Brewsers

Brewsers #165- Mike Quakenbush

Today on Brewsers, we talk to Mike Quakenbush. We talk all about his journey into pro wrestling, Chikara, and Jushin Liger. Follow us on instagram and twitter at Brewserspod. Like, share, review, enjoy and cheers. Sign up for our newsletter! #brewsers #brewserspod #Enjoylife #DrinkLocal #Cheers

https://linktr.ee/brewserspod

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 11 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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V-G-W group, vibrated by law. 18 plus, turn to conditions of life. 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9. Welcome to Bruisers, a podcast about beer, coffee, booze, and bruisers. I'm your host, Rody John, and today we talk to Mike Quackenbush. We talk all about his journey into pro wrestling, chakara, and juchen thunderleiger. That is right. We got Mike Quackenbush on the show. This was such a big, you know, I was so happy to have him on the show because I loved chakara. I loved everything they were doing, what they, you know, will get into it in the interview, but I saw them live in Chicago only once when they did a show with Ring of Honor and I love everything about chakara. So we're going to get into it, but first, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. It comes out twice a week. You can even more information about our guests. You get fun facts and you can find out what's happening with your favorite podcast, all about beer, coffee, booze, and bruisers. So without further ado, here is Mike Quackenbush. I would like to welcome the show Mike Quackenbush. How are you doing today, sir? Doing quite well, thanks. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. So for those listening right now, can you kind of paint us a word picture? Where are you at? What's going on around you? Where am I at? I'll try them very best here. I live just about an hour outside the city of Philadelphia and an idyllic little suburb. Moments before we started, there was a very noisy Memorial Day parade that I thought was going to ruin this recording. It was all the emergency vehicles and a whole lot of marching bands. So yeah, if I happen to be drinking something that's double strong this morning, well, that is why. I mean, it is a holiday as we're recording, so you were perfectly fine to obviously do whatever you want within the law, obviously. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Let's go all the way back in time real fast. What is your earliest memory of Pro Wrestling? It's funny that you ask. I guess there's kind of two answers. The probably more compelling of them is this. So in the sleepy little suburb where I grew up of West Lawn, Pennsylvania, so sleepy, it doesn't even exist anymore. Oh, really? Absorbed into a township, so now like my, there's no post office, I think is what that basically means. Okay. Across the street from me, and we're going to full name this kid, Kyle Baskowski. Kyle Baskowski's family used to get the big four pay-per-views back when there were only the big four, RumbleMania, SummerSlam Survivor Series, and it was like all the neighborhood kids would come over. Now this is the 80s for peak Hulkamania period, so there's the appeal of that. But there's also the appeal of free pizza at Kyle Baskowski's house. So this brings people in. And I was like, yeah, I wasn't into wrestling, but I wasn't into free pizza, and I thought all the other neighborhood kids are going over to Kyle's house. Let's see what's going on. And when I got there, the main event on that particular night was Hulk Hogan against the ultimate warrior. So we're talking WrestleMania six. Yeah, six. And oh, man, I thought this was so boring. I'm looking around and I'm like, is this what you guys are into? They're just locking fingers and shaking their arms multiple times for a really long time. But everybody seems to be losing their minds. Yeah. And I thought, this is not for me. So I don't know, a year or two goes by one night after it's a Saturday night and the reruns of the A team and Knight Rider are over for the day. And I'm flipping channels and I land on a Turner own station where they happen to be showing WCW Saturday night, right. And walking to the ring is Jushin Thunder Liger with this mask with crazy horns. He's got like a vest with a huge flowing silver cape. He gets in the ring and he's doing flips. He flies out of the ring. And I was like, what is this? Yeah. It didn't even connect in my mind. That is what you saw at Kyle's house just through a very different lens, right? But once I saw Liger, I thought, I don't know what that job is because, you know, I don't know, ninth grade, maybe at the time, but I was like, I want that job. Like my dad's job, I think is quite boring. But the thing with the cape and the mask, I want to do that. I can get into that. Yes. No, Jushin, like, I think it was Liger versus Pillman. I happen to see when I was a kid, but it was years later because I, you know, only grew up with WWF and then Dustin, Dustin Reynolds or Dustin Rhodes, I'll slip through channels myself. I'll show my age. I was like, Dustin, what is he doing here? And I, you know, pull off the TV guide. I'm like, all right, it's Saturday this time. What the hell is it? WCW. So eventually I just kept watching because yes, there's more wrestling. I can, I don't have to wait until the next time, WWF comes on. And then when you found that out, did you discover beyond WWF and WCW that there was anything else in your area as well? Yeah. Was that all you had access to? So I had access to, I mean, it wasn't the Von Eric, you know, world class here in DFW, but it was the aftermath. It was like global. And so I had that from the sportatorium as well. Right. I watched that and Iceman came Parsons and, you know, Chris Adams and all this. I was like, this is even better. I never went. Unfortunately, you know, time machine, if we all had one, certain things we would do, go to the sportatorium and watch, you know, local wrestling, who wouldn't want that? That building doesn't exist anymore. It's like your town doesn't even exist anymore. Right. Yeah. I remember we used to get global on ESPN every afternoon after school. Yeah. So if you hustled home fast enough, you could catch global. Yeah. Yeah. Finding out there's more wrestling out there. Once you already love wrestling, it's like their weight, there's more candy stores. I didn't know they're going to be possible. There was some local indie company that would be on like cable channel nine million up here. They only came on Saturday nights at one a.m. Wow. So if you could wait until Saturday Night Live was over and you flip and you knew what channel it was on, you could watch IWCCW, which always had like 10 fans. And that was it. And the main event was always Jimmy Snooka against somebody. And it was all fairly lousy, but you're right, because it was like, there's more wrestling to consume. I have to stay up. Yeah. And then I imagine you had a little bit better access because the Northeast has always been such a fantastic place for not only local wrestling, but access to international wrestling. Because I mean, you guys are so close to Canada as well. How much of I guess which other country did you get first? Was it Mexico? Was it Canada? Was it England? Was it Japan? What kind of came across your radar while you were up there? So I was still in high school when I became aware that tape trading was a way to discover wrestling in other countries. So there were companies that they would have a monthly catalog with all the newest stuff that they got. There was a guy out of Virginia, I used to order Japanese tapes from. And you know, when you first discover that, right? I think it's a lot like when you get to that part of your life as a kid where you want to discover your own musical tastes beyond what your parents listened to. So you know, when I was at home, I knew who John Denver was because my dad listened to John Denver. I knew the sound of music soundtrack because my mom listened to the sound of music soundtrack. But when you go into a music store for the first time on your own, you realize there's this universe of music and you almost don't know where to start. It's baffling. Right? There's these other genres. Like what's prog rock? Right. Like prog rock? Do I? I don't know. And I felt that way when I would pick out of the wrestling VHS catalog, like if somebody's name sounded cool, you know, what else do you have to go by? Right. So I always felt like if you're of this generation, I'm sure you feel similarly when the package would come in the mail, it was wrestling Christmas because the matches in there could be mind blowing. They could expand your imagination or they could be rotten. It could be a pair of argyle socks, but you couldn't wait to rip it open and find out what was in there. And through that process, but you just start discovering because on this Japanese tour, oh, guess what? There's this, you know, there's a German wrestler. And you know what? That German wrestler? He's the father of Alex Wright, who's on WCW. But now I can trace him back here and you just start going down those rabbit holes and discovering this is what I like. And I'm not ordering any more of those, right? Why expand in that part of the universe? And I don't like that part of the universe. So I'm just going to focus on this right now. Right. You know, I think that often I feel like there's always a danger, you know, to I think swimming too deep in wrestling social media. If you do this, you're going to find people, man, they want to pick arguments. Yes. They hate this thing that you love, man, they want to ruin your day. There are so much wrestling that's awesome. Yes. If you hate some kind of wrestling, don't watch it. There's so much other stuff. And you and I don't have to like the exact same stuff. Right. And yet I should be able to tell you why I love the thing I love and listen to you tell me why you love what you love and wait on me to fight about it. Yeah. And at the end of the day, right, there's more awesome wrestling than not. Yes. And you know, if you want to laugh at the stuff that's not, we have bought your mani. Exactly. I mean, as well, because we have, we're, I've told this to so many people that if I were growing up now with the access to pro wrestling, I wouldn't have friends probably outside the internet. I wouldn't, I'd be incredibly so awkward because I wouldn't leave the house because I have access to literally any bit of wrestling I ever want to know if I want to know what Toledo, Ohio pro wrestling looks like, I could look it up and figure it out. What companies are around there, what runs. And then be like, Oh, perfect. I love watching the same 15 people in a bar and wrestling on a regular basis or GCW or any of the bigger companies or even like the, you know, semi small, because like trying to find like the, you could, like you said, the rabbit hole of you go from a WWE, maybe an AEW and you go further down, further down, further down until you're watching the 15 people in Toledo, Ohio, and it's, that's mind blowing to you because you're just on the super micro level as opposed to a giant macro level, which we have, you know, now with all this other giant pro wrestling companies. Right. It is, it's very much like, you know, listening to top 40 radio in the car, then discovering that obscure local band that you love and buy the T shirt of and go every time that they're playing some local concert growing up as a huge fan of this very wacky Brooklyn duo, they might be giants. Oh, yes. The fact that they remain relatively obscure forever, I think is great. Like I love that about them. I never want to hear them on top 40 radio. And sometimes I want to enjoy wrestling that is also that way, right? It's so niche. I feel like there's 50 people who watch this and it's only us who watch it. And other times I want to listen to top 40 radio and everything in between. But I really related to what you just said a moment ago, John, about that idea of if the access to wrestling that we have today was available to me when I was an out of control super fan in the early 90s, I would never leave my house. I would have no friends or relationships. And I mean, I'm not here to tell you I'm the most socially developed human being on the planet. I'd be several kilometers behind if I had spent forever hold up and think about like a week, like the week we're having between WWE, AEW, new Japan, they'll be more wrestling made this week than any human could watch if it was their full time job. Exactly. But when you're like a college age or high school kid with nothing but time and desperate to avoid doing your trigonometry, oh, man, there's more AEW to watch. Yes. And then you go even further down the rabbit holes with vlogs and everything like that that's on YouTube or, you know, as much wrestling content like this podcast that you could consume or multiple podcasts you've done. And so it's, it's, yeah, it's the best time to be a wrestling fan and I think it's the best time to be associated with the wrestling industry in general. I'm curious to know what you think about this. Okay. I think a real paradigm shift that's happened as well in wrestling is that many times the meta narrative is more exciting than the narrative. There's the angles that we see on TV. And that is the story, the narrative they're selling you, but oftentimes it's the meta narrative you see on social media that becomes far more interesting, like, oh, these two people are actually friends outside of wrestling. That's really interesting. I think, you know, two people who cut their teeth working under me, Angelo Parker and Ruby Soho from AEW. Yeah. But people became much more interested in the meta narrative of them outside of wrestling. Right. And then it was really incumbent on AEW to find a way to weave that in or get left out of all the excitement. And I think, oh, a key way in which wrestling has changed in the last 10, 12 years as the social media era really supplanted the cable TV era is the rise of the meta narrative being as valuable as the narrative. Right. And then it does weave into the, you know, swerving the internet, because you actually are thinking ahead and scripting everything out to where you have these little things happening. So like even in, so I didn't know that they were actually dating in real life. I just thought that they were just randomly doing things on screen. And then she ends up being pregnant. I was like, Oh, I guess they really are dating. And then they just happen to get married. I think it's this past weekend because the pictures I'm seeing, I was like, Oh, all of that was completely real. And they were, like you just said, they weaved it in there. So for people who aren't as into the social media aspect of it and just be like, okay, what is the story they're telling us on the screen? And sometimes you might catch certain things if they're big enough on your social media radar to know that they are in fact working both ways. And so you have things like that that happened. And it's absolutely beautiful. And, you know, wrestling has brought many people together and I think it's wonderful. They are together now. Yeah, it's interesting to see how the meta narrative became a factor in wrestling. Whereas can you imagine if, like when the rockers broke up, if the day after Sean Michaels threw Marty Genetti through the barbershop window, they were like on TikTok together being like, Oh, I'm hanging out with my bro at the amusement park, like what? But I do think, right, there's a pro and a con to that. I think there's a type of fan that loves the meta narrative because it feels like a look behind the curtain. I think the downside of that is because it is so evident that everything is artifice on your screen, its value is lessened. I can see that. Yeah. And less so I'm seeing, I'm seeing this more on the social media that there are tiny bits in the back footage of WWE now, like it's little things like, it's usually around the Liv Morgan and the Judgment Day situation, like Liv had gotten out of a car one time and the Finn Balor got on the other side of the car. Then they have things where she's, you know, coming out of a locker room and then like a second or two later, Dom Mysterio comes out of the locker room. But none of it's been mentioned on TV because it's in the background. And now that she, you know, as a recording time just won the title, I'm very curious how much all of this is going to start connecting, you know, in the forefront as opposed to just stuff happening in the background. I mean, they did the same thing I know with Paul Heyman for quite a while and just different people and it's, if you're paying attention, then it's, you're seeing the great things that are doing eventually going to end up on the screen. Right. And I do think, you know, here we are in kind of like a post McMahon era of WWE. Right. There's a chance for the type of storytelling that they embrace to really change radically. They're, you know, for so long and a couple guys that had come up under me ended up on the WWE's writing staff for a period of time. And I was always very curious to ask them, what is that experience like for you being in that writer's room and, you know, working alongside these people? And a frustration I often heard echoed was the feeling that what happened last week doesn't matter. Yes. Forget the continuity. Our goal is to grab a new viewer roughly every three minutes and every time we come back from a commercial break and don't worry about what worked last week, worry about tonight. But I think a pro wrestling that has more of a mind for its continuity, the same way that the comic books I grew up reading minded their own continuity, we'll find a new audience because they're people that do crave that type of storytelling. Right. Without a doubt. I mean, as much as we always will shit on people of saying that their attention span is getting smaller and smaller, which for the most part is, however, they still obviously love long-term storytelling because, you know, you have things that can happen multiple years ago. Like, once we eventually get Cody versus Randy, that storyline obviously is going to go back to when they were in legacy together and all of that. And then that's going to weave itself forward. But, you know, even with what you guys did with Shakara, like, the way that place closed down was like sprinkled throughout the history of Shakara and obviously had some time travel involved as well, which I would love to get into at some point. But you guys did the same thing as well where you made the consistency and the continuity actually makes sense throughout the entire history of the company, which you are storytelling. That's what you need to be doing. You can't just erase your continuity and be like, nope, we start from here again. Like, all that stuff we did before doesn't really count. We have to start from here now. Right. I'm not a fan of like the reboot, you know, or the reimagining. I think we see a lot of movies that are kind of that like, this is sort of Star Trek, but also kind of not Star Trek. And I think because of the one growing up on comic books where the continuity was really never broken, you know, I read X-Men for 15 years and there was never that like reboot moment where it's like, now it's totally different. And then certainly it was the type of television, the serialized TV shows I was into at the time like Lost and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica and other stuff too that played more with anti-heroes like Dexter and the Sopranos and Breaking Bad. These are heavily serialized stories. You need to see the characters evolve. And I was really fascinated to play with those types of ideas. Like when, you know, what you're referring to, I call it the Ashes Project. Something that kind of built up to the idea of us being where we effectively were taken off the air during a live pay-per-view and shut down by an evil conglomerate. And it kind of wove in a lot of things that, oh, I liked how they did this bit of viral marketing for the last nine-inch Nails album or the Dark Knight movie. I don't want to steal from that. And I like the idea of this, you know, conspiracy thing here from Weird 70s paranoia films that I like. And how does this become a wrestling story without ever ignoring our own continuity? And I feel very lucky at the time, I had a very dedicated team of people around me who understood what we were trying to create and wanted to help me create it. Because no big project like what you're talking about there, the Ashes Project where- I'm Victoria Cash. Thanks for calling the Lucky Land Hotline. If you feel like you do the same thing every day, press 1. If you're ready to have some serious fun, for the chance to redeem some serious prizes, press 2. We heard you loud and clear. So go to luckylandslots.com right now and play over a hundred social casino style games for free. Get lucky today. At luckylandslots.com. Available to players in the US, excluding Washington and Michigan. No purchase necessary. V.T.W. group, vibrated by law. 18 plus, turn to conditions of life. We're going to go film a movie in secret. This angle involves time travel, mystical artifacts, secret evil organizations. You don't make that stuff by yourself. You need a team of people around you. Exactly. I was going to ask that. So who was some of the creative forces that were happening behind the scenes? And also, you're- I mean, I bought more DVDs based off the covers to not even see who's even wrestling on the show. You guys had such great artwork and, like you said, the detail for everything was involved in there. Walk us through that. How did you kind of start the whole- where did the idea come from? And then also, like you said, where did all the creative people come from and who was helping with all the visuals and everything like that? So the ASHA's project started being formulated two years before we came up with them. So I think of it as like the first moment that it's happening now. And the moment that it's happening in Chikara is there's a new director of fun assigned and his name is Wink Vava Sur. And he's the son of some wealthy industrialist guy who works for a shadowy company and it's not quite clear what they're doing here. We were formulating that, like I said, two years before it begins. So far in advance that Claudio Castagnoli was still a regular part of my roster and was coaching with me at the Wrestle factory. By the time we're actually doing it, he's been signed away to go play Cesaro for WWE. But at the time, he's still part of the crew. Because we would drive to training and at the time, our training facility was in the ECW arena. Oh, wow. So we would spend an hour driving and an hour back three times a week. We had a lot of time in the car together and we were into the same kinds of things. We watched Lost every week. We were into really heavily serialized fictional narratives. Even the wrestling we were watching at the time was the same and we were able to look at it and say, let's not do this. Do you know what no one is doing? No one is doing this. And every step of the way with the ASHA's project, very justifiably, there was always someone in the room, sometimes me, but usually someone else saying, this is crazy. And it's probably not going to work. So the idea being that this evil company shuts Chikara down for a period of nine to 12 months. In the meantime, we're also secretly running eight other wrestling organizations. And then everything kind of comes back together in that third act of the Avengers moment where you finally see the six of them standing together in the circle and the Chitauri are coming through the big purple hole in the sky and you know it's time to fight. And we knew we were going to lose a ton of money. We knew all of that, but we were really just very committed to, let's tell a story that's never been done in wrestling again and maybe there's a reason why no one did it before. There's a reason why it will never be attempted again. But let's just do it to the very best of our ability and go as crazy with it as possible. And luckily the voices in the room, you know, whether it was, it was Claudio and I or whether some of my more senior guys, Holla Wicked, Icarus, Bryce Remsberg, the referee Bryce Remsberg, anybody that was kind of really tight knit who'd been in it with me for years, everybody had their moments of doubt like, this is the worst idea ever. We should not do this. But luckily when those moments happened, everyone else was kind of like, no, this is why we must do it right around that time as fate would have it. There was an editor who had worked at Marvel DC and image comics who was getting out of comics and wanted to jump into wrestling. His name is Ruben Diaz. So he had edited Justice League. He had edited Fantastic Four. He had worked with some of the top names and comic books and was jumping out to work in wrestling. And we already wore our love of comic books and superheroes on our sleeve, but he gave us access to a world of artists. Now we could get literally the guy who's doing teen titans to do this month's DVD cover. You know, we could get those types of artists to jump over and do Chikara related projects, which for me as a comic fan was very thrilling. But he also saw things outside of like the wrestling norms, right? When you're in wrestling, sometimes it's like, well, this is how we do it in wrestling. And when you're challenging your group to say, let's not think like that anymore. If this was a drama on ABC or HBO or we had the freedom to do what they can do in a comic book where the budget doesn't matter, what would we do? And having Ruben in the room to be like, it's that, it's that. I felt very validated. Like we can do this. We can pull this off. And when I look back on it now, right, there are elements of it. We didn't have the skill or the craft, the experience or the budget to realize it to its zenith. But when you consider that whole thing was made for like a ham sandwich and a diet code, we did about as good a job as we could. Yes. Now I unfortunately was only able to go to one Chikara show. It was the synergy show y'all did in Chicago with Ring of Honor. Because at the time, I was like, oh, they're never going to, this is the first time ever, I have to go to this show, like this is going to be absolutely amazing. And it was, you know, I was only in Chicago for 24 hours maybe and just flew in, met some other fans, which was phenomenal. And then flew back out, you know, slept in Midway for a little while, but it was good. But it was just being there, I was like, oh man, I wish that, because y'all never made it down to Texas that I can remember. Yeah. So the fact that you guys were even going to Chicago, which was always a hotbed for wrestling, I was like, I have to go to this. There's no reason. There's no way I'm going to miss this. And, you know, I thought it was such a great show. And I loved everything. It was happening. Finally seeing the colony live and watching all that a Kingston and a young young bucks at the point. At that point. Yeah, it was such a good show. So I'm glad behind the scenes story from that exact event. That was shortly after Sinclair Broadcasting bought Ring of Honor. I don't know if that had even been made public yet, but the Sinclair Broadcasting COO was there because he was going to see it in person. Right. So you might remember the layout of the day was we wrestled in the afternoon and then Ring of Honor went on in the evening. At the very end of the night, as we were starting to clean up the whole arena, that COO, Joe Koff from Sinclair Broadcasting, came right up to me, shook my hand and said, I think we just bought the wrong wrestling company. Oh, that always stayed with me. Right. Because I was like, yeah. Yeah. Right. Oh, well. Maybe next time. Right. Who would a wrong Philadelphia company? Who would have thought? Right. Well, let's go back to Jucian Liger because we both were super fans as kids, but you ended up wrestling him. Yes. What was that like as a wrestler at the time? Because at that point, I think that was 2010, right? Yes, you're right. Yeah. So you were like 16 years into the business. But I imagine the kid inside of you was like, holy shit, what is happening? How is this real? I'm actually going to be in the ring with Juched Light and then kind of walk us through that day and then the match and then afterwards, like, what was that like? Yeah. At the time of that match, I lived five minutes from the venue. So it was weird to think that like, I could get in my car and five minutes from now, I'm going to be at work with Jucian Liger because that had always been my career aspiration was to share the ring with him. Right. And after 16 years, it was happening. I'd had a number of kind of like marquee matches pitched to me throughout the years. None of them had ever really come through the way they were promised. Right. And so I became very reluctant to like allow myself to get excited because I felt like I'm setting myself up for disappointment. This thing will not happen. This guy promised me this match with Takamichinoku. It never happened. This guy promised me a match against Dr. Wagner, Jr. It never happened. And yeah, I saw the posters are out and I know that, you know, but I don't know, flights get canceled and things happen and food poisoning happen. Yeah. Exactly. Right. And I just thought I'm not going to allow myself to get excited. Also at that point, I had been training other wrestlers for so long and I have to explain to them, look, you cannot behave like a fan while you're in the locker room. That's unacceptable decorum. Right. So even if you are meeting someone you've idolized your entire life, you treat them just like a fellow professional. You treat them like a colleague. You don't treat them like you've put them up on a pedestal. The moment that dynamic comes into the locker room, you're saying something about yourself. Don't do it. So I got there and, you know, of course, one of the first things I was like, is, is Liger here? And they're like, Oh, yeah, he's here. And I admit, like I felt something in that moment and it couldn't have been more than just a few minutes later. His personal dressing room opened up and he came out in the full cost to whoa. So I never saw him without his mask on or any of it. Like he just emerged as Jewish and Liger and in that moment it really was like, I remember what it was like when I was eight years old and my parents took me to Disney World and I got to meet Mickey and goofy, right? Like though as a child, those are the characters from the movies, right? They're not a person inside a costume. Yeah. You're meeting Mickey Mouse in that moment. And I thought when I saw him, I immediately went back to where I was watching him on WCW Saturday night after the 18th and night rider were over. This is the reason I've been doing this for 16 years. He's right there. And of course, I want to express that to him, but I also know that doesn't belong in a wrestling locker room. Like that type of behavior doesn't belong here. We had a discussion because his English is better than he lets on. And basically he said, I'm absolutely exhausted from my trip here. The travel itinerary has been just absolutely exhausting. It would mean a lot to me if you would just put the match together. And if you know my moves, just plug in what I'm supposed to do. And once that's done, just tell me whatever you came up with because I'm exhausted. And then I think he maybe went and took a nap or something. He disappeared for a while. And I thought, this is the guy to me. He's my idol, my hero, my inspiration. What is the greatest service I can do to thank him? And I thought he needs a night off in the ring. I am going to design the easiest possible match for him to have. And it really put me in the right space because going into it, I was like, I'm going to have the match I've dreamed about for 16 years with Jush and Liger tonight. But when I saw him just as a fellow wrestler, just another journeyman and a guy who was tired and beat, my heart just went out to him. And I thought, no, the thing I want to do is give him a night off. When the match is over, I want him to say, that was the easiest match I've ever had. And that was the approach that I took the rest of the night. Before we parted ways, he said to me, I would love to wrestle you again in Japan. And when he said that, my heart was all a flutter. Because there's no greater validation I could have asked for from my hero, but it never came to pass. Although we did tag together later on, we never had that chance in Japan. But I'm very thankful for that experience. That was Jersey, all pro wrestling who put that on for us. I'm really grateful that those guys, they could have put anybody in that spot. They could have chosen the independence had hundreds and thousands of choices, but they chose to give that to me. And I'll never forget it. It was a wonderful experience. I love that so much. Yeah. I really wanted to ask about that story because, you know, like you said, you, he's the reason why you got into pro wrestling and also, you know, I've loved him since I was a kid too. And when I finally got to see him live, I was like, this is huge. This is, you know, obviously, Japan would be amazing. But here in America, I get this. What more can I ask for? Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a segment on the show. I call it the five count, just five random questions, just answers as soon as answers come to your brain. All right. I'm ready. Let's do it. What is your go to breakfast order? My go to breakfast order, that's a great question. Right now, this is what I'm eating all the time. Okay. I know this sounds ridiculous. It's a protein pop tart. It's a thing. They're good. No, I had them. My buddy told me about them when we were at mania this past year, and I was like, and they're at H.E.B. here in Texas. I'm like, Oh, these are fantastic. The cinnamon rolls are really good, too. Yes. I've been eating that because I'm like, I'm doing a healthy thing. Right. Of course. Yeah. Then you look at all the sugars, you're like, maybe that right. No, don't look. Don't look. Just focus on the protein and it tastes good. Yes. You just keep going. If you owned a liquor company, brewery, winery, or coffee shop, which one would you own and what would the name be? Oh, wow. I would love to own a coffee shop where there's like magazines and comic books out that people can just read somewhere. What would you call it though? Oh, man. Like you feel like it's got to be clever, it has to have like a pun in it or something. I can't come up with one, but there's a local coffee shop near me, which I have to believe was named by a Rick Rood fan because it's called Brewed Awakening. That's perfect. I wish I didn't know that when I was up there because I would definitely would have gone there. What are three things still on your bucket list, whether they be career or life or together? Wow. I've spent a lot of time thinking about exactly that. I just I'm coming off a broken foot. So I just got out of my walking boot last night. Congratulations. Yeah, thank goodness. But those eight weeks of being idle gave me a lot of time to think about what do I want to do. And here's a here's a question. I think I never took the time to really answer for myself. And I think it doesn't matter if you're a wrestler or what you do in life. This is an important question. What does success mean to you? Is it about? Is it about money? Is it about a claim? Is it about some other thing? Because you can pick. It can be whatever means something to you. And something I came to realize was I love being able to get out there and see the world and share my passion for wrestling with people in other countries. And I think when I really landed on that, it crystallized for me what I need to get out and do. That there are all these countries out there and just regions of the world. I've never been to the Middle East. I've never been to Southeast Asia. I've never been anywhere in Africa. I've yet to go to Central or South America. And when I just started kind of writing them down, like I absolutely need to go and wrestle in Brazil. Like I absolutely, it really crystallized it for me and made me appreciate like, why did I not figure this out until I'm 30 years into doing this? Because I think a lot of us, we're willing to just accept what other people say success is. Right. Because it's about material things. It's about this car or having a pool at their house or whatever, you're like, right, that is what it is. That sounds correct. But that might not be what works for you. It's not what works for me. Yeah. Yeah. It's like certain championships are having to wrestle certain people or on certain cards. It's like, if you haven't, then what have you really done? And yeah, I understand that. Who or what inspires you? I draw a lot of inspiration from outside of wrestling now. I look at musicians who are relentlessly creative in their career, like David Byrne, the former frontman of Talking Heads, every couple of years, he finds someone new to collaborate with that opens up a new part of his creativity. He recently staged a Broadway show. Before that, he did like a book of photography. Before that, he figured out how to wire up a cathedral so you could play the whole building like it was a musical instrument. Oh, that's amazing. He's relentlessly finding new things that, yeah, they kind of fit within the greater genre of creativity, but he's relentless. And I love watching what he's doing and how fearless he is about just doing collaborations. So I take great inspiration from that. And then also just like every once and again, whether I'm reading a book that will really inspire me, I just reread Start With Why by Simon Sinek. It's brilliant. It's incredibly powerful. Or sometimes I just get sucked right into a television show. Some new thing that I'm watching, I just did all of X-Men 97 on Disney+, and I look at right, amazing. I look at that and I'm like, those are faces and those are heels and we should be doing this all as wrestling. Can we make a wrestling show, people? So I draw from everywhere. That's amazing. Yeah. So you're inspired by creativity. Mm hmm. Yeah. And what would you tell your 17 year old self? Um, I would tell my 17 year old self, it's almost never about you. I recently, I heard this term coined. Have you ever heard of main character syndrome? I have not, no. I just heard this like a week or two ago, um, and it's that tendency, and I think social media exacerbates this, to imagine that like, you are the main character in the series of life. And that's really only true to you. You imagine it must be true to everybody else, right? Everybody else isn't thinking about you every minute of the day. Everybody else isn't out there to get you, right? Everybody's not out there trying to screw you up. It's not about you most of the time. Now, yeah, every once and again, it is. Yes. But most of the time it's not, um, but I think when I was coming up in wrestling, and I started right after my 18th birthday. Thank you so much to my Quackin Bush, a little peek behind the curtain. We did try to record a separate part, uh, because Zuma only gives us 40 minutes. We tried another 40 minutes. Um, unfortunately, I did not record the entire conversation. So he's definitely coming back on the show. I can't wait for it. Mike Quackin Bush has so much, uh, history and stories when it does come to the world of pro wrestling that we didn't even get into and everything outside of it, he is an author as well. So, uh, I love it. I love my Quackin Bush and I can't wait for him to be back on the show. So while you're following him on the social media, make sure to follow us on the social media. It is bruisers pod that is B-R-E-W-S-A-R-S-B-O-D on the Instagram, the threads and the Twitter. If you want to send us an email, it is bruiserspod@gmail.com. If you want to follow me personally, it is Rodee John that is R-O-D-I-E-J-O-N. Rodee John is the name on the Twitter and on tap in case you want to find out when I'm drinking. Maybe we can have a beer together. If you want to follow me on the threads or the Instagram, it is official Rodee John. So until next time, make sure to enjoy life, drink local and cheers. A new law is helping me save more money on prescription drug costs. You may be able to save too. If Medicare is extra help program, my premium is zero and my out-of-pocket costs are low. Who should apply? Single people making less than $23,000 a year or a married couple who make less than $31,000 a year. Even if you don't think you qualify, it pays to find out. Go to ssa.gov/extrahelp paid for by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 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