My Mom's Basement - EPISODE 172 - TONY KHAN/BEST FRIENDS/QT MARSHALL

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

We've got an AEW Extravaganza in My Mom's Basement today with interviews featuring Tony Khan, The Best Friends, and QT Marshall! 3Chi: Use code MMB at checkout to receive 5% off at 3Chi.com Bearbottom Clothing: Use code BASEMENT at BarebottomClothing.com for 10% off your first order **************************************** Subscribe to My Mom's Basement on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIeZ96PqdsJYQ7DFLRx6MHw My Mom's Basement Merchandise: https://store.barstoolsports.com/collections/my-moms-basement Intro Music: “Basement Noise” by All Time Low Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/basement-noise/1499013757?i=1499013968 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/3Aq9W9BBCjsFOQqcYyO6IA?si=d9d0f74cf54a48deYou can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/mymomsbasement

Hey My Mom's Basement listeners, you can find our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and Prime members in the basement, noise in the basement. Just stupid boys making basement noise in the basement. Yeah, yeah. Hello and welcome to My Mom's Basement presented by 3G and Barstool Sports. I am your host, Robbie Fox, and today I have an AEW edition of the show for you. So I don't want to waste any more time. I'll do the 3G ad and we'll get right into it. It is Tony Khan, the best friends and QT Marshall. Now 3G is the industry

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It's number three, CHI.com, from the taffies to the candy to the disposable vapes, the gummies, the cookies, the brownies. They have a ton. Use the promo code MMB at three dot com and you will receive five percent off your order. Now let's get into the first of these three interviews with Tony Khan, and then I'll send you right into the one with the best friends. Meet you on the other side. All right, it's My Mom's Basement. It is Robbie Fox, and I am here back with Tony Khan. We are here ahead of AEW Dynamite at the UBS Arena.

Is that what it's called? Yeah. On Long Island? Sorry, I can't say in Long Island. On Long Island. On Long Island. I can't wait for it. AEW is on a tear right now.

Obviously, MJF, the talk of Long Island right now, the MJF versus CM Punk feud. We've got Brian Danielson and Hangman, amazing feud there, the TBS title tournament, the tag division is on fire right now. I feel like AEW is on a tear. I want to start with MJF and CM Punk because it's Long Island, everyone's going to be talking about that. What did you think about that 20-minute back and forth? I mean, that was, in my opinion, one of the best wrestling segments of the year, so what were you thinking backstage listening to that? I felt it was going to be a

huge critical and commercial success. I knew people were reacting and responding and people around the world were watching it, but also that it would build a huge audience, you know, on Thanksgiving Eve, people that would come back and watch it on video. We saw not only our biggest DVR audience we've had and ended up being our most watched dynamite of the month and it's intrigued fans around the world on thanksgiving day i saw this is an amazing stat uh the top two trending videos in the world on youtube were the macy's thanksgiving day parade and mjf and cm promo and all day those are the top two videos on youtube, which I thought was really cool. CM Punk kind of like weirdly runs Thanksgiving.

Like his original, like when he came out and told the whole story about his previous employer, that was on Thanksgiving. Isn't that kind of weird? He is the king of Thanksgiving. And by the way, on the holiday movies, I have to reuse it. I made a great comparison on another show.

That CM Punk, much like Kevin McAllister, the king of the holiday movies, your favorite holiday movie being Home Alone. It's also my favorite Christmas movie. And that CM Punk, much like Kevin McAllister, is a Chicago guy through and through, but also super over here in New York and pretty much everywhere he goes, except maybe for Long Island. And if CM Punk were Kevin McAllister, let me take this much further than I did before,

and now it's really yours. Now you've claimed this analogy for your own because I didn't get this far earlier. If CM Punk were Kevin McAllister, then perhaps he might be lost on Long Island, and perhaps MJF might be the wet bandits or the sticky dicks. Or sticky, yeah, depending on which movie you want it to go with. That's really, I mean, it's like a Harry and Marv type situation, but they're in their own territory here.

So, you know, I don't know if UBS Arena is going to be Duncan's toy chest, but it's going to be very exciting here. It's a situation to see with MJF as the hometown hero, because like Tony Schiavone coined the expression, wherever CM Punk goes, he's the home team. But here, I think this might be the one exception. So I'm excited to see. It could be, yeah. I can't wait to see how the crowd's going to react.

Speaking of the crowd reacting, someone I brought up, Brian Danielson and Hangman. I love this feud. Are you surprised that the crowd turned on Bryan as quickly as they did? No, not at all. It was kind of exactly what we expected was going to happen. Bryan certainly leaned into it. It was just straight heat right away. It wasn't even like the crowd was torn. It was just straight booze. It was crazy. Yeah, and they haven't even seen the most of Bryan yet. I think, wait till they get a load of what Brian has in store. I can't wait for Hangman Page

versus Brian Danielson to have Hangman win the world title. You know, it's been such a cool build. I know from talking to you and like so many other wrestling fans,

people were excited to see Hangman Page versus Kenny Omega. The build has been huge. And at Full Gear, it was such a classic title match. Great culmination yeah and

after a story that's gone on for years literally yep and uh so now we have this great champion hangman page and for his first defense to be against brian danielson who i think is not only the best wrestler in the world but maybe the best wrestler of all time yeah i agree it's my favorite he's bet me too and so i think brian danielson to be the number one contender for the first title match uh what a way for hangman page to start his title reign and frankly it could be the end of his title absolutely and uh winter is coming is one of the biggest shows of the year so i wanted to deliver for the fans like you know i try to put the biggest matches on dynamite and rampage whether we get whether it was debuting CM Punk on Rampage at the first dance and the huge wrestling we try and put on every

Friday night on TNT, which is like, honestly, right in the demo of Barstool, right? The Rampage is like, you know, there's going to be people up late watching your show and who watch the great shows on Barstool and listen to the great podcasts because it's like, you know, it's not even that late. Friday night, 10 o'clock is not late. Let's be honest. It's like pregame hours and like it's a great pregame show. And frankly, it's wrestling that you don't have to be embarrassed to show people because it's just going to be great matches and great athletes. Like just look at the show this past week. You know, people are very impressed by the debut of Tony Nese to come in and have a great TNT title match against Sammy Guevara. It was a crazy pull apart with Jade and Thunder

Rosa, the TBS tournament down to the Final Four. It's really exciting what's going on and I think it's the best women's tournament in a long time anyone's seen certainly in America. And then also, what a great tag match. And we were in a tough circumstance with Phoenix not being there, not clear to come. So, you know, what happened certainly at the end of the show with Malachi Black, a big surprise to everybody, but what a great wrestling match and a great main event, Pac and Penta versus FTR. Great tag team match. And there's been some great matches like that.

Adam Cole and Bobby Fish have had a couple great matches on our homepage lately. So it's absolutely awesome. And then on Dynamite every Wednesday, our flagship show, this is the last month of Dynamite ever on TNT. And I want to go out with the best month we've ever had. I want to go out, which is saying something, because this run of Dynamite on TNT is the biggest thing ever in my life. It's the greatest thing i've ever been a part

of and uh and it's coming to an end but something amazing starting with uh the the run on tbs and i want to make the final month here on tnt of dynamite and the first month on tbs of dynamite so huge and it's great rampage is staying on tnt so so we're still going to have TNT still at home of AEW. But to have Rampage staying is huge. But the end of Dynamite on TNT, it's emotional. I can't think of any place I'd rather have it than where we're having it, which is Daily's Place. Yeah, absolutely. Last time you were here, we talked about SmackDown going head-to-head with Rampage.

And that was a big thing. Wrestling fans were talking all about it. Do you anticipate that happening more often? I don't know. Maybe when there's preemptions, it's not, it wasn't really our choice. Like, you know, a lot of times people, I think I have a reputation for coming out aggressively in the media, but it's usually only in response to, like, real world stuff. Like, that was an example. Like, you know, during the Wednesday Night Wars, we had to be aggressive, but we didn't choose for there to be a TV battle. We just had to bring the fight and we brought the fight and won it. And that was another time that you just brought up where I was here last time I saw you. And it turned out we had a head to head competitor, which I wasn't expecting.

But I certainly was wanted to bring the competition we thankfully had already announced a great card before i found out there was competition because we didn't know about the 30 minute overrun and this head-to-head thing that we were going to be doing for 30 minutes which we won the demo we won the 18 to 49 which is you know honestly mostly your your core demo here so thank you to all the great fans like it means a lot to have the support because it that was huge for us and we had already announced cm punk versus matt side l and ruby so over ruby so over the bunny it was a great card and it was you know the fans really tuned in for it and it was pretty cool because people said terrible things about matt side l and the bunny and about cm punk and ruby soho

and they delivered huge numbers and uh punk and side l came out of the gate and uh and they were up against a huge match and they won and uh and then for ruby soho and the bunny to be up against some huge stars and put up the number they did it was amazing and to win the half hour head-to-head especially all weekend people spent leaking numbers to the contrary and then when the real numbers came out, I was wondering why the demo hadn't come out. I thought maybe it was a good sign. And it turned out it was. So, you know, now I'm back and we're promoting something that's not about the competition as much.

Because I think right now, it's just a great time in wrestling, you know. When the shows are head-to-head, there is some excitement. And it definitely fuels excitement. But there's other good things about being able to watch. Like right now, think about it, almost every night of the week, there's so much good wrestling on TV. It's a great time to be a wrestling fan. Like you said, watch your wrestling.

Absolutely, and I do want everyone to watch your wrestling, and I know you watch your wrestling, and I watch my wrestling, and I want all the fans to watch your wrestling, and I hope that includes Dynamite on Wednesdays and Rampage on Fridays, but there's lots of stuff happening in wrestling. It's really exciting. And whenever somebody brings competition to us, I just want to aggressively promote it, but I'm also not, like, looking to start that stuff.

So it's probably, like, a bit of a misconception. Have you ever had a conversation with Vince McMahon? No, never. I heard from them recently. I'll break this news here. I don't think it's being aggressive or anything to say it. I heard from them recently. They're doing documentaries and a lot of the biographies,

like they've been doing the biography shows. This is, I guess, breaking news. I heard from them recently. They were doing a lot of biographies, and they wanted to use some of the people here, and I think that's a thing. It's probably going to come out sooner or later. In interviews or something?

They wanted to interview some of the people that wrestle here that used to wrestle there, and some people that have had history there or the other libraries that they own. And so we'll see. You know, I think I'm open to talking. I heard from them, and they were very nice. Is that the first time you've heard from them since AEW started?

No, it's not. We've heard a couple other things. We did the thing last year. Chris Jericho did the thing with Steve Austin. Oh, yeah. And that was made sense to me because of Steve, right? And I trust Steve and Chris completely. And Steve's a friend of mine and Chris is a friend of mine. And they talked about AEW on that a lot. It's super classy. And as long as everything's classy and the way they approached me was very classy, so I have nothing bad to say about that. And so I don't know if we'll see that competition head-to-head, but I am considering some of these requests on some of these biographies. And it was actually a very nice call I received the other day, but I've never actually talked to Vince himself. Interesting.

Something we talked about the last time you were here, another promoter that you have a very good relationship with is Dana White. And Dana, how long have you known Dana? Only since the pandemic, really. Oh, really? Because, yeah, he was in Jacksonville, and we were like actually in adjacent bubbles, because at one point there was like a hotel that basically was just split up between AEW and UFC on different parts of the biggest hotel in the region. And so there's a lot of conference space and rooms. And we had a set of bubbles in different parts of this hotel. And we had our testing and did all that stuff.

And that was pretty cool. And they did the shows, as you remember, in Jacksonville. So we had a lot of time to get to know each other. And he's just like a really cool guy. And that was one of the things I was committed to do when they set up in Jacksonville was as we were running our own shows safely through the pandemic. And they were running their shows safely through the pandemic. It was cool getting to know Dana and become friends with him. And they have such an amazing promotion to UFC.

And it's been fun having some of the great fighters come in, along with American Top Team and Dan Lambert. And that's something to keep an eye on too. And some of the biggest fighters in the world, some UFC stars and former UFC stars have been in and I think that's awesome. They're the 800-pound gorilla in the world of combat sports and I think it's just awesome getting to know Dana because I can see why he's been so successful he's a really cool guy too the last time you were here you played a voicemail for me can we play the voicemail for the people yeah from uh Dana himself

because this is I'll get it out honestly hilarious and and very uh it speaks to like who Dana is like kind of off camera I guess but it is who he is on camera, too. Well, so last year I was fortunate. I won some awards in the Wrestling Observer newsletter, and thanks to the great fans voting, and Promoter of the Year was an award I won, and Dave Meltzer had some quotes about it. Here, I'll hold it up to my mic.

I can hold it up to your microphone. Yeah, I'll go like this. Sure. You know, it's funny i uh today dave melcher wrote a story about me going to jacksonville and he's like uh you know obviously completely against it and he says for all the people that were bitching and wondering why dana white didn't win promoter of the year last year now you know and i'm like if I didn't win, who the fuck won? I looked it up and it was you. I was like, well, listen, if somebody's

gonna fucking win it, let it be fucking Tony. honestly put that on my tombstone Dana yeah I mean yeah you can put that on my tombstone I'll say it right now that to get that uh from him and uh I have so much respect for Dana and all the success of the UFC um so speaking of year-end awards I'd like to do some like year-end awards with you on this show being work towards the end of this year so do you have a favorite match of the year uh yeah I've I've can I pick a favorite television and a pay-per-view? Yeah, absolutely. Even better. Thanks.

Favorite TV match would be St. Patrick's Day Slam, Britt Baker versus Thunder Rosa Lights Out match. It's up there for me as well. And then favorite pay-per-view match would be Young Bucks versus Lucha Brothers cage match. Steel cage match. All out. And it's hard to pick on all out because I also thought

CM Punk versus Darby was outstanding. And there's been so many great pay-per-view matches. Darby and MJF had such a great match at this pay-per-view. You know, Punk versus Kingston is one of my favorite matches of the year. Punk versus Kingston was outstanding. It was the shortest match on the show, I think. It was. It was.

It was. It was the timer, I know. And it was just balls to the wall, fight from the start. It was the only match under 1650. Yeah. And every other match. And from a timing standpoint. It didn the only match under 1650. Yeah. And every other match, and from a timing standpoint. It didn't feel like it, though. As a person who formats a show,

I knew I was putting myself into a tight situation, but we were able to still have all these great matches and have Kenny, Omega, and Hangman Page, which would be up there also to, honestly, Hangman versus Kenny. They had, unquestionably, my favorite match of the year prior, Kenny and Hangman versus the Young Bucks.

Yep. It's maybe the best match ever in AEW. Maybe the best tag team match ever. Kenny Omega and Hangman Page versus the Young Bucks may be the best tag match ever. So we've had some great wrestling, and this year was great, and I think those would be my top picks. But I think you've named some other great selections. Obviously, Bryan and Omega going to a time limit.

Draw's got to be up there, right? That would be from the Grand Slam, AEW Dynamite, I would absolutely say the 30-minute draw between Daniel Sin and Omega would be right there with the Thunder Rosa Lights Out match. The Phoenix and Pac versus Young Bucks match from April 14th was outstanding.

That was a five-star match on television. Also, we opened the year with Kenny Omega versus Ray Phoenix. Had a great match. That one feels like so long ago. It's crazy that it was this year. You know, and it's crazy because the year is almost divided into two halves for AEW and really for both companies. Like the Daily's Place half? Yeah, because literally half and half because the first six months we did everything through the end of June was in Daily's Place.

So we did six months in Daily's Place, and then we've been on the road six months and and then we're gonna end it fittingly and it is yeah it's fun like to have both halves because the Daily's Place shows were great like they were a lot of fun there's also been a lot of great wrestling history in Greensboro Dallas and now here on Long Island where we're gonna be so we're hitting all these great cities for the final run of Dynamite. It's not by accident. So to have this great show on Long Island and then winter is coming in Dallas and then to do the Holiday Bash,

which is coming to Greensboro. It's going to be the Holiday Bash officially, which is going to take place across two days. And I'm like, you know, we were talking about before the show, I'm also a big Christmas guy. Yeah. And something very special

that I can tell everyone officially, the Holiday Bash will be live from Greensboro on the 22nd, and Rampage is not going to be on Friday, Christmas Eve. Rampage will be a Saturday Christmas Rampage. Awesome. Yeah, Christmas night, which I think is better for TV. And like Christmas Eve, you know. Christmas night, everyone's getting back from the party. You're like all full, and yeah, you need something to throw on. Christmas night Rampage. Christmas Night Rampage. Christmas Night Rampage. There you go.

That's amazing. Your favorite moment of the year? My favorite moment of the year would be I have a, can I also pick a TV? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A TV, the first dance, the arrival of CM Punk. I was going to say, it's got to be, right? If you're a wrestling fan and that's not your favorite moment of the year, what are you doing? The first dance and uh then uh we have uh on pay-per-view i would say the end of all out where uh brian

daniel double debut adam cole the double reveal the adam cole and the brian danielson and then standing there of course as it would as it would line up for the tv with uh brian danielson christian cage jungle boy and luchasaurus and kenny omega the young bucks and adam cole and it was like wow this is gonna and and that would be my and Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, and Adam Cole. And it was like, wow, this is going to end. And that would be my favorite pay-per-view moment, I think. And you also had the arrival of Ruby Soho and Punk versus Darby. Suzuki came in on the same show. Yeah, all on the one pay-per-view.

So much in and all out was one of the great shows. You know, I mean, all out, what a great event. And one of the things that makes AEW really special to me, and I think for fans like why this is a great time in wrestling is it's been 20 years since there was i think this close of a competition like even within a week where people would knock the dynamite rating it's still within you know it's still within striking distance of raw yeah and like uh and in a week where people like raw is putting up amazing ratings right now companies ratings right now either. Both companies, well, you know, they are. They're good. These are good ratings.

First of all, you have to look. The TV audience declined by 9% last year, and right now it's down by, last count, I just got 12%. So every number you have to look at, anything that's level year over year is really now plus 12% year over year, plus 9%. So it's over 20% drop over the last two years. So the numbers that were from two years ago, people have to look. The universe has changed. Going digital? It's gone digital.

And we have a great audience there, too. And frankly, so does WWE. Both companies are poised very well for the future. And it's a good thing. But we're right there. And it's been a long time since the two companies. It's been so long since the top two wrestling companies have been this close to each other and both are very strong and it's been the last time the two companies were both this

competitive and the business was this strong was 1998 yeah and that's and that was the peak of wrestling so the world is very digital and wrestling happens to be something's very strong digitally and on cable and satellite and and wwe is putting up some interesting stuff on network television too and god bless them with that and so it's it's the most competitive the wrestling world's been in a long time and people uh you know frankly there was never another company as an alternative that presented anything that was a true competitive alternative and i'll give you examples okay uh they say that, nobody would run a big show. I know that Ring of Honor in New Japan did the one show in, you know,

the Ring of Honor did the one show where they had all the New Japan people. And, of course, I think that when the fans had originally bought the Ring of Honor tickets, I do believe a lot of the sellout crowd probably thought when they bought those tickets months in advance they were going to see the people that didn't end up being there with Kenny Omega, the Young Bucks, and Cody, and Hangman. Definitely. And that was part of it. But nobody else has really done anything at Madison Square Garden in 30, 40, 50 years.

WCW never even did it, right? Yeah. But WCW, they had their own buildings. They ran all over the country and had dome stadiums. And nobody's done anything like that in the live attendance world since it's one of the reasons why i have so much respect for eric bischoff we haven't talked in a while and i probably would at some point i probably should talk to eric because we're friends but like uh we just you know i honestly super busy and then

some of that i was surprised by some of the stuff he said i guess he was taking a step there's only really like three big wrestling presidents in my lifetime that have had a big run. And he's one of them and Vince McMahon's one of them. And now, thanks to the great wrestling fans, now I'm one of them. Yeah. And so there's only three of us. So it's important for us to have a good relationship. But I haven't talked to him in a while.

And, you know, they did such great things. But now when you look at it, nobody else is running the big show of mass and square garden but we have arthur ash stadium and yeah like we haven't run the staples center at least not yet but we run the united center which is pretty amazing and nobody's done that in a long time and what a great crowd we had at the first a w like chicago is aew territory at this point what what you chicago feels like it too chicago is my home i was there for thanksgiving and now new york here yeah uh being here all long island and we're drawing this great audience on long island and also uh coming back hopefully i'll see you in a few weeks i'd love to come back and visit you again when we are doing the first always the start of dynamite on tbs i'm so focused on

making the end of dynamite on tnt huge and a very fitting way to end what has been the biggest run of anything in my life and then to make dynamite on tbs launch is a huge success so there's huge plans for the weeks and months ahead and it's going to be the biggest run of tv we've had and somebody asked me recently just very recently here has it been hard not to throw all the big stars in the big matches? And I said, well, I haven't done it yet. Like, we've built to them. We've built to them.

You know, we had Omega versus Danielson. We've had big matches, and we're building to big matches on television. And now, just like we did Kenny versus Bryan Danielson at Grand Slam, we're building to more big matches like that. Can you imagine anything bigger on television than what's coming, a winner is coming with Bryan Danielson versus Hangman for the world title? That's the biggest match in wrestling right now. It is. Yeah, absolutely.

And what's building between CM Punk and MJF, I think, is also like the big dream match. So a lot of exciting stuff happening in AEW. And with the TBS tournament, many people feel is the most exciting women's tournament and the best women's wrestling tournament in a long time. And the TBS tournament down to four wrestlers with Nyla Rose, Ruby Soho,

Jade Cargill, and Thunder Rosa, and the best women's champion in all of wrestling. Maybe the best world champion in all of wrestling is Dr. Britt Baker. And also Rio, now the number one contender again. And Rio has never lost a match to Britt Baker.

Britt Baker, every match. Every singles match. I think there's one tag match every match, she's been... Every singles match. I think there's one tag match, right? Well, I think every singles match and multi-match. There's also the four-way at the Homecoming show on January 1st, 2000. So they've had, I believe, Britt has never beaten Rio in a one-on-one or multi-person match. And so Rio's got this amazing record against Britt,

and I think as the first-ever AEW champion, that's something to keep an eye on. And with that and the TBS tournament heating up, it's such an exciting time for AEW, I think. And there's more to come, surprises to come. I think I plan to be still active signing great wrestlers and I think it's a great time to be a fan and I want to give the fans something to look forward to going into the holidays. So we have big shows coming up, Long Island and Winters Coming Dallas and this Greensboro

show. There's a great tradition of holiday shows in Greensboro and I think we can bring something really special around Christmas time with a holiday bash on Dynamite and Rampage. Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be awesome, and, you know, and again, we get to do it all again to start the TBS era in Newark with the great fans here. And I'm just so excited to be able to do the shows here

and come up and see you guys because thanks to Barstool and thanks to your guys' loyal and dedicated audience, it's really helped us stay engaged with young fans because you guys have such a great audience here and you guys have been such a great home to us for interviews. So I really appreciate every time you have it. Oh, of course. Yeah, I appreciate you coming in. Who do you think the breakout performer of the year was?

The breakout performer of the year, in opinion was dr brit baker the world champion and you know we talked about how that was i thought my favorite tv match and she went from there and and took that platform the the big main event match on dynamite at the saint patrick's day slam and went on and of course uh she didn't win the lights out match but she proved uh how tough she was it went by fighting through it and then took that because that didn't count against her record since it was a lights out unsanctioned fight and she really took that and built off that performance that that match and she kicked ass the rest of the year and she's she's just uh not only had great wrestling matches but she's really built herself uh a star and i also another great champion who I think had a breakout year,

in my opinion. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the other pillars. And, you know, Darby Allin, TNT champion, and I think what a breakout year he had. Recent match with MJF was outrageously good. CM Punk match also. He's had these amazing matches with CM Punk and MJF, and he's also won every match he's had with Sting this year. And Sting, and he's had this team he's

set up with Sting, and they are... Kind of convinced Sting to come back. I just interviewed Darby. We kind of talked about that. Like, that has to be a check on his resume as well for this year. Like, kind of convinced Sting to get back in the ring, and Sting's having amazing matches now. Yeah, it's pretty amazing the runs Sting's had because, to be honest, I don't know if they told you much about it, but Sting was, like, wanting to get back into wrestling and now he's, like, an every week wrestler. Yeah.

And I take a lot of pride in wrestling in, like, pairing people up and finding pairs that work. And, like, we've made a lot of new pairs and new entities in the AEW and we've also had a lot of people that have worked together in the past, and we respect history. So it's, I think, the best of both worlds where, like, you know,

just like teams that have reformed and have a lot of history together and then forming new combinations like Darby and Sting. And they fit together like, you know, a glove on a hand, in my opinion. I loved Sting doing the Darby-inspired makeup recently and all that. It was great. It was so cool to see. Seeing Darby firsthand, working with him as a mentor, when I asked him to mentor Darby and work with him,

man, Sting, since he's come back, they've not only become honestly really close friends, but Darby has inspired him and told him, you can do it, and helped him believe in himself. And look at Sting now now wrestling regularly on Dynamite. Looking awesome doing it. And every match they've won.

And so what a breakout year that Darby and Sting have had. And also what a great comeback Sting had had. Because, look, it had been a while since Sting had won wrestling matches. Like the last time we saw Sting, he wasn't winning matches. The whole time he was back in his last run in the competition i think he had like two or three matches they they screwed him out of multiple matches let's be honest and uh he should have been presented better and that's one thing i won't uh back down on is sting deserves uh to be treated like one of the great legends in wrestling and

I set out to do that from the beginning with him and I think he and Darby have had a great year and what a great thing for them to be right now on an undefeated winning streak 5-0 and also pretty cool that we've had Sammy Guevara one of the pillars

also become the TNT champion and he's had a great run already with that title he's had a great run of matches he's had Sammy Guevara, one of the Pillars, also become the TNT champion. He's had a great run already with that title. He's had a great run of matches. He's had the Blood and Guts match in the Stadium Stampede where he was a breakout star, and he had one of the best matches all year on television with MJF. At the end of our Daily's Place run, you couldn't ask for a better match to send it off

than that amazing main event with Sammy Guevara and MJF again pillars and then come back to MJF who now uh he's going into this Long Island Dynamite where he's in the Dynamite Diamond Battle Royale and he's going to try and defend it we'll see if he can retain it we'll see if he can three-peat but the run he's had with that ring he's used it to win a lot of big matches, and we saw him and Darby, as we just talked about, Darby and him, one of the best pay-per-view matches you'll ever see. I think one of the best openers I've ever seen, definitely. I would list it on the Mount Rushmore pay-per-view opens

of all the dozens and dozens of great pay-per-views there's ever been. And, you know, so MJF now in this story and having these promos back and forth and clearly building to something special with mjf versus cm punk yeah and that's been a big breakout and uh so mjf and of course jungle boy yep and for him to win the uh first of all for them to uh win the uh the the casino battle royale yeah i'm sorry sorry uh uh but but uh also um to you know uh for him to win the casino battle royale that was huge but i i also have to, he's been in some of the greatest tag matches of the year. And I didn't want to sell those short because he's been so great as a singles wrestler and as a tag wrestler. Because I thought that the trios street fight that he had with Luchasaurus and Christian Cage versus the Young Bucks and Adam Cole was so outstanding.

But I also thought that the tag matches that Luchasaurus and Jungle Boy have had on television have been just so good. They recently had a great match with Adam Cole and Bobby Fish on Rampage. It's an awesome long match that you can come to expect on Friday nights. Great wrestling on Friday nights on Rampage and Wednesday nights on Dynamite, and I think Jungle Boy and Luchasaurus as a tag team have been great but but I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up some of his great singles matches this year including winning that Casino Battle Royale as a breakout moment and also I just have to say his match with Kenny Omega yeah what a kick-ass match on Dynamite again one of the last matches of that run in

Daily's Place before we went back out on the road and Omega and Jungle Boy there was a hot crowd for that yeah it was one of the last Dynamites in daily starting to fill that place up at that point yeah it was cool it was when we were finally allowed to pack the place and it was starting to get packed and it was uh really cool to be able to do that sell the place out for double or nothing when we were finally able to safely uh fill that outdoor amphitheater again so i have three fan questions uh the first of which isn't really a question, but I put out the call for fan questions, and a friend, Dan Housen, reached out,

and he said, can you please tell Tony I said hello, and you could put a question mark at the end of it if you really needed to be a question. So Dan Housen says hello. Okay, thanks. I appreciate that. Was that with a question mark at the end of it? Hello?

Yeah, he said hello. That's great. Very good. Well, the hello. Are you familiar with Dan H, he said hello. That's great. That's great. Okay. Very good. Well, the hello. Are you familiar with Dan Houser? I'm very familiar with Dan Houser. Okay. He was on the Jericho cruise.

Yeah, he was. A question from Chuck and Trent, who were just in here before. They said to have Tony tell his side of the post-parking lot fight celebration you guys had. They said you guys immediately celebrated and re-watched that match the second it was over uh it was a perfect match uh so i was really excited about the parking lot fight i was about as excited as i've been about anything we've done because it was perfect and it was not it didn't it could have been if we needed to but it wasn't a cinematic match it was all one run that's what they were saying yeah change any they said the cameramen were excited and cheering at the end of that because they knew they could go home everybody went nuts yeah like

that was just a home run match and it was like a real fight that's one of the best or that's last year at this point yeah it was an idea i'd had all through the pandemic i had like uh there was like you know at the beginning when we knew there weren't gonna be fans in the arenas i tried to think of ideas of things that would be awesome. Just fun and different. Yeah, different. And we ended up having these great matches. What a great match.

Kenny Omega and Matt Hardy against Sammy Guevara and Chris Jericho in the street fight last year. That was one of the great street fights I've seen on TV. And that was a forerunner, kind of a precursor to the wild action and the story that led to the original Stadium Stampede. And around that same time, I really wanted to do a parking lot fight, and I felt like we could do a really special one in AEW, and something brewed just a great story, great rivalry between Best Friends and Santana Ortiz. And I always wanted to do this, and I always felt like something

that would really, after just the most awesome fight, you have to remember like the world of wrestling it's very polarizing and and you know uh characters in AEW I want them to be three-dimensional and different people have different perspectives just like in Long Island I expect like MJF will get a great reaction uh whereas CM Punk would probably get the bigger reaction 99% of the other markets. It's a different crowd and it's a different thing. And I think it's just something to keep an eye on. With the Best Friends and Santana Ortiz, that the best friends fought dirty. And they had Orange Cassidy in the trunk, and they resorted to doing something dirty to win the fight,

and I felt like it would be an awesome moment. So that, from the beginning, I thought would be such a great payoff. And if it was as special a match as we thought it could be, then it was just going to be a real exclamation point. And it would make sense because after everything Santana Ortiz had done and after they trashed the van and the terrible things they said about Trent's mother and Sue and all the awful stuff they'd done to the best friends and Sue and Trent's family and that van, I felt like it would be such a great payoff.

And I loved the idea of orange cassidy popping out uh it's great similar how for a long time i wanted orange cassidy to pop out of the cake at the wedding yeah uh and that was chris popped out of the uh the crane machine the claw machine the best friends just keep popping out of stuff that was it that was also a great moment the the arcade anarchy right arcade anarchy that was another big payoff i had great so yeah so the best friends consistent and then trent also at arcade anarchy made they made a great return yeah so there was a lot of great moments and great payoffs and you can count on the best friends sometimes uh to have those things up their sleeves but the so i have i was so happy when we got that recorded and i just like ran from gorilla to where they were filming it which was on the

other side of Daly's place. They said that they said they saw you just running with your arms up in the air. I was so excited we got it and there's you know great photos and the guys are all bloody and covered in glass and we're all hugging and then I was bloody and covered in glass but it didn't care at all and it was so happy because uh it was such a great match and uh I was so happy for them that they got the five-star rating because they deserved it. Yeah. And it's one of the craziest things we've ever put on TV. Absolutely. Definitely. For the fans last year in the pandemic, you know, we tried to put on great stuff like that and that was one of the home runs I thought. So the Best Friends and Santana Ortiz was a great match.

Tremendous. And the final question from Paul Walter Hauser, he wants to know what are your top three favorite finishers? Oh, what a great question, what are your top three favorite finishers? Oh, what a great question. Well, my top three favorite finishers would probably be... And then I'll throw on, what's your favorite in AEW right now? Okay. Well, then that makes it that much of a better question. I would say the Scorpion Deathlock would be an all-time favorite and i would say that that could also probably be a favorite in aw the scorpion deathlock man was it cool and sting did the double scorpion deathlock that was pretty amazing um so that would be up there for me um i would say and it's a great question because now i didn't know it was coming so you you've really got me thinking. Well, I want to give a nuanced answer because I do think it's a pretty great question.

And it's amazing because, like, Bryan Danielson, I was just thinking about this. I mean, Bryan Danielson is arguably my favorite wrestler, and he has so many great different moves that you could list just one wrestler. But that is just among Bryan Danielson, you could probably pick three great finishers, honestly. Cattle mutilation, running knee, LaBelle lock, there's three right there. There's three right there, and also we just saw him injure Alan Angel's ankle. And so, you know, really, I would say Scorpion Deathlock for sure. The Macho Man elbow drop for sure is going to be in there.

So that's two. And for three, I would say, and this is covering a lot of ground, the Spike Piledriver used by FTR and the Brain Busters before them, and a lot of great teams. And the Spike Piledrivers I've always thought is a great finish. And the Young Bucks use a variation, the Meltzer Driver, which is their variation on Spike Piledriver, the Spike Tombstone Springboard.

So that's a great move too. FTR, the classic Spike Piledriver, I think that's a great one. And a few of those are from the world of aw and i think the all-time favorite yeah the scorpion death lock that's a great one great answer great interview tony i appreciate it i'm looking forward to dynamite tomorrow i'll be there me and brendan walker let's go thanks for coming and thank you to all the great fans uh who support aw and thank you to barstool for always uh giving us these great interviews. Hell yeah.

All right, welcome back to My Mom's Basement. It is Robbie Fox, and I am here with the best friends, Trent, Chuck, Orange Cassidy. How are you guys doing? I'm good. I'm well. Oh, yeah. My armrests, arms are, this is good for the audio only.

First question, do you guys remember me, like, annoying you guys with mostly bad t-shirt designs in high school? When I was in high school? I don't remember t-shirt designs, but I just remember that you were like, I know who you are and you've always been around. And then, like, then you have a Barstool podcast show. I actually got to design a Best Friends shirt. One of them got through. Really? Which one? It was the one of you guys as Jesse Pinkman and Walt from Breaking Bad. Oh, that was so long

ago. I barely, yeah. That was like 2013, I think. I don't think I've ever seen that one in person. Unfortunately, yeah. It wasn't a top seller. Post-surgery, a lot of people have been wondering, how's Trent doing? What's the updates for everyone?

I'm doing good. I feel like a guy with a normal neck again, which is nice. Do you have basically the same surgery that Tiger Woods had? The fusion? I don't know what Tiger Woods had, but yeah. I had a fusion.

Tiger got fused? Oh, from a car accident no no before that oh he broke all his legs yeah i got uh i landed on my head in 2015 and like things were bad that's what this it all yeah yeah back to 2015 yeah i had mocap for a video game of all things oh like something went wrong i landed right on top of my head. And then... What was the move? Do you remember the move? Yeah, it was a dragon suplex. I wonder if it's in the game.

I don't think so. Oh, my God, that animation looks like he broke his neck. It got thrown like a regular German instead of a dragon. So, like, the arc was that. And I just landed right on top of my head but yeah my symptoms got slowly worse and worse and worse for like five or six years i can't do the math did you know like this is going to be an issue one day like i'm gonna need surgery for this one day or no i don't know did i i think i would talk about my neck being i think we all think our necks are broken

yeah i'd be like yeah my neck's broken but but... I think we all think our necks are broken. I'd be like, yeah, my neck's broken, but... But then they tell us sometimes that our necks are broken, and I can speak for him because I've heard him say it. You feel like a real tough guy. Just a world-class tough guy. To find out that, oh, yeah, for five or six years, I've been wrestling. To go in for that MRI, and you're laying there,

you've got to stay still, and you don't think you're claustrophobic until you're in there. I'm pretty good at them. And then you look up and it's like, what if they tell me, you've just been a bitch this whole time. You're not even hurt at all. But then they tell you, no man, you're broken. Something real neat about my neck.

There was so much extra... My discs were crushed basically. Tell them the whole thing. There was so much body there's so much extra bone growth from my neck just freaking out trying to fix itself and that was like fusing itself together but i was waking up with like sleep apnea like gasping awake and sometimes i would have trouble swallowing like my spit, and after surgery that went away. So I think it was just, there was so much extra bone and shit.

Can I say shit? Oh, yeah. Did I already say it? Say whatever you want, probably. There was so much extra bone and shit that I couldn't breathe while I was sleeping. Choking on your own bones, man. So it's been very nice to get that fixed. Yeah. Not choking on your bones anymore.

Yeah. It's beautiful. I saw a picture of you guys recently at an IHOP. I wanted to ask, as people that are on the road constantly, IHOP, Waffle House, or Denny's? Ooh, is it an IHOP you guys find? You have the option. We went to IHOP last week without you.

Sorry, man. I like all three. I'm a southern boy at heart, so I'm pretty partial to the Waffle House. But, you know, you can't go wrong with a nice Denny's at 2 a.m. They can get you anything you want. go wrong with a nice Denny's at 2 a.m. they can get you anything you want 24 hour yeah

Orange Cassidy's here didn't you say anything Orange Cassidy loves Shoney's does Shoney's still exist yeah I don't know what that is is that a place

didn't Scott's Diner own a Shoney's what is Shoney's I haven't been to Shoney's it's like a breakfast I don't think it was 24 hours

but it's like a like a Perkins oh similar to a Perkins we one time think it was 24 hours, but it's like a... Like a Perkins? Oh, Perkins. We one time went to a Perkins, and it just had like sewer diarrhea smell throughout the whole place. So Perkins has ruined for me forever. But Waffle House is my answer to your question.

Chocolate chip waffles at Waffle House. I don't... I like to slip and slide across Waffle House. Everything's greasy to the touch. Like you can do a full like... If I ran and slid on my belly I could slide across the entire place

I love it do you guys know like what the ladies are always nice do you know how to do you have like show up and be like yeah smothered in cupboard

and shit on like shit on do you have yours memorized I have no idea you got yours memorized no no no

okay I've only been to Waffle House like three times okay if you have yours memorized you're kind of hey whatever I bet old WW to Waffle House like three times. Okay. If you have yours memorized, you're kind of... Hey.

Whatever. I don't know. I bet old WWF road guys are like... I saw like Marty, Jannetty, and Sandman kind of get into it at a Denny's in Orlando. It was WrestleMania weekend. What happened? I don't know what happened, but we saw them step outside. Like it got to the point where they stepped outside to settle it, and then it didn't get settled. They kind of just came back in.

Those WrestleMania weekends are like... If you want to see like two of your idols from your childhood getting a drunken brawl over nothing, that's the place to do it. At a Denny's, yeah. Outside of a Marriott courtyard or something like that. Just swing on each other. I saw a tweet from you, Trent, recently

that I wanted to dive more into. You said, pre-gym routine. One JCPenney lap, try on jackets, gas station for hard-boiled eggs, drive way past gym, see horses, tell them that they look nice, sit in a parking lot, buy a jacket on the internet, eat four gas station eggs, and then party. Yeah. Define party. Oh, I just went. Are you pounding off in your car? Oh, no. What's party? I just went into the gym at that point. Oh, that's the party. Yeah.

I've been saying party a lot lately. It's one of my new things. I've noticed that. That's why I was... New for 21. I just use it for everything, you know? I'll go through a phase of saying something way too much, and then it goes away.

Like, we used to say boy and dog. Oh, yeah, long boys. We used to say that a lot. Long dogs. I'm taking full-on credit for long boys, by the way. I think you should. People give it to me. I just tweeted what you said, man.

Okay. When Punk came out in the long boys, everyone was saying it. He said it. Long boys. I don't think he knows. He doesn't know. He's got to know. He's got to know.

You know what? Let's pull him aside in the locker room and rough him up a little bit. He should have been reading my tweets in 2016. Let's rough talk him a little. He could. Moving on to some wrestling things. You guys have, I think, perfected the art of the wild, fun match. The parking lot fight, the arcade anarchy.

Are those matches as fun to put together as they are to watch, or are they complicated to put together and kind of stressful? We got in a huge fight. With each other. Over one of those matches? The parking lot fight, yeah. It's actually kind of a funny story. Do you want to tell the actual story?

I don't have to get the full thing, but like trying to put that match together. It was a stressful day because we didn't know until like about 6 o'clock, maybe later what that meant it was just parking lot fight okay well like we've got cars yeah and then at about six o'clock some cars show up and they're like hey you guys can't touch any of these except for like two of them yeah there's one that was just if you want we only touched two cars actually no we used the truck a little bit we and then we touched one car that we, you touched one car you weren't supposed to. I was doing punches on it, yeah, I remember. But one of the cars, it just looks like, they're all, like, nice from some dealership.

And we had little dealership stickers. That's how we got, I don't know if I'm allowed to tell this part, but we got a hookup from a local dealership to promote them. You're not allowed to tell that. Yeah, I know. That doesn't seem that spicy. That seems like, no, it just seems like

one weird email that I get. I'm like, you can't tell people we get hookups from car dealerships. It's going to be on Wrestling Talk tomorrow. But yeah, one of the cars was clearly

not like the other. Oh yeah, fuck this car up. Just like a weird red piece of shit. Yeah. We smashed it. What was the fight over that you guys got into?

Just putting, just deciding what to do. And I was pretty hurt at that time. And so, like, existing just was not fun for my neck and arm. And I was probably a little short. And, like, we fight. Tag teams are like married couples. Like, you spend too much time together and you have to do the same thing over and over again.

You just fight over the dumbest shit. And then you think you hate each other. And then you go, like, a while without seeing each other it's like oh no actually we like each other yeah uh but we got in a like basically a screaming match at you know 7 p.m and jerry lynn of all right there and it's broken jerry lynn comes in hey boys hey hey he's nice i don't think i was screaming that day i might have been been screaming. Jerry Lynn comes in and goes, hey, hey, hey, break it up. Come on, guys. All right, you're friends. Hey, hug it out.

And I was like, no, no, I don't want to do it. And Jerry's like, you guys hug. And I was like, oh, okay. Did he make us hug? He did make us hug. I swear to God. That sounds like fake, like, if you read some guy's autobiography, like, you know, fucking Jerry Lynn made them hug, but it actually happened.

But I actually think overall, those matches are actually fun and easier to make because you have so many things to play with and there's no like, you don't have to worry about the Did you know your mom

was coming in? Or was that a last minute thing? That was on the fly. No, no, we knew. She just showed up. Yeah, I think. You said like at 7pm,

like you didn't know what you were doing we knew the mom the first one the first time your mom came in happened in like four days though

yeah we were like wouldn't it be funny if your mom dropped us off and we told somebody and they were like alright we were going

AW went through a phase where like I think FTR had like a truck somebody else there was like three or four vehicles

Cody had like a bus and then there was like. A bus? He had his big, no, like his tour bus. He had the bus with him on it. It was like the nightmare bus. But he didn't come through the side entrance. I think it came down there and then they fought. Really?

Yeah. And then there were like four or five just different cars and it felt like, you know, twisted metal or something like that. So we were like, what if, as a joke, we said like, what if my mom drops it? What if we're the fun boys that have our mom drops and then we were when you were done with it did you know it was awesome there's that one of those matches that like there was no tv well yeah there was no because you got the fiver from dave oh for the the parking lot oh okay uh during it i i could feel anyway, this is going very well.

I don't think we knew, like, it was going to get the reaction it did. But, like, when it was done, I think we told this before, but, like, so we're beaten and bloodied. Sue comes and picks us up and drives us, like, I don't know, 20 yards away just to get off camera. And we're, like, sitting there and, like, you know, bleeding everywhere. And, like, all right, well, I think that like all right well i think that was are you okay yeah all of a sudden tony khan comes running from like 100 yards away from the truck going celebrating like like the jaguars won the super bowl or something like that and we're like i guess that went well yeah and he's like guys that was awesome we gotta go watch it come on then we went in the truck bleeding in the truck

watching it yeah so that I've never so when that happened I was like okay I guess it was it was good

because normally you don't go or I've never heard of people going in the truck to re-watch something ever again and I think the camera guys

and the crew people were excited too that we did it all in one take because like I think we've done a few of those like cinematic style matches like Stadium Stampede that take like four days to shoot

oh i didn't even think of comparing it but they were like seriously at the end they were like wait we're done fuck yeah everybody was all excited like we could go home they thought they were gonna be up until six yeah oh yeah celebrating that's awesome so i mentioned i was a big fan of your guys since the pwg days do you have a favorite PWG match that you guys were in? Would you be at those shows? No, I never got to go. I was an East Coast guy. I think our favorite, excuse me.

Zack and Marty. Zack and Marty, just our regular ass little tag matches probably. It was just so fun and the crowd was great. It was like old school and it wasn't. Yeah, it was just old school and it wasn't yeah it was just old school relying on you I think I got I took like a

15 I got beat up for like 15 minutes maybe more to build through the hot tag that went our little hardcore match just because to me

oh me against you yeah the for somebody like I think deathmatch wrestling is the new comedy wrestling in that like it's really funny when things are like excessively violent like what people For some reason, I think death match wrestling is the new comedy wrestling.

It's really funny when things are excessively violent, when people aren't expecting it. People expected us to have a funny ha-ha match, and then we started hitting each other with chairs and thumbtacks, which is really funny to me. Death matches are just on every show now, huh? There's a lot of death matches in wrestling right now. I mean, Chris Jericho had one on.

Yeah, that's bananas one on. Yeah. That's bananas to me. Crazy. Yeah. What do they do? Like, the average indie death match, what are they, light tube and glass paint? Light tubes are the big thing, yeah. Glass. Thumb tacks.

Tacks. Always a staple. The bucks do the, you know, the thumb tacks on random objects. That's becoming more of a thing. People are kind of ripping that off, I feel. I thought death matches would go away, but they came back pretty hard. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. You hate them, man.

I love them. You guys had one that could be classified as a death match, the one-minute Iron Man match. Oh, yeah. I was a big fan of that. That was on Orange's show, I believe. It was, yeah. What was that called?

Orange Guesty Does Something. Something like that. Was that the name? It was something like that. How did that come about, the one-minute Ironman match? Hysterical, if people haven't seen it. I thought of it. Really?

I said, do you want to do it? And they said, we'll be tired, but okay. Yeah, because it was like an 11 a.m. show? It was an afternoon show. I thought you meant tired from the cardio it takes to beat a match like that. We must have meant early in the morning. It was like in the afternoon, and I said, Hey, friends, do you want to do my show?

And they said, No, we'd rather not. And I said, Well, how about it's just one minute long. And then you said, okay. And that's how it came about. Also, Bryce Remsburg helped with that. He helped. And Gerard Durling. There we go.

It's a great match. If people haven't seen the one-minute Ironman match, I would say it's a must-see match of the year from that year. So we did decide. I'll do a little inside baseball here. We did decide that we knew that they were probably, is this, am I still a person? Okay. They were probably going to chant five more seconds, we hope, instead of five more minutes. And some of them did. And we decided whoever got the biggest response was going to win. And so you can probably see me at some point go like, give them the nod,

you know what I mean? Like the, hey, it's like give him the nod you know what i mean like the hey it's your time kid you know wait whoever got the biggest response like the crowd response the crowd decides yeah i think it was like me deciding like you know what he got a bigger pop than me like you're you're going out big cat yeah it was reaction coming out yeah i don't i don't remember that at all but look at me that's some real stuff people love actually that would happen on the show heelsels. People in Newark, New Jersey love Greg. And then I had

Bryce give me a headstand. I actually did an alcohol before that match which I've never done before. Oh really?

Me too, yeah. First time ever. I did a whiskey. 11 a.m.? Yeah. 12-ish. 12-ish.

12-ish orange says. Well, it's impressive nonetheless. Chuck, did you ever wind up getting that dental work from Britt Baker? No, still fucked.

Damn, I was wondering about that. That was a few months ago. Is this a real thing? I have wisdom teeth coming in, and they're just going nuts. And then I had to get insurance, and none of my... Let's just complain about insurance for a while. None of my dental insurance is covered in Pennsylvania or New Jersey or New York, apparently. Where is it? Kentucky?

I bought it while I lived in Philly, but I had to go to Idaho to get dental work done, apparently. That's brutal. It's fine now. Tell us more, dude. If you guys weren't headed to AEW, if you guys didn't sign when you did, were we headed towards a best friends breakup in New Japan? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. With him going crazy?

Yeah. I don't know if, I would actually, that's one of the regrets I have, which are very few about signing with AEW because it's changed my life for the better and I love it very much, but I do, I would have liked to have seen where that could have gone because we didn't really have much plans for it other than where it got to because it was kind of in its infancy. I think it was mostly just to give Dustin's guy, like, a thing where he's a guy that can go crazy.

Yeah. Like something more than just, like, cute white guy. Because I had been there with Rocky, and then we came in, and, like, we're best friends, and we're hugging, and, like, people did not like us there. Just confused by it. Yeah. Dude, these, like, dudes don't hug.

Yeah. They did not like the hug at all the first time we did it. Just nothing. When they hit it with the Rainmaker zoom out, did they get it then? I don't think they ever got it in Japan. We stopped doing it in matches, right? We wouldn't do it during the match, I don't think, as much. Oh, wow.

But I think we would do it, you know, like on... We would do, like, hold hands on the entrance and maybe do it after the match and stuff. They just, they hated it. So I think that's why you had to go nuts. A couple questions for fans of your old High Spots show. What is it like working with Jerry Lynn now? You always used to ask for Jerry Lynn stories from people,

and now you actually get to put matches together with him. Do you hate him now? I love Jerry more than anything. We both knew him a little bit. We had both wrestled him. I had wrestled him a couple times. And he's just always the sweetest man in the universe. He still remains.

He's the best. He's number one. He's awesome. And he's a legend. He's a genius. And if anyone says anything bad about him, I'll fight him. I agree. He's my friend, man.

He's one of my favorite interviews of the year, I think. Oh, he makes me. Oh, really? We'll go check that out, yeah. You know, he has, like, you don't watch basketball, but, you know, like, I don't know if you've ever seen, like, LeBron has a different handshake with every player on the team. Like Jerry kind of has that with like a bunch of, like he and Orange will do like the shitty kicks. Like he makes me hug him now.

This is new for 21. Oh, I've been hugging him. Like he'll be like, no, he'll do like the. Oh. Oh, we just hug like, hey man. No, he makes a production out of it. The people want to know, this was actually a fan question, an update on how you guys wipe.

I'm still the same, man. Same. You can find it. I haven't changed. There's literally like a... Cedars, not quitters. I don't know. Somebody made a highlight reel of me explaining it on YouTube.

I refuse to watch it. Of how you wipe? Yeah, like me just explaining the story over and over. To different people? Yeah, because it's the same thing every time. So I wish that didn't exist. I have a bidet in my bathroom now.

Oh. Ooh. So I mean, the process has changed. A little bit. I mean, I always use the bidet in Japan, but now I have a local bidet.

Is it a nice one? Does it heat up? No, it's one of those strap-on ones. That's a weird way to call it. It clamps onto my toilet on its own. Oh, I've seen those. And it's supposed to have temperature control, but the way Orange hooked it up,

I don't have hot and cold water coming out. It's only cold. Where would you even get the hot from? You'd have to be a real guy to hook up hot to a toilet. Probably. I think it's supposed to come from the sink, because there's the one that hooks into your toilet that I think is just cold. So it goes through the floor and stuff?

Yeah, there's two different hoses. I think I would have to drill through my drawers and cabinets and stuff. Does it give a good blast? Dude, the lowest setting, that'll light you up, brother. Really? It is. It's not soft. Who would be the guy in AEW to call to hook up hot water to a toilet?

Who's the guy? Fandango. Like one of the FTR guys? He's in AEW now? Fandango. He does, he builds stuff. I don't know. I have no idea.

Is Fandango a builder? He does like, yeah. I think he like gets houses and redoes them up, but he does it all himself. This yeah yeah I think he like like Jesus gets houses and like redoes them up but he does it all himself this guy's flipping houses out there his Instagram story will be like a bathroom

that he redid he's a badass man what's up wow I feel like Hangman people think Hangman could but I think he's a fake he's just a

he's a fake guy just a fake cowboy ooh I want to really get an answer to this question who would I I mean I he hooked mine up. So if there were hot water, he could do it.

Okay. Dax. He looks like he could, but... He's too busy watching, like, Rock and Roll Express highlights to do anything, I think. Man, let's... I'm not moving on until I get an answer to this. Okay, pass.

All right, cool. Before I get you out of here, some year-end awards for you guys. Favorite match you saw this year. Ooh, that I saw? Mm-hmm. Ooh. Oh, no. Hangman and Kenny made me tear up a little bit at the pay-per-view.

Just because I love a good reaction just really charges me up. Yeah, I liked that. I liked the Bucks cage match with the Lucha Brothers a lot. I feel like I'm forgetting something, too. They just have too much quality. Yeah, there's been... A lot of good matches. Yeah, a pay-per-view now,

the opening match would have been the best match on the show five years ago. MJF and Darby. Yeah, that was great. Great opening match. Probably like a wingman, eight-man tag. I love the wingman. I do, too. They're great.

Favorite movie you saw this year? My memory is so bad. I can't do this. I just.. I saw Resident Evil a couple weeks ago. It was good? I like.. I was like.. My memory is so bad. I can't do this. I saw Resident Evil a couple weeks ago. It was good? I liked it.

Wow. Do you like the other ones? No, they're terrible. But I'm a big fan of the games. The new Resident Evil movie is if someone made a movie for 12-year-old Dustin. They were like, this is what he's into. He likes violence, Resident Evil, and babes. And they're like, you know he's into he likes violence resident evil and babes and they're like you know i get them out there what are you gonna say before babes you just i was gonna say i was thinking about there's not actually that many so that's your movie of the year resident

evil that's just the most recent movie i've seen could you remind me of things that came out recently ghostbusters just came out a couple of nerds it looks good things that came out recently? Ghostbusters just came out. I haven't seen Ghostbusters yet. I'm a nerd. It looks good. A couple of Marvel movies came out this year. Are you into those at all? Superhero movies? I like Batman only. All right.

Well, they just announced the Penguin's going to get his own miniseries. Really? It's going to be like The Sopranos, like him coming off the mob. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Younger Penguin, right? Yeah. I hope it's still Danny DeVito. Like 85-year-old Danny DeVito.

Well, it's going to be Colin Farrell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you guys seen Colin Farrell in the makeup? I think I have. He looks all fucked up. Wait, is he the penguin in the newer one coming out? In the Battinson movie. Battinson?

Yeah, like that. Yeah, I did. I think I might have seen the Joker this year. It was good. Joaquin? I liked it. My issue with that is I feel like that Joker was such an idiot that the Batman would just punch him in the face and kill him.

Yeah. But in the end in the face and kill him. Yeah. But in the end, it wasn't really him. It was just him remembering something in the hospital, right? Maybe. You can interpret it that way. Man, I had another answer. It's gone. I'm no good at these questions. Gone girl. Gone girl. Never seen it. I watched Twister this year. You just talked about a three-year-old movie.

And finally, I'm about to interview Tony Khan. What should I ask him on your guys' behalf? Oh, man. We're just freezing up. Just don't fire us, man. It's not a question. Hey, can you not fire them, please? Question mark?

Put a question mark at the end of it. Don't fire? Don't fire the best friends. I don't know if he'd want to tell it. I'd like to hear his side of the story about the parking lot fight, about him running out. I don't think we've ever talked to him about it. That's also a good way to have him bring us up and put us over.

He'll remember the match, how great it was. Yeah, just ask him about our sweet match we had. I'm going to do it. Perfect. All right. Best friends on My Mom's Basement. Thank you, guys. Thanks for having us, man.

Thanks, man. All right. Before we get into this final unheard interview with QT Marshall, I want to tell everyone about Bare Bottom. You can get 10% off your first order at Bare Bottom today at barebottomclothing.com slash basement. I mean, this deal is amazing. Bare bottom, they're on a mission to make the most comfortable made to last menswear around. They've got that soft and stretchy gear that

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3G and Barstool Sports. It is Robbie Fox and I am here with QT Marshall. What is going on, man? A couple of Jersey guys. I'm happy I got a Jersey guy. Yeah, it's exciting. You know, I live in Atlanta now, but it's always good to come back to the old stomping grounds in New York City. I noticed this morning that everyone's in a rush. Yeah, it's just people pushing me out of the way on the street and I got my suitcase with me. So yeah, the city's kind of like back to how it was pre-COVID. Yeah, I feel like well, I haven't been here since then. So really? Yeah, I haven't your first time since it crazy. In the middle of COVID, you would go out in Times Square, and it would be a ghost town. Really? Yeah.

No, I never made it back. Good for you. That's a good thing. Big show for AEW coming up, though. Today, as we're recording this, it's going to be at the UBS Arena, the first show ever there on Long Island, not in Long Island. I made sure Tony Khan got that right yesterday. Can't say in Long Island. Those people go crazy about you.

Like on the plane and in the plane, huh? Yeah, kind of the same. On the line, in the line. That's also an East Coast thing, apparently. I didn't know that until I was older. But it's a huge show. I can't wait for it. It's actually going to be my first, like,

I call it my first real AEW show because I got to go during the pandemic at Daily's Place and they were fun, but it wasn't full crowd yet. Sure. So it's going to be the first time getting the full environment. And speaking of, you kind of got the full environment in Chicago when you had to wrestle CM Punk recently. What was that like?

Man, I was getting ready to go out for a commentary on Elevation, you know, possibly to start something, and Tony pulled me aside. He's like, hey, next week you have CM Punk. I was like, okay. In Chicago. He's like, yep. I was like, okay. Why? And he was just like, you know, we talked about it and this is something I think we want to do. And, um, you know, it's going to be a really good thing because it's his hometown and people hate you. So it'll be a really good dynamic, um, and just have fun. And I was like, that's awesome because, you know, someone like punk, you know, not to get too inside, but we can just go out there and kind of wing it. You know what I mean? Have a couple of bullet

points. And that's what I was trained to do. Um, you know, and I thought we'd had a really good one and it was, the fans really enjoyed it. And, um, you know, there was some pushback, but there's always going to be pushback when it comes to me and i kind of realized that and i i enjoy it do you like that style i talked to punk about this about the style of like calling everything in the back or going out there like you said with a few bullet points and kind of working off that working off the crowd punk seemed to like that a lot better he said like he likes kind of the old school style do you fall on that same side yeah normally like um i like to put together stuff at the very end um just like any good movie i try to backload everything yeah uh this one was a little different you know there's also business to be

done as well and i understand how business works so you know maybe if it were completely my show i would have done it a little bit differently towards the end and made a little more you know my style but also when the crowd wants what they want and just give it to them. You know what I mean? It's kind of like when CM Punk first came, everyone was like, oh, they're going to hit his music. And then, uh, MJF is going to come out or QT will come out. Like, no, we're just going to give the people what they want. Cause yeah, that's what they want. And they just wanted him to put me to sleep. So we just kind of, you know, we did it, you know? So, uh, it was really cool. Um, he was super cool just kind of, you know, we did it, you know. So it was really cool.

He was super cool about it, and, you know, there was a lot of eyes on me for that moment. And to be able to be trusted, that's, like, my biggest thing, I think, in AEW, that I realize I'm one of those guys that you could just count on. Like, you know, I don't have to get in the ring beforehand and practice stuff. It's just like, hey, we need you to work. Okay, cool. You know, hey, we don't need you to work this week. Yeah.

So I just always have my gear. How does it affect, you know, you liking the style of kind of like being able to call it on the fly, do things on the fly? How does that affect your training? Because I know you train talent now. Do you kind of try to teach them to be able to do that if they have to? Or are you more relying on like the modern style of more like let's call everything in the back so when we have our training classes we do call matches on the fly

okay um and we'll pair people up and we'll just say okay you two go five minutes six minutes and just have fun and see what works see what doesn't work and of course you don't have a live audience but luckily i mean i think i've been doing it long enough to kind of gauge what an audience would want to do. And we kind of go off of that. So it's pretty cool because there's a confidence that you have when you know, like, nothing can go wrong. Because, you know, if you've been doing it long enough, like any rock star, you know, if his string breaks on his guitar, he's going to keep going. He's not just going to freak out.

You know what I mean? Like, so, and because it's probably happened to him before. Um, and it's happened to all of us where something goes wrong and you know, someone's not in the right spot and you just got to keep going and you can't stop. And you know, in the pandemic you could, there were no fans. Hold on. Can we redo that? You know, um, we can't do that now. So, and especially I wouldn't be able to do that in, uh, sold out crowd in Chicago. Cause they would have booed me out of the building even more than they already did. You booked up. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I don't know if we can say that on here, but yeah.

It's Forstall. Say it wherever you want. Yeah, they would have. Luckily, I've never gotten one of those chants. Never. Yeah, and not to say I've never messed up. I've never messed up to the point where people notice. Yeah, that's a nice thing to hang out on.

Yeah, I try to, you know. Also, the other thing is, like, and this isn't a sales pitch for the school, but I also train. Yeah, that's a nice thing to hang out with. We filmed it dark, and one of the guys I was in there with was like, I could hit this 100 out of 100. I was like, okay, cool. And then he did it, and he just fell, and I just like – I pointed to him, and I looked at the crowd, and I was just like, all right, here we go. 99 out of 100, I guess. I was like, you know. And then they were like, good cover-up. I said, there is no cover-up.

I just stood there and looked at him and laughed because that's what I wanted to do at that moment. You weren't necessarily covering things up. You were kind of pointing it out. Yeah, I was showing everyone, like, hey, like hey this guy you know he needs to go back to training um so it was it was pretty fun so yeah like I said there's just a confidence that you have when you're able to know you can go out there just wing it and um go off of the crowd like hey if the crowd's cheering and I'm up just let them fight back and then take it away um you know wrestling is like human it just involves a lot of human psychology.

And my job, what I was taught, is to not give the people what they want. That's it. That's my only job. Just don't give them what they want. And that night they wanted CM Punk to win. It's a very easy gig if you treat it like that. And then you can add those fireworks and stuff like that. Like the Bucks are really good at it.

Oh, yeah. You know, their whole gimmick is like, I don't want to say that they don't use ring psychology because they do. It's just at a whole nother level. They think of stuff that like at all out, I mean, Paul and I were talking afterwards, I would never even think of these ideas in which, you know, puts them in like a whole nother, a whole nother category. It's like the meme with like the galaxy brain at the end, like they're the galaxy brain. Oh yeah. It's absurd.

How much did the way that you were trained coming up affect the way that you actually train talent? Is it, do you kind of try to replicate what your trainers taught you or is it the opposite? Are you like, no, they, you know, I know better at this point, this is how people should be trained. A little bit of both. You know, I do definitely stick to the old school psychology of I try to teach logic. And the only reason why is like, this fans are going to hate me.

We have the wrestling fan, like I'm a wrestling fan, right? And hopefully you are. And we'll watch wrestling no matter what. It could be great. It could be terrible. We just like wrestling. Like if I have to choose between wrestling and basketball, I'm going to watch wrestling. My mom, not that way. Right. So I always ask the non-wrestling fan, like, Hey, what do you hate about wrestling? Like, why do you think it's stupid? Or why do you think blah, blah, blah. And my brother, he's very honest with me, you know, well, I think it's just really stupid that you uh you know whatever run into the turnbuckle as hard as you can and it hurts but then when you're in your comeback you run into the turn like daniel brian or brian danielson and it's just like okay but you have to understand

like at that moment he's so fired up that nothing can can stop him you know and i try to explain that to my students like if you don't do what he's doing at that moment and have that facial expression, all that stuff, it doesn't translate. It literally just doesn't make sense to people. And if it doesn't make sense, as my mom would say, it doesn't make money. It doesn't make dollars, right? So, you know, I really try to stick to that. And then, of course, sometimes I just tell them, like, also it's wrestling. So just have fun.

You know, I mean, we had a match one time and uh billy gunn was our agent coach and he was really trying to tell us about the logic of why what we were going to do was wrong and cody just told him like hey man i get it um we're just going to do it like it's pandemic wrestling man we're just out here in front of nobody like don't worry about it we're going to do this and uh we did it and you know it is what it is like you know i always say for the students for myself when i'm out there and if i have a coach which we all do don't tell us what to do like let us do it um within within reason yeah and then explain why it didn't work or why it did work um but if you just tell us a b c d i mean that's easy anyone could do that and then you can't feel it right like kind of like paint by numbers right like

which is like fill in full-on wrestling school is paint by numbers and that's the one thing that i used to really harp on and then when cody and i started teaching together because he's the complete opposite oh really oh yeah he was like you know don't get stuck in the rut of there's four parts to a match and blah blah blah blah like. Sometimes you just got to wing it. Tell a different story. Tell a different story. Be different. Also, if there's heat on the finish, you don't really need much during the match.

If there's heat on the finish, what do you need? It's what they'll remember. Exactly. It's really cool. I really enjoy the psychology aspect of wrestling more than anything um you know the moves are fun and stuff like that too but you know like excalibur always says to me man i saw you do that phoenix splash the other day at the school like how can we never pull that out i was like i don't know phoenix splash yeah well you know what it is is

that one time uh anthony agogo was on commentary and he said there's like like, nothing he can't do because he was getting ready to do the factory angle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Excalibur was like, well, I'd like to see his Phoenix Splash. So I went right to the school and did it. And then I tweeted it out, you know, and he's like, man, I didn't know you could do that. I was like, I could do a lot of stuff, you know, Excalibur. I almost called his real name. And I was like, you know, it's just, one, I just feel really bad to ask someone to lay down there for that, you know?

And two, like, I don't want to miss it either because I remember I missed a 450 once. And, man, I almost knocked myself silly. Were you too short on it? No, I just, I just, no, I missed it, like, told the guy to move. And when I, the rotation is just so fast that you have no choice but your head snaps. So I've been doing a dive in headbutt recently. I've been on a real dynamite kick lately. So I've been doing a dive and headbutt, and, man, that hurts.

Yeah? Yeah. You land in belly flop in the ring? Between that and then your head just smacking against the guy's chest, it's like the force, you know, but it looks cool. Yeah. Speaking of Cody, we kind of just talked about Cody off air. Yeah.

And your recent escapades at Planet cool. Yeah. Speaking of Cody, we kind of just talked about Cody off air. Yeah. And your recent escapades at Planet Hollywood. Yeah. You've got a pair of boots now in Planet Hollywood. How did that come about? So, you know, on Twitter right now there's Walt Disney World and stuff. They're posting about it. And I always see, like, a wrestling fan, like, oh, I guess they ran out of stars and all this stuff. And they didn't read the story.

So the story is when I was 21, I moved down to Florida to pursue wrestling. And I was waiting tables at the time, and I got a job at Planet Hollywood. And that job kind of supplemented all the way through even my Ring of Honor contract. When I signed with Ring of Honor, the money wasn't, you know, anything to quit my job about. So I moved back to Florida and I got in trouble. They were like, Hey, we can't fly you to every show. Like, this is why we hired you besides, you know, your talent, whatever. Uh, it was also the fact that I lived in the Northeast. I was in New Jersey. I moved back for like that time period. And I told him like, well, I'm only making X amount of dollars and I don't have a real job here. Whereas there, I can make like $300, $400 a night.

And they were like, okay, well, what does that mean? I was like, that means I'll buy my flight. Like, I don't care. You know, I shouldn't say this, but like I was only at Ring of Honor because I was hoping it would get me somewhere else. I never really bought into the full Ring of Honor experience. And I think that's because of the money that they were paying also. Sounds like the circumstance had a lot to do with it.

Yeah, a lot. So when I thought about it, I was like, so anyway, Plano Alley would really help supplement that. And then I left in 2014 only because I realized at the same time I can't get stuck in the rut of the restaurant because it's just such easy money. It's fun, party atmosphere, the whole deal. So I moved back to New Jersey, and then I kind of went all in on this whole wrestling thing.

But once, you know, the success that I've had, which isn't amazing success, but it is at the same time. Like, Cody always jokes about my mom, how he's like, man, your mom treats you like Elvis, you know? And I'm like, well, you have to understand Cody. Like I'm from a regular family. Like your whole family's famous. You know what I mean? Like mine, dad's a carpenter and my mom was like, uh, she sells furniture now. So, you know, and she was a bartender growing up. So it's like when I told them I was going to do this for a living and after all these years, it actually paid off like i i am the

i mean not elvis but you know what i mean like your family you're in my family i'm like the guy like oh my god he actually did it yeah you know i have lawyers and doctors in my family and they all laugh about like oh you know i took the easy road i'm like what do you mean you're a doctor you know and they're like yeah i just went to school i did it and blah blah blah and i think about it like okay that's true yeah as hard as is, there's a lot of doctors out there, a lot more than there are professional wrestlers with big contracts on television. So, yeah, so when I spoke to the people from Planet Hollywood, I explained the story, and I wanted to do something nice for them

but also get some recognition as well. And because I do have friends that still work there. So it was cool to go back there. So it was the same one you worked at? Same exact one. The guy who waited on us the first time we went, we had to go back because Cody's flight was late, so we had to end up going twice.

Both people that waited on me, I trained to be servers. Wow. Yeah, and the manager who paid for our bill, basically, he was at an indie show for me in 2009. So I had a lot of support when I was there. And I always like, so yeah, the people that I worked with are like, oh, this is incredible. And even Punk last night, we were talking about it. He was like, you know, Cliff Compton and I are friends.

And he's friends with Cliff, obviously. I used to design stuff for him as well. Really? Back in the day. Yeah. So we trained at the Monster Factory at separate times. But because of monster factory connection and i guess he sent it to punk and punk was just like dude that's crazy like it's a really cool story i was like you know i just i always thought when i was working there like man i'm gonna be like famous enough that i could put my i didn't know that's all i had to do was like hey can i donate

my stuff you know but they did a really job. They made a huge deal of it. It looked cool there in the glass. Yeah, when you walk up the stairs, it's like right there. And I figured, all right, well, they'll put it on the top floor away from everything. It's literally across from the Dorothy dress from The Wizard of Oz, which was like their main piece. I was going to ask what the main piece of that was. Yeah, so it was the Dorothy dress, and then they completely redesigned it.

And I haven't been there until this week or this past week when they redesigned it because I just didn't. I never went back. You know, so going back there and seeing everybody and stuff like that, it was really cool. And then the server was funny. I tipped them on the side. I zelled them some money because they didn't want to put it through the computer.

And he texted me back, and he was just like, hey because they didn't want to put it through the computer and he texted me back and he was just like hey i didn't want to say anything but can you watch this music video i made and i was like yeah man and i'm thinking in my head like i don't care how good this is i'm gonna tweet it out like it doesn't matter to me you know what i mean and it actually wasn't bad so uh it's a catchy song my wife and i were singing it the other day so yeah hopefully josh hopefully you do well. Hell yeah. Speaking of Planet Hollywood, kind of Hollywood celebrities, another thing that you did recently, or I guess it's maybe not too recently now,

it aired recently, is you training Shaq. Yeah. I was actually there for the Dynamite where Shaq had the match. Oh, okay. We did like a little segment where it was like a press conference with Jericho. We were like the journalists. Yeah, yeah, I remember. I remember. It was an awesome experience getting to watch the Shaq match backstage with everybody.

Sure, yeah. To see everyone react to it. Yeah, he did great. So great. The table spot, everything. Insane. What was it like training him? Did you know from training him, like, oh, he's going to go out there and crush it?

Yeah, he was really dedicated. And they're not going to show that because I think he really wanted to protect what he did, which is great. So please don't hurt me for saying any of this. But, you know, hopefully we're still friends. I just bought a house in the same town as him. Oh, nice. But, yeah, he came by one day, and I joked with him. I said, hey, when are we going to get you in here?

That's literally how it started. I'm sure he had it in his mind, and he always had that stuff with, you know, Paul White at, WWE, all that other stuff. And I just brought it up and he was like, what do you mean? I was like, I could teach you how to do this in 10 days. And he's like, really? I was like, for what I think we're looking to do a hundred percent. And he got in there and, uh, I suplexed them right with a crash pad. And then he was like, all right, let's move the crash pad. So then I suplexed them again. And he was like, it ain't that bad. He's like, it hurts, but it's not that bad. I said, and when the adrenaline's going, you don't feel anything.

Especially like a first match like that, right? Oh, yeah. Even more so. Yeah. So he was, you know, we were trying to hold off as long as we could because of, you know, the pandemic and the crowd, all that stuff. But then one thing led to another. But like I said, he was there all the time, really paying attention to what I was saying and, hey, try to do it this way.

I mean, he powerbombed me the first time, and he dropped me right on my head. And I was like, hey, so, you know, we had the crash pad down. I was like, hey, you're really tall, so if you don't squat down with this, you're going to dump everyone on their head. It was like the angle. Yeah, and I was like, and you can't do that to Cody. You can do it to me, but you can't do it to Cody. But, yeah, he was really dedicated.

And also, he was having fun. And that's more than anything. He could tell. He made a tribute to Brody in the match. That was a cool spot. The entire feud, it seemed like he was having fun, to be honest. Like going back and forth with Cody on TNT. The basketball show was great.

Yeah, he's a good dude. So then when they were filming Shaq Life, they were like, hey, do you want to? The thing is, when I body slammed him practicing, he did it all the right way. On the show, he didn't post. He didn't jump. So it was like, you know, that's what we were joking about it last night. Protecting kayfabe a little. Yeah, they were like, man, you could slam anyone.

I was like, no, I can't. That hurt, you know. So, yeah, it was really cool. and it was unexpected to, you know, I got a lot of tweets and stuff, and they put a lower third for me. I mean, it was really cool. I got a lot of exposure out of that. So, you know, I don't know what that means at the end of the day, but, you know, I'm here.

You know what I mean? It's cool to see footage of, like, wrestling Shaq, of all people. Yeah. It's Shaq. Yeah, like, no one knew that that happened because I don't, unless it airs, I don't say anything to anybody because you always, you know. That's old school. Yeah, it's old school, right?

And then when it aired and then Snoop Dogg is voicing it over, like I put it out there and people were just like, all my friends from Planet Hollywood, believe it or not, like, dude, this is insane. Like body slamming Shaq and Snoop Dogg is talking about you. Like what is your life? I'm like, I don't know. I literally don't know. But, you know, I got to write, you know, I got to type something on the computer.

So leave me alone. We do a show here called Coach Prime for Deion Sanders. It's a docu-series about him coaching his football team and everything. And Snoop is the narrator for that as well. And there was just one day where I was like walking over and I see my friend Roan and he's writing something. I'm like, what are you writing? He's like narration for this documentary. I said, oh, who's going to i'm like what are you writing he's like narration for this documentary he said oh who's gonna read it like you and he's like no snoop dogg i was like oh well yeah that's a better that's a better voice

yeah snoop dogg yeah as good as you can get who are your favorite wrestlers to watch in aew nowadays like this year i just asked tony khan who he thought the breakout performer of the year was who would your answer be to that question i'm a big Jungle Boy fan yeah yeah if there's someone I could uh and Dante Martin yeah oh yeah he's he's really been able to um for someone that came in in the team with his brother and just he kind of went on his own way uh yeah Jungle Boy like there's a lot of younger guys that I'd really like to work with and um just have fun um you know and I don't younger guys that I'd really like to work with and just have fun. And I don't want to say, oh, I'd like to work with all the younger guys and get them to a – most of them are past my level anyway.

I would just like to work with them just to have some fun. And I got to work with Darby on Dark a couple weeks ago, and I got to work with John Silver, who's in the main event tonight, with Brian Danielson. So, yeah, there's a the main event, you know, tonight with Brian Danielson. So yeah, there's a, there's a lot of the younger guys. And then, you know, of course, I mean, I'd love to wrestle Chris Jericho, you know, that's like a bucket list thing. You know, I got to wrestle Dustin. Do you have a list in your mind of like a few people I want to wrestle before it's all over?

I do. And they're not always like, it's not always the top guy or the the you know there's like frankie kazarian is another guy that i'd like to work with because he's just been around so long and it's crazy that you guys haven't yeah yeah and it's just the style right like i think we would have a really good match and you know on paper the fans might oh yeah but the thing is like i was trying to explain this to tony one day we were talking about stuff and like twitter and people being mad at me being on TV or getting a spot and all this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, but how about the real fan, the fan that actually pays their money to come to the show? How do they react when I go out there?

Because for me, it sounds like the whole crowd chants QT sucks. Maybe it's only five people chanting really loud like Twitter, but I don't think so. It sounds like it starts to go up and then the whole arena does it and stuff like that. So, um, you know, like I said, I think getting me out there with anybody at this point is, is good for both of us because, uh, you know, the crowd's going to be into it. So is that a weird thing? Like the QT sucks chance to explain to non-wrestling fans, like you were talking about, like how much, like if, if an entire? Like the QT sucks chance to explain to non-wrestling fans, like you were talking about, like how much,

like if, if an entire arena is chanting QT sucks, you must love that. That must be amazing for you. Yeah. Like non-wrestling fans must be like, what? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yeah. And then, like I said, when you actually break it down for them and kind of let them know, like I said, at the end of the day,

you're getting a reaction. I'm getting a reaction. And what is my job? Yeah. Again again just don't give them what they want and i used to think like oh my job is to do this for the baby face and then no just who's the biggest heel in the world is the guy or girl that doesn't give you what you want from them you know what i mean like when you're that makes you like have that visceral reaction right booing yeah like when you know when i wanted something for christmas and i didn't get

it i was really mad at my mom you know what i mean like what do you mean my friend just got a bmw and i don't have a car like what's going on here you know okay we'll get you a car so it's just one of those things and then she was a baby face i loved her you know so and i invited her to play in hollywood because of that yeah so uh yeah i mean it's it's really fun to get those reactions because i never thought – one, I never thought when AEW started I'd get the chance to even be out there. In an arena too, right? Like that's got to be a different level.

Yeah. Like in Ring of Honor, on the indies, it's one thing. When you're in a sold-out arena, it's crazy. So that was my biggest fear was I hadn't wrestled in a big arena since I was a babyface with Cody. I teamed with him. Then I did another match with, like, Jake Hager. And we did some dark stuff, but it wasn't, like, at the level. Then the pandemic happened, and I was like, okay.

And then when I turned, you know, we started going back on the road, and I remember talking to Uno about doing a match with him. And he was like, you know, I don't have the Dark Order with me. We're going through these problems or whatever. Maybe I could work with you at the united center and i was like man it's like sold out you know uh okay and then i was thinking like okay this is the test if we go out there and no one's into it like we're done i'm dead in the water you know what i mean and luckily um we were one of the first matches on dark on that dark taping that had two contracted talent. A lot of it was just, you know, get over matches for our talent and stuff like that.

And I remember going out there in the booze. And then when the Dark Order music hit, the cheers. And I remember thinking, like, we don't have to do anything. I was going to say, can you take a deep breath even before the match at that point? Like, oh, okay, we got them. Yeah, exactly. And that was one of the things. Now I'm still learning because, you know, with Darby was the same way

where Billy Gunn pulled me aside. He was like, hey, man, you didn't need to do that stuff in the beginning. Like they were already chanting his name as loud as they could. What do you think you're going to do that's going to do that? Interesting. You might as well take it away and then bring it back. And I was like, he's like, you know this stuff. I'm like, I know, but this is what we call it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Darby has to do it, so I'm not going to say no, you know, Darby's in a pretty good spot right now. And, you know, and as much as I have a pretty good spot behind the scenes, I don't, I never use that to my advantage. So, you know, I just try to do good business all around. Of course. And finally, this is a question that I assume you've probably gotten before and all the talent gets at this point in the wrestling business, but if we could open that forbidden door for you. Sure. And allow one person through to AEW, could be from any other company,

and say this is someone that you get to wrestle. Who would you pull through? Oh, that's good. Hmm. Past, present, or no? Is it like present right now? Let's go past, present, future. Man.

I guess not future yeah future my son now uh that i don't have um man there's so originally like j lethal was a guy i always wanted to work with again because i thought we had really good chemistry now he's here so that kind of takes away that question. Like an Okada. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Only because I throw a really good dropkick.

No, and, you know, his style is, you know, it's for the Japanese style, it's still a very my kind of style. So if it was, like, someone from New Japan, it would be him. Psychology heavy, right? Very. Yeah. You know, and they're big on the whole callbacks and stuff like that. Big time, yeah. I think a lot of the problems with wrestling today is a lot of people do callbacks,

and no one knows what they did before that. You know, like on indie shows, you see all these guys doing 100 false finishes, and I joke about it with my students. Like, you can't get someone to bite on a false finish if they don't know what it is you know they don't know that that's your false finish so my pet peeves in wrestling is when someone will do a move that's never finished a match right it gets to count they do the they do the meme face oh my god they do that face right yeah yeah that's why like uh when i when i work when we go over false finishes i'm like yeah i'll roll you up and put my feet on the ropes no like what do you i'm like, yeah, I'll roll you up and put my feet on the ropes. I'm like, everybody understands that.

And if we do something right before that, you know, some of the best false finishes I get are like I go for the diamond cutter and they hook me in a backslide. The roll-ups. The roll-ups, yeah. Yeah, because you get them unexpected, and that's kind of how wrestling works now. Finish matches.

Yeah, especially nowadays, right? Like the schoolboys, you know, I'll trade the diamond cutter for the schoolboy any day of the week you know um so yeah i think that and then like i said if of all time you know shawn michaels is someone that i really try to watch and learn from and stuff like that and then you know do you like uh the first half of his career or the second half of his career better you know as a fan i really enjoyed the first half but that was because i was a child you were yeah i was like i was yeah i was into sean i mean i dressed like him i my dad thought this is kind of strange you know what's going on but then my dad uh yeah i used i had one of those

hats with the zebra print and i took another hat that had like the ponytail attached to it and i ripped it off and stapled it to it i Man, I was just in my own world. No, I'm with you. I was shown for Halloween. I had the muscle suit I had my mom draw on. Oh, there you go. Yeah, so you know how it is. And I'll tell you real quick.

I went to go meet him on Route 17 in Ridgewood at a car dealership. And my dad, whatever happened, you know, if he's watching, he was late. And we got there, and there were way too many people. And I remember like being very upset and probably crying. So he took me to the Meadowlands that night and we bought tickets up, up top and Shawn Michaels in the main event. I want to say against Vader could have been against gold dust, long story short. Uh, my dad told me years later, like, Hey, when you were younger, you were like really upset about this whole Shawnwn michaels thing and i was really concerned at the time he's like but then i watched him and i realized like oh

my god like this guy is an incredible athlete he looks great you know the stuff that he's doing he's taking a you know an ass kicking and he makes the big comeback and all this stuff so uh you know i think my dad became a believer right he saw it and then he saw why the same reason why like i look at kids that look up to john cena i'm like yeah that makes perfect sense you know as a wrestler you know we everyone has their own takes on what a good wrestler is but i think a good wrestler or a great wrestler is the one that makes the fans go crazy you know so he's one of the best you know what i mean so uh they came back this summer and the reactions that he was getting were crazy yeah yeah i think there's just uh like i said that's when we talk about wrestling at the school, when we watch matches, you can point out every

little flaw that somebody had, but at the end of the day, when that bell rings at the end, if that crowd's up or they're throwing stuff, you're doing it right. Remember, especially the people that are there, they'll remember going crazy. Yeah. You know, and all that. Yeah. We make people feel a certain way. And, uh, you know, that's, that's my biggest thing is that I try to, I try to, which I think a lot of the times the way I was taught and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not into what wrestling is nowadays, but I think that's, uh, what, you know, what I try to do is just make people feel. Um,

and my job is to make them feel a certain way. Like when you open that Christmas box and there's a big pile of shit inside, you know what I mean? That's the, that's the feeling you should have when i win a match you know so yeah it's uh it's it's a it's been a fun ride you know luckily it's just starting so yeah i think that's a great note to to wrap it up on yeah no pun intended yeah exactly exactly i'm excited for dynamite tonight and uh if you're listening to this on monday we got dark tomorrow we got another episode of Dynamite coming up. So check it out.

Winter is coming. That's one of our biggest shows, right? You have Hangman and Bryan Danielson and some other matches. Whoever wins the Battle Royal tonight,

the two guys that win the Battle Royal, will go on next week for the Dynamite Diamond Ring. So Max might not have it after this week. So I'm excited because he always uses

that ring and i want it so i can't wait i can't thank you for coming yeah of course man this is great thank you