83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff - Strictly Business with Eric Bischoff #54: Live Touring in Wrestling

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

In this edition of "Strictly Business," Eric Bischoff and Jon Alba discuss the logistics and concept of live touring in wrestling! Happy Thanksgiving from Eric and Jon! Special thanks to this week's sponsors! BlueChew- Try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code WRESTLEBIZ at checkout--just pay $5 shipping. FOLLOW ALL OF OUR SOCIAL MEDIA at https://83weekslinks.com/ Stop throwing your money on rent! Get into a house with NO MONEY DOWN and roughly the same monthly payment at SaveWithConrad.com On AdFreeShows.com, you get early, ad-free access to more than a dozen of your favorite wrestling podcasts, starting at just $9! And now, you can enjoy the first week...completely FREE! Sign up for a free trial - and get a taste of what Ad Free Shows is all about. Start your free trial today at AdFreeShows.com If your business targets 25-54 year old men, there's no better place to advertise than right here with us on Strictly Business. You've heard us do ads for some of the same companies for years...why? Because it works! And with our super targeted audience, there's very little waste. Go to AdvertiseWithEric.com now and find out more about advertising with Strictly Business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, hey, it's Conrad Thompson from Save WithConrad.com. Heads up, homeowners, all of a sudden your house is worth more than ever these last few years. But what are we going to do with that newfound equity? No, I'm not suggesting you sell your house or go buy something else. But didn't we all make this decision when we bought a house where we said, hey, someday we'd like to, and one day it would be nice if, maybe it's the dream kitchen, maybe it's an in-ground pool. cave. But you've got this newfound equity and I think we should use some of that equity

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the podcast heat and ad free shows networks i am john alba now this week i'm not joined by eric bischoff in this current format we were supposed to be doing and ask eric this week but because of some travel logistics for the holidays eric was taken up this week but don't worry i got a special piece of content i think you guys are really going to enjoy that most of you have never seen before. I hope you're all doing well and having a great Thanksgiving. You can be rest assured. We'll be back in business as normal this coming week. But first, Eric and I have a lot going on. We are going to be over at Russellcade down at the Ben Convention Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And I really hope that you guys can

join us for that. Eric's going to be there. I'm going to be there. I'm going to be doing a live show with Matt Hardy, wrestlek.com. Still time to pick up your tickets for this three-day family-friendly convention. Come meet Eric Bischoff, come meet me, or if you just want to meet Eric, that's fine, too. It's going to be an awesome time there. WrestleMania.com is where you want to get your tickets. Eric and I have been doing this show on the public forum for more than a year now, but prior to that, we were doing the show strictly on ad-free shows.com. And we had a lot of great discussions there that most people have never even seen. They haven't seen the lie of day.

Now, if you're an ad-freeshoes.com subscriber, of course, you've seen some of these before, and why wouldn't you want to be part of ad-free shows? Get early access now. Go to ad-freeshows.com where you'll get strictly business. You'll get all those other great podcasts, early access at your fingertips whenever you want them. But last year, Eric and I did an episode about live touring

and how different companies tackle the logistics of that. What are some of the challenges of doing live touring? how is it different for talent? Do they have to play the different types of hard cams? It's a really, really fascinating conversation. I think you guys are going to enjoy. Now, there may be a couple references that have since changed, obviously, in the year plus since we recorded this conversation.

But I do think it's one you guys are really going to find fascinating, especially from someone who was a master of the live touring schedule back during his days running WCW. He is a tome of knowledge that Eric Bischoff, and I think you're going to learn something from him with this episode. So, without further ado, I present to you strictly business, live tour. We got a cool topic this week. When you pitched this to me, I was all about it because I think that we are in a really big transitional time and professional wrestling when it comes to this topic.

And that is live touring. And this industry, as we all know, Eric, used to be very much driven by the gate. you have as many house shows as possible as you can in addition to TV. That's where the money is made. But I feel like we've seen a seismic shift in the last few years as these TV contracts have become so gargantuan. And now we're looking at a different arena, quite literally here, in terms of how wrestling companies and wrestlers make their money. So let's start by setting the stage and let's look back at the business model that you were familiar with when you were in charge of WCW. How reliant on how shows in the live gate was the industry at that period of time?

We could spend three episodes, maybe two, talking about this very subject. And I'm going to answer your question in a second, but just to kind of set the framework for what we're going to talk about today and why I think this is an important conversation. is that most people, well, almost inevitably, I would say 90% of the people that are fans of the industry, watch it, engage in social media, all that, are of the mindset that the live event portion of the wrestling business model is strictly revenue. That's not true. The correlation between Livegate revenue and touring and television is much more significant than even people in the industry think about. Because you know, you're running, you're on the treadmill, you're balancing your budget, you're increasing, you're trying to increase your business, you know, all those things, right?

And I'm guilty of this myself, especially early on, and thinking, okay, you know, we do television and a television, you know, and when I was running WCW, we didn't get television rights. And we're no television rights in our revenue stream. Certainly not any, well, since there weren't on, obviously you can't compare to what there is today, you know. But I think the connection, and you put it out just as you were setting this up, you know, how important was, you know, the LiveGate revenues.

in the WCW business model. I think in general, ideal, here was the ideal scenario when I was running WCW. Think about WCW's revenue, the end of the year, gross revenues, as a table. And each one of those tables were supported by one of four legs. Okay. You had, let's knock it out first, arena, tour. LiveGate, whatever you want to call it, you had pay-per-view, you had licensing and merchandising. Well, you had merchandising.

I'll separate them, and then you had licensing. Ideally, all four of those legs were equally strong. That certainly wasn't the case when I took over WCW in whatever year it was, 93, we'll call it, really not until 94. but let's say 94 at that point you know wcw's table was trying to balance on two legs basically um the most significant one being television live events were there it was a cash flow but it it it was all the cash that was flowing in was flowing out at a more rapid pace so it was completely off balanced as things started changing for wcd view in 95 really is when it began to change 96. It certainly changed 97, 98, so forth.

Those four legs, those four revenue streams were more closely kind of constructed in terms of strength, you know, the value to the platform. And it's an overall revenue stream. That was then, you know, now is completely different. You've got more legs now. You know, You've got streaming, you've got other things, licensing, which really didn't exist back then, certainly now for WCW and in no significant way to WWE. So I think a lot has changed now, but what's not changed, and this is the part that I think gets so lost, and people don't really think about it much. And total disclaimer here, this case.

out of this thought, this discussion in my head, really started about 1994, 1993, and it came out of research. Part of the research at that point in time, and it wasn't the best research we'd ever, I'd ever been a part of it, Turner, but was, you know, why does wrestling even work? Why do people watch wrestling? And more importantly, why has wrestling been? and one of the most successful genres in all of television, going back to the Dumont Network in the mid-50s, when wrestling was one of the first and really, in some respects the most successful formats on national television.

And you think about, you know, back in the day when it was territories, right? Every local market had its own promoter, and they were promoting to that local lot. Local being, you know, 100, 150, 200 mile radius because that's typically where those television markets, that was their coverage, until you got into New York and Chicago and L.A. But it was territory driven, but promoters, they lost money on their television show. It was the cost of doing business and all of the revenue. They had one, basically one leg to their table. It was live events. But wrestling back in that period of time in the territory. period was one of the more successful in highest-rated shows in almost any market in the United

States. Fast forward into the 70s, cable television comes along. You know, wrestling became and still is one of the most successful genres on cable television. Cable gave birth to pay-per-view. What was one of and probably still is, well, probably not as much anymore. We'd have to have that discussion. But for decades, wrestling was one of the most successful genres and pay-per-view. Now we're in the digital age. Guess what? WWE and WrestleMania outperformed the NFL and Super Bowl in many respects on that digital platform. So wrestling has always been on the forefront of just about any form of or on any media platform. And you have to ask yourself why. To fully understand the business of the wrestling business, you have to understand

why your customers come to the door. What is it? And there's no one answer. I don't think. I know there's not. You know, it's different for everybody. But I think at the core of it, one of the reasons that wrestling has endured and has survived all the cultural shifts and and everything else, you know, just people's taste, change, and all that, why is wrestling always been there at the forefront? And I think in at least an important part of that answer is touring. Because unlike any other form of entertainment, certainly some forms of entertainment can't tour.

Documentaries don't tour. Sitcoms don't tour. A lot of things don't tour. But what if they did? What if friends back in the whatever, 80s, 90s? In live shows, sorry, 90s. What if friends back in the 90s, in addition to having a hit television show, that cast toured around the country. And you had similar versions of what you see on television happening in front of you live.

Big towns, small towns, theaters. I don't know. It would be a different business model. And there's a lot of reasons why it wouldn't work. But that's what wrestling does. And I think coming to that local market and engaging and creating that experience, it's as close to a one-on-one experience as you're going to get, creating that connection to your local audience,

which is a part of your national audience, is one of the reasons why I think wrestling is so successful still in any form or any way of transmitting it, any platform. There is something to that live event experience, right? Like, I mean, I know friends who could not care less about professional wrestling who I've dragged to a show or they've gone, and they'd be like, you know what, that was actually kind of fun.

It was different live. It was different in person. Hell, you talk about things being on tour. A show like Dancing with the Stars is now doing live tours. And I think they're recognizing there is value in that model. as you just said. But with that said, Eric, I don't think there's any doubting. We've seen a shift because of TV rights in the importance of live event touring.

Now, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, and I look at this through the shows that I host here on ad-free shows, and I'm sure on 83 weeks, you've seen some of the attendance numbers of live events. You guys are drawing 15, 16, 17,000 people to house shows back then. Now that just doesn't happen. that's not the case anymore and for a variety of reasons right so i guess the question then becomes even though there's value in the live touring model is it a somewhat antiquated system and if not what is the remaining value in it i don't know if it's a you know if not type of question

i think it's more of a question of what is that its real value. If it's real value is in revenue and the decision to tour or not tour or to expand your touring or not expand your touring is strictly a revenue issue because you have all this money coming in from all these other areas, what happens to the business? Because if you displace, if you eliminate that immediate connection, that unique opportunity, to connect your stars to that live audience and that experience. If you take that experience away in time, and this is, I guess, the real point I wanted to make,

what happens five years from now? Because you're taking away by focusing so much on the television product, and by television, I mean pay-per-view as well, anything that you're watching on a media platform, but by focusing so much of your energy and your resources on just that, because that's where the bulkier revenues are coming from. Eventually, what happens to the product when in the process of focusing on the media platforms, you're eliminating or greatly reducing your local connection that turns into a national audience.

And I think that's what's going to be, and I don't have the answer, but that's kind of what's fascinating to me is for so long, It's been at least a large portion of what makes wrestling work, in my opinion, is that connection. You know, when AEW comes to Chicago, that market, they have so much fun. It's a community experience. It's like going to a really good party and showing up. And it's not just you and your friends showing up. It's you and your friends and 25,000 other people all having a good party.

great time. It's a festival. It's a, it's a unique experience. It's a unique human experience. And you don't get that in social media. You get a, you get a community. Don't get me wrong, but it's not the same thing. And my question is, what's going to happen five years from now if, and I'm not suggesting it's going to happen. What happens to the business overall when that powerful, most valuable part of the professional wrestling equation that's been around for however many years now, what happens when you take that away? Is the social media experience enough to keep that connectivity to the television product alive enough to continue to sustain the audience? I've wondered that as well. And you mentioned a really interesting point about

when you're on the road, it's almost like you're building goodwill with your audience to keep them wanting to invest in the television program. So with that said, we've seen consistently WWE's viewership has gone down over the course of the past few years, as has professional wrestling in general. But meanwhile, they're still running house shows at the same time. And attendance has gone down on those house shows. They're running different venues than they have in the pass. So is that a point that still carries merit then? Because if the audience is dropping on TV, then is there still value in getting out there in front of the crowd when you know you've already got a steady, dedicated, hardcore group of 1.5 million people who are going to watch

every week no matter what? I think at the very least, you're almost forced into doing it. Or you're going to take the risk by eliminated and completely. that it really isn't significant and it really doesn't matter anymore and then potentially miscalculating and realizing that by even though Turing, Live Turing isn't as successful anymore

and even though ratings are coming down or trending down over time like everything in television by eliminating Turing, does that accelerate that? Are you willing to, not me, but is one willing to risk that? or does one double down on it.

Take AEW. AEW doesn't tour. AWW only does their live events on tour, or live TV on tour, I should say. They're not doing house shows per se. And that's just not part of their business model. And there are other wrestling promotions where it's just not part of their business model. So if they took that risk and they then took on some overhead costs that they currently don't have,

is that a risk worth taking in today's environment? Is that an investment worth making in today's environment? because that's what we're really talking about. And I don't have the answer that. I don't want to pretend I do. But if I were in that seat today and had to make that judgment, my judgment would be to tour versus not tour.

And I'll tell you why. Not only for all the reasons that I've already laid out, I won't repeat. I'll try not to repeat myself. I know I do anyway, but I'll try. Let's take all of the audience connectivity, and experience out of the equation for right now. Here's the other reason why I think touring is really important.

First reason. I think the risk of injury to talent is much greater when they're not as active and they're not out there performing every day. Maybe every other day. And by the way, I wouldn't want to advocate to see anybody. out there on the road 250 or 300 days a year.

I think that's a bad, bad long-term situation for talent. I've seen it. But by not touring at all, I think you actually, and on the surface of it, you say, yeah, but the more often you wrestle, the more likely it is you're going to get hurt. And there's probably some truth to that. But by not wrestling every day,

your body is not conditioned to absorb the kind of things that professional wrestlers absorb, especially when they're out there busting their ass on television, you're really cranking it up on a pay-per-view and trying to raise the bar even higher than they typically do during the week. By not being out there and doing it on a regular basis, I think you run the risk of getting hurt. Now, why do I say that? I've never been a wrestler. I've never been on tour. I've never been out and performed two hundred. I've never been out and performed three days a week, two days a week, okay? As far as being a wrestling, So I don't have the personal experience here.

But, but over the years, I've talked to a lot of people that have. And across the boards, most of the guys that I've had this conversation with at very high levels and some breaking into the business is that they're going to get hurt when they've had four or five, six days off, as opposed to being out there two, three days a week or four days a week. the time off is almost a bigger risk in some cases than working consistently. That's one reason. I do think that you run the risk of injuries,

especially to your top level performers, the ones that are really going out there and trying to piss higher than they did last week and do things that nobody's seen before. But here's, I think, an even more important aspect of it is talent doesn't really get a chance to develop. Yep, entirely. agree. Hey, this episode of Strictly Business is presented to you by Blue Chew. Let's talk about sex, gents. Remember the days when you're always ready to go. Well, now you can increase your performance and get that extra confidence in bed by heading on over to bluechew.com. Blue Chew is a unique

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I hated it when guys would say that to me. older guys, right? You know, I heard that from, you know, the minute I walked through the door at WCW, O'E Anderson, we're not out on tour, you're not doing house shows, you're not going to get it good. Well, I intellectually, I understood that, but I really didn't understand the magnitude of that position until much later on in my career. Now I can see it even more clearly than I did it late in my career. Because, look, one of the things that I learned from Ted Turner, specifically from Ted Turner. And Ted said it within the context of programming a network, right? I don't know what his exact quote was, but it was something to the effect of,

you know, don't program your network for your own tastes because you're programming an entire network for an audience of one. Not everybody loves what you love. You may be a very successful person. You may have passionate interests. You may think that whatever it is you are excited about is the most exciting thing on television, but not everybody agrees with you. So you have to learn how to program a television network for a mass audience if you want it to be successful. And I think the same thing is true in life, right, in a creative life. If you're all, unless you're an artist, you know, or something, but if you're creating content and you're creating it solely based on your tastes and lights, you're missing potentially a large part of your potential

audience. And I think the way that relates to performers is how do you develop a new idea? You're not going to develop a new idea on television, not if you're smart, because you don't know if it's going to work or not. A lot of guys do, a lot of people do, men and women, do today because that's the only option they have. And I'm not suggesting that they don't work on it and practice it and all that. They do. But how do you know the audience is going to like it

as much as you do? You don't. And I think the really true professionals that are out there, and I think this is true. Look, stand-up comics, or they do it all the time. They come up with the material.

They think it's funny. And they go out and they try it in a small club with 50 people there in case it bombs. So the word doesn't get out to the same extent, right? And I think wrestling has to, when it can be its best, I think it's a result of young talent and even experienced talent coming up with an idea and say, hey, what if we did this next time? I know what we did last night or last week, but what if we try it this way instead and then have the ability to go out there in front of a live audience without the risk of television, you know, or the pressure of it. and go out there and try it and see if it works or not and if it works great fantastic now you know what you're going to do on television next week or whatever but if it doesn't even though you thought

it was a great idea yeah maybe not and i think that's one of the reasons especially when you look at talent coming up today they comes from so many diverse backgrounds number one and and but very few of them have real, I want to say real, the kind of live event experience that they really need to be able to test things and try new things because every audience is a little different too. You know, what worked for you at an indie show in New Jersey six months ago might not work for you in North Carolina, you know, because it's a different audience and have different expectations and tastes and everything else. So that's another reason why I think live touring is so important in today's equation,

regardless of whether it's making money or not. It's almost the cost of doing business if you want to keep your television at the highest level possible and develop your talent to the greatest extent possible. Live promos are a perfect example. I can sit here and write a promo that I think is just going to get over. and I can go out and do it in nothing crickets why did that happen because I was entertaining myself I was appealing to my own sensibilities my own taste the kind of promo I like the blah blah blah blah and 50% of the time I'll pretty pretty close and 50% of the time I'll miss it by a mile

but if I go out there and play with that and come back and go okay well this work this was flat I could have done this so much better and then try it again the next night or two nights later until you get it dialed in and then you go out and use it or something close to it on television that's that i that i think is it's that value that is so undervalued because it's just not in your face a few points i want to make off that one i think that you ask most talent they'll tell you how show matches are some of their favorite matches that they work because A, they get to try out a lot of stuff. B, they generally just have a lot of fun with it.

And C, they do get to develop themselves a little bit. My second point is that how show reports, right? The office gets how show reports. They see, okay, hey, these guys had a really good match. This was getting over. The crowd was chanting this. And maybe this is something we can invest some TV time into. And that's a good way to get a litmus test for your product as well.

And the last point I want to make, and I'm so glad you said this about the whole developmental thing. NXT, for example, the main development that you saw from NXT from 2015 to 2019 was that they were doing what was called the Florida loop, which is they would go to different cities and different towns in Florida, and they would work house shows on three, four nights a week. And they were short, they were small crowds, 200 people, 300 people maybe, but you're getting the reps and these are developmental talent, maybe who don't have a whole lot of wrestling experience. in general and then they're getting TV ready for that and and exceeds the baseline for TV right like that's developmental now in the current XC system because they haven't been back on the road and they're going to be soon but the only time these people are wrestling in front of people is on live television and that's just not a healthy way to get talent reps in any way no no in fact it's almost teaching them a bad golf swing well the holidays are upon us

and with new year's resolutions around the corner maybe time to think about mental health as we head into 24. So here's what I've got to ask you. Are you feeling like you're in a rut or you're distracted? Many people today are questioning whether they could have ADHD or wondering, well, isn't everyone a little ADHD? If you find yourself thinking along these lines and can't get out of your own way, maybe it's time to talk to a life coach. Meet fellow ad-free show supporter and wrestling fans, Steve from damn healthy dose.com. Steve is a certified ADHD life coach.

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So mention Strictly Business, and Steve is going to provide you with your first two sessions for free to see if life coaching is a fit for you. That's two sessions, absolutely free, just by saying strictly business. So don't wait. If you're feeling stock, visit damn healthy dose.com. You know, and I'm not a golfer, but I'm not a golfer, but I've heard this analogy. I didn't create it, but I've heard other people use it.

And I can identify with it. You know, it's like once you develop a bad golf swing from what I've been told, I have a bad golf swing. I guarantee you I have a bad golf swing. So so far I'm talking for personal experience. But once you develop and that muscle memory becomes ingrained, it's hard to undo it. You know, I used to teach martial arts for a long time. and I used to love it when a new student would come in with absolutely no training,

previous training, because you didn't have to untrain them, right? You started out with this really great, you know, ball of clay. You could shape it the way you wanted, and you felt it should be shaped. As opposed to somebody coming in that had two or three years worth of training and moved or for whatever reason decided to study a different style of martial art. and you have to undo all that stuff. And I think what you're talking about with NXT and the only time to get to try anything is on television,

what happens is you're forced to work a television type of match and for young talent. And you don't get a chance to really try things because you have a limited amount of time. And your goal is much different when you're doing that on live television that it is when you're an arena. So I think what you end up doing and not intentionally, certainly, but I guess, you know, by default, it just happens is your, in some respects, teaching bad habits. You're giving them experience in some great ways, but you're also teaching some bad habits, rushing being probably the biggest one because of the time restraints.

And what happens when you rush, aside from, you know, risking botching things? People can get hurt. People don't develop. You don't sell, right? You don't take the time because you don't, oh, man, if I spend, you know, 15 more seconds selling this, I'm going to lose the audience. Subconsciously or consciously, it happens. So, yeah, it's a tough, like I said, I don't have any answers here, man. I'm just observing from the sidelines and taking, you know, 30 some odd years of experience and conversations and research and my own ideas and kind of sitting back and going, okay, how does any of this apply now?

I think a lot of it does because we are in such a transitional time, as you pointed out to head this thing up, man. It's a whole different business model today than it was even 10 years ago. Well, there is one more talking point I wanted to tee up on before we wrap things up here on Strictly Business. I've been waiting to ask you about this since we came up with this topic. And that's about the future of what a live event looks like in professional wrestling. And I don't just mean a house show.

I can also mean TV here. And the reason I say that is because we just saw something very experienced. during the pandemic era. And that was the Thunderdome in WWE, where WWE contained its production in one fixed space. They had a virtual audience.

They controlled crowd reactions. Everyone was playing just to a camera and no live crowd at all. And when this was all happening, I remember talking to a lot of people in WWE about it. And I had multiple people, Eric, say to me, as crazy as this may seem,

this is the future. of where things are going, where a promotion, specifically WWE, in this case, wants to control every aspect of the live production.

Do you think there's any merit in that? You know, maybe, I don't know. I will tell you for me, absolutely not. At that point, I'm really out. You know,

and as an example, example, said this many times before. One of the things I love, I'll say love is a strong word. One of the things I like much better about AEW's production than WWEs is I actually feel like I'm in the arena. It's not so pretty and almost artificial because it's done so well that I just feel like I'm in the arena. I can almost smell the popcorn. And for me, that that, That's the part that I miss. That's the part I enjoy the most. That's the experience.

When I say, I can almost smell the popcorn, I really want to almost smell that popcorn. I want to smell that stale beer that somebody spilled the night, spilled the night before. Because that's part of what brings you back to what made me fall in love with professional wrestling, right? And the cleaner it gets, the more distance I feel from it. I agree. The less my experience becomes. So when you create that totally artificial environment, and there's, There are probably a lot of reasons why that might be a great idea.

I will tell you for me as an individual, they lost me at that point. I just, I will, there's no way I'm going to spend two minutes of my life because I'm not getting anything out of it. For the reasons that I love professional wrestling, and we all have different reasons why we love it, why we were attracted to it the first place, why we continue to keep watching it. It's all, it's different for everybody. Me personally, the minute they do that, I'm out. completely out. Could you see a scenario where there's an emphasis on live touring taken back a little bit and it becomes a fixed setting?

So like say WWE builds this massive production facility, state of the art, it can hold fans and everything. And that's where Monday Night Raw is held every single week. That's where Smackdown is held every single week. It's an attraction. Hey, come to us like you would go to a live sitcom taping every single week. You are coming to us. We are building an experience for you. And yeah, we'll take pay-per-views on the road,

but we are building this massive production in-house experience for our fans to come to and cut overhead costs on touring. Could you ever see a scenario like that? Because I had people swearing to me that that is where this is all going at the end of the day. And maybe it is. Again, I think for the current fan, the current younger fan, because probably in many cases, haven't had the same experiences I didn't get involved in professional wrestling for the reasons

I did. Perhaps for them it'll be awesome. Perhaps for them it'll be so much better and it'll work really, really effectively. But again, that's not the same thing as going to my local arena where I watch my local hockey, you know, team play or whatever. You know, it's just not the same community experience at that level. It's still, it's a community experience. Give me wrong. I get it. It's not the same, you know, it's, it's like if some, if you have a friend that you haven't seen in 20 years come to town and you say, hey, you know, come to meet me over at a local, you know, Mexican restaurant for dinner. It's going to be great, but it's not the same as hanging out at your house. That's different. That feels like you're hanging with your friend as opposed to meeting them out on the road.

It's just different. It's not bad. It's just different. I don't know, man. I don't know. That's a men of their shit right there. I just bring that point up because it seems very apparent when I watch, especially WWE TV, but there are other promotions that exemplify this.

They are playing to the TV audience, not the live audience. And that is a noticeable shift in recent years, the last 10 years specifically, I think, where you've really seen that change happen a lot. So I agree. And that's one that you mentioned, NXT. And I know we've got to cut this one a little short. I promise I won't drone. on and on and on. I'm really excited about the next two weeks of shows. I'm working on a couple

guests that it's really going to dig into a lot of things that at least I have not heard discussed anywhere before. But there's a plug for the next two weeks. But yeah, I mean, that's one of the things when you brought up to NXT and how it's working. And I think there's a lot of really positive things about it. But you're teaching the talent how to work for television, how to work a camera, keeping an eye out for, you know, that tight shot, you know, working towards a corner for this whole purpose of getting a specific shot. And that's all very valuable shit you need to know. But while you're learning that, here's what you're not learning. How to watch the person in the fifth row, not the

first row, because they're going to react to anything. In fact, if you can see far enough, go back to the 10th row or the 15th row, look up into the stands because that's the person you want to get to react. If you can get that person to react, those people sitting in the front row. They're going to follow you home, right? You've got to learn how to play to the bigger, broader audience as opposed to just that hard camera and learning how to read the audience. It's one thing people can knock Hulk Hogan all they want or guys in Hulk Hogan's era. You know, Rick Flair is another example. I've heard talk about this so many times. You've got to learn how to work the crowd. You can't learn how to work the crowd while you're working the camera, two different

Thanks. Fantastic stuff there from Mr. Bischoff. Always appreciate you guys listening to us here on Strictly Business. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoy bringing this show to you every single week. As does Eric Bischoff, we are extremely grateful, grateful, not as graceful, but grateful for all of your support here. And I hope you guys have a great Thanksgiving. We'd love for you to be part of our team. Head on over to advertise witheric.com.

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