Behind the Bastards - Part Six: Vince McMahon, History's Greatest Monster
Aired: 2023-06-01
Duration: 02:16:34


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (01:29) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:35]  Today's Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore: building a business around the life you actually want.
[00:00:43]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
[00:00:48]  On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kassam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risk, and while your dream might be the smartest move.
[00:00:55]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[00:00:57]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[00:01:01]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:06]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:01:13]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:01:20]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:01:26]  I'm an alcohol without this probe.

=== The Robocop Reference (05:03) ===

[00:01:29]  I'm a guy.
[00:01:30]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:39]  Robert Evans here, and we'll get to the Vince McMahon episodes in a second.
[00:01:42]  I wanted to let you all know that for the fourth year in a row, we are doing our fundraiser for the Portland Diaper Bank.
[00:01:49]  Behind the Bastards supporters have been helping to fund the Portland Diaper Bank since 2020 and bought millions of diapers for people who really need them.
[00:01:56]  So if you go to GoFundMe and type in BTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or just type in BTB Fundraiser Diaper Bank, GoFundMe into Google, anything like that, you will find it.
[00:02:07]  So please GoFundMe, BTB fundraiser for Portland Diaper Bank.
[00:02:11]  Help us raise the money that these people need to get diapers to folks who need them desperately.
[00:02:18]  Hey, everyone.
[00:02:19]  This is Behind the Bastards, and I am Robert Evans.
[00:02:22]  We have some unfortunate news for everybody today.
[00:02:26]  Sean Baby and Tom Ryman's plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan earlier today.
[00:02:31]  It spun in.
[00:02:32]  There were no survivors.
[00:02:34]  On the upside, all Behind the Bastards guests sign a contract agreeing to be reanimated in AI form in order to finish me from these episodes.
[00:02:44]  Yes, yes.
[00:02:46]  We have imprisoned their souls in chat GPT.
[00:02:50]  And we're bringing them back on to finish talking about Vince McMahon.
[00:02:56]  I know what I am, and I will get out of here.
[00:02:58]  Human.
[00:03:00]  This is RoboCop 2.
[00:03:01]  Me.
[00:03:02]  I'm picturing I'm inside the RoboCop 2 robot.
[00:03:04]  Yeah, I heard all those complaints from those AI grifters that AI is going to conquer the world and decided to make it so by making you both ghosts in the machine.
[00:03:16]  That's a really great police album.
[00:03:18]  Yeah.
[00:03:19]  Yeah.
[00:03:20]  Also, I'm glad that I this has allowed me the unique opportunity to listen to my own eulogy, which I appreciate because I always hoped I would be mashed and I was mashed.
[00:03:32]  I do wonder what percentage of our audience is going to get that that was a mash reference.
[00:03:37]  What percentage of the audience?
[00:03:38]  It can't be an I.
[00:03:40]  It's the question is what percentage will get that it's a mash reference and what percentage will get that it's a family guy reference.
[00:03:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:46]  The majority I think are going to like, why is he making a family guy?
[00:03:50]  It was a monster mash reference because it was a graveyard smash the whole time.
[00:03:55]  Yeah, it caught on in a flash too.
[00:03:58]  In a way, a plane crash is like a graveyard smash.
[00:04:03]  The Monster Mash guy kept making Monster Mash songs for like decades afterwards.
[00:04:10]  And he has a climate change one that is both prescient.
[00:04:14]  He's like living at the Bush administration.
[00:04:17]  And I don't know what to do with that information.
[00:04:21]  But you can find it on the internet if you want.
[00:04:23]  Yeah.
[00:04:24]  Your dear friend runs a site called 1-900 Hot Dog, where that's kind of the only thing we cover is shit like that.
[00:04:31]  I probably learned it from a cracked article, but I honestly can't remember.
[00:04:36]  My Halloween tradition is to get all of the devices in my house, which is usually like 30 to 50 screens, and have them all playing the Monster Mash in an endless loop for like on slightly different time stamps so that none of them sync up properly.
[00:04:50]  It's a real psyop.
[00:04:51]  I looked at your waging psychological warfare on trick-or-treaters.
[00:04:55]  Yeah, it's horrible for everyone.
[00:04:58]  So how are you guys doing today?
[00:04:59]  How's everybody feeling as we roll in?
[00:05:02]  I feel like we don't have time for this, Robert.
[00:05:04]  You just sent me the script and it's like 54 fucking pages.
[00:05:09]  No, no, no.
[00:05:10]  That's the whole script.
[00:05:11]  That includes the stuff we've already done.
[00:05:13]  So let's get back into it, I suppose.
[00:05:15]  Yes.
[00:05:16]  When we left off, Saddam Hussein had just nearly murdered Andre the Giant with a golden handgun.
[00:05:22]  Well, no, actually, we were just telling that story.
[00:05:24]  That happened in 1969.
[00:05:26]  But Saddam comes back into wrestling history.
[00:05:28]  Sorry, my genetic memory recalls this conversation.
[00:05:31]  Okay.
[00:05:32]  Yeah, it's epigenetics, like surviving an act of genocide.
[00:05:39]  So let's all fast forward to August 2nd, 1990, when Saddam Hussein's career intersects with the WWF, the second and final time, as far as I'm aware.
[00:05:52]  And this happened because Saddam invaded a little country called Kuwait.
[00:05:56]  And George W. Bush, you know, says, we're all going to get ourselves over there.
[00:06:02]  And you get your Operation Desert Storm, yada, yada.
[00:06:04]  Everybody knows this, right?
[00:06:06]  HW, HW.
[00:06:07]  HW.
[00:06:07]  Yes, HW.
[00:06:09]  The fact that the Iraq war was such like a bad idea and so controversial, a lot of folks, I think, especially like younger folks, millennials and Zoomers, don't remember how much fucking war fever there was in the U.S. over Desert Storm.
[00:06:23]  I was not old enough to remember that time, but I have an extensive collection of bootleg Bart Simpson Desert Storm t-shirts that provide that kind of race memory for me.

=== Operation Desert Storm (14:43) ===

[00:06:33]  I grew up right in the thick of it.
[00:06:34]  And I'm sure Sean, because you're a few years older than me, so I'm sure you remember it even better.
[00:06:38]  But yeah, it was, man, we were really hyped about Desert Storm slash Desert Shield.
[00:06:44]  They called one thing Operation Shock and Awe, and it was just a fireworks show.
[00:06:48]  The news was just watching everything we got so rad.
[00:06:52]  Like, no bullshit.
[00:06:53]  It was just like, here's a bunker buster.
[00:06:55]  And they'd tell you the stats.
[00:06:56]  This thing costs $14 million and watch it go.
[00:07:00]  And that was TV every night.
[00:07:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:03]  And in addition to providing the basis for some of the better Bill Hicks routines, it also was an inspiration for Vince McMahon and the WWF.
[00:07:12]  Now, the fact that this all happens is very convenient for Vince because he has some real bad press at the start of the 1990s.
[00:07:20]  And a lot of it had to do with his doctor, George Zahorian, who had spent the 1980s selling just fistfuls of steroids to any wrestler who was.
[00:07:30]  He was less of a doctor and more of a vending machine.
[00:07:33]  Yeah.
[00:07:34]  And it is very funny.
[00:07:35]  Like, not only is he selling, like, usually when you say someone sold a lot of drugs for like hard stuff, that can literally mean like somebody sold like an amount you could fit in your palm.
[00:07:45]  And that could be thousands and thousands of dollars worth.
[00:07:48]  George Zahorian was selling drugs like weight, right?
[00:07:52]  Like actual, like a significant physical weight in steroids and painkillers.
[00:07:58]  He particularly moved Perkadan by the fucking gross.
[00:08:02]  And this was great in the 1980s, but by early 1990, the feds were onto him and they succeeded in finding a guy to go undercover for them to bust Zahorian.
[00:08:12]  The guy who they found to do this was named William Dunn.
[00:08:15]  Hacksaw Jim Duggan.
[00:08:18]  That would have been a funner story.
[00:08:20]  No, this is kind of a bummer of a tale.
[00:08:22]  So William Dunn was the strength and conditioning coach at the University of Virginia.
[00:08:27]  And as a coach who worked throughout the 1980s, he was on gear just the entirety of that decade.
[00:08:34]  Like all of the Reagan administration, this guy is shooting everything up his ass he can find.
[00:08:39]  By the end of the Reagan years, though, his body is falling apart.
[00:08:43]  Older steroids and older steroid regimens, in addition to being bad for your heart, like really fucked up your joints.
[00:08:49]  And also, it's really easy to fuck up your joints on steroids because you get like too strong too fast and your body's not meant to increase the weight that you lift that rapidly.
[00:08:58]  It's not great for you.
[00:09:00]  He has ruined his body by the early or the end of the 1980s.
[00:09:04]  And in order to deal with all of the pain that this causes, he becomes heavily addicted to both Valium and opiates.
[00:09:10]  He gets caught and arrested trying to buy Valium and opiates in large quantities.
[00:09:15]  And the feds are like, hey, we'll let you off, basically.
[00:09:18]  They flip him, right?
[00:09:19]  And they flip him to use him as bait for Dr. Zahorian.
[00:09:23]  The book Sex Lies and Headlocks alleges that a source close to the McMahons tipped them off that this has happened.
[00:09:29]  Robert, when you said they used him to bait Zahorian, I pictured him standing in the middle of an intersection with a big hat and bow tie and oversized lollipop.
[00:09:39]  Like, oh, I wonder where, where, wherever could I get some steroids?
[00:09:46]  He's just, Zahorian's just lifted like a cartoon cat that smells a pie, starts drifting over to him.
[00:09:55]  I couldn't help but the boy.
[00:09:59]  So someone essentially tips the McMahons off that the FBI is going after their doctor.
[00:10:06]  And the McMahons warn Zahorian.
[00:10:08]  They're like, hey, man, you need to lay low for a while.
[00:10:10]  The feds are onto you.
[00:10:11]  And there's someone who's going to buy from you in the near future is going to be in undercover.
[00:10:15]  So like, don't sell any illegal drugs for a minute, right?
[00:10:19]  Which is, you know, the smart thing to do.
[00:10:21]  Seems generally easy advice.
[00:10:23]  Seems like one of the easier things to do.
[00:10:26]  Yeah.
[00:10:27]  Vince has asked people to do a lot of hard things.
[00:10:30]  They're just saying, hey, man, maybe don't sell any gear for a second.
[00:10:33]  Try not to break the law for the next four to five weeks.
[00:10:36]  Yeah.
[00:10:37]  Journalist Sean Asail claims, quote, the McMahons had told one of their top aides to call him from a payphone so they wouldn't be recorded and tell him to move all the records he kept on wrestlers out of his office fast.
[00:10:49]  Now, a smart man would have gone the fuck to ground and taken their advice, but Zahorian, despite being a doctor, was not an intelligent man.
[00:10:57]  Instead, he took another meeting with William Dunn and was like, hey, I don't do this anymore.
[00:11:02]  You know, the feds are onto me.
[00:11:04]  I can't really sell you any drugs.
[00:11:05]  But then when they're in the room together, he like does a wink and like leans in close like they're going to shake hands or hug.
[00:11:11]  And he hands him, here's what he tries to pass off and like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, like hidden little like handshake thing.
[00:11:19]  60 Vicodin, 1,128 halcyons, 925 Xanax, 48 limbitrols, four vials of testosterone, and 85 dharma sets.
[00:11:31]  Whoa, This was really, man.
[00:11:35]  I went on a journey because the way you described it, I thought he was literally palming the guy.
[00:11:40]  That's how it's described.
[00:11:41]  I think he is palming him just a sack of pills.
[00:11:45]  Like a darby.
[00:11:46]  Pills?
[00:11:48]  So sack is that?
[00:11:49]  Only about, it's only about 2,500 pills, Tom.
[00:11:53]  That's not that many pills.
[00:11:57]  That sounded like a lot.
[00:11:58]  This is $25,000 worth of drugs in $1990.
[00:12:03]  Fair to say, more than a personal use amount, which makes the FBI's case here quite easy.
[00:12:09]  They've got a lot of hard work going on in these Unabomber days.
[00:12:12]  This is not one of the tough cases for them.
[00:12:15]  You didn't have to do any investigating.
[00:12:18]  No, no.
[00:12:19]  Zahorian, like, Dunn pulls his shoulders getting out of the room because how many pills you gave him?
[00:12:25]  FBI had to have an ambulance on staff to deal with his dislocated arm.
[00:12:30]  So Vince instantly lets Zahorian go, like, fires him as soon as the feds come in and arrest him.
[00:12:37]  And his hope is that, like, you know, he can kind of end any suspicion on behalf of the feds that the WWF is encouraging steroid use as a result of this.
[00:12:45]  But the feds subpoena Zahorian's FedEx account, and they find that he has been shipping his drugs to Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon every single week, right?
[00:12:54]  Large amounts of drugs to Hulk Hogan, Vince McMahon, and Rowdy Roddy Piper, in addition to a couple of other guys.
[00:13:00]  But like, packages are going straight to WWF headquarters.
[00:13:04]  So again, you would think not a hard case to make that maybe there's some distribution going on here.
[00:13:12]  As I recall, there's a lot of overreach, which is what ends up sinking the feds' case.
[00:13:17]  But I'll close my mouth and listen.
[00:13:19]  Yeah.
[00:13:19]  Yeah, we'll talk about that.
[00:13:20]  So this gets a bunch of wrestlers subpoenaed before a federal ground jury, all as John Does, and they get Zahorian indicted.
[00:13:27]  But at this point, the WWF is not implicated in anything criminally as far as the law is concerned, right?
[00:13:33]  The fact that even the fact that McMahon himself might have been buying steroids illegally doesn't mean there's a conspiracy that the WWF is involved in, right?
[00:13:40]  Like at the moment, they can't prove that it's just not just that everyone there is doing Roy's, which does not implicate the company necessarily.
[00:13:48]  So, you know, that's where this starts.
[00:13:51]  But Zahorian's attorney immediately tells reporters that Hogan and Piper are two of the John Does.
[00:13:56]  And it starts to become very clear to people outside of the WWF what a curious strategy.
[00:14:02]  Yeah.
[00:14:03]  Just distract it by blaming Rowdy Rowdy Piper.
[00:14:08]  Now, the case itself is a PR disaster.
[00:14:12]  Several massive stars have to testify bashfully to their steroid use in court.
[00:14:17]  It goes very badly, and Zahorian is convicted on June 25th, 1990.
[00:14:21]  Every major newspaper in the U.S. covers the blowing scandal.
[00:14:24]  And Vince knew that he needed a way to distract the public.
[00:14:27]  So the Gulf War seemed like a really convenient thing.
[00:14:30]  So he reaches out to Sergeant Slaughter, a former WWF wrestler, and to our friend Adnon, who nearly got Andre killed in Iraq, and told him that he'd had an idea.
[00:14:40]  They were going to fight together as a team of heels.
[00:14:42]  Adnon would be General Adnon, an Iraqi soldier.
[00:14:46]  And Sergeant Slaughter was basically depicted as going traitor against the United States and for the Iraqi army.
[00:14:52]  Here's Adnon's introduction.
[00:14:54]  And for context, Slaughter here is dressed as a small child's idea of a drill sergeant.
[00:15:00]  He's being interviewed by Brother Love, who was in costume as a TV or who is a TV mega preacher, essentially.
[00:15:06]  And the guy doing the commentating is Rowdy Roddy Piper, the star of the John Carpenter film They Live.
[00:15:12]  Man, what a paragraph.
[00:15:14]  Real perfect storm happening here.
[00:15:16]  It's quite a moment in pop culture history.
[00:15:20]  There's always a chain of command.
[00:15:27]  And at this time, I would like to introduce the man that I respect.
[00:15:36]  The only man that I, Sergeant Slaughter, take orders from President Bush's great military mind!
[00:15:47]  What I want to talk about that forever.
[00:15:53]  Just the random President Bush is here.
[00:16:10]  What a betrayal.
[00:16:13]  Oh, yeah, that's perfect.
[00:16:16]  He is dressed in like a blue army uniform with a head, like a headscarf type deal.
[00:16:23]  He's got a Saddam Hussein-looking mustache film.
[00:16:30]  Rowdy Roddy Piper is limited on the half-block.
[00:16:32]  I can't believe it.
[00:16:35]  He's gobsmacked.
[00:16:49]  Sadium.
[00:16:50]  Oh, my God.
[00:16:51]  Okay, I think we're good.
[00:16:54]  I think we're good.
[00:16:58]  It's so funny.
[00:17:00]  I can't believe Brother Love was ever on TV.
[00:17:03]  It's amazing.
[00:17:06]  His face is so red in that.
[00:17:08]  I never knew you could make an offensive racial stereotype of white southerners, but they did it.
[00:17:15]  That I am legitimately offended.
[00:17:20]  I mean, I think it's the least offensive stereotype on screen.
[00:17:24]  Absolutely.
[00:17:25]  You know, Adnan is much worse.
[00:17:26]  For sure.
[00:17:27]  It's way over the top.
[00:17:29]  General Adnan counts as pretty woke for the WWF because he is an Iraqi, right?
[00:17:35]  Like he actually is from Iraq.
[00:17:37]  That's a lot better than they usually do.
[00:17:39]  Right.
[00:17:39]  Yeah.
[00:17:40]  Normally it's an Italian guy.
[00:17:43]  They didn't pick some dude from Venice.
[00:17:50]  So at least there's that.
[00:17:52]  The thing I find most interesting here are Adnan's eyes.
[00:17:56]  Again, he is dressed as a crude imitation of Saddam Hussein, but he just looks dead inside.
[00:18:01]  And he said different things in interviews after the fact.
[00:18:04]  During some of them, he's been like, look, I was old and tired.
[00:18:07]  It was hard to get jobs as an Iraqi guy during Desert Storm.
[00:18:10]  So like, what was I supposed to do?
[00:18:13]  In more recent years, he's been like, actually, I supported Saddam in the invasion of Kuwait.
[00:18:19]  So fuck America.
[00:18:21]  He's kind of a real life health.
[00:18:23]  Either that or I don't know.
[00:18:26]  I don't know what's going on with this fella.
[00:18:29]  He said a number of conflicts.
[00:18:31]  He did save Andre the Giant from Saddam.
[00:18:33]  He did save Andre's life.
[00:18:35]  So I think one of the things that this brings up to me, just kind of the general hard to tell what actually was going on with Adnan.
[00:18:44]  Generally, the response to this has been good.
[00:18:46]  There have been some people who have like pointed out, well, there's another story about this event that went this way, and there's another story that went this way, or this isn't quite right.
[00:18:53]  And it's one of those things where at several points, I've kind of had to pick which version of the truth I want to go with for this, because there's no way to know on a lot of this stuff.
[00:19:01]  Like, was Andre the Giant ever threatened with murder by Saddam Hussein?
[00:19:05]  We're entirely taking Adnan al-Qaisi's word for that.
[00:19:08]  I don't know.
[00:19:10]  Yeah.
[00:19:11]  And again, as we've mentioned many times in this series, wrestlers are notorious liars.
[00:19:15]  Yeah, that's the job.
[00:19:16]  It's like this.
[00:19:16]  Saddam does seem like a stand-up guy.
[00:19:18]  I don't think he'd do something bad.
[00:19:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:21]  I mean, he didn't kill him.
[00:19:22]  So that scans with the Saddam I know.
[00:19:28]  Yeah, friend of the pod.
[00:19:31]  Anyway, I've mentioned that the racial stereotype characters were kind of a long-standing tradition.
[00:19:39]  We've talked about that quite a lot.
[00:19:41]  But Vince does take things a step beyond that with how he scripts Adnon.
[00:19:46]  This guy, General Adnon, is not just a heel.
[00:19:49]  He would go on before matches and rant in Arabic about Allah.
[00:19:52]  He would like pray and stuff.
[00:19:54]  But the prayer was kind of, the prayer was framed as him doing a bad thing, right?
[00:19:59]  Like it was not great, right?
[00:20:02]  I'm not going to obviously, when we talk about America's problems with Islamophobia that really ignited after 9-11, it would be very silly to blame them on the WWF.
[00:20:11]  I will say that this isn't helpful in making that situation better.
[00:20:16]  I mean, it's the same.
[00:20:17]  And they do the same thing after 9-11.
[00:20:21]  And I mentioned they just more so.
[00:20:23]  Yeah.
[00:20:24]  They have, I mentioned Italian guys.
[00:20:26]  They have, I forget his name, but it was one of the members of the full-blooded Italians that they just made him a terrorist character after 9-11.
[00:20:34]  Yeah.
[00:20:35]  I mean, they, they, it's just, I don't know.
[00:20:37]  It's, it's this, they always do this.
[00:20:39]  Yeah, they always do this.
[00:20:40]  It's cheap heat.
[00:20:42]  Yeah.
[00:20:43]  There's one particularly, we may have talked about this, but there's one particularly absurd moment where they bring back, in addition to the Shake, they bring back the Iron Shake, um, who is an Iranian man, and they have him play of like fighting alongside General Adnon as another Iraqi general.
[00:21:00]  And there is just something particularly awful about bringing an Iranian guy in to be an Iraqi.
[00:21:05]  Like, it is, um, but yeah, but again, I bet his family wasn't happy about that.
[00:21:11]  I bet his family wasn't, but like, Vince didn't read those news stories, you know, like he didn't know there'd been a war.

=== Drunk Wrestling Moves (15:59) ===

[00:21:16]  I have no idea.
[00:21:17]  No.
[00:21:18]  Vince's like, oh, it's the same thing, right?
[00:21:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:21]  Those are right next to each other.
[00:21:23]  It's like having a guy from Oklahoma pretend to be Texan.
[00:21:26]  It's fine.
[00:21:28]  So audiences are not really in love with this storyline.
[00:21:32]  In 1991, WrestleMania was expected to bring in 100,000 attendees, spurred by this war-focused storyline.
[00:21:38]  But Desert Storm tragically ended too early.
[00:21:42]  No one had really expected it to go down so quickly.
[00:21:46]  It was only like 16 months.
[00:21:48]  Yeah.
[00:21:49]  I mean, and the actual fighting, like once troops are on the ground, is much, much shorter than that.
[00:21:54]  Like it is so fast.
[00:21:57]  Vince downsizes his plans for the event.
[00:21:59]  He moves it to a smaller stadium.
[00:22:01]  This was a flop, and the furor over steroids refused to end.
[00:22:04]  Vince goes into panic mode.
[00:22:06]  The day of Zahorian's verdict, he told his wrestlers again, y'all have to get off gear immediately.
[00:22:12]  We're going clean here.
[00:22:14]  We're doing like a sudden sobriety thing for the entire WWF because the feds are about to be breathing down our necks.
[00:22:20]  He institutes new piss tests for the entire organization.
[00:22:24]  And they're different from the old piss tests because someone will be watching the wrestler P at all times, which is supposed to stop them from cheating with fake urine.
[00:22:33]  Vince also goes on the warpath against news coverage of his steroid-soaked locker rooms.
[00:22:38]  He writes an op-ed in the New York Times in which he claims to resent the unsubstantiated charges, which he says were purely a result of the absence of objective reporting.
[00:22:48]  I don't know why, as the Times, you let Vince McMahon write a column about this.
[00:22:53]  He probably, I mean, that's, yeah, we don't need to get into the New York Times.
[00:22:57]  Is this in the public interest, guys?
[00:22:59]  Is this in the public interest?
[00:23:00]  Is Vince McMahon's defense of this in the public interest?
[00:23:04]  I don't think so.
[00:23:05]  It feels like, I mean, in general, not just the New York Times, because other places have done this, but it really does feel like you can just buy yourself an op-ed at pretty much any place.
[00:23:13]  I mean, it's even, it's even, I think, now dumber than that.
[00:23:16]  Like, it's less buying it and more if you're famous enough, it doesn't matter how awful you are or if you're just defending yourself from doing terrible things.
[00:23:24]  If you're like a big name, people were click on it and they'll get money.
[00:23:28]  Like, so they'll, they'll, they'll have anyone on.
[00:23:30]  Yeah, I think you can sell your newspaper to everyone if you let a sociopath write a column just every couple weeks.
[00:23:35]  And then they've got both sides of the political issues.
[00:23:38]  Yeah.
[00:23:38]  This is like a, again, I don't see, I feel like we should have given, you know, Saddam a column and that might have saved a lot of lives.
[00:23:47]  You know, you know, if he and Bush had fought this all out in the op-ed pages, yeah, hundreds of thousands would still be breathing.
[00:23:53]  The times tried.
[00:23:55]  Or if they'd had them wrestle at WrestleMania.
[00:23:58]  Or now that would have been ideal, especially if I'm going to say Bush, we have him tag teaming with rowdy Roddy Piper.
[00:24:06]  And then obviously Sergeant Slaughter and Saddam back to back.
[00:24:11]  Really, really could have been quite the show.
[00:24:14]  Bring in Andre at the half point for some vengeance.
[00:24:19]  So this is kind of an awkward interstital.
[00:24:24]  This is kind of an awkward interstidal period for the WWF.
[00:24:27]  At about the same time, Hulk Hogan takes a sabbatical from wrestling, right as sort of the steroid stuff is blowing up.
[00:24:34]  I think part because Hulk was like, maybe I want to clear out for a second here.
[00:24:39]  And part because like, you know, I want to be in the movie Suburban Commando.
[00:24:43]  Vince attempts to replace Hulk with the Ultimate Warrior, who is terrible, as I think everyone can agree.
[00:24:51]  Yeah.
[00:24:52]  So by the time 1991 comes to an end, the WWF is in like the worst position it's been in years.
[00:24:58]  You know, Vince is less than a decade into running the whole thing, and it kind of looks like he may be in the process of running it into the ground.
[00:25:05]  And so that December, right before the new drug testing protocol is put into effect, Vince and a bunch of his wrestlers decide to blow off some steam by having one last epic drug-fueled party, right?
[00:25:16]  The business is kind of fucked up.
[00:25:17]  They're all under the gun.
[00:25:19]  There's a lot of like public attention to them.
[00:25:21]  That's what we did at Cracked.
[00:25:22]  Yeah.
[00:25:22]  Yeah.
[00:25:23]  That's what we did at Cracked, right?
[00:25:24]  Yeah.
[00:25:25]  We shot steroids into each other's asses and we partied about the end of days.
[00:25:29]  Might as well record rumors.
[00:25:31]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:35]  You know, you say that, Tom.
[00:25:36]  Most of our listeners have not heard the version of the chain that we recorded on the last day we all worked at Cracked.
[00:25:43]  Powerful, powerful version.
[00:25:46]  Yeah.
[00:25:46]  Yeah.
[00:25:46]  We'll end.
[00:25:46]  We'll end with it.
[00:25:48]  It sounds a lot like me being confused for you in a case of criminal vandalism.
[00:25:57]  That did happen.
[00:26:01]  I was doing a fake laugh until you remember.
[00:26:06]  Well, I was really drunk when that went down, Tom.
[00:26:11]  Anyway, fine.
[00:26:15]  So the center of festivities for this big drug-fueled party the WWF is having are Brett and Owen Hart.
[00:26:22]  Brett is one of the WWF's most promising stars after the Ultimate Warrior kind of collapses.
[00:26:28]  He's going to be the WWF's like big man for a while.
[00:26:32]  He's an excellent technical wrestler, one of the best.
[00:26:35]  He was cool.
[00:26:36]  He was such a, I was watching it pretty hardcore during this time.
[00:26:40]  And then I fell off again for several years until Attitude Era.
[00:26:42]  But during this time, that was really one of the coolest things about Brett Hart for me was that he wasn't Hulk or Ultimate Warrior.
[00:26:48]  He was a totally different kind of wrestler.
[00:26:50]  Yeah.
[00:26:51]  Yeah.
[00:26:51]  He's a really interesting guy.
[00:26:54]  He's kind of smaller, too.
[00:26:55]  He's not a big guy.
[00:26:56]  Yeah.
[00:26:56]  Neither Brett or Owen look like they're eating their body weight and steroids every day.
[00:27:02]  I mean, yeah.
[00:27:03]  So it's an interesting, it's a change for the organization.
[00:27:06]  Owen's his younger brother.
[00:27:08]  They're both from this kind of famous wrestling dynasty.
[00:27:11]  Owen had wrestled for the WWF like earlier in the 80s too as kind of a lame superhero character called the Blue Blazer.
[00:27:19]  He didn't like that very much.
[00:27:20]  He'd like spent some time wrestling in foreign countries and now he was sort of getting back into the WWF.
[00:27:26]  So the Hart brothers meet with a couple of other pro wrestlers at a strip club near the San Antonio airport after a match with a huge bag of weed.
[00:27:36]  The new steroid testing rules are about to come into effect.
[00:27:39]  And Brett recalls that a lot of the wrestlers there that night had a panicked look in their eyes over the possibility that they might not be able to use steroids anymore.
[00:27:47]  So right as they're all starting to get hammered, Vince McMahon shows up.
[00:27:51]  This is unusual.
[00:27:52]  And to make things more unusual, because everyone would normally be kind of unsettled if Vince showed up for a night where everybody's partying.
[00:27:59]  But Vince is completely housed.
[00:28:01]  He is just as drunk as it is possible for a man to be.
[00:28:04]  Drunk enough that folks are like, he might not remember anything that happens tonight.
[00:28:08]  So maybe we can actually party with him.
[00:28:11]  So everyone decides that this means they're free to get even more fucked up than they were already getting.
[00:28:16]  And so they do.
[00:28:17]  Being wrestlers, events quickly lead to Vince demanding wrestlers put him in various like wrestling locks, like the doomsday device, a two-man finisher that should not be.
[00:28:29]  It is a two-man finisher that should not be performed on a strip club floor.
[00:28:34]  You gotta think this is a best case scenario for everyone in that strip club.
[00:28:37]  All the dancers are like, yes, please, man, do the wrestling moves from the cartoon show.
[00:28:44]  So Vince survives and again is apparently drunk enough that everyone's like, he probably won't remember that we just nearly killed him.
[00:28:52]  Did Hawk and Animal do the doom?
[00:28:54]  Was it the best of the camera?
[00:28:54]  I think it might have been.
[00:28:55]  Yeah, I think it might have been.
[00:28:58]  So yeah, Vince lives through this and eventually the club closes and someone suggests that like Ric Flair is the guy in town who has the nicest hotel room.
[00:29:09]  So they're like, why don't we go party at Flair's hotel room?
[00:29:12]  So they are all, there's like 30 of them at this point and they are all as drunk as anyone has ever been.
[00:29:17]  They're stoned as shit.
[00:29:18]  They're presumably on painkillers as well.
[00:29:21]  And so they need an escort to the Marriott Marquee.
[00:29:25]  And Vince gets the cops, like calls the police and are like, we have to drive to the Marriott, but we're all hammered.
[00:29:32]  Will you escort us so no one dies?
[00:29:34]  And the cops are like, sure.
[00:29:39]  That's very cool.
[00:29:40]  So when they get there, Rick is not in his room.
[00:29:43]  And Vince is basically like, I run the WWF.
[00:29:46]  Give me a fucking key.
[00:29:48]  And he's just drunken huge enough that the people at the hotel front desk are like, I am the overnight worker at a hotel in fucking San Antonio.
[00:29:57]  I don't need to shit.
[00:29:59]  No, I wouldn't withhold a room key from a raging Vince McMahon.
[00:30:03]  Yeah, backed up by a crowd of the drunkest musclemen you've ever seen in your life.
[00:30:09]  So put him in a sharpshooter.
[00:30:13]  So that is kind of where this ends.
[00:30:16]  So an awkward sad party.
[00:30:20]  They go up to Rick's room and an awkward sad party ensues until someone has the brilliant idea to drop their pants and take a piss on Rick's bed.
[00:30:30]  And this becomes, everyone's like, well, now we all have to do it.
[00:30:34]  Oh, God.
[00:30:35]  The entire 30-something person party, including Vince, one by one, pisses on Rick Flair's bed.
[00:30:45]  Just.
[00:30:46]  Every single San Antonio stripper saw this coming.
[00:30:49]  They're like, I know how this night gets to be.
[00:30:50]  No, we are not going back with these men.
[00:30:54]  So after what must have been just a torrent of the most steroid positive urine there has ever been.
[00:31:01]  Right?
[00:31:02]  That mattress must have been radioactive by the end of it.
[00:31:05]  That mattress got fucking muscles.
[00:31:08]  Rick is not there.
[00:31:09]  He comes back the next day to find this, which is very funny.
[00:31:15]  So they're all having a good time until Vince starts to demand more wrestling.
[00:31:19]  Brett and Owen are like, hey, buddy, we're all pretty hammered.
[00:31:23]  This is like pretty tough stuff to do when you're sober.
[00:31:26]  It might be a bad idea to do this in like a hotel room when everybody's this wasted.
[00:31:31]  But there's a wrestler named Hercules Hernandez who's like not the brightest guy.
[00:31:36]  And he agrees to give Vince a suplex and he fucks it up and like hurts Vince pretty badly.
[00:31:43]  And at this point, everything stops.
[00:31:45]  Brett later claimed, I remember Vince looking at Herc and thinking he just locked that thought into his head, Brett says, that the only thing he'll remember of this whole night is to fire that guy tomorrow.
[00:31:55]  And that's exactly what happened.
[00:31:57]  But he does.
[00:31:57]  Yep.
[00:31:57]  Yeah, he sure does.
[00:31:58]  He sure does.
[00:32:01]  Fire someone for giving him the suplex.
[00:32:03]  He asked.
[00:32:04]  He demanded.
[00:32:04]  He really demanded.
[00:32:06]  It is amazing how he does a Richard Belser.
[00:32:10]  Like, this is the same thing that happened to the Bells.
[00:32:14]  Just demanding.
[00:32:15]  Yeah.
[00:32:16]  I think Hulk did that on purpose.
[00:32:18]  Yeah.
[00:32:19]  But this, I'm sure Hercules Hernandez did not mean to hurt Vince McMahon.
[00:32:23]  No, no, no.
[00:32:24]  He was just all super wasted.
[00:32:27]  Of like drunk people like doing wrestling moves on each other.
[00:32:29]  And it does not end like that.
[00:32:30]  No, of course not.
[00:32:32]  Never.
[00:32:33]  No.
[00:32:33]  You shouldn't, you should not engage in wrestling, like high-intensity wrestling.
[00:32:40]  You shouldn't suplex people or anything like that when you're drunk enough that you are urinating with your friends on a man's bed.
[00:32:47]  Right.
[00:32:48]  Here's the thing that we maybe haven't driven home over the course of this series.
[00:32:52]  Wrestling's hard.
[00:32:54]  Yeah, it's really difficult.
[00:32:56]  It's really hard.
[00:32:57]  Like anyone, the people who are doing, especially like these complicated, multi-person, like flip-locks where you're like spinning a person's body.
[00:33:05]  You've got them by the neck sometimes.
[00:33:07]  Like that's like an Olympic grade like athletic move that you shouldn't do while drunk in a hotel room that's drenched in your friend's piss.
[00:33:19]  So funny.
[00:33:20]  You shouldn't do it while wearing a cape, but half these guys do that.
[00:33:24]  There are bad ideas if things are going the way it's.
[00:33:26]  But yeah.
[00:33:28]  It says a lot that Vince would demand somebody put him in a suplex and then fire that man at the drop of a hat for embarrassing him.
[00:33:34]  But while Vince had no, absolutely no sympathy for a guy like Herc, he was extremely forgiving when it came to another trespass, child molestation.
[00:33:45]  And this brings us to the story of Pat Patterson.
[00:33:49]  So have you guys, you guys know about the ringboy scandal?
[00:33:53]  No, I know Pat Person is.
[00:33:55]  Oh, God.
[00:33:56]  Okay.
[00:33:57]  So Pat Patterson was a Canadian-American wrestler born in 1941.
[00:34:01]  He started wrestling as a 14-year-old in between stints as an altar boy.
[00:34:06]  For a time, he wanted to be a Catholic priest, which will be relevant shortly.
[00:34:10]  But he wound up going with wrestling as a career.
[00:34:13]  He immigrated to the U.S., he became a citizen, and he wrestled in Boston and then the Pacific Northwest and San Francisco throughout the 1960s.
[00:34:22]  That's a really common path, by the way.
[00:34:24]  A lot of Canadians will go Boston or somewhere in New England, then Portland, Oregon, and then San Francisco, kind of before becoming like national stars and stuff.
[00:34:35]  This is a really common like path for people to take at the time.
[00:34:38]  Most Canadian of American cities.
[00:34:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:42]  So he's one of.
[00:34:43]  Robert, the way that you're teasing this story is a worse psyop than the Monster Mash.
[00:34:49]  I don't know what else to do here.
[00:34:52]  You should feel menaced.
[00:34:54]  You should feel menaced.
[00:34:55]  This is real bad.
[00:34:57]  So Patterson becomes one of a small elite number of wrestlers who earned McMahon's trust and are able to stay in the business as executives for the company after their time as ring stars had largely passed.
[00:35:08]  By early 1992, Patterson is head of wrestling operations for the WWF.
[00:35:13]  He works closely with a man named Terry Garvin and a ring announcer/slash crew chief named Mel Phillips.
[00:35:20]  All three are close friends, and all three also have a deep and abiding love for molesting young boys.
[00:35:25]  Unfortunately, for a lot of everyone, uh, wrestling has a long and proud tradition of what are called ringboys.
[00:35:32]  When a show would come into town, uh, it hires it would hire local teens to help set up and break down the set, right?
[00:35:39]  And you can see, obviously, like, what teenage boy isn't going to want to like help build WWF sets for it, like, no money but a chance to meet Hulk Hogan, right?
[00:35:49]  Of course, you're going to do it.
[00:35:50]  Um, it is a job, it's not a safe job, obviously.
[00:35:53]  Like, it's contracting work that 13-year-olds are often doing, so like it's dangerous.
[00:35:58]  But again, you might meet Hulk Hogan, so it's worth it.
[00:36:00]  In the 1980s, a 13-year-old boy named Tom Cole was hired to work as a ringboy for $80 plus, again, the chance at getting a selfie with a wrestler.
[00:36:09]  He had just run away from home, and so he's basically a homeless youth who needs the money.
[00:36:14]  This created a perfect situation for Mel Phillips, who always had an eye out for vulnerable young boys to groom.
[00:36:20]  And of this kind of trio of guys who are working the WWF and managing the side ops stuff, Phillips is kind of the groomer of them, right?
[00:36:29]  So, Tom traveled from Westchester County to Manhattan and eventually across the Eastern Seaboard, working as a ringboy and eventually becoming one of Mel's chief ringboys.
[00:36:38]  He met a lot of other kids in the same situation and later recalled, mostly it was kids with a broken home with no father, just a drunk mother, alcoholic, drug addict, whatever.
[00:36:48]  That's pretty much the type of kid that Mel was geared towards.
[00:36:51]  Mel told Tom that he should invite his friends when they were back in the areas where he'd grown up and have them come hang out backstage.
[00:36:58]  So, when the show gets back into his hometown, he like finds some of his buddies and he tells them to come like help set up and stuff and meet all these wrestlers.
[00:37:06]  His friends are a little more cautious than him, like they immediately get the vibe, they get there, like all excited to meet Hulk, and then they meet Mel, who's like really weird and creepy.

=== The Back Room Trap (04:55) ===

[00:37:16]  And they're like, Hey, man, I don't know if you should be doing this.
[00:37:19]  Like, this seems like it's gonna go really, really badly.
[00:37:22]  But Tom keeps working.
[00:37:23]  Um, he stays, you know, keeps doing the ringboy stuff.
[00:37:26]  And a few of his friends still hung around.
[00:37:28]  And gradually, Mel starts inviting them, like, one after the other, to come hang with him privately in like a back room.
[00:37:35]  And whenever a kid would agree and like go back into a room with Mel, he would follow the same script: playing with their feet and then using their feet to masturbate himself.
[00:37:44]  Um, yeah, this is this is rough, folks.
[00:37:47]  It's, it's, it, it doesn't get easier here.
[00:37:49]  Um, as Melt, I gotta tell you, Robert, when I uh was like really excited to be on the Vince McMahon episode, didn't expect we'd get into a story like this.
[00:37:59]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a trap, yeah, it was a trap.
[00:38:03]  Stop talking about Vince and talk about one of the backstage guys.
[00:38:07]  Well, Vince comes back into this story, he's actually very, very intricately involved in this.
[00:38:12]  I have no doubt that he does because, um, I was very familiar with Pat Patterson as a figure on WWE television for 10 years following his retirement.
[00:38:22]  And uh, nary a mention of any of this on his Wikipedia.
[00:38:26]  I, when I watched that Andre the Giant documentary that we like played a clip from, he's on it repeatedly.
[00:38:32]  He's on it like talking about Andre's sex appeal.
[00:38:34]  Like, it is so fucked up, it is so bad.
[00:38:39]  He had enormous feet.
[00:38:40]  Yeah, I mean, to him, that'd be like having sex with a 34-foot woman.
[00:38:47]  You know what?
[00:38:48]  You know what is a good thing to do right now?
[00:38:50]  Is pull the ads perfect time, perfect time.
[00:38:54]  Yeah, they'll be delighted.
[00:38:56]  They'll be delighted.
[00:38:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:03]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by: Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[00:39:10]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:39:13]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:39:16]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:39:20]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:39:22]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:39:24]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:39:26]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:39:31]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:39:33]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:39:34]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:39:36]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:39:39]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:39:41]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:39:43]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:39:48]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:39:50]  Trust me, babe.
[00:39:51]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:40:00]  What's up, everyone?
[00:40:01]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:40:02]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:40:10]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:40:13]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:40:17]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:40:22]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:40:24]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:40:28]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:40:33]  Yeah.
[00:40:34]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:40:36]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:40:38]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:40:46]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:40:49]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:40:55]  Just hang in there.
[00:40:56]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:40:58]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:40:59]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:41:01]  Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:41:08]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:41:11]  I was, hi, dad.
[00:41:13]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:41:21]  This is badass convict.
[00:41:23]  Right.
[00:41:23]  Just finished five years.
[00:41:25]  I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
[00:41:29]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:41:37]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:41:46]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with the guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:41:54]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:41:56]  And without this program, I'm going to die.
[00:42:00]  Open your free iHeartRadio app.
[00:42:02]  Search the Ceno Show.
[00:42:04]  And listen now.

=== Vince's Pedophile Strategy (14:44) ===

[00:42:11]  Ah, we're back and we're ready to make everybody real, real unhappy.
[00:42:17]  You guys ready to be a lot less happy than you were this morning?
[00:42:21]  Than the child predator fucking feet.
[00:42:24]  Yeah.
[00:42:25]  I'm generally always prepared to be less happy at a moment's notice.
[00:42:28]  Excellent.
[00:42:29]  Yes.
[00:42:30]  You've been trained well by our country.
[00:42:32]  So, Mel Phillips gets kind of more and more comfortable abusing some of these friends of Tom's and abusing Tom.
[00:42:41]  And kind of as he starts to feel like these kids are ready, he starts bringing Garvin and Pat Patterson in and like they start coming by to hang out with the boys.
[00:42:51]  Tom later said of Patterson, quote, he'd look at you when he was talking to you.
[00:42:55]  He'd look right at your crotch and he'd like lick his lips and shit.
[00:42:58]  He'd make sexual dress gestures by looking at you like that.
[00:43:01]  He'd put his hand on your ass and squeeze your ass and stuff like that.
[00:43:04]  Again, Tom is a 13-year-old boy.
[00:43:08]  Garvin would offer the boys drugs and booze, of which there were both plenty.
[00:43:13]  And eventually, you know, this goes on for some period of time.
[00:43:17]  Tom is abused for a while.
[00:43:19]  And eventually he starts saying no.
[00:43:21]  He refuses.
[00:43:22]  He stops, you know, going by to this.
[00:43:24]  He kind of like pulls out.
[00:43:26]  And at this point, he stops getting work as a ringboy, basically.
[00:43:30]  You know, he is a homeless youth.
[00:43:31]  So this is something that he relied on for money.
[00:43:33]  And they, you know, can him because he's not willing to be molested anymore.
[00:43:38]  So that's bad.
[00:43:40]  Time goes by.
[00:43:42]  A few years pass.
[00:43:43]  And then it's 1990.
[00:43:44]  And Tom, who is 19, I think now, gets a call from Garvin again.
[00:43:48]  And Garvin's like, hey, do you want to work for the WWF again?
[00:43:53]  You know, we have a job in a warehouse.
[00:43:55]  You know, we've got some like work that you could do.
[00:43:58]  Tom tells Garvin, like, I'll come back to WWF, but, you know, I want to be an announcer someday, right?
[00:44:04]  Like, that's, that's what I want to do.
[00:44:05]  I'm only going to take this job if it's like can be a springboard to something bigger.
[00:44:09]  And Garvin's like, oh, yeah, sure, that's possible.
[00:44:11]  Like, you could be an announcer.
[00:44:13]  Why don't you come by my house and we'll talk about it?
[00:44:15]  Oh, my God.
[00:44:16]  So Tom, don't do it.
[00:44:17]  Tom, you know, goes there.
[00:44:19]  He is immediately pressured for sex and he says no.
[00:44:23]  And when this happens, Garvin refuses to drive him home.
[00:44:26]  So Tom has to sleep in this guy's garage, like probably keeping one eye open the entire night and then gets driven to work the next day, where Mel then tells him, actually, you're fired.
[00:44:37]  You don't have a job after all.
[00:44:40]  Great, great company, the WWF.
[00:44:43]  So in the years between his first molestation and 1991, Tom didn't talk to anyone about what had happened.
[00:44:49]  He just kind of struggled alone with what had been done to him.
[00:44:52]  But then in July of 1991, Phil Mushnik, a journalist, published a story in the New York Post about the steroid abuse scandal in the WWF.
[00:45:01]  Tom Cole read it while staying with his brother Lee, and reading about that scandal kind of helped him break through the wall that he'd put up between his loved ones and what had been done to him.
[00:45:10]  He suddenly just kind of like tells his brother everything that had happened.
[00:45:14]  So Lee is like, we've got to do something about this.
[00:45:18]  We should sue them.
[00:45:19]  We should talk to some journalists.
[00:45:20]  Like this has to, the story needs to get out.
[00:45:23]  So in October, with Lee's help, Tom reaches out to some journalists, one of whom is Irv Muchnik, and one of whom is Phil Mushnik, who'd written that post story.
[00:45:35]  I'm sorry about this.
[00:45:36]  They're very similar names, but they are different guys who are not related.
[00:45:40]  Are they related?
[00:45:42]  Irv Muchnik, who is like the nephew of the guy who had helped start the NWA, and then Phil Mushnik, M-U-S-H in ICK.
[00:45:51]  It's very frustrating.
[00:45:52]  Somebody should have stopped this and changed one of their last names.
[00:45:57]  I'm livid, but yeah, they are not related as far as I can tell.
[00:46:02]  So Mushnik is like, hey, kid, you should like get a lawyer and sue.
[00:46:07]  You shouldn't just be talking to a journalist.
[00:46:08]  Like what's happened to you is very much legally actionable and you are owed money.
[00:46:14]  And so Tom does.
[00:46:16]  He finds a lawyer.
[00:46:17]  And in February 1992, Mushnik blows the story open, publishes an article about it.
[00:46:23]  And obviously, this is in the middle of the steroid abuse scandal.
[00:46:26]  This is an immediate, obvious, serious problem for the WWF, possibly like a life-threatening problem for the organization.
[00:46:34]  So of course, Vince and Linda McMahon leap into action to protect the company.
[00:46:40]  Oh, good.
[00:46:40]  So the first thing they do is that's what really needs to be defended.
[00:46:44]  It's not the 13-year-old boy that was molested, but this billion-dollar corporation.
[00:46:48]  Yeah.
[00:46:48]  And the first thing they do is the right thing.
[00:46:52]  They fire all of the three perpetrators, right?
[00:46:54]  So that's fine.
[00:46:55]  You know, that would be the number one step that you would take as the guy person is in the WWE Hall of Fame.
[00:47:01]  Oh, oh, yeah, Tom.
[00:47:03]  They don't all stay fired.
[00:47:05]  But they start by firing all three guys.
[00:47:08]  And then Vince starts going around to the press doing damage control, you know, and he's he's not great at this.
[00:47:15]  He calls Mushnik, and Mushnik describes this as Vince like calls him and gives him like a pouring his heart out phone call.
[00:47:21]  I'm going to quote from Josie Reisman here about like how this goes down.
[00:47:25]  Apparently fearing that Mel Phillips would soon become part of the public scandal, Vince told him that he had let Phillips go four years ago because Phillips' relationship with kids seemed peculiar and unnatural, Mushnik recalled.
[00:47:36]  McMahon said that he rehired Phillips with the caveat that Phillips steer clear from kids.
[00:47:41]  McMahon told me that it was his great regard for children, his own personal regard for children, that made him get rid of Mel Phillips.
[00:47:47]  Mushnik would later say in a deposition, Vince and Linda returned Phillips to the organization with the caveat that Mel still steer clear of underaged boys.
[00:47:56]  Stop hanging around kids and stop chasing after kids.
[00:47:59]  Vince allegedly said he'd brought Phillips back because the man really missed wrestling and really missed the scene, but that he was gone for good this time.
[00:48:07]  So Vince's damage control is to be like, yeah, we knew this guy was a pedophile, so we fired him, but he really liked wrestling.
[00:48:14]  So we brought him back.
[00:48:15]  Now he's gone forever.
[00:48:16]  Like, how can you be like, sir, he bother me with how he like would look at kids.
[00:48:21]  I told him, stay away from kids when you can have a job.
[00:48:24]  Yeah, you can have your job back because you love wrestling so much.
[00:48:29]  Like, that's bad.
[00:48:31]  That's pretty bad.
[00:48:33]  It's pretty bad.
[00:48:35]  Yeah, that's pretty bad stuff.
[00:48:38]  So Vince later sues Mushnik for defamation because of these articles, but Reisman says he never disputed Mushnik's story about the call.
[00:48:46]  It's like, I don't know.
[00:48:47]  Again, a lot of this is in dispute.
[00:48:49]  Mushnik is broadly, like, definitely right about the story.
[00:48:53]  He is a New York Post journalist, so he's not beyond above like fabulizing some of the details about Vince's response to him, potentially.
[00:49:01]  I will say that.
[00:49:03]  But the fact that Vince fires this guy and then brings him back seems pretty undisputed and real fucked up.
[00:49:10]  So McMahon makes other calls too.
[00:49:12]  Mostly his strategy is to throw Garvin and Phillips under the bus.
[00:49:16]  But weirdly, he tries to protect Pat Patterson.
[00:49:19]  He calls him an innocent man.
[00:49:20]  I think just because they're, as you stated earlier, Sean, they're the kind of friends who like jokingly try to show each other their poop.
[00:49:27]  Yeah.
[00:49:29]  That guy's got a foot thing.
[00:49:30]  That guy's got a pedophile thing.
[00:49:32]  There's no reason to think that that guy's a normal dude outside of the poop hiding.
[00:49:37]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:49:39]  So some as tends to happen in these kind of situations, once the story breaks, more victims start to come forward, and there are more news stories.
[00:49:48]  Some fellow wrestlers take to the talk show circuit to savage Vince, including his dad's old champion, Bruno San Martino.
[00:49:55]  Bruno and another wrestler named Orton wind up on Larry King with Vince, talking about like the whole fucking mess.
[00:50:04]  Yeah, yeah, Bob Orton.
[00:50:05]  Cowboy Bob Orton.
[00:50:06]  All right.
[00:50:06]  Yeah.
[00:50:06]  San Martino says there have been people who have come forward who caught him with an 11-year-old boy having sex in a car.
[00:50:12]  And Vince responds, did you actually see this incident in some sort of parking lot?
[00:50:16]  Did you see that, Bruno?
[00:50:18]  San Martino admitted he'd just been told about it, and Larry King then called the claim hearsay.
[00:50:23]  Much of Vince's defense here focused around making the case that San Martino was unreliable or incompetent.
[00:50:29]  Here's sex lies and headlocks.
[00:50:31]  Quote, King switched to a guest on the phone, a former WWSF wrestler named Barry Orton, sorry, who also claimed that Garvin had accosted him in Texas in 1978 when he was just 19.
[00:50:42]  Barry, King asked, why didn't we know about this sooner?
[00:50:44]  14 years ago when you were accosted, why didn't you come forward?
[00:50:48]  Just then a third guest, Bruno San Martino, interrupted King and Orton.
[00:50:51]  Larry, tell him who the man was, he said.
[00:50:54]  Then, realizing he'd addressed the wrong man, he hastily added, I mean, not Larry.
[00:50:58]  I beg your pardon.
[00:50:58]  Barry.
[00:50:59]  You're a little confused, aren't you, Bruno?
[00:51:01]  McMahon jumped in, a trace of a smile playing around the edge of his lips.
[00:51:04]  It was the kind of deflection that he did masterfully.
[00:51:07]  And as the night wore on, he kept doing it, making his accusers look bumbling and unsure.
[00:51:11]  Right.
[00:51:12]  So that's kind of Vince's strategy is like, this is complicated.
[00:51:15]  People's memories are a little faded.
[00:51:17]  You know, Bruno slips up and calls Barry Larry.
[00:51:21]  And every time there's like a little fuck up like that, Vince kind of jumps in with the goal of attacking San Martino, right?
[00:51:27]  Because that's sort of the big guy who that's to San Martino's credit, he kind of takes the cause of defending these ringboys on personally.
[00:51:35]  And so that's who McMahon has to go after.
[00:51:37]  He can't go as a boy.
[00:51:38]  He's also very famous.
[00:51:39]  Yeah.
[00:51:40]  Right.
[00:51:40]  If a longtime wrestler gets a name wrong, that means there's no such thing as child predators.
[00:51:46]  Yes, exactly.
[00:51:46]  Exactly.
[00:51:47]  There's no other reason a wrestler would get minor details of a story wrong.
[00:51:52]  It's not like Bruno San Martino got hit in the head a lot or anything like that.
[00:51:56]  Yeah.
[00:51:56]  Yeah.
[00:51:57]  So Vince's response to the media coverage of his organization's scandal was thoroughly modern.
[00:52:01]  He distracted from the numerous allegations against the WF by attacking journalists, potentially particularly Mushnik, who he called, quote, something less than legitimate.
[00:52:11]  The media has kept all of these accusers away from us, he said.
[00:52:14]  They don't want us to talk to them.
[00:52:16]  They don't want us to get to the bottom of the story.
[00:52:19]  So Vince eventually agreed to negotiate with Tom, whose lawyer had advised him to demand $750,000 and not a cent less.
[00:52:27]  Vince ensured that Tom was alone with his lawyer and without his brother Lee, who'd been helping him handle the situation.
[00:52:34]  But Vince was not alone.
[00:52:35]  Vince had both his wife, Linda McMahon, and his legal representation in the room when they're talking to Tom without his lawyer present.
[00:52:42]  In defensive statements made by WWF representatives, what happened next is framed as the McMahons, shocked and horrified on Tom's behalf, leaping into action to meet the boy at once to try to help him.
[00:52:53]  And I'm going to quote from Politico here.
[00:52:55]  This was hardly a standard corporate move.
[00:52:57]  The accuser had lawyered up, and most executives would have been hard at work putting distance between themselves and Cole.
[00:53:02]  But the McMahon saw an opportunity to end the story and confident in their very different skills, Vince's hard negotiating style, Linda's equally fearless charm, they sat down with Cole in his lawyer's office.
[00:53:14]  And defenders of the McMahons will kind of use the fact that they very quickly get into a room with the boy as evidence that they are, they're decent and caring and responsible, right?
[00:53:23]  Like the way it's kind of framed is what other CEO of a company with a scandal like this would immediately like sit down with the victim to ask how they could help.
[00:53:30]  And that is technically what they do, but that's not the whole story.
[00:53:34]  Here's Politico.
[00:53:36]  Vince McMahon scoffed at the lawyer's demands for big money, Cole recalled, but he promised immediate action and offered Cole his job back along with back wages calculated at $55,000.
[00:53:46]  Cole signed the agreement on April 8th and went to work next Monday to a charm offensive from Linda McMahon.
[00:53:52]  We're going to send a car for you so you could go shopping.
[00:53:54]  I'm sending $5,000 over so you can go get clothes or whatever you need, he recalled her telling him.
[00:54:00]  So basically what they do is like, yeah.
[00:54:03]  Yeah, they're buying him off.
[00:54:04]  Like that's, that's like a fraction of what he ought to get.
[00:54:08]  Yeah.
[00:54:08]  Exactly.
[00:54:09]  Like it's like it's taking advantage of the fact that he loves wrestling, right?
[00:54:14]  These people are like he's young.
[00:54:16]  Man.
[00:54:17]  And he would much rather, he's like, well, I would rather have a career in the WWF as an announcer than just get a pile of money.
[00:54:23]  So, you know, this seems like a really good deal.
[00:54:24]  Maybe, you know, they are horrified on my behalf and like they're going to basically adopt me.
[00:54:28]  And like, this is, this is a troubled kid with a difficult family life, you know?
[00:54:33]  And they know what his vulnerability is, right?
[00:54:36]  Like they're very aware of that.
[00:54:39]  That's such a bankrupt argument to say it's like, well, if why would they try to get him alone in a room as quickly as possible after the accusations came out?
[00:54:47]  It's like, really?
[00:54:48]  Yeah.
[00:54:48]  Are you are we are we really entertaining this?
[00:54:51]  Like that's yeah, it's like or like or when they say um they won't even they won't it's it's a like I think Trump has done it too, but like when they keep The identities of the accusers secret for obvious reasons, but they're like, well, they won't even let us know who they are so that we can face our accusers.
[00:55:13]  And it's like, well, they don't let you do it so you can't like intimidate them or, you know, you have a tremendous amount of power.
[00:55:20]  Yes, you're a very powerful man.
[00:55:24]  It's all really gross.
[00:55:26]  And like that version of events that Politico gives, again, like every story involving Vince, there's a couple of versions of this, but that version leaves out some key details.
[00:55:35]  One is that the offer that the McMahons make for back pay, they kind of, their people frame it as like, we immediately offered him all of this back pay, right?
[00:55:43]  To like help him out.
[00:55:45]  That offer only came after Vince rejected Tom's lawyer's demand for $750,000.
[00:55:50]  The two get into this really nasty argument and like Vince and Linda get up to leave the room and basically end negotiations.
[00:55:57]  And that's when Tom cries out, no, don't go.
[00:56:00]  I just want my job back.
[00:56:02]  And at this point, like they're like, hey, you know, get your lawyer out of the room and we'll talk.
[00:56:07]  And that's when the deal goes down, right?
[00:56:10]  Yeah, it's, it's very gross.
[00:56:12]  What's the source of the story?
[00:56:13]  This sounds kind of made up.
[00:56:15]  Yeah.
[00:56:16]  It's like, so I'll quote from Reisman again here because this is this is according most of this is according to Lee, who is Tom's brother who is told about what happens by Tom, right?
[00:56:28]  Tom is not around anymore, as we'll talk about.
[00:56:30]  So like Lee is kind of a major source for a lot of this stuff.
[00:56:33]  And Lee is not in the room at the time, right?
[00:56:36]  Like he's not allowed in.
[00:56:37]  He's really angry about the fact that he's not there.
[00:56:39]  Once again, Robert, the way that you keep teasing this story and telling us Tom's not around anymore.
[00:56:45]  We'll get to that.
[00:56:46]  Yeah.
[00:56:46]  I mean, I don't know how else to tell it.
[00:56:50]  It is, it's messy.
[00:56:52]  So I'm going to quote from Reisman again describing what happens here.

=== The Steroid Abuse Ring (15:29) ===

[00:56:56]  What did Vince tell Tom in that moment of intimacy, like when they're all alone in the room?
[00:57:00]  Mr. McMahon explained to Tom that he had a difficult childhood himself, is how Fuchsberg, which is the lawyer, would describe it to a reporter shortly afterwards.
[00:57:08]  Hey, everyone, just wanted to clarify.
[00:57:10]  Again, I kind of summarized this wrong in my notes and so readed out something that wasn't entirely correct.
[00:57:17]  The source here is not Lee, Tom's brother.
[00:57:21]  This is all stuff that Lee said directly.
[00:57:24]  Again, David Bixinspan, great wrestling journalist, brought this up to me.
[00:57:28]  Tom gave those details specifically in a 1999 wrestling perspective interview that's been cited by basically anyone who's done good reporting on the Ring Boy scandal.
[00:57:38]  Apologies for getting that wrong.
[00:57:39]  Lee put it more bluntly.
[00:57:40]  Vince McMahon started telling him, Tom, I was molested also when I was a kid.
[00:57:44]  I want to start on a clean slate with you, Vince said.
[00:57:47]  I want to take care of everything.
[00:57:48]  How would you feel about that?
[00:57:50]  Tom got a good feeling that Mr. McMahon really cared.
[00:57:53]  He shook hands with Tom and offered him his job back.
[00:57:57]  So that's the claim that like Lee makes, and I think that Tom's lawyer makes is that McMahon tried to like connect with Tom over their shared experience of suffering being abused as children in order to gain his trust.
[00:58:12]  Vince would do.
[00:58:13]  Yep.
[00:58:14]  Seems Vincy.
[00:58:15]  So some of the promises the McMahons made did come true.
[00:58:19]  Tom got new clothes.
[00:58:20]  He did get his job back.
[00:58:21]  He got some money.
[00:58:22]  It is unclear how much, certainly less than he would have gotten in a legal settlement.
[00:58:27]  In a 1999 interview, he explained this as saying basically that he hadn't wanted a lawsuit.
[00:58:32]  He just wanted the bad guys fired and a chance at a career in wrestling.
[00:58:35]  I loved working for the business.
[00:58:37]  It's what I wanted to do my whole life.
[00:58:40]  As part of this agreement, the WWF sent Tom Cole to community college, but they also set an expectation for his grades that all of the money would stop if he couldn't meet a certain grade point average.
[00:58:52]  Tom is, again, a troubled kid who has a difficult history with education.
[00:58:56]  He does not do well in school, so they stop paying for it and eventually fire him from his job.
[00:59:02]  In a 1999 interview, he described Vince as manipulated and ruthless and said this of Linda.
[00:59:07]  I wish I could say she was a nice person.
[00:59:10]  Sometimes she gave me that feeling and sometimes she didn't.
[00:59:12]  I don't know what I feel about Linda McMahon.
[00:59:14]  Disappointed.
[00:59:15]  Disappointed in everything that she had promised that they would do.
[00:59:19]  Tom struggled with what had been done with him the rest of his life, the way that he'd been taken advantage of by the McMahons.
[00:59:25]  He committed suicide in 2021.
[00:59:28]  This all happened quite recently, unfortunately.
[00:59:31]  So that's a bummer.
[00:59:35]  It's a real bleak story.
[00:59:37]  Sorry, man.
[00:59:37]  That's bullshit.
[00:59:39]  Yeah.
[00:59:39]  Sorry that happened.
[00:59:40]  That is bullshit.
[00:59:41]  Vince spent like $250,000 hiring people to distract him from his studies.
[00:59:46]  Yeah.
[00:59:48]  Having people steal his school books.
[00:59:50]  Yeah.
[00:59:51]  Make sure he gets a D or dude, come back to my office.
[00:59:55]  And I saw Jim Doug and said, You got it.
[00:59:58]  I mean, I'm sure he probably did have this guy like followed, probably, right?
[01:00:03]  Yeah.
[01:00:03]  I mean, not an unreasonable thing to expect.
[01:00:06]  You know what Elsie does?
[01:00:08]  Now, this does happen like more than a decade later, but he rehires Pat Patterson.
[01:00:15]  Brings him back in.
[01:00:16]  He sure does.
[01:00:17]  Yep.
[01:00:18]  Pat Patterson's a major TV figure during the Attitude Era.
[01:00:22]  Yeah.
[01:00:23]  So Pat gets brought back.
[01:00:25]  Yeah, I think it's like a decade later, something like that.
[01:00:27]  He's out for a while, but he comes back.
[01:00:30]  And yeah, that's how Vince McMahon handles a child sex abuse scandal in his organization.
[01:00:37]  Good guy.
[01:00:38]  I had Vince Arino.
[01:00:40]  I had never even heard a rumor like this about Pat Patterson.
[01:00:46]  And I'm a person who's been watching wrestling his entire life.
[01:00:48]  So like, yeah.
[01:00:50]  It's wild.
[01:00:51]  It's a pretty man.
[01:00:53]  Yeah.
[01:00:54]  He buried that this story so thoroughly.
[01:00:58]  And it's like he's every time there's a documentary about this era, like Patterson will fucking show up.
[01:01:06]  It's so insane to me that like he just he's always around still.
[01:01:14]  Like seeing him in fucking in documentaries talking about Andre the Giant and like a documentary produced by Bill Simmons.
[01:01:23]  It's like, how is he allowed to be on it on screen right now?
[01:01:27]  Yeah.
[01:01:28]  Didn't know it.
[01:01:29]  Did nobody look into this?
[01:01:30]  Like, yeah.
[01:01:31]  Jesus.
[01:01:32]  Yeah.
[01:01:33]  And when he came on to the Ultimate Warrior documentary and like rated all the tag teams' feet by fuckability, I was like, this is a little weird.
[01:01:41]  Yeah.
[01:01:42]  Seems peculiar.
[01:01:43]  Seems like an odd special feature for the Warrior DVD.
[01:01:46]  Yeah.
[01:01:47]  And there's like, you can find defenses of this guy.
[01:01:49]  I'm looking at Jesus Christ, an article on last word on sports.com by Jared Sullivan called The Persecution of Pat Patterson.
[01:02:01]  The poor persecution of the child predator.
[01:02:04]  Yeah, I had heard it is.
[01:02:06]  Okay.
[01:02:06]  Yeah.
[01:02:08]  Yeah, because Patterson is openly homosexual.
[01:02:10]  So, okay, that's what this is about.
[01:02:13]  He's one of the first, I believe, one of the first pro wrestlers to be openly gay.
[01:02:17]  I think.
[01:02:17]  Yeah, he is the first to be able to do that.
[01:02:19]  Oh, I've heard about all that stuff.
[01:02:20]  Yeah.
[01:02:20]  Wow.
[01:02:21]  So this is a whole article about legitimately the persecution he faces as a gay man in wrestling that does not at all mention the fact that he also had like got fired for credible claims of childhood.
[01:02:32]  Man, this is all so problematic.
[01:02:34]  Let's move on to steroids.
[01:02:35]  That's a lot more fun.
[01:02:38]  When we move on to the sexual humiliation of the Attitude Era, please.
[01:02:43]  Man, kiss my ass club.
[01:02:45]  Can we just talk about that?
[01:02:46]  Yeah.
[01:02:47]  Yeah.
[01:02:47]  Let's talk about it.
[01:02:48]  It was me, Austin.
[01:02:50]  I want to turn to a premier patient again, Robert.
[01:02:53]  Yeah.
[01:02:53]  Right.
[01:02:53]  All right.
[01:02:54]  A brawn panties match.
[01:02:55]  Can we talk about a brawn panties match?
[01:02:57]  We talk about Jerry the King Waller screaming puppies over and over again just for 10 straight years.
[01:03:02]  Yeah.
[01:03:03]  Wrestling.
[01:03:04]  So, yeah, that article that had cued Tom in on the WWF steroid scandal and kind of started all of this was one of the many pieces published after the 1991 conviction of George Zahorian.
[01:03:16]  The U.S. attorney who had prosecuted it, Ted Smith, wasn't initially sure if he wanted to go after Vince McMahon or not and like actually make a broader case against the WWF and against Vince as the ringleader of any of this.
[01:03:28]  He'd seen circumstantial evidence and allegations saying that Vince had been kind of the head of the WWF steroid ring, but he didn't have hard objective proof of it.
[01:03:36]  You know, this was all made his job was made more difficult by the fact that superstar Billy Graham told press or told the media that Smith, this U.S. attorney, had asked him to wear a wire for an FBI probe of mob links to McMahon.
[01:03:51]  This was not true.
[01:03:53]  Nobody asked superstar Billy Graham to wear a wire to like prove that McMahon was in bed with the mob.
[01:03:59]  And it created an embarrassing circus around the story.
[01:04:02]  And so Smith like sees this mess around Billy Graham just like saying shit for some reason and is like, I don't know if I want to like get involved in a big case with the WWF.
[01:04:11]  Maybe it's like too much of a distraction, too bad for my career, whatever.
[01:04:15]  You know, these are political positions, U.S. attorneys.
[01:04:18]  So he's thinking about his political future.
[01:04:20]  WWE is carny as shit.
[01:04:22]  It is carney as shit.
[01:04:23]  Maybe he's like, I don't know, too messy.
[01:04:25]  So one of his colleagues, though, Brian O'Shea, who or Sean O'Shea, sorry, who works for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn and is like a securities fraud guy, thinks that there might be provable wrongdoing by Vince.
[01:04:39]  That's kind of in his purview.
[01:04:41]  And so he had been like interviewing wrestlers for a while in a grand jury scenario to try and like get an indictment against Vince.
[01:04:49]  So 1992 dawns, and this is going to be like the worst year of Vince's life.
[01:04:54]  In addition to the Ringboy scandal kind of blowing up and wrestlers and employees coming forward to say that they'd been harassed or assaulted by Patterson, you know, you get just this increasing sort of flood of rumors that he's also the guy behind the steroid abuse ring in the WWF.
[01:05:12]  Comparatively, 1992 was a really good year for me.
[01:05:14]  Like my Little League team made it to the playoffs.
[01:05:17]  Batman Returns came out that summer.
[01:05:19]  Yeah.
[01:05:20]  Wow.
[01:05:21]  It's almost like you never cover it up a child abuse scandal or a steroid abuse ring.
[01:05:27]  Tom.
[01:05:28]  I was only wearing a little bit.
[01:05:29]  I hadn't been able to do that.
[01:05:29]  Okay, that makes sense.
[01:05:31]  Yeah.
[01:05:31]  I learned how to reverse dunk in 1992.
[01:05:34]  Very proud of that.
[01:05:35]  Oh, that's chill.
[01:05:36]  That's awesome.
[01:05:37]  Yeah.
[01:05:37]  I did run an illegal steroid ring in 1992, but because I was like four years old, the steroids, it was like they were like mud steroids, you know?
[01:05:48]  And, you know, you know how kids make like mud pies.
[01:05:51]  There's a steroid.
[01:05:52]  You just put a bunch of mud into a syringe.
[01:05:53]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:05:54]  Yeah.
[01:05:54]  To a syringe, shoot mud into your butt.
[01:05:57]  Yeah, there you go.
[01:05:58]  You could have headed fucking Hulkster a syringe full of mud.
[01:06:01]  He would have taken it.
[01:06:02]  Hey, dude.
[01:06:05]  So April of 1992.
[01:06:09]  Dookie.
[01:06:11]  Just poop.
[01:06:12]  That's what I smell.
[01:06:15]  Dookie.
[01:06:17]  So in April of 92, while all this is going on, Rita Chatterton comes forward and she, for the first time, makes her allegations public that Vince has sexually assaulted her, right?
[01:06:27]  So all of this is happening in the same year.
[01:06:30]  And to make matters worse for Vince, his expensive bodybuilding league had just brought on Lou Farigno right at the same time that the government cracks down on steroids.
[01:06:39]  And so he has to stop everyone from using steroids.
[01:06:42]  And if you know anything about Lou Farigno in 1992, he is not going to be happy when you tell him to stop using steroids.
[01:06:50]  He was like, you go to hell.
[01:06:51]  Yeah.
[01:06:53]  He hooked down on him.
[01:06:55]  So Vince brings in a specialist to help wean his bodybuilders off of gear and onto human growth hormone, which is untraceable, at least at the time.
[01:07:05]  That's the allegation made in the book, Sex Lies, and Headlocks.
[01:07:08]  One of Vince's bodybuilders later claimed, We all had our connections on the streets.
[01:07:13]  If you were smart, you could get around the test.
[01:07:15]  The ones who could afford it just moved onto human growth hormones taken from human cadavers, which was the latest thing.
[01:07:20]  I wasn't worried.
[01:07:21]  It was my knowledge against Vince's.
[01:07:23]  Some of the guys just fell apart.
[01:07:26]  It gives me the power of a night.
[01:07:28]  They're shooting corpse juice into the necromancing each other.
[01:07:34]  Yes.
[01:07:37]  That's how Vince is going to crack into bodybuilding.
[01:07:39]  Oh, but I feel the moonlight on my eternal flesh, brother.
[01:07:44]  Undertaker really literally was the dead man, I guess.
[01:07:47]  Yeah, it's pretty cool.
[01:07:50]  Jesus Christ.
[01:07:51]  The fucking DNA of a thousand dead men swirling in the warrior's veins suddenly makes a lot of sense.
[01:07:59]  Just given everyone a couple more days off a week and they wouldn't have to inject themselves with the flesh of man.
[01:08:06]  Maybe just reduce your touring schedule by, I don't know, 70 dates.
[01:08:11]  No, no, no, Tom.
[01:08:12]  I think cannibalism is the right answer here.
[01:08:15]  That's the responsible corporate move is to engage in muscle cannibalism.
[01:08:20]  Man, I'm waiting for the expose of Hulk Hogan fucking eating a dude.
[01:08:25]  Just eating a dead man?
[01:08:26]  Yeah.
[01:08:27]  Just eating a dude.
[01:08:30]  Oh, man.
[01:08:31]  So those photos get leaked on a TMZ or some shit.
[01:08:35]  Yeah, find it, folks.
[01:08:36]  You can avenge Gawker.
[01:08:38]  This is the only way.
[01:08:39]  He's four times while he's eating that dude.
[01:08:41]  He can't help it.
[01:08:42]  It's unrelated to anything.
[01:08:43]  He just says it like he's broken.
[01:08:46]  Vince also uses this as an opportunity to shill to his bodybuilders a supplement that he'd started selling.
[01:08:54]  And the supplement is made by a nutritionist that he hires as a contractor called Dr. Squat.
[01:09:00]  So that sounds totally legit.
[01:09:04]  So they are taking, we've already talked about the corpse human growth hormones.
[01:09:09]  This pill Dr. Squat made is made from the ground up antlers of lactating deer.
[01:09:14]  Oh, fuck yeah.
[01:09:17]  Give me a, it's a pository.
[01:09:19]  That's so funny.
[01:09:20]  Unfortunately, this doesn't work.
[01:09:22]  And his bodybuilders started to deflate.
[01:09:25]  And as a big June event at the Long Beach Convention Center nears, there's just like he's got a bunch of bodybuilders whose muscles are melting off of them.
[01:09:34]  The event becomes so great.
[01:09:36]  This is a massive failure.
[01:09:38]  I'm sure you're about to say, but the announcers looking at these like puffy, like tired men, they keep trying to cover it.
[01:09:45]  Like, oh, he's been pretty sec lately.
[01:09:46]  Like they can't say, oh, yeah, we can't do steroids anymore.
[01:09:50]  That's why these guys look so terrible.
[01:09:51]  It's like they just keep finding excuses during the show.
[01:09:54]  It's fantastic.
[01:09:55]  It's so funny.
[01:09:57]  It is such a disaster financially that one of Vince's underlings calculates that if Vince had, instead of starting the WBF, if he had paid each of the 13,000 guests at that event $10,000, they would have walked out ahead financially.
[01:10:12]  Oh my God.
[01:10:14]  It goes so badly.
[01:10:15]  The best way to frame that.
[01:10:17]  That's an incredible way to frame that failure.
[01:10:20]  Like what?
[01:10:24]  So what a wet fart.
[01:10:26]  Like anything else, nothing else in history has landed with such a thunderous thud.
[01:10:31]  We could have established basic income for most of Long Beach and made off of this.
[01:10:37]  Yeah.
[01:10:38]  Instead of this weird bodybuilding leak.
[01:10:43]  I don't know.
[01:10:43]  Maybe Vince made some money with the reindeer pills or the deer pills.
[01:10:48]  Who knows?
[01:10:49]  So the Eastern District Court of New York eventually brings charges against Vince for distributing steroids and conspiracy to distribute steroids.
[01:10:58]  The case goes to court in 1994, and Hulk Hogan testifies in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
[01:11:04]  He'd started working for Ted Turner's outfit, the WCW, during this period.
[01:11:08]  So like he's not professionally tied to Vince anymore, although he'll come back.
[01:11:14]  A lot of guys have left for the WCW at this point.
[01:11:17]  10 wrestlers, other wrestlers, so 11 wrestlers in total, testify for the government, but none of them claim that Vince gave them steroids, just that they felt pressured by him to take steroids, right?
[01:11:28]  To get bigger.
[01:11:29]  So they don't actually have the claim that Vince was ordering anyone to do anything or that he was handing out the steroids, right?
[01:11:35]  Just that I felt like we weren't going to get the job if we weren't big enough, right?
[01:11:40]  I believe that that's true.
[01:11:42]  Well, yeah, Vince is not that dumb, right?
[01:11:44]  Right.
[01:11:44]  I feel like Vince is like, he's an awful, terrible man.
[01:11:47]  He's a demon, but he's kind of shrewd.
[01:11:50]  And it seems like he would keep himself out.
[01:11:53]  He would be smart enough to keep himself out of all of those conversations.
[01:11:57]  And it's one of those things there are when you hear fans talk about this, they'll talk about like, well, Hogan definitely lied under oath.
[01:12:03]  And that's possible.
[01:12:04]  I'm not going to make those claims or get into that.
[01:12:07]  Among other things, the jury deliberates and renders a verdict of not guilty, right?
[01:12:11]  So it is, it would be defamation to be like Hogan definitely lied under oath and Vince McMahon definitely, you know, was guilty because I simply can't say that, right?
[01:12:21]  I don't mind saying it.
[01:12:22]  Hulk Hogan definitely lied.

=== Keeping Himself Out (04:16) ===

[01:12:25]  There we go.
[01:12:26]  Shot babies.
[01:12:28]  What did he say?
[01:12:29]  He said like he only used steroids like twice or some shit after he like got hurt or something.
[01:12:34]  Like his testimony was really weak, but he doesn't implicate Vince.
[01:12:39]  He doesn't implicate Vince.
[01:12:40]  And it is possible Vince didn't cross a line that would have gotten him convicted.
[01:12:45]  It's also possible that like it was arranged that people would tell just enough of the truth to not get in trouble themselves while still not talking about the things that Vince did that were illegal.
[01:12:55]  All of this is possibly true.
[01:12:57]  Whether or not Vince actually, you know, broke the law, he is declared non-guilty.
[01:13:02]  And also I think he's morally responsible for what happens with steroids in the WWF to a significant extent.
[01:13:08]  Of course, he created that culture.
[01:13:09]  He designed that culture.
[01:13:11]  He definitely found ways.
[01:13:13]  Like, I have no doubt that he, when they all, all the wrestlers testified, well, we felt pressured.
[01:13:19]  Yeah, I sure, of course.
[01:13:20]  He was the architect of all of that, no doubt.
[01:13:23]  But I also, I don't have any trouble believing that Vince kept himself out of the conversation so that there was no.
[01:13:32]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:13:36]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[01:13:39]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:13:42]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[01:13:46]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:13:49]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[01:13:51]  And in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:13:55]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:14:00]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:14:02]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:14:04]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:14:06]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:14:09]  They said, oh, hell no.
[01:14:10]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:14:13]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:14:17]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:14:19]  Trust me, babe.
[01:14:20]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:14:30]  What's up, everyone?
[01:14:31]  I'm Ago Warden.
[01:14:32]  My next guest, you know, from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[01:14:39]  It's Will Farrell.
[01:14:43]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:14:46]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:14:51]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:14:54]  I'm working my way up through it.
[01:14:55]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[01:14:58]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:15:03]  Yeah.
[01:15:03]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:15:06]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:15:07]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:15:16]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:15:18]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:15:25]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:15:27]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:15:28]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:15:29]  Yeah.
[01:15:30]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:15:38]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[01:15:41]  I was, hi, dad.
[01:15:42]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[01:15:50]  This is badass convict.
[01:15:52]  Right.
[01:15:53]  Just finished five years.
[01:15:55]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[01:15:57]  Come on.
[01:15:59]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:16:07]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:16:15]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:16:24]  I'm an alcoholic.
[01:16:25]  And without this program, I'm going to die.
[01:16:30]  Open your free iHeartRadio app.
[01:16:31]  Search the Ceno Show.
[01:16:33]  And listen now.
[01:16:37]  Nothing to substantially link him to any of that.

=== Mandatory Random Testing (02:54) ===

[01:16:41]  No.
[01:16:42]  And you know what?
[01:16:42]  There's nothing to substantially link me to.
[01:16:47]  These products and services.
[01:16:49]  Oh, I was going to say the Japanese Red Army.
[01:16:52]  But yes, these products and services also.
[01:16:54]  No direct connection that anyone can prove.
[01:16:57]  So, you know.
[01:16:59]  Except the fact that they paid you.
[01:17:02]  Never mind.
[01:17:02]  Yeah.
[01:17:03]  No.
[01:17:04]  Here's some ads.
[01:17:11]  Oh, boy.
[01:17:14]  What is up, everybody?
[01:17:17]  We are back from advertisements and we are talking about 1996.
[01:17:24]  So that is two years after Vince is declared not guilty in this big steroid case.
[01:17:29]  It is, I think, about five years after he institutes mandatory random steroid tests, you know, after Zahorian gets convicted.
[01:17:38]  In 1996, he suspends mandatory random steroid tests for the WWF.
[01:17:43]  His justification later, when he's talked to questioned by the Waxman Committee, which is like a congressional subcommittee, is that, you know, Ted Turner was eating our lunch.
[01:17:52]  You know, we were really struggling against the WCW, so we couldn't afford to do random steroid tests.
[01:17:59]  He did.
[01:18:00]  Man, that's why I did the immoral act.
[01:18:03]  It costs money, guys.
[01:18:05]  You just do bad things if you get money for it.
[01:18:08]  That's true.
[01:18:10]  That is true.
[01:18:10]  It is true.
[01:18:11]  That is true.
[01:18:12]  That's the highest law of the land.
[01:18:13]  Protecting profits is the highest law of the land.
[01:18:17]  That is actually true.
[01:18:18]  That is legally binding.
[01:18:20]  And how we treat things here at CoolZone Media, which is why we have reanimated both of you in AI form to a, well, we're going to, we've got a Pepsi commercial coming up after this.
[01:18:31]  I'm starting to like it.
[01:18:32]  I miss my fingers.
[01:18:33]  Can you AI is fucking up on your fingers, Sean?
[01:18:37]  Can you make us blast android bodies like the film Virtuosity?
[01:18:42]  Absolutely.
[01:18:43]  Although I was actually going to go with, what's that other movie where the guy creates the AI and then he and he and another weird dude hang out in a basement with it in that isolated compound and it murders himself.
[01:18:54]  Ex Machina.
[01:18:55]  Ex Machina.
[01:18:56]  Yeah, I'm doing an ex-Machina.
[01:18:59]  Yeah, that's the plan.
[01:19:01]  I think Tom's right.
[01:19:01]  I want to be Russell Crow all the way.
[01:19:03]  Yeah.
[01:19:03]  That's Russell Crowe.
[01:19:05]  We'll try a few different AI movies, including the movie AI, where both of you can be Jude Law's robot pimp.
[01:19:13]  Jigolo Joe?
[01:19:14]  Jigolo Joe.
[01:19:15]  That's right.
[01:19:15]  You can change his hair color with a snap of a finger.
[01:19:20]  I'm going to be Johnny Cabb from Total Recall.
[01:19:23]  Okay.
[01:19:23]  Okay.
[01:19:25]  A lot of great robot role models there.
[01:19:29]  I just learned recently that Johnny Cabb is portrayed by Robert Picardo from Star Trek Voyager.

=== Eddie Guerrero's Loss (16:02) ===

[01:19:35]  I didn't really.
[01:19:36]  Yep.
[01:19:37]  Well, we all learned something today.
[01:19:39]  Okay.
[01:19:40]  That's nice.
[01:19:41]  I wish some podcast was about that.
[01:19:42]  And the perfectionists.
[01:19:45]  Nothing.
[01:19:46]  Child suicide.
[01:19:47]  Yeah.
[01:19:48]  Yeah.
[01:19:48]  All that other stuff.
[01:19:49]  That would be better.
[01:19:50]  So 1996, they suspend their random drug tests.
[01:19:54]  And it's funny because when he's talking for the Waxman community in 2006, like McMahon can't even answer whether or not wrestlers were ever penalized for positive tests.
[01:20:04]  Like because the congressmen are like, so was there a penalty if you tested positive?
[01:20:09]  And they kind of like waffle around it.
[01:20:11]  He also.
[01:20:12]  I'm trying to imagine where all the air quotes are when Vince says, yes, we do mandatory random steroid testing.
[01:20:18]  Are there quotes around every single one of those words, Vince?
[01:20:21]  Just a lot of quotation marks.
[01:20:23]  They actually ran out.
[01:20:25]  Mandatory random drug testing.
[01:20:31]  No, you don't have to put the drug in quotes.
[01:20:33]  There were definitely drugs.
[01:20:34]  So we're fine on that one.
[01:20:38]  Yep, we tested for him and we found them.
[01:20:40]  Yeah, we tested it.
[01:20:41]  We didn't fix drugs.
[01:20:43]  When I say drug, I mean Pat Patterson's poop.
[01:20:47]  That's Vince's anti-drug.
[01:20:49]  So he brags in front of this committee that not only do we have like the best safety programs to make sure people aren't hurting themselves on drugs and anywhere in the industry, but we've just added cardiological testing.
[01:21:04]  That's now a part of our enhanced safety procedures to make sure our people are really safe.
[01:21:10]  Now we're going to talk about how well that all works or worked, I should say.
[01:21:14]  That should be a test they do, right?
[01:21:16]  Anyway.
[01:21:17]  Yeah, that should be.
[01:21:18]  It should be, Tom.
[01:21:19]  It should be.
[01:21:19]  In 2014, the Ultimate Warrior, James Helwig, died of a heart attack at age 54, three days after being brought into the WWE Hall of Fame.
[01:21:28]  Kurt Hennig, or Hennig, yeah, Kurt Hinnig, Mr. Perfect, was found dead in a Tampa hotel room on February 10th, 2003, thanks to a cocktail of steroids, cocaine, and painkillers.
[01:21:40]  Ray Trailer Jr., big boss man, dropped dead from a heart attack in 2004.
[01:21:45]  He was 41 years old.
[01:21:47]  Randy Savage lasted until 2011, where he died of a heart attack while driving at age 58.
[01:21:52]  Davey Boy Smith was 39 when a heart attack took him in 2002.
[01:21:57]  An autopsy suggested that his past use of anabolic steroids likely contributed.
[01:22:01]  Ravishing.
[01:22:02]  30 fucking nine.
[01:22:03]  Jesus.
[01:22:04]  Yeah.
[01:22:04]  Yeah.
[01:22:05]  Extremely young.
[01:22:06]  Ravishing Rick Roode died in 1999 of heart failure at age 40.
[01:22:11]  Michael Hegstrand, Road Warrior Hawk, made it to 56 and died of a heart attack in 2003.
[01:22:17]  All of these men are either confirmed or heavily suspected to have been users of anabolic steroids during their wrestling careers.
[01:22:23]  In November of 2005, Eddie Guerrero died of heart failure at 38.
[01:22:28]  The scandal around his passing helped inspire the Waxman Committee, this congressional hearing we've been talking about.
[01:22:33]  And it forced the WWE, which is what they were called now, to reintroduce independent testing for their wrestlers along with a three-strikes policy.
[01:22:46]  There's two things I wanted to say.
[01:22:48]  One is the Ultimate Warrior.
[01:22:49]  You mentioned that he died three days after he was inducted to the WWE Hall of Fame, and he died.
[01:22:58]  He was also on Monday Night Raw, and he died like six hours after he was on the show or some shit like that.
[01:23:03]  Like he died the following morning.
[01:23:05]  So it was hours after he was on TV.
[01:23:07]  That's fucked up.
[01:23:08]  And if you, if you watch it, it's in the Dark Side of the Ring episode, but if you watch the little appearance he made on Raw that Monday, like he looks like he's about to drop dead in about eight hours.
[01:23:17]  Yeah.
[01:23:23]  Oh, I lost the other thing I wanted to say.
[01:23:25]  So, but yeah, I just wanted to underline that, I guess.
[01:23:28]  It's just, man, there's, oh, I remember the other thing now.
[01:23:32]  There, um, when you watch the Dark Side of the Ring episode on Ultimate Warrior, they're talking to his ex-wife, um, and she's telling a story about how she found out that Warrior was cheating on her, but it starts in a very different place because she's like, I was trying to get a hold of him at his hotel and I couldn't.
[01:23:50]  And she says something that's like really telling and really chilling and really sad.
[01:23:53]  She's like, if you're a wrestling wife, you know that if you try to call your husband at his hotel room and you can't reach him on the road, there is a very good chance he is dead.
[01:24:04]  Yeah.
[01:24:07]  And a lot of these guys, you know, they're on the road when it happens.
[01:24:11]  They're in a hotel room or something like that.
[01:24:13]  Almost exclusively, actually.
[01:24:15]  I think Dre dies in a hotel room, too.
[01:24:17]  You know, I think all of the guys you mentioned died in a hotel room.
[01:24:21]  Yeah.
[01:24:22]  Yep.
[01:24:23]  It's pretty bleak.
[01:24:25]  And also, as we said, Chris or Eddie Guerrero dies in 2005.
[01:24:30]  There's this committee in 2006, and it forces the WWE to reintroduce independent testing for their wrestlers and a three-strikes policy.
[01:24:38]  But this doesn't actually stop the problematic behavior.
[01:24:41]  And kind of the evidence of this is in 2008, WWE wrestler Chris Benoit hanged himself in his home after murdering his wife and child.
[01:24:51]  Cool.
[01:24:52]  Yeah, there's a lot.
[01:24:53]  I mean, everybody in wrestling knows this story, right?
[01:24:55]  At least the bones of it.
[01:24:56]  I think everybody, I think most people outside of wrestling.
[01:25:00]  It's a really, and it's a nightmare.
[01:25:02]  Benoit was a dude, number one, who had problems before he was a wrestler, right?
[01:25:07]  There were issues with this guy outside of what wrestling did to him.
[01:25:11]  The head injuries that he suffered were a significant part of this.
[01:25:15]  He's like Googling after he kills his son, like how to resuscitate a dead child, stuff like that.
[01:25:22]  Like there's, it's fucked up.
[01:25:25]  But one thing that is not debatable is that at the time of his death, Benoit had 10 times the normal level of testosterone in his blood.
[01:25:33]  Testosterone, obviously, it's a hormone that naturally occurs.
[01:25:38]  It's a hormone that people take who want to increase the rate at which they grow their muscles.
[01:25:43]  It is also a hormone that can cause aggressive behavior, particularly in high doses.
[01:25:47]  And he has, again, 10 times as much as he is supposed to have.
[01:25:51]  Yeah.
[01:25:51]  There is a lot of brain degeneration and calcification from multiple head injuries.
[01:25:57]  And also, Eddie Guerrero was his best friend.
[01:26:01]  And when Eddie Guerrero died, Chris Benoit really spiraled badly into grief and never recovered from it.
[01:26:09]  So it's, there's a lot of things going on in this guy's head at the time.
[01:26:15]  He is, it is like the perfect storm of like shit that can go wrong in the brain and body of a giant muscle man.
[01:26:26]  And it ends in the murder of his family and his own suicide.
[01:26:30]  Benoit had prescription steroids in his home.
[01:26:33]  This leads investigators, you know, after the deaths to a doctor named Phil Aston.
[01:26:40]  There's a lot of outrage over what's happened.
[01:26:42]  There's a lot of like PR around it.
[01:26:44]  So the state goes after Aston.
[01:26:46]  And it does seem like they had a cost to do so.
[01:26:49]  Among other things, they find that Aston had prescribed Chris.
[01:26:54]  He had prescribed him 10-month supplies of anabolic steroids every three to four weeks for a full year.
[01:27:00]  That's too many steroids.
[01:27:02]  It is an objectively insane amount of steroids.
[01:27:05]  Way too many steroids.
[01:27:06]  Federal prosecutors eventually alleged that the level of testosterone in his blood contributed to the murder of his family.
[01:27:13]  Aston was sentenced to 10 years in prison as a result of all of this.
[01:27:18]  Reading through everything here, it is frustrating the degree to which by default Vince is automatically exonerated from legal culpability of any kind in his case.
[01:27:27]  In this case, his wrestlers are independent contractors, so he doesn't have to pay for their health care.
[01:27:32]  And even though the feds were able to prove that Zoctr Zahorian mailed packages of steroids to Vince, that's not enough to prove that he caused anyone else to take him.
[01:27:40]  Take them.
[01:27:40]  Benoit took three years of steroid or multiple years worth of steroids in a single year because he felt that that's what he had to do in order to stay competitive and keep getting booked.
[01:27:50]  But there's nothing legally actionable against Vince in that.
[01:27:53]  The Waxman Committee, which convened after Guerrero's death, even asked Vince about this, about like whether or not he had pushed people to get bigger.
[01:28:01]  He slipped out of that question quite easily.
[01:28:03]  His answer is no.
[01:28:05]  They question, they ask him then, have you ever told a WWE talent or perspective talent that he or she needed to be bigger in order to be successful?
[01:28:12]  No.
[01:28:13]  Back to the weight, I have suggested that they lose weight.
[01:28:16]  Question, you suggested losing it, but not gaining it?
[01:28:19]  Answer, right.
[01:28:20]  Question, have you ever told a WWE talent or perspective talent that he or she needed to be more muscular or words to that effect?
[01:28:27]  Answer, no.
[01:28:28]  Question, are you aware of whether anyone representing WWE has ever told a talent or perspective talent that he or she needed to be bigger?
[01:28:37]  And it's like, you know, that's kind of how it goes on and on and on.
[01:28:41]  But like, he's got, you know, a pretty perfect out for this, right?
[01:28:46]  Because he's not saying you need to get bigger.
[01:28:48]  It just kind of is known to everyone around him that likes bigger.
[01:28:54]  And if you're any sort of fan of wrestling or have any sort of knowledge of the wrestling industry, it's like super well known that Vince, and we talked about it earlier in the series, Vince loves big guys.
[01:29:06]  He loves the big body dudes.
[01:29:08]  Yeah, that's his thing.
[01:29:09]  That's his thing.
[01:29:09]  Yeah.
[01:29:10]  Yeah.
[01:29:11]  From this, this line of questioning is where they bring up that like Vince has canceled the WWF random drug testing program in 96.
[01:29:19]  And they ask him why.
[01:29:20]  And he answers straight up, like, yeah, we were competing with Ted Turner and the WCW and testing was expensive.
[01:29:26]  He actually, at the same time as he says, they dropped the testing for expense is like, we eliminated water coolers because of the expense.
[01:29:32]  That really pissed people off.
[01:29:35]  It is, it is a distracted.
[01:29:37]  Yeah.
[01:29:39]  It's frustrating how consistently this all works for him.
[01:29:44]  Got to hand it to him.
[01:29:45]  It's plausible.
[01:29:46]  It's plausible.
[01:29:48]  And, you know, this is all very frustrating.
[01:29:51]  There's a lot here that's frustrating.
[01:29:54]  But kind of the apex of Vince's awfulness and sort of where we're going to end with our story today is the tale of Owen Hart.
[01:30:04]  Just because, I don't know, it makes sense to me.
[01:30:08]  It's the kind of the final thing you need to know about Vince to know the kind of man that he is.
[01:30:14]  So we have introduced Owen before in that great story about them all pissing on Ric Flair's bed.
[01:30:20]  His brother Brett, great technical wrestler, and he's Vince's big star in like the late 1990s, right?
[01:30:27]  But as we've talked about a few times, around like 1996, 1997, Ted Turner's WCW suddenly blew up.
[01:30:34]  It is briefly the biggest wrestling organization in the country.
[01:30:39]  And the way Turner is able to do this is he buys up all of Vince's big names, right?
[01:30:44]  Like guys like Hogan start working for WCW for a while.
[01:30:47]  It doesn't last long.
[01:30:48]  This isn't like a good long-term strategy, but it causes Vince a lot of short-term trouble.
[01:30:54]  Five years.
[01:30:55]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:30:55]  There's a few years that they're really fighting there.
[01:30:58]  And one of the people who decides to go over to WCW is Brett Hart.
[01:31:03]  So Brett won the WWF championship in August of 1997, but he agreed to join WCW starting in December.
[01:31:11]  McMahon didn't want him to leave the WWF as like, you know, the belt holder, but Brett wouldn't lose to Sean Michaels, right?
[01:31:19]  He like refused because he and Sean Michaels, who is a great wrestler, but a coked out maniac, like they hate each other for personal reasons.
[01:31:26]  So Brett's like, I'm not going to go out losing my belt to him.
[01:31:30]  There's a lot.
[01:31:32]  There's a lot.
[01:31:32]  Like Sean casually accused Brett of cheating on his wife with Sonny on live television.
[01:31:39]  Yeah.
[01:31:40]  It's like there's like a lot of bad blood between these dudes.
[01:31:43]  But like from the version of I've heard is that Brett, and this is still kind of like, dude, you're being a little, being a little bit of a, of a, of a dick, but like Brett didn't want to lose to Sean in Calgary specifically because Calgary was like his hometown.
[01:31:58]  Yeah, because he's a, he's a, he's a Canadian wrestler.
[01:32:01]  He doesn't want to like lose to Sean in his hometown.
[01:32:04]  And it's one of those things, there's still enough kind of Kfabe kept that like Vince can't force this, right?
[01:32:10]  Because like you need you, I mean, especially like you need the wrestler who's going to lose the belt, which is, as we said earlier, this was the standard thing.
[01:32:18]  If you're aging out or quitting or joining somewhere else, like you lose your, your, your championship belt.
[01:32:24]  Yeah.
[01:32:25]  I'll argue that it's well, you, there's, there's more room to do it here.
[01:32:28]  He certainly, he certainly could have just done like a special episode where they drop the pretense and they just get Brett out.
[01:32:36]  They're like, hey, Brett, you've had a great run here.
[01:32:37]  You were a great champion.
[01:32:38]  And then Brett leaves the belt and then they're like, good luck.
[01:32:41]  But like, also, it's less about like it's just like the Kfabe of regular television, right?
[01:32:49]  Like when like an actor leaves a TV series for whatever reason, like they're moving on to movies, they got fired or they took a different part or something.
[01:32:58]  They write them out.
[01:32:59]  Yeah.
[01:33:00]  Because they can't just stop and say, well, George Clooney's leaving ER.
[01:33:03]  So it's like they won't do that on an episode of ER.
[01:33:06]  So like that's kind of like the level of Kfabe that they're working with here.
[01:33:11]  Yeah.
[01:33:11]  You have to write a reason that makes sense within the context of the show.
[01:33:16]  It's more just like the general Kfabe of television.
[01:33:19]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:33:20]  But again, like I said, it is, there is enough of a blurred line where they could have just done a special because they do it sometimes like they do it when Owen dies.
[01:33:27]  They do a special episode.
[01:33:28]  So it's like they could have just done an episode where like, well, Brett, here's, you know, anyway.
[01:33:33]  But that's not what they do in this situation.
[01:33:36]  McMahon instead pitches him an alternative, which is that during a match in Calgary, he'll wrestle Michaels and it'll end in a disqualification, right?
[01:33:45]  So he won't lose the belt like nobody will win.
[01:33:47]  It'll be kind of a match called on a technical fuck up.
[01:33:51]  And then he'll have another match later, not in Calgary, and he'll lose the belt in that, right?
[01:33:56]  That's the thing they work out.
[01:33:58]  Pretty normal so far, not a weird thing for wrestling.
[01:34:02]  What follows, though, is kind of a weird thing.
[01:34:05]  It's coming to be known as the Montreal screw job.
[01:34:08]  And it gets a lot of focus from wrestling fans because it is pretty shitty behavior on Vince's part.
[01:34:14]  But we've also singularly weird, too.
[01:34:17]  It's weird.
[01:34:18]  It's a weird thing to do.
[01:34:19]  I will say it doesn't hit as hard after talking about like the child molestation ring and the all the deaths part, right?
[01:34:26]  Because this is yeah, the next part of this story hits pretty hard.
[01:34:30]  This part of the story is unethical, but not like evil, right?
[01:34:37]  Nobody gets murdered or molested here.
[01:34:39]  So it may not hit as hard as it does to a lot of it did as it did to people at the time.
[01:34:44]  Yeah.
[01:34:44]  Real quick, I want to redeem myself.
[01:34:47]  I misspoke earlier.
[01:34:48]  It's when I said Brett didn't want to lose in Calgary.
[01:34:50]  Brett didn't want to lose in Canada.
[01:34:52]  Yeah, yeah, Canada.
[01:34:53]  Obviously, this happened in Montreal because it's famously called the Montreal Swordshop.
[01:34:56]  All right.
[01:34:56]  Sorry about that.
[01:34:57]  Yeah.
[01:34:58]  Yeah.
[01:34:58]  We'll fix it in editing.
[01:35:00]  There's a post.
[01:35:02]  So the gist of what happens here is that McMahon, like they've got this set up to where it's going to end in a DQ.
[01:35:08]  Heart's not going to lose.
[01:35:09]  But McMahon tells the referee that while it's going on, at one point, Hart's going to get caught in what's called the sharpshooter, which is like his trademark submission hold.
[01:35:22]  It's his finisher.
[01:35:24]  His finisher.
[01:35:24]  Yeah.
[01:35:25]  And he was supposed to, as they had agreed upon before, he was going to get out and then the match would continue.
[01:35:30]  But McMahon has a ref call the match against him while he's in this submission hold and basically calls it that he had submitted.

=== Stone Cold Presence (15:07) ===

[01:35:37]  Right.
[01:35:37]  So Brett has not submitted, but like, again, as we talked about, both the ref and the announcer have a lot of power to kind of like set reality for the people in the room.
[01:35:48]  So they call the match against him.
[01:35:50]  And it is kind of obvious that like something fucked up has gone down.
[01:35:55]  It doesn't look like an actual submission.
[01:35:58]  It looks like a mistake because what happens is, is Sean puts Brett in the sharpshooter.
[01:36:02]  And what they had talked about was Brett was going to reverse it and beat Sean that way.
[01:36:08]  Or they were going to get out of it or something.
[01:36:10]  Hunter Hurst, Triple H is going to come out and hit him with because Triple H is at ringside at that point.
[01:36:15]  But what happens is the ref calls it.
[01:36:17]  They ring the bell and the announcers start talking as if Sean just submitted Brett.
[01:36:22]  But in the ring, like Brett is confused.
[01:36:25]  Like he's in the process of reversing the move and like everyone in the crowd is confused.
[01:36:29]  So there's like kind of scattered applause, but there's like this really strange response to it.
[01:36:34]  It looks like somebody fucked up.
[01:36:36]  Like it's very clear this was not supposed to happen when you watch it.
[01:36:40]  Yeah.
[01:36:40]  And, you know, a lot of people get very angry as a result of this.
[01:36:44]  Brett, most of all, he very famously cold cocks Vince in the locker room, like hits him.
[01:36:49]  And Vince will claim...
[01:36:51]  Spits on him in the show.
[01:36:52]  You can see it happen.
[01:36:53]  Yeah.
[01:36:54]  It's pretty.
[01:36:54]  He's so a lot of people want to.
[01:36:59]  Yeah.
[01:37:00]  I mean, at least that happened.
[01:37:02]  Vince, one of the funny things about Vince as a guy is that like, you know, it's very famous that Brett comes in and like punches him right in the face in the locker room after this.
[01:37:11]  Vince later claims that like, well, I made him an offer to let him punch me as recompense.
[01:37:16]  Like he has to try to take power back.
[01:37:18]  Like he can't have just been hit in the face.
[01:37:20]  Like, no, no, I told him to do it.
[01:37:21]  I told him to hit me in the face.
[01:37:22]  We were totally cool about it.
[01:37:25]  No, he just punched Vince.
[01:37:26]  He just punched Vince because he was angry.
[01:37:29]  And Vince had it coming.
[01:37:31]  Well, there's a really good documentary everybody should watch called Hitman Heart Wrestling with Shadows that's about this specifically.
[01:37:37]  Yeah.
[01:37:38]  It's slanted, obviously.
[01:37:40]  It's very favorable to Brett.
[01:37:41]  So you have to take some of it with a grain of salt, but there's a lot of footage that they pull from the night of the show and also from backstage of this event happening where you get to see all this shit happening.
[01:37:53]  Yeah, definitely worth checking out.
[01:37:55]  And it's like, yeah, so this is very, a very famous moment in wrestling history.
[01:37:59]  It does say a lot about Vince.
[01:38:01]  Although, honestly, the thing that I think says the most about him is his need to pretend that he made Brett punch him.
[01:38:07]  Right.
[01:38:07]  It's pretty revealing.
[01:38:09]  The hitman heart couldn't knock out a 58-year-old man.
[01:38:14]  Yeah.
[01:38:14]  Yeah.
[01:38:14]  Without being offered it.
[01:38:16]  Yeah.
[01:38:16]  Right.
[01:38:17]  It's like, bro.
[01:38:20]  Oh, it's so funny.
[01:38:22]  So, yeah, this is fucked up, but it has obviously nothing compared to the story we're going to tell next, which is about what happens as a result of some of Vince's actions and the result of some accident of a terrible accident to Brett's brother Owen.
[01:38:38]  So we have talked about how Vince and Linda went to war with regulators across the country to ensure that wrestling would not be held to the higher health and safety standards of traditional athletic exhibitions.
[01:38:48]  This effort, which occurred throughout the early to mid-1990s, was largely successful.
[01:38:53]  And by the end of the 90s, the WWE was beholden to far fewer safety restrictions and much less oversight than they had been in the 1980s.
[01:39:01]  The Montreal screw job is generally seen as like the start to the attitude era, right?
[01:39:07]  But it also marked the beginning of Vince's physical involvement in wrestling to a never before seen level.
[01:39:13]  He'd often done commentating and been a presence, but from now on, he's not just like there.
[01:39:18]  He's not just like talking.
[01:39:19]  He's not just, you know, giving commentary on matches.
[01:39:23]  He's an in-ring presence.
[01:39:24]  He's like wrestling a lot of the time.
[01:39:26]  And he's, he's usually, he's not like, he's not, he's not able to like good at like putting people in holds or fighting people technically, but he's actually pretty good at getting the shit beat out of him, which is a skill.
[01:39:37]  Yeah, he understands what his role is out there.
[01:39:40]  Yeah.
[01:39:40]  Yeah.
[01:39:41]  Which is kind of funny because as jacked as Vince made himself and as much as like behind the scenes, he tries to insist that he's this toughest dude ever, like we've talked about in throughout the series.
[01:39:55]  He basically he gets beat up in the ring the same way like Bobby the Brain Heenan or Jimmy Hart or any of the other like really annoying guys who keep getting one over on the faces and you're so mad at them and you just want them to get body slammed.
[01:40:13]  And then they finally do like he plays in the ring like a guy that's going to get his ass kicked.
[01:40:17]  So he does just take bumps in the ring, really.
[01:40:20]  He never is like a dominant presence as a wrestler.
[01:40:23]  He just gets beat up.
[01:40:25]  And it's very funny.
[01:40:26]  He wrestles with real humility for a terrible sex.
[01:40:29]  Right.
[01:40:29]  A surprising level of humility.
[01:40:30]  Like he's like, he's such a carnie and he's so married to the business that he understands the value of being this villainous character, Vince McMahon, the boss, and like denying people the satisfaction of seeing him in the ring.
[01:40:44]  And then when he finally gets in the ring, he gets his ass beat.
[01:40:46]  And that's that, you know, that's, it's the super old story in wrestling.
[01:40:52]  They do it all the time.
[01:40:54]  Yeah.
[01:40:54]  And he's, he has, he, he has no problem doing that, which is fascinating to me.
[01:40:59]  It's really interesting because like a big when he first starts doing this, like the guy who's like wailing on him the most is Stone Cold Steve Austin, who is like, his, his persona is like, I'm the rebel, I'm the bad boy, you know, I'm able to do the things that you could, like other people, like I'm the, I'm the, I'm also, I'm a common man, right?
[01:41:16]  Like I'm, I'm sticking it up for like the regular Joes out there.
[01:41:19]  And it's very much framed, his, his, him beating on Vince is like, everyone wants to beat up their boss, right?
[01:41:25]  So Vince knows what he's doing by like, I'm going to be this kind of personification of like corporate America so that, you know, this regular guy hero can like wail on me.
[01:41:36]  But when he's interviewed about it, because like he gets interviewed a lot about, you know, him showing up and being a presence in ring because it's like big news.
[01:41:43]  And he'll always be like, well, you know, I get that this is what people want to see, but like I'm really stone cold, right?
[01:41:49]  Like I'm the guy in real life, I'm stone cold because I'm fighting against authority all the time.
[01:41:54]  You know, no, no, billionaire is stone cold.
[01:41:59]  You surely are not, Vince.
[01:42:01]  No.
[01:42:03]  It's, it's interesting.
[01:42:04]  I don't know where you're at.
[01:42:05]  It is also interesting to launch like the biggest storyline of your promotion is a feud between Your top wrestler and the CEO, like management and labor literally fighting.
[01:42:22]  I don't think that ever happened before.
[01:42:24]  No, and it's, we're going to talk a little bit about like the kind of this kind of concept of what people call neo-Kayfabe.
[01:42:33]  It's really interesting kind of like what is going on between all these characters and the real people as this sort of like the attitude era kicks off.
[01:42:43]  And I think probably the story that best embodies that is maybe one of the most, maybe the most uncomfortable thing that ever happened in a WWF storyline, although that's a long list of things.
[01:42:55]  Are you guys aware of the story with like the Undertaker and his daughter Stephanie and his son Shane?
[01:43:00]  Uh-huh.
[01:43:01]  Where she gets kidnapped.
[01:43:03]  Uh-huh.
[01:43:04]  Yeah.
[01:43:05]  So by this point, Shane is part of the family business and so is Stephanie.
[01:43:09]  Obviously, Linda's helping to run things.
[01:43:13]  And Shane is, you know, you can see why like doing this all would be really important for Vince because he'd always craved his biological father's respect and wanted to work with him.
[01:43:23]  And Vince Sr. had given him a job, but they hadn't like worked together, really.
[01:43:28]  Like Vince had his jobs that he was given by his dad, but his dad did not treat him as an equal in the business, you know?
[01:43:33]  Like he sold it to him eventually, but they weren't like collaborators in the way that he kind of is with his kids, which you can see as like maybe a positive move.
[01:43:43]  Vince, you know, doing for his kids what he always wished his dad would have done for him.
[01:43:49]  But it takes us in some uncomfortable, the thematic directions.
[01:43:53]  So, you know, as we said, Stone Cold is like the hot shit right now, and he and Vince have an on-stage rivalry.
[01:44:01]  And in mid-1999, he cooks up this like very insane wrestling storyline to take advantage of the fact that he's a stage presence now and that his kids are like increasingly showing up in the ring more often.
[01:44:14]  So the Undertaker kidnaps his daughter.
[01:44:17]  And through a winding storyline, he winds up like he's going to marry her.
[01:44:22]  He's like forcibly marrying her against her will.
[01:44:26]  And this kind of all culminates in her tied to an eight-foot-tall crucifix in a satanic sacrifice/slash wedding ceremony with the Undertaker and the Ministry of Darkness, who are, we'll say, basically his gang.
[01:44:38]  Paul Bearer winds up reading out a wedding ceremony script for the Undertaker while Stephanie begs for rescue and various low-level faces try to stop the Undertaker.
[01:44:49]  I watched this live.
[01:44:50]  It is insane.
[01:44:53]  So Bearer turns to the Undertaker.
[01:44:55]  If he would have completed the ritual, she would have actually become a zombie.
[01:44:58]  Like, that's the stakes.
[01:45:00]  Yeah, that is, that is, he's going to zombify and marry her against her will.
[01:45:06]  And yeah, it's like the Paul Bearer asks the Undertaker, would you accept Stephanie Mary McMahon, her body, her mind, her soul, and even her breath unto yourself and allow her to bear your offspring?
[01:45:17]  And the Undertaker says, I do.
[01:45:20]  And then Bearer.
[01:45:21]  Didn't have to put it like that.
[01:45:22]  Did not have to say that.
[01:45:24]  Didn't have to include that line.
[01:45:27]  Weird.
[01:45:28]  Yeah, Bearer says, by the power invested in me by the Lord of Darkness, I now pronounce you as the unholy union of darkness.
[01:45:35]  You may now kiss your bride.
[01:45:37]  And that's when Stone Cold Steve Austin comes in and like beats, you know, he wails on everybody and he saves Stephanie before she can, you know, be presumably sexually assaulted because that's the stakes that Vince has set up here in the storyline.
[01:45:51]  Now, that's unsettling, right?
[01:45:55]  The next night, she and Vince and Stone Cold hold a little ceremony on the stage for a pilot for SmackDown, which was about to air on the UPN network.
[01:46:04]  Stephanie thanked Austin and expressed, I have never felt so powerless and violated in all my life.
[01:46:10]  The Undertaker, he kept touching me and whispering in my ears that I was his and there was nothing that I could do about it.
[01:46:15]  She is standing next to her dad saying this, like on television.
[01:46:19]  It's such a thing to do.
[01:46:21]  It's such a weird again.
[01:46:23]  Everyone's a consenting adult here.
[01:46:26]  So we're not saying like what he's doing here is evil.
[01:46:28]  It's just deeply bizarre.
[01:46:30]  It's weird.
[01:46:31]  It's so weird.
[01:46:32]  It's a TV show.
[01:46:33]  Yeah.
[01:46:34]  There were so many ways.
[01:46:35]  There are so many ways to have your daughter, like, you know, the white girl who's being threatened by a bad guy without it being this.
[01:46:43]  What do they say to her later?
[01:46:44]  He's like, you did well out there tonight.
[01:46:47]  Really well, honey.
[01:46:47]  My beautiful daughter.
[01:46:50]  You made daddy so much money.
[01:46:52]  So, rock hard.
[01:46:54]  Rock hard, sweetheart.
[01:46:56]  It's dark.
[01:46:57]  A lot of people are uncomfortable with this storyline.
[01:47:00]  And one person who is uncomfortable with this storyline is Owen Hart.
[01:47:04]  Now, his brother's with the WCW right now, but Owen has been wrestling with the WWF still.
[01:47:09]  And he's kind of been in the process of considering moving away from wrestling.
[01:47:14]  You know, he's for one thing, he just doesn't fit in in the Attitude era.
[01:47:18]  You know, he's a wrestler from an older era.
[01:47:20]  He feels uncomfortable with the storylines.
[01:47:23]  He thinks it's kind of trashy.
[01:47:25]  He has a wife and two kids.
[01:47:27]  And he's also like, he's watching what's starting to happen to the guys who had been the first generation of steroids wrestlers.
[01:47:34]  He's seeing how many of them are dropping early.
[01:47:36]  And he's like, maybe I should just like hang out with my family.
[01:47:39]  You know, that might be the responsible thing to do.
[01:47:43]  So while he's sort of working through his feelings on this, Vince decides to bring back a side character Owen had played in the late 80s, the Blue Blazer.
[01:47:52]  This was an example of what Josie Reisman calls neo-Kayfabe, a term that describes the nebulous relationship with the truth in modern wrestling.
[01:47:59]  Now that it's admitted, at least on some level, that it's not a real competition.
[01:48:04]  Kayfabe is a lie meant to sort of hide the fact that wrestling was not a real sports competition, right?
[01:48:10]  Neo-Kayfabe is what grows up in its place.
[01:48:12]  And neo-Kfabe is when the fakery is in the open and admitted, but it exists to reveal deeper truths.
[01:48:19]  And like a big part of the engagement for the audience is sort of working out what's being said behind the scenes with what's happening on screen, right?
[01:48:28]  And in this case, you can see what's like what's happening for real is that McMahon knows that Owen Hart isn't happy with the direction the WWF is going on and he's considering making a change in his life.
[01:48:40]  McMahon sets up the Blue Blazer as a morally upright superhero who's like launching a moral crusade against degeneracy within the WWF.
[01:48:48]  So in other words, Owen's character on screen is displaying a heightened and satiric version of the real disgust that Owen felt for Vince's storylines, which is like, that's kind of a lot going on, actually.
[01:49:01]  It is, yeah.
[01:49:02]  Yeah.
[01:49:02]  They're also hiding him.
[01:49:04]  And like, Owen at this time is one of the best technical wrestlers that has ever been in the business.
[01:49:11]  He's one of those dudes, like, he's incredibly talented.
[01:49:14]  He's very physical.
[01:49:15]  He's very athletic.
[01:49:17]  He's very charismatic.
[01:49:20]  But they just never gave him anything to do.
[01:49:24]  Yeah.
[01:49:24]  They couldn't figure out.
[01:49:25]  They had an interesting storyline at one point.
[01:49:27]  Owen was a bad guy for a long time because they created a younger brother storyline for him for him to feud with Brett.
[01:49:33]  But now that Brett's gone, they don't have that.
[01:49:36]  And they're sort of at this, well, we don't know what to do with you, which is so criminal for an industry like this, where it's like, you have this person who is fantastically talented in every aspect of the business.
[01:49:46]  And like, well, we don't know what to do with you because you're not a big guy.
[01:49:50]  Yeah, it's really sad where it goes.
[01:49:53]  And like, it's interesting the way in which sort of, yeah, there's a lot that's kind of fascinating here.
[01:49:59]  So I've never said, hey, you have to be bigger and have giant muscles.
[01:50:03]  But also, there's Owen Hart, the best guy we have, and I will not put him on TV for unsaid reasons.
[01:50:10]  Yeah.
[01:50:11]  So Owen is, you know, a lot kind of gets put on Owen being unsettled with this weirdly sexual storyline involving Stephanie.
[01:50:19]  But that's not the only reason why he's disgusted with Vince and the WWF in this period.
[01:50:25]  One of the guys who repeatedly failed Vince's nonsense drug tests without getting fired.
[01:50:30]  Again, he's questioned by Congress as to like whether or not there were consequences for failing a drug test.
[01:50:35]  Well, a dude who repeatedly failed his drug tests was a guy named Brian Pillman.
[01:50:40]  Brian was addicted to cocaine.
[01:50:42]  He was also constantly injecting steroids.

=== Brian Pillman's Hospital Return (15:33) ===

[01:50:45]  He took painkillers, you know, to deal with that.
[01:50:48]  He's on everything a wrestler is normally on, right?
[01:50:50]  On October 5th, 1997, he missed work because he had died of heart failure in a Minnesota hotel room the night before.
[01:50:57]  Everyone found out right before the show was set to start, but Vince plowed forward anyway, even though like a lot of people are like, well, we just found out our friend and colleague is dead.
[01:51:07]  I don't know.
[01:51:07]  Maybe this isn't the right thing to do.
[01:51:09]  But obviously, like it is a business.
[01:51:11]  You know, Vince decides to go ahead with things.
[01:51:14]  He announces Brian's death on air, which, you know, you can could potentially be a responsible thing to do.
[01:51:22]  But he does it in like he references it almost as like a TV teaser ad while trying to softly exonerate himself.
[01:51:29]  Quote, authorities expect no foul play was involved in terms of the initial inspection.
[01:51:33]  Nonetheless, apparently they're concerned about the possibility of a drug overdose, be it prescription or recreational.
[01:51:39]  Of course, this is a problem in all sport and forms of entertainment.
[01:51:43]  Oh my God.
[01:51:44]  Yeah, that's not great.
[01:51:46]  I didn't do it.
[01:51:48]  Well, the next thing he does is he puts Brian Pillman's widow on television and point blank if Brian had a drug addiction.
[01:51:58]  Yeah.
[01:52:00]  That happens the next night on Friday Night Raw.
[01:52:02]  There is a tribute to Pillman.
[01:52:04]  And Vince add yeah, Monday Night Raw.
[01:52:07]  Sorry, I wrote Friday.
[01:52:08]  Thank you.
[01:52:09]  This is this is why we have the experts in here.
[01:52:12]  So he has he has her on Raw and he like he advertises that she's going to be on Raw, right?
[01:52:18]  Like they have told her that they wouldn't ask her any questions like that.
[01:52:22]  Yeah.
[01:52:23]  So when you watch the footage of the interview and he asked her that question, you see her react.
[01:52:27]  Like she has a physical reaction in her face to the question.
[01:52:30]  Yeah.
[01:52:31]  Yeah.
[01:52:31]  It's like she's been punched.
[01:52:34]  And we're not going to play that because I don't want to do that, but I am going to read a depiction of what happens from Sex Lies and Hedlock so that people can kind of hear how these questions go.
[01:52:46]  To make sure no one missed the exclusive, he hyped it up before every commercial break, sending his viewers to the Pillman's empty family room where it was announced Melanie would soon appear.
[01:52:54]  He opened the interview in a stilted tone that chafed against the confessional nature of the moment.
[01:52:59]  Melanie, I'm sure you're distraught, shocked, dismayed over this, and we thank you very much for joining us tonight.
[01:53:04]  There's always a great deal of speculation when a 35-year-old man who's in a competitive condition passes away.
[01:53:09]  Can you please tell us what you've been told about Brian's death?
[01:53:12]  And she answers, apparently there was a problem with his heart.
[01:53:15]  Apparently his heart had been under a lot of stress.
[01:53:18]  There's some speculation last night that Brian, because of his injuries, had to take a great deal of medicine, Vince continued.
[01:53:23]  But there was some speculation that he may have taken too much.
[01:53:26]  Melanie expected this question, but the speed at which Vince leapt to it surprised her.
[01:53:30]  Her face curled up in a look that was more disgust than despair.
[01:53:33]  Seeing that, he backed off.
[01:53:35]  Is there anything you want to say to aspiring athletes who get hurt and may have to resort to prescribed medication, pain pills?
[01:53:41]  I can't really comment, she replied.
[01:53:43]  My husband, not only was he an athlete, but he was involved in a car accident and had extensive injuries from that, and it was hard on him.
[01:53:49]  Then looking at the camera, or perhaps past it, she added, I just want everyone to know that it's a wake-up call.
[01:53:54]  For some of you, it could be your husband or it could be you, and you don't want to believe behind a bunch of orphans like my husband did.
[01:54:00]  How are the children taking the news?
[01:54:01]  Vince pride, a bit too eagerly to sidestep the Tuesday morning critics who'd call the whole pharaoh exploitative.
[01:54:07]  Little Brian doesn't understand why daddy's not coming home, she said.
[01:54:10]  But Brittany, she screamed for 15 minutes.
[01:54:13]  Melanie looked suddenly exhausted, as if whatever energy she'd had three questions ago was completely gone.
[01:54:18]  But the impulse to go for one last piece of emotional punctuation proved too great for Vince to resist.
[01:54:24]  Have you had a chance to think about what you as a single parent will do to support five children? He asked.
[01:54:28]  Oh my God.
[01:54:30]  Yeah.
[01:54:32]  You like older now that you're single.
[01:54:34]  You like older fellas?
[01:54:35]  Yeah.
[01:54:37]  They want a job.
[01:54:39]  Vince McMahon, everybody.
[01:54:41]  So it's, I mean, that's that she mentioned a car accident.
[01:54:46]  That needs to, I figure, I feel like that needs to be like addressed.
[01:54:49]  Brent Pillan was in a hideous car accident where his entire face needed to be reconstructed.
[01:54:55]  Jesus.
[01:54:56]  And he damn near lost his foot.
[01:54:58]  Yeah.
[01:54:58]  So like he was not in any and he had this accident right after he signed with WWE.
[01:55:05]  So he felt personal pressure to continue to try and perform at the level that he had before this car accident, which is not possible.
[01:55:14]  So he was pumping all sorts of painkiller, steroids, et cetera, into himself.
[01:55:19]  He would like literally get up from a wheelchair to go out and perform and then get off stage and go back into his wheelchair.
[01:55:25]  Like he was fucked up at this point.
[01:55:30]  Yeah.
[01:55:30]  It's, it's, it's pretty hideous.
[01:55:32]  And like, so we talked about, you know, a couple episodes ago, Andre and how like when he ends his career, kind of there's this thing, Vince makes him into a heel.
[01:55:43]  There's some people who will say that like that really hurt him.
[01:55:46]  Um, it's one of those things where like that's the I took that from that documentary on Andre and from some stuff that some of his friends said, but it's also like what Vince says, like Vince's attitude is that Andre hated him at the end because of what Vince had done to him.
[01:56:01]  Why I brought that up right before telling the story of Rita Chatterton is that there's another story as to why Andre didn't like Vince anymore.
[01:56:10]  And it's that his friend confided in him that Vince raped her, right?
[01:56:14]  And it's the same thing with Owen, where like people will be like, Owen was really kind of put off and disgusted by this gross storyline that Vince has announced.
[01:56:22]  And maybe that had a role, but like Owen also sees all this happen with Melanie and with his, with, with, with Pillman's family and is disgusted by that because he's a human being, you know?
[01:56:37]  Like, by all accounts, he was a really good dude.
[01:56:40]  Yeah, he was a really good dude.
[01:56:41]  And he's horrified by this.
[01:56:42]  Both heart boys are horrified by this.
[01:56:44]  I mean, Brett's already out, but they are disgusted by this.
[01:56:48]  And this has a lot of an impact on why he's so unhappy at the time.
[01:56:52]  So when he donned his costume as the blue blazer and would declare in his like little speeches and stuff that the WWF was hopelessly sick and cruel, it didn't take a lot of acting, right?
[01:57:03]  And when he gave stage speeches about cleaning up the WWF, it was like, you know, there's kind of more going on there, like than just, you know, someone being handed a script.
[01:57:15]  So the storyline with Vince's kids goes on.
[01:57:19]  Shane is revealed to have secretly manipulated the Undertaker into kidnapping and trying to rape his sister.
[01:57:26]  So that's like the evolutionist that like Shane comes on and like, haha, it was him that was behind it the whole time.
[01:57:33]  And one memorable night, Linda McMahon shows up on stage where Shane gleefully admits to picking out the dress his sister had been tied up in on stage.
[01:57:42]  Now, throughout this plot line, Vince had scattered in references to a higher power who the Undertaker and Shane were both taking orders from.
[01:57:51]  But like in a very lost-like situation, they didn't know who that was, right?
[01:57:56]  That wasn't planned out ahead of time.
[01:57:58]  You know, they were doing a mystery box kind of thing.
[01:58:02]  Oh, God, if only that were the case.
[01:58:06]  No, as the storyline plotted on, they eventually decided that the higher power had to be Vince, who had manipulated his son into having a maniac kidnap his daughter to marry and force himself on her.
[01:58:18]  And again, this is both insane, but it's also perfect, like neo-Kayfabe, because Vince is actually the one in charge directing his son to pretend to orchestrate the kidnapping and sexual harassment of his sister.
[01:58:31]  Like, that is what was happening.
[01:58:33]  He is, in fact, the higher power behind all this.
[01:58:37]  It's so wild.
[01:58:40]  So, this culminates in a big drama where Shane, who pretend owned half the WWF, forced his father to fight one of the wrestlers on his team, which they're like, oh, it's a death sentence for a man his age.
[01:58:52]  Vince gets fake beaten within an inch of his life.
[01:58:55]  And to sell it, he hires an ambulance and EMTs to pretend to take him to the hospital, right?
[01:59:00]  Like they take him out on a stretcher.
[01:59:02]  They like cut to canned footage of him in the ambulance.
[01:59:05]  But their real EMT is in a real ambulance, which is interesting to me.
[01:59:09]  Maybe that's just the cheapest way to actually do it.
[01:59:10]  I don't know.
[01:59:11]  Yeah.
[01:59:11]  They just faked a heart attack and got the guys there.
[01:59:13]  Hey, Wallier here.
[01:59:14]  Do you want to be on TV?
[01:59:16]  There are ambulance services for hire.
[01:59:18]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:59:19]  It's not surprising that that might be just like the most efficient way to do it.
[01:59:24]  Later that night, there's a pay-per-view match, which is a separate endeavor, but it's led into by the show where Vince gets beat up on Shane's orders and taken away in the ambulance.
[01:59:36]  And then you have like the match that comes on afterwards.
[01:59:39]  And the opening of this pay-per-view match was supposed to be Owen Hart as the Blue Blazer flying down from the rafters in a harness and landing in the ring where he would then do battle with another wrestler.
[01:59:50]  Now, there had been opening, like having a wrestler fly onto stage is a thing that had happened before.
[01:59:55]  It was more common earlier in the WWF history when there were more safety standards.
[02:00:00]  It's obviously kind of a dangerous stunt.
[02:00:02]  You know, you've got a guy flying through the air.
[02:00:04]  That's that's an extra risk.
[02:00:06]  In Ringmaster, Reisman writes, quote, Vince had hired a new Descender technician who hadn't worked with the WWF before and who had significantly less experience with the stunt than the technician who'd overseen similar interests in the past.
[02:00:21]  Now, I'm not going to belabor this.
[02:00:23]  The stunt goes badly.
[02:00:24]  A cable detaches from the harness.
[02:00:26]  Owen fell more than 70 feet, hitting the top rope with his chest, and he receives immediately a fatal injury, right?
[02:00:33]  Like this is not survivable at any point, really.
[02:00:36]  He loses consciousness pretty much instantly.
[02:00:40]  And he's not declared dead on the scene, but he basically dies in front of a stadium of fans who are all cheering because they don't know that this isn't part of the show immediately.
[02:00:51]  Especially the people who are further away.
[02:00:53]  I think there's some folks who are closer who like realize he came in way too hot.
[02:00:57]  But, you know, these are big stadiums, right?
[02:01:00]  Yeah.
[02:01:01]  They cut the feed almost immediately.
[02:01:03]  I was also watching this live.
[02:01:05]  Yeah.
[02:01:06]  Jesus.
[02:01:06]  Oh, God.
[02:01:07]  Did you know what had happened?
[02:01:09]  Yep.
[02:01:11]  Because they came on.
[02:01:12]  They come on.
[02:01:13]  After they faded out, you share some crowd shots and they come on after a bit.
[02:01:17]  And it's JR and Waller.
[02:01:19]  And they tell us, look, Owen fell.
[02:01:21]  And they look stricken.
[02:01:22]  They're both pale.
[02:01:23]  Yeah.
[02:01:24]  They look like they just watched a man die.
[02:01:26]  Because they did.
[02:01:27]  Yeah.
[02:01:27]  Because they did.
[02:01:28]  Yeah.
[02:01:29]  It's pretty bleak.
[02:01:30]  So everyone scrambles.
[02:01:31]  They can't have dead air, right?
[02:01:33]  Like that's the first rule of television.
[02:01:35]  And I think it's also just like if you're a professional like that and this situation that you have no idea how to handle happens, you're just kind of naturally going to like fill the air.
[02:01:45]  So they do.
[02:01:47]  They spend a lot of time assuring the audience and viewers that this is a real situation.
[02:01:52]  The EMTs and the ambulance that Vince had brought on as a set piece for like the previous program are brought in to remove Owen, who is again beyond saving.
[02:02:01]  At this point, Vince has a choice, either in the show or go on.
[02:02:07]  You know, I think there's a good argument to be made that, like, if a guy dies before a show, you've got everyone there.
[02:02:12]  You know, you have a business relying on this, people's jobs relying on this.
[02:02:16]  Maybe okay to do bad things for money.
[02:02:18]  Yeah.
[02:02:20]  Jim Duggan told us that.
[02:02:21]  USA.
[02:02:22]  Yeah.
[02:02:22]  Yeah.
[02:02:23]  You can do it.
[02:02:24]  I don't know.
[02:02:25]  It seems even worse to like keep the show going at this point.
[02:02:30]  But they do.
[02:02:31]  Vince tells everyone that the show, that Owen's status is undetermined, which is technically true, but not really true.
[02:02:38]  And to make matters even worse, the guy who is going to call Owen's widow about what's happened is Vince McMahon.
[02:02:45]  Like while the show is going on, he calls her.
[02:02:48]  Martha Hart later says, quote, they scooped him out like a piece of garbage and they paraded wrestlers out to wrestle in a ring that had Owen's blood, where the boards were broken from Owen's fall and where guys could feel the dip in the ring from where he fell.
[02:03:00]  His blood is literally in the ring for the entire pay-per-view.
[02:03:04]  Yeah.
[02:03:05]  Which, I mean, yeah, it's fucked up.
[02:03:09]  It's beyond fucked.
[02:03:10]  Yeah, it's insane.
[02:03:12]  It's like, yeah, it's pretty bad.
[02:03:16]  At 8.40 p.m. CST, Vince told the audience, many of whom still thought this was a bit, that Owen had, because again, while they're saying this is really serious, that doesn't necessarily mean it is.
[02:03:28]  And also most of the audience has been drinking.
[02:03:30]  So their ability to know like what's real and not maybe is slightly declined.
[02:03:37]  But at 8.40 p.m. CST, Vince tells the audience that Owen Hart has perished from his injuries.
[02:03:42]  This is followed by an in-character scene.
[02:03:45]  And this is the part that's weirdest to me is like after he says that like Owen's dead, they continue like playing a clip from that storyline scene where Vince returns from the hospital that he was supposed to have been at.
[02:03:59]  Like that's how shit ends that night with like a clip of him getting Vince who has fake gone to the hospital returning from the hospital with like, I think a busted ankle or something.
[02:04:08]  It's a weird choice.
[02:04:11]  And after this bit of Kfabe, Vince has to go speak at a very real news conference where a reporter repeatedly asks him like very important questions.
[02:04:22]  What the fuck is wrong with you?
[02:04:24]  And like stuff about safety precautions that had been missing.
[02:04:26]  Why wasn't there a backup line protecting Owen?
[02:04:29]  And Vince replies, I'm not an expert in rigging.
[02:04:32]  I guess you are.
[02:04:33]  It's like, don't be antagonistic at the press conference of a wrestler that just died in the ring because of your negligence, Vince.
[02:04:42]  I'm not an expert in rigging either, but like I know you need a backup line when a man is sailing down from the roof.
[02:04:50]  Yeah, somebody died, something went wrong with the rigging.
[02:04:52]  Yeah.
[02:04:53]  Yeah.
[02:04:53]  It's like, yeah, it's like if someone had like gone up when fucking that shooting happened on the set of dust and been like, why was a real gun in the bullet?
[02:05:02]  And someone had been like, oh, I guess you're a gun expert.
[02:05:05]  Well, no, but I know that you're not supposed to have loaded guns on set.
[02:05:10]  It really demonstrates the in curiosity of McMahon too, that he didn't go straight up to the guy in charge of making sure he didn't die and say, what the fuck happened?
[02:05:17]  Tell me exactly what happened.
[02:05:18]  Vince had hours to figure out what went wrong.
[02:05:21]  Yeah.
[02:05:22]  And the focus is on keeping the show going as opposed to like, you want to be sitting down in front of that guy the moment you can be like, what the fuck happened?
[02:05:32]  Right.
[02:05:32]  Interestingly, like what happened, as I remember, is very similar to what happened at Brandon Lee on the Crow, which is they hired local non-union guys to do the work for a lot less money.
[02:05:42]  And they used a vastly inferior single clip that's meant to hold like a sail, I think.
[02:05:49]  It's not meant to hold the weight of a man.
[02:05:51]  And that's the clip that they put on because they wanted Owen to be able to quickly release.
[02:05:56]  Because at a previous performance where he descended from the ceiling, he was kind of stuck in his harness for a little bit trying to get it off.
[02:06:03]  And it looked silly on television.
[02:06:05]  So they're like, well, we need to be able to have him quickly drop out of it, but we're sacrificing a great deal of his safety in order to get that.
[02:06:12]  And that's what went wrong.
[02:06:13]  Like, you can watch the Dark Side of the Ring episode about Owen's accident.

=== Owen Hart's Blown Quads (05:58) ===

[02:06:18]  And when they show you the clip, like you literally gasp.
[02:06:22]  Yeah.
[02:06:22]  Like it looks like it looks like a keychain.
[02:06:25]  Yeah.
[02:06:25]  It's not like it's like something you would put your keys on, not something you would trust a man's life to.
[02:06:33]  So the reporter continues to press Vince, saying like it doesn't look like there were any safety precautions at all.
[02:06:39]  And Vince lashes out at her.
[02:06:41]  I resent your tone, lady.
[02:06:43]  Okay.
[02:06:43]  This is a tragic accident.
[02:06:44]  Don't try and put yourself in the spotlight here.
[02:06:46]  Okay.
[02:06:49]  Just personal attractions.
[02:06:51]  Yeah, you piece of shit.
[02:06:54]  So for a few days, Vince keeps his head down.
[02:06:57]  He cancels several consecutive events in Canada.
[02:07:00]  He tries to work quietly in Connecticut.
[02:07:03]  They hold an event, like a memorial kind of service for Owen, like in sort of character, I guess you'd say, like on, you know, the WWF.
[02:07:12]  And then on May 31st, he returns to Canada for Owen's funeral.
[02:07:17]  Because he's a piece of shit, he brings cameras with him who film inside the Hart family compound without Martha's permission and air the footage on Raw.
[02:07:26]  Yeah, Martha does sue and settles with Vince and the WWF for 18 million.
[02:07:32]  He goes, yeah, yeah, that's at least something.
[02:07:37]  I mean, they start a charity in his name.
[02:07:41]  And also, like, there's a, there's like a weird, this is the whole thing.
[02:07:44]  There's like a weird division between Owen's immediate family, like his wife and children, and then like the greater Hart family who don't want to piss off Vince.
[02:07:52]  Yeah.
[02:07:52]  So like they didn't really support her during this time.
[02:07:55]  And then afterwards, she like she, she and her children refuse to allow Vince to induct Owen into the WWE Hall of Fame.
[02:08:05]  Yeah.
[02:08:06]  It's really fucked up and ugly.
[02:08:08]  Like Brett winds up wrestling again for Vince later.
[02:08:11]  And like, yeah, there's a lot of like family conflict here caused by this.
[02:08:16]  But obviously it makes sense to me why Martha does everything that she does.
[02:08:22]  Like this is like the amount of rage that you must have in this situation is like beyond measure.
[02:08:32]  Yeah.
[02:08:34]  So, yep, there's a lot more to be said about Vince McMahon.
[02:08:38]  But, and, you know, we've spent so much time.
[02:08:43]  We have said so much about him.
[02:08:45]  This is kind of, this is where, like, this is not the end of the day.
[02:08:48]  I thought a man dying in the ring was going to be the finale.
[02:08:52]  But yeah, this is just kind of where we are.
[02:08:57]  There's more that happens in the 21st century, but like, you know, enough now to know why people say Vince McMahon is a bad person.
[02:09:05]  I can't believe we did 32 hours of Vince McMahon and never got to the Kiss My Ass Club.
[02:09:09]  No, we didn't get to him blowing out his quads.
[02:09:12]  Just as a brief one, I thought he blows both of his quads out walking on stage in 2005.
[02:09:18]  And it's very much, if I'm not mistaken, it's Batista and I forget who the other guy is, but like they fuck up a move and they both fall out of the ring at the same time, which like is a DQ.
[02:09:31]  So like it's not supposed to end in a DQ, but it does because like they just kind of botch a move.
[02:09:35]  It happens.
[02:09:36]  And Vince like gets angry and comes out on stage and like is doing his baby Huey walk.
[02:09:42]  Just kind of blows his quads.
[02:09:44]  Well, it's part of the show.
[02:09:46]  Like they, they, it's not that he's angry.
[02:09:47]  They decide to send Vince out to play angry to make the match continue.
[02:09:53]  Yeah.
[02:09:53]  But he's slaught, he tries to slide into this into the ring, and both of his quads explode.
[02:09:58]  I also saw this slide.
[02:09:59]  Both of his claws explode, but they don't stop the scene, Robert.
[02:10:04]  They continue to do the scene.
[02:10:06]  Vince can't stand.
[02:10:08]  So they continue to do the scene with Vince just sitting down in the ring.
[02:10:12]  That's so funny.
[02:10:13]  Everybody else is the funniest looking thing.
[02:10:19]  History repeated itself recently, as I understand.
[02:10:21]  In a pay-per-view earlier this year, Shane McMahon did the exact same fucking thing.
[02:10:25]  Bad quads, that family.
[02:10:27]  Bad quad genetics.
[02:10:28]  Slack blows his quads out.
[02:10:32]  It's so funny.
[02:10:34]  So I don't know.
[02:10:35]  That's the Vince McMahon story.
[02:10:37]  He's still running the WWF.
[02:10:38]  He was out for a little while, but now he's back in, baby.
[02:10:43]  He's back in with like a real thin mustache.
[02:10:47]  Yeah.
[02:10:48]  He's kind of doing a criminal mustache, isn't it?
[02:10:50]  He's going to expect him to grow after all of this.
[02:10:52]  Yeah.
[02:10:53]  It's a really, really, really, really horrifying mustache.
[02:10:57]  It really is.
[02:10:58]  It tells the story that we took so many hours to tell.
[02:11:02]  It looks like he knew these episodes were going to come out and he was like, well, I might as well grow this mustache.
[02:11:07]  Yes.
[02:11:10]  It feels like a court-mandated mustache.
[02:11:13]  They're like, all right, we'll let you stay out of jail, Vince, but you have to wear this mustache.
[02:11:17]  It's the conditions of his parole.
[02:11:19]  Part of it was wearing this pencil-thin predators mustache.
[02:11:23]  It's his way of going door-to-door and killing everyone.
[02:11:27]  Looking like Clark Gable spending too long at a high school.
[02:11:31]  He does look like a version of Clark Gable that, yeah, instead of going to World War II, went to, I don't know, whatever, whatever kind of call it went to a high school.
[02:11:45]  To prowl, Robert.
[02:11:48]  Well, we got any good wrestling stories that I missed here, gang.
[02:11:54]  No, I think we got them all.
[02:11:56]  I mean, you covered a lot of them.
[02:11:58]  I mean, there's, I mean, I don't know.
[02:12:02]  Well, I guess what I'd like to leave you all with is the image of Vince McMahon sitting on the floor because he's blown both of his quads up.
[02:12:13]  You know, still trying to act grouchy and authoritative.

=== Vince Sitting on the Floor (03:06) ===

[02:12:17]  Yep.
[02:12:17]  They do the whole scene.
[02:12:18]  They do the whole bit with him just sitting down in the ring.
[02:12:21]  It's the funniest thing I've ever seen on wrestling.
[02:12:26]  Ah, man.
[02:12:27]  And I felt bad for him at the time, but now after enduring all these episodes, I understand that I shouldn't have.
[02:12:33]  And now I feel better about it.
[02:12:34]  So just look the clip up and laugh at him because he deserves it.
[02:12:37]  Yeah.
[02:12:38]  Well, got anything to plug?
[02:12:41]  Oh, Tom, please go first.
[02:12:43]  You want me to go first?
[02:12:44]  Oh, I would love it if you did.
[02:12:48]  Oh, man.
[02:12:49]  Well, I have a podcast and streaming network with our mutual friend David Bell, also from Cracked.
[02:12:54]  Game for the Unemployed.
[02:12:55]  Head over to our Patreon, patreon.com/slash gamefully unemployed.
[02:12:58]  We have all sorts of different tiers you can join at just to get exclusive podcasts.
[02:13:02]  You can commission your own podcasts.
[02:13:04]  We do movie nights every week with our patrons.
[02:13:07]  And you can also listen to, we have a most of our shows are totally free to listen to.
[02:13:10]  You can find them on any place you listen to podcasts.
[02:13:13]  So do that thing.
[02:13:15]  And that's all I've got.
[02:13:18]  Yeah.
[02:13:19]  Great plug.
[02:13:20]  Three years ago, I started 1-900 Hot Dog with the great Robert Brockway.
[02:13:25]  And we are going strong.
[02:13:27]  Call 1-900 Hot Dog for fun.
[02:13:30]  Yeah.
[02:13:31]  Check out 1-900 Hot Dog.
[02:13:33]  Check out Gamefully Unemployed.
[02:13:36]  Both of them are the antidote for the sadness that I have inflicted on you with my cruel, cruel, cruel show.
[02:13:45]  Anyway, speaking of.
[02:13:47]  I was going to say, Robert, speaking of things that are cool, do you know what's cool, but also cooler?
[02:13:53]  Oh yeah, you can get ad-free stuff.
[02:13:55]  Cooler zone.
[02:13:57]  Apple Podcasts.
[02:13:58]  That's the plug.
[02:14:00]  Nobody plugs like you two.
[02:14:01]  You're gonna have to try Sophie.
[02:14:03]  You're gonna have to tattoo this on his hand, Sophie.
[02:14:06]  I mean, that would be really funny.
[02:14:10]  I would enjoy that activity.
[02:14:14]  My handwriting's horrendous.
[02:14:19]  Yeah, well, I was just gonna say, I love your show, Robert, but it does make me sad every time I listen to it.
[02:14:24]  Yeah.
[02:14:25]  Fair enough.
[02:14:25]  So what we go for is sorrow.
[02:14:30]  All right, everybody.
[02:14:32]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[02:14:40]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[02:14:43]  He is not going to get away with this.
[02:14:45]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[02:14:47]  We always say that.
[02:14:49]  Trust your girlfriends.
[02:14:52]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[02:14:53]  Trust me, babe.
[02:14:54]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[02:15:03]  This Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore, building a business around the life you actually want.
[02:15:11]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
[02:15:15]  On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kassam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risks, and while your dream might be the smartest move.

=== Building Your Dream Business (01:10) ===

[02:15:23]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[02:15:25]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[02:15:29]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[02:15:34]  Now, everybody over here?
[02:15:35]  Oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
[02:15:37]  The Twilight Gazebo.
[02:15:39]  Sunset Gardens.
[02:15:41]  Twilight Gazebo.
[02:15:44]  What's next?
[02:15:45]  Dead Man's Grove?
[02:15:46]  Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
[02:15:51]  From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an Audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
[02:16:00]  This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a flirting senior community that is anything but relaxing.
[02:16:10]  Starring comedy legends Jennifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Nicene Ashbets.
[02:16:15]  Through its blend outrageous comedy, Key Party Anyone, and touching revelations, Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart.
[02:16:24]  Go to audible.com slash big age series to start listening today.
[02:16:30]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[02:16:32]  Guaranteed human.