stuff happening, they were completely broke.

Then they won several hundred thousand dollars in a fake match,

but then one of the dipshit brothers went to the casino where he has a gambling problem and lost $500,000 in the time it took to film a vignette.

And then they've been broke again, and now they're in a match for $1 million.

Boy, this was a hot angle.

Josh Alexander and the Kookamunga kids

against Jungle Jackoff, Dino Douche, and our old friend Twinkletoes McFinger Bang is back. Kenny,

he's moped back in with his head down to have another

multiple-man match for no reason

with and for it against people who fuck him around and he never does anything about it.

So the fans yawned when the Bucs came out.

Alexander might be okay, but he stuck with these dip shits. And we know what we think about the other three.
So I said, all right,

I bet you

that if when they ring the bell, if I skip ahead 20 minutes, they're still going to be going.

And I skipped ahead 20 minutes and son of a bitch, they proved me wrong. They had just done the finish.

So I had to back up two minutes to see it, but

I was right in that they would take too much time because

then they got a big, long, fucking drawn-out

fake angle to do.

So they did a six-way with everybody boosting people up into flips. And somehow,

one of them busted Josh Alexander open hardway over his eye.

And then Kenny and Dino put both of the Hardley boys on their shoulders, like for a chicken fight, shoulder ride.

And Jungle Boy

did a double clothesline off the top on the Bucs, but the Bucs landed on their feet after backflipping and super kicked Dino and Kenny.

But then

Jungle Boy backflipped off the top rope at the Bucs, but they double super kicked him.

Then they double super kicked Dino. Then they double super kicked Alexander by mistake when Jungle Boy had ducked.

And then Kenny gave Alexander the one-wing fairy on the floor.

But then the Buckaroos gave Jungle Boy the shitty double knee lift and beat him one, two, three.

It was just a fucking mess. And I only saw two minutes of the 20.

So

then

they start the angle.

The little kiddies from Cookamunga have won the million dollars, and now they're rich again.

And Don wants them to be part of the family.

And Don takes the Bucks, and they're leaving with their bags of money, and there's still five or six heels in the ring.

And they start

getting

sloppy, boring heat on Kenny.

And the Bucks

seem fake upset, but Don said, don't worry about him. Come with us.
It was milked so long, you knew

because the camera was lingering. They went so long, it was past the point

where you knew already.

And they run back to the ring, and the buckaroos beat up all the heels and save Kenny.

And Dino chokeslammed fat ass Davis and got him maybe 12 inches off the mat.

Good God, he must have a gravitational pull like he's on the planet Mercury or some shit.

They need a tree crane to get him up in the air.

And then the buckaroos shake hands. What? I'm just, you know, these people, they need to make a living too.

The buckaroos shook hands with Jungle Boy and Dino, but they're milking it with Kenny.

And the fans are chanting, hug it out, hug it out.

My God, I just think back to, do you think that the people in the Omni at Atlanta chanted hug it out when there was Dusty looking at Oli and they were contemplating it for the first time?

This is a soft group of fucking pansies.

Anyway,

Kenny slaps their hands away that they offer and hugs them instead.

And they got some mild applause. And I can't wait to see the fans turn on the babyface buckaroos in two weeks when they're still this fucking boring.

But

this thing had to take well over half an hour to get accomplished from start to finish.

The lack of reaction from the fans at times was telling to the Buck stuff. You know, we've been saying it's all the bad drama, the bad storylines that they come up up with themselves.

And then,

you know, the bad execution. Kind of knew they were going this way with Omega and it had to play out this way.
The idea that they

were walking down the rampway with all their money and Don Callis just kept saying, let's go spend this money. Let's go spend this.
They just won this money. Let's go spend this money.

That's how you got in this position. And these guys who care about nothing more than money all of a sudden drop the money.

Why didn't they, why did they drop the money when they ran to the ring to save Kenny?

I'd have carried the money back with me. Right.
Why would you take those? I would hit them with the bags of money. See what happens.

But they gave like, they just gave him the bag. Hey, go, you can keep this money.
Why? It made no sense.

Well, because their friends are worth more than a million dollars to them or whatever the fuck it is. It's crazy that here we are six years in.

And look at the state of these guys who were the alleged big stars as things were getting going, the guys who had all the indie buzz.

Still in the same place doing the same shit. Everyone's, yeah, just more injuries, just less time left to actually help the business of AEW.
But that's an impossible task at this point.

But there it is, the reuniting of the elite.

Now I guess we have to wait until they do the big dramatic thing where Adam Page somehow gets pulled back into this and him and Kenny make up.

And then everyone can be made up and everyone could be friends. Everything about this is friends again.

There was another promo I just saw.

What was it? Where the guy was like, and we could be friends again. It's all about friendship.
I don't even remember, but everything in AEW about friendship.

Friendship, my ass.

Well, you know, Jim, if I had asked you in advance to pick what you think will happen, will the Bucs,

after... telegraphing it for weeks make up with Kenny or will they join the Callus family?

I think you would have been able to give me an educated pick, but what if I had asked a football fan for an educated pick on football and so on and so forth? There are prizes at stake.

Jim, you know what I'm talking about.

No, I don't. Prize picks.
Huh, prize picks. Hey, you know, if there's an educated football fan out there, I'd like to meet him.

No, if there's an educated football fan out there, it's time for the bowl games, the big games coming up over the wintertime, or they got the basketball matchups going on.

It's the best time of year for sports. It's all happening all just willy-nilly out there in the ether.
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You're making decisions. Dixie Highway.
But sometimes can feel good to be right well especially on dixie highway but also

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He's just going to do everything.

And if he does, then if he knows what he's good for or what's good for him, he'll continue to do it. What?

Because when they get a bunch of picks on some of these people, they go and have a little talk with him personally. No, they don't.
Let's not

perform up to goddamn stuff.

No goddamn talks with any people. There's nothing like that going on.
Nobody's going to phone it in like Okada.

They're going to try their best when they're out there because they know if they don't, they're going to be taken out back and horse whipped. Again,

there's stuff on the line here. Not prize picks ain't whipping anyone.

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I messed up a little bit there, but why not? Oh, you think? We're talking about full gear. Back to full gear.
We still have the men's and women's world championship matches.

Yes, and of course, both of them are equal, according to Adam Page. So, we've got to term them like that.
Well, the women's came up first, the flip of the coin,

Mercedes Moon against Chris Statlander.

And again,

by the time the bell rang for this thing,

three and a half hours into the show, plus the pre-show,

and now you've got two girls

not in a no-DQ, no holes barred fucking gimmick match. They're just, they're going to try to be Dory Funk Jr.
and Jack Briscoe.

And they're going to have a 20-plus-minute

wrestling match

marred with a few modern things.

They started out at 100 miles an hour.

They had their choreography, and

they go from one thing to another by rote.

It's move to move. It's not reaction.
Holy shit, get myself together, come back. No, it's just, oh, we're going to this and this and this.

Because they're trying to have a classic match with a lot of moves like they've seen on their

Japanese videotapes.

Then they got the dive in, then the spot on the floor. Then

Statlander took a superplex or gave a superplex

and went for a 450 off the top rope, but Mercedes moved. So Statlander sold her arm and rolled to the floor.

And a referee brought it to a halt.

And why? I thought she really, she fooled me.

I thought she really has hurt her arm because.

Why would you just bring everything to a halt right now?

And then Mercedes comes off the apron and hits a meteor

on her on the floor and gets heat on her.

And of course, Aubrey Ed was the referee. Brian, who's a better referee for wrestling, Aubrey Ed or Sea Biscuit?

I'm just wondering.

So

Mercedes was working the arm. I zoned out.
I believe Stacey asked me a question.

But a few minutes later, they were both selling, and Mercedes went to the top and went for a splash. But Statlander raised her feet into the face.

And then they were both motionless forever so long that the announcers were plugging dynamite.

I mean, seriously, they've got to, because it has to be a long match to be a classic. So they have to

do a bunch of shit they don't sell and then sell forever, whether anything was done to a person or not.

and again after a lot of bloody gory matches and a lot of long kick out of everything matches yes now we got two girls wrestling

and if statlander raised her feet and caught mercedes in the face then why can't statlander get up

nevertheless

After a while longer, they go back and forth. Statlander gets a crossface, gets the old

crippler

or whatever.

And Mercedes just gets out of it and gets her own.

So the heel breaks out of the babyfaces move.

Then they rolled around and they fought on the top turnbuckle.

And Statlander gave her some kind of big move off the top and covered her and the kick out with no reaction because it's 20 minutes in.

It's almost four hours into the show.

And finally, just

apropos of not really a lot, in my opinion, Statlander just scooped her up and gave her a tombstone, one, two, three,

and beat her. So

it's about time the overpaid, undertalented bitch did a job.

But I don't know why they didn't.

I think Statlander still just doesn't exude a lot of confidence and personality. And they were having Mercedes beat Tony Storm, right? Which

personality is almost all she's got anymore.

But I'm not advocating that Mercedes should have won this match. She still got 13 belts.
But goddamn, did they have to be out there for a half an hour? I thought it was 14 belts now.

She would add 14 if she won this one, right?

I don't, I thought. I don't know because she won the.

It depends. Like she had the interim women's championship and and then she won the other championship.
Do you count that? I guess it's one championship now. Yeah.

Well, no, they, because they had a belt made for the interim title. So I guess when she's the ROH interim women's champion and the ROH women's champion, that's two belts.

You know, this match really didn't stand too much of a chance just because of where it was on this card, considering everything on this card.

This was the cleanest wrestling match on the entire card.

With the exception of the six-man match, but

to be fair,

To be fair, they had Pyro in the middle of the match. I was about to say that that was gimmicked up.

It wasn't really clean with two guys coming in in the middle and toward the end and all this other stuff.

I hate to say it because it's the women's world title, but they should have started the show with this before everything got completely crazy and they had to change the mat several times.

It actually probably would have gotten over if they'd have started with this.

Well, that was the women's championship match. And of course, Jim,

a big steel cage match for the AEW World Championship: the champion hangman Adam Page

versus Samoa Joe.

And now we're four hours into the show, plus the pre-show.

And

here comes the cage. And Brian,

usually

in the course of not just any particular company, but it's as a general course in

wrestling.

You can kind of figure if you're a longtime fan, they're building this. It's going to, oh, this is going to be the one.
He's going to be the guy that's going to win the title.

And they went past that point

a couple of times with Moxley when everybody's like, oh, this ought to be it. That ought to be it.
And he didn't lose.

All of a sudden, here is Samoa Joe.

The fucking

babyface beats him clean in their first match. Then he switches heel.

And then I can't remember what they did last time. And then he

now, did you see that this was going to be the climax of hang nail Adam Page's

triumphant reign as champion? That now was going to be the, did it seem like that they had built this up where this would be

the end of the road for little Rico there?

I mean, looking back now, I guess maybe you could argue they had beaten Samoa Joe so much in the feud that

you couldn't believe he would actually lose again.

He bled as much as I've ever seen him bleed by far.

But I guess we'll get there.

Well, and that's the thing is, I didn't call this. I'm not arguing.

I said beforehand, I'd love to see Samoa Joe win the belt from this fucking goof, but it didn't seem like that they peaked this to where most people believed it was going to happen,

which is why they pay to see things. But nevertheless, Joe got color three minutes in.

And

then Paige took his cowboy boot and hit Joe over the head 12 times with the heel of his boot and covered Joe and got a one count.

Even if it's Paige, who I think is Drek,

these baby faces are all so weak.

And there was nothing for him to do in this match that hadn't been done already. And it's two guys

in a cage. They're going to bleed and they're not going to.

I don't, it's just Paige, I guess, but I don't like any of his matches. He does the same shit.

Joe's great when he's got a

as a heel, when he has a smaller,

sympathetic baby face that knows how to work, but this was just

Joe bled so much. At one point, I was thinking, he didn't really do anything to deserve this.

Paige has beat him every fucking time.

What horrible thing is that? And now he's about to lose, die of blood loss.

The fans were kind of getting on his side.

And Paige was bleeding too, but not as bad.

No, with Joe, you could see it pumping out every time he was taking a breath. Yeah.

But that's the thing is, besides the bleeding, not much happened in this match. Then

Shapupi came out and got the title belt and climbed the cage. But Kingston came out and jerked him down.

And while I was going on, literally, while because they missed it with the camera, they bumped the referee.

And Paige got a cover, but no referee was there to count it.

So Hobbs came out.

And I swear to God,

they tried to recreate Kane ripping the cage door off.

And what we got was Hobbes grabbing the chain

with the big padlock that was chaining the door closed and just pulling for a second. And the gimmick chain broke.
You couldn't believe it. It was too easy.

The idea is not to just clip it and stick it together with toothpaste.

It's rig it where it's a struggle but the giant beast gets the

anyway

he ripped the door open and but then paige beat hobbs up

but then joe got a sleeper on page but paige ran him into the turnbuckle page hit him with a buckshot lariat and covered him there's still no referee

then hook comes in

and picks up the title belt and turns around and hit page with the title belt

and takes his jacket off, and he's got an ops shirt on. So, all the time that he was telling Joe that he was mad at him because they turned on him and left him alone or whatever,

now he's gone back to the ops

who apparently have the entire

outlaw mud show crew of New Jersey in their dojo.

And

Joe gave Paige a muscle buster on the belt and covered him one, two, three and won the title, but it was not a good match. And it was a rotten finish.

And at least Paige is not the champion anymore.

I can only assume that

even Tony realized.

Or do you think they do realize? Or do you think it was just time for somebody else to win it? Or did Tony realize that Adam Paige was a shitty world champion?

I don't know if Tony realized that. I don't think I can concede that.
No.

I think they have an idea. I mean, we'll talk about the post-match in a moment.

You know, again, I said it earlier.

There are matches with a lot of blood that I love. This match had, this card had too much blood.
This match,

Samoa Joe, however he hit it.

He hit it. I mean, it was gushing

like 10 minutes after it started gushing.

There's blood blood everywhere.

So I don't know. I,

you know, you're almost immune to it in a sense, but it's also,

it feels like we're getting more and more, not just more matches with blood, but more blood in the actual matches.

Well, they got to outdo what they've done because they've already established a baseline of complete chaos and carnage.

So then, how do you improve on that?

It's what it's what they've

this is the corner corner they've been working toward for six years

They've lost most of their legitimate main event talent

Many others are hurt the booking has led to they just do the same shit for hours at a time

to dwindling returns based on people getting tired of seeing the same shit all the time

and then

well

can we go to the to what happens next

Now they've got a brand new world champion. The lights go out.

And there's a video on the screen of a burning house.

And here comes Prince Nana out on a stage for a big laser light show.

And Swerve comes out. Swerve Strickland to a new but still shitty entrance song.

And he strolls to the ring with Nana dancing. And Stacey had walked in the room while I'm watching this.
And

it took him so long to get to the ring. I asked her, I said, how old is Nana? He's going to blow up from dancing.

Swerve is the fucking athlete. He's just walking like he don't give a shit.
And Nana's trying to put the whole thing in the dancing.

Paige was still laying there in the ring. It's been five minutes

since he got beat, but he's still laying there because they want to paint a dramatic picture and they have no idea in their heads when they go over this shit verbally how long all this shit's going to take.

And nothing happened. Swerve took off his jacket and stared at Joe.

And then all the ops dojo members who are standing there in the t-shirts,

they just start feeding Swerve

while Joe jumps out of the ring and leaves.

And Swerve beats up

the op stooges who obviously are letting him and feeding him one at a time to do this stuff forever.

And then Paige got up and clotheslined one of them.

And they played music and that was it. And Stacy, what is, what did I just watch? Is this a parody?

What the fuck is happening?

It's a big moment. Swerve and Adam Page on the same side, Reunited.

He even had the burning house in a video to celebrate the good times.

Yeah, and beating up fucking 12 guys we've never seen before. You heard the pop from the crowd in the dark because I guess they had to get Nana out on a stage and he, you know, glitters.

So they saw him out there. He was doing the same dance he was doing for the other song with this song.

He didn't mix it up at all. It's just, okay, another song I'll do the exact same thing to.

He's got to be at least 55. But um.

Oh, come on. he's not that old.
I think so. Well, you think that's that? I don't think it's that old.
50 is the new, you know, 30.

Well, I'll tell you what, 64 is fucking awful goddamn old either way. Swerve Strickland, an AEW star,

returns.

Now you have the ops, I guess, established maybe a little more as a heel, top heel faction with Hobbs as the chain-busting power man, and

Samoa Joe as the devious world champion and Hook as the kid.

Shibata as the

it used to be Jackie Coogan. Now it's Hook.

That's right.

That's right. Well, Hook, we always talk about Tony doubling down on the things that, like, why?

Maybe they'll prove me wrong. Maybe Hook will have a heel run here

where you finally see it.

But why would you be giving Hook a main spot like this right now?

But that was an AEW.

It fits the story. It fits the story that Tony wrote in his head that he comes back to often.
And he thinks everybody,

Tony not only thinks because of his condition that everybody can store as many

meaningless, trivial, and obscure factoids and happenings and callbacks and remembrances in their minds as he can in his.

And

he thinks they're hanging on every bit of it because he's telling these compelling stories to himself.

And

when you watch them in front of you, they come out as gibberish because you don't have the same luxury that Tony did of thinking it up and understanding it.

Well, celebrating six years of Tony Khan the Booker, AEW Full Gear in Newark, New Jersey, we shall return momentarily with some audio from Tony Khan, TK himself, at the Full Gear Media Scrum.

All right, Jim.

We have returned. And of course, AEW Full Gear was a spectacular like no other.

But you have to wonder, what does the boss have to say about all of this, about everything happening in AEW, the state of AEW, we always talk about it. What does Tony have to say about it?

We have Media Scrum. Oh, I thought you meant the final boss.
You just mean the regular boss. When the final boss shows up next, he may be the size of Tony.

We'll see what happens, but we have Tony Khan audio from the Media Scrum. It's been a while since we checked one of these out.

Do you have any thoughts about Tony Khan Media Scrum audio returning to the show here?

Yes, I'm not ever in favor of it because he says the same shit every time.

Let's get the first question here that was asked of Tony. This one

was about where the company was a year ago and how it is today. I guess the one year,

I don't know what the hell I'm saying.

But I guess

we've heard a narrative recently.

I'm just looking at this email titled This Week's Spaznor's.

Oh, God damn it.

I type things out quickly because you're being a pain in the ass. And then I get this Spaznors on the show.
Ladies and gentlemen,

I don't know where we were, but here we are.

Tony Khan Audio, Jim, a narrative you've heard recently, it was on the Ariel Hawani show. It was in, I guess, other interviews.

Is the idea that he really kicked it into full gear, no pun intended, a year ago. And it's the best work he's ever done, the best booking he's ever done.

He quit doing things against his better judgment, and he's taking control of the ship, and he's steering it, and he's stoking the furnace, and he's pedaling the pedals, and it's him, him, him.

And he thinks this is great, great, great.

And at the same time, over a period where WWE has cooled off, AEW has cooled off, and you could see it in the crowds, notwithstanding 10,000 people for a pay-per-view in Newark, in the New York City area.

You see it in the ratings when we had the quarter hours, and now that we only have the new method, which is causing people to panic because it's so low for wrestling.

There hasn't really been much progress that you see. We hear loose things about pay-per-view numbers, but there's no tangible evidence that anything's up.
Basically,

everybody reports that Tony says that, oh, yeah, it was exceeding our expectations by 10,000 over last time, or it's right about what we usually do, but nobody ever sees a manifest or anything, do they?

Maybe Dave does, and that's why he's so confident. But let's go to this.
Tony, reflecting on where the company was one year ago to where it is today. Swami, quite upset about this.

Hey, Tony, Bill from Pop Break.

We've talked a lot tonight about people coming full circle.

Take us from last year at full gear to this year at full gear and talk about creatively and everything that's gone on and how you personally feel about where the company was one year ago to today.

Thanks.

One year ago, sitting in this chair today,

I felt i don't feel now one year ago i felt and today it's 180 degrees the other way

felt one year ago embattled

i feel the opposite i feel uh uh like we are like doing the 10 000 fans and having the full gear show felt like the beginning of a turnaround.

And that's really what everybody, the vibe of the full gear last year was like, this feels like the beginning of a big turnaround for us.

And you look at one year later, and it feels like we're on such a great run this year. It's been a really great year for us.

Some interesting things I'm learning about

looking back at this year, and we're in the fourth quarter now of the year. It feels like the fourth quarter, like a sports game, but also four quarters breaking the year down into quarters.

The first three quarters of the year in the year. What is he saying?

What is he talking about? I can't follow the guy. I'm trying to make notes of the words that he says.

I know you were listening, so you didn't really pipe in. He was saying how

last year, when they had a big crowd, apparently for the same pay-per-view event, people said this feels like the beginning of a turnaround,

and that the last year that we all witnessed with our eyes was the turnaround.

He's trying to tell us how many quarters there are in a year.

He won't just

let's go back to Mr. Calendar.
He loves his calendar, girl. Let's go back to TodyCom.

Here we gained share on CBS for Dynamite, which is huge. For TNT, right now on Collision,

this is the time of year now where after some playoffs and stuff, the show's

back in its groove. And this is the most exciting time of the the year, I think, because now the continental.
200,000 people.

Collision is back in its groove at 200,000 people.

And Dynamite is winning its share.

To phrase it that way means that the rest of TBS's programs suck too.

Collision's back in their groove of 56,000 in the key demo. Let's go back to Tony Khan.

And we're down into the final stretch. Last year, it felt like from full gear and the Continental Classic, things really picked up.

I thought the Continental Classic last year was even better than the first year. And there were so many exciting things happening.
I thought we ended the year on really high notes. And then this year,

I've just been so happy with the AEW shows. I think this has been the most consistent year.
I thought tonight was another great pay-per-view, which means, and it's just opinions.

It's all personal opinions. I feel like we're batting

on the shows this year. I thought the pay-per-views were great last year, too, but I also think that the TV has been more consistently great this year.

Great, great, great. We're batting a thousand.
One of the big changes is having

batting a thousand. That's a hell of a statement for a promotion.
I didn't even know Vince McMahon or Bill Watts would have ever said that.

Nobody would ever. He loves

his shows, the shows that he puts together for him.

Having the show streaming on HBO Max, and there were a lot of questions. Would we be able to

having shows every Wednesday on TBS and every Saturday on TNT when we started putting the shows on HBO Max, would we be able to sustain, hold up, do well? And we've done really, really well

keeping a great audience on cable for the shows and also adding a whole new audience on streaming. And then recently we started doing the pay-per-views on HBO Max.

And I think this is going to be the biggest one yet. And I'm really excited about it.
I won't have all the data till early next week, but just

from early advanced buys it felt like this was a real great success story we had great international support for the show but uh trying new things having the tailgate brawl having a an hour on tnt right before

we go live with a pay-per-view to sell the pay-per-view and do things to hook people in the last pay-per-view what what things what things hooked people in seeing a fat guy from costco spots fucking do it

and again we're several minutes into the question about reflecting on where the company was a year ago versus today yes

and we understand that tony likes his television programs that he writes and produces but again

besides all of this gibberish

he's not speaking in any coherent

logical train of thought about the question that he was asked because he's too busy blowing himself. And how in the world does he think that they, you notice he said, would we hold up?

Would we sustain? Would we do well? And we've done well. You didn't hold up.
You didn't sustain because your ratings have dropped even before the new method dropped them further.

Well, let's go back a little bit more for this question with Tony Kom.

Like it worked really well, and there was a very positive reception having things on the tailgate brawl, including the FTR versus Jet Speed match that went into the pay-per-view and that was very positively received tonight we had a twist on it where it was again a match that that helped us hook people in but then uh okada's arrival a little different but also a very exciting way to have the tailgate brawl connect to the pay-per-view and that was very well received also uh by who we were doing yeah where's that feedback coming where is the great reception except that when you were sitting there at the monitor you said oh wow this is so cool

let me see what my friends on Twitter are saying.

What are my friends in the Discord server saying? Let's go back a little bit more, this answer, TonyCon.

Things differently a year later, but I felt like one year ago, that was the beginning of a great run of things that now, like you said, full circle, it feels like

a total opposite feeling where it was like a year ago, it felt like the beginning of a turnaround. And now it feels like just flow, momentum, and what a great year we're having.

So thank you for asking.

Well, there it is. He wrapped up the question, Jim.
They're having a great year.

Last year, it felt like a turnaround

to which direction?

That's what they did.

Because last year at this time, they were doing, well, I mean, they were doing better than they are now, but the show still mostly fucking sucked.

So was he, he felt like a turnaround where it was going to get better? It felt like a turnaround where, yeah, it got worse.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't hear a lot of people saying AEW feels really hot right now, or they're running on a hot streak, or they have a lot of momentum they're building upon.

He sees things that no one else sees.

Well, somebody else over in Campbell by the Sea, California, might see, I think, the same thing.

Well, Jim, our next question to Tony is one about the brand new national championship that was just introduced and what the inspiration was for this championship.

Let's go to this and see what you think. Seems like an easy question to answer.

Justin DeRazio with Sports Radio 94 WIP in Philadelphia. Tony, it's nice to see you again.
Hey, good to see you. We've heard a lot from indie promoters talking about

how much success they've seen from Mercedes-Monet going to their promotion and winning belts there. Did that have any impact in the decision to create the AEW national championship?

I think absolutely that is one aspect of it.

And it's not just independent promotions, but also I think

strong international promotions. We've had a really good year in ROH.
We've done a lot of different things this year.

And so far, I think the ROH pay-per-views have been great, but there's also been really good reception.

I think every time we've put some of the shows on YouTube, people have really been very receptive. I know a lot of people due at times when we used to put up dark and elevation on YouTube every week.

Hearing Shivani and Paul White on commentary made me miss elevation. I don't know about any of you elevation hardcores like me.

And I absolutely love those shows.

So I know people love when we put wrestling shows on YouTube to begin with, but really in terms of having stories, championships, and a great group of wrestlers and some young wrestlers and some veterans, I think it's been a great year for ROH.

And I thought that Super Card of Honor. Let me stop it for a second.
Wasn't it? What? And I don't even, again,

it's a great year for Ring of Honor when he puts him on YouTube and all his others do that with the national title.

And why the fact that there's 18 million titles? And

what does if Mercedes is winning little indie companies' titles, what does that have to do with the national title?

Is he going to put the national title on Ricochet and send him around to Jerkwater and Mud Lick to

fucking face the local champion Tits McGee?

What is this rambling?

More getting Ring of Honor is having a great year. This somehow explains how Mercedes Monet was part of the influence in his decision to create a national championship back to Tony Khan.

And Death Before Dishonor have included some of the best wrestling matches. And even though I was frustrated

with the circumstances that led to me making a choice in the chair of putting up

Super Card of Honor on YouTube for everybody to watch, actually, there was some very good silver linings because then I think it opened a ton of people's eyes. Like, this is an awesome pay-per-view.

I like, this is what Ring of Honor has been doing. These are great.
And then,

in addition to that, I thought putting the global warm-let me stop for a second. Have you heard anyone, even the biggest Tony Khan defender, say that he has

boosted the recognition of Ring of Honor? No,

I don't even see anything about it on Twitter anymore.

Does it make any news anywhere?

For all you elevation hardcores, no one was an elevation hardcore.

That's why the show went away. There was no one wanting to see it.
Let's go back to more from Tony Khan.

Global Wars Mexico, when you look at some of the matches, Bandito and Dorada,

Moriarty and Blue Panther.

uh that tag match now and look back at that seeing persephone and athena on opposite sides in that tag match Persephone and Thunder against Athena in Red Velvet was outstanding and now Athena versus Persephone for the R

this is about how the national championship was created yeah and how I swear to God

you tell me something ain't wrong with him people say that I can remember everything ask me to goddamn list the card for Siler City North Carolina in August 1986 I'm gonna have to go to the notes

but he's just

bing bing bing these obscure.

How many shows and matches does he see and write and et cetera per week? Well, he's at every show. He goes to every show.
He's the only one who's going to be able to do that.

Let's go back to Tony Khan

on the inspiration for the creation of the national championship.

ROH women's world title. So ROH can really benefit for the first time ever.
There's never been AEW sending a champion to ROH. It's never happened in the history of the promotions.

So that's very exciting.

I know that from talking to CMLL and New Japan, they are interested in this, especially when you consider Ricochet has wrestled for both those promotions and done very, very well and made appearances for New Japan Pro Wrestling and CMLL, even going to wrestling on Wrestle Dynasty, going down to Arena Mexico.

So certainly you couldn't have asked for, frankly, a better first champion than Ricochet. I absolutely think.
Yeah, you could have. There were several options in the match.

Well, besides that, Brian,

if he's the national champion, that means he's the champion of the whole nation.

So who gives a fuck about him in Mexico or Japan or any other goddamn nation?

Let's go back. Are there still more about, I mean, at least we got to the national championship.
The idea that Ricochet may defend it like Mercedes-Monet in different places around the world.

I guess that's what he's saying. I don't know what Ring of Honor had to do with any of this, but let's go back to Tony Kahn.

It is eye-opening to see people

raving about the positive contributions of having an AEW wrestler on their shows, but it's not just any AEW wrestler, it's Mercedes Monet, the TBS champion, somebody that is one of the really recognizable stars of wrestling, and somebody that is one of the top wrestlers in the world.

So, in this case, you have another top, top star, somebody who has great credentials and also

is a very recognizable wrestling star, who is a very hardworking star who's traveled the world.

So I do think Mercedes blazed trails in terms of probably traveling and wrestling outside AEW more than any champion ever, not necessarily always defending the TBS.

This motherfucker can make you tap out like you've been sugarholded by a NCAA champion.

Do they ever just say, okay, that answers my question?

Again, the question was about if Mercedes-Monet inspired the national championship and

in his own Stingales, we kind of got there. We have a few more seconds of this answer.
Let's go back to this.

Championships and

taking over promotions. So it'll be interesting to have AEW having a champion going and making defenses.
And we'll see how far it goes. He may only make one, and it could end any time for Ricochet.

That's what makes it very compelling and interesting. But I absolutely think

Richea was great tonight, and

he could be a great national champion.

But you have to give tons and tons of credit to Mercedes, to your point, for all the different promotions and all the different championships Mercedes has gone out, and all the business to your point that she's done for the different promotions she's wrestled for.

And I think those promoters are on to something. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Good heavens. It could end at any time for Ricochet.

Those promoters are on to something. We can only hope.

Why?

You know, I was going to say if somebody would take

the transcript of his media scrums and just boil the answers down to a sentence or two,

then you could actually maybe understand them and they would only take like 10 or 15 minutes total for the whole scrum. But then there really is no answer to boil down, is there?

He gave a five-minute answer to that national championship question where he actually kind of answered it in the last eight seconds.

But it took us a long while to get there. Like, it's like an AEW show, it's like an AEW match.
That's the way Tony's brain works.

You'll get the finish, but you're going to be here a while and you're going to see a lot. Maybe too much, but you'll get the finish.

Jim, Tony was asked in the media scrum after full gear about the runtime for AEW pay-per-views. And is there a chance they'll get back to ending before midnight

on the East Coast?

Here's Tony Kahn.

Lots of hands. This is great.
I love this. Thank you for all coming.

Graham Matthews' bleach report. Tony, earlier, you mentioned the quality of programming that AEW has been delivering this year, the consistency in the quality of the programming.

And I think that's been especially evident so far on pay-per-view in 2025 for AEW.

But that being said, though, with the runtime of these shows, will we ever get back to a point where we can deliver the same quality of event that gets done before midnight, 11:30, specifically for the East Coast shows, or I mean, maybe specifically in terms of crowd engagement and stuff like that, just to maximize that.

For Saturday night.

Good lord,

and he had to grovel like some foreign leader bringing Donald Trump a golden egg and then ask a question after he's blown him.

And you don't get

the visual of Tony responding to that.

He just very, very, you know, shakes his head nervously, or he kind of sometimes, this one, he tipped his cup to the man when the man said the pay-per-views have been so great over the last year.

Tony tipped his glass to him or his.

They've been great, but can they possibly be great under four hours so anybody could leave the arena and get home before daylight? That type of thing. Well, let's go to Tony Khan's answer.

A good question.

I definitely was in, you know, I could see that. You know, after dynasty, I like the feedback.

So I do think, like, to your point, after Dynasty, I said, like, I probably on the East Coast wouldn't do a Sunday night like that late again.

And so then we started doing, which worked really well, a lot of afternoon start times. I thought tonight was really great.
And obviously there was a lot of captivated people

throughout the night. I am interested in that.
Captive, captive.

I don't know if I meant captivated, but they were being held captive.

Epic pay-per-views with earlier start times was interesting also

when the show, to your point, like is on the West Coast. Like it's not as,

you know, you can play with the start times a little more. Also, it'll be interesting going back to Sundays because I look at Sundays and Saturdays a little bit different from each other.

You know, I go to boxing matches in MMA where like the main event's not getting into the ring until like one in the morning and the cards are like several hours longer with the prelims, but you know, it's and and there's like 37 minutes between fights with video, like, you know, and whereas it's not the action doesn't taste the same.

So

I really like it, but I at the same time, you know, I like the feedback. So after Dynasty, he's all about, I like the feedback.
Thank you for the feedback.

The feedback is these shows are going way too long and they're ending way too late. And he's like, I love it.
He doesn't want it to end. That's the problem.
You're listening to him.

He's not like looking to go back to the hotel. He doesn't want the show to end.

Well, and it's, it's a different audience now more than ever with the UFC or the big boxing fights. And

a lot of those people just go to sit there and drink.

But nevertheless,

he can't address the issue. Thanks for the feedback.
I'm not going to listen to it is what he's saying.

See, I really last year, or, you know, this past year when in Philly, I was like, you know, I probably, I love the show, but I probably on a Sunday, maybe I wouldn't do that on the East Coast.

So I think

I look at Saturdays and Sundays different. We'll have a history of doing more Saturday pay-per-views in Q4, particularly like during football season.

I really think it serves us well not to do Sunday pay-per-views.

So then Saturday pay-per-views, I will always be a little more flexible than Sunday, but also I think there was something to the early start time pay-per-views at times too, and that could be interesting too.

So, you know, something to think about. We ended up doing it.

It could be interesting to do one on a deserted island somewhere in the South Pacific, but for this purpose of this fucking answer, just get to the point, say it one time and move on.

With early start times, and that ended up being, they were all great shows. So

there might be something to that. And then,

you know, we've always done show, our contracted time from the shows has always been.

uh close to four hours like so if you look every aew pay-per-view has gone over three and a half hours there's never been an aew pay-per-view that went under three and a half hours in the history of the company because we were contracted to do shows that go about 345

and uh and

hold on one there one second

He's saying

these words came out of his chicken lips, Brian, last. We were contracted to do three hours and 45 minutes.
That's what he just said, right?

That's what he said, yeah.

That ain't the way it works.

They don't tell you the pay-per-view company or the

streaming distributor or whatever, they don't tell you how long your show has to be.

You

have to clear the length of your show with them when it was satellite pay-per-view. You had to get satellite time.
That's why Vince would never go over three hours.

He'd have to buy in the early days, you had to buy another hour of satellite time, which was thousands of dollars, whatever. But it,

no, he's telling them how long that's what he's telling them. His side says this show is going to be at least three hours and 45 minutes.
And then they still go over.

And remember, in some cases, some systems have cut them off over the past few years. Remember, that's happened a time or two.

That's because they were going to go four hours. Then they started going four and a half.

So it's up to him. Nobody says

we're not going to carry that fucking show unless it's X amount of time and length. That is not a thing that takes place.
You're booking a time slot. You're booking a window.

When you do pay-per-view, you're saying we have a three-hour window. That's why WWE pay-per-views would typically end a few minutes before three hours because that was their window.

Yeah, and in the early days for the replay, they had to have this into the end of the time I was with TNA in the early 2000s. They had to have like six or seven minutes to rewind the goddamn tape.

So that's why there was always panic if you weren't off the air 10 minutes till. Oh, fuck.

Well, let's go back to a man that's not panicking, Tony Kahn. He's still answering this question.

And thankfully, we never ended up in a Chi-Town Rumble situation where they had to send enhancement guys to go wrestle for 15 minutes after Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat because they didn't fill the contract on to do a pretty good job pacing it.

So, uh,

uh, what I think it's interesting, but definitely, uh,

you know, I can say I always like hearing the fans' feedback. I thought tonight was really, really great show.

And that was it. Well, that was it.
Here's my feedback, Tony. Get out of show business.

They didn't. So, by the way, it was who was it they sent out after Flair and Steamboat in Chicago? It was

Steve Casey and Kendall Wyndham.

And

they didn't not

fulfill a contract. They saw that they had time.
Flare and Steamboat went home early because it was

right, right? So they were going to send one more match out also for the people in the arena.

And

there was, you know, I think they were close on the pay-per-view time anyway, but for the people in the arena.

And then the mistake they made was they were only supposed to go like six or eight minutes, but they sent them out there and everybody was so excited about Flaring Steamboat.

Nobody ever sent them a cue.

So they went like 20 fucking minutes. I think they went off the air on the pay-per-view, too.

Nobody told them to go home.

It's pretty fucking funny.

Anyway. Well, Jim, our next question to Tony Khan from the Media Christ.

Is it his last one? It isn't. There are several more here.
Oh, Christ. But this one is about if Tony watches independent wrestling and what he looks for when scouting talent.
Let's go to this.

Oh, boy.

Thank you. Tony, you've got to fly to Phoenix for Jags for tomorrow.
You want to take three more questions? That sounds great, but at the same time, I do appreciate you all. Of course.

And it feels like even, you know, I'll try to pay some here. So

three feels about right now. Cool.
Great.

Thanks, Renee. Tony, thanks for the time.
Rob Pasbani from the stunner here a few years ago here at full deer

was one of the most iconic moments where we had the double debut of adam cole and brian danielson and i'm just curious what was that all out oh that was all out that was all out 21.

but uh

my whole question is bullshit thank you very much the guy why didn't the guy ask that if he wasn't certain about that but let's go uh back to this let's go back to tony con

i'm sure you're constantly scouting and I'm curious, do you watch independent wrestling yourself? Yeah, I do. Like, are you looking for the next? Yeah, I do.
Sometimes I go to independent wrestling.

So what do you look for when you're scouting?

Like, what, what, what? I look for wrestlers that the fans

connect with and also that and it's all different things. Just like in football, football players are built different.
Like you're looking for different players that play different roles.

Like not every player is the same height and speed and skill set.

And

there are things that you look for in some players versus other players and you look for people that can come and play a role in your organization.

So when you're looking, you say, oh, I think that person could do this. And then eventually maybe they could grow into

a role. And same thing when you're scouting a football player.
You think, okay, well, they could come in and I think they could play this role in the organization.

And then I think they have the potential to grow. And sometimes in whether it's football or wrestling.
Let me stop it for a second because that's a great example there.

Because, much like wrestling, Tony was inserted in a job in football, and now he's talking about football scouting, successful football scouting.

Like, he understands it like aren't they the worst team in the whole goddamn history of football, is what everybody is always saying.

Well, I don't know about the whole history of football, but they haven't been good.

I think this year is the best year they've had in a while, and they haven't had a good year in a long while.

But again, they have people you hire. You know, baseball scouts are typically old players or people who have been around the game forever.
Never like, hey,

the kid of the owner wants to be a scout. He's a scout now.
What? That was the Wilpon. Here's the thing.
That was Jeff Wilpon. That's what that is.

It's an easy thing for him to say, I look for people to connect with the fans or the fans like or whatever. Well, yeah, ding bat.

But also, that's. That just makes it a little easier in some cases.
But if this is the problem, he's going to indie shows

and he's seeing who the indie fans connect with instead of going to indie shows, looking at all the talent and saying, first and foremost, what could I do with that guy?

How would I present that guy? How would I produce that guy? What is his, is he a, do I see a baby face or a heel?

What do I see to accentuate his presentation? A change in clothing, a different attitude, some kind of music, whatever the fuck.

What slot might he fit in a roster that I'm envisioning? Would he be an upper card guy or a main event guy, or is he a young, exciting preliminary star that you could see some growth in?

And have that's

it's not just who

300 people in a barn in

Poughkeepsie are going to be cheering for because they're a local guy or doing a silly gimmick or it's somehow caught on because it's a rib

amongst the fan base, which he's hired a bunch of ribs.

Whether it's because the guy sticks his hands in his pockets or his thumb up his ass or whatever the funny thing is, that guy has got over with those fans, but you can't put it on fucking television, although he does.

But it's scouting talent is how is this guy's work?

Is he

shit good, at the same time, safe? Does he have timing?

Talk to him. Can he cut a promo?

What, what is there about him that you

like, but what is it about him that you believe he should do better if he's going to fit into what your fucking vision is?

Am I going above Tony's head at this point? I don't know if it's possible to go above his head. He's pretty high.
But Jim, let's get back to this answer.

There's still a little bit more about what he looks for when scouting independent wrestling.

I can't come down.

Perform or underperform those expectations, but they're just estimations and ideas that you have.

But in the end, I go out and I look for people that I think could connect with the fans and people that could be a good fit for AEW, and especially people that'll be good in our locker room and be a good part of the company, but also people that are going to be great wrestlers for us.

And it doesn't necessarily in every case have to be right away. Sometimes it can be, but it could be somebody for the future.
Thanks.

Thank you. Brian asked me if anytime I've ever booked anything ever anywhere, if I wondered whether or not that the guy would get along with the rest of the locker room.

Jim, when scouting independent talent, do you take into the equation how the wrestler will get along with the rest of your locker room? No.

Not even independent to anywhere, anytime.

No booker in history ever said, well, I'd love to bring that guy in, but I'm afraid the boys wouldn't like him. Well, fuck it.
They'll have to fucking figure it out.

Goddamn, one of the other will like one or the other, or one of the other will goddamn leave, but I'm not going to

just, oh, I don't think somebody would like him.

What the fuck?

And what are your thoughts on Tony when he's not dealing with all this AEW stuff and football stuff, watching independent wrestling, going to independent shows looking for talent?

I guess his eye is a talent scout.

Well, I don't know how he has time or again, it's so much of the same shit. I don't know how he has the patience, but we've seen that Tony has plenty of energy.

But I wonder, does he disguise himself?

Like, because

there's not a lot of pictures that you see circulated. Well, there's Tony Khan at front row at Garbage Championship Wrestling Palooza.
So I wonder if he's, is he hiding? Is he sneaking the back?

Is he hiding? Whatever.

Me and Bobby and Stan were leaving the

Orange Bowl in Miami at the Bash 87.

And a guy came up and said, Jim, Jim. And I said, no, no, buddy.
Got to go. He grabbed me by the arm.
I looked around.

He took his baseball cap off it was pat patterson wow he was since he lived in florida or had a place in florida at that time and he came down to the show and came in and was just checking out the

the talent on crockett's roster had you ever met him before no that's first time i met him He just said, don't say anything. Loved your match, boys.
Oh, thank you, Pat. Good to see you.

We got to go, blah, blah, blah. And he went back in to sneak up and look at the

look at the rest of the show.

I don't think I've ever heard that story before. Wow.

And at first, I almost blew him off. I thought he was going to ask for an autograph and it's fucking pat.
But he was, no, but that's the thing is that

every once in a while,

you would send in the old days when anybody had opposition, whether it was local or national, you'd send somebody you trusted over to

sit up in the fucking bleachers and see how the show went, what the people thought of it, and what talent you might

want later on

all right jim our next question for tony kahn from the media scrum following full gear is a question regarding the potential sale of wbd something you just talked about on the extreme uh-huh

and

what happens if someone with ties to wwe purchases it let's go to this

hey take a few more here

hi tony aria witner f4wonline.com earlier this week it came out that there were a number of suitors for warner brothers discovery including some that already have commitments to other pro wrestling companies are you worried that if wbd is sold to one of these companies that this is that may not be good for the future of aw on tv i am not worried at all i am feel really really good first of all we have a great partnership with warner brothers discovery and we are very blessed to work with the great superstation tbs with tnt

and now having the show stream on HBO Max. And

no, that doesn't concern me at all. I'm very, very, very, very, very optimistic about the future of the HW and where everything's going.
Thank you. Is there any?

That was a quick one there, but what is that? That was the quickest answer ever in the history of Tony Khan answers. Is that a tip

in and of itself to give that he said something quickly like that? Yes, and let's move on to another subject.

The answer that he did give was we have a great relationship with the people that own the thing now. I had a great relationship, Brian, with the guy that used to own the car wash that I used to go to.

Where the guys that were, they all knew me, and boy, they would just buff everything just right down to the goddamn shine.

And then they sold it and they do a shitty job

because I don't have a great relationship with them anymore because of different fucking people.

So he can't say he needs to be worried, but he needs to be worried. And that's why he didn't say anything because he's worried.

Yeah, he was looking very positive in the video while this is all happening. He obviously doesn't want to give away any weakness.

And again, even if you have a great partner in WBD, and I guess you could argue they really are a great partner. They let AEW do whatever the hell they want.

They give them more time than they're supposed to have on their shows. They let him air.
A lot of money. They let them air the pre-show now into the pay-per-view and cut off the main event of TV.

It just goes from Okada into a movie. Like he's standing there and all of a sudden a movie starts.

So they really have to be able to do that.

Because they do derive some benefit from their pay-per-views and they do have some,

whether it be minute amount or not, of ownership and somehow they're financially benefiting to some degree from this. But the question is, is it going to be

long enough or is this going to be another deal overly on a much bigger scale where Spike TV comes and says to TNA, well, we've been paying a lot of fucking extra talent expenses and this and that for you guys.

And what the fuck?

And then Dixie's going to go, hamina, haman, hamina.

Only this is Jacksonville Dixie. So he's going to go hamina, hamina, hamina, for about six minutes straight.

And again, you can talk about how you're a big part of Max.

If Max gets gobbled up by Netflix, you're not a big part of Max anymore.

Because it's about what Netflix wants but we'll see what happens there are a lot of interesting uh stories going around about potential purchasers of WBD one way or another it will affect AEW

Jim now our final question for Tony an interesting one because it relates to something we've talked about for any booker

Let alone for Tony Khan. We've discussed it about him as well.
And we're going to have follow-up audio from Dave Meltzer after this. Oh, good lord.
But it's Tony Khan being asked.

Brian, you're just hitting me with all these great orators. It's just

these incredibly talented public speakers that just captivate your attention. You sit in wrapped amusement at the whole thing.

Well, here's Tony Khan being asked about burnout as a booker and as a promoter for AEW.

Anybody here who has not gotten to ask a question yet that's holding up? Yes. Okay, because we've had, thank you.

I want to make sure anybody who has not gotten to ask a question yet because thank you.

Yes. Thank you, Tony.
Thank you. I just have to ask.
Clearly, you're a big wrestling fan, like a lot of us are in here as well, too.

But in being in that space, you know, we have, we have what we like to call a burnout, basically, where it's

a burnout. It's what we social media viewers kind of call, where you're posting so much, you're

burnout. You're saying it too fast.
Oh, burnout. There we go.
Burnout to a burnout? Yes. Yes.
Yes.

What? I have the feeling that Tony's heard this this phrase before.

He just suddenly doesn't know.

You have a burnout. It sounds like a meltdown.
It sounds like a nervous breakdown.

You just, you get burned out. I don't know.
Is English a second language for all the people in this room? I see no video. I don't

know why they have such trouble and mangle the goddamn King's English. And you have to see Tony's face as he's trying to figure out what this man is saying.
And then he realizes it's burnout.

And it's tony that he's asking

tony may not understand hard work what

basically where you're posting so much you're consuming so much of the product that you just kind of go into that burnout phase to where you don't feel as motivated to say post or as motivated to basically do what's a part of your job necessarily i have to say for you if there's any case where you might be say a little less motivated No,

I haven't taken a break from wrestling in a long, long time and I love it. And I'm very much in the zone.
I love coming to work every week. And

I've never missed a show, and I absolutely love it. And I talked about this a little bit earlier in the week, but I love coming here.

And even if it's a question I've talked about before, or and this is not a question I've talked about, I really like it, but I did reference some things along these lines earlier this week that I'd get back into.

Every day I come in to work, I'm so grateful to be in the chair. And I think all the time about how fortunate I am.

I'm also really glad that you all, for the most part, a a lot of the wrestling fans seem to like the work I'm doing and want me to be in the chair because I'm also cognizant that it's not always that way for people.

And I feel like, again, like I said earlier, a year ago, I felt like I was working really hard and I was trying my best. And

I feel like after a year later, being in the same building in the same place, after going to turning it, you know,

it feels like we're in a better place than we were a year ago.

Let me stop it real quick. Would a sign of burnout be not necessarily like you're stressed or you know, just you're hitting a wall, but you can't recognize when things that

are not good aren't

that? That's what I'm, and I just keep sighing because he just and won't ever end.

But it's not about not being excited to come to work or not

trying hard or not, you know, being motivated to do it. It's you've lost it.

You're burnt out. You can't.

It's not, this is not like a job where you go and perform a specific function

every day.

Whether it's

music, the music business, or whether it's movie making or the television business or the wrestling business, it's entertainment. There's not office hours.
There's not days off, weekend, Sunday.

It doesn't make any difference. In the wrestling business,

it's all the time, constantly,

for however long you're doing it. And that's why bookers would quit booking for a while or promoters would goddamn

Jerry Jarrett bought him a construction company to have something else to fucking do. Whatever.
You can't just do this goddamn forever.

and it's being creative is more difficult than just going and doing a rote task you can go and stuff envelopes you get burnt out with that

and you don't want to goddamn go to work

but in this case being responsible for a television program for entertainment and effect

Bad as he wants to go, he just ain't got anything else to do.

He's doing the same shit over and and over the same way.

As Ernie Ladd would say, ring your brain out. Your brain is like a sponge.

When it has absorbed all it can, you must ring it out.

He's just doing the same shit over and over. He's bumping into the wall.

But it doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy it. He just ain't, he's lost it.

Well, let's see if he finds it. More audio from Tony Khan about burnout.

Any, Many, many ways. And for me, I don't get that.
So I'm always really grateful. Now, as a wrestling fan, wrestling's on 52 weeks a year.
So I do realize that like it takes

a special kind of sports fan to have no offseason and to follow a sport year-round.

And there were times when I was a kid where there would be periods where like I wouldn't, you know, I'd be, when I was playing basketball and it was like, you know, I missed some wrestling shows and the next thing, you know, you missed the show a couple weeks in a row and I'd tape a lot of things on VHS.

So I'd forget to set the recorder and then you missed the show. And

there were a couple of times where that, like

in the 90s, I had a couple times like that. And

then

let me stop it real quick. What does it have to do with him being burnt out after booking his fucking fiasco for six years that he used to miss a show every once in a while in the goddamn 90s?

And he hasn't missed one since

he's saying he hasn't missed one since. He's trying to think back to when he missed a show.
And he's like, well, there was a time in the 90s that I kind of wasn't interested.

It's been non-stop ever since. He wasn't writing them except in his basement to his other three fans on whatever the thing was.
Again, this is burnout of a

whether you're an executive producer, whether you're a

Lennon and McCartney as songwriters, whether you're a goddamn movie producer, whether you're a writer, you've got writer's block. He's done it.

He can only rehash the same shit. He needs to get away from it at least, even if he comes back to it.

I'm not saying that would be a lot better, but

he's...

You can tell he's slowing down a little bit unless they adjusted his medication.

he's a little less peppy than he used to be but mentally

come up with a goddamn new idea

one that's good not one that you just think is good because you won't listen to people

let's go back to tony cotton

after time anytime i got away from it i always rediscovered my love for it and then

being entrenched in it now for seven years every single week without a week away from it

i'm obsessed with it. I love it so much.
I never think about being away from it. And I

eat and breathe and sleep it. So it's a really pleasure to be here.
And I never take it for granted how special it is to be able to do this. Thank you for asking.

All right, well, there it is. Then he's going to ask again.
You know what? I'll tell you one more thing, and then I'm glad we're done with him.

In Smuggy Bound Wrestling,

I never missed a TV because we shot our TV once every three or four weeks, right? So, and, but toward the end, I not only took off some of the spot shows because it was just getting ridiculous.

I needed some goddamn sleep, but also

for the whole, the whole duration,

maybe once every three months or so,

I would tell Brian Hildebrand and Sandy Scott, you'll see me in three and a half days.

And there would be a way that they could call me somehow if somebody goddamn fell in a well. And otherwise,

I crawled in my hole somewhere and didn't think about fucking wrestling for about three days.

Imagine how you feel if you're a Jaguars fan and you hear Tony, who has always been so involved, saying he's obsessed with wrestling, doesn't miss a show, it's all he wants to do, it's all he thinks about.

How's he supposed to have time and the energy and the desire for all these other things? The football team, the soccer team. Well, but here's the thing: analytics.

He didn't really run those to begin with. It's not like he's out there writing the football game for them.
That's why they can't pick talent. That's something that runs as a pattern.

But they've got people

running the football team. Can you imagine that? If he went in and said, okay, guys, now on four, hut one, hut two, whatever.
No,

this because this is his childhood fantasy he didn't book football games so he'll let other people do that

he he booked wrestling so he's got to do this

well of course jim a lot of us have thought that tony has indeed burned out not that he had great ideas at the beginning but

the same things over and over the mistakes that are never learned from

the tv's not exactly good

but someone did come to the defense of Tony's burnout, and that's Dave Meltzer, who apparently returned from his vacation and recorded, or maybe he's still on vacation. I don't know.
He's in a room.

I've never seen him in here in this video, but he's speaking to his co-host, Garrett Gonzalez. Hey, wait a minute.
Is there padding on the walls? That could be a clue.

No, but Dave's hair gets darker and darker every time I see him. I don't know what he's doing to his hair, but let's go to this audio right now.

Garrett Gonzalez and Dave Meltzer talking about Tony Khan burnout.

Somebody asked Tony about burnout. What did you think about that question? That was pretty interesting.
He doesn't burn out, but

you know, the,

you know,

it's kind of inhuman to do as much as he does. I mean, he is devoting most of his time to the wrestling, but it's not like he's not.
you know, you know, devoting a lot of time to football and

soccer.

So, but yeah, you know, I mean,

I mean, look, I think it's pretty clear that Tony Khan's always going to be the booker of AEW. And, and, um,

you know, whether that's good or bad, I mean, it's if you like the product, the way he presents it, it's good. Um, if you want some other type of product, it's not going to be that product, yeah.

Um, and and

that's how that's how let's stop it there for a second because what Dave is saying is actually the truth. I I think he's saying

exactly right here.

That's amazing that he's come out and said it. Won't that offend Tony more than

anything else is that Dave is actually saying, look, it's not going to change. It's never going to get better.
If you like what it is, this is what it's going to be.

But it ain't ever going to change because Tony's never going to quit.

That is what he's saying. Wow.
Tony's always going to be the booker. And for anyone who wants a different thing, which you could take as a better thing,

it isn't going to be that. Let's go back a little more audio here.
Oh, it is.

You know, there's a lot of different questions on

that. But

I,

you know, sometimes you don't know you're burning out. And a lot of times when it comes to booking,

you know, bookers burn out and they're the last to know it.

And I'm not saying that Tony's burned out or anything like that.

And that's where that clip cut off on YouTube. But

well, now then, I'm not saying that this is what's happened, but this is what's happened.

Good Lord. And yeah, he's having this conversation with Garrett Gonzalez.
Listen to some of the things Brian Alvarez has been saying.

Well, I was about to say, is Garrett Gonzalez trying to do Brian Alvarez, like a Wayland Flowers and Madam type of thing where Alvarez has his hand up Gonzalez's ass? because he sounds just like him.

He tries to. I don't think that's the, I don't know if they sound alike, but I don't think that's the situation at all.

But I thought you were going to say you didn't know whether a hand was up anybody's ass or not, but you're just concerned about how they sound. Jim burnout is what we're talking about.

Burnout, burnout's a thing that I'm going through after listening to those two brilliant enunciators.

Jesus Christ.

If either one of them had been Abraham Lincoln, we'd still have slavery.

You see, Dave won't admit that Tony isn't as good as he thinks he is. He'll just say, instead of saying like Tony needs help or Tony, he'll just say, like, Tony's going to be the one doing it.

That's just the way it is. This is what it's going to be.
This is how it is. It's a weird form of just acceptance.

Just accept this is how Tony books and this is what the show is going to be and nothing will improve it. Stop being a grifter.
Stop complaining about it.

You know, just this whole, you got to learn just everything with dave this nonsense and

he said everything true there about burnout and how it affects bookers and they're the last to know he just wouldn't apply it to the person we're talking about tony

but that's the closest he's come so i do have to give him a tip of the hat instead of a wag of the finger because he actually

said the truth, just didn't apply it to the specific person. So he's got plausible deniability when Tony says, you said bad things about my booking

well jim there'll be plenty more bad things to say about his booking in the future that was the aew full gear media scrum for tony khan and with that

that's right this is the drive-thru the drive-through is closed i forget what this thing is that we're doing here

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