WWE Plaintiffs Seek Sanctions Over Deleted Messages | Pollock & Thurston

0:00Branded and thirsted from Russ dynamics is up next and we're going to follow Brandon with John Pollock from Post-Retro. Delivering on the returns, increasing our margins. Ready to go down the toilet if I'm out here. All I do is simply put the map in my favor. We agree that Brandon and John do good work. The reason is simple wrestling economics. Ben told the Netflix numbers. I've been told the metrics a little bit. Quite five different times. I still won't get it. There were respectable wrestling journalists who needed answers. Thank you very much, members of the media. I hope you all got a hell. How about we pop a number right here, right now? I hope part of the show, Ben. Here we are, Pollock and Thurston Thursday night. March the 5th. We are live. We have a lot to discuss.

1:00We are going to be discussing Paramount taking over Warner Brothers discovery. We're going to talk about could the UFC end up on TNT? We got a Mark Shapiro appearance at the Morgan Stanley Tech Conference. Always a celebratory holiday for those that celebrate. We're going to talk lawsuit updates. We're going to talk about the power of the press when it comes to getting filings unredacted. All that on your favorite Thursday night programming. It's back. It is must see TV once again on Thursday nights. Now the poll. That was called nine years. That was on NBC. Yeah, here we are. To get NBC in Canada. Yes, we get NBC in Canada. We do. We get my channel too. Yes. No, that's Fox. Come on. Is that the Fox affiliate? Sorry, sorry, sorry. That's what I would get. WGRZ. WGRZ is art. NBC.

2:00Probably. But I can't confirm that. 100%. I used to get your CBC. Oh, did you? Yeah. Would you watch Olympic coverage on CBC? That would be worthwhile. I would watch Hike Night in Canada. Okay. For sure. Ron McLean and Don Cherry. Yeah. CTV. We got also. We got two Canadian channels. And those are the two. CBC and CTV. Yeah, we love our seas. No. Royal Canadian Air Force, I think we got. We got some red green. This hour is 22 minutes. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Well, we could do a whole history on, uh, to watch off the record. Did you get TSN? No, that was TSN. TSN was specialty. We did not get TSN. We will be getting two WFeeds. Now we can't have that. We can't be too much. Well, we are not going to spare any time. We're going to get into it. Hello, chat room. The real ones that are here with us live. We are going to be getting into, uh, all the latest, uh, topics and. Brandon, where do you, where do you even want to start here? We have, but we have a lot to get to.

3:01Uh, there's breaking NXT TV ratings. We'll hold off on the NXT ratings. I want everyone to be at the edge of their seat when we find out how the Ricky Saints absolute experience performed. How much did that say? I heard there's a big concert. Uh, concert, doing a lot of heavy lifting to describe that segment. But, um, yeah, not NXT's finest, uh, 10 minutes of broadcast quality. But we have the shareholder lawsuit. The, the lawsuit that is just giving us. I mean, if there is one thing that is becoming very clear, the parallels between this shareholder lawsuit and what is going on in the antitrust lawsuit, this company loves their signal. And they sure as hell love, uh, not holding on to communications that are vital when it comes to litigation. That is what I am seeing. That is the true merger of these companies, UFC and WWE. What a pair of, so we can talk to this. Yeah.

4:01There's, there's, um, this has been an issue in this case before. In the, in the big shareholder lawsuit, this has been going on since 2023. And there have been motions for, uh, deletion and spoliation. There's, I've learned about something called spoliation, which is when you do not preserve records that you're supposed to preserve because you were anticipating litigation. So basically, especially when you're in a big company, you've got, uh, you got to worry about litigation, especially when you're concerning yourself with a merger, when you're putting yourself an entire company that's worth billions of dollars on the market, like W did in early 2023. You get what are called legal hold notices, and we have some file that's exhibits here. Uh, you get legal hold notices from, from your legal team saying, make sure you preserve all your communications. They send these out to the, to the important people, like Vince McMahon and Nikon. And you're supposed to make sure that you keep record of any text messages and things like that. And, uh,

5:02according to, uh, to the filings in this case, uh, there was a lot of signal use and of course signal if people don't know. Signal is the app that I, that I message John. No, no fewer than 50 times a day. That's the app that, that we use it for. But you know what? You and I have one, uh, I don't, I don't know what your non-polic signal use is. We can at least say this for Vince McMahon. The man was, uh, juggling like dozens of signal groups with members that bled over from group to group. I don't know how you would keep all of this. Uh, like imagine Vince wanted to like, uh, talk bad about someone in another group chat. Like you could just imagine the, the problems that could arrive out of this where the wrong message, uh, goes through. Like he's, he's in messages groups with Nick and Ari that he's in a group with like, Levacan Nick, and like John Gaborik and Kevin Dunn or in another, and then there's all these like, uh, overlap. Is that someone C? HE, Turkey, I love chic. Yes. How,

6:02do you think Vince McMahon knew that that's what HE stood for? Or if it was just, I think so. I think this reflects the name of the person in the app, so which reflects how you've entered that person in your phone. Or maybe it's just how, uh, Turkey has entered his own name. I don't know. Uh, those pronouns. The, the important thing here is that yes, signal is, is encrypted, but more importantly, you can time your messages. It's just like Inspector Gadget. Did you get Inspector Gadget? I think that was something. Yes. I think we lose up here. We go, we got both. Well, there's different, different media distribution is happening. Um, you, you can time, you don't have to, but you can time your messages to disappear after some amount of time. This is, this is actually an exhibit that, that was filed back in, um, I believe in December. This is from a table that was, uh, among materials, emailed, I believe by Vince's lawyers to the, to the plaintiffs lawyers saying, all right, this is,

7:02there's a red door here. These are all the, the signal Chatsys got. Cause there's concern about signal being used by, by the defense in this lawsuit. And whether or not they were actually, whether or not, there were records related to maybe discussions they had. Remember the, the plaintiffs' alleging in this case that this was a predetermined merger that, endeavor in our annual, got a big head start on this. They didn't allow the real process to play out and become more competitive, and didn't allowed more properly high. So they want records of all the text messages they've had. Well, we can't get a lot of them because a lot of them are on signal and apparently we're auto deleted. In addition to that, Nikon, who also is apparently using signal, according to these filings, but he also deleted a number of conventional text messages. So there's that issue as well. This was being litigated over earlier in a different motion practice and it appeared that they came to some sort of off-dock agreement. But then there was this filing that was filed under seal. We can only see it on the

8:07docket. But now we've got this public version of those files this week. We're there saying, yes, we want what's called an adverse inference, which is if you're a party to a lawsuit and you've not been protecting your communications records like you were supposed to, then the judge will assume the worst. Right. If the judge grants this motion, then the judge will be allowed to at trial assume an adverse inference. That is to assume that whatever information there was that we can't get access to now, we're just to assume that it would not be favorable to the parties who lost that information. And this kind of has gone both ways for Vince McMahon, where there's the potential here that these deleted messages could be, it could certainly work against him and the other defendants in this case in the Janelle Grant suit. Like that is what has come up is that Vince did not preserve any of like his side of the dialogue with Janelle Grant that was believed that it

9:10would have given, you know, Vince's side would maintain that it would have given it a more of a favorable look toward Vince. But again, he did not save those those messages. So Yeah. And unlike in this case, I don't know if there's going to be an adverse inference motion there. When we're talking about Merge, I mean, you can, if you look deeply into research major mergers among billion dollar companies, especially publicly traded ones, there's almost always some sort of lawsuit, which there is in this case. And just to explain to people too, I've been you know, thinking more of it, we've covered this number of times when we came to follow this thread is, you know, this notion that look TKO stock has performed really well. What exactly are the the plaintiffs trying to argue in terms of monetary value? You know, how much you think about like when we learn the news that that these two companies you have seen W you're going to merge, I believe it was nine billion dollars that W was valued at and 12 billion dollars that UFC was valued at. So let's just take the W piece of that. That's nine billion dollars.

10:13And if the plaintiffs can convince the court at trial that this should have been, you know, just a few percent more valuable than it was ultimately merged at, then we're talking about I think I was doing the math while I was walking the dog the other night. If you say one percent of nine billion is something like 90 billion dollars, you know, if it's if say they can convince the court that well, this five percent off, well, it's whatever 90 times it's something close to I think half a billion dollars, we'd be talking about that can't be right. Anyway, it's a lot of money. So that's why these these merger lawsuits are so common because there's just so much money involved and you only have to move the needle a little bit to make it really worthwhile for the lawyers involved. So in this the shareholder suit, it's it's alleging that Vince McMahon, Nikon and Paula Beck, as well as non-defendants, Stephanie McMahon and Brad Blum, all failed to preserve communications,

11:15despite the the warnings from WWE's internal legal staff because under Delaware law, the parties are that are subject to litigation. They are required to preserve all relevant communications. And you know, what I can't get into that their head if they felt like because signal has the specific function that that was sort of their it's a relatively new app. Perhaps they thought this is a workaround towards this like this is this technological loophole that this is what the function of signal is. And I mean, certainly of what we have gotten to see when certain topics were broached and Nick is correcting people to signal, that seems to be the unspoken communication tool that they would go to when they want to have sensitive information that they would not have to that wouldn't be preserved. But this is very clearly like a lesson for these major companies that are going through mergers that like obviously we're seeing this in the UFC and

12:17WWE that signal is, you know, it's it's a relevant communication tool and you are responsible for maintaining that. Yeah, and as we reported in my much longer report in very late December, there is that signal chat that has an exhibit and on COD exhibit in this case where Vincent Man is talking to to Nikon over conventional text message about a conversation that he's having in a different text message with Bruce Pritchard and Paul Avek about the main amount of WrestleMania between Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes, the biggest thing that anybody took out of that article probably. And and and this is where Nikon says Langus and he and Vincent man says what the blue hell is Langus and and Nick advises him to read it backwards so that they could apparently have this conversation on signal. Do you think he figured it out in the end? Do you think he made it to signal by the end of this? I don't I hope we learn in the course of this litigation. So in your right up, you also do note the this new meeting that we learned of.

13:17We were aware that the Ariah manual and Vincent man, they had been in communication throughout the period that Vincent man retired in July of 2002. They were to meet at a steakhouse in New York in August. And then we fast forward to December the 13th, 2022. And this is another meeting that takes place involving Vince McMahon, Stephanie McMahon, Nikon, Ariah manual, and Mark Shapiro. And what's interesting about this, this is two weeks before Vince McMahon does his force back onto the board of directors with his his holiday greeting toward the WWE board of directors, which unanimously tells him to stay home and then have to reverse course. And someone in the chat just who we've got on the air here said that this is a meeting that Mark Shapiro actually talked about in a podcast in the days after the merger. Do you do you recall that? You might remember something like that better than I would. No, I don't recall actually.

14:20In any case, and I mean, I don't look at that as like they had spoken about a March meeting, I remember, but I don't remember it December 2020. Well, certainly this was this was a deal that was negotiated in March. And I want to be nuanced here too, that there's nothing necessarily illegal or legally hazardous about maybe having a meeting like this, but it does it does lend itself to litigation exactly like this. And there are issues, you know, according to the plaintiffs around just how the actual M&A process unfolded in terms of not giving other bidders like perhaps KKR and Liberty Media ample opportunity to run the price up of this company that was on sale. So yeah, this adds to that that meeting that appears to have happened in August. Now we got a meeting that happens in December. And in the weeks before Vince comes back, remember, he comes back in the very beginning of January. So this is just a couple weeks before

15:24that. This is at the time when you've got those data letters that have been filed as a CC filing between the board and Vince sort of very very ceremoniously sort of going back and forth about whether Vince should actually come back and Vince basically saying, I'm not going to agree to anything unless you let me back back in. I'm not going to agree to a new media deal. I'm not going to prove of any any M&A transactionalist I'm a part of it. And to add just jumping back to saying a second ago, Vince was the you know, he was a controlling shareholder at the time. That's how he he was able to get himself back into the company. And he was going to have to approve of any M&A deal. So it's not you know, totally out of pocket to think that he would that that somebody who wanted to buy the company would be meeting with him. But it is all part of this larger narrative and this larger set of allegations that the plaintiffs are making to allege that this was not a fair process. And that shareholders didn't get a fair deal here

16:24and didn't get a competitive deal, which these defendants who are Vince, Nikon, Paul, Vech, George Maros, Michelle Wilson, they had a fiduciary duty to ensure that there was a fair and competitive process here. I stopped sure of saying the best, but I don't think that's quite what their duty was, but it is their duty to ensure that that shareholders get a fair and competitive deal. And if you're the plaintiffs, you now have multiple meetings to point to all before Vince McMahon comes back to announce they are looking at their quote unquote strategic alternatives. Plus you have that that message that Mark Shapiro delivers on July 22nd of 2022, just hours after Vince steps down where he forecasts exactly what is going to happen in the ensuing months of Vince McMahon who would install Stephanie and Nick who would lay low, he would come back, he would put in his members of the board of directors like it's I again, I don't think there is

17:25the smoking gun here, but it certainly paints a picture of this being a process that they were well in the midst of crafting together. One of my questions though is that this is December 13th, all these parties are sitting down, including Vince McMahon with Nick Conn and Nick Conn is voting against Vince's return to the board just two and a half weeks later when he is making his forceful way back like what like Nick Conn admitted on the Bill Simmons show, he was routinely checking in with Vince McMahon, we are aware they're having a meeting here on December 13th with with with Ari with Stephanie, where is the descent there when Vince is ready to come back and the board unanimously rejects it and you would have to think that Nick Conn carries a lot of influence on that board of directors towards such a major decision to be made about Vince McMahon's placement in the company. And when we're thinking about this, there are and Dougie's board in particular at that time,

18:26there's a number of what we call executive board members who are people who are executives as well as board members and then you've got the independent board members who are not day-to-day W executives, they're often retired or semi-retired former executives or something like that or they're executives in different companies. It appears to me that the opposition to Vince's return was especially from the independent members and one of the criticisms I think coming out of Vince's conduct, coming in and out of this company is maybe the board wasn't as independent as it should have been to take care of shareholder interests here. You've got Paul Vack his son-in-law on the board. You've got the president of the company at Stephanie McMahon on the board. So there's those issues. I do wonder too what the board and unanimous really meant, really refers to. I think there may be cases in board votes where you have some people abstain

19:29rather than asserting an actual opinion. So I wonder if that plays a part in our understanding of that or maybe he just went along with what the board wanted rather than going against them. Another thing, I don't want to get into palace intrigue very much, but it does raise the question of Vince came back to the company. A certain board members resigned, Ignacio Loud, Majit Singh. He removed other members and Stephanie resigned just a few days after he came back. Yet we have Stephanie with him at this meeting just weeks before his return. So it continues to raise questions and maybe just reflects the complexity of whatever is going on between Vince and Stephanie here. I don't know. It's an episode of Successure Perhaps.

20:45We'll stay on the shareholder lawsuit and I will go through this one, Brandon. You can chime in because it does in fact concern you because Brandon was the one who had filed a notice of challenge through the chance record of Delaware back in December arguing that redactions that had been filed in the shareholder lawsuit on behalf of KKR had been the redactions were overly broad concerning the specifics when it comes to the bid terms that KKR was offering for the company. KKR was one of the groups that was attached to the WWE sale process which they had acknowledged in a deposition, Liberty Media had been another one as well. And they had argued that it is the public interest is not enough versus their harm in these bidding terms being publicized. And the fact that it would

21:45be something that would be detrimental to future processes like this where a company may be reticent to engage in such a bid if they knew that their terms would eventually become publicized. And Brandon's response to that was that the information that KKR seeks to seal goes to the heart of the underlying action whether WWE's board conducted a fair and competitive sale process KKR has not demonstrated particularized harm sufficient to overcome the strong public interest in access. It also contains the caveat about Vince McMahon being involved or not if KKR had been successful and that is very relevant to the public. So we got a ruling this week by Vice Chancellor Travis Laster. He issued his ruling on Wednesday. So what would it turn around when it comes to a decision being made? This was this was pretty speedy in terms of my experience with these decisions coming down. But we got a quick two month turnaround here. And so the the judge here Travis Laster he has

22:54denied KKR's request for continued confidentiality of the bidding terms stating that KKR failed to identify any particularized harm that would result from the information becoming public and that its argument for the harm that it would cause was just not sufficient to meet the threshold necessary to keep that information redacted. KKR argued that it entered into a confidentiality agreement with WWE but the court is separate from that. And the fact is when KKR engaged in this bidding process it understood it could be subject to litigation and that these terms would have to come out. You and the the party that are being KKR you have agreed that cell phone records will continue to be redacted. That was not information. You were necessarily seeking issue. So that's an issue that WWE's attorney. The D&O would call the D&O to finance the directors and officers real quick Vince has his own separate attorneys Nikon Paul Vec George-Barrister shall we'll send our represented by attorneys that appear to be provided by and also representing W&TKO.

23:59Those are representing you? Me. So how many figures did you save yourself representing yourself here and basically prevailing here? Yeah, I think these parties may have incurred some costs because of this too from you know, payable to their attorneys. So the D&O defendants, the WWE defendants, they asked for the continued reduction of phone numbers. And I said yes sure as long as as long as it's just an error privacy measure and it doesn't otherwise impede our ability to understand the case. If perhaps let's say a phone number is the only way to identify somebody. Right. But it's not. Yes, somebody that was key to understanding this information. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. So do we know what KKR is? KKR is one of the world's biggest private equity firms. I don't want to get ahead of what exactly their involvement was

25:01in this eminent process until we see the filings unsealed and the red actions unsealed that they were looking to maintain confidentiality over. I can say this. There's what's called an S4. There's an SEC file in that WWE published just after the merger. And there's a party called Financial Sponsor 1. Maybe that's KKR. There's also a party called Strategic Party 1. Maybe that's Liberty Media. So it looks like there are these additional parties who are involved in bidding for this company. And they were looking to withhold certain information about their involvement in this process. So the big article I did in December, this is quite complicated. Now I was looking at this this docket today to try to figure out what has been produced by the parties and what has not yet been produced. There's over 500 entries in this docket. A docket is just a list of all the

26:03filings that are in a case. And it's a long and winding road. And so the big article that I did in late December, that was from largely the filings, the exhibits that had been confidential, then because of my notice of challenge in early December had been filed with public versions. So those, that's one set of documents that I challenged the confidential treatment of. And then there are these public versions, which are themselves sort of refiled, but redacted versions of filings that had previously, like a week earlier, had been filed completely under seal. They give them, you know, they allow them to file confidential filings with the requirement that I believe that, I believe it's 10 days or something like that within a certain number of days, you have to file a public version. And the parties get to pass around this version of the document and decide what they want to redact. And I think it's basically no

27:05questions asked. You get to redact what you want to redact. And it stays on, you know, and then they file the public version. Okay, it's out in public, but it's redacted. And however, manner, the parties want it redacted. And it stays that way until or unless someone, and anybody can under rule five one of the court dollar in the dollar chance record can come in and challenge it. And anyway, so these public versions, which contain redactions, none of those have been revised yet. And now that the judge has made a ruling here, my understanding is that these public versions now must be refiled. And my understanding is that they should be refiled without any redactions except for any personal phone numbers that might appear in the filings. So do we know a time frame for that? The judge did not assert a time frame. So I have reached out to to the parties to ask them when I should expect this. Well, we will keep it updated. But, you know, as a result

28:09of your challenge like in theory, we're going to learn more about this, this process and what exactly KKR's bid consisted of and what their involvement was in all of these discussions, at least having a clear view. It remains to be seen what the information entails. Yeah. And is there's there's there's some discussion about Vincent here and we'll we'll leave it until we see the public violence. Tonight we got a notice that on Tuesday, Erica Nolan, who is the counsel for Genelle Grant, along with Grant appeared in front of the Connecticut legislature. This was earlier this week. This was the second public appearance for Genelle Grant and the two appeared and spoke in front of the Connecticut Labor and Public Employees Committee to back Senate Bill 355, which is the bill that Genelle Grant had spoken about back on February 19th, limiting the use of NDAs in the cases of

29:11workplace harassment and discrimination specific to the state of Connecticut. Nolan spoke first. She was asking lawmakers to basically amend this bill to allow survivors to proceed directly to court rather than go through Connecticut's administrative system. And there is also this 300 day deadline that she stated can be impossible for certain survivors subjected to coercive control. And in the case of Genelle Grant spoke about that she was told by the by the feds not to not to say anything while they conducted their investigation, then the federal investigation ultimately did not go anywhere. And she missed the 300 day deadline that she had as well. Grant spoke afterward and kind of outlined like her time at WWE. She made reference to the allegation that was in her lawsuit about a rape occurring in the workplace while in the middle of the day while people were

30:16working. And also that over the last week she had experienced online intimidation tactics without specifying like what those consisted of that she felt posed a threat to her her safety. And she filed a police report and she alleges that the police contacted WWE who did not return the police's phone call about this. And so this is this video was it is embedded in our story if you want to go and watch it's about 16 minutes with Eric and Nolan and Genelle Grant. We do have the audio if you want. Oh, that is right. So here here is Genelle Grant speaking about the filing this police report. This past week alone I filed a police report because I noticed some intimidation tactics online playing out that were potentially going to, you know, pose this threat and jeopardize my safety in some way that I could not ignore. I called the police. They took a report. The officer reached

31:20out to WWE and to the state when I got the report yesterday, WWE did not return the police officer's phone call. So that was Genelle Grant. Again, like we really don't know what that consists of WWE's direct role in such a thing. You didn't reach out to WWE. I don't imagine they are going to comment on the matter. But yeah, this is, you know, the the bill that they have been pushing that would they they are not trying to outlaw NDAs, but specifically to have them utilized for lawful purposes such as containing trade secrets or the more traditional form of what NDAs were initially designed for and not to just mask illegal behavior, basically. Yes. And she did sort of go out of her way to to, you know, to talk about how NDAs are useful for some reasons, but they are used in a lot of occasions to keep people quiet who may have been

32:22subject to misconduct. Do you make anything of it? So, so it's been two weeks. She's spoken public twice in as many weeks. And in both times in government settings, I believe the first setting, this video, by the way, is coming from what is the name of this website? It's basically like a local Connecticut version of C spans, ct-n.com, which broadcasts apparently a lot of government, government affairs, you know, hearings and in front of, you know, committees for the Connecticut General Assembly. And I do wonder with with Dr. Kolker, who we'll talk about later, he is suing Ann Callis, who's one of general grants lawyers. I would I would think that this probably helps them probably helps them avoid successful anyway allegations of defamation given that she's speaking for, you know, in a government building before a legislative committee, you know, talking about legislation that that might help protect her from defamation lawsuits. Whereas

33:29the allegations that she's made in her lawsuits themselves are part of lawsuits. I believe it's quite difficult to sue somebody for defamation or something that that has been stated in a lawsuit or in in the course of litigation. Yeah, I don't think those are accidents of like the forums that she has opted to speak in, you know, to it would be very surprising to see her, you know, just based on legal advice to do any kind of, you know, interview type of to appear in any kind of interview setting at this point, because I think if they had opted to want to do that, they probably would have by this point. And I mean, it is certainly noteworthy just the fact that she is speaking publicly now. And I think it is adding like a face and a voice beyond just like the lawsuit and the one photo of

34:30her that had existed online for the last two years. Like this is giving just like this is a real person that is you are now hearing from instead of just through her legal representation or through, you know, just through consultants or lawsuits of where she's been represented for all these years. And if I'm not making any clear, Dr. Colcker is suing Ann Callis and the related law firm for defamation, which is also a case in Connecticut federal court. Yeah, why don't we talk about that now before we move on to a Mark Shapiro, but yeah, you and Jason had a story up today about Dr. Carl and Colcker losing an appeal of order to produce documents showing Vince McMahon paid Janelle Grant's medical bills, which has been a ongoing fight between these sides, which has not resulted in a lawsuit between the parties, but Colcker is suing Ann Callis herself and her legal

35:30firm. Yes, so this is at the state level. Janelle Grant is seeking records from Dr. Colcker and Colcker and peak wellness. This is a wellness clinic that apparently Vince was sought treatment at and he directed allegedly directed Janelle Grant to get treatment at this clinic as well. So there's an order that was ruled on back in December that Dr. Colcker, she had wanted him to do depositions and things like that and the judge said no to those, but did say yes, you have to produce the medical records. There's a continuing dispute over whether he had to produce the payment records and not just what was paid, but whether who paid for Janelle Grant's treatment at his clinic and the grant side wants records showing that Vince McMahon paid. I don't think there's a dispute from the Colcker side that Vince did pay for the treatment,

36:33but Grant wants records showing that he paid for the treatment and there's there's dispute about how hard the Colcker side has looked for this. The judge ruled back in December that yes, you have to produce records that show who paid for Janelle Grant's treatment and Colcker decided to appeal this, took it to the Connecticut appellate court and it was in there for a couple months and the appellate court ruled to grant, moved to dismiss it and granted her motion to dismiss his appeal. So he is a bit closer to having to produce those records. We did reach out and ask his attorney if they plan to take the appeal further. Do they plan to petition the Connecticut Supreme Court, which I believe would be the next step they could go above the the appellate court, but we did not hear back. So we'll see what happens is it goes back to the lower court where it came from. Earlier this week we had the Morgan Stanley tech conference

37:33and TMT. TMT that was right and there on board was Mark Shapiro to come in and give 35 minutes of his time and we covered a lot of ground with Mr. Shapiro. This is coming off their earnings report the previous week. There was a discussion of on locations performance at the recent Olympics in Italy, the launch of Zufa boxing. He was glowing over the elimination chamber and the fact that Randy Orton is going to WrestleMania after his elimination chamber win. I'm sure Mark Shapiro, I wonder if he was on a polymarket on Saturday and following the trends. But we heard about polymarket. I've been scrolling through that lately. I've tried to look up like some Davi stuff on polymarket. I'm waiting any day now. Any day they will have some some affiliation. I have no doubt about that one. Maybe bet 360.

38:34Well, let's hear from Mark Shapiro. It is several months into the ESPN deal for WWE's premium live events. In the US, our truth will tell you all about that deal and who can get it, who cannot, spoiler brand and cannot give these without an extra $30. But here's Mark Shapiro assessing the first couple of months. ESPN limited is a phenomenal package. It really is. It's worth every penny if you're a sports fan and if you're watching ESPN, you are some level of a sports fan if not a die hardest sports fan. We've got some work to do here. Look, things will immediately get better once they strike their deal with Comcast, YouTube and Dish, specifically those three that allows viewers to authenticate. So I'm at home. I have Direct TV as an example. And because I have Direct TV, I authenticate on ESPN limited. It's a very easy process and it cost me zero pub kiss to get ESPN unlimited. If you don't have

39:36or excuse me Direct TV or you have Comcast and ESPN hasn't closed out their deal yet, well then you have to pay $29.99. And that is, I believe, somewhat prohibitive, especially in today's economy and the struggles that certainly middle income and low income earners are having with affordability. So they have to get those deals done. And until they do, that will affect our audience. But I believe they're going to get them done. Jimmy Pataro has promised that they're on the heels of getting them done. And when they do ESPN unlimited will be the same appointment, viewership destination that it is today on the mothership. So we're excited, we're excited about that. So there you go. Mark Shapiro, champion of the people. Award, I have never heard, I have covered a lot of Mark Shapiro soundbites. I have never heard the word affordability. Or affordability is a hoax. I heard. Somebody told me that. Yes.

40:37So that is a problem. Both worth every penny and $29.99. That's ridiculous. Hivitive somewhat prohibitive somewhat prohibitive. Yes. So I mean, you can, a lot of these, you got to kind of read through what is not being said to get a little precise. It's maybe it's, maybe it's splitting hairs. But he said that they're waiting for the deals to be done with Comcast and YouTube. Those deals are already done. I think Comcast is on the screen there. Comcast subscribers tell us if you're able to authenticate. The YouTube deal is done because remember, what was that with Disney? Anyway, the YouTube deal, I believe it was Disney because this is Disney because remember Disney related channels were not available on YouTube for a minute there. They made a deal. It's just the actual technical solution, I think, of being able to actually authenticate in and get access to that great content. That is the issue and rumor has it. Somebody said somewhere maybe by the fall. Well, it's, it's March. So that's, that's a long time

41:41for Mark Shapiro to await this. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, like while I don't think it's ever going to be $29.99, do they really believe that they're going to keep ESPN unlimited free for all ESPN subscribers? You feel it will, it will just come with your cable subscription that, like, for eternity? No, that's that's how you boil everybody. Everybody's just fraud. You have to boil. You have to charge everybody $9.99 at the beginning and then slowly turn the volume up. I actually, I unsubscribed to Spotify recently and I was like, let me try, let's see what it's like free. And it's basically like Pandora at this point. I can't, I can't, I can select a song, but I can't like listen to an album and just let it run through. It wants to play like some random algorithmic song for me after the one I pick. It's, it's the trick of, there's a free version, but we're going to make your experience so awful that you'll pay to alleviate this horrendous

42:45user experience. Right. We're going to charge you way less than it's actually worth. This is a, a valuable service, but we're going to charge you way less than it's worth at the beginning and then gradually turn, turn the volume. I'll be YouTube TV is the same thing. NW Network if it had lived long enough as a standalone service would be charging people a lot more by now. So elimination chamber took place on Saturday night and here's Mark's assessment of how the show went in Chicago. Yeah, a massive event Chicago this weekend, elimination chamber, one of our big premium live events, PLEs, as we call it. And we saw a significant increase in audience from the first event we did last year with ESPN, which was Russell, Paloza. So they're already making strides. Are they where Netflix was last year? Not yet. Are they where peacock was after all those years? Not yet. But inching closer and I was optimistic. I am optimistic and I was super encouraged by the numbers that Nikon was sending me

43:49by the hour this past weekend. Do you think March Shapiro received those updates on signal and does he still have those messages? Well, we don't have records in that table. Remember that table with events. Now, I don't know if March Shapiro and events were communicating directly at that point. But March Shapiro is not included among the people who who are the spoliators, if you will. What a tag day. New wrestling stable. Yeah, maybe they'll be in the world tag like this. Back to the shareholders lost it real quick. The spoliators are our Nick, Paul, Stephanie, Brad Blum. I think it's those and events, events as well. So that's a five person stable. Anyway, I don't know if if March Shapiro is on signal. No, no word on that front. Now, if we also go to a media analyst, Phil Brooks, he also noted on the post show that this was the second highest

44:50arena gate in company history. So Brandon, you doing your deduction. What would that if if point can be trusted and believed? Where would this place? A little more of Phil, Phil Brooks, it's it's simple wrestling economics. Less than 6.55 million dollars, which is the record set by Cena. But if, but that would make it more than the Intuit dome Netflix debut, which was 4.8 million dollars. So we're talking about a five million dollar gate and all likelihood. At the United Center, yes, which is an incredible amount that they drew for their Chicago faithful. So this is not a cheap ticket. The I mean, the secondary market was very, very high for the show. I think tickets were like starting on the secondary market at around 230, I believe. So they did an enormous gate for this for the elimination chamber. Like think about this, this I'm sure they

45:55did a bigger gate for this than they did for the elimination chamber last year, which was the the Roger Center show in Toronto. They, well, it could be higher. We don't know, right? Because we don't know what the chamber did last year, but that's not arena. So that could be higher than this. Yeah. I I don't know if they would have done 5 million last year, but it does tell you. So let's say 5 million dollar gate. How many tickets do you think they sold at the United Center? Actually sold. Actually sold. I would imagine 14. Let's let's say it's 14. That makes the average ticket price $357. That sounds very accurate. Yeah. By the way, 5% of 9 billion is about half a billion. That's what we're talking about here. That's that's what the shareholders are you only got to move the needle a little bit when we're talking about massive companies. Well, you know, it's not going to do a great gate. The UFC at the White House on June 14. Okay, we're going to lose millions, but Mark Shapiro, if the man can spend anything, it's,

46:59is 30 million dollars? Is it even a loss? That's our philosophical question. And by the way, whatever is 30 million dollars at this point on the on the event, are we really losing, right? I mean, other properties would would kill to have the opportunity we're going to have and we're grateful to the president for wanting to do this and putting us front and center in our in the birthday celebration, if you will. This is going to be enormous in terms of attention, in terms of earned media in terms of our fans being happy. The fight cards are going to be off the charts exceptional. Fight to fight, not leading up to the championship fight. Each fight will be all star caliber. And I would just say from a sampling perspective, huh? Even the promotion and press and the attention we're going to get the publicity, you're going to have so many viewers, content viewers, entertainment viewers, sports viewers that are just surfing and

48:00tuning in to see what this spectacle is all about. So we are going to fully capitalize on the stage that is the White House, but we're not going to capitalize on America. We will not profit from this event, no matter what. We will not be making money on this event or exploiting at the birthday of our country. In any way, shape or form, it's going to be a massive celebration. One thing they will not exploit is the birthday of our country. It is our patriotic duty to lose eight figures on this show. Okay, we refuse. We refuse to accept any profit from this particular show. But we will go ahead. We're these fighters that are in this image for people watching, but you've got this is a preview of what the card is going to be. This is Colin Anglin and Austin Arnet. Are those real fighters in say aye? Yeah, this is a aye. Yes. Okay. Okay. This is not from a Hollywood reporter article. So okay. Well, it is funny to look at this.

49:05And for a company that it just stresses the profitability and maximizing shareholder value. When it comes to something that they really want to do, then it is, you know, yeah, it's 30 million dollars. But you know what, this is like, I'm somewhat surprised that like their shareholders are like, they're cool with this. And they probably look at this as like, this is a big investment that they are going to reap rewards out of. I just, I don't know, call me the pessimist. But I think this will be an event that it's going to attract a ton of attention. And I think that anyone sampling this on CBS, if it ends up airing a portion on CBS, I don't think any of these people are coming back. I don't think there's going to be any like trickle down effect that is going to up their business after the fact. I think there's will be a one night spectacle. And I think if you're tuning in and you're not a big UFC fan,

50:05I don't think you're coming back after this. But they believe that this is going to be an investment for the future that will create all these fans. And maybe I'll be wrong. But how much is super bad? This past year, I think that it ranged because I listen to this whole thing. It tells me it's eight million dollars for I think that's the average. I think like if you're somebody that has been getting ads year after year, you get like a favored fee. And that that's still several million dollars. I mean, it's like if you're a brand new company that just wants to make a splash, like they are going to milk the hell out of you because they figure you probably won't be coming back next year. And we're just going to get all we can out of you this year. And you're going to pay top premium, which is like this higher end. Yeah. Google, which is referencing USA today says eight million, but some paid over 10 million. I mean, you can get three to four Super Bowl commercials, I guess, out of this. But but Super Bowl commercials don't come with

51:07with the kind of relationship building. I think that this comes with the WWE get a whole lot out of that Super Bowl ad that one year. Remember when they bought the Super Bowl ad that one year? I do remember that. Yeah. Get it. Get it. And no one did. No one didn't. I was like, okay. Okay. So that was those vents trying to be, you know, be accepted by the masses. Get better. What better ways there to to embrace culture and to be to become a member of accepted society than to be involved in a in a Super Bowl commercial. Well, I'll tell you the cheat code of how you get accepted into the TKO culture. Oh, we're running, you know, a mile and minute here. This is these are properties that are year round across the board, right? UFC year round, WWE year round, PBR year round. And then IMG is selling sports rights. The year round on location has an event year round. I mean, there's no Christmas holiday when it comes to TKO. So we need best-in-class

52:11operators that are strong, insightful, intelligent killers, if you will, and really just work a whole let's say I hate to say it, but we do promote work-life balance. But of course, that's hard to do. Everyone knows, you know, that's how you get to 40% margin, by the way. You work really hard. Killers. But they do. It's almost like his internal voice when he's coming out and you're like, okay, okay, we work-life balance, all that stuff, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all that. You can have, you can have, you can ask your favorite WTK employee what their work-life balance is like. Yeah, yeah. I would love to hear what the work-life balance was like when they had a four-house show tours a night. But there you go. That was on Mark Shapiro at the Morgan Stanley conference. Over a paramount, they held a call on Monday. And what came out of that was, of course, they gathered all of their investors together.

53:15As a whole purpose of the call. So we found out paramount plus HBO Max should this acquisition go through, they will combine the streaming services together. This would give them a combination of roughly 200 million subscribers worldwide. They also have no plans to divest or spin off a package of cable networks right now. And that they have the flexibility with the UFC to put it across all of its platforms, some on broadcast, and specifically mentioning TNT, which would be whether that would be occasionally or a permanent place that they could put UFC. Certainly, that would, that would affect AEW as our, as our man likes to ask so, so frequently and often. Yes. Davis Aslov, by the way, cashing out big on WBD stock this week, I believe $114 million. He cashed out a worth of stock in WBD. Good for him. How many subscribers does paramount plus

54:20F? 79 million. Global worldwide. In the US? Do we know a number? I don't know if I know a number. Don't think we know what the US number is. I don't think paramount has broken that down. But the US is where most of the money is because you've got, you know, you got the, the economy, where the median household income is higher and there's carriage fees, there's advertisements, et cetera. HBO Max has how many subscribers? Just over 131 million. And I believe they're globally. I think their US number give or take around 60 million, I believe is the number. Okay. Well, I think it's interesting to think about. I think we all think of HBO Max as being this far superior service to paramount plus. I think it's important to remember that that number from HBO Max is largely significantly boosted by their traditional cable households who subscribe to HBO as a premium cable channel having sort of automatic access to HBO Max.

55:23If we look at the Nielsen streaming services can they can do that? If you have a channel, you could get the streaming service with it. If you know how to do the technology. Okay. Okay. So this is the Nielsen gauge for January. I think this is the latest one. And it shows, you know, it shows the breakdown of TV watch time and they break it down by entire sort of media parent company down here at the bottom. YouTube is the big winner, our media partner. Netflix is number two. And but they, they, they combine paramount, which is now, I believe, paramount plus combined with Pluto, which is also owned by paramount. And that makes up 2.3% of all watch time in January. But the WBD services, which I believe means HBO Max combined with discovery is only 1.4. I mean, that's, that's not quite half of paramount, but it's, you know, it's 1.4 versus 2.3, which I'm curious how much of that they used to break out Pluto separately. But it's just like to say that these in terms of watch time terms, how much people actually use

56:24this, these services paramount is ahead? Well, ahead. Well, it's, uh, it's going to get bigger. That's, that's the goal of this. Less options. More influence. What does this mean for AW? Well, what does this mean for AW? So we know that, um, you know, Saturdays might be something that they, they look at as an outlet for UFC. And that could certainly have a potential. If I could have a, wouldn't I really push for that? Because there's, there's added benefits. It's nice to be on TKO. And it's nice to be on Saturday nights on TNT. We would really like that spot, right? Uh, I, I am sure that they, they don't have an opinion on the matter. Um, they're just going to program what is most effective for their viewership. Um, but I, I think it's certainly, that's could go in so many different ways that we're kind of just spitballing scenarios here of what could happen. I mean, AW could be viewed upon as, you know, this is by, by just,

57:28their sports portfolio, like it's going to come at a fraction of the cost of so many of these others. And if it can do comparable audiences at a fraction of the cost, it could be really attractive. It could also be very expendable when this company is going to be saddled with so much debt. It's expected that by the end of this day, we'll be working with $79 billion of debt. And as much as they want to shine this up, like this is going to be great for Hollywood. And we're going to be investing and building. I'm sorry, I'm not an expert in the economics of such a thing. But I think anyone expecting that there are not going to be some deep, deep, deep cuts across the board to make sense of this enormous purchase. You know, anything could be on the table here. And Alex Sherman, who's been on the show, he, he wrote a piece just today, actually. And he brings up the point that when, when WBD lost the NBA, they signed up all these kind of smaller sports to,

58:33and included AEW in this, with the whole idea that we can, if we're losing the NBA, and we sign up a bunch of these other sports, it can maintain our carriage fees. And the strategy basically worked. They got their renewal of their kind of previous carriage fee. But now, like, you can, you combined Paramount with Warner Brothers Discovery Sports portfolio. And now they are, they are, like, equal almost to ESPN now when it comes to the depth of sports they have, that they're not going to have to worry about carriage fees dropping. And these smaller sports that they had signed up for, and AEW would fall into that pile, do they become as, must have, as they did a year ago when these were all part of our post NBA strategy. And now, like, we've got all of this premium sports content that we, we can fill up our networks with. So, like, this can go so many different ways. And we're not going to know, you know, with this deal with AEW,

59:34like, the option year is up at the end of 27. And we'll see if they pick up that for 28. And then, beyond that, like, where, where AEW stands, where, where TNT and TBS stand, if this, where HBO Max is positioned, if it's merged with Paramount Plus at that point, the performance of their pay-per-views, like all those things will be decision-making, the factors in their decision-making. It's something explained to me once. You're talking about the notion that Paramount and WBDR combined, the reason why WBD had loaded up on certain sports, but they did drop the NBA, but they did load up on other sports to try to keep their carriage fee up. But if you, if you're stacking sports on top of sports, do you really need the extra sports to convince the carrier, like Comcast or YouTube TV, to pay a good fee? Do you really need, you know, double sports, rather than just one sports? It's something explained to me once you kind of need, you need certain content to satisfy certain areas, and once that area is satisfied,

1:00:39you don't necessarily need redundancy there. So I think that's the theory there. But yeah, for now, I was going to say. Well, the state of AEW, we were, it'll be the never-ending question. At least with, you know, if they end up on the same streaming service as UFC or the sync network as UFC, there's probably not a, there might be some sort of exclusivity clause in the UFC, UFC Paramount deal, but a prize in say no pro wrestling. I can't imagine Paramount agreed to not carry pro wrestling just because they have MMA, especially with the lack of overlap, it seems. The ESPN deal, ESPN had UFC and PFL. So they didn't even have an exclusive, an exclusivity for MMA. So I don't think that would be an issue that they would run into. But, yeah, like certainly when you're looking at the combat sports area, if you put AEW under,

1:01:39under that heading, like certainly UFC is, it's a massive, massive property for Paramount, given what they have invested in it and relying on that to be an area of growth for Paramount Plus that they can get all these new subscribers to come to Paramount Plus for and boost that domestic number. You just think it's kind of encouraging to see TNA did manage to get a deal with AMC. It tells me that maybe even if the BBD decides not to renew or keep AW, despite owning a piece of it, that there might be other bitters out there. Might be other potential suitors out there, maybe. It's possible. I mean, two years from now, this could be a landscape that changes very much over those next two years, but I would say that it's got like a very reliable audience. There's a component of it that will pay for events as well. That can be very attractive to a streaming

1:02:43service that you can, like there are pretty much the only game in town now when it comes to pay-per-views in the US. Like everyone else is out of that game and it becomes like, for some, it's like it's antiquated, but there are still people that are willing to spend that amount of money for a wrestling show every month. We have not spoken yet about the war in Iran. How does this affect pro wrestling? Will it affect professional wrestling? Some people have a... WWE. Well, you did see the warning from the US government this week about areas like that are now under travel advisories, not advising Americans to travel to, and if there had been a Saudi Arabia show coming up in the immediate future, there's a very strong chance that that event would not be happening for WWE. Now, our understanding is that the next show will probably be in June, and there is a big difference if it was in Jeddah or Riyadh, because those are very,

1:03:49very far distances apart from one another. But it's hard to say if this is still going to be like a combat zone come June, but it's worth at least noting this factor. They have two more Saudi shows this year that are huge, huge monetary shows for the company, and of course, we're really getting ahead of ourselves, but of course, WrestleMania next year as well, and I mean, there's always these potential conflicts and what other things could occur over this next year. Yeah, I don't know that it's been reported elsewhere to this point. Let me know if it has. That there are internal calendar or something like that that's showing there. The next WPLE in Saudi Arabia is scheduled for June sometime. As you mentioned, Riyadh and Jeddah are in very

1:04:50different parts of the country in Saudi Arabia. Jeddah is way over on the other side of the country, on the coast of the Red Sea, whereas Riyadh is kind of right in the middle of the country. So it would be closer to Iran. If Iran is making attacks on neighboring countries, maybe Riyadh is one they would be looking at. There was an internal message sent within TKO just about basically reiterating what the State Department has said about travel. The State Department has directed everybody who's in the air if you're in the United States citizen to leave. So yeah, as I mentioned to you earlier this week, I don't think if there was a Saudi PLE this weekend, I don't think it's happening, but by June, it could be much calmer. Who knows? Also, we will just go through some of the TV and streaming numbers from the past week, including folks. We're going to get to NXT. We're going to get to those numbers from Tuesday night.

1:05:52Last week, we had RAW on February 23rd doing 2.8 million views, which was seventh globally on their top 10 chart, fifth in the US, ninth in Canada, and ranked in the top 10 in 21 countries. Then we fast forward to Smackdown. Last Friday night, this was their return to the USA Network after two weeks on sci-fi, and they increased 24% up to 1,379,000 viewers and a 0.34 in the 18th to 49 demo. They actually had a tiny drop in 18 to 34 from sci-fi to USA, and this one did rank in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and good old reliable Bolivia as well, among the six countries where it ranked last Friday. This was the night before the elimination chamber and the chamber. Of course, does not air on Netflix in the US, but internationally, it ranked in 25 countries in Netflix's top 10. It was number three in Saudi Arabia, fourth in Mexico, fifth in Canada,

1:06:5610th in Australia, so it seems that we don't know what the ESPN numbers are. You have to discern from Mark Shapiro and his cryptic updates that he got from Nikon throughout the show. But maybe the most interesting number of the week was collision on Saturday night. This is the first time in a year that they opted to run collision head-to-head with a WWE PLE, and the result was 365,000 viewers and a .06 in the demo. If you look at this, it's a five-week low for the show. However, this did way more audience than a year ago when they went against the elimination chamber, and this was the best performance they had against a WWE PLE since SummerSlam 2023, when they did over 400,000 viewers. Collision has definitely gotten a bump since January, and I would say this was a very good performance. They did well on that same day as the Royal Rumble.

1:07:58It wasn't head-to-head, but it was the same day. It will be interesting if they sort of feel that there's a lot less people watching these WWE shows on ESPN than there were on Peacock, and it's not having the same effect where collision just used, like they went out of their way for a year to avoid running on the WWE nights. The cost is somewhat prohibitive, considering that the issues around affordability in this country, that maybe just not as many people are watching ESPN. I'm sure that was the top of Mark Shapiro's thought when he heard about this. I think that is the issue. It's just less of a risk, because their reach is quite a bit lower, even though it's the same series of content, I guess you'd say. Is it surprising to you if this early into the ESPN deal? This is a brand new ESPN unlimited service. Did you expect there was going to be a sizable drop-off from Peacock? Did you think it was going to be minimal? Did you have any thoughts going in of how? He thought that it was going to

1:09:00be, especially when you're putting that kind of price point on it. The price point is going to really prohibit a lot of people. What other content am I really getting? This is not Peacock where you're getting whatever the giant library of Peacock general entertainment. What else is exclusive to ESPN unlimited? Wrestling wise, nothing. You're just getting these P.I.s and you're getting. Other than, I know there's access to the traditional ESPN channels, but if I'm already a cable subscriber, I already get that. That's not new stuff to me. What else is on there? I guess what I sort of say is in addition to that. If I'm not a cable subscriber, I guess let's say, I don't care about the ESPN channels. It is a way for me to get the ESPN channels. What I'm saying is it is such a high cost and there's not this big library of content in addition to the wrestling content like there was for Peacock or like there is for Netflix, which is already the market leader.

1:10:01Again, we brought this up last week, but we have a month until that stand-in deliver show and figuring out where that's going to air when NXT does not have a streaming home after this month that we're aware of. YouTube? That would be your fallback. That would be worst-case scenario. Yeah, you would have YouTube. I would have to think that there's going to be some kind of announcement for this. It's also like we know that Peacock still has a deal with WWE because of the relationship with Smackdown and with Saturday Night's main event. But for an event like the Hall of Fame that is airing like that was airing on Peacock always. Is that going to be like a special one off that Peacock will continue to air? It's like stuff like that that is sort of up in the air of where all this stuff is going to broadcast. That is not your Saturday Night's main event. I don't know if I'll pull up in time,

1:11:06but I was in the Peacock app on my TV like yesterday and for people who aren't Americans, you don't know this, but there's a sidebar that has some stuff on it, including the W logo. And now when I looked at it yesterday, the W logo is gone because it's just not that much W content there anymore, right? They got the W and the E out. I don't know that it means that we're on a computer right now. So I think they would have the W logo maybe up here somewhere. And it's not here. Anyway, on my TV, it's over on the left and there's various little options on their toolbar and there'd be a W logo and that's how you go and browse through the W content. But not anymore because there's just not that much there anymore. And NXT Tuesday Night Show, it did 604,000 viewers and 0.09 in the demo. It was slightly up from

1:12:06last week, although last week went against the State of the Union address, all 1 hour and 47 minutes of it that did 589,000 viewers and 0.08. So a small increase for NXT, which was there, go home episode before vengeance day on Tuesday. I did manage to get the report up for subscribers and patreon.com slash restaurants as we're speaking here. I did two things at once here. Had the Python scripts going and everything there it is. Look at that. The fastest man on in wrestling media, Brandon Thurston, you can catch all of his work. Patreon.com slash restaurants get all of your TV viewership data access to the elusive spreadsheet and so much more that can be found on restaurants. We are going to say goodbye to everyone, but we thank you as always for joining us here on this Thursday night and you can find all of my work over at postreston.com as you can, Brandon's as well. And today we just put out a new rewind away,

1:13:09covering WWF insurrection 2002, the final show marketed as a WWF event before they switched out to WWE for in the UK as well, right? Yes, they were in the UK. This was the event where the ride home was the infamous plane ride from hell. Oh, was it? Okay. Yes, quite the weekend for the WWE. We go into all of that. The plane ride, the event itself, the brand split, very early days of the brand split. That can be heard at postrestlingcafe.com. All right, we're going to sign off, but thanks to everyone for joining us. This is our our new night and time Thursday nights 8 30 PM Eastern time and we'll speak with you next week. Next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week, next week,