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John Cena is a WWE 17-time World Champion wrestler, bestselling author, and actor whose on-screen career includes installments of the “Fast & Furious” franchise, “The Suicide Squad,” and its spinoff series “Peacemaker.” https://www.wwe.com/superstars/john-cena
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Joe Rogan, what's up?
John Cena in the fucking house.
Put these on?
Yeah, let's put these on, pretend we're professional.
What's up? Good to see you, man.
Thanks so much for having me.
My pleasure.
And there's no way I'm having a pro wrestler on without Tony Hinchcliffe.
Of course.
It's possible. He's the expert.
He knows more about pro wrestling than I know about UFC.
Yeah.
Sometimes I translate little things here and there.
That's cool. It's all right.
Yeah, he has to. He has to.
And he's a giant fan of yours, too.
You know who else is a giant fan of yours is Bryan Simpson.
Bryan Simpson was going on last night about how intelligent you are.
It was really interesting.
You sure was me?
Yeah, man.
Well, you do speak fucking Mandarin, which is kind of crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
How long did it take you to learn that?
Man, I was doing that for quite a long time.
I've since kind of declined on the studies.
A wonderful takeaway from the study of Mandarin, just because you know a
language doesn't mean you know the culture.
So that was a fantastic experience with that.
But I studied Mandarin for like a decade.
And I would say like not even conversationally fluent.
It was a really tough hill to climb for me.
Well, it seems like a really big hill.
Just it's just different.
And then even if you can speak it, can you read it?
You know, the reading.
No, no.
I didn't even bother to read.
And like reading all the characters, understanding everything.
Yeah.
How long did it take you to learn?
Around 10 years.
Whoa.
Yeah.
And then like, I mean, I would dream in Mandarin and like have conversations
and kick down and that.
So it became like a second language.
But, you know, I lived in China for a little bit.
I filmed a movie with Jackie Chan.
So I was there for like six or seven months.
I lived there in, man, we were in Inner Mongolia, Yinchuan province.
So like in China.
Wow.
And it was fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You were in Mongolia?
Inner Mongolia.
Yeah.
What's the difference?
I don't know because I've never been in Mongolia.
But Inner Mongolia was, man, I was the only person that looked like me there.
And everyone would say, look, it's big white guy.
Hun Da Bai Ren.
Hun Da Bai Ren.
That would call me.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
So what motivated you to learn that?
It seems like such a task.
Honestly, man, it was everything in my life seems to be wrestling related.
It was wrestling related.
Like WWE's reach spread everywhere.
I mean, I've been able to lucky enough to perform everywhere from like Moscow,
Philippines, South
Africa, Bangor, Maine, every place in between except China.
China was like the one place that didn't understand what we did.
So it's literally like it's a universal language because you can turn.
It's like UFC.
Like you turn the volume down, but you can see like, oh, this is two guys, best
guy wins.
I get it.
The Chinese just didn't get it.
So I figured if like one of our superstars spoke the language, maybe that would
help break
down the barrier.
Was it your idea?
It was my idea, but the WWE offers, and I think they still offer it.
They offer a free second language program.
So like when they rolled out the initiative of like financial advice and, you
know, they'll
pay for portions of your secondary education and free second language.
This is like 2011, 2012, big talent meeting in like an auditorium.
I'm one of the old guys at the time sitting in the front being like, these kids
don't know
how good they have it.
I should stand up and tell them to, I'm like, no, fuck that.
I'm actually going to lead by example and take a language.
So I signed up right then and then and there for Chinese because I wanted to
get us into
China.
Wow.
And like I said, it worked, but it kind of only worked.
And I think actually right now, China is experiencing what wrestling is to them.
Because like there's, I've read articles that there's promotions over there
that are
thriving.
So like now they get it.
Oh, so they have their own promotions.
Yeah, yeah.
And this is a fairly recent thing?
I think so.
Like I just read recent articles that like pro wrestling is thriving in China
and they
have their own, like their own way of doing it.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's wild.
It's wild how like expansive the pro wrestling business is, that they would be
that open-minded
to say like, let's give second language programs to the athletes.
Well, you know, I just, it's weird.
The origins of the business are carnival related.
It is like a carnival attraction and then it was like ruthlessly territorial.
And then when it became national, it was still trying to find its way.
It's almost like you see pro sports doing it.
You know, the more a sport succeeds, the more benefits they offer to their
competitors and
athletes.
But, you know, WWE kind of hit that stride.
Yeah.
It's just such a smart thing to do.
Yeah.
Well, you give your talent the opportunities to gain knowledge and wisdom.
And the sad thing is, I don't know how many people did it or do it still, you
know.
Was there anybody other than you that you know of?
Two other people.
Who?
Claudio Castagnoli, who speaks, I think, four or five languages already.
And he just wanted to take like a brush up course.
And Natty Neidhart.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's it.
That's it.
Everybody else is like.
Not going to do it.
Too much work.
Yeah.
What was the not knowing the culture aspect of it?
So, man, I got put in a bit of a hot spot with, I made a pact to myself when I
was like,
okay, I feel fluent.
We would do these global press tours and I just happened to be on a global
press tour.
I'm like, you know what?
I'm going to do 70% of my media in Mandarin, like in dialogue.
And I got to say, I did it.
Like, I went over there, spoke.
People were taking off the translator headphones.
Like, life was good.
Everything was great.
At the very end of the day, as with all these press tours, you do like a bunch
of prompter
reads.
So, I'm doing prompter reads for everywhere.
And it's like, hey, go to this place and see this movie.
Go to this place and see this movie.
And no, my bad.
I didn't check the reads because it's like an end of a 10-hour day.
You do a million of these things.
And one of them said like, hey, Taiwan, see this, this.
And it was all in Mandarin.
And the opinion described Taiwan as a country.
So, be the first country to see this.
Now, over there, they look through a different lens.
Like, geopolitics are murky waters, man.
And that's what I learned of like, I just said it, left.
Everybody was cool.
I did my thing.
Like, I read the prompt.
It was like a Ron Burgundy moment.
Like, go fuck yourself, San Diego.
It was like the most offensive thing you can say.
So, I'm like, man, you know, good job, John.
You said you did 70% and people understood what you were talking about.
And then they put that out and everybody was like, what the fuck did you just
say?
We don't, that's not how we do it over here.
And again, just because like my takeaway.
And it was a pretty tense moment for me.
Like, I had to apologize to China.
And in apologizing to China, I pissed off my home country.
I'm a patriot.
I love the United States of America and everything it stands for.
But like, no one, it was never enough.
Nobody was happy.
Everybody was fucked up.
And it was like murky waters for me personally.
And it was weird.
Like, I'm the, I think I might have been the only guy almost to get canceled
for doing his homework.
You know, like, we're trying to like learn, like learn and try to do something.
But the cool takeaway, you know, we can learn from every mistake.
My mistake was just because you know the language doesn't mean you know the
culture.
Did they even refer to it as Taiwan?
I think they referred to it as Chinese Taipei, right?
Man, what was in the, I know what I read in the thing.
Oh, okay.
So that's, again, I don't know enough depth to know that.
And now like people like, oh man, can you, can you speak Mandarin for this?
I just won't do it.
It's a skill that I have and it's, but it's a skill that's going to remain with
me because it's, I don't understand, I don't have the depth of field to know
what to call that place in that region of the world.
And I haven't done enough research and I don't have the wisdom and I don't have
like the cultural fluency, you know?
So it was a cool lesson.
It sucked because I thought I was just trying to do something good, but it was,
it was a cool lesson.
Was it really that big of a deal?
Man, I thought, like I was filming Peacemaker season one and when they came out
with all of this stuff, I went directly to James Gunn and was like, hey man, if
you have to fire me, I understand.
Wow.
Is that serious?
Yeah.
But it wasn't even words that you wrote.
Someone out, the WWE wrote it?
That doesn't, no, no, it was, it was for the movie I was promoting.
Right.
So the movie, the people that made the movie wrote it.
So I don't know, like when you do these press tours, let's say if I'm doing a
movie for Warner Brothers, let's say, let's use Peacemaker as an example.
I'm doing a global Peacemaker tour and we go into China or we go into South
America.
You meet like the PR person there and they have all the stuff you're supposed
to do and they curate your experience and they hold your hand.
You're like, okay, now we're going to go to this station.
And by the way, they just want you to do some shout outs.
So anytime I go anywhere globally now, as much as I want to thank fans for
their attention and, you know, investing in the product, I really shy away from
like speaking the language because I don't understand the cultural nuance.
You know, I just, I just want to be like, yo man, thanks for watching what we
do.
And I love the fact that you're entertained, but I want to speak to you at a
level that I understand that I'm fluent because your boots on the ground here
every day.
And I might say something that's a nice gesture, but completely fucking offend
you.
And that's, that's not good.
That's not good for anybody.
So was the teleprompter in English and you translate to Chinese?
No, it was in, no, everything was in Mandarin.
And in, uh, in Chinese they have the characters, which are virtually impossible
for me to learn.
There's like an infinite number, but they have, they also have what's called pinyin,
which is, it's kind of spelled out in English with phonetics.
So it has the four tones.
Okay.
So if you were to put something in front of me in pinyin right now, I could
definitely read it.
And I got good at reading pinyin.
So I was like, man, I could, I could send all these messages in Mandarin and
then more people will know about this movie and more people will know about me
and more people will know about wrestling and more people will be excited.
Looked good on paper.
Just my follow through was a bit weak.
You know, it doesn't even seem like that was your fault.
Right.
It's probably a PR assistant assistant that's typed, that's probably in charge
of doing the grunt work of typing in all the different languages and the
different countries.
Like it's tedious.
Uh, uh, from, from what I know, I know I'm going to learn a lot about you guys
in this episode, but from what I know about you, you're, you're into looking at
looking things through different lenses and different perspectives.
It also could have been somebody being like, I'm going to get this kid, but
here's the thing.
I, I do appreciate you saying like, it's not your fault.
That's not true.
It was my fault.
And I think that's when I can start to work on like, well, what did I learn
from this?
And I could easily blame a PR and assistant.
I could say somebody had a target on my back, all that stuff.
I fucked up.
Did you suspect that somebody might've set you up?
No.
Well, you're saying it like it's a possibility.
Well, man, when it happened, every, every theory came, like, here's the thing.
The world doesn't revolve around me, but my little world, everybody was like,
they fucked up.
They did this on purpose.
I was like, well, first of all, who's they?
So I was able to kind of eliminate all that.
And once I realized I could still go on working, uh, I, I really made a lot of
people angry.
And for that, that I'm sorry, like, again, I was just trying to, that's crazy.
Just by saying that Taiwan's a country in, in Chinese though, you know, like
those are murky
waters to begin with, you know, like I, I'm not even thoroughly.
Fluent on the U S policy.
I think it's like, like a territorial ambiguity or some shit like that.
Like it's, it's so weird and it's, it's so fragile.
And I, I, uh, I got into some water.
I shouldn't have been swimming in, but that's, that's on me.
It's not, it was my fault.
And, and I think that's important for me to bear the burden of that and be like,
yo, what,
how can I course correct?
What did I learn?
Who do I really, really genuinely have to apologize for offending?
The, the biggest thing that was a kick to the nuts is when like people stateside
got pissed
off.
Because you apologized.
Yes.
In, in Chinese.
And, and I understand it.
I mean, completely like bowing down to the demand of this, that gosh, what a,
what a shitty move
by me.
Like I just, I should have taken a breath.
Again, what did I learn?
Don't be reactive.
Take a breath, find out what's going on, find out the best path of action.
Maybe give it a few days, maybe give it a hot second, um, and then move forward.
But immediately I was like, oh, they're mad.
You want us to do this?
Fine.
No problem.
I'll fix it right now.
Man, that not only did I not try to fix the hole in the boat, I sunk the
Titanic.
So it was, but again, it was a learning experience.
Well, it speaks to your character that you don't blame anybody else.
Cause I'd blame everybody else.
I'd be like, who fucking wrote that?
Don't you, don't you know what you're saying or what you're making me say?
Uh, the, the release you guys have for the show.
I, I read it and you might be the only person.
So that was, that was whoever handed it to me.
That was what they said.
Like, I think you might be the only person that's ever read it.
Yeah.
Man, if, if, if you're gonna, if you're gonna take liberties with me, at least
I want
to be able to read that you are.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
And I can't say I'm perfect with doing that, but like I was handed a release.
I'm like, oh man, can I just glance this over for a hot, oh, this says what I
think it
says.
Okay.
Let's go.
Trump didn't even read it.
Just.
To each their own.
Yeah.
No, it's very smart of you to read it.
You know, who, who knows, you know, who knows?
So this is a Tony, is this, is this the full trifecta now?
It's like, if you've gotten all of your heroes on this podcast now, there's a
couple more
we can knock off out of the pro wrestling world.
There's a couple more.
Todd, let's, if you don't mind, if I can indulge, talk pro wrestling heroes.
Who do we need to knock off?
Who do we need to get in here?
Well, I mean, in all reality, and it's a diabolical, diabolical.
Because man, he can, he can kind of invite, he can't, you can invite anyone you
want in here.
You just kind of got to get in the wish list.
I mean, you got to, you got to start with the number one, without a doubt,
Vince McMahon,
who started this gangster shit and spread it around.
I would definitely have him.
It was a little...
Man, he would be great.
Yes.
Whatever magic you have out there, and you have a lot of gravity...
Do you think he'd be interested in doing it?
Are you kidding me?
I think he would love it.
Really?
Yeah.
I think he would love it.
I don't know when the right time is, but man, don't miss out on that.
At least send it out to the universe.
Yeah.
Well, I would definitely.
Vince, if you're listening.
Vince, if you're listening.
Let's go.
I think this would be a great, I think this experience would be a great one for
you.
Is he still involved?
Is he out?
Is he in?
He's out.
He's out.
He's out totally.
Yep.
It seems like he's the guy that'll be out for a little while, and then
something will happen
and they'll bring him back in.
No.
Well, I don't know.
Again, that's way...
We were talking about, like, why is your last event in this place?
I'm like, man, because I don't choose the events.
Like, I don't...
All that stuff is so far above me, but I know now he's out.
In my eyes, I'd like to think that, like, time heals everything and I believe
in forgiveness
and I also believe in, like, looking at the body of work, but I also know there's
a lot
of fragile stuff going on there.
I don't know.
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's a hot subject.
It is.
It can get us into another Chinese Taipei incident.
Well, no, no.
Man, I'm...
Again, I've learned to become a little bit more accountable for what I say and
just how...
Just because I feel a certain way about a person doesn't exonerate them from
being accountable
for their actions.
Right.
And just because he did start, quote, unquote, all this gangster shit, that
doesn't mean he
doesn't need to be accountable for his actions.
Right.
So let's figure out what that means and then figure out if we can move forward
and bring
that back in the fold or if it stays the way it is.
What do you think, Tony?
Do you think he's coming back?
I think he would come here.
Yeah.
I think he would come here, too.
And I think he...
Yeah.
That's one of the more entertaining people of all time.
He created the entire universe.
You got to remember, Hogan's Hogan because of him.
Cena's Cena because of him.
I'm me because of him.
Yeah.
Every single Stone Cold.
He's like, that sounds good.
Yeah.
Keep it going.
We'll do the glass breaks thing and they'll throw you beers.
I like it.
Let's do it again next week.
So everything that we think...
When he sits here, you got to do that impression.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stone Cold's another one that hasn't been on.
Steve would be great.
Oh, my God.
I think you would dig Steve.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sure.
Yeah.
He lives out here, too, doesn't he?
Yep.
Does he?
Well, actually...
Doesn't he have a ranch out here?
I think he does somewhere.
I think he does.
Yeah.
But I think he's based out of somewhere else now, New Mexico or Arizona.
He's on the...
He's kind of cool and reclusive.
He doesn't really do a lot.
It's amazing.
He would be a good get.
And I'm pretty sure...
I guarantee he would do it.
Yeah.
Steve, if you're...
I know you're watching.
Come on.
Come on.
Come on in.
Let's talk some wrestling.
The man.
I mean, everyone has him on the Mount Rushmore.
Triple H, who runs it now, the son-in-law of Vince McMahon.
Yeah.
I mean, he runs the entire thing.
I mean, you want answers to those high-level questions.
Yeah.
There's your guy.
Yeah.
That's the guy you need to get into.
A lot of the stuff you'd probably ask today, I'd be like, that's way above my
pay grade.
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Well, you know, if you don't know the history, Tony at one point in time was
offered a job
with the WWE before he really made it.
No way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was offered a job to write for the WWE because, you know, Tony was a giant
pro wrestling
fan.
And, you know, he already had a Netflix special.
So he was known as a comic.
It was before that.
Was it before the Netflix special?
Yeah.
The first one?
The one that you released yourself?
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
It was only a couple years into me doing standup like seven nights a week at
the comedy store
all the time.
And somehow I ended up, someone's like, hey, I have a friend in WWE if you want
to have
a meeting with them and just talk.
And I went in with straight up ideas.
This, that, the Undertaker's brother comes back again, this, that, the next,
like everything
back and forth.
I can't even remember any of them.
It's been so long.
But I went in with the whole thing.
And this guy's like, where the hell did you, like, what, this is crazy.
You just like did this?
I'm like, yeah, I found out a couple days ago we were going to talk.
So, but yeah, they offered it.
But I would have had to move to Connecticut and take a train to New York every
night to
go do standup.
And that would have just been exhausting.
And everything I heard, because Patrice O'Neal, the late, great Patrice O'Neal,
wrote
for WWE for a while.
Did he really?
Yeah.
Yeah, for like a couple of years, I think.
What did he, just wrote lines for them?
Like, what did he do?
The whole shebang.
When you're a WWE writer, they, they make you write.
It's not like a cute job at all.
No, there's a lot of, there's a lot of television, or there's a lot of content
every week.
Yeah.
Right now, I think they got, they have three weekly shows.
So that's 20, I think one of them's going back to three hours, 16, it's like 50
segments
of TV.
Yeah.
Every week.
Yeah, but I remember when you were talking about it.
Yeah.
When you're talking about potentially doing it, I was like.
Yeah, it was tricky.
And I was like, dude, you do not want to live in Connecticut.
No, that's the main thing.
If it was anywhere else other than Connecticut, it kind of would have made more
sense.
If it was in New York City, it would have been a no-brainer.
If it was in LA, definitely.
But like, fast forward, now you're more and more involved.
Yes.
Well, this is the crazy thing.
Like, we had talked, like, during the old days, like, we would talk in the
green room.
I'd be like, that would be your ultimate dream job.
Yeah.
Like, to make it as a comedian and somehow be involved in the UFC the way, or
excuse me,
in WWE the way I'm involved in the UFC.
Like, very similar.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
And look.
It's insane.
I'm going tomorrow night.
I'm going to be in the front row at the arena in my hometown.
Are they here tomorrow night?
Oh, man.
Are you messing with me?
Are you going to...
Is your music going to hit and you're going to pop out?
No, I'm not there.
I got one more left.
This is what they do, by the way.
Oh, yeah?
Oh, yeah.
I didn't even know they were going to be in town.
He's correct.
There's a lot of...
You mess with people.
You're right.
But then somebody like me will actually shoot you straight and be like, I'm not
going to be there.
And I won't be there.
And you'll be like, ah, now I'm just...
I'm building the equity for people to mess with people.
Exactly.
Like, I'm giving 20 mulligans out there.
Tomorrow.
No.
Not a chance.
Not a chance.
Exactly.
I heard a great story.
You'll probably love this.
You might even know the story.
But The Undertaker, his wife, and his podcast co-host went to WrestleMania.
They're up in a fancy suite.
This was...
Which one was it?
The Rock made an appearance.
Did you...
Yes, you were there, right?
That huge finish at WrestleMania like three years ago where it was just boom,
boom, boom, boom.
And all these legends were coming out.
This huge finish.
Just like they can't even like follow it.
The ultimate climax of a WrestleMania.
And one wrestler comes out, interrupts this huge main event, and then another
one, then another one.
Anyway, The Undertaker, his wife, and his podcast co-host were up in the suite.
Undertaker goes, I'm going to go use the restroom.
They're like, he's been gone a while.
The lights go out.
The bell tolls.
They're watching from the suite.
He's been gone for like 10 minutes, 20 minutes.
He went and changed real quick.
And then now he's...
Came out as The Undertaker.
Yeah.
Came out as The Undertaker.
They're in the suite like, oh my God, it's The Undertaker.
It's like, they don't tell anybody.
It's so old school and awesome that they keep secrets so locked up that their
own loved
ones his wife didn't even know.
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
That is so crazy.
It's fun to be able to surprise the live audience.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's got to be a big part of it.
How did you get involved in pro wrestling?
Were you a fan as a kid?
And then...
I sure was.
I think we have the same gravity of like, man, I was a super fan as a kid.
But then I fell out of it, admittedly, kind of when Hogan went to WCW.
So like, I was into wrestling and then I wasn't.
And then I got into sports or whatever.
And then I got back into wrestling when everyone else did.
When like Stone Cold Steve Austin became big.
The Rock became big.
The Attitude Era hit.
And I was just working a dead-end job over at Gold's Gym Venice and like, didn't
know
what I wanted to do with my life.
How old were you?
21.
Wow.
21.
I'd moved out to California not to be famous or anything.
My degree was in Kinese.
And I wanted to, like, that was the center of the fitness universe in 99, 2000.
So like, all equipment manufacturers were there.
I'm like, man, I'll go get a job with Hammer Strength or Cybex or like, maybe
Gold's.
Or like, put that piece of paper on the wall to like, get a good paying job.
It did not work.
So I ended up like, front desk, cleaning toilets, selling protein bars, in that
order.
So don't ever buy a protein bar.
I'm just kidding.
But no, I was kind of like a jack of all trades over there.
And a friend of mine, Chris Bell and Mark Bell.
Oh, I know those guys.
Yeah, yeah.
They literally were like, dude, you talk about WWF all the time.
You know, we train down in Orange County.
And at that time, Chris Bell was kind of like writing for this promotion.
And they're like, would you want to do it?
And I, man, I, that doesn't happen without them accidentally saying like, yo,
we trained to do this.
His documentaries are fucking incredible.
Bigger, Stronger, Faster.
And then the other one, the pill one, what was that one called?
Magic pill?
No, what was the one, the addiction one that Chris released?
But Bigger, Stronger, Faster is such a fucking great documentary.
The Bell family, I've been friends with them for a long time.
Great guys.
Yeah.
That documentary, like, blew the lid off of, like, the reality of steroids.
Prescription Thugs.
Prescription Thugs.
That's another great one.
Yeah.
Crazy thing is, he got addicted to pills while he was doing that.
Because he had surgery while he was doing that.
And got addicted to pills while he's making a fucking documentary on people
being addicted to pills.
That's how potent pills are.
A guy making a documentary about addiction, he just thinks, well, I'm just
taking these because I got hip surgery.
And I'm in fucking agony.
And then gets hooked.
Oh, yeah.
Like, that's how crazy it is.
Yeah, they're strong.
Yeah, I would imagine.
Did you ever have an issue?
No.
No?
No, as a matter of fact, I've had fusion in my neck, right pec, completely
detached, reattached, both triceps reattached, both triceps scoped, nose relocated.
Like, I got, I probably, I'm in like 10 physical surgeries where they got to go
and correct something.
Never taken one pain pill.
Wow.
I have all the prescriptions in the bottom drawer of my house filled.
And it's weird because at every facility, the first thing they, the first hill
they climb is pain management.
You wake up from anesthesia, you're like gray and murky.
And I've been in a bunch of surgeries at a bunch of different facilities.
The protocol is always the same.
Do you want something for the pain?
Here, we got to make sure you take this with you because you're not in any pain.
Yeah.
Like, I understand because you, if you leave, if you're feeling okay, maybe you're
high off adrenaline, I don't know.
And then the operation sets in of like, holy fuck, this is a 10 out of 10.
I can't, I need something.
I get that.
But I, I guess from falling down and hurting my body a lot, like I know my pain
threshold.
Yeah.
And when I, the worst one was probably the, putting the whole pec back on and
then attaching it.
But when I woke up, I was able to like mess around with a stress ball and I
never took one pill.
That's amazing.
And I still have the full bottles of like, some are labeled 2008 is when I had
my first surgery.
And they're just all there.
There's a lot of people listening right now going, what if they're still good?
You count them all.
What if they're still good?
I'm going to find out where John Cena stores them.
Yeah.
It was weird because the medical staff couldn't, couldn't believe it.
Like they're like, you don't want anything.
No, because man, that's a, I know how I am with this.
It's yeah.
It's a fucking slippery road.
And I would just, I'd be high on opiates, opioids all the time.
I got my first knee surgery, I think in 93 or 94.
And they gave me, I got an ACL reconstruction and they gave me Vicodin, I think.
Pretty sure it was Vicodin.
And I took one, one day and I felt so stupid.
I was lying in on, lying on my couch watching TV and I felt so dumb and my knee
still hurt.
You know, it was just like, it was distracting me from the fact that my knee
hurt.
But I'm like, I can't be this dumb.
I'm dumb enough as it is.
I can't add to my dumbness with pills.
Like I just saw it coming.
You know, and also I knew a bunch of guys who had pill problems.
I wound up selling my pills to a friend of mine that would sell pills.
Gosh, I should have taken your idea.
Could have made some cash.
I only made like a couple hundred bucks or something.
I don't even remember.
It was like in the 90s.
But I remember just that one pill.
And so then every surgery I've had ever since then, they always offered me
stuff and I never took anything.
I got my other ACL reconstructed in 2003.
Never took anything.
I got my nose fixed.
It's like 2008.
I got my nose reconstructed, deviated septum.
Yeah.
The guy was insisting that I – he gave me two prescriptions for pain medicine.
And I was like, I don't want anything.
I was like, is it going to get worse than this?
He's like, it could get.
I go, right now it feels like nothing.
Yeah.
It's like – but if you've been – again, like you, you've been beaten up so
many times.
Your body – you're so used to just being in pain.
And I think for some people, it's just the daunting anxiety of pain itself.
It's like they just want a pill before they even realize like I can kind of
just – yeah, it sucks.
But it's not going to suck forever.
It's going to heal.
So let's just deal with the suck and just lay here.
Put some ice on it or whatever and just relax.
And along with that, it's kind of like your body's natural way of saying like,
okay, maybe push a little bit more.
Try to get a few more degrees of range of motion in physical therapy.
Like if those senses are numbed.
Right.
And like shut off.
Right.
First of all, you do feel just like I don't want to do anything.
So you won't work.
Or in many cases, you won't work to do the work to get better.
Right.
Or –
You're just numb.
You don't know the messaging.
You can't listen to your body.
Yeah.
Like if it's really, really in pain, maybe it's – maybe your body's trying to
tell you something.
I don't know.
I always assume that people feel pain differently.
I mean I just would imagine.
Like people feel hot sauce differently.
Like some people, they can't have any spice.
Some people fucking can have like, you know, death peppers and they're fine.
So all right.
I'll throw that out to the group.
Is pain a personal experience?
I mean there's no way I'm as tough as you guys.
So yeah.
It has to be.
But I think in other dimensions you might be way tougher.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe – I think there's something.
You don't know Tony.
I can't imagine the dimension.
I went and visited a firehouse the other day and I was going down the pole
going, wee.
Like you guys wouldn't do that.
I would do that.
So in that aspect you're tougher than me.
Yeah.
You can take ridicule.
We can take ridicule really easily.
But I don't know how – what it feels like for other people.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean I would assume that everybody feels the same.
But you know one of the reasons why I think maybe it is like – it's different.
Because my mom.
My mom has a crazy tolerance to pain.
Like my guy who – my stem cell guy in L.A.
My mom had a real knee issue and he was treating her as well.
And he goes, it's hilarious.
Your mother is just like you.
She just takes it.
Like she doesn't even flinch.
She's sticking it.
Like he's like that doesn't happen with like 75-year-old ladies.
Like take a needle and shove it in their knee and push it.
And she just doesn't move.
And you know she's like, oh, it wasn't painful.
It was no big deal.
It's like a lot of 75-year-old ladies would be fucking sweating and freaking
out and seeing the needle.
Pretty sure I would be.
Yeah.
But I don't know.
You know I don't know what it feels like to other people.
Like when I got my ACL, my right ACL reconstructed, it was a lot easier because
it was a cadaver and I recommend it to anybody.
The difference between a patella tendon graft recovery and a cadaver recovery
is literally like six months.
The difference is –
Really?
The cadaver was so much quicker.
Wow.
Oh, my God.
Because the cadaver, they take it – I mean it's all swollen and everything
afterwards.
But it's somebody else's tendon.
They take an Achilles tendon off of a cadaver.
So it's 150% stronger than an ACL.
They fucking screw that sucker in place.
Little tiny orthoscopic holes, not nearly as invasive.
And then five days later – you know Matt Lichtenberg?
I went to his party for his birthday party five days later just walking around.
And he was like, did you just have surgery?
I go, yeah.
I was like, it's not that big a deal.
Man.
Like it feels fine.
You know, it was so much easier.
The left one was brutal because they take a slice out of your patella tendon
and then they could take a chunk out of your shin bone and a chunk out of your
kneecap.
And then they use those to screw this new tendon that they created into the
shin bone and into your thigh bone.
That was rough.
That one was painful as fuck.
And it took a long time before it felt normal.
It took a long time before I could go down on one knee again.
When was that?
It was in the 90s.
And then the other one was –
Early 2000s.
2002-ish, somewhere around that, 2003.
I mean 10 more years of performance surgeries, 10 more years of medical.
I just think it's the – because they still do that patella tendon graph.
And I think George St. Pierre had it done that way.
I know a bunch of people that I'm friends with had it done that way.
And I was like, oh, don't do that one.
Yeah.
Do the cadaver.
But people are worried like, what if you get AIDS?
Like, Jesus Christ, you're not going to get AIDS from it.
Stop.
And it's also – it's like you feel better before you are better,
unfortunately, because the way the tendon works.
When they replace a tendon with a cadaver, it's not like you have this guy's
tendon in your body.
What it is like is that tendon is a scaffolding.
And then your body re-proliferates that with your own cells.
So over the course of six months, my body had filled in all of what used to be
a cadaver with my own cells.
So you'll feel like it's better before it's better.
So a lot of MMA fighters, they start training too quickly, and they blow it out
again because it's still soft.
That's always the concern.
It's always the concern.
In any – you feel good.
Yeah.
You're like, man, I can do this.
Especially animals.
And it's a little too early.
Guys who are just used to pain and used to pushing, you know, and they just pop
it out again.
I know multiple MMA fighters that have had knee surgery and then blew it out
while they were recovering.
And just a few months more, it could just – it'd be all right.
But it's impatience.
You want to get back in there.
And then it's even worse because you've got to drill into the same holes and
pull it out and open you up.
And it's a more invasive surgery.
They've got to remove the screws and – fuck.
Yeah.
But I just – I don't think everybody feels pain the same.
I think it's a genetic thing.
It's just an assumption, obviously, because I don't feel what other people feel.
But I think some people, just any kind of pain, it's just they can't function.
They're just in agony.
And I think those people are way more vulnerable to the pills.
That's just my assumption.
That's a decent perspective.
I definitely – I would agree with pain is a personal experience.
Like there are people who – I mean I've seen people like I can't believe you
go through that.
And then people will be like but you get the shit kicked out of you.
I can't believe you do that.
It's all relative.
I would be shitting cufflinks if you get that stem cell needle out.
I would be sweating right until the fucking final moment like some stuff I can't
take.
So I guess it is – it could be combined with like what we fear in life or
maybe fear of hard work or fear of effort.
Who knows?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think it's also being accustomed to pain.
Did you wrestle when you were younger?
No.
I played football.
You played football.
Well, that's just like that in that you're always in pain.
I mean if you're playing football, you're always colliding with people.
You're always – you got to have shoulders fucking with you.
Your backs fucking with you.
It's like it's never ending.
I've always said that there's something – there's some value into losing a
fight.
Oh, yeah.
Like I grew up with four brothers and we kicked the shit out of each other and
I was not always on the winning side.
So very early on in my life as a young person, you know what it's like to lose
a fight.
Oh, it's very valuable.
And I think that there's a lot maybe to do with the pain conversation there of
like just flat out getting your ass kicked and then being able to dust yourself
off and be like, I'll get you next time.
You know, like it's not over.
You know what I'm saying?
Right, right, right.
We're brothers.
We're going to fight again, you know.
It's also knowing like why did he beat me?
What can I do to beat him next time?
You know, like if you don't have that in your life – also if you don't know
what it feels like to get your ass kicked, you get a little mouthy.
I mean how many mouthy people do we know that have never been fucked up?
And I think that's why.
Like there's real consequences if it actually comes down.
You start yelling and you get mouthy.
If it actually comes down to it – and we've all seen many of these videos on
the internet where someone just don't –
they don't know what the fuck they're asking for or what they're getting into
and then all of a sudden they're getting hit.
And man, I'm not perfect and there are days where I'm short of patience but
when it gets to that weird spot of like, yo, someone's going to get hit in the
face, I always try to like lean on diplomacy.
Always.
Always.
Yeah.
Please, let's not do that because that fucking sucks.
And I've heard a lot of people say to you, man, if I was you, I'd be fucking
everybody up.
That's – dumb people always say that.
But like it doesn't end with that.
Then this guy gets his brother or he shoots you or he'll run you over with a
car.
Or you think you're going to fuck somebody up and you get fucking handled.
Right.
Like you never know, man.
You never know anybody else's story.
Especially today.
You know?
Especially today.
You never know.
There's so many people out there that train today.
It's so much different than when I was younger.
Like you would assume that – like I assume that a good solid 10% of all men
you meet have martial arts skills now because of the UFC.
Popularity of it.
Yeah.
Certainly in Western society.
Yes.
You know, the gym – there's a gym every plaza.
Also, there's so many kids that like watch UFC and then play practice with
themselves.
And you could learn a lot just doing that.
Guys learn a lot just watching it on TV and then emulating it at home with
their friends.
You can tell those who watch WWE because when those moments happen, they try to
do some crazy.
Oh, yeah.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
Oh, how many guys have fucking thrown their buddy onto a conference table or
something because they thought it was the way to do it?
Oh, it's crazy.
You know?
I mean the fucking sheer amount of punishment you guys put yourself through is
staggering.
I mean it really is staggering.
But thank you very much.
It is all for the – like it's like a pro football player, pro hockey player,
UFC.
See, I think the beautiful advantage that we have is that it's – we can make
choices on what we do.
So when you're in UFC and they close the door, it's kind of fucking best person
wins.
You know, you've got to – it's survival.
When we're in WWE and we both step in the ring and they ring the bell, we're
working together.
We're working together to put on the best show for the audience.
And in that process, you can calculate the risks you want to take.
And I think that's what allows somebody to be able to perform for 23 years.
You know, I don't know – I know that age-old stat that everybody says about
like the average NFL career is what, two and a half years or three and a half
years.
I don't know what the stat is on average UFC career.
Like how long – what's your window to be functionally profitable in UFC?
But I know because our risks are calculated and we're working together rather
than against each other, the math is way higher for you to have like a 10, 15,
20-year career in WWE.
But that also is 10 more years have fallen down, 15 more years have fallen down.
So it's weird.
Like you can choreograph the risk, but you have to do it time and time again.
And the schedule in WWE just changed.
Like to do 70 matches a year now in WWE is like, man, you're a workhorse.
We used to do 220, 230.
Which is so crazy.
220 days of trauma in a year.
Because you're getting – no matter what, you're getting some trauma.
No matter what.
It is.
A guy body slams you, something happens, you're colliding, you go off the ropes,
you're smashing into each other.
I get such a warm feeling when first-timers go into the ring for the first time.
It's like, oh, it's like a bouncy floor.
And then they fall down once and like the wind's knocked out of them.
They're like, my brain moved.
Yeah, yeah.
Now you got to do that again and again.
But it's weird.
I've gotten to work with a lot of stand-ups.
And WWE is kind of changing.
I would say it's on the progression of a stand-up making it to just like a
stadium tour.
But, man, when I performed, my sweet spot, we ran very parallel lives.
Like, I've worked every city.
Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom to Madison Square Garden.
Like, to the Saitama Super Arena to AT&T Stadium to Bangor, Maine.
Or to Valparaiso, Indiana.
Like, you go to all of these places.
Yeah.
And it's like, Friday you're in one place, Saturday you're in another place,
Sunday you're in another place, Monday you're in another place, Tuesday you're
in another place.
One day to drop your shit, one day to catch your flight out, do it again.
Like, it's kind of, we're kind of like touring stand-ups in that regard.
Very similar.
Yeah.
And you're responsible for your own trans.
And I'm speaking from my day.
I don't know how it is now because I got one left and then I'm done.
But you were responsible for your own transportation, booking your own hotels,
like, you were, they were just like, hey, we're starting here, we're in here,
good luck.
Which is awesome because you create, people are really independent when they go
through that fire.
And you weed out the people who don't want to be there.
Yeah, because there's just the sheer work, the sheer workload.
Making those clubs and, like, making, doing a tour.
Also the adrenaline, like, it's like, what do you do after a night?
Dude.
Most jobs, people can't wait to be done and then go home and relax and fall
asleep where you're doing stand-up or, obviously, wrestling.
You were just.
You're done late at night and you're like, man, what the water rush.
Yeah.
Fuck.
What can I do better?
This fucking killed.
And then it's four in the morning.
Yeah, you're buzzing.
Yeah.
You're buzzing.
And it's also, it's really hard to have any kind of a normal relationship
because you're just constantly not home.
You're constantly gone.
Like, even your friends, like, you really, as a touring comic, the best thing
that I ever did is start taking friends with me on the road.
Yeah.
Instead of just working with, like, random guys that I didn't know in different
towns.
Those are fun sometimes.
Sometimes.
Like, you know, two out of ten times you meet a new friend.
Yeah.
Eight out of ten times you're with some annoying alcoholic who, you know, who
fucking sucks and they're annoying and then they want to take you someplace and,
you know, you get in trouble.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's certainly the normal life aspect of it.
It's also, like, at full tilt, it's a very absorbing thing.
It's a very selfish thing.
So I think not only you don't work regular office hours and you're a nomad, a
gypsy, but especially from a WWE perspective, you have to, like, you're a
startup founder.
You have to wake up thinking about it.
You have to think about it all day.
You have to go to sleep thinking about it.
Wake up in the two hours of sleep that you get being like, I remember this line
or maybe we can do this stunt or whatever.
Right.
And it's people who are in your sphere, at least through my perspective and my
journey.
Man, if you were in my gravity from, like, 2002 to, like, 2019, I wasn't a part
of a team.
You did it my way.
Like, bus leaves at 10.
If you're there at 10.01, you're a fucking left.
Like, we're doing this and we're training here and then we're doing this.
But it's so the end product is good.
So, like, the dream job of, like, man, I never, the six-year-old kid holding
the paper belt can be an adult holding the real belt and get shekels for doing
that.
And I don't ever want to, I don't want to put that in jeopardy.
So, you fuckers are going to have to get in line and we're just going to have
to go.
Like, you know, I was absent a lot in relationships because if it wasn't on my
terms, it didn't exist.
You know, because here you got, you catch lightning out of a jar.
I'm a kid from West Newberry who's, you know, come from a family of five and we,
there's always more broke.
But, man, we were a good level of broke.
And then now, like, hey, if you just work hard at this thing, you can kind of
not ever be that again.
All right, fuck this.
I'm doing this thing all the time.
But that comes with, hey, I'm getting married or, like, my grandfather died or
I got a birthday coming up or, like, hey, man, you missed another Thanksgiving.
You're damn right I did because I'm doing the thing.
Yeah.
You know, so it's all, for me at least, it was that as well of, like, laser
focus, all things WWE.
Well, it's that in everything that you do where you want to really be
successful.
It takes, saying yes to the thing means no to everything else.
I had Jensen Whying on the podcast the other day who's the CEO of NVIDIA.
Like, one of the biggest companies on planet Earth.
Huge company.
Fucking dude still to this day works seven days a week.
And he was talking about when he goes on vacation.
I go, do you go on vacation and just put it all down?
He goes, no, I work.
He goes, even when I'm with my family, I have to work.
I'm working.
I work seven days a week.
I don't take a day off.
I love it.
And he goes, and I'm terrified of failure.
He goes, that's my motivation.
My motivation is not I want to succeed.
My motivation is fear of failure.
Yeah.
And every day I show up saying, if I don't do this, we could fail.
And I'm going to work seven days a week.
Everybody thinks they want to be a CEO.
You think you want to be a billionaire.
Like, you want to do that?
You want to do that when you're 60 years old?
Do you want to be working seven days a week, all day long from the moment you
wake up?
He wakes up at 4.30 in the morning.
He says he answers thousands of emails a day.
I'm like, what?
How is that even fucking possible?
Gets up at 4.30 in the morning, answers all these emails, works all day long,
constantly
problem solving, making AI chips.
It's fucking crazy, right?
Yeah.
But that's with everything.
You want to be at the top of the heap?
There's only one way.
Yeah, when you see something difficult look easy, there's a bunch of 4.30 in
the morning
wake ups that made that happen.
I think with everything in life, anything in life where you really want to
excel at it,
there's no shortcuts.
It doesn't exist.
That weeds a lot of people out.
It does.
It does.
And there's a lot of, man, armchair quarterback is the easiest and best
position on the field.
Yeah.
I can do that.
All I needed to do was do this.
Sure.
Go right ahead.
Yeah.
Take your best shot.
Yeah.
Good luck.
Yeah.
It's interesting because it must weed out so many talented people.
There's probably a lot of talented people that you've seen over the years that
just didn't
have that drive to constantly improve and succeed and really be thinking about
what they're
doing all the time.
I like that statement because I think the talent is doing it all.
You could have a...
No, you can have one.
You can smoke if you want.
I don't care.
Smoke if you're on and we're going down.
We have fans in here.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah, we have fans that suck out all the smoke.
Okay.
I think the statement of, man, so many talented people didn't make it.
They may have...
They may be an acrobat.
Mm-hmm.
They may be a fast talker.
But that's not the only attribute that makes one special.
You may be a great joke writer.
But, man, if you don't master stage presence, I mean, you're a great joke
writer with stage
presence.
But if you can't lug the tour, you're not talented for it.
Well, it's really the grind.
It is.
In everything.
It's like the all-encompassing thing.
So when someone with great athletic ability decides that it's not for them,
because eventually
that is...
One thing about WWE, for all the arguments of, like, backstage Politico,
everybody understands
the sound of money, and no one refuses it.
Like, I fucking hate this guy, but I gotta give him another match.
It may not be, but I now have to give him a 10-year contract.
But when they go out there, if the noise is there, even if the theys fucking
hate you,
you get another match.
I am proof positive of that meritocracy at work.
Like, everybody fucking hated me.
Why'd they hate you?
I was just real different.
Like, I was just really different.
In what way?
So I didn't ruffle any feathers when I kind of entered the business, kept quiet,
did my
stuff, but I also didn't connect with the audience.
And I don't know, maybe you guys see this in stand-up or not, but then I got,
like,
a personality of, like, the white rap guy, like, the white hip-hop guy.
You know about that?
Yeah.
But, like, I fucking went all in, you know, urban gear, like, and I'm a hip-hop
head, so
it's like, oh, man, this is my sweet spot.
This is the avenue.
This isn't all of my personality, but this is one level that I can show that I
think everyone
will get.
So if you go to Madison Square Garden, you get it, but if we go to Wheeling,
West Virginia,
you'll also get it.
And you may like it in some places and hate it in some places, but everyone
will get it.
I will not be selling apathy.
But in doing that, I never followed dress code.
I was saying disrespectful shit about my peers.
Like, I kind of did it my own way.
So I was kind of ruffling some feathers backstage or just, I was taking big
swings.
Because I was going to fucking get fired anyway.
The alternative was lose my job.
So I was like, fuck it, I'm going down swinging.
Yeah.
And then the people behind the curtain were like, ah, the kid's disrespectful
to the business.
He doesn't care about the business.
All the while, I just want to keep my fucking job.
You know?
So the they's behind the curtain weren't really invested, but they were also
humble enough
to be like, there's noise out there.
Got to give them another match.
And one match at a time, times 23 years of compounding interest, we're here.
What did Vince think about your hip-hop persona?
Hated it and then loved it.
He hated it and then loved it.
And I think I'm thinking for somebody.
But I think from his perspective is, like when I hear somebody's idea for a
personality, man,
I want to be this sports agent guy or whatever.
Oh, yo, I have the idea of what that is in my head.
And if their projection of that idea doesn't match my projection of that idea,
I'm like, ah, fuck, I hate it.
But that doesn't mean it can't work.
So I think what maybe would happen was my perspective of the white hip-hop guy
from the mean street of Wes Newberry
and Vince's perspective of John Cena, the rapper, we probably missed.
Like he had an idea and I had an idea.
And usually he will craft it to his vision.
I got to give him respect for allowing me to kind of run with it, you know?
Well, it's probably that fear of being fired that, like, keeps you on the edge,
too.
Dude, that was it.
Of, like, the NVIDIA guy of, like, I don't want to fail.
Yeah.
I got the sit-down of, like, hey, we're going to cut you because it's not
working.
Like, you're out there for your matches.
You hear the same thing.
It's not working.
And there's no argument there.
I'm like, fucking all right.
I got to touch the sun.
I got to make it.
I got to play for the Yankees.
I got my one at bat.
I'm Moonlight Graham.
And then they heard me rap in the back of the bus and was like, man, Stephanie.
Heard me rap in the back of the bus.
It was like, yo, you want to do that on TV?
I'm like, lose my job or fucking rap?
Yeah.
Let's go.
Let's do this.
So it was Stephanie's idea?
And it was a fucking accident, dude.
It was an accident.
Wow.
It was my final overseas tour for the WWE.
And the boys just spend time.
Like, that's the one time they get the whole group together is overseas because
you don't
want to be herding cats like in Amsterdam or something.
Everybody rides on the bus.
You go from town to town.
So, like, to pass the time, the boys just do whatever.
And they were freestyling on the back of the bus.
And I normally just fucking kept to myself because I was raised in the
environment of,
like, keep your ears open, keep your mouth shut, don't do anything less spoken
to.
So I did that.
But I also didn't make any connections with people who were putting their lives
on the line
for me.
You know, some of the guys you really beat the shit out of in the rings are
like your
best friends.
So I didn't have any of those connections.
And I heard these guys rapping.
I just remember playing Roller Coaster Tycoon on my laptop, full matching up,
putting it
away.
I'd be like, I'm going to the back of the bus.
And just waited my turn and then filleted like 12 guys.
Yeah.
And Stephanie was like, how the fuck did you remember all that?
I'm like, no, no, it's freestyle.
You just make it up.
And she's like, well, make up something about me.
And we were boarding a plane.
And I literally, like, utilized the plane, the people getting on the plane,
what she was
wearing, what she was eating.
She's like, would you do this on TV?
And that's where we got a chance.
Wow.
That's crazy.
And it wasn't like off to the moon.
Like, I got a shitty chance on a small spot.
And that worked.
So then I got moved to, like, the dog shit Saturday night program that nobody
watches.
But the cool thing is no one's watching.
So, like, I can do whatever I wanted.
So I started saying more racy shit and dressing more outlandish and having more
personality
and, like, claiming ownership of the show.
I called myself Mr. Saturday Night, and it's the shitty show.
You don't want to be Mr. Saturday Night, but I did.
And then that got another match and got another match.
And one by one, it kind of brought me here.
Wow.
Just a fucking happy accident, man.
That's crazy.
All the way to.
And even when the bells were like, hey, the whole thing's a fucking accident.
You want to start training?
Fuck, yeah, sure, all right, great.
You want to start rapping?
Yeah, fuck it, sure.
Let's see what happens.
That's amazing.
It's a happy accident.
And for it to go all the way to last year's massive heel turn, he went heel,
dude.
That was this year, by the way.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was this year.
Yeah.
It's been a year.
It's been a year.
Yeah, that was.
That was a mania.
And man, one, literally, perhaps, other than maybe Hogan, right, the greatest
heel turn in wrestling history.
When a good, good, good, good, good, crowd-pleasing guy goes bad, bad, and dark.
You had moments, the things you were saying, the way you were saying them.
Epic, iconic, iconic, iconic heel turn.
Cold, dark, working with the Rock, he was in cahoots.
That's the good guy, Cody Rhodes.
You can, like, see the people's faces.
That's the fun thing.
It's like, the stuff is so simple, but it's the, if you take out the crowd in
that situation and just put those three guys, it is really fucked up what we do.
But when you add the audience in the back and all of their faces and what's
going on, that's what makes one of you do magic.
Bro, even your face.
You got, like, a mean guy face all of a sudden.
It's like you look like a different person.
It's interesting.
I was having a bad day.
Well, this is also when you'd already done a bunch of acting.
Yes.
Like, this is this year.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is February this year.
Yeah.
How much of the creative control do you have over the aspects of that heel turn?
Like, for example, one thing that I thought was the coolest.
My idea.
I was in the front row of WrestleMania behind the Spanish announce table.
So, I'm directly across from the entrance, you know, the giant WrestleMania
football stadium in Las Vegas.
And there was no music and it was a black background.
Normally, he's the most color with the most iconic, loud, wild music, no music,
black background.
And in white letters, it just said, Cena.
And you just walked out with, literally, the statement was, I'm not here to
entertain you people, basically, is what it felt like.
And I loved it.
I mean, this is the main event of Mania.
You are so entertained.
I may not want to entertain you.
Fuck, I fucked up.
Yeah, I have a degree in pro wrestling, but my master's is in heeldom.
Like, it's like, the bad, I just love a bad guy.
And even ever since that bad guy turn, I feel like, and I feel like most bad
guy fans do, now newly connected with the back to the return of the good guy
Cena.
Yeah, there it is.
Oh, I mean, it was literally just.
I used to come out like a Tasmanian devil.
Yeah.
And it just reversed it all.
And it seems like nothing, but it's iconic.
Just cold as ice.
Everyone else for four hours coming out with colorful music and pyro and all
this stuff.
And there's the guy that normally did it the best and the biggest.
Just really not giving a fuck.
And WrestleMania, if you're going to do it, like, you'd give your best entrance
for WrestleMania.
And this was, I guess we were going for the shittiest one.
Oh, but it just rang the opposite and simple and true.
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So, like, for example, those things, those details,
that's you mostly pitching to the creative team?
Like, for example, like the, even just the white letters,
the black entrance, is that, how does that kind of come together?
So, I think that's, I've, and I've been lucky enough to kind of take this
perspective of not knowing everything
and realizing that even, even with 23 years of fluency, I'm not the smartest
guy in the room.
I don't know the technology they have and what they can do.
Now, granted, a black LED board, I could probably come up with that.
But what I, what I like to do is lean on my resources.
Like, hey, let's go to production and see what production is thinking.
And I don't want to tell them what to do because I want to hear their ideas
first.
And production was like, what if we just went basic?
I'm like, how basic can you go?
What if we just blacked everything out?
Yeah, but I know from what you guys have said, you also like to light the, no,
no.
What if we just black everything out?
You guys would do that?
Oh, that sucks.
Yeah, let's do that.
So it's not, it's not me with all of these things.
I don't, I don't have enough depth of field to touch all the bases, but I will
go to every
department and say like, okay, entrance is a big part of what we do.
What do we do for lighting?
What do we do for production?
Go to camera.
Like, how do you guys want to shoot it?
And then it trickles down when you talk to the talent you're working with.
How do we portray this message?
And then of course it starts at the top with creatively, I want to make you a
bad guy.
So we're going to do that.
Okay, sure.
We're going to do that.
How do you want to do that?
But it's, I think it's getting, we have a lot of talented people and just
allowing them
to do their job and let you know like, oh, I was kind of thinking this and then
tell
them like, yeah, that's a good idea.
Let's do that.
Yeah.
You know, that's amazing.
Cause I don't know what, I don't know what I miss if I'm making all the demands.
To show you the contrast, his opponent that night came out to, I think it was
40 people
on red, white and blue dirt bikes, all dressed like American people.
Nitro circus.
He comes out elevated from inside of the stage wearing this super gaudy mask
that he has
to take off.
Fireworks, fireworks, fire, sparks, smoke, all of these different things.
And he just comes out blank faced.
I just got my bunk sock on the back, just right on.
There you go.
It's so funny hearing Tony talk about this because for people who don't know,
the way
Tony runs Kill Tony is basically a version of a WWE event.
I mean, it really is.
Like when he does the arena shows, he has everything set up like a WWE event.
Yeah.
I mean, even the thing we did with Shane, when Shane was playing, when Shane
was playing
Trump, when Trump and I were supposedly feuding online, Trump had said
something about me online.
And then Trump's talking shit, like as Shane's talking shit.
And then the music plays and I show up behind him.
It's pure pro wrestling.
Oh yeah.
It's pure pro wrestling.
And MSG's on their feet, shocked, you know, you're surprising this crowd that
thinks they're
just there for a comedy show.
And well, there's the panel.
I guess that's what we're going to have tonight.
But the surprises, the ups, the downs, and then he brings up Joey Diaz.
So it's like, boom, boom.
Kind of like that big finish at Mania that I was talking about.
Yeah.
Superstar bringing up a superstar, you know, music, music, smoke, fire.
Yes.
All these little things.
The more you make it important, the more important it becomes.
Yeah.
As when, what he's saying is like when Trump was there, this was as Trump was
running for
president and Trump thought that I was endorsing RFK.
So he got mad at me.
So I said, I am here to endorse someone.
And I brought out Joey Diaz.
I mean, which is great because you're going to get a reveal, but you get a
different reveal
and it's like, everybody went nuts.
And, but it's like the audience, they're into it.
Like they're into pro wrestling.
They want all the heel turns.
They want all the chaos.
They want all the, the, the pageantry and the, the fire and the explosion.
And all the shit.
Man, you get, you get any live audience, they're into all that.
Like watch a college football game.
Watch, watch a soccer game overseas or, or a football, as they would say.
Like the fans, it's, it's like a group think of energy that's fucking nuts.
Like audiences wanted, it doesn't matter where you're at.
Like what, man, when comics just go out and light up a stage and they have that
fucking
stage presence and they just slay a set, the fucking audience is rolling in the
aisles.
Like they, you, you let the, you let them in and they, they can help make a
joke that
might not hit the night before slay.
Like it's, it's all about the moment.
It's all about being there and reading the people.
And the, the fun thing about WWE is you can, you can go out there with an idea
and in kind,
I can only imagine this as kind of like standup where if you got your set and
you tell the
first joke to crickets, you may try another joke.
And if that's crickets, you got to fucking pivot.
Yeah.
So we go out, we go out and do something and oh man, they're into it.
Great.
All right.
We have them.
We just got to maintain their attention until we get to act three essentially.
But if you hear fucking crickets, you're like, all right, we're switching it up.
Fucking pivot right now.
And you, that's the beauty.
That's, that's one of the things that I love the most is the, it's not just me
and the
other person out there.
Like the audience is the act.
Like that moment only means something.
If you put a blue screen behind the people, it is super fucked up.
Like what the fuck are they doing?
And why does that mean anything?
Right.
But when you let the level of the audience and everybody's on their feet, they
go, no.
Like it's fucking everything.
It's everything.
That's why Tony's so interested in the coordination of it all and the setting
and the sabotage and
all the chaos that's involved in all of it.
But these are, these are human emotions that are universal.
Everyone understands betrayal, jealousy, anger, disappointment, failure,
excitement.
Like these are universal things that you don't, if we don't speak the same
language, you still
have felt these things.
And you could watch that.
No one spoke in that clip, but you could watch that in anywhere in the world
and be like,
that kid just got fucked over.
Right.
Oh, what's going to happen next?
Like that's the beautiful appeal of it.
You know, it's, it's, we don't hit too far above our weight class.
Like we, we try to send large scale universal messages based on true, real
human emotion that
we all know.
Yeah.
And up to that day, that moment, like even that thing that we were just telling
you about
me bringing, uh, him coming out, that being a reveal, him bringing up Diaz was
coordinated
literally, I think 15 minutes before go time.
Like literally me with a, with a big piece of paper going, Hey Joe, what if we
did this?
He confirms it.
So I go to hair and makeup where they're finishing up Shane as Trump, which in
itself is just hysterical.
I pitch it to him.
He loves it.
I go to Diaz.
I say, Rogan's going to bring you up.
And the thing happens quick.
Whereas with almost, you know, every form of entertainment that we're used to
other than
wrestling and like kind of, you know, kill Tony in this instance, everything's
so pre-planned
that if we over pre-planned it, we wouldn't have had the topical RFK endorsement
because
it was like news that day.
Yeah, sure.
And, uh, so again, that inspiration, you know, totally comes from there.
Cause what else is doing that at MSG 10 minutes before the show, reorganizing
things.
So now we have to go to production and go have Rogan's, uh, LED ready.
And then Diaz in that order, you know, it literally comes from that.
And when it goes right, there's not a better feeling in the world.
I just get to sit back and watch.
Yeah.
But it's so funny that that connection with pro wrestling is really why you've
made to
kill Tony the way it is.
Yeah.
Like without your love of pro wrestling, it would be such a different show.
Like if it was just run like a traditional standup show, it's, there's so much
else going
on that makes it the biggest show.
Yeah.
Well, it's longterm storytelling.
We had a guy on, on Monday that had been doing it 14 years and man, he just,
his timing
was off.
He struggled.
Even after the minute I go, you've been doing it 14 years.
He goes, yeah, man.
I go, what do you, how do you make money?
He goes, I do this.
I go, you do this for a living.
He goes, yeah.
I go, you must have better material.
I'm going to give you another shot.
Do another minute.
Here we go.
Ladies and gentlemen.
And I introduced him again and he bombs again.
And literally, um, I was talking with it about it with Stephanie after the show.
Cause she just happened to be at kill Tony on Monday.
And she goes, guy, a guy like that, you know, what happened?
You know, what happens next?
I go, hopefully, hopefully the guy gets pulled out of the bucket in a month or
two has a great
set, puts it together, realizes his timing was off.
He wasn't taking a breath.
He wasn't connecting with the crowd.
He was just memorizing his stuff.
And the story begins to be told about this guy.
And sometimes it happens in reverse.
Sometimes somebody starts off, you know, fire hot.
Rocket strapped to the back.
Yup.
And then, and that's kind of the sadder thing, right?
Is starting hot and then never being able to touch that again.
Have a moment like your first time.
Well, it's like we were talking about people with talent.
We all know someone who killed during open mic days that we're like, wow, this
guy's going
to be huge.
Yeah.
They have like undeniable talent and they just can't manage it.
They can't figure it out.
They self-sabotage.
They get addicted to drugs or alcohol or whatever it is.
There are so many things.
Yeah.
It's not just the ability to go out and do the task well.
There's so many variables that will fuck you up.
Yeah.
Dude, you're right.
So many, so many gifted people have just, just have that roadblock in front of
them.
Which is why I think conversations with successful people are so important
because you get to
hear those stories.
You get to hear like with Jensen the other day, he was talking about how NVIDIA
was basically
bankrupt.
They were, they were on their way out and someone gave him a chance, like some,
some one
guy that was an investor gave him a chance and then they wound up becoming
successful.
And then there was this, these moments and people need to know that you're
going to have
those hurdles.
You're going to have those roadblocks.
You're going to have to figure out how to adjust.
It's not easy.
None of, no one who has been successful at anything will tell you the whole
ride was
easy.
Yeah.
But a lot of the time, sometimes, man, sometimes we'll be in it.
I, so I've been through like three generations of knowledge and learning, uh,
23 years in
the business that are operating at a high level.
I have seen thousands and like, it is the man, if you're a stud in peewee
football league,
then you go to this junior high school and then you're the number one player in
college
and then you're the number one, number one player in high school and number one
player
in college eke out a spot in the NFL.
And then a year later you're gone because the funnel just gets so thin.
Like WWE has like 200 personnel in their NXT development program right now.
Maybe 10 will make it maybe.
And of those 10, like really, honestly, maybe one will make it.
And what the hope is, is over a six year period of those classes of 200 that
get matriculated
probably every four months.
So we're talking 6,000 people.
I'm hoping one makes it.
Wow.
In five or six years, I need one because my top guy right now, my Roman Reigns
and Cody Rhodes
and the Charlotte Flares and Becky Lynch's of the world, like they'll last half
a decade to draw.
Maybe if we're lucky, maybe we'll get it more.
They can, you know, maybe parlay it into a decade or two, but that's an anomaly.
You got to play the legit math of like, after five years, I better have
somebody in the on deck circle.
So out of like five, 6,000, I just need one.
But it's still, everybody's biting their fingernails of like, we don't have the
person yet.
It's so many folks just don't make it.
Just don't make it.
Yeah.
That's, that's the parallel to standup.
Yeah.
It's man.
So the, you know, there's so many people that we were talking last night in the
green room.
Thousands.
And when I see them like in the ring do stuff, I'm like, I could never do that,
but they just won't, they just don't make it.
It's just, there's so many things that fuck people up.
So much self-sabotage, so much inability to stay the course.
Being our own worst enemy.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I don't know.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Happy accidents though.
Fuck it.
Well, yeah, happy accidents, but not just that.
It's you being able to stay on course and you being able to recognize that, you
know, okay, this didn't work.
What do I do?
You want me to rap?
Okay.
I'll fucking rap.
Like a lot of people would have been like, I'm not fucking rapping.
That's beneath me.
Yeah.
I'm here to be a wrestler.
Yeah.
I'm not a gimmick.
I'm not going to be a buffoon.
Yeah.
I'll be a buffoon.
Yeah.
Because it beats working a real job.
It's not only that.
It's part of the entertainment of it all.
Even the cringe aspect of it.
Yeah.
Where people are like, what is going on here?
Yeah.
It's great.
He loves that shit.
Oh, it's the best.
The best.
You know who my guy is right now?
Dominic Mysterio.
Love Dom.
Oh my God.
So he's.
Were you?
No, you're here.
You weren't at Petco, were you?
No.
Oh gosh, we had fun over there.
I bet.
I caught a lot of it.
Yeah.
Man, that kid's good too.
Like good human being too.
I happened to be in Salt Lake City doing a gig.
I was doing stand up in one arena and the WWE happened to be in the other arena
in Salt
Lake City just a few weeks ago.
And I'm like, ah, darn.
But I look it up and it's a 5 p.m. taping of WWE.
So I hit up my friends at WWE, I go, I'm coming in, I'm bringing my openers,
right?
Anyway, Dominic Mysterio's in a triple threat match and his whole thing is he's
wrestling
royalties, Rey Mysterio's son, but he claims that he might be Eddie Guerrero's
son because
his father's, you know, one of the ultimate good guys of all time.
So basically he takes on the traits of Eddie Guerrero, whose whole thing was
cheating and
lying and stealing, breaking the rules in original ways all the time.
And he's doing a triple threat match, which means there's three guys at once,
right?
But if someone beats anybody, you could lose your belt.
And his Intercontinental Champion, I think it's Intercontinental, right?
Is on the line and he gets thrown outside the ring and I'm having fun, right?
I go, Dominic, cheat, do something, right?
And he's kind of on the other side of the thing and he lifts up his head and
looks at
me and goes like that.
He gives a big wink and then he goes back down again.
And I'm cracking up.
I go, did you see that?
I'm next to Pauly Shore.
I go, did you just see him wink?
He goes, yeah, man, what's he going to do, bro?
I don't know.
But these two guys in the ring are wrestling and one of them has the other one
in a submission
hold, a camel clutch.
I can't remember who it was, but anyway, and I'm like, you, I literally, even
me watching
since I was a kid and even though he just winked at me, it was just enough time.
I forgot that Dominic was over there because this action in the ring is really
happening.
Something's about to happen and you hear the bell ring and I look over and
there's Dominic
with the hammer in his hand, ringing the bell and the guy lets go of the
submission and
the referee goes, what the hell?
And something I hadn't seen in 35 years of watching this thing, he was, he's
innovative
enough to find a brand new way to cheat in this.
Less twice.
Yeah.
A brand new way to cheat and the crowd, everybody's cracking up.
It's a whole new, right when you think you've seen it all, this guy who you
would love, he's
literally like built like me.
He flexes like Nate Diaz without flexing and he's just braggadocious.
Oh yeah.
He thinks he, he thinks he won, but the ref's like, no.
And they got to cut to Dominic.
He just loves it.
Yep.
There's our guy.
Dirty Dom.
Yeah.
And the crowd just loves him.
That's all of us right there.
That's Matty Edgar, Joe DeRosa, Pauly Shore, me.
It was DeRosa's first real wrestling event.
He had the time of his life.
Childlike wonder.
I love getting people in there live for the first time.
Yes.
There's something funny about a pro wrestler that's not built to.
Oh, oh yeah.
And he's the champ.
Oh yeah.
And all these other guys, that guy penting.
Man, he just whipped my ass.
Dirty Dom.
He just whipped my ass.
Yeah.
For real, I just lost the Intercontinental Championship to that son of a bitch.
Look at him.
Covered in gold.
Yeah.
Probably, what, five, nine, hundred.
No, he's a tall drink of water.
He's taller than me, but he's 170 pounds soaking wet.
Yeah, exactly.
He's such a uniquely American form of art.
Yeah.
It really is.
It's weird because in pockets of the world, like it's, Japan has their own
style of doing
it.
Latin America has their own style of doing it.
The UK has their own style of doing it.
But this.
Yeah.
Like, the Japanese is very strong style with respect to martial art.
The English style is very, like, catch-as-catch-can.
A real, like, technical expose.
The Latin American style, the Mexican style is high-flying.
Mm-hmm.
The American offering of, like, steak, sizzle, apple pie, ice cream, 4th of
July, everything,
like, huge.
And that's all Vince, right?
A lot of it.
So, is it all ever one person?
Right, it's not.
A lot of it is.
Yeah.
A lot of it is.
But, like, promotions like world-class championship wrestling were some of the
first to use music.
Vince was the first to be like, rock and roll, get over here and get on cable
and let's blow
this thing out.
I want to do it.
It's not just something we have in a local VFW with cigar smoke and guys taking
side action
on carnival tricks.
No, this is a fucking thing.
And we are going to make this a fucking thing.
Yeah.
It's also a fucking thing where it's a lot of it is not televised because you're
just traveling
around the country doing these shows.
Yes.
So, the business model has kind of changed where media content is king now.
So, from what I understand from TKO, and I know their executives will correct
me, but from
my perspective, we have scaled back on the live event only offerings, which
helps, you
know, lick the wounds.
It's weird, like you don't bump enough or you don't bump as much, but you kind
of need
to get in there and bump to get your callous and to get your wind and timing.
So, it's kind of, you get your signals crossed.
But anyhow, the content that is provided is always available for media or 99%,
where it
used to be the opposite.
We used to do like four live shows, one TV taping.
So, you'd have four live shows under your match.
You know, you'd do like Lafayette, Little Rock, Pensacola, and then TV in
Orlando, you
know, and that would be the end of the run.
And then you'd do it again of like Bangor, Portsmouth, Providence, TV in Boston,
you know,
like, and then you'd go for another week and go somewhere else.
But it's different now.
It's like every piece is televised for the media, which is great because we get
a lot
out to our fans across the world.
But like, I learned, I learned how to fail in those non-televised events.
I could take big swings because it's like, man, if I'm on the middle of a card
in Valparaiso
and I kind of fuck up in a gymnasium with 3,500 people, they might, they might
tell me to
fuck off.
But there's also the last match that's going to send them home happy.
So, let's try this new weird thing.
And that's where like me being invisible starts.
You know, it's just like, ah, I can try it.
Who cares?
Because it's an environment where you don't want to fail.
And now it's, there's way more advantage on getting our content out there.
But production is super slick.
It's like really precise.
Everyone's really good.
And I don't know how many people go out there and just like, like Dom, like
that was an example
of swinging big.
I'm going to fake ring the bell.
Will people even get that?
Who cares?
Let's try it.
Like he's, he's the only one of those guys who will, or very few of those guys
will stand
on an idea like that where the other guys are like, no, I want to have a good
choreographed
performance because I want my stuff to look good because it's on television and
going around
the world.
You know, I loved the non-televised events, but there's just, there's not,
there's not,
it's not a good business model.
So how does a young person coming up now learn how to fail?
That is, I think, a conundrum that we're facing because you're failing in front
of the world.
Right.
You know, it's, it's weird.
You can have, you can, it's like you work out your set, but you can't do it on
small clubs
before you go to arena.
It's like you would, you would work out your set at home and then you just play
the Intuit
Dome or you play Barclays Center.
Like you don't have a small room to be like, all right, it landed.
Oh man, I'm going to rework that one.
You don't ever have that.
You just have this, you put it together in your head, you think it's okay.
And then you're out there.
So I, I don't know.
I'm not saying it can't work.
I think it can because analytics show that it does work.
And we, we have a lot of people watching now, but from my perspective, I really
enjoyed
the carefree nature of just going out and being ready for anything and, and it
being okay.
If I, I fucked up and I failed, if I told some bad jokes, I could come back and
be like,
that didn't work.
That didn't work.
And then you have a partner to be like, oh, and this didn't work, but this slayed,
why
don't you do this again?
Like literally that's where this came from.
Just fucking around at live events and oh my God, there's noise.
I'll do it tomorrow night.
We're in a different town.
Let's see if they can.
How did you come up with that?
It was a dare.
My brother, happy fucking accident.
My brother dared me to do it.
Like when we, um, when I was in the middle of the, the wrapping wormhole, I
made, I'm a
platinum rapper.
I made my own album.
So like in, in making, yes, drink it in, drink it in.
In, uh, in making the album, we would bring home all the tracks and like my
little brother
was our test audience and he would do this dance where he would like shake his
head and
keep his hand in front of him.
I'm like, that is man, look at you.
He's like, you won't do that on TV.
And again, I was on the programs that no one was watching.
So it's like, no one's watching anyway.
Yeah.
Fuck you.
I will do it on TV.
And I did it on some meaningless Saturday show and there was a little bit of
noise.
So I took it with me on the road for the next week and did it on the live
events that weren't
televised.
There's a little bit of noise.
Okay.
Like, this is my thing now.
This is my thing.
And I just, you can't see me.
And like, that's now it's a thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, I did it on a dare.
Wow.
But like, I also had, I was in a place to be able to tell my brother, okay, I
can waste
two seconds on an inside joke between you and I.
That's the dare.
It's not going to ruin the match, but if you're watching, if you're the only
one person watching
velocity that night, you'll be like, inside joke.
Got it.
All right.
Let's like shouting out your gaming group.
Like seven people get the joke, but this is one of those things where it kind
of fit
and it stuck.
Wow.
It's just so many of those things in your life.
So many of those like fortuitous moments.
Well, you know, admittedly, I have an optimism bias.
I will admit that.
But life will deal opportunity.
It's a, it's, it's a matter of understanding that it's happening.
You know, don't get in your own way.
Like say, yeah, come here, sit with you guys.
This is a new experience for me.
Uh, like, yeah, let's do it.
Uh, okay, great.
Um, man, first wrestler to ever retire.
Yes.
That's a good idea.
We're just going to do it.
Yeah.
But you'll never be able to come back.
Yes.
But the, let's just do this thing.
Like life is throwing me an opportunity to create a year's worth of programming
narrative
that I think will be interesting.
The alternative is to do what everybody else has done and maybe hang on too
long.
People are like, man, you should have left a few years ago.
Now let's, let's, let's do this rap.
Let's do this.
Do you want to train?
It involves you working at this shitty job where you're probably going to, I
tried to
be a cop and failed.
I was going to go down and join the Marines.
That's lifelong employment.
I'm, I'm really good with structure.
I dig uniform.
Like I, I give me what to do and like a code of conduct to live by.
I have a feeling I would have fit in there.
Great.
I love being in shape.
They, they feed you over there.
Like I think I would have done okay, but life put an opportunity in front of me
and I was
stupid enough to say yes.
Going out naked in the Oscars.
I was just on Jimmy Kimmel last night.
He's like, man, you want to do this bit?
I'm like, dude, I am super tired.
I'm on, I'm on a different coast.
He's like, let me send you the bit.
And I read it.
I'm like, yo, fuck.
All right.
I'm going to do it.
What'd you do?
I shuffled out there with an index card over my dick.
Oh, that, that thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But like, man, in a room full of not even peers or contemporaries, like the pantheon
of the professional goal that you try to read.
I don't know any of these fucking people.
I don't belong in that room.
Right.
And he's like, yeah, man, let's kind of walk out there naked.
It'll be a fun bit.
And he's right.
It would be a funny bit.
But I could have got in my own way of like, now I got to fly.
I'm exhausted.
I'm going to make a fool on myself.
I don't know any of these people.
It's my first impression.
I can, I can sit on the couch.
Like, that's the easy part.
The tough part is like, life has dealt you this opportunity.
Fucking say yes.
15 minutes before the show, when you get a good idea, the easy thing to do is
be like,
do the show.
The hard thing to do is be like, yo, let's, let's fucking swing.
Let's go for it.
Yeah.
So it's, it's not like, I think those moments happen to a lot of us and it
doesn't have
to be a lottery ticket.
Granted, holy hell, I've been given a lot of lottery tickets.
But it could be something as simple as like, yo, you're in a crummy mood.
Find a way to be kind.
Like life just gave you an opportunity.
The person getting your coffee was like, yo, have a nice day.
You could stay crummy or you could be like, fuck, thank you very much.
Appreciate that.
Yeah.
Appreciate your time.
Like, that's an opportunity.
You know, life is just a matter of like us reacting to what life throws at us.
Pivotal decisions.
And it doesn't need to be a world changing decision.
I think now, I don't want to say nowadays.
I think we always think that like the decision needs to change the world.
No, it's, you just need to fucking commit and do something.
As a 12 year old, I want to start working out.
And I liked it.
And I just fucking keep working out.
And now, now I can't live without it.
It's part of my life.
It's a fabric of my life.
But in working out, I've learned structure and discipline, accountability,
essentially budget.
If you take in too much and you don't spend enough, you're going to have some
excess.
Like, these lessons that opportunity can teach you, if you allow it.
Me fucking up.
The thing I spoke about at the beginning.
Like, the easiest thing to do is your fault.
But if I take it as an opportunity of like, all right, you missed.
What did we learn?
Where's the game?
Yeah.
You can move forward.
And I can move forward and wholeheartedly apologize to those I've hurt along
the way.
And they don't need to forgive me.
That's on their terms.
I can't control that.
But man, the sleep is a little more sound at night.
Knowing like, in learning this lesson or having this opportunity, fuck dude, I
kind of trampled
on your shit.
And I'm so sorry.
Like, I had such a shitty relationship with my dad.
And just recently, we've mended fences.
And he's 80.
So I'm glad I've done this.
Because I mean, we don't last forever.
We're all going in the dirt soon, you know.
But I just wanted him to be something else.
I always wanted that motherfucker to change.
I wanted him to be something else.
And finally, I got out of my own way.
The hard thing is meeting that guy where he's at.
The hard thing is allowing him to be who he is.
Take the weight off my backpack and say like, yo, I might have needed you to be
this in my
life, but because you weren't, man, because of your absence in being the dad
that I had in my mind,
I got all these fucking cool male mentors who gave me a key to the gym at 15
and said,
you better fucking be here in the morning.
And like, dude, I still can feel a key in my hand from Dave Knock, the dean of
students at Cushing Academy who bet on me.
He was like, man, if you get your grades from C's to A's and you play two varsity
sports, this place cost in 94, this place cost 35 grand a year.
We will give you aid and you will have a place to learn.
And that allowed me to become an adult.
It allowed me to the opportunity of being in a diverse group of students who,
man, there's like royalty that goes to that school.
And then there's fucking poor kids.
My roommate was a basketball player from Compton.
And then we got kids with generational wealth who they're naming buildings
after.
But when it's just like 450 kids in a social experiment, money goes away and
you just kick it.
So I learned to be friends with everybody.
But I wouldn't have learned that in West Newbury where it's 99.9% white, 1,200
people in a small town, no stoplights.
You either leave or you never leave.
Like just little things like that.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, man, I should do this.
And I'm deciding to meet my dad where he's at.
And be like, dude, whatever I thought you were, you're not.
You're just you.
And I love you for you.
And man, when we sit, there's some shit that he'll say that's all fucked up.
You know, he said some shit yesterday that like, I don't think John's last
opponent should be there.
And people listen to him because he's a wrestling fan.
He's like in the kind of like the weird subculture zeitgeist.
And I want to call my dad and be like, what the fuck are you doing?
But then like, no, he's doing what he does.
This is him.
This is the dad I, this is the John Cena I love.
This is the guy I can sit down with.
And part of that is being able to process all that.
But the opportunity I get from that.
I've learned about my father's story.
I've learned about what he wants to do with his life, why he does what he does.
Maybe what he wanted to do, dreams he didn't have.
So I can gain wisdom from there.
But it's just, that's the hard part.
It's like getting out of your own fucking way to do the thing you really want
to do.
The easy thing to do is to hold a grudge against my dad.
What I really wanted to do was tell my dad I love him and sit down with him and
be like, yo, let's fucking break bread.
Talk about whatever you want.
And now we do that.
And it's great.
But that's like a, that's a small example of the easy thing to do is sit on the
couch and say, fuck it.
Somebody else's fault.
The tough thing to do is like life is handing me a moment right now.
And dude, I don't bat a thousand.
I mean, it's more like major league baseball.
I'm hoping 300 gets me in the hall of fame.
Like if I can capitalize on 30% of the moments that life gives me and squander
the other 70%, I believe I will go into the ground being like, man, I earned
life.
If you can capitalize on 30% of the moments, you are in the 1% of human beings
that have ever lived.
I earned life.
Yeah.
So I'm just trying to get that, make it to Cooperstown.
Yeah.
That's, that's the reality.
And also the reality is if someone doesn't give you what you need, it gives you
a desire to get what you need.
So many.
Sometimes it's a gift to not have like doting parents.
Like, yeah.
I'm like, oh my goodness.
Like I said, I would never have gotten those, the beautiful guidance.
I got it in life.
I always had father figures because I was searching for it and they, they found
me.
And I was also savvy enough to be like, this guy needs to stick in my life for
a little bit.
It sucks.
And he fucking pushes me, but I got to keep this guy around.
Like just weird stuff like that.
I hear a lot of wrestlers, a lot of times.
What do you want to do here?
I want to be champion.
Okay.
The math of that's really slim.
I never wanted to be a fucking champion.
I just wanted to wrestle.
And if you're good, it'll take you places where one day you can hold one of
those.
But if you start with a goal of, I want to hold one of those, man, am I pigeonholing
my goal?
What the fuck do you really want to do?
I just wanted to wrestle.
And if I got fired by WWE, I would have tried to go to Japan.
I would have tried to go to Mexico.
I would have tried to go to the UK.
Fuck it.
Because I just wanted to do it.
But that also meant I would put my best foot forward.
And I wasn't shackled to, I need to be champion or I'm not validated.
I'm not successful.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
Just give me a chance to go out there and get the noise and whatever else falls
into place, fuck it.
Cool.
Because what I want to do is just go out there and be in the arena.
It's funny because they talk about the noise the way we talk about the laughs.
Yeah.
It's the same thing.
It's the same thing, man.
It's the same thing.
Yeah.
You know, and I don't need to be the most decorated person, but it's weird
because in not even trying, I have a resume that people will now measure up
against like, oh, that's, you got to win X amount to pass the hurdle.
So it's weird.
Like I didn't, I didn't even try to do any of that.
All I tried to do is like, you'll just get me out there.
And, and when you look at what I've done and you've, you've followed a bit,
like, um, it was weird.
I was in the main event of WrestleMania this year and to talk to people, they
were like, oh man, that's crazy.
The last main event of WrestleMania I was in was 2012.
So you'd think that like, oh, John Cena, this guy's everything handed to him.
He's always at the top.
That was my first main event WrestleMania appearance as an attraction in like
13 years.
And in that span, I worked new wrestlers.
I worked for lower level titles.
I sat ringside and crushed three beers and then got fucking squashed by the
undertaker as a fan.
Yeah.
Like I did all sorts of shit, you know, but because it was never about like, I'm
not a success unless I'm in the main event of WrestleMania.
No, that's just a position with a ton of stress.
Just fucking get me on the course.
Just get me in the arena.
Have me in section one, shaking hands with people from Australia and I'll make
it the best fucking time they ever had.
It doesn't matter.
Like just get me out there.
What I don't want to do is sit on the bench.
Right.
You know?
So.
How did you go from that into acting?
Like what was your first?
So originally it was a business choice.
Vince opened WWE Studios and with the idea of if we make these guys movie stars,
more people come to the arena.
Now as a young 20 something on the road, people chant your name every night.
I'm like more people in the arena.
That sounds fucking great.
And his first movie was supposed to be with Steve Austin and the, it, it fell
through.
They were about to shoot in two weeks.
So movie pre-production is way longer than that.
But he was like, you're going to Australia to film this movie, the Marine.
And it, it was tough.
It was tough.
I went from arrive in a town at noon, work out, get a good meal in, crush the
show, have some beers on the ride to the next town, fall asleep, do it all
again.
And it's like this whirlwind of electricity to, okay, you're in hair and makeup
at six o'clock.
We're doing an explosion today.
So the lights are going to be weird and we probably will get to you around 5 30
PM.
You just said it's six in the morning.
Yeah.
So what the fuck you want me to do from here until 5 30?
I don't, you just hang out.
And I couldn't like as a young 20 something, I wanted to be in the electricity.
I couldn't handle the, um, the nature of the business.
Yeah.
And therefore my passion wasn't in it.
I wasn't fully invested in it.
I am, I am fucking here with you guys right now.
We are talking about this.
My, my mind isn't elsewhere on other shit.
I want this to be, I want to give you all I got.
So I'm here with you.
I was never there in those movies.
I was always back in fuck.
Maybe if I had the feud with this guy or if I could have done this, I was never
there.
And you could see it in the performance.
So I kind of got run out of the movie business.
I did so many shitty movies in like 2009, 10.
My, my best friend agent, Dan Boehm at the time, I was like, man, we're never
doing movies
again.
Right.
And you know, as an agent, you're supposed to be the guy to pick you up.
He'd look to be dead.
He goes, nope, we will find another way though.
He was honest.
We are never doing, we are run out of town, but we'll find another way.
So we did, we did, um, hosted some live shows, uh, um, hosted some game shows,
did little
appearances here and there.
And then, uh, Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer gave me a chance on, um, uh, gosh,
train wreck.
And it was a very small part, but again, like just, just get out in the arena
and do your
best.
And, and look, I was in a fucking room with comics, like funny people.
I don't belong there, but they, they created an environment where I wasn't
judged.
They only showed the good jokes that they didn't show the fucking 20 takes or I
tried to tell
jokes that sucked.
The only ones that made the final cut were the ones that made people laugh.
So they, they provided an opportunity for failure.
And at that point I've been playing the same characters in 2014, 15, I've been
playing
the same character on TV for 15 fucking years.
And now I'm like, yo, I get to do something different.
I can do this for 12 hours.
You want me to sit?
I'll go fucking read a book.
I don't care.
I'm in.
So I accepted the patient process of movies.
And then after that, I, I, I got a little bit of noise and train wreck.
And then Judd sent word to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler who were filming up the
road in
Long Island.
I'm like, if you got a spot, you should hire the kid.
And then they made me a drug dealer in their thing.
And then like things started to roll downhill, but it was very, very small
parts at a time.
And here I am.
That was 2015.
Here I am a decade later.
And I'm still trying to advance to fluency.
By no means am I like, I'm the 17 time champ of the acting community.
Those are the motherfuckers I was looking at when I was naked.
You know, right.
I'm aspiring to try to be that, but it's basically the pivot happened when I
was like, yo, if
you just invest in this, the hustle you and patience you put into wrestling, at
least, you
know, you gave it your all, you know, be coachable, be professional, be
reliable, be interested
and, and see where the chips fly and fucking say yes.
Well, it's also, you had the, the objectivity, like the, the introspective
objectivity to
look at your past performances and say, I wasn't really in there.
I wasn't.
And I got run out of town.
Yeah.
I lost the job.
So like, here's that, here's that mulligan.
What?
Fuck.
I'll, I'll never work in this town again.
I will.
All right, let's go.
Let's try.
What else could go wrong?
They've already fired me, you know?
So again, an environment and no one does it alone.
The, the people I was around, uh, Tina and Amy are the same way, like only show
the funny
shit, but try whatever you want, like fail.
It's okay.
And just because you're around people who do comedy for a living, all we need
is three seconds
and we'll be patient enough to give you what you need to give us that three
seconds.
You know?
Yeah.
It's a, it's just such a fun story, you know?
And there's so, there's only a few guys that have managed to make that leap
from WWE.
Obviously the rock is the big one.
Sure.
You know, I mean, he's the biggest one to make that leap and now become a giant
movie star.
Well, I think it's a, I think it's a leap.
A lot of people can make, uh, it's not from, from lack of talent.
We talk about like obstacles and like we're in our own way.
WWE is all consuming and you got to remember, like I, I was their biggest act.
So at 220 shows a year for me to be like, Hey, I need six months off to film
this action
movie.
That really fucks with the bottom line.
Like, Oh yeah.
So the answer is no.
Right.
You know, and, and, and now with less live events, it's still, you, you want to
be on
television.
It's like, okay, I need to somehow leverage my relevance with this to the, what
it's going
to do to film that in WWE.
If you're not, I'm, I'm going to retire on the 13th.
They will be moved on by the Royal rumble.
And that's, that is real facts.
I will be forgotten.
That is not a plea to sympathy of like, always remember me by the Royal rumble
and the
Rojo WrestleMania, nobody gives a fuck because they're focusing on what the
show is.
That's like three weeks after I retire, three weeks after I retire, nobody's
going to give
a fuck.
And that's not, I'm not saying like what I did was meaningless.
I've lived the moments.
They're great.
People move on.
So when, if I'm a talent who's on TV and finally got one of those spots and edged
my way in,
do I, is this the right time to leverage taking myself off a TV to do?
Four months on something that isn't going to come out for another 18 months.
And then I got to go back to TV, hoping people still care that my, my ring work
is still polished,
that I still have my finger on the pulse.
Like it's, it is, we can get in our own way sometimes.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
So I, I, I was just at the point in 15, 16, 17, where I was like, man, my body's
kind
of banged up.
I'm a little older.
I would like to take some time off.
And how I talked about like every five years, you need somebody in the on-deck
circle.
So I'm, I'm running at the front for like 15.
They needed someone in the on-deck circle.
And then they finally got some folks.
So they're like, yo, we got, we got folks.
Yeah.
Go do the thing.
It's fine.
Go do it.
So my, my passion for it was ignited at the perfect time when, when the office
side of
it was like, that won't affect our bottom line too much.
Go give this thing a try.
So it, it, again, just happy accident, man.
And I'm, I'm grateful for it.
So now you're in the situation, you're going to retire and then are you just
going to go
all in on acting now?
So that's again, beyond my control.
If I could, if I could.
Is that the goal though?
Is that what you would like?
Uh, the, the goal is to live useful.
That's it.
The goal is to live useful and, and not lack like a depth of purpose in my life.
You know, I can't control if the phone rings and they say, we want the kid in
the picture.
That's way beyond me.
What I can do is when someone bets on me, do my fucking damnedest for every
dollar.
I want to give them 10 back.
I want to show them that you, I want to show you your time was well spent today.
I want to give you my heart and soul.
And when I leave here, you may be like, ah, not my cup of tea, but the fucking
kids are
right.
You know, like that's, that's all I'm trying to do.
So if I can do that, maybe I get another, maybe I get another match.
Maybe I get another phone call, but I also realize my mortality in, in the
retirement,
like it's over, but also there'll come a day where y'all out there are like, ah,
the kid's
not, not cool anymore.
I'm done.
I'm onto the next shiny thing.
I'm grateful for what I got.
And I know I don't control how many times the phone rings.
I just want to, I never want to phone it in.
Right.
And, and when my time is up, it's over with, man.
I like, I'll, I'll do the rest of whatever life is.
So I think about that, like what the rest of life is.
Do you have other interests?
Sure do.
Sure do.
Um, love messing around with music.
I, I never read as a kid, so I'm reading more than I ever have.
Um, love cars.
Love to, I'd love to just drive that like just being in a car and driving, not
track stuff,
just like going on long drives.
Love that.
I see a bunch of sticks.
I love an occasional stick with some conversation.
Uh, I love, boy, did I miss out on loving connections in my life?
So I'm like, I have them now and they're fucking so cool.
So if, if a day is just spent with friends or a week or like, man, with WWE, I've
been
around the world like 12 times.
I haven't seen shit.
I've seen the inside of arenas, a hotel bar and a fucking airport.
Yeah.
I want to know what Tokyo is all about.
I've been there like 20 times.
I haven't seen shit.
You know, my God.
And, and I don't know if I'll ever get tired of that.
I like, um, I always have a curious nature onto, to what's next.
I don't know what that'll be, but I'm, I never want to wake up and be like, man,
life's
taken forever.
You know what I'm saying?
I think there's always something to do with the day.
So I don't, I don't know.
Would I love to continue to tell stories and get paid for it?
Fuck, that's a great gig, but it's also beyond my control.
So instead of being like, I'm going all in on acting and I want to do this.
And one day I want to win an Oscar.
And when I seen that approach is bad, I'm just saying my approach is like, man,
when
they do call, be grateful and don't be grateful in the easy times.
Be grateful when they ask you to work a 16 hour day or be grateful on that
press tour when
you have to read off the, or when you get to read off the prompter and you're
doing 86
reads and the reads are so you can dress up in the costume and all that other
shit.
Like that's, that's kind of more of where I'm at.
That's a great approach to life.
How did you develop this philosophy?
Is this dude, I'm not supposed to be here.
Like I'm from fucking West Newbury, Massachusetts.
I'm not supposed to be here.
And that's another thing.
There's not a day that doesn't go by where I look at someone I love and connect
with and
be like, man, what a life.
I understand how lucky I am and I understand I have been awarded more
opportunity than one
human being should get.
And it's, it's, um, from what I've tried to boil down to it, the best way to
honor that
opportunity is to do your best to try to live a good life.
And a good life is, that's almost like pain.
Everybody's perspective of a good life is different.
I've come up with core values and I try to live by those fuck I'm human.
I ain't perfect.
But like, again, if when I go into the dirt, I feel as if I didn't waste it.
And I don't mean grind like homeboy from NVIDIA.
That's, that's a grind.
And I think a lot of him, there's fear there, but also a lot of, a lot of that
effort he loves.
And that's what, that's what an ideal life to him is about.
And if he goes in the ground working 70 hours a week, he'll go in with a smile
on his
face.
You know, I just want to go in when it's my time.
I want to know that I honored the luck I was given by not fucking squandering
it, by not
wasting it.
And that doesn't mean grind to a monetary number.
It just means live a fulfilled life where the sleep is sound, the love is real.
And every day you're driven with curiosity and purpose.
And I don't know what the fuck that is.
And it could change, man.
I thought I was born to be a WWE superstar.
And then the elbows start hurting a little bit.
And you're like, ah, man, I'm born to be a storyteller.
And then you realize that like, I'm not in control of any of that shit.
That's just luck.
That's somebody being like, oh, I liked him in this.
Put him in that.
Yes.
No problem.
I think a key factor you're talking about here is gratitude.
I was born to honor the luck that I've been given.
Yeah.
And just try to do my best to live a full life.
Like, that's it.
Yeah.
And that having gratitude about the life that you live and being happy.
God, it's so hard, but so important.
And it's tough when you use that word because it's such a-
I know.
It's a new agey bullshit word.
Like, look outside the box.
Like, but nah, man.
It's a real word, though.
Real thanks.
Yes.
It's hard.
Yeah.
Because you have to be thankful for the suck, for the pain.
You have to be thankful for the lesson, for the journey.
Like, and these are, again, these are all like slangy, hashtaggy terms.
I don't know what the fuck else to call it, so I'm just calling it what it is.
They've been co-opted by people that just sort of bullshit and use those words,
but the
reality of those words is strong.
It's very powerful.
It's like grind.
Grind is another hashtag word, you know, but like, there is some realism to it.
But that, from what I've figured it out thus far, that's my path.
And when the facts change, so does my opinion.
So we can come back here in a few years and I'll be on some other shit.
But right now, that's kind of where I'm at.
Well, it's such a, the gratitude word has been really co-opted by goofy people,
unfortunately.
But it doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.
It's the real word.
And if the word makes you feel weird, come up with your own word.
Right.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Whatever.
Just having thanks.
Because I'm with you there.
Some words make me feel gross.
Yeah.
Just about how overused they've been.
But like, I can't stray away from that one.
Yeah.
I mean, we talk about gratitude all the time.
And we're always like, talking about how we're living the dream.
Yeah.
Like, just being happy.
Because what are we doing?
Just shooting the shit.
Yeah.
I know.
People are paying attention.
I know.
What the fuck are you guys doing?
A lot.
A lot of people.
If you're still with us, I can't believe it.
This is great.
Yeah.
I was thinking, I was talking to my buddy the other day, Peter Shore, the owner
of the
comedy store.
And I was telling him about how, just a few weeks ago, because now that I have
a place
that I like, and a car that I like, and a job and everything, everything's
finally, it
appears how I have always considered what the dream is, that I was saying to my
buddy the
other day, who I came up with, who I really started with.
And I'm talking about like 14, 16 hour days at the comedy store.
I'd answer the phone at 11 a.m.
Because back then they didn't even have a website.
Hello, you want tickets tonight?
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Work all night.
Put on the t-shirt at 8 p.m., tear tickets and check IDs until 2.30 in the
morning.
So I would hit, I would hit overtime by like Wednesday or Thursday, but they
couldn't pay
overtime because the comedy store in 2007 was half to quarter empty.
Anyway, so they would cut my hours and I was paying $400 a month to sleep on my
buddy's
couch in his living room.
And he had a bedroom and my other buddy, Matty, had a bedroom.
But Sandy was like, you know, he was like, the apartment was registered in his
name.
And I mean, terrible couch, terrible setup.
I'd have to go through one of their bedrooms to go to the bathroom.
So if you have to pee in the middle of the night, you're kind of tiptoeing
through, you
don't know what you're going to see.
You don't want to make noise.
You don't know what you're going to see, whatever.
And I was talking to Matt a month or so ago and I go, I think I still owe Sandy
a little
bit of rent money because I just simply didn't have it back then.
Isn't that crazy?
He goes, you do.
He mentioned it last time because we were talking about how successful you are.
There's an accountant right there.
So I Venmoed him out of nowhere.
I haven't even, we haven't even talked since pre-pandemic.
He's got a family.
I'm out here, this, that.
I Venmoed him a thousand bucks out of nowhere.
And I go 2007 rent money as the memo part of it.
And he hits me up saying thanks and we're communicating.
And then I remembered that at one point I couldn't even afford the $400 a month
for the couch.
And there was another comedian that was a door guy at the store that did have
the $400 a month
because he was getting help from his parents.
So I got downgraded to a beanbag for like a month or two.
I was sleeping.
Great for the spine.
Oh, just horrendous.
Exactly.
A sore back for two months.
Just in pain all the time.
But doing what I loved.
So much of what you're saying about enjoying the process, enjoy what you're
doing.
Because I really did back then.
And I think about that now more.
I've been thinking about that beanbag and that couch and that living room more
than ever the last few months.
It's like that's talking about gratitude.
It's like those are the things that that's who you are is enjoying that process
and making the best out of it.
And in my case of a similar story and from what I'm hearing from you, it's like
you wanted to be there.
You were not going to give up the beanbag.
Oh, yeah.
There's a lot of folks out there who are put behind the eight ball and really
have to dig themselves out of a trench.
When I moved out to Venice and I was working at Gold's, I was sleeping in the
parking lot in my 91 Continental.
And everybody's like, oh, man, you were homeless?
I'm like, no, no.
Choice.
It was my choice.
I didn't want to leave.
My old man had a room for me.
Nobody ever leaves West Newbury.
My dad was like, yo, come back.
You got a roof over your head.
You get some fucked up job over here.
You don't have to pay rent.
So I had choice.
I stayed in the car because I wanted to.
Life was great.
I got to see like the bodybuilders of the 2000s.
I got to train at the gym and shower at the gym.
And the rock came through.
There's like an old picture of me in the rock somewhere where I'm in my Gold's
Gym Club Store shirt.
And he's fucking doing this one.
And like I got to see all these people.
And it was fucking cool.
And I wouldn't have left if they took the car away and I had to sleep in the
parking lot.
Like I was by choice.
You know, you slept on the beanbag because you wanted to be there.
And the fun fact.
Look at that.
That's me in the background right there.
No, no.
Keep that.
Hold on.
I'm taking the phones off.
I'm going at.
Yeah.
That's me right there.
He had just taken a photo with me.
And that's me.
Wow.
That's DJ.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
That's 1999.
Wow.
Yeah.
Fucking rock was white hot.
Selling out every place.
Probably Staples Center, Anaheim coming in to press some weights.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
What a, what a, that, so like that's where the perspective exists.
Yeah.
Because I shouldn't have even been in the fucking club store selling candy bars.
I should be, you know, in, in, in, in West Newberry doing what everyone else
does.
Like that's the, that's the tale, you know?
And I'm not.
So I'm grateful for it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of people out there on beanbags right now.
Listen to this.
You need to hear it.
Stay on the beanbag, man.
Stay on the beanbag.
24 more hours.
Who knows?
24 more hours.
Something could happen.
Yeah.
And the, the success will be so much sweeter.
All so much sweeter if you do it that way.
I mean, if you were a trust fund kid and you had plenty of money and your
parents gave you
a hundred grand a year to go out and pursue your dreams and they paid for your
apartment
and man, you know, I don't want to fuck on anybody's flex.
You're right.
But at the same time, if, if you understand that, right, if you understand I
was put on
the board ahead of everybody else, I was born on third base.
That's again, that shit's beyond your control.
Right.
But I think you need some failure to understand that.
So if you're grateful for what you have, you will swing and miss and be
accountable.
Right.
Because you can't really control what you have.
You can't control where you start.
Right.
You can't control where you start.
You control where you're going.
So if.
Or how you respond along the way.
Yeah.
And, and the kind of person you are to somebody who was born on third base, I
think also will
dictate your perception, uh, from the, from the eyes of others.
If you feel you are greater than fuck, we're all human beings, dog.
Like nobody greater than nobody.
Right.
You know, uh, everybody's out there struggling and, and all of us, especially
in this area
of the, the pale blue dot, we all believe in capitalism.
So, so the fact that you were born on third base means everybody's doing their
job and
the whole system's working.
Like you can't think you're, when you start getting the, like, I, I never use
this word.
I feel bad even saying it deserve.
When you start getting the deserve mentality of, I deserve this.
Fuck it.
What the fuck do you deserve, man?
That's crazy.
You know, have you earned this?
Have you earned it?
And if you feel as if you haven't, what steps, steps are you going to take to
earn it?
If you're born on third and you feel bad about it, take some steps to feel good
about it.
I don't know what that is, but if you're born on third and you feel you deserve
it, to me,
that's fucking sprinting through a minefield, dog.
Yeah.
That's not a good path.
And I don't, I don't ever, I don't ever want to fuck with somebody who turns
like a hundred
thousand into 10 million or a million into a billion.
That's good investing.
That's, I mean, that's the system.
You, you, you learned how to work the system.
It's just in the process, if you think, you think you're better than, yeah, murky
waters,
man.
In, in, in my perspective.
Well, it's just a terrible perspective anyway.
Like you're just like, cause it's all, right.
It's all kind of fugazi.
Like there's all just paper IOUs or whatever.
It's just digital ones and zeros.
Like, are, if it melts down, are you really better than anybody?
You know what?
Well, a lot of times it's also a defense mechanism.
You know, you pretend that you deserve it.
You pretend you're better than other people.
Cause maybe you don't feel enough or again, everybody's walking through their
old mile,
but like, I don't feel validated or I want attention or I don't know.
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was crazy hanging out with Steph McMahon and how human she was and hilarious
and human.
I was telling her, cause I was telling her like, man, you know, I always wanted
to be a pro wrestler when I was a kid.
And then I realized I wasn't going to be tall enough and I wasn't going to be
big enough.
And then lately I've been meeting these guys and they're not that huge.
And when I tell them that they go, look at me, you know, Sammy Zane, hilarious
guy.
He literally told me that he's like, you could have done it.
And I'm like, yeah, I guess I could have actually done it.
You could probably still do it.
And I was telling Steph that she goes, do you think you can do a little
something?
I go, I can hit a super kick on anybody at any time from any place.
What's a super kick?
It's Shawn Michaels' old finishing move.
It's like a high Savat kick.
You would literally, you would faint from laughter because you actually know
how to fucking kick through a wall.
But it's a, it's a, it's a kick.
And the goal is not to hit the guy.
Right.
Exactly.
Come real close.
Yep.
And she's so cool.
She goes, oh, that'd be funny if next time, you know, I'm with Triple H, you
just super kick me out of nowhere.
I'll sell it.
I'll fall down the whole thing.
I'm like, I know.
Stephanie, this is crazy.
There we go.
There it is.
Yeah, that's a perfect example.
Man, this is, you're on it.
Okay, so a guy flies through the air and you kind of catch him.
That's just one example.
Like that's a, that's a really good example right here.
But it could be from, it could be from standing anywhere.
It's just pretty much that high, that high kick.
You can do that?
I can do that.
Are you flexible like that?
I'm flexible.
At least I think I am.
I don't know.
We'll see.
I wasn't throwing, I was throwing a rock at the tree the other day for the
first time in forever.
And I'm coming up about 15 feet shorter.
There it is.
That's what she looks like.
Whoa.
That looks real.
Yep.
Yeah, it's on there.
That looks like it's really hitting.
It's on there.
Two of the best right there.
It's on there.
Yep.
You really got that kind of flexibility?
Yep.
I don't.
You have to slap your leg at the same time and it makes everybody actually
think that you did it.
Oh.
Like if I did it to somebody, you'd be like, dude, you just fucking kicked him.
Because slap the leg.
Yeah.
Right.
Like stomping on the ground when you punch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Slide a head.
Yeah.
There's magic in the business, man.
Yeah.
There is.
I want to see you out there.
Hey.
I wrestled with my pillow for like eight hours a day as a kid.
I would do the entrances.
I would record off of the cassette player.
Remember how you used to have to record?
Dude, I had a whole, we had a whole league in our basement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I didn't need the pillows because I had four brothers.
We had belts, a league, personas.
Yep.
And in one persona, I would get my ass kicked all the time.
And then there was one persona that could not fucking lose.
Like we kept standings and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
That's amazing.
My brothers and sisters were all much older, but we had a music class teacher
in my grade
school that didn't give a fuck about his job.
He would just sit in the corner and play piano the whole time and let the kids
do whatever
we wanted.
And again, we had entrance music.
We were all different people all the time.
We'd run it back again, the entire 45 minutes jumping off of desks, cabinets,
chairs.
It's crazy how many injuries didn't happen.
It's amazing how resilient kids can be when we were that.
The energy of youth, just bulletproof.
God.
Yeah.
It doesn't make sense how arms and legs and heads and necks weren't broken.
You also don't weigh that much back then.
Yeah.
That's a big part of it.
Man, you're so full of energy.
Man, I can tell I'm getting old because I can be like, is that chair okay?
I'm going to be sitting for a while.
Am I going to be all right?
Is everything going to be good?
I'm like, oh man, this bed's going to kill me.
Yeah.
Just laying down like this.
The beanbag?
Oh my God.
Oh.
I'd spend four hours in that thing.
You'd have to cart me off.
I think I'd just sleep on the ground rather than the beanbag.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Back then it seemed like the better option.
It was the better option.
Yeah.
Probably.
That's hilarious though.
Yeah.
Have you talked to them about possibly doing something?
I mean, no, not exactly.
At one point there was a little chatter, but.
Come on, dude.
I think you can come up with an insane character.
Royal Rumble's right around the corner.
I have big shoes to fill over here.
Sturdy entrance.
We need bodies.
Yeah.
iShowSpeed did a good job at that.
Man, he got drilled out of his boots.
He took the streamer, famous streamer, internet guy.
He took what's called a bump from hell.
He got speared at the, was that the Rumble?
Yeah.
Yeah, he was.
That guy, he does some wild shit.
He does.
He got in the cage with Dan the Hangman Hooker.
Yeah.
And he's game for anything.
Yeah.
He has like, um, like a kinesthetic awareness.
Like he's, he's obviously an athlete.
Yeah.
And he's brave.
Like, look at this shit.
Yeah.
Watch his mother, just leave screen.
See ya.
Oh, man.
Oh my God.
You can't fake that.
Oh my God.
But like, you also have to, the reason that looks so good, a lot of that is
because of Braun,
but also a lot of that is because of I Show Speed.
He committed to the fall and really tried to fall with snap and with quickness.
Like, he's, he's good, man.
He really is good.
And like you said, like, I've seen a lot of the other stuff he does.
He, he does well.
Oh yeah.
He'll get in there and mess around, you know?
Oh yeah.
Well, he really sparred with Dan Hooker and Dan beat the shit out of him, but
he hung in
there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just.
Crazy enough to try, you know?
It's also interesting, these YouTube guys, they're just becoming famous and
there was
no avenue for them before, you know, that they would have had to have been cast
in a TV
show or become something.
With limited spots.
Yeah.
And now they're doing it completely on their own and becoming huge.
I mean, he's got like 50 million Instagram followers or something crazy.
Yeah.
And, and a bunch of content and a bunch of revenue to match that and like.
And always working.
Always.
He's always doing something.
Puts himself out there.
Those guys hustle and it's all, all the content creators out there.
People don't understand the hours that they're, they, they may end up getting
some financial
reward, but when you break it down to hourly wage, they're working 24 hours a
day, seven
days a week.
Like they don't stop because it's a lot of the content they make will have
short shelf
life.
It's not, they're not, they're not essentially putting gone with the wind out
in the universe.
Like it's like, you got, you're only as good as your next one.
Not the last one or the one you did.
It's like, you're only as good as what you're doing five minutes from now.
And if you drop off the map, someone will replace you.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
There's so many fucking streamers.
There's so many people that are doing content.
They, they work hard.
They do.
They work hard.
And even, even the, the ones where it seems like a man to a perspective of like,
I don't
understand this.
It's still the effort that goes into that.
And it's not just what you saw.
It's like, okay, you got to have a repeat performance.
And then you got to keep coming and keep coming and keep coming.
Like I do a movie.
And like I said, it's out in 18 months.
In 18 months, they've already put out 10,000 videos.
Right.
You know, like it's, it's bananas.
It is interesting that nobody saw that coming too.
Nobody ever thought that that was going to be a thing.
I just think it's because we get so used to stuff.
We get so used to consuming in a certain way when something is new for us.
It's like, oh man, I don't know if that's going to take off, but there are
young people
who are experiencing everything at the same time and like, no, this is cooler.
Right.
It's way easier to do this.
Also, he's really young.
And when you start young, there's not a lot of expectations on you.
No.
You can kind of just do whatever you want.
And if it works, great.
Young and courageous too.
Yeah.
Like just go for it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, it's, it's also a great example for other people that are thinking like,
I'm kind
of entertaining.
I just don't have an avenue.
Let me just start making videos.
You got a phone.
Yeah.
You got a chance.
Isn't that crazy?
That's all you have to do is have a phone.
It's nuts.
You see the videos where he was sprinting with Ashton Forbes, you know, that
super jacked
guy that does that morning routine that everybody made fun of.
Cause he has this like morning routine where he dunks his face in water and
then someone hands him his
gold watch and he puts it on.
It's like really kind of silly.
Yeah.
Huh.
You know, and he had a whole series of races with him cause he couldn't believe
that this
YouTuber guy could beat him.
Cause he's like this fucking super jacked, ripped guy who a lot of his online
content is him
running and he just looks like a force of nature.
And I show speed beat him like three times in these races, but he didn't want
to believe
that he lost.
So he wanted to do it again.
Let's do it again.
Let's do it again.
And I show speeds talking shit to him.
He did it again.
So you can find it.
It's very funny.
It's very funny because when you look at the guy, you're like, Oh, this guy
looks like
he could run like a horse and I show speed is actually faster than him.
I think he, he sprinted an actual Olympic sprinter.
I mean, he started fucking around a little bit, but he held his own.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
He was like right there with an Olympic sprinter.
That's nuts.
I think he won the gold, the guy that he raced.
That's, he's like right next to him.
That's crazy.
Like, and he's not even fucking training like that guy is.
Imagine if he was like that fucking guy, if he wanted to like fully invest
himself into
sprinting, he's only what?
20, 20 years old.
That's wild.
Wow.
Really?
Imagine if that kid fully invested in that and then became an Olympic gold
medalist as
well.
So that's, that's where, that's where my mind goes as well.
It seems like he can, but also why, why not?
Cause it'll make his streams even bigger.
Will it?
I don't know.
I mean, or will sprinting against a gold medalist, getting in the cage with a
fighter, getting
in the ring with a champion, uh, go into that guy's house and, and besting him
at his own
thing.
Like he should keep doing that.
He shouldn't, he shouldn't go into one hit the lane he's in.
I think he's doing pretty well.
Right.
It's almost better losing to the fastest man alive by that much.
Or like, so I can tell by watching that you, like, I love potential and you see
that and
you're like, Oh my God, potential.
Right.
This guy could, he could win it all.
It's finding a video of him, uh, sprinting against, uh, that Ashton guy.
Cause it's kind of wild.
For what?
This guy's got the world by the nuts, right?
He should, he should do what he's doing.
Exactly.
I only know him from that appearance at the Royal rumble.
Like he got booked on the rumble because he has a big following.
I'm watching the rumble.
I go, who's this high show speed guy?
And I go, wow, that kid took a hell of a bump.
So I know him.
Ashton Forbes guy.
No.
Look at the way this guy's built.
Oh my.
He's talking shit while he's running.
Oh man.
And he fell.
He's yelling.
40 million people.
Is that right?
The number of views in the corner?
40 million?
Unbelievable.
Wow.
Oh man.
Look at that.
Wow.
Yeah.
They raced a bunch of times.
And the other guy, didn't that other guy, he played football, right?
Not in the NFL, but I think like college football or something.
Look at this fucking size of him too.
The other guy's fucking super jacked.
Like that's his whole thing is online content.
It's him running, being super jacked.
And he has to deal with I show speed talking shit to him.
And he's saying like, play some of this.
The first one I slipped.
Second one, you barely beat me.
Let's run it again.
Well, I got to beat you three times.
Come on, let's do it.
See, when I see that, right?
Let's go again.
Excuse me.
It's not easy.
And he said, what is he, 25?
26?
That's hilarious.
He's talking so much shit.
So I see this and be like, this kid should be a wrestler.
Right.
Because he is athletic and he can talk shit and back it up.
My God, this kid would, he would be a 20-time champion, whatever.
No, he should do this.
Are they running barefoot on the fucking concrete?
I think so.
They have shoes on.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
That'd be a bad decision.
That was pretty close.
Yeah, but he started before him.
Yeah.
Before me, he's still lost.
He started before him.
Before me, he's still lost.
Like, he should be doing that.
Yeah.
But, like, you see the sprinting potential.
I see the WWE potential.
He should do neither.
He should just do that.
Right.
Well, he's already done WWE.
I guarantee you they'd probably want him to do it again.
Oh, my God.
I think he did a thing.
He just went to, like, the performance center.
Yeah.
And, like, he's really good.
Really good.
He's got great instincts.
He's got great timing.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
And he's only 20.
There's now, like, this is, like, full multi-camera, really good shooting.
And he's Speedverse Pros, I think, because he's kind of doing that ID you just
said.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, like, where he goes to people's expertise.
Look at that, 46.2 million subscribers on YouTube.
That's wild.
Yeah, so I think, like, he should just do that, you know, whatever he's doing.
Why not?
I mean, he's obviously doing it.
Does he have, like, a team behind him that's editing all this shit now?
I'm sure.
I'm sure, yeah.
Probably.
Oh, look at that.
He's learning how to do flips.
Oh, that's crazy.
So he's really in it.
Yeah.
And I think it's just, like, show up for a few days and then go on to the next
discipline.
Wow.
So he does everything.
Smart.
Very smart.
He spent all summer going to a city every day.
Everything was live streamed for, like, 24 hours straight.
They'd go to a city, show up.
What's the coolest thing to do in the city?
And do it?
Do it.
Like, what kind of shit was he doing?
Go to the fair, ride all rides, try all the games.
A bunch of kids following around.
Next day.
They were here in Austin going to Terry Black's.
I think he went and did stand-up with Mark Norman in, like, New York City.
Like, that's cool.
That's cool, man.
He went on stage for a second.
That's wild that he's so young, too.
Only 20?
Yeah.
That talented?
And just brave and courageous and going for it.
Yeah.
Like, that's, regardless of what you and I think, he's doing exactly what he
should be doing.
You know, he should just keep doing that.
And obviously not getting in his own way.
Not.
Yeah.
Not at all.
Not at all.
All the things you're saying, like, capitalizing on every opportunity.
There's a story yet to be told.
Yeah.
Story yet.
Still got a lot of life left.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of life left.
Yeah?
Yeah.
But still.
He's doing great so far.
Yeah.
Amazing.
I think we can wrap this up.
It was a fucking awesome podcast.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you very much.
It is a real big opportunity for you to have me on here because the WWE folks
that you have had, I think I'm still, I only got one date left, but I still
think I'm the active one.
I hope this experience has been good for you guys.
Oh, it's been amazing.
I hope you have more of the guys and gals from us in on your show.
Absolutely.
Every one of them's got a great story to tell you.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think your philosophy is contagious, and I think it's really good for
people to hear.
And I think there's a lot of young people out there that are really going to
benefit from a lot of the things you said because I think it's rock solid.
That means a lot coming from you.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Tony, you're the man.
Awesome.
Thank you, guys.
Appreciate you.
Just call it.
Bye, everybody.
Good call off.
Thank you.