BONUS The Friday Show - Big Vinny V Hopes That You Enjoy The Show
Guest:professional asshole is kind of what i am but people seem to enjoy it that's funny that you think that of yourself though because clearly on the show and in the dynamic of the show you're not that one if i could just put it that way
Guest:Chris.
Marc:B-Mac.
Marc:How you doing, buddy?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:We're like the walking wounded, I guess.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I told you, man, I do not feel good.
Guest:I'm kind of under the weather.
Guest:Let's, you know, not do such a heavy lift today.
Guest:And you apparently what you can't move.
Marc:What's going on?
Marc:I slept the wrong way, which is a thing that just happens in old age.
Marc:And now my neck hurts.
Marc:And now I was outside and I have to turn like I'm Batman from Michael Keaton's Batman.
Marc:I have to turn my whole body to see things.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Oh, brother, I've been there.
Guest:I've had this exact thing.
Guest:The physical therapist told me I was locked.
Guest:Locked.
Guest:Like he said, yeah, that's the word.
Guest:You're locked.
Guest:And it's actually, well, I don't know about you.
Guest:I'm just remembering it from myself.
Guest:It was not a neck problem.
Guest:It was a back problem.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:It was the muscles in the thoracic area had gotten too tight and essentially just pulled everything down.
Guest:And so all this up here, all the way up to the base of my skull, locked up.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:And I had to go to physical therapy for quite a few weeks and get that worked out.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:Getting old is super not fun.
Marc:Super, super not fun.
No.
Guest:No, why do you think we're talking about fake fighting and underwear every week here?
Marc:It helps us stay young.
Marc:By the way, just just watching these people perform.
Marc:And I'm just like, I could not do a second of this.
Guest:Oh, my God, dude.
Guest:I say it every time.
Guest:Brian Danielson does those kicks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's he's our age.
Guest:I think he might be like a couple of years younger than us, but he's in his 40s and he's in phenomenal shape.
Guest:And he does those kicks that are like, you know, judo type kicks.
Guest:I do five of those on the punching bag and I am done, cooked, toast.
Guest:And this guy's doing it in a one hour match.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I can't I can't fathom it.
Guest:That's why they're athletes and we are not.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, just jumping over a guy as he's going over, I'm just like, oh no, my ankle would split in half, I think.
Guest:Oh, dude, I have to wear these Birkenstock sandals around the house because I'm not allowed to walk barefoot anymore.
Guest:Not allowed.
Marc:I've been there too, yeah.
Guest:Okay, speaking of not allowed, we're not allowed to do this.
Guest:This is like a thing.
Guest:You're not supposed to just, when you're around other old people, you don't just talk about how you're getting old.
Guest:It's not what we're going to do.
Guest:I will say one thing about getting older is, you know, my son is getting older.
Guest:He had a birthday.
Guest:He's now 12.
Guest:And you came up, Chris.
Guest:I did tell you this story already.
Guest:I'm not revealing anything to you, but I did think it was worth telling it again.
Marc:Please do tell this story.
Guest:This was the night of his birthday.
Guest:He had a big day.
Guest:It was very enjoyable for him.
Guest:But then he was really pushing things with bedtime and not following directions of our normal house rules and this and that.
Guest:And I was kind of keeping it together.
Guest:Like, all right, let's go.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:Get to bed.
Guest:Get washed up.
Guest:All the stuff that you're supposed to be doing.
Guest:And he was not doing it.
Guest:And I was just really trying to keep my stuff in order.
Guest:And then all of a sudden I hear from the bathroom, like the sound of if you had a full basin of water and you're like trying to silently drip more water into that.
Guest:Like I knew exactly what he was doing.
Yeah.
Guest:And I quietly but stealthily, because I wanted to catch him in the act, made my way toward the bathroom.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:And I saw him there, and as soon as he saw me standing there, he knew, like, oh, man, I'm caught, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I still kept my cool.
Guest:I just said, all right, is this what we're supposed to be doing here?
Guest:No, we're supposed to be getting ready for bed.
Guest:So empty that sink.
Guest:And I'm going to stand here now, watch you brush your teeth and watch you do all this stuff and make sure that it all gets done.
Guest:And he said to me, how did you know what I was doing?
Yeah.
Guest:And I said, I did not think about it for one second.
Guest:I just said, because I'm a fucking genius.
Guest:But I said it.
Guest:I said it like Booker T cutting a promo on Hulk Hogan.
Guest:Like, I was immediately like, oh, no.
Guest:because you have to understand we never curse in front of him never like i think it no never in in his 12 years of life he's heard me curse twice and it was for like dangerous stuff happening in a car right like you know slamming on the brake saying fuck or whatever yeah
Guest:he's never heard he makes a big deal out of the fact that he doesn't like to hear curses they bother him and that so I said that and his like jaw hit the floor he's like he's saying why did you say that why did you say that and I was like
Guest:Pal, I don't know.
Guest:It just came out.
Guest:I wasn't thinking, but that's not important right now.
Guest:My apologies.
Guest:Let's just move on from this.
Guest:And you just need to get ready to go to bed.
Guest:And he says to me, too many recordings with Chris.
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:Right there.
Marc:What you just said.
Marc:I'm catching strays on his birthday for no reason.
Marc:Dude, my guy, you have a podcast named WTF.
Guest:I know, man, but you're the bad influence.
Guest:You're like Bart to my millhouse, man.
That's right.
Marc:I'm showing up in a leather jacket smoking.
Marc:Dang it.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I will say it's funny because it's like there's nobody else in in his brain that fits that bill.
Guest:Like everyone else is just some random adult.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you're like the you're like the Harley riding adult, I guess.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, that's me.
Marc:That's my white Prius over there, Owen.
Marc:Don't you fucking touch it.
Guest:Oh, hey, that thing parks itself.
Guest:That is pretty badass.
Marc:Well, I'm sorry.
Marc:Can I just add to this story?
Marc:I feel like Owen has a bad sense of who I am.
Marc:And I think it's your fault because you told me a story that you would have music on and then on your Sonos or whatever.
Marc:phone right and then you you would get a text message from me and apparently you you have your your texts go through uh you know over the air and uh siri reads it reads texts if you if you have the phone off yeah
Marc:That should only be for your headphones, my friend.
Marc:Because apparently the story that you told me about some other day with your family is that one day you listen to music with the family all around.
Marc:And then you get a text message from me.
Marc:And the text says, Chris Lepresso says, big ass titties.
Marc:Yeah, wait.
Marc:How's that my fault?
Marc:You wrote it.
Guest:What the hell?
Guest:I didn't tell you to write that to me.
Marc:By the way, when I tell this story to my wife, she's like, so wait, let me get this straight.
Marc:You're sending texts to Brendan saying big ass titties?
Marc:And I'm like, you've got to understand the context.
Marc:And I can't really get into it.
Guest:no there's no context i mean like listen we could tell we should tell people right here that is a line from tropic thunder we're just making a movie reference but uh but there's no even the people listening right now are like i'm disgusted
Marc:But yeah, I feel like your son is a bad, bad representation of who I am.
Guest:I think it's probably fairly accurate.
Guest:I think he's just, I don't think he's, I don't think it's bad.
Guest:I think that you're just the one realistic perception he has and everyone else is fake.
Guest:Everyone else is doing this pretend adult thing and you are a walking brainstem, right?
Guest:You just get to be yourself in front of him.
Guest:Fair.
Fair.
Guest:Uh, you know what I want to tell you, Chris?
Guest:Something I saw.
Guest:What's that?
Guest:Was, uh, looking out my window the other day.
Guest:I saw my neighbor, two houses over.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Guy I know.
Guest:He's weird friendly.
Guest:And, uh, I saw a shirt he was wearing and I was squinting at it.
Guest:I said, I think I know what that is.
Guest:And then he turned around and I got a full view of it.
Guest:And sure enough, it was the logo of the Learned League.
Guest:No way.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's awesome.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:He is a big time donor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I looked up his name in the Learned League database.
Guest:Sure enough, he's there.
Guest:He's not in our rundle or anything.
Guest:What rundle is he in?
Guest:Oh, man, I forget.
Guest:It was a name that I didn't even recognize.
Guest:But the fact that we're saying all these words and probably most people listening have no idea what we're talking about requires, you know, a little explanation.
Guest:And that is a private invitation only trivia league that is global.
Guest:There's a global thing.
Guest:What did they say the last time we checked?
Guest:It was something like 20,000 members or so.
Guest:18,000, 20,000.
Guest:Yes, but but it's big for what we think it is.
Guest:but it's very small when you consider that it's got a global reach but you all get the same six questions which is just everybody gets the same six questions every day for about a 25 day period and this happens four times a year you go head to head with another trivia member and then at the end of those 25 days you see where you are in the standings uh it is it has become an integral i would say part of
Guest:our lives you and i uh you your wife aaron is involved as well that's right uh we have a circle of friends that does this we're on text messages every morning that the questions come out and it's it's a big part of the day yes it is actually my favorite part of the day like when when a season is over i'm like really sad because i'm like i i'm i love this
Marc:I love waking up, drinking my coffee, and answering these six questions and debating on which questions I should score higher on.
Marc:It's just the best.
Guest:Just a general trivia thing.
Guest:Think of Jeopardy questions, sometimes a little harder.
Guest:Ken Jennings was part of this league.
Guest:I don't know if he participates anymore.
Guest:He doesn't since he hosts it.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:He's not doing it because he hosts Jeopardy?
Guest:I believe so.
Guest:He's like, I'm out since I'm hosting Jeopardy.
Guest:That makes sense.
Guest:That's a little bit of a conflict.
Guest:But yeah, these are the kind of things that like, I don't know, I just feel like it keeps me active.
Guest:It keeps me engaged in the world.
Guest:It keeps me engaged with friends.
Guest:And it's a community.
Guest:It's a community building experience.
Guest:And I definitely think of these trivia answers when I see them out in the world now.
Guest:Like I'll see something and send a picture to friends.
Guest:Hey, remember this?
Guest:Like a book title or something.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh man, there was a book that
Marc:I forgot the question, but it was like, this person has five of the top 10 bestselling books right now.
Marc:And I'm just like, I don't know who it was.
Marc:And the next day, I think you were at like a Barnes & Noble and you're like, son of a bitch, this could have been helpful one day ago.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, Colleen Hoover.
Guest:There were books everywhere.
Guest:Colleen Hoover books on every end cap.
Guest:And yeah, none of us knew the answer to that the day before.
Guest:That's a good example of like the way that this has factored into our lives.
Guest:But all this got me to thinking about how, you know, it really is this kind of important part of our day.
Guest:And yet most people on earth, like I said, I think the cap on this is 20,000 people.
Guest:That's not a lot.
Guest:That's like that fills one, you know, a basketball arena.
Guest:And so, you know, most people have no idea what this is, and they wouldn't know what it is if you started talking about it with a with a friend or with someone else, particularly knowing how much bandwidth it takes up in your life.
Guest:And I was thinking about this, that this is something that happened to me with pro wrestling.
Guest:And it wasn't just the fact that I was watching wrestling.
Guest:It wasn't just the fact that I was a fan and I did it as a hobby and learned about it on my own.
Guest:It was the fact that you probably have heard me mention it several times before.
Guest:Dave Meltzer is kind of the preeminent wrestling journalist or historian, whatever you want to call him.
Guest:He is a guy cataloging wrestling and has been doing so for about 40 years for a newsletter at first and now a website called the Wrestling Observer.
Guest:Well...
Guest:I had always known about the Wrestling Observer.
Guest:Somewhere along the line, there were other people doing the same thing.
Guest:Similar type of newsletters and wrestling content for subscribers.
Guest:I didn't know what they were.
Guest:But there was this one called Figure Four Weekly...
Guest:Never knew about it.
Guest:The only time I ever found out about it was because the people involved with that merged with Dave.
Guest:They joined up and joined forces, and it became pretty quickly apparent.
Guest:The reason they did that was because the guys behind Figure Four Weekly were very good at multimedia stuff, which Dave was not.
Guest:He was still just printing out this paper newsletter.
Guest:And one of the things that happened that stemmed from the figure four weekly was this radio show.
Guest:There's no other way to call it.
Guest:I mean, you could say it's a podcast, but it predates podcasts.
Guest:It was happening before there were iPods.
Guest:You could not sync to this.
Guest:And this was a guy named Brian Alvarez and his partner, Vince Verheye.
Guest:And they did a show called The Brian and Vinny Show that had been going on since 2005.
Guest:It goes on to this day.
Guest:And I'd mentioned this last week and I mentioned this to Chris.
Guest:If you're one of the people out there like me who listens to Brian and Vinny.
Guest:They're like family members like you.
Guest:I know them.
Guest:I know them very well.
Guest:I know all all their opinions on things.
Guest:I put the show on to feel like I'm hanging out with people that give me a good time.
Guest:And, you know, it's a it's a comfort.
Guest:It's definitely comforting for me, just the same way I think WTF is for a lot of people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the weird thing is, for the people who listen to it, it's inordinately popular, and it's a very big part of their lives, and they obviously have enough subscribers to keep them in business.
Guest:But for most people, they just don't know.
Guest:And so I thought, everyone listening to this, if you don't know these guys, why don't we talk to one of them?
Guest:And so I asked BigVinnyV,
Guest:Vince Verheye on Twitter, if he would come on the show and he said, absolutely, I would.
Guest:And I started thinking like, wow, man, this is the guy who really is the reason why I thought when we started getting wrestling subscribers, hey, we can do this.
Guest:We can just start talking about wrestling because I knew Brian and Vinny did it.
Guest:Like if you listen to this right here, this is a clip of Vinny introducing the same segment that we introduced to Mark.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:On the very first episode of this Friday show, Vince McMahon and Stone Cold Steve Austin in the hospital.
Guest:Just take a listen.
Guest:Listen to Vinny describe it, Brian's reactions as they talk about it.
Guest:Listen to these two guys get into their love of the fine art of pro wrestling.
Guest:So the doctor is Steve Austin in disguise.
Guest:He proceeds to beat up and torture Vince McMahon.
Yeah.
Guest:Now, a lot of this I remembered vividly, like when when Austin pounces on Vince on the gurney and starts throwing hammer fist to the knee or the ankle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Vince's bug eyed screams of agony.
Guest:I remember that vividly.
Guest:Some of this I had forgotten, like when he zaps Vince with a defibrillator.
Guest:I didn't forget any of this.
Guest:Vince sells this by he does the Undertaker sit up, waves his arms back and forth and lays back down.
Guest:But the best.
Guest:The moment.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And I do mean the moment.
Guest:That was the best thing I ever saw in my entire life.
Guest:Vince is screaming and wailing.
Guest:He's wailing because Austin has been pummeling his bad ankle.
Guest:He's in the middle of screaming over his bad ankle.
Guest:Ah!
Guest:Ah!
Guest:Ah!
Guest:And Austin turns and grabs the most convenient weapon he can find, which happens to be a bedpan.
Guest:And Austin does a mighty overhand swing.
Guest:I'm stunned he didn't take out the ceiling lights, swings it over his head, brings it down on Vincent Mann's skull.
Guest:There is a great bang sound and Vince goes silent.
Guest:I laughed and I laughed and I laughed.
Guest:It is a bang.
Guest:And then all you see is Vince frantically waving his hands in front of his face.
Guest:Five times in a row I watched this.
Guest:Five times.
Guest:You know what the whole key to the bedpan is?
Guest:Nobody who watches this will ever in their whole life forget the bedpan.
Guest:No.
Guest:It was one whack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He did not whack him repeatedly.
Guest:No.
Guest:He did not whack him 25 times.
Guest:He did not whack him with like a big, hard steel chair.
Guest:He found one stupid aluminum bedpan that made a funny noise.
Guest:And he whacked the guy one time in the head and nobody will ever forget it because less is more.
Guest:I mean, I sent that to you, Chris.
Marc:Did you relate to those guys?
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:It is as if they were sitting on the couch with me.
Marc:Like it was it was like family, really.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:And the thing that makes it appealing to me is that I felt like these were people like me who did not take it too seriously, but at the same time took it very seriously.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And also keyed in on the same things that I keyed in on.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:the clang and everything like, yeah, they, they get it.
Marc:They were on the scene.
Guest:It's just a, an idea of getting it right.
Guest:And you're listening and you're going, Oh, these people get it.
Guest:And there are other people listening.
Guest:They must get it too.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we have seen it coming into us as feedback to this show, people going, Oh, that's so awesome that what you're doing on this Friday show.
Guest:I love listening to it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:For the same reason.
Guest:Cause it's, they're like, we get it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Another thing that I loved about Brian and Vinny was they hated the same things that I hated.
Guest:Like there were there are things about wrestling that I find stupid and I wish it would go away and would improve my enjoyment of the product if it did.
Guest:And I bowed out of watching WWE wrestling for about 10 years just couldn't take it anymore.
Guest:And then I listen to Brian and Vinny and they're complaining about the same things.
Guest:I'm like, oh, thank God.
Guest:This was Brian and Vinny after the 2022 WWE Money in the Bank pay-per-view.
Guest:And Vinny is reacting to almost exactly the same thing I react to when I watch WWE programming, the camera work.
Guest:This was the worst camera work I've ever seen.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I swear to God, the match has just started.
Guest:All right.
Guest:This is how the show begins, really.
Guest:Alice gives a back kick.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She throws a kick.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She throws a back fist.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She starts to run.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She's still running.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She hits a hip attack.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She drops to her knees.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She throws a kick.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:The kick connects.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She follows through the kick.
Guest:Camera cut.
Guest:She stands up and screams.
Guest:Camera cut to people broadly on the floor.
Guest:I was furious.
Guest:You understand?
Guest:I wanted to shut the show off and not watch anymore.
Guest:Fuck this.
Guest:This is horse shit, Brian.
Guest:This is how it began.
Guest:I mean, listen, listen, listen, I've been holding this for four hours.
Guest:This production is horrible.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:I mean, we've talked about it all the time, dude.
Marc:We, we cannot stand that camera work.
Marc:It's the, it's the thing that I can and cannot unsee.
Marc:It's just, I can't focus on, on WWE too much because my brain will be at my eyes or just be like, Oh, I'm tired of like zooming back and forth.
Guest:I mean, I think for me, it's 50-50.
Guest:The camera work is one, and then the dreadful, dreadful announcing, the commentary.
Guest:Those two things are... Aside from the disreputable things about WWE that have kept me away from it as a product, those two aesthetic things...
Guest:The camera work and the commentary have absolutely kept me away from it for a very long time.
Guest:And it just felt it felt like home to listen to these guys and to then kind of grow with them through their enjoyment of wrestling.
Guest:They sit and they watch.
Guest:They don't watch.
Guest:Every show.
Guest:But they watch a lot of shows, and that's what primarily the Brian and Vinny show is, is them reviewing these episodes.
Guest:But then they involve a whole bunch of other people, cast of characters.
Guest:They bring in listeners.
Guest:They have contests for things and have listeners send things in.
Guest:They have Brian's grandmother come and review...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:created our theme song, and we love it.
Guest:Just as that happened, it happened for Brian and Vinny with what I think is the best theme song of any type of audio entertainment that I've ever heard.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:It stays in my head all day long.
Guest:It's not only a great earworm, it does a great job of setting up what you're about to hear because it's not just Brian, it's not just Vinny, it's Granny and Craig and sometimes other people
Guest:And these are the people who you're going to enjoy when you listen to The Brian and Vinny Show.
Guest:And it's what I'm going to talk about with Vince Verheye right now.
Guest:Chris and I will talk about it again on the back end.
Guest:Brian, Brian and Vinny.
Guest:Along with Granny and Craig and sometimes other people.
Guest:Ooh.
Guest:Tell me who and what's happening Hanging between the business and storylines Sometimes they're rippin' as we're watchin' along Did you see him killin' that bloke on the outside?
Guest:Tell him that they're paid by a con And they'll say
Guest:Okay, that is the Brian and Vinny show music.
Guest:And it is stuck in my head most of the day, every day.
Guest:And so now I hope it is the same for you.
Guest:And I got to wonder, Vinny, when you got that music, tell me again who it was that made that music for you.
Guest:That is an artist who calls himself Pepper Coyote.
Guest:Pepper Coyote, that's right.
Guest:Pepper Coyote.
Guest:We did a contest to see who could write a theme song for the Brian and Vinny show.
Guest:And we did it as a joke and we were expecting nothing but joke replies.
Guest:And this very talented performer who is known for his musical talents contributed to that and it stuck.
Guest:I mean, it must have been so awesome to get that.
Guest:Like, I know that from our perspective, when we get fan stuff sent into the show, sometimes you're just like, wow, I can't believe somebody did this.
Guest:It's so nice.
Guest:But that, it's like, it's a signature.
Guest:It's your show's music forever now.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:There's no one has complained about it.
Guest:Everyone mentions to get stuck in their head and they tune in to hear the song, rewind to hear the song again.
Guest:And then eventually, maybe if they have a little spare time, listen to us.
Guest:Then they'll listen to you guys.
Guest:I remember some.
Guest:This tells you how long I've been listening.
Guest:I remember a similar thing when a guy did a, a song for your 10th anniversary show.
Guest:It wasn't an original per se, but it was a, it was like an audio montage set to a Daft Punk song.
Guest:I think it was like one more time or something.
Guest:And it was just clips from like the first 10 years of the show.
Guest:And I remember like, it was similar to when we were Mark and I, we've been on the radio and we've been doing this podcast when people do that.
Guest:And they, you're like, Oh my God.
Guest:Like,
Guest:People really care about this.
Guest:It's like part of their life.
Guest:I mean, I've been doing this show now for 18 years.
Guest:The first show we did was in 2005.
Guest:Yeah, wow.
Guest:It's never made sense to me, quite frankly.
Guest:But I've grown to accept that some people like it an awful lot and it's very important to them.
Guest:And that's a nice thing.
Guest:That's a nice feeling to know that you're helping people out.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I mean, and that's kind of why I wanted to have you on the show is kind of get to the bottom of that idea of –
Guest:making sense of it i mean making sense of it kind of for all of us who like this weird thing wrestling is it a sport is it a show is it it's all of those things but it's also becomes this kind of community and you guys are like a big part of that i guess one thing that i'm definitely not clear on from the years of listening to you guys is your actual life like what what
Guest:And that might be something that's totally your choice to not want your full life out there.
Guest:But if you're comfortable sharing it, what do you do during your day when you're not part of the Brian and Vinny show and part of Wrestling Observer?
Guest:I live with my wife, Bridget, and two cats in North Bend, Washington.
Guest:It's a lovely little town up in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.
Guest:It's the last town you visit on this side of the mountains before you hit the mountain pass.
Guest:Uh, so my two jobs for most of the past 15 years or so, uh, I've been working for the Brian and Vinny show and, uh, watching shows, producing shows for that.
Guest:And I should, you know, recording shows that I don't do any production.
Guest:I show up, I run my mouth, I go home.
Guest:And the other job, I've been a football writer for a website called football outsiders.com.
Guest:And it's been about a 60, 40 revenue split.
Guest:It's funny, when I started doing these, I had been working for a fishing magazine, like most magazines that went out of business in the 2000s, and I had these other two careers kind of running, and both started very small, and I thought, well, I'll just do them both, and whichever one takes off, I will abandon the other, and instead of either one taking off, they both kind of grew simultaneously over the next decade and a half, and
Guest:Things are changing as we speak.
Guest:I'm not going to go into great detail, but I'll be doing a lot less football writing and a lot more podcasting in the future going forward.
Guest:There's a lot of questions to be answered right now, but change is in the air.
Guest:Well, we will stay tuned for that.
Guest:Anyone who's listening, I'm sure, will be kept updated on that.
Guest:What I...
Guest:It's very funny, though.
Guest:You're talking about this in a similar way.
Guest:I've described my own life and career to people that I was doing things which I didn't know really what the future of any of them were.
Guest:So it was like, well, let's just do whatever we're doing here and see if it works out.
Guest:And then
Guest:At some point, I had to make a choice.
Guest:Okay, this is really taking off as a podcast.
Guest:Let's focus on this.
Guest:Let's do this.
Guest:The interesting thing, though, is that, you know, we got into doing podcasts around 2009.
Guest:A lot of people point to us and say, oh, you guys were in at the very start.
Guest:You know, some people...
Guest:call mark like you know a founding father of podcasts and they're you know very um complimentary about the role we played in the beginning of podcasts but you guys as you mentioned have been doing this since 2005 which is i i can't even imagine what the landscape kind of felt like i know that i probably started listening to podcasts and
Guest:In like 2007, I want to say, was the time when I actually synced my physical iPod up to a computer and got podcasts on it.
Guest:But you guys have been doing it since 2005.
Guest:What was even the conception of it at that point to say, yeah, this is a viable thing?
Guest:So Brian had already been running a figure four weekly newsletter.
Guest:He'd been doing that since the mid 90s, at least.
Guest:And that was his full-time job.
Guest:And he had a side gig coaching gymnastics, but he mostly did that as a reason to leave the house.
Guest:Because otherwise, he did this newsletter.
Guest:He went, he did go to the gym, and that was his life.
Guest:And he needed to do something to interact with people.
Guest:So he was coaching gymnastics at the same time.
Guest:And he started a website purely as a way to distribute said newsletter electronically, to save postage, to cut down on postage costs.
Guest:That was the only reason it existed.
Guest:And about this time, for those of you who are watching Raw a long time ago, you'll recall in 2005, they were doing the very first D.Va search.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And this spawned, I want to say Christy Heavy was in that.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I forget who else was in that, but...
Guest:Joy and Amy and they all wound up being like small, maybe Maria Kanellis even.
Guest:They wound up getting small roles in the show.
Guest:But the big thing was that they were these attractive women that they were going to judge as the next diva star.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:And to pick a winner, they did an obstacle course.
Guest:And though these women all were very, you know, they exercised a lot and kept in great shape, they're not necessarily very athletic.
Guest:And we were told we live on the West Coast.
Guest:So by the time Raw airs out here, you know, word would have gotten back to Brian.
Guest:It was a catastrophe.
Guest:And so like at a spur of the moment, uh, we grabbed, I want to say it was like, I think there's one Mike held between us that we were sort of huddling next to.
Guest:And, um,
Guest:We watched the show and started laughing and screaming as these women were falling on their heads over and over and apparently breaking their legs and breaking their backs.
Guest:It was just one tragedy after another.
Guest:And we just, in hindsight, mean-spirited comedy about all this.
Guest:Everyone survived.
Guest:Everyone's fine.
Guest:Just some pratfalls were taken.
Guest:But we ended up with a little five-minute clip.
Guest:And Brian uploaded it to the site, and it was incredibly popular.
Guest:And Brian is an entrepreneurial spirit.
Guest:He saw a demand and set out to satisfy it.
Guest:And he bought some, he started buying equipment and really never stopped.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:Did he have a background?
Guest:I'm sorry to interrupt you, but did he have an audio background?
Guest:Because the show always has sounded good, even when he was not working with the best of equipment.
Guest:And he's a stickler for it, even as you're on the air live.
Guest:So I just always figured he must have a background in this.
Guest:He has zero formal training.
Guest:He is a devotee of the old Art Bell show.
Guest:Radio is something he always thought he would be doing.
Guest:Unlike me, this is never on my radar.
Guest:For one second, I think I'd be doing audio of any kind.
Guest:It was not on my screen as a possibility.
Guest:But it was something that was always something that he kind of always wanted to do.
Guest:And it was a big deal to him.
Guest:And so this is a way for him to start doing that.
Guest:And it started with the two of us, again, huddling around one microphone in his apartment for a
Guest:Probably like a year before he upgraded to a second mic.
Guest:And things grew from there.
Guest:And you got a condo with a studio in it and there was a house with a studio in it.
Guest:And there you go.
Guest:And when it was first being posted, it was available to like figure four weekly subscribers or was it just something on the site to get people to come into the site?
Guest:I think a little bit of both.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think you would do like a, there was like one free show a week and you had to subscribe to get the rest.
Guest:That makes sense.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I forget exactly where our initial schedule was.
Guest:I was, I was doing probably, I was probably doing four shows a week for a while until the merger with the resting observer.
Guest:And then Dave Meltzer came in and then your boy Vinny became a less of the headliner on the show, which is fine because I might, my workload went down, my salary went up, which is all I could ever ask for.
Guest:Well, also, I think it became part of this community, right, that it wasn't just the Dave Meltzer site that had a radio show.
Guest:It wasn't just you and Brian talking about old wrestling shows or current wrestling shows.
Guest:It became what it's grown to today is this, you know, multifaceted.
Guest:faceted wrestling one-stop shop for people who want to subscribe.
Guest:And I think that the key element of that is the community quality that was fostered like mostly through your show, but clearly there are other shows doing the same thing under your umbrella.
Guest:It has like a Howard Stern feel to it or any kind of morning zoo quality where the community becomes important that people start relying on it.
Guest:Listeners say, hey, I want to hang out with my friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When I mentioned earlier that Brian has never taken a class in audio technology or that stuff, he's all learned it on the fly as he's gone along.
Guest:I don't know if he's ever taken a class on marketing or brand building or that kind of thing, but I can tell you I've been to his house and he has tons and tons of books on secrets of successful people, building an audience, building a connection.
Guest:And so that part he is very, very tuned into.
Guest:And like you say, people are more likely to stick around if they feel they're not just a customer.
Guest:They are part of the show, part of what's going on.
Guest:They're appreciated.
Guest:If they feel appreciated, if they feel wanted, they're more likely to pay to come back.
Guest:And that's the whole goal.
Guest:So that part is very deliberate and something, like I say, he's very on top of.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But now I have a question for you.
Guest:Have you ever noticed this in any of the other media outlets you've worked at, like be it whether it's like fishing or working with football outsiders or any of any of those things?
Guest:Have you noticed a similar type of kind of audience interaction, community participation?
Guest:I'm just wondering if you feel like it's kind of heightened with wrestling.
Guest:uh the football outsiders community is devoted partly because they could talk about things that you that you won't find to talk about anywhere else most football sites you will it's just name-calling insulting and we beat you this year we'll get you next year blah blah blah blah and uh there's a lot more discussion about uh uh the game itself going on at football outsiders there's actually right now there's a discussion on the boards related to uh economic growth in europe oh okay yes
Guest:The NFL is playing a few games over in Germany and England this next year.
Guest:And there's a, we have some, a lot of German, English, European readers who are debating back and forth.
Guest:I should see you debating, discussing how this is going to work out and why it's successful, why it won't be successful, et cetera, et cetera.
Guest:So I tend to show up and do whatever works works.
Guest:And I don't think about it too much, but the one thing that I think for shows and products that are,
Guest:I tend to produce like the Brian Vinny show, like football outsiders, et cetera.
Guest:They're most successful when you target a very narrow audience, but very deeply.
Guest:Don't try to appeal to everyone because you can't anyway.
Guest:Appeal to some people, but appeal to them a lot.
Guest:I think that's the way to go.
Guest:Yeah, well, and, you know, I think with wrestling, here's my theory on it.
Guest:This is kind of my thoughts in listening to you guys for so many years, and then also what wound up just happening to us here on this subscription feed.
Guest:You know, we did a wrestling series, and all these wrestling fans joined up.
Guest:And we still have them here, so that's why we're doing wrestling content.
Guest:They're loyal.
Guest:They'll come, they'll stick around, they want to hear this stuff.
Guest:And the thing that I've kind of been getting my head around...
Guest:is that I think a lot of people, especially if they've been wrestling fans as long as we have, we're in our middle age and we have had this around since we were kids, there's always been this kind of shame element built into it.
Guest:Sure, sure, sure.
Guest:And so you have this kind of protective quality about being a wrestling fan.
Guest:Like, oh man, I don't know that I can tell people this.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And I don't know that that's entirely true anymore, but I still think it's ingrained when a lot of people, their haunches are up about it.
Guest:And so it is great to have this comfortable environment, this protective community of people who are like-minded, who are like, hey, I like the same thing and we don't have to be embarrassed about this.
Guest:that's a really deep question.
Guest:It's hard to answer because it's a, there's a lot of people who used to be embarrassed about being into a lot of things and now they're pretty proud about what they're into.
Guest:Uh, but as far as pro wrestling itself goes, I have the gene, you know, the gene that makes you a wrestling fan.
Guest:You're either into it or you're not, you have it or you don't.
Guest:Very few people learn to like it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:One time you fall in love or you see it one time.
Guest:You never, it's not part of your life and you rarely go from group A to group B. Um,
Guest:I remember my dad would, whenever I was watching it, he'd come in, he would make fun of me.
Guest:He would make fun of, you know, the 80s, late 80s, WWF, like the absolute steroid peak.
Guest:And he would make horse noises because they were all, in his words, on horse steroids.
Guest:And the exact term he used.
Guest:Even within my own family, there was a sense of shame, let alone out in the world.
Guest:The business has changed in a lot of ways and will continue to change in a lot of ways.
Guest:It won't be the same 30 years from now as it was 30 years ago.
Guest:Think about what you would see on a typical Saturday afternoon superstars 30 years ago.
Guest:You might see, for example, the Warlord.
Guest:That's a big, jacked up, juiced up, lumbering oaf in a silly costume.
Guest:And he'd do some unimpressive fake fighting and do a couple of power moves.
Guest:And he'd get the pin.
Guest:He'd flex and pose.
Guest:He'd leave in his wacky costume.
Guest:And that was the show.
Guest:It was two hours of that or an hour of that every Saturday.
Yeah.
Guest:And you tune into a random, just for example, dynamite now, and maybe you've never seen Hiko Dump a Kingo before.
Guest:And your first question was a little fellow at a wacky Viking costume.
Guest:I'm sort of looking at it.
Guest:Holy crap, what was that?
Guest:And it goes out for 10 more minutes.
Guest:And, you know, it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it will capture your eyes a lot more quickly than a big stiff.
Guest:And, you know, that's just one name, one show.
Guest:You can say the same thing about a Seth Rollins match or a Finn Balor match or a Riddle match or Montez Ford matches, you know, a hundred guys.
Guest:But the fact that, you know, that generation of wrestlers, you know, sadly literally passed away has opened the door to a smaller, more active, more athletic style of wrestler, which at least in the short term will get people's attention better.
Guest:You're less likely to call it silly.
Guest:We acknowledge I've never seen anyone do that kind of thing before.
Guest:And I don't know anyone who ever will do that kind of thing before.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And, you know, like, you know, Mark, when he went to the AEW Dynamite show in L.A., you know, his reaction was, these people are so much closer to me than any sporting event.
Guest:I mean, they're athletes, they're physical, and they keep themselves in great shape.
Guest:But these are performers.
Guest:These are more like showbiz.
Guest:This is a showbiz world, not a combat world, right?
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:And I think that, you know, the embrace of that has become more explicit as, you know, people want to talk about kayfabe dying.
Guest:The mentality around watching wrestling, I think, still wants the suspension of disbelief.
Guest:You want to be able to be like, I enjoy this fake thing, so tell me a story, even if it's fake, right?
Guest:And...
Guest:Because now you have a situation where the product itself isn't trying to con you.
Guest:It isn't trying to protect that and say, well, hey, this is this is real.
Guest:Like what you're seeing, you got to believe it at all times.
Guest:It allows for you to ease in.
Guest:You can take I can take someone like Mark to it and he doesn't feel like he's being made a fool of by these people in the ring, you know.
Guest:No, don't insult people's intelligence is a big part of it.
Guest:20, maybe 30 years ago, when then the World Wrestling Federation basically declared in court their show was planned, not an authentic competition, people were outraged as if it wasn't mostly common knowledge over the past 100 years.
Guest:But from what I read, it was Bobby Heenan who turned to someone and said, well, the magic show's over.
Guest:We've got to find a different way to entertain people now.
Guest:And for the most part, they have.
Guest:And you still need to make people care.
Guest:You still need a connection to the characters and the storylines of what's going on because as impressive as all these athletes are that we're talking about, if you turn on an Olympics gymnastics show, you will see everyone on that is better, a better flipper than anyone you'll see in AEW or WWE or et cetera, et cetera.
Guest:So it's still about the characters and the connection and the large and the life personalities.
Guest:That part is still very much a part of it.
Guest:Well, that's a good place to go, though, because you know this pretty well about the connection and about the character and what you actually have to do to connect with an audience.
Guest:And I'm glad that this hasn't come up until we've been talking now for about 20 minutes.
Guest:And I have not mentioned this before to our audience, but anybody who's listening to this and hearing Vinny speak for the first time might be surprised to know that he was a wrestler.
Guest:And I, I did not know that for years, years and years and years and years.
Guest:I would hear you guys talk.
Guest:I'd hear you talk about doing backyard wrestling.
Guest:And I, you know, I understood that I used to do the same thing, but you were an actual wrestler with an actual gimmick and an actual name.
Guest:You performed in front of crowds.
Guest:I kind of just, it's like, how, when, why, what, how did this happen in your life?
Guest:In hindsight, those are all very good questions.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So I was a fan forever.
Guest:I happen to be larger than the average person.
Guest:These days, when I was wrestling, I was six foot two, about 245 and running six miles a day.
Guest:So I was nothing special in the world of sports or wrestling, but larger and better shape than most fans.
Guest:So I went to college, finished that.
Guest:I went to high school with Brian.
Guest:That's how I knew him.
Guest:He was doing shows.
Guest:He was doing shows in the Seattle area.
Guest:So the long story short is I got a hold of him and talked to some people and got trained.
Guest:And were you a fan throughout from your childhood up until the point?
Guest:Like there was no gaps?
Guest:No, there's been no gaps since.
Guest:My first match that I remember seeing would have been Junkyard Dog versus Missing Link in 1985, I believe in World of Class.
Guest:They must have had a show in the Seattle area for a while at some point in syndication.
Guest:And the fact that I watched that match and then came back to tell you what an addict I am for this stuff.
Guest:And then the next year, the next year was what I still think is the single greatest angle as far as creating lifelong fans, which is Randy Savage dropping the ring bell across Ricky Steamboat's throat.
Guest:It must be.
Guest:It must be.
Guest:You must encounter, what, 75, 80 percent of people our age that bring that up.
Guest:I mean, same for me.
Guest:My cousin and I stayed up all literally all night till the sunrise waiting for a breaking news update on whether Ricky Steamboat was alive or dead.
Yeah.
Guest:It never came.
Guest:And the fact that we had to wait like seven days till superstars was torture.
Guest:But anyway, yeah, so a fan forever, went to college, started training, and I did about 120 shows in Washington State, Oregon, and a little bit in Canada, mostly for Tim Flowers, a few for Buddy Rose in Oregon, and Tito Carrion in Oregon.
Guest:I've paid the dues in the sense of I have driven from Seattle to Eugene, Oregon to set up a ring, wrestle, tear down the ring, and drive back for free.
Guest:So in that sense, I've paid my dues.
Guest:I never got any higher than that.
Guest:I never advanced any beyond the hot dog and handshake phase.
Guest:And there's a reason for this, a complete lack of physical talent.
Guest:I am sort of big, and from watching Wrestling Forever, I know how to put a match together, but I am very, very, very clumsy.
Guest:And so that did not last long.
Guest:And there have been a few, I guess you'd call them cameos here and there over the years where I made returns.
Guest:But I am much better talking about wrestling than doing it.
Guest:And you were shoulders to ready?
Guest:Is that the name you went by?
Guest:The initial name was Childress Torelli and the story about that is Torelli.
Guest:My name is Vince and one of the other guys, Matt Farmer, who is currently booking Defy Wrestling in Seattle.
Guest:He started calling me Vince Torelli, which was Ken Shamrock's first name when he first broke into pro wrestling.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:That's where Vince Torelli came from.
Guest:And then one day I was reading a ring around the Northwest newsletter.
Guest:Back in the day.
Guest:And they're talking about an old Pacific Northwest wrestling legend named Shoulders Newman.
Guest:And I said, and I said, Shoulders, that's the dumbest name I've ever heard of.
Guest:And so, of course, I was dubbed Shoulders Torelli.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:I saw a cousin I don't see very often a couple weeks ago.
Guest:His first thing she said was, it's Shoulders Torelli.
Guest:I was like, oh, Christ.
Guest:Um, and then, uh, Vinnie V was frankly a much better name, a better, better marketing name.
Guest:We had, we had a fun skit where, uh, shoulders was basically went insane and, uh, inherited a great windfall of cash and, uh, re-dubbed himself Vinnie V and, uh, there you go.
Guest:And got some gold to me pants and white go-go boots.
Guest:And it was, uh, it was more, it was more successful on the very low bar of successful moments in my wrestling career.
Guest:And were you ever Vinny in life before that?
Guest:Or have you always been Vince, Vincent?
Guest:So my middle name is Aaron.
Guest:And I forget if my parents' decision or mine, but I went by Aaron for my entire childhood and adolescence.
Guest:And when I graduated, part of that is every time I would go to a new class,
Guest:They would call it the first day of school.
Guest:Is Vince here?
Guest:Present.
Guest:Do you prefer Vince or Vinny?
Guest:Actually, Aaron.
Guest:I have to do this every period, every year.
Guest:So I got out of high school, went to college, and I didn't know anyone.
Guest:There was zero people that I knew I could start over.
Guest:And on top of this, to be perfectly frank, I didn't like myself very much coming out of high school.
Guest:And so I wanted a new identity.
Guest:And so once I started going to college, everyone calls me Vinny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Most of my mother's family actually still calls me Aaron to this day.
Guest:I was Aaron for 18 years.
Guest:I've been Vinny now for almost 30.
Guest:But for some people, I would just always be Aaron, and that's the way it goes.
Guest:Well, that's very wrestling to have a shoot name and –
Guest:work name and uh you know you don't want to be a mark and call you i'm not i'm not gonna call you aaron because like i wouldn't call a wrestler by his real name so uh yeah i get it it makes sense now i do remember one time on the show you were relating to something happening in the ring and you said i remember doing a match in oregon or wherever it was and saying i just laid on my back looking up at the ceiling thinking this sucks like i
Guest:I'm sure there was a lot of that, too.
Guest:There was there was one moment, you know, we were doing shows, the Temple Theater in Tacoma, Washington, drawing a
Guest:I think a few thousand people, definitely several hundred.
Guest:And the building was just crammed full of people.
Guest:It was hot and you'd go crazy.
Guest:This was like attitude era.
Guest:This was when wrestling was wrestling, man.
Guest:And we did a tag team match.
Guest:And like I say, I was never a good athlete, but I knew how to put a match together.
Guest:And so I just, you know, they didn't.
Guest:The other guy was even bigger than me.
Guest:So the heel team got the heat on me, as they say.
Guest:And as they're working me over, it's time for the hot tag.
Guest:And I, you know, it's very simple.
Guest:Just duck under the double clothesline, jump as high as you can and clothesline both of them.
Guest:And I did that and the place went crazy.
Guest:And that was one why I just laid on my back and looked at my eyes and said, that's it.
Guest:This is why I came here for.
Guest:This is why I did all those squats, all those pushups, running on all those hills.
Guest:I did it for this moment right here.
Guest:And for that moment, the whole thing was not just a tire waste of time.
Guest:So that's a good thing.
Guest:There were a lot more moments when things went terribly wrong.
Guest:I'm trying to think of which one you're probably referring to.
Guest:And my best guess is, here's the opposite end of the spectrum.
Guest:We were doing a show.
Guest:Was it Shelton?
Guest:Was he like Shelton or Roy Washington?
Guest:There were less than two dozen people there.
Guest:And that includes like the ring crew and guys, girlfriends were in the crowd and stuff.
Guest:And we were in like a tent, maybe like a blue tarp hung out in the woods.
Guest:And we're just doing a match in there.
Guest:Actually, the first thing Big said, who was my partner in that tag match, but now we're against each other here.
Guest:And he's supposed to whip me in and supposed to, he was supposed to hit a clothesline or elbow, whatever.
Guest:He forgot and just stood there as I ran by him.
Guest:And I, it was like, I had my eyes closed because I was supposed to take a bump for a strike and I'm running and he stands there and he doesn't hit me, but I take the bump anyway.
Guest:And I just landed on my back and I'm utterly humiliated.
Guest:And I actually just shouted, pin me.
Yeah.
Guest:I just want to get out of there so bad.
Guest:But yeah, there's a lot more moments like that than moments where the crowd was jumping on their feet and cheering my name.
Guest:And with your self-awareness around it, are you able to look at all of that and think like, oh, I didn't botch a career path.
Guest:It's not like you should have kept at it.
Guest:Do you feel comfortable with the decision you made?
Guest:You don't look back on it regretfully?
Yes.
Guest:Yes, I lay my head on the pillow at night knowing that I tried my hardest to be a pro wrestler, and it just wasn't meant to be.
Guest:Well, but I will say that I think it's one of those things where it factors into what you do, especially with Brian.
Guest:I look at the two of you as really this medium's version of Siskel and Ebert.
Guest:That's fair.
Guest:That's how I, and those were guys I grew up with too.
Guest:I grew up watching that show every week.
Guest:I learned, the most I ever learned about movies was from watching Siskel and Ebert.
Guest:And I feel the same way about wrestling.
Guest:I knew a lot about wrestling before I ever subscribed to The Observer.
Guest:But once I started listening to you guys talk about it, I understood really the art of putting a match together, really the sense of
Guest:why something psychologically makes sense, why it doesn't, why you should avoid certain things, why certain things are safe, why certain things aren't.
Guest:And you guys have such a respect for it at the same time of knowing what's ridiculous about it and getting aggravated about it.
Guest:It would just be like the same thing with Siskel and Ebert.
Guest:They talk about sometimes be like, oh, Raj, I know we have like the greatest job in the world, but sometimes this is hard, man, to watch these movies.
Guest:They suck.
Guest:But then they'd watch something that just like gave them life.
Guest:Like they'd be talking about Fargo and how it was like the greatest thing they've seen in years.
Guest:And they wouldn't stop talking about it for the whole year.
Guest:And I noticed the same thing with you guys.
Guest:It seems like it's still fun.
Guest:And I know there might be times where it doesn't feel that way because you do it every day as a job.
Guest:But it definitely comes across to the listeners that you guys still love it.
Guest:Oh, for sure.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:There's nothing I love more than great wrestling.
Guest:And there's...
Guest:Well, I hate a lot, but I definitely hate bad wrestling.
Guest:I'm not afraid to say that.
Guest:My sister once told me I'm only happy when I have something to complain about.
Guest:And my wife once said, one of the things I love about you is when you hate something, you do not hold back.
Guest:So, yeah, I'm kind of a negative person.
Guest:A professional asshole is kind of what I am.
Guest:But people seem to enjoy it.
Guest:That's funny that you think that of yourself, though, because clearly on the show and in the dynamic of the show,
Guest:You're not that one, if I could just put it that way.
Guest:It's different for different people.
Guest:There's definite people who see Brian as the good cop, me as the bad cop, and then somewhere it's the other way around.
Guest:I'm sure that's definitely true for a lot.
Guest:I think the show works such as it does, in large part because we are so different.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And we are very different people.
Yes.
Guest:For a lot of reasons, it would not work if we were more of the same.
Guest:I don't know if you ever watched, there was a South Park documentary where you go through a week of producing the show.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And you realize this is not a 50-50 partnership.
Guest:This is a 95-5 partnership.
Guest:But that's because Trey Parker is a control freak.
Guest:And if Matt Stone is there all the time giving his opinion, trying to control things, they would just fight constantly.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:In this sense, Brian's the Trey Parker, I am the Matt Stone.
Guest:Brian's the one who will buy 15 different microphones, go through 15 different tests with each one to determine which one's the best, which to send back, which to keep, just engage, et cetera, et cetera.
Guest:If I was the audio kind of audiophile that Brian was, we would just argue about equipment for four hours and never record anything.
Guest:It wouldn't work that way.
Guest:And that kind of thing trickles down over the show.
Guest:I am just told, I told what to watch.
Guest:I show up and I give my opinion and I go home.
Guest:And rarely do I offer to change anything or insist on doing this instead of that.
Guest:So I kind of just do what I'm told and let him run things.
Guest:And that works better.
Guest:And that personality carries over into the show itself.
Guest:Yeah, well, and I'm sure there's things of yours that he's not going to step on either, right?
Guest:Like, you might not say that explicitly, or you might not even be fully communicating that to each other.
Guest:But it's like with me and Mark, like, we both kind of know where we each have autonomy.
Guest:And it's, you know, never the twain shall meet, like we both
Guest:are controlling our own thing, even though it might not be the thing that's at the forefront of the listening experience or vice versa.
Guest:And, um, you know, part of the reason our, our partnership has worked is because we don't like intrude on the other person's thing.
Guest:We don't say, Hey, you should do this differently or whatever.
Guest:And, and then, yeah, it does work.
Guest:No, uh, he, he gives you the space, you know, like I said, this is never something I expected myself to do.
Guest:And so for a while there, I was trying to do good audio and,
Guest:And people hated it.
Guest:It was very unpopular.
Guest:And so I gave up.
Guest:And now my goal for every show is playing in something to make myself laugh.
Guest:That is the only target.
Guest:That's the only bullseye to hit.
Guest:And if other people happen to enjoy it, good for them.
Guest:I'm happy for them.
Guest:But mostly I go to abuse myself.
Guest:So if you listen for a while, I'm constantly dropping references to 1980s rock bands or Transformers or Godzilla movies or...
Guest:cartoons or any of the other dork stuff i'm into and i know brian won't get it i know most of the audience won't get it but i get it and that makes me laugh yeah and a perfect a perfect example that he will not like stomp all over your references like he knows okay i'm not this is not my thing this is vince's thing if he's absolutely perplexed by something he will ask and i will explain it but most of the time he just it just goes over his head he didn't care
Guest:Well, you guys have provided me with a lot of entertainment, so I thank you for that.
Guest:There's still plenty of stuff of yours that I think about all the time, even when I'm not watching wrestling.
Guest:I think that there's a friend of mine, his name is Bill, and I call him Young William, and I think that's because I always heard Brian call you Young Vincent.
Guest:And I just kind of got stuck in my head and say, hey, young William.
Guest:And it's just like your theme song.
Guest:It's a lot of what you guys do just kind of rattles around in my head all the time and comes out in spurts.
Guest:And so I fully understand how you feel about it with a detachment and with a sense of you're just doing it for yourself.
Guest:But you're absolutely giving your listeners something that that they rely on and that they really love.
Guest:Well, thank you.
Guest:It's very nice to hear.
Guest:I'm glad you enjoyed the show so much.
Guest:I hope others enjoy it as well.
Guest:When they go, sign up at F4WOnline.com.
Guest:F4WOnline.com or also WrestlingObserver.com gets you to the same site.
Guest:And yeah, I mean, you guys do full video as well.
Guest:So if people want to go to your YouTube channel, they can subscribe there.
Guest:And hey, it's been a pleasure talking to you, Vinny.
Guest:I hope someday in the great big world that we live in, we will meet up sometime, maybe at a wrestling show, maybe elsewhere.
Guest:I really appreciate you doing this.
Guest:And look, best of luck to you guys.
Guest:Hope you go on for as long as you want.
Guest:Thanks, man.
Guest:I appreciate it.
Guest:And if you or anyone else like to get ahold of me, follow me on Twitter at Vincent Verheye.
Guest:And as of yesterday, not even 24 hours ago, I have been active on Cameo.
Guest:Oh, Vincent Verheye.
Guest:If you want to want to want me to say hi to you or your friends or wish you a happy Mother's Day to turn the corner.
Guest:We'll get that taken care of.
Guest:Yeah, there you go.
Guest:Get a cameo from Vince.
Guest:Get his best review of something in a bite-sized video form.
Guest:This was a pleasure.
Guest:Thanks so much for doing this, man.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:So yeah, Chris, I mean, I wonder listening to that talk with Vinny, and again, if anybody wants to subscribe to the Brian and Vinny show and Wrestling Observer in general, go to F4W online or WrestlingObserver.com and you can subscribe to the Wrestling Observer and the podcast.
Guest:You can get it all.
Guest:You can also subscribe to their YouTube channel.
Guest:But I wonder, Chris, is there anything about that that you have in your life?
Guest:Like a kind of...
Guest:secret community like that, that, uh, that you rely on and nobody else.
Marc:Fantasy baseball for sure.
Marc:Uh, yeah, that is, that is my thing.
Marc:And, uh, yes, it's my secret society.
Marc:It's just great to, to be able to do that every single day, like talk shit about our lineups and, uh, and make trade offers, terrible trade offers.
Marc:Uh, but yeah, that, that would be, that would be my, uh, my, my, uh, example of,
Marc:And that's been going on for years, right?
Marc:Yeah, it's been going on since, geez, maybe 2002 or so.
Marc:So yeah, it's been a minute.
Marc:But yeah, it is my ride or die.
Marc:I love my fantasy baseball team, La Rowena.
Marc:I have never won that league, but I'm still hoping.
Marc:So how long have you been listening to Big Vinny?
Guest:Oh, I guess, you know, on and off for probably since they merged with Dave Meltzer, which was probably around 2007, 2008.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:And yeah, definitely like my interest level would would dip in and out the way in terms of how much I was watching wrestling.
Guest:So there was a period of time where I basically stopped listening altogether just because I didn't follow wrestling.
Guest:But like I think around like pandemic time, I started like checking in again pretty seriously and
Guest:Which is frankly like a pattern that people have like with WTF, too.
Guest:Like we've been around for going on 15 years and people listen and then they bail out and then they go, oh, I want to listen to Mark again.
Guest:And then they kind of get involved again.
Guest:So I'm totally familiar with that kind of pattern with it.
Guest:But yeah, they've been in and around my entertainment diet for a long time.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I love, like, I'm learning where you, the guy who I turn to about understanding wrestling, pick up or built upon, like, this vast wrestling knowledge.
Marc:Like, you just know shit.
Marc:And now we kind of peek behind the curtain on, like, where you get some of this stuff.
Guest:Yeah, well, like I said to you a couple weeks ago, it's like, I always know there's somebody who knows more than me about this stuff, and they're, like, a reason why.
Guest:And it's like, they don't know more because they sit and, like, study endless hours of Monday Night Raw.
Guest:They know more because they're wrestlers, or they were at one point in their lives.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I just think that's so cool.
Guest:I think that's so cool that these guys have actually gone out and done it.
Marc:I also like that you were mentioning that wrestling has this built-in shame to it, right?
Marc:It's very similar to how people felt about Star Wars and Star Trek in the 80s and 90s.
Marc:It's like this sort of guilty pleasure.
Marc:And it totally, I totally know that feeling.
Marc:And the tide is turning.
Marc:I mean, the tide is, you know, turned on Star Wars.
Guest:Completely.
Marc:It is like the thing.
Marc:But like, I can see the tide turning, especially since there's a product like AEW out there getting bigger.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And bigger.
Marc:And yes, wrestling is different.
Marc:And like Vinny was saying, it captures your eye like on AEW, right?
Marc:But the biggest thing that AEW should put out there is that they're a better and more humane wrestling company.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because for me and lots of people, my wife and our family, wrestling is steroids and dead wrestlers at a young age due to wildly varying circumstances, right?
Guest:Yeah, a lot of it being drugs and mistreatment of their bodies.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And AEW is here and they're putting on this actually different product that is more sustainable.
Marc:I like to think it's more sustainable.
Marc:And yes, people are gonna be upset because so-and-so like Ricky Starks isn't on the show every week, but this one is.
Marc:But that's what's so good about this product is that it's the sustainability to it, you know?
Marc:Like it's, I just think AEW has such a long bench
Marc:to give wrestlers just a breather, you know?
Marc:The wrestlers will have family and they get banged up and they give them, you know, time to rest up physically and like hopefully mentally, you know?
Marc:And like, I honestly think AEW is the future of wrestling.
Marc:And if they can sort of get that out there that like, hey, this isn't the old time wrestling.
Marc:This is like a more humane company.
Marc:I feel like even more eyeballs will be drawn to it.
Guest:Well, you know, from your lips to next week's ears, it looks like something big is going to happen next Wednesday at the Warner Brothers Discovery upfronts.
Guest:A lot of rumors going on out there about what they're going to announce regarding AEW.
Guest:Nothing confirmed yet, but I would say there's probably a very good likelihood that by the time you hear us talking next week,
Guest:there will be some security for the future of aew as a company for a very long time which is good news for all wrestling fans and anybody who likes to watch this um whether they ever watched aew or not it's going to be good for everyone because the marketplace will be supporting uh more jobs more hours of television as a product and uh you'll have more options and that's good that's a good thing
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:Well, you know, talking about AEW, we'll get to the best thing we've seen in wrestling this past week.
Guest:I'm guessing that has to do with this past Dynamite for you, right?
Marc:Dude, can I just say I watched a lot of wrestling this week?
Marc:Like, I'm a bit high on wrestling.
Marc:Like, over the weekend, I watched WWE's Backlash because...
Marc:Honestly, I'm on a wrestling podcast.
Marc:I should immerse myself.
Marc:And my wife was busy doing other stuff.
Marc:So I watched Backlash.
Marc:And I thought there were some good matches on it.
Marc:The crowd was great.
Marc:There was a Bad Bunny and Damien Priest street fight that was great.
Marc:There were two women's matches, which I actually loved.
Marc:And I was like, oh, this is what I will tell Brendan was my favorite thing happened.
Marc:And then AEW Dynavite said, hold my beer.
Marc:They put on a show that was true to its name from the opening bell, which by the way, was like a minute into the show.
Marc:Yeah, they had no entrances, just started the match.
Marc:We should talk about that one day because it is the polar opposite to what WWE does for Raw.
Marc:I mean, it's all entrances over there.
Marc:But this is just bell rings a minute into the broadcast.
Guest:I think that was 100% deliberate that they were like –
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You know, they loaded this card up like a pay-per-view style card.
Guest:It had, you know, a lot of big matches.
Guest:And so they knew there'd be some eyeballs on it that weren't on it normally.
Guest:And it was like, here's a decree.
Guest:We're the wrestling company.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Marc:We're not the pageantry business.
Marc:We're the wrestling business.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it started out and here are two amazing wrestlers, Claudio and Ray Phoenix, and they are going to give you amazing wrestling.
Guest:And they did.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And a double jeopardy match, which thankfully Excalibur was able to fill me in on because I didn't really understand it.
Guest:I don't think it existed before that match.
Guest:No, no, I'm serious.
Guest:I saw Tony Khan like on Twitter say, I just thought of this the other night.
Guest:Double Jeopardy.
Guest:They're both of their titles would.
Guest:It's not that the titles were on the line, but if you lost the match, the guy who beat you would then get a shot at your title.
Marc:So that was incredible.
Marc:And then Orange Cassidy and Daniel Garcia had a great match, followed by Anna Jay and Julia Hart, another great women's match, and then a really great-looking dark match with House of Black versus The Best Friends.
Guest:Okay, can I say something about this?
Marc:Sure.
Guest:So they do this thing that it's like the house rules, right?
Guest:So The House of Black has all these rules about the show, about the match now, which I couldn't follow any of them, but...
Guest:One of the rules, apparently, that just happened when the match started was the arena would now be black.
Guest:And on the video screens, there's, like, you know, static snow going, right?
Guest:Embers.
Guest:Yeah, embers.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's more of what it was, more than static.
Guest:And I got to say, like, I knew it when I was watching it.
Guest:I was like, people are going to be...
Guest:shitting all over this there's going to be i'm going to go on twitter and on on wrestlingobserver.com on their message board and people are going to be like oh this lighting it was so stupid i loved it i loved the way that that looked and i hope i hope they just keep it up
Guest:For another couple of times, do not listen to people who just want things to be the way they always are.
Guest:Because, look, if the whole show looked like that, yes, that would be bad.
Guest:But the visual change between those matches and the other matches on the show and that match was awesome.
Guest:And it definitely made the House of Black seem like a big deal.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah, special.
Marc:Like, they really made it seem special, for sure.
Marc:There's a Killer Christian Cage promo, an FTR promo, some surprise reappearances by wrestlers, and it's all culminating in...
Marc:the most disturbing steel cage match that I've ever seen with Kenny Omega versus Jon Moxley that featured broken glass that I immediately had to just text you like, what the fuck?
Marc:And I was like, oh, right.
Guest:Oh, is that what that was about?
Guest:Because I wasn't watching live.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was wondering what you were, what you're texting me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So this show dwarfed what
Marc:I just watched over on WWE.
Marc:It just proved what I thought, that AEW is my type of wrestling show.
Marc:And unfortunately, I have outgrown WWE.
Guest:That may be true, you know, just as the way it is.
Guest:I will say, I haven't watched that back last show.
Guest:Like I said, anytime I watch WWE stuff, the camera work really puts me off.
Guest:But...
Guest:I saw some clips of that show and I loved the way their arena looked.
Guest:And they did not have a gigantic stage with big LED monitors.
Guest:And it was just a very minimal thing with a ramp.
Guest:And they were in like a sports stadium.
Guest:It fit like 18,000, 19,000 people.
Guest:And they packed it in there.
Guest:It looked like a 40,000, 50,000 stadium, right?
Guest:And it sounded like it too.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:The visuals were great.
Guest:And that's a big deal when it comes to wrestling.
Guest:Like, you could have a show with 9,000 people, which was what that Dynamite show had.
Guest:And it feels like, you know, every person in the world is at that show.
Guest:That felt like it was a jacked, hot crowd.
Guest:And they were, aside from that House of Black match, they were very well lit.
Guest:So you saw all over this arena.
Guest:It looked like...
Guest:you know, thousands and thousands of people writing your camera shot every time.
Guest:And I thought the WWE did a great job with that in this Puerto Rican event backlash.
Guest:But yeah, Dynamite was just, it really was a pay-per-view style show.
Guest:Hats off to them for doing that.
Guest:I probably could pick anything on that show as the best thing I saw in wrestling, but I'm not going to.
Guest:In fact, I want to pick something that was not on any particular wrestling show.
Guest:It was actually on...
Guest:A documentary on the A&E Network about the NWO.
Guest:WWE has been producing all these documentaries for A&E about various wrestlers.
Guest:They had one about the NWO.
Guest:And on this show, they talked with Eric Bischoff, who used to be in charge of WCW.
Guest:I was never a fan.
Guest:I didn't love WCW during the Hulk Hogan years, watched mostly WWE.
Guest:And I thought Eric Bischoff got way too much credit for the NWO in particular and WCW in general when they were heavily financed by Turner Networks.
Guest:I didn't think he was a very good booker.
Guest:I just didn't have a very high opinion of him.
Guest:And he had a very high opinion of himself.
Guest:So I was never a fan.
Guest:And on this NWO show, Eric Bischoff, who's been, you know, out of wrestling for a while, retired, he is talking about a convention that he was at.
Guest:I think in this clip he was talking to Sting at a wrestling convention after he had been retired from WCW and Sting had long since moved on as well.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But in this clip, he explains and they show footage of this young woman coming up to the mic during a Q&A and asking a question.
Guest:And I'll just let it play from here because I pulled the clip and I just found this to be really, really moving.
Guest:She told me this amazing story about how when she was a little kid, she had a tough family situation.
Guest:and the only time that she got to spend with her dad i'll say i start crying every time i tell this story it's funny she said the only time she ever had to really have father-daughter time was on monday nights because he worked
Guest:different jobs and he was an alcoholic he had issues but on monday nights that was father-daughter time they watched nitro love the nw and she told me that story oh god stop you know there's 1500 people here watching me cry like a like a baby and then you know that was the end of when i got away from that show it was over it was done it was you know a nice story
Guest:and of course she finds a way to track me down and she sent my wife an email and really went into detail about that same story and said look you know my mother's no longer here my father's no longer here i'm getting married would eric walk me down the aisle and
Guest:of course i said yes i walked her down the aisle and that's when i realized this stuff has a bigger impact on people than you realize when you're doing it when you hear a story about how what we did actually brought people together and created bonds made it way more meaningful
Guest:And as cool as that was, Chris, and I, you know, it was definitely, you know, designed to pull at the heartstrings, right?
Guest:Like they had the music playing and everything.
Guest:But I will say, like, it was, it reminded me of exactly what I was talking about with Vinny.
Guest:And just in general, how I feel about...
Guest:Talking about wrestling here, like when I'm talking about it with you or when you come over and we watch pay-per-views or, you know, I just think about the friends I made throughout my life and we watched this stuff together.
Guest:You know, I had friends much like Brian and Vinny who I did backyard wrestling with when I was a teenager.
Guest:I never went and did it professionally like those guys did.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But, yeah, I have a bond with those guys for life.
Guest:And, you know, it is like most things.
Guest:I think there are people who feel that way when they go to Comic Cons, right?
Guest:There are people that feel that way when they go to Star Trek conventions.
Guest:It's like family, being with your people.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And feeling like this thing that means so much to you is not silly because it means that much to other people as well.
Guest:And yeah, I was really happy about that.
Guest:And I was happy for Eric Bischoff, a guy who I never gave much thought to, but I thought in that moment, wow, I was wrong.
Guest:He did something great.
Guest:Even if it was just for this one person, which it was, and it was clearly for...
Guest:Many millions of people.
Guest:But even in this one moment, he gave a great thing to the world.
Guest:And that's that's to be admired.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:Well, we'll leave it there on that note.
Guest:We'll be back with the Friday show next week.
Guest:Please send us your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, anything you want to talk about.
Guest:Just click on the link in the show description down there.
Guest:And, you know.
Guest:It's a fun thing, this wrestling stuff.
Guest:And it's not for everyone, but if you're here listening to it and enjoying it with us, thanks so much for doing that.
Guest:And hopefully we're going to provide this little community for you much the same way Brian and Vinny have done for me and thousands of others.
Guest:So until next week, I am Brendan.
Guest:That is Chris.
Guest:Peace.
Peace.