Greggulator

On Raw, they have had a really long single camera track like that the past few weeks. They have also had a lot of really quick 30 second promos to promote a match without an interview. The Sami thing was a combination of the two pretty much. Was really awesome to see that because it felt like a great storytelling representation of Sami’s journey for this WrestleMania.

I fell asleep during the main event, so I still have to watch. But from the show: 1) Sami/Gunther was absolutely incredible. Gunther is an all-time great Goliath type. Sami is the best underdog babyface of his era.The opening camera shot of Sami told such an awesome story — Sami’s doubt came because he lost against Roman in front of his wife and entire hometown, Gable is the one who picked him up, KO reminded Sami of exactly how good Sami is. A+ presentation. 2) Rhea/Becky ruled. The electric chair spot was mind boggling. I really liked Becky’s expressions throughout and Rhea’s reactions in how she could not put Bex away. 3) The Rey/Andrade vs. Escobar/Dom stuff was silly fun. They shoehorned a lot into the set up of the match, which doesn’t do anyone any favors. But a good match with the awesome catapult. Kelce’s involvement was definitive Philadelphia. He’s essentially a Messiah type figure here. Beloved by all. I don’t watch football much but he could spit in my mouth as my child watched and I would thank him for the honor of it occurred. We love him that much. 3) Every WM needs a nonsense and chaotic car wreck match. Glad we got this and can move on. 4) Jimmy/Jey was there. Disappointing because they had an epic build for it. Going for a match so dependent on in-ring acting at a football venue was a really bad decision. A quick brawl like how brothers fight would have been ideal. But I don’t hate it like everyone else. Just forgettable.

Oh, was he the dude who in some indie once dunked a basketball and then hung on the rim before using that to perform a Hurucanrana on someone?

I had an absolute blast last night. Pro wrestling live is always fun. And some of Dean’s best stuff came from his road reports, where it just made me wish I lived in Richmond so I could have a 40 and watch some indie sleaze. This show was really in that spirit. It had a lot for everyone. I know nothing about indie wrestling anymore. The only guy on the show I knew was Timothy Thatcher. But I was really impressed by as someone said earlier the curation of the show — some really good goofball stuff to brawls and etc. The post-intermission stuff was a little more “serious” but the matches were really great. Some of the highlights: The tag match with Wasted Youth was a really great 2000 indie juniors tag team match. And you know what? People shit on that stuff now (9/11 changed everything) but we all loved it back then. It had what those matches should have: Long haired babyfaces who have emo theme music and an insane name, cocksure jock arrogant heels who talk shit, and just the basic tag structure match but in the style where the ref at the end just stops enforcing the five count and let’s double teams happen and they all break out moves that were so completely new. It felt very OMEGA or that indie in Delaware that did the Super 8. My only notes are that I do not believe any of the participants had the first name of “Shayne” or any of the other derivatives of that name so common to indie wrestlers born in the late 70s. (I believe Dean made this commentary at one point.) The double dog collar match was so great. Usually that’s a stipulation to end a blood feud and I could easily see some dork complaining about a dog collar match with some random pairing of dudes who never met before being an awful booking decision. But fuck that noise. Dean was a huge fan of the absurdity of wrestling and “yeah, sure, I will fly in from Mexico to get in a dog collar match against a guy who was apparently decreed by a royal authority as the King of the Dog Collar Match” is hilariously absurd. And Dean also loved blood and gore. One of the best Dean reviews was on the Dump Matsumoto hair versus hair match where she did something despicable to win and shaved the beloved babyface’s hair — writing about it being representative of the darker nature of life, and the fears of the innocent have about being corrupted into darkness. This match obviously was not part of a broader angle that was the Hulk/Andre of Japanese women’s wrestling, But any kind of match like this, where a guy from Mexico is willing to fly to the fringe of the South Jersey suburbs to get the fuck whipped out of him with a chain and to bleed, is always representative of mankind’s darker natures. We all have a dark side. But almost all of us abide by a social code where we will not give into the demon’s we all carry. A match like this — chaotic, brutal, ugly, bloody and for no real reason than to just be chaotic, brutal, ugly and bloody — always feels somehow cathartic to me. There’s a part of me (and I assume all of us) that would like to drown in chaos of my own making. (Also, that match was fun as fuck.) (Also, I have no idea how to do footnotes, or else I would in homage to the DVDVR’s usage of footnotes, which I believe was a Ganc trademark.) The main event blew me away. Timothy Thatcher was the one guy I knew, and that was only because he was on AEW for a minute. But this was pro wrestling as art. “Telling a story in the ring” is the wrestling snob’s cliche. But so often, the wrestlers might think they are telling a story but it’s really hard for the audience to see the story — especially live and without announcers. They told a great story. The Wrestling Genius believes in sportsmanship. Thatcher did not cheat, but he was uncomfortably ruthless and dickish in a lot of his actions (all expressed with his facial expressions.) Thatcher targeted Macabee’s left hand succesfully. Macabre went after the ankle but was never able to fully hook his submission. Instead, he had to win by another method — And that was three punches from his right hand. (I don’t remember ever seeing a punch ending a match unless it was a guy’s finisher or involved a roll of coins. But when you think about it — it’s the best finisher. Punches end fights, even when thrown in real life by people who have never thrown a fist.) But what was best about this was the crowd’s reaction. It was silent for a lot of the beginning — but because we were all focused on the intensity and wizardry and seeing their strategies unfold. Then we got louder as the match progressed, with everyone acting it was like a horror movie because someone twisted an elbow in a funky way or bent a wrist back. We all know what it’s like to roll an ankle or jam a finger, and seeing that in an exaggerated visual form 10 feet in front of you really makes you conjure up those memories. And I’m sure the knot tying joint work hurts, but it’s also not going to hurt or cause the damage of blading or back bumps. (I assume.) But one thing I noticed (and I am sure everyone did) was that they did not talk at all during the match. We all know the tricks of when a spot is being called (even when we can’t hear it.) I talked with Macabee after the show and asked about it and how they didn’t seem to talk or call things. He said they didn’t. They had a few matches against each other before and wrestled a simulated “real wrestling match.” I am so blown away by that. As you guys probably know, I was a comedian for about 15 years. Comedy and wrestling are both live performance art. One of the many things in common is that you have to learn to feel or hear a crowd. But, most importantly, you have to recognize what the crowd is telling you — when to pick up the pace or when to heighten your act/work to a spot that will pop the crowd or when to slow things back down and start to build to your next punchline/spot or then how to build to the big finish. I usually don’t care how wrestlers build their stories when Bret Hart or whoever brag about not needing to plan out a match or call a spot. The final performance is all that matters. But watching it in an intimate setting, it really just blew me away that they were able to dance like that. Amazing time. DEAN~ FOREVER!

I said my own variation of Dean's incredible performance art from the 400 level of Citizens Bank Park. Surrounded by children. My heckle was received with laughter, applause and gratitude -- especially from the parents in this section. We raise them right here in Philadelphia!

Not sure if I can watch this week because I really don’t want to see Best Friends break up. Ever. They should have been kept like The New Day — forever friends who stick with each other no matter what. As someone put it: The episodes that end with Best Friends standing talk are the best episodes of AEW. The thing that finally made me check out AEW was not Punk or Danielson. It was the end of Arcade Asylum. Wrestling perfection: A goofy hardcore match, Rusev wrecking shop, Stat popping out of a video game, Sue driving off in the mini-van, the gang celebrating with a group hug as “Where Is My Mind?” plays and Tony Schiavonne screaming that we have to go while plugging The Accountant coming up next!

Also, how crude can we act tonight? I am not a fan of being crude. But I remember a road report where Dean went to some horrible show and reported he screamed “My mom wants her clit ring back” at a wrestler. That is high end heckling. I used my own variation of that at a Phillies playoff game this year when I screamed at an umpire that I hope his wife’s clit ring didn’t give her an infection. This is the only time I have ever used that phrase in my life.

I am so excited for DEAN~! Going to be a great celebration of not just Dean himself, but the joy of professional wrestling as a weirdo subculture. Can’t wait to meet you all there! No Riot, No Peace!

I've had to write a few things on the FTC and its oversight on mergers/acquisitions. They do a lot with the resources they have. There has been an increase in the amount of anti-trust challenges under Biden, and a lot of other changes that make it more difficult for these to proceed. There are new rules proposed and being considered (and some in place already) to increase their oversight but there are people fighting these rules in the eternal push/pull over how much our government should regulate business. There probably should be a lot more. But, especially under the Biden Administration, there has been a huge push to increase oversight. The SEC governs different things. But they put through a lot of rules about what I write about that resulted in what a lot of people called the most significant changes to the government's regulatory power over the US financial industry since Dodd-Frank. (That's the laws put in place after the 2008 financial crisis.) And the rules Biden put in place were also watered down from what they were originally asking for. There's a lot more we should do. There are a lot of people really pushing for stricter anti-trust concerns -- Bernie and Elizabeth Warren come to mind, but probably the person most effective in highlighting the issue is Amy Klobuchar. I'll check out the Jon Stewart thing either. That crosses all of my paths since I write about this stuff and was/am also a stand-up coming.

I see your point. But the difference is: A pyramid scheme/MLM requires a never ending stream of new participants on the bottom end to make it work. Until it doesn't. A private equity fund has a timeline to raise the amount of money it wants to raise. Usually it's something like 2 years. It usually takes less than that, but that's the general rule-of-thumb. And a private equity fund only has room for a limited amount of investors in the fund. The bigger ones will get more investors than smaller ones. But there's still a limited pool of investors. And when a private equity fund decides it's time to start raising a new fund (which sometimes comes pretty quickly), the current investors are given the first opportunity to re-up but the fund might be big enough to allow for some new investors. There's also governance. The SEC and FTC have a lot of oversight over how private equity and mergers/acquisitions. And, under Biden, they've put in a lot of new regulations to increase oversight on the industry and provide for more protections for the pensions and endowments and etc. who are the investors. And within the private equity fund itself there's governance. Each private equity fund has something called an LPAC. This is a special group of the investor pool (usually saved for the biggest or most influential investors) who act in an advisory role for the private equity firm that manages the fund. And the LPAC will have certain veto powers within the fund to approve/deny different things the private equity manager may want to do or propose. So -- that's where it's not a pyramid scheme, besides the pyramid scheme that is capitalism overall. But where PE gets gross in my opinion is that there's a mad rush among institutional investors to increase how much they participation in private equity. There's a lot of pressure on those on the allocation side (who I write about) and that can be brutal. And there's also different talent levels and resources among allocators. For example: Massachusetts has a really big public pension for people who work for the state or local governments. (And this means teachers and etc.) They'll have more to work with since they can hire more people to manage the investments and can pay them higher salaries. Plus, it's also based in Boston where you have job candidates from top-level universities and plenty of people who work in finance. And living in Boston itself is attractive to a lot of people. (I lived there myself for a few years -- not attractive to me, personally, but I get it.) The people who work for a pension system like that (along with the board that has governance over them) are really sophisticated and know what questions to ask and who does a good job and who is reputable and looming economic trends. But then there are all sorts of really friggin' insane and random pensions across the country. They'll have names like "Western Oklahoma Policeman's and Utility Workers Retirement System." I love watching these meetings (since a lot are streamed.) But they pay a lot less money. The investment team might consist of one or two people. There aren't going to be a lot of finance professionals interested in moving to wherever such an entity would be located. There's even less experienced people interested in job openings at such a place, because you'll probably have a wife and kids by the time you have a good amount of experience to make these decisions and why would you uproot them? The governing board consists of police officers and utility workers of Western Oklahoma and a bunch of people connected to the local government, and good luck explaining any of this to them. There's so much pressure at these sorts of pensions and the like to invest in really complicated investments, and there's not as many people who can make those decisions. There's something like 7,000 private equity managers who manage tens of thousands of private equity funds who are all looking for money from investors -- and the grosser ones know who to target.

Toys R Us is one of the biggest negative headline stories. So here's my take on what happened with Toys R Us. 1) Here's how a private equity company makes money, using hypothetical money and very simplified examples. They go out to investors (pensions, etc.) and raise $1 million. They have roughly 5 years to buy 10 companies with that $1 million. They then have up to an additional 7 years to sell those companies at a profit -- either by selling them to another entity. Or they can take them to the stock market. The private equity fund usually charges a 2% annual management fee for the first five years on the money they have collected in the fund. The general idea behind this is: "Hey, we're working hard to find good investment opportunities, so we're charging you for that." Those fees are then reduced (0.5%) if not eliminated after those first five they. Then they make the bulk of their money when they sell a company. How this works is the investors say: "Thank you for the good work. We will get the entirety of the first 8% of the profits you sent back to us. Then after that, you'll get 20% of everything that was made, and we will split the remaining 80% amongst us." (This 20% is called carried interest.) The private equity manager will also usually put in a certain amount of money in the fund it raises (say 5% of the initial $1 million) and they don't have to split their share of those profits. Does that 2% annual management feed result in a lot of money for a private equity company that manages a fund? Absolutely. A good amount of money. I have been using $1 million as an example just for math purposes. In reality, a private equity fund that's $1 billion in size is on the smaller side. So those 2% in fees is absolutely a lot of money. I'm too busy to find the exact numbers for Toys R Us now, and it was a more complicated investment. But using the math above for a $1 billion fund -- the private equity fund would receive $200 million in management fees for those first five years. But like I said above -- a private equity fund is a basket of companies that you can look at as Easter eggs. So those $200 million are for management fees not just for Toys R Us, but all of the other companies in that basket. (Which was probably 7 or 8 other really big companies.) The private equity funds pay a lot more for a company like Toys R Us than it makes in the management fees. And the private equity fund also puts in a lot of money(*) in ways to make a company grow. The private equity fund's money is made by successfully selling a company and earning that 20% in carried interest. So -- buying Toys R Us and then having it go into bankruptcy and having your investment in Toys R Us as a complete and total loss means the private equity fund lost money. They bought the company. They invested in the company. But the deal went bust and they lost a lot of money. A lot of people read the management fees (and it's an insane amount of money) and think the private equity funds walked away holding the bag. They didn't. THose management fees acted as a buffer for their losses, so they didn't take a full hit. (And, chances are, the other companies in their basket did well.) But they absolutely lost money in the transaction. 2) This is where the * comes in. Here is a hypothetical example. (It's also probably very flawed since I don't gamble, but just bare with me.) You have a DraftKings account. You see a point spread that shows Northern Iowa favored to beat Southern Illinois by 8.5 points. But you've been following Northern Iowa basketball intently this year and think there's no way they'll beat Southern Illinois by 8.5 points. So, you want to bet $100 on this game, because you're going to make a lot of money doing so -- thinking you can even get $1,000. But you have an even better idea. What if you bet $1,000? You could get $10,000 if your hunch is true. But you only have $100. So, you ask someone you know to loan you the $900, along with a 5 percent interest ($45) he'll charge for taking the risk in lending you the $900. That way, you'll win $10,000 but will only spend $100 of your own money. You'll pay the person giving you your loan back, along with interest. Even after all of that, you'll still make $9,055 ($10,000 minus the $900 loan and $45 in interest.) But what if you lost? You'll have to pay him back the $945. But you don't have that $945, and you can't pay back this loan. So you make an agreement -- if I lose and I can't get the $945, you can take possession of my $945 couch instead. No one really wants that to happen -- you'd like the couch. And the person who lent you the money would rather have the money than your couch, because he has to go and then sell your couch and hope he can get $945 for it. This type of thing happens in finance. It's called "leverage." You will hear the phrase "leveraged buyout" or "LBO" a lot. The people who work for private equity funds do a lot of research. They examine industries and companies for potential acquisitions. They (especially the biggest firms) have these very hardcore debates about what companies to buy and when to sell them. They look for what they see as opportunities to make money -- they think they see an opportunity where others don't, just like the Northern Iowa and Southern Illinois example above. But they also know that you can make a lot more money by using leverage (loans) to do so. So they take out these loans with the interest (who they take out loans from is incredibly complicated and I'll spare you) and then will use the assets of the company they just purchased as collateral. The private equity company hopes that along the way the company becomes more and more profitable so they can pay back these loans as quickly as possible, because the more you wait to pay them back, the most you have to pay in interest. (People even do this to buy stocks on RobinHood. Please don't do this.) If you can't pay back these loans, the lenders get to take possession of these assets. This is bankruptcy. It will usually go to bankruptcy court or something similar and everyone will fight about who gets what and how much things are valued at and then eventually a judge or someone similar decides on all of that. Then there's essentially a new company with new owners who probably don't want to own a new company. So the private equity funds who owned Toys R Us -- on top of losing their initial investment, they also had to pay back all of the loans they used to buy Toys R Us, and then they had to spend even more money for the resources needed when you're trying to salvage what you can in a bankruptcy proceeding. 3) When a private equity fund buys a company, they have a timeline with which they have to sell the company -- usually within 10 years of when the fund was started. (There's complications to this.) Willa private equity company "cut expenses" (code for "lay people off") when they buy a company. Or they'll replace a company's entire management team. In many cases, yes. But that's not an absolute truth. It really depends on the company and the private equity manager's strategy. Like I said before -- I worked for a company that a private equity fund bought a huge stake in. Nobody there got laid off. We opened up an office in a different region and expanded. And companies lay off people all of the time if they think they need to do a better job managing expenses and they think they can do so because they hired too many people. And are there examples of when a private equity company took on too much leverage when it bought the company, and the debt expenses become too much? Absolutely. But companies themselves can take on debt to grow, and that can backfire. (I'm not defending any of this. But it's the sad, ugly reality of capitalism. We aren't guaranteed jobs. But that's a whole other fucking topic.) 4) As far as media relations and private equity -- I say this as someone who writes specifically about private equity. People in the more general media really don't like private equity at all. There are a few reasons for this. A primary one -- a lot of private equity companies bought newspapers, cut their staffs, saddled them with debt and then lost a lot of money when they tried to hawk them off. It war really bad for the industry. One trend in private equity that has gotten a lot of negative press the past few years is in healthcare. A lot of PE firms buy companies that manage/own a bundle of nursing homes or hospitals or doctors practices. There's plenty of examples where they are not managed well by a PE fund -- closing a local hospital, trimming costs at a hospice facility meaning there's less employees -- and that's actively awful, and there is a ton of bad press about when this happens. And there should be. 5) As far as Toys R Us goes -- I can't say one way or the other about how it was managed. Retail's not my expertise (aside from working in retail in my teenage years) and I wasn't writing about the industry yet. But, yes, the whole Amazon excuse literally just came up at something I'm writing about. That's certainly not the only reason why Toys R Us went bankrupt. I would say that, yes, the debt costs probably were a gigantic burden on the company. But Amazon really did completely change the ways we buy and shop, and other big retailers (Borders comes to mind immediately) and even shopping malls also went bankrupt or were severely impacted by Amazon.

I would also say that is a very complicated issue. There is never a one size fits all or east answer. I am not a private real estate expert but my company writes a lot about it and it comes up a lot in my work. Here is a contrary point of view. There are a lot of reasons why housing costs the way it does. But everything with prices always at the end comes down to supply and demand. There is an incredible amount of demand for housing (everyone needs somewhere to live) but there is limited supply because it takes a long time to build new housing and a lot of resources to maintain what already exists. So… you need money and expertise to make that happen. And that has to come from somewhere. Do people on the financier side do things to profit by controlling supply or not spending enough (or spending poorly) to maintain what they own? Certainly. But do they also spend money to make money by building new houses or refurbishing properties or etc? They do that, too. Here is where I come down as someone who writes about finance professionally: There are certainly many criticisms to be lobbied at this practice. But many of the critics stand to gain by exaggerating the criticisms — politicians want your votes, people want to sell books and get booked on speaker tours, advocacy groups want to grow their influence. And there are many people in finance who defend this system night and day, make very good livings doing so, and then completely wash away any of the bad side of finance while enjoying comfortable lives. In the middle are the people who work for pensions and college endowments who allocate that money. And while they make decent money (I would love to have a six figure income), and while there are certainly opportunities to end up working for someone on the finance side to make a lot more money, most are in the business because they feel a duty to be stewards of the money that is needed for teachers/firefighters/etc. have a good quality of life. And many of the people in this role are very thoughtful people and want to invest not just to make money but to make money in positive ways. After all, it’s one thing to provide a retirement for a teacher, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re retired as the world crumbles.

So with what I write about — pensions are absolutely for regular people. The people who get pensions are teachers or firefighters or people who work for the state roads division and pave roads or the people who answer the phone at the state DMV office. They worked in public service and in return get a guaranteed monthly payment during their retirement years. But in order to make it work, you need to make sure they have enough money. And that requires investing that money. Pensions invest money across all sorts of assets — the general stock market, government bonds, real estate and then riskier things like what I write about. There are also retirement plans and endowments that own very large amounts of timberland.

That’s the idea behind it. You are diversifying and reducing your overall risk.

Well, there is tangible value in a lot (if not most) cases. A private equity fund bought a company I used to work for. That gave the company a huge injection of cash. And then the company used that to hire a lot more people to grow. The company I used to work for wasn’t going to be able to do that on its own. Venture Capital — that’s essentially a private equity fund, but it instead looks to buy stakes in companies that are just starting out. It’s riskier since it is really hard to start a company. But entrepreneurs need to get money to start and grow from somewhere. There are certainly many other cases where things are not as rosy. I will write about some of those later. But it’s not a “blanket statement” thing where this is all bad or it is a perfectly run sysytem.

See below. There are certainly criticisms to be made about how this all works, but one company in a private equity fund failing isn’t going to ruin a pension plan.

So what happens is this: There is a private equity fund and it raises $1 million. It puts in $100,000 of its own money. And then it gets nine investors (pensions, etc.) to each kick in $100,000. (All math is hypothetical math and it is more complicated in reality.) The private equity fund takes that $1 million and will use it to buy 5 companies at $200,000 a pop. Maybe they are able to sell all five for $400,000 each later on for a total $2 million. Then the proceeds are split between the investors (pensions, etc.) and each investor did well with returns (they put up $100,000 and got $400K back.) But maybe what happens (and it can happen) is they will have four successful “exits” (when you sell a company) but one company will be a bust and goes out of business. So what happens is that the fund made $1.6 million instead of $2 million. Think of it like this: Silver Lake raised $20 billion for its 15th private equity fund — think of it as an Easter basket. They will buy probably 10 companies with that $20 billion — each one an Easter egg. Endeavor will be one of those 10 Easter eggs. Maybe one egg will break. But will all 10?

This is what I write about professionally. I am sleep deprived so bare with me if I mix anything up. There is something called a private equity fund. Basically, a private equity firm says: “We would like to raise, say, $1 billion. We will go out and ask investors for this money. But we do not mean the general public. We mean pension plans that manage money so teachers are firefighters can retire, college endowment funds, various charitable foundations and incredibly rich people. Then we will take the $1 billion we raise from these investors, buy privately held business, and hopefully sell them for a profit 5 to 7 or 10 years later and we will split those proceeds with our investors.” (Literally — I write about how pensions and endowments and etc. invest in private equity.) Some of the bigger private equity managers you may have heard of are BlackRock and Apollo and KKR. And private equity is this incredible amount of the global economy. There are only 3,000 or so publicly traded (as you can own a portion of the company by buying shares of it on a stock exchange) and there are probably 3,000 privately held businesses within 10 miles of my house. Literally, private equity managers own trillions of dollars in assets (and are then indirectly held by government employees with a pension plan.) Silver Lake is a really big private equity manager. They raised $20 billion for their last investment fund. Silver Lake largely focused on buying and selling technology and tech adjacent companies. (It’s all sort of nebulous.) Or they buy large stakes in these companies. The term used for these are “portfolio companies.” Silver Lake is or was a big investor in AirBnB and Expedia and SoFi and Twitter and Ancestry.Com and Skype and Dell Technologies and a lot of other companies. Silver Lake is really big time. Silver Lake has branched out into sports and entertainment recently. They own/own large stakes in AMC and Fanatics and the Australian professional soccer league and Manchester City (and its sister teams around the globe.) They have also been buying assets from Endeavor like a bunch of minor league baseball teams before just deciding to buy Endeavor outright. (Which is today’s news.) Endeavor was a publicly traded company (and still will be until all the technicalities of this sort of merger and acquisition are completed.) You can buy shares of Endeavor. At the same time, Endeavor owns 51 percent of TKO (WWE and UFC combined) and people like us can buy shares of TKO. (Endeavor is what is referred to as a parent company.) Private equity firms do something called a “take private” where they will buy a publicly traded company (or like a division of a publicly traded company) and own all of almost all of its shares. Silver Lake just bought Endeavor and now owns it as a private company. But Endeavor still owns over half of the WWE. So, what does this mean for the WWE? This from here is just speculation. Silver Lake has to sell Endeavor over the next few years (they are contractually obligated almost certainly) and give their share of the proceeds back to its investors (pension funds, college endowments, etc.) There are all kinds of technqiues private equity managers can use to hopefully make a company more profitable. Sometimes, they will put in place their own leadership team. Other times, they will use their own expertise to help a company they acquired grow the business. Or other times they will, say, lay off 25 percent of the company to “save expenses.” In this case, it’s probably highly likely that Silver Lake will give Endeavor’s current leadership team some degree of autonomy in how they run the company. Ari Emmanuel is the Endeavor CEO and he’s a power broker in entertainment so Silver Lake is likely saying “Hey, Ari Emmanuel and your team. We bought your company because we like you, now go make us more money.” But there could easily be a time where Silver Lake does not like what Endeavor is doing and will decide to put their own people in place. As far as TKO itself goes: Who really knows. No one who works in this space would Be surprised at all if Silver Lake was to buy TKO or the WWE separate from that. I have no insider knowledge of this — just that Silver Lake owns Endeavor, which owns just over half of TKO, so why wouldn’t Silver Lake just buy TKO outright? Or someone like Comcast or Disney could approach Silver Lake and say “hey, we really want to buy TKO” or even “We really just want to buy the WWE half of TKO.” None of that would really surprise anyone. But Silver Lake now owns Endeavor. And it has to sell Endeavor at some point over the next 7-10 years so it can give money back to its investors so people who work for your state’s public works department can have a monthly check sent to them when they retire.

Also, the product feels so different and fresh with the change in production. I never minded the Kevin Dunn stuff as much as everyone else. Producing live television is insanely hard, and there’s a benefit to doing things the same way in order to make it as easy to produce as possible. People always pointed out when a spot or a big moment was missed by the camera… because of how little that actually happened. It’s not like real sports has changed its production too much over the years. But the WWE also has the benefit of being scripted. And that adds in flexibility. Just the simple “walk-and-talk” quick promos they do before matches or the video segments like the Sami/Gable and Drew funeral stuff is so fresh and fun. They also have been experimenting with long tracking shots. Some of that feels a bit too much — it’s such a show-off technique in film and TV since people want to bite from Goodfellas. But last night, they had a really good one where Seth did his interview walk-and-talk, Drew’s awesome cameo, with the camera then trailing him for his entrance (which was so rad to see up close with how he switched right into the orchestra bit) and then to the ring. It really added to the atmosphere and gave a sort of “here’s what Seth sees when he comes to the ring” appeal. They really are being smart about how to do these segments and who they are doing them with. The first one I remember doing a taped segment with was the KCs — they were probably used to it in NXT and if it doesn’t work with your low-card babyface act, who cares? Now they are using Sami and Gable and it felt really natural coming from two of the high end performers who have some acting chops. I have no memory of who did the first walk-and-talks but I remember Kofi and Xavier having some quick bangers before their matches with Imperium. You have two all-time greats who know to not miss their marks for the blocking and staging and can deliver really concise promos. It’s all so fun to watch.

Over 10 million people watched the game last night. That’s right what the men’s tournament did the past weekend — which has a giant head start on women’s hoops, has huge interest because of (gross) gambling, and featured a bunch of blue bloods that always attract eyeballs. It’s so awesome to see this unfolding. Women’s basketball is a really great product, even beyond Caitlyn Clark or South Carolina. It obviously can’t generate that at-the-rim highlights of the men’s game. But the passing, ball movement, player movement and the like is just at the absolute highest level. They barely stop moving. I describe elite women’s basketball as the absolute highest form of basketball that I am familiar with playing. I grew up playing basketball with some really good athletes — one kid was a walk-on at Providence (total douche), a few other kids who played other D-1 sports at least for a little bit. But I did not play with anyone who could dunk in-game. Maybe, at most, someone I knew could barely do a one-handed ”dunk” more like a finger roll after 15 attempts in a layup line. This is not to say that I could have ever competed with a women’s player even on a crappy junior college team. But, aesthetically, the women’s game is how 99 percent of the world actually plays basketball and they are the absolute best at it. Also: as stated before, I played daily with a kid who walked-on at Providence. He was more like a D2 level player if he wanted to actually play in games. That is still impressive. (Even though he is one of the biggest tool bags I have ever met in my life.) He was NOT the best player in my neighborhood. The best player was my friend Patty. She balled out. She frequently beat the kid mentioned above one-on-one. She was also a starter for one of the top girls high school teams in New Jersey at the time as a freshman and sophomore. She was getting early recruiting letters from Top 25 teams. We were playing 3 on 3 and someone we were playing (another girl who was decent but not nearly as good) against took a cheap shot when Patty went up for a layup, and Patty came down and tore her ACL. Me and my other friend walked her home. She missed about a year and had to regain her athleticism right when recruiting really happens so the big schools didn’t give her any offers. She still ended up playing D1 (St. Peter’s) and is in their Hall of Fame. She was their leading scorer for two teams that made the NCAA tournament as a 16 seed, too. Awesome player and a really good friend when we were kids.

The Bray Wyatt documentary is absolutely incredible. I don’t know if there is another wrestler whose work I have ever enjoyed more. Not everything was for me or for you, but we were really lucky to have a guy like Bray firing off all kinds of ideas and making a lot of them happen. You can tell how much he was liked and respected and enjoyed his time.

Sami has acting chops. We saw it during The Bloodline stuff and even the comedy side with Knoxville. Would not surprise me if he ended up as a lovable goofball in a family comedy.

Oh man, the final segment on RW was absolutely epic. I love a good heel whipping babyfaces angle. Rock and Roman properly laid in the lashing. Good on Seth and Cody for taking the beating. Great touch by Cody keeping his shirt on, because that got some crowd “noooo” murmurs when The Bloodline ripped the shirt off. Roman talking smack on the floor to the camera with the carnage in the background was so good. Only note was this had the opportunity for fans to pelt the ring with garbage like 90s nWo or a father trying to hop the railing since his kid was crying. The Rock in 2024 just got a New York City crowd to chant “Rocky Suxks” less than a week from WrestleMania. So amazing.

Plus the comeuppance of Kim Mulkey!

I am watching Raw in bits and pieces tonight. I just finished Richochet vs. Ivar. How many weeks this year has Ivar been involved in the best match on Raw? Because it has been many weeks. He is this secret awesome worker.