Joe Rogan talks to Billy Corgan about his Involvement in Pro Wrestling

Hello freak bitches. So I mean I don't mean to just jump right into this but it kind of freaked me out that you have involvement in pro wrestling. Do you own the NWA? Yeah I bought the National Wrestling Alliance the oldest brand in the world. I was working for TNA you know I was president for Hot Second then I got fired. You were president of TNA? Yeah yeah that's a crazy story. I don't know how much you want to get into that. Get into it. Well you know Dixie Carter owned TNA I knew her through the years. I used to go to shows and stuff like that and at some point they approached me about investing. I said no then they offered me a job. I started working for the company then they would they have started having money problems. They started putting money in and through the contrivance of all that then I started getting more power in the company and putting in more money so then it became like well if I'm gonna put in all this money and I'm gonna have all this power I want to run the show they basically said that was cool and then the minute I had the spot it was like Game of Thrones. They all started to kill me off and then you know wrestling is weird because you have this weird mix of reality and fantasy and it's hard sometimes to know where one thing and the fans get into both the behind the scenes and the fantasy so no one's quite sure sometimes where the blur is and yeah it got pretty crazy for while there's a lawsuit. A real lawsuit? I sued and this is a quick funny thing people continually write that I lost the lawsuit. I never lost the lawsuit. I lost one of the motions which led to them me negotiating and we settled out of court but the judge the contract that they signed that would have allowed me to take over the company under the under the motion that I had filed the judge basically dismissed my motion because the contract they had signed with me was illegal under Tennessee law even though a Tennessee lawyer had negotiated on the company's behalf and signed it. Whoa that sounds like some double-cross wrestling type stuff. Yeah, so it'd be like if you did a contract with me and then I sued you and then the judge says well even though Joe had a California lawyer signed it's illegal under California law so therefore the contract's meaningless it was bizarre. How does one go from smashing pumpkins to pro wrestling and then go so deep that you're like an owner? Yeah, I know. It's pretty wild. Unexpected for a lot of people, right? Yeah, I get that a lot. And I've actually learned over time it's just best to keep the world separate because the music fans don't want to hear anything about the wrestling thing. I mean they just don't want to, they just, they get that I'm a bit goofy but they just don't want to hear about the wrestling thing. They ask the worlds to be kept separate. Did they ever get mad at you? Oh yeah. I could imagine. You know, and you can appreciate it. It kills the gimmick. They want me to be this goth vampire guy or whatever and then it's like and then there's pro wrestling. It just totally kills the gimmick. It's really funny though. I think it's awesome. Yeah. I love when people just get into what they like. Well that's something I appreciate about you, you know what I mean? Like I've watched where you guys go deep dives and MMA and other things it's like I think it's cool to have multiple interests. It's the Renaissance man thing. Yeah, well I think for some reason people shy away from that because they think folks are going to be confused. I don't care. Yeah. Good for you. That's awesome. No, growing up in Chicago there was a really rich wrestling history in Chicago growing up and my great-grandmother watched wrestling. I mean it was like I grew up in the at four years old I'm watching Dick the Bruiser on television. And this is also the era of hockey fights and roller derby. Oh, roller derby. So we'd watch hockey, pro wrestling, you know, it was in the family. Yeah. And then later I found out that my other great-grandmother also watched wrestling. So both sides of the family, both great-grandmothers watch wrestling. So it's just in the blood. I guess we like that. We like the carny of it all. Well, I'm always amazed at roller derby. Never made like a serious comeback. They tried. They kind of did the, you know, the tattooed girls doing roller derby, hipster-y type of thing. It had a moment there. Well, I know I had a friend who was into it and she, you know, was that type. I just thought, well, that seems like something that would catch on today. Yeah, they transitioned from like roller derby to suicide girls. Yeah. You got to get a little hotter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can be thick and be a roller derby girl. You could eat all the carbs you like. The roller derby back in the day was huge. Yeah. I mean, they were doing like pactorinas and stuff. That's crazy. Well, it's fun to watch. It's pretty wild. You know, you see them go after each other and skating around. It's pretty aggressive. It's fun. It's fun. It's like racing plus fighting and hip checking each other. You know, it's early days memory, but I remember thinking, you know, there's something sort of hot about the whole thing. Yes. I think especially in Chicago, the women's roller derby was bigger than the men's. So that says something. Yeah. I didn't even know there was men's roller derby. Like thinking of men's roller derby, I'm completely drawing a blank. It's just, I always associate it with like tough women. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. I think the women's thing actually had some sort of staying power where the men's, I think it didn't have the same allure maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. You're my age. You remember killer Kowalski? Of course. Yeah. I remember watching that when I was a kid in Boston, watching it on regular TV, you know. Those guys were great. I mean, it's a golden age. It's like anything. You can go back and sort of romanticize it. And I think that's part of what we're trying to do is that's the cool thing about the NWO is we actually possess that history. And so our job is to sort of update it, you know, to bring it, to bring that tough guy thing back into the modern world in a way that sort of doesn't insult the audience's intelligence. So the NWA, is that older than the WWE? Yeah. 1948 is the NWA. Whoa. Yeah. And the cool thing about the NWA's history was you had all these rival promoters, including the McMahons in the Northeast that eventually sort of formed a kind of ad hoc association to create a better business. In essence, get everybody on the same page. And what they would do is they named one champ and the champ would rotate through the different territories, come in and take on the whoever was the local guy. They build up the local guy and then a guy like Ric Flair would come in and beat the local guy. And it would always be like a bit of a scrum. And then he'd come back for a second, there would be a cage match. And then Ric Flair would move on to the next territory. And that's how those guys rotate around. Then everybody made more money. Wow. And then the government got involved at different points because there was collusion. There you go. There's Ric Flair with our belt, actually. I follow him on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Ric and Dusty Rhodes are probably the two most prominent champs that the NWA had. So just to be the owner of that history is so humbling for me as a fan. It's like, wow. That is so cool. Yeah. That's pretty wild, actually.