#1261 Neal Hebert & Jon Cogburn: Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lops, and today I'm joined by Doctors Neil Herbert and John Cockburn. Uh, Doctor Herbert is assistant professor of theater in the department of visual and Performing Arts at Grambling State University, and Dr. Cockburn is professor of philosophy and department chair in the Department of Philosophy and religious studies at Louisiana State University. And today we're going to talk about their book KFab Nation Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump and the New Cynicism. So Dr. Herbert, Dr. Cockburn, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone.

00:42 Neal Hebert: Oh, there it is book KFve Nation in reverse, sadly, but

00:46 Ricardo Lopes: By the way, is that Steve Austin on the cover? Oh, OK, OK.

00:52 Neal Hebert: We did not come up with that idea. Um, ACTUALLY, the press just gave us that, and I'm looking at it, I'm like, wait, that's Steve Austin.

01:01 Jon Cogburn: 13, I think. We could get him, so I'm happy about that. So they

01:04 Neal Hebert: must have found a photo that's that the rights were available to, but yeah, that's, that's definitely Stone Cold Steve Austin on the cover. So that's,

01:11 Ricardo Lopes: well, well, that, that's awesome. I mean, every wrestling fan, I mean, it will catch their attention for sure, yeah. OK, so let me ask, let me start by asking you, uh, how did you come up with this idea, uh, of making a connection between WWE and particularly WWE from the attitude era and Donald Trump.

01:34 Neal Hebert: So, um, actually, we, so John and I have been talking about these ideas since 2003. Uh, THERE'S a, in the introduction or the, the, the preface to our book, we talk about Uh, a smoky apartment on Chime Street with, uh, where someone asked, have y'all ever seen a tape of Japanese pro wrestling? That was me when I was in, uh, the MA program at LSU in philosophy, and I had John and our deceased, uh, uh friend Ian Crystal had come over one day. DAY after class, just cause my apartment was right off campus. So students and grad students and professors would just drop by whenever they'd get bored, um, for that period of time. So, um, we started talking about that when I got John into, um, Japanese and Mexican professional wrestling. And then we sort of incorporated into our weekly watching of wrestling. So, when we started in 2003, I had been watching for 10 years at that point, since 1993. Um, MY dad was a huge boxing fan, and I found boxing kind of boring because they only punched, right? Like, I, I was young, I didn't understand the nuances of boxing, so I, one day I saw wrestling. And my dad's like, that's fake. So of course I wanted to watch it cause my dad said it was fake. I was like, well, it's probably good then, um, if it's fake, cause they can control what happens, and uh I was indeed uh right. So I wanted to get my first pay per view, which was SummerSlam 1993 with uh Lex Luger on the Lex Express versus Yokozuna, and my mom decided she was gonna watch wrestling, and if she liked it, I could get the pay per view. And the first time she ever watched, she watched Monday Night Raw. The main event was Money Incorporated versus uh the Steiner Brothers in a cage match. And the only detail I remember is that the Million Dollar Man, Ted DiBiase, got his trunks pulled down and he was wearing a thong, and my mom thought he had a nice butt. So she decided because of that, I could watch wrestling and get the pay per view. And that's kind of the, the Origin story of me as a pro wrestling fan, that's how John got into it. And, you know, we just have been watching, um, throughout all that time. Like, I would, uh, there's another thing in our book called the, uh, that where we thank the true wrestling fans, and that's a text thread that we've maintained for 1015 years of just all people that talk about wrestling that were in our friend group, and we still have it going to this day. So, You know, I was in a philosophy program with John, and then when I got my PhD in theater history, I wanted to be a classicist. I wanted to focus on Greek tragedy, and my entire committee at my first year review sat me down and said, no. Um, THEY'RE like, you're gonna write about wrestling cause you like that, and we think it's very marketable. So, John was on my committee as, as, uh, an outside reader, um, and I produced a book that kind of combined performance studies with My fandom and uh turned that into my dissertation, which was called uh Professional Wrestling, Local Performance Practice or Local Performance, uh, Local Performance History, Global Performance Practice. Uh, IT'S been a while. And, um, You know, I, I decided not to fully book that, and, uh, just cause I, I, I, I don't know why I didn't feel like booking that just yet, and John and I started co-writing something around the same time when I was in grad school, so we started writing what became the book. In 2012, does that sound right?

05:07 Jon Cogburn: I think 2011 we presented at the ASTR in Dallas. That was the first actually,

05:12 Neal Hebert: wait, I was directing how I learned to drive when that happened, so I think that was fall 2013. OK. When we went to Dallas and uh so that was the first version. We let it sit for a couple of years. Uh, WE had actually got it admitted to, we've gotten the paper we wrote, uh, accepted for a pro wrestling anthology that we eventually quote in what would become our book, but because we were doing mostly philosophy at that time, that the book wanted a radical revision, and I was in the process of trying to finish my dissertation while being a full-time high school teacher. So, I just couldn't get that level of notes done. John was also committed to another project, so we pulled that paper, and then we resubmitted it once I got um Once I was working for a charter school, I sold out and made a lot more money in the, uh, in the alternative American education system. Uh, WHICH for any Americans that are watching it, that charter schools pay more, but they're also, you know, ethically suspect. Um, BUT I had the money to do another conference, so, and, uh, that year, uh, the American Society of Theater Researchers conference was in New Orleans. So John and I just drove down to New Orleans and presented it as part of a working group convened by Shannon Walsh, who is a professor at LSU on performance and sports. And it just so happens that there was a member of the, was it Vanderbilt Press, had scoured our uh program notes, like the all of the papers, and he he cold emailed us and said, I wanna hear about your paper and possibly turn it into a book. So, um, he, he quit the press though. So our book was orphaned at Vanderbilt, and we rewrote it a couple of times. And in the end, we decided to walk away from Vanderbilt just because they wanted the book to become something that I felt there was already a competitor on the market for. They wanted more of a history of pro wrestling.

07:06 Jon Cogburn: You know, you know, it's interesting, Neil, is that, uh, first, Neil, if you become a supervillain, everyone has your backstory now. So, uh, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, uh, SO I'll give you a little bit of my backstory. I, I started watching wrestling and, um, When I was a kid, I sort of barely remember it because it was on local access in Montgomery, Alabama. And we absolutely believe they're real, but at 1.2 of the wrestlers, Neil and I figured out who these were at one point, we saw them in a car together and they were like, enemies. They broke Kfabe and that caused like this is so embarrassing. I was in high school and still believed it was the outcomes were not in 1986 in Montgomery, Alabama, um, kind of like a Danny McBride, uh, reality, um, and so that was, and then with Neil, I rekindled my, my love of it. But the interesting thing that Neil just said is like this, this is a broader point, academia. It's, it's actually people encourage it to display work, but it's very hard to do because most presses. Uh, THEY have an editor that maintains a list, the list isn't just in terms of philosophy or performance studies. It'll be one area of philosophy, just analytic philosophy of mind or just continental political philosophy. It's so like, um, trying to, this is, this, I, I forgot that happened to us with the first paper, like in 2014 or whatever, where we were told like that, that first paper is, uh, made a really interesting philosophical point that Neil and I discovered that they're two separate ontologies of wrestling. Mhm. So an ontology, among other things, tells you the identity conditions of things. So, if you're a wrestling fan, you talk about one of the key terms is the match. And Neil was doing aesthetics and philosophy, and we, we put this together, um. The, the match is sometimes a performance kind and sometimes a particular performance. These are different types of artwork. So like a, a musical work can be multiply instantiated. But the performance itself isn't. It's, it's a singular spread out over space-time, vaguely. Well, in wrestling, in the storyline, the match is a performance. Mhm. But outside of the storyline, if you're talking about the industry, it's a performance kind, because you, uh, practice the match if it's WWE in a dark show before you perform it.

09:20 Neal Hebert: And for people that don't remember the, the, back in the day, the, the way it would work is, in the buildup to a pay per view, they would have most of the matches that were gonna be at the pay per view, rehearsing spots on house shows. So, if, if that, if that SummerSlam, you were gonna see The Undertaker and Kurt Angle, there's a strong chance in the 3 weeks building up to that pay per view, if you go to a house show, you would see a Kurt Angle versus. Taker match, but it would not be the match from the pay per view. It would,

09:50 Jon Cogburn: can you talk about before WWE, because because I didn't know this before you. This is,

09:54 Neal Hebert: oh yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, yeah. So this is a point in the book.

09:56 Jon Cogburn: It's amazing to me that like, this is a cool one.

09:58 Neal Hebert: So if you look at Mick Foley's book, he talks about this. That's where I got this idea from. That's Have a Nice Day, his first autobiography, is that, um, in certain territories where you went from town to town, you might lose your Title or lose a big grudge match, 5 nights in a row, and each city thinks they got the match. So, Mick Foley tells a story about how he had to break the news to some of his close friends in, I think it was Tennessee or Texas that he was, he had to leave after he lost the loser leaves town match. And one of the friends was like, Mick, we, we went to a, a nearby town 3 days ago and we saw the match, we already knew you were losing. Um, SO, and, and that would happen with, like, in Mid-South and Ric Flair, because in Mid-South, which is what I wrote my dissertation on using Louisiana history, I, I was the historian who found a way to get a PhD in history by talking about 9 years. Um, IT'S very elegant, uh, elegant bit of work on my part. But, um, what would happen is in Mid-South, they would do different tapes. The tapes would have to be bicycled out, is what they called it. So, one town would get 1 week of television while another town over would be a week ahead of. That, then another town would be 2 weeks ahead. So they had to keep track of which episode of TV was airing in each area. So when they did their local shows, they would deliver the right matches. And, um, you know, you could see in each of, each, each town thought they were getting the match, even though, you know, in every city, they've seen Ric Flair lose his US championship for the last week, and everyone would be convinced that was the match, um, because they were, you know, Each time in within the logic of KAve, that was the match you saw, the, the live match in your town was the real match, but if you actually know the backstory, you know that, hey, he's lost this title 5 times, like, first in, uh, Charlottesville, then in this town, then in this town, then in this town, and you know,

11:51 Jon Cogburn: so keep going. Yeah, so, so we've written up a, a, a paper on like the ontology and metaphysics of wrestling that nobody much wanted to publish, and we're like, OK, Neil, finish your dissertation, get a job, and we'll, you know, do, do your more historiography stuff, then we'll come back to it. But then like 2015 happens and Trump comes out and starts giving these, um, and we, we kind of got obsessed with Trump's speeches. Because we, we, we view them as wrestling promos. They're totally wrestling promos that became the, the, uh, the discussion that led to the, the actual book, which we're able to, and so, so, so prior to Trump, we had, um, we had started to think about Neil Kafey, but there's his, uh, the first broad usage of that is Josie Reisman. Uh, HER book The Ringmaster, but a few years ago, uh, uh, a paper,

12:39 Neal Hebert: I wanna say we used it in 2015 or 2016, so yeah,

12:42 Jon Cogburn: it was on the web elsewhere.

12:44 Neal Hebert: It's convergent evolution, right? Like, like she of all dies, we evolve dies. Um,

12:49 Jon Cogburn: SO we had like a, a, uh, just quick, we, we had like, we realized that like when we're doing our metaphysics, we had an aesthetic point, a philosophy of art point that the idea of like, um, um, aesthetic distance becomes much more interesting and, and with Neo Cafabe. So we have a, we have an architect that we have, we have fan types. So the first one is just the fan, or no, the southern fan. Yeah, and I was a Southern fan and through until like maybe 1986, I started to doubt, um, but you still will go to a BW 3, and sometimes it's so lovely when this happened. A guy comes up to you and says like, so when CM Punk was like shaving people's heads and they joined the Straight Edge Army, 2011, I would run into people like smoking cigarettes saying like, uh. I can't do a southern accent. Can you do it? Oh, the guy was trying to

13:34 Neal Hebert: let me tell you something about CM Punk. If he tries to take me out the audience in front of my kids, that's not gonna happen. Uh, LIKE this dude believed, and it was awesome because when you're in a show like that, it's fun to be around people who believe.

13:51 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, yeah, I said

13:51 Neal Hebert: the last time I saw local pro wrestling, by the way, uh, the local promotion up here is called Bayou Independent Wrestling. I was cheering for a bad guy. Because in Baton Rouge's independent wrestling, which John and I went to, he was their big, good guy, the, the Cajun shoots, Cajun strong style, something like that. So I was cheering him cause I'd seen him before, and a child ran up to me and punched me in back of the head, um, because I was cheering for a bad guy and his mom was mortified. I was like, I'm so sorry. And I was like, look, he's, you know, your, your child's like 3. IT didn't hurt. It's kind of funny, but, but, uh,

14:24 Jon Cogburn: but we, we've seen some like, uh, people like

14:26 Neal Hebert: that is so much

14:27 Jon Cogburn: we've seen some moms that are like gonna punch you in the head too, though.

14:30 Neal Hebert: Yeah, right, when, when the adults believe too, oh, it's so great. It's

14:34 Jon Cogburn: so happy. But, um, so that's a fan, uh, that's a Southern fan. Then there's the fan, and this isn't that different from like a movie. You, you have some aesthetic distance, but you sort of like, uh, what's it called, the suppression of, um. Oh jeez, you know, what's the suspension

14:48 Neal Hebert: of disbelief, suspension

14:49 Jon Cogburn: of disbelief, suspend disbelief, and that's the way it works in art, um, oh, but you, before that, you have the critic, and we named this eternal critic after our, our, our friend Dan Crystal, because when I watched with him, he'd always just say that's so fake. That's so fake when he was a kid, he used to go to the Montreal Superdome with his father or whatever the normal dorm's called Montreal and watch, uh, Jean Ferret, uh, uh, Andre the Giant. Yeah, and, and so Ian still loved Andre the Giant, uh, but he wasn't big on wrestling. So the in terminal critic is like, just that's fake, that's fake. OK, you could do that with a movie. Like real pirates didn't do that, but you like you're kind of missing the point.

15:25 Neal Hebert: Pirates of the Caribbean is not accurate.

15:27 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, then you got the fan who distances. But what we discovered, and this is what we started thinking about now, OK, Fabe, is to understand the storylines in wrestling now, you have to simultaneously trace the supposed real world. Because when the, when the real world and the story curated around the real world, because it's not so real after all, becomes more compelling, um, they will inconsistently change the storylines to bring the real world in. And the only way the fan like has to do a lot of cognitive damage to themselves for the southern fan to keep going because it'll just be inconsistent. We can talk about examples of this as we go along. But then like, so we started to see Trump not just Kfabe, but we'll, we'll talk about this later. I, I think we should move on from uh, this is the origin story, but Neil Kafabe too. So that, that's sort of how the, the, the book came about. Um,

16:14 Ricardo Lopes: YOU

16:14 Jon Cogburn: know,

16:15 Ricardo Lopes: you, you know, it's funny because back in 2016 during the, er, I mean just before the elections, I had a friend who was really far left and he really opposed, er, US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. WAS like, oh my God, I hate Hillary Clinton because she's going to do the same things that the previous presidents were already doing, Obama and Bush and so on. So I prefer that Trump wins, and I think he's not going to do the same. And and I was like, hey. Take it easy, take it easy

16:48 Jon Cogburn: because you know wrestling,

16:50 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, yeah, go, go, go back to 2007 and watch Donald Trump's promos, uh, up till WrestleMania 23 and perhaps we'll, you will know, or you will learn what I'm talking about because it's getting a promo there. Come on.

17:09 Neal Hebert: Yeah, it's, it's. I don't know, 2016 was when a lot of people got radicalized, uh, that I know. Um, BUT, you know, we also have to talk about this, and we'll talk about it later, is the role in which the Democratic Party played in the rise of Trump. You know, the Hillary Clinton campaign, they pushed him to win. They They were like, oh, we're gonna destroy him. And it's like, I don't know, you, you, you kind of set us up for this. Like, I, I think Little Marco and the others would have probably been much easier to beat than an anti-establishment figure against, you know, the embodiment of democratic liberalism. But

17:44 Jon Cogburn: this is, this gets to sort of the key behind a lot of the book because there's, there's two incompatible stories you could tell about Trump. And we think they go through with KFB and you know KF. So, so one thing he did that was like really worked, like he and Bernie. There are a few things that most American voters suspected or believed that no one would say on those debate stages. The two biggest things, and I have to be really clear, if you watch the 2015 debates, Trump ran as economically populist, economically left wing, but socially conservative. Most Americans tend to be slightly economically left wing and slightly socially conservative, but whenever the party system offers up a moderate third way, they reverse those polarities. So moderates are always presented as running against the new parties, but the moderate is always like what people hate about both parties because they end up being very libertarian socially and very conservative, uh, economically. Anyway, so Trump, like he railed against the, um, the American foreign policy and the forever wars with the war on terror. His LAG says the war of terror, uh, the, no, it's Borat that says the war of terror. Um, HE ran against that. He ran against, uh, Obamacare, but he didn't run against it from a libertarian perspective. He was gonna provide much better healthcare. He ran against offshoring jobs and It was only like, I remember like watchers, there was late in the campaign where he called Bernie a socialist to differentiate itself from Bernie, but that actually surprised a lot of people because his economic policies up to that point have been determinate for Bernie. So one theory of Trump. Is that like uh he actually was hitting the sweet spot of American politics at the time, which neither the parties nor the third white people do. But, and that he, he got superpowers that people thought he was honest, because he said a few important truths that people believed, so they went along with him. Neil and I thought that and that's why we thought like this guy might actually win once Bernie was out of the, you know, uh, I mean,

19:46 Neal Hebert: everyone,

19:46 Jon Cogburn: we don't bet on our academic expertise, so we, we've never won any bets on these, but yeah,

19:50 Neal Hebert: that's the thing. I remember everyone I talked to that knew politics was like, oh, yeah, if Clinton runs, she's losing. Um, LIKE, people were like, Bernie's, Bernie will probably lose too, but he's got a better shot, was, was what a lot of the people I know. I, people got very angry with me. Too, when we would say things like that, like, but, but, but Trumpers in political science get very angry with me when I said that. It's like I'm, I'm sorry.

20:14 Jon Cogburn: Um, WHEN, when, when, um, the other thing that Trump did that's more wrestling-centric and it's wrestling better is that the core truth he told that Bernie didn't, is that like, this is all fake. You know, why do you, why do you give all this is a really famous line. You gave money to Hillary. You get, why did I give her money? Because she does what I said. Like, you know, like, like

20:38 Neal Hebert: I give money to everybody because that's what he

20:40 Jon Cogburn: said that it's, that it's phony, and that is the OK babe right there. And then, so how does Trump stay possible? He didn't do any of the economic populist stuff that he said he was going to do. Why do these people still, uh, why does he have, you know, a third of the country still supports him? Um, YOU know, we, we go into this in the book. Biden did much more of the things Trump said he was going to do, um, for better and worse, um, probably it was a terrible idea to maintain the tariffs against China during a period of high inflation. Yeah, that probably cost him the, you know, um. But things with restoring manufacturing, you know, I don't know if you remember Trump had manufacturing week every week and it never came to pass. So how can he not do any of that stuff? What's really going on here? And that's where I think the, the, the lens of Neil Kafabe. This is all a joke. It's all fake. You're in on the con with me because we both see that it's fake. What's left of politics at that time? I can make people you hate really miserable. It's, and that's, that's wrestling. You know, it's, it's,

21:43 Neal Hebert: you watch the heel, get, you watch the people you dislike get humiliated. Their pants get pulled down in the cage just like my mom saw, and people are happy.

21:53 Jon Cogburn: Trump is great at owning the limbs. Yeah, but that's that might be the only thing we're getting way ahead of ourselves.

22:01 Neal Hebert: Sorry, yeah, sorry,

22:02 Ricardo Lopes: no, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was going to say, uh, I mean, but how old is the connection between Donald Trump and professional wrestling, because I mean, uh, I, I was born in 1990 and I only started watching wrestling in 2006, so everything that came before that. I watch, I watched most of it from the WWE slash WWF mainly, but it was after the fact. So I remember, for example, that I hope I'm getting the facts right here, but I think that WrestleMania 4 and WrestleMania 5 were held at Trump Plaza,

22:40 Neal Hebert: right? So actually, WrestleMania 4 was billed as being held at Trump 1988 in, in, yeah, 1988. And but it was actually held in the Atlantic City Convention Center, but they said it was Trump Plaza. And then, uh, Trump will appear on WWEE programming throughout the 2000s, but when he really gets involved was the 2007 Battle of the billionaires when he and Vince put their, so the, for people that aren't familiar with this, which I'm assuming will be a lot of people because we all watch wrestling, but I'm assuming you, the viewer, are probably here for the philosophy content. Um, WHAT happened was there, there, there was a match, and Vince McMahon chose a wrestler to be his proxy, and Donald Trump chose, uh, Donald Trump chose a good guy wrestler to be his proxy. And the winner of that match at WrestleMania would, would cause their billionaire to shave his head. So, of course, the draw for that WrestleMania is, is the guy from The Apprentice gonna shave his head? Head on TV, which, of course, he was never gonna do, right? Like the, the, Vince McMahon was the bad guy. So, obviously, Vince McMahon's wrestler was gonna lose, and then Vince would get his head shaved, and, and Trump was the good billionaire versus Vince, the bad billionaire. Um, AND then, a couple of years later, they started doing this, like, guest host thing on Monday Night Raw, and they A storyline where Donald Trump buys WWE from Vince McMahon, which actually causes the stock to get really weird because they send out a press release, so people aren't aware that it's just a story. So then they have to clarify like, oh yeah, this isn't real, blah blah blah blah blah. But 2009, that was 2009, yeah, and then, so then Trump was the good billionaire again, and he was 20 years. Yeah, so he would give us episodes of Raw with no commercials because he spent his own money to give us this gift. Just like in the White House, Donald Trump doesn't take a single cent of his presidential salary. He gives that back to the government so that they can spend it on things we need, right? Never mind that he gets a billion dollars in bribes and jets and things like that. But, but the same story. That we get from Trump the politician we got from Trump the character

24:47 Jon Cogburn: it's so uncanny to watch them they're on YouTube, some of the promos he got. It's, it's so uncanny. Like he's doing it'll be the greatest thing ever. He's

24:56 Neal Hebert: gonna be the greatest matchup ever.

24:58 Jon Cogburn: That McMahon is evil, awful, and it's gonna be defeated, and it's gonna be the best thing in the world. And it's, it's, it's just indistinguishable from like what he started doing in 2015 to, to crowds, um.

25:11 Ricardo Lopes: OK, OK, OK, but that was the period of time where Trump more directly participated in wrestling, right? But how about his relationship with Vince McMahon? I mean, how old is it and uh how did it develop exactly? All right,

25:28 Neal Hebert: John, you take that one.

25:29 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, so I, I've heard this from a few people who Neil has said no people, but, uh, but, but Josie Reisman talks about it, so this isn't just hearsay, it's, it's, it's in her book. Um, SO it's widely reported, there's two people in the world that Donald Trump, when he's on the phone with him, he sends everybody out of the room. One is Vladimir Putin. And the other is that's bad. So that's, and so we, there's theories about why these two people, he, he does it and people don't understand it, um. The, the relationship is personal, it's performative, it's financial, and it's, it's political. Um, I, I think that McMahn is maybe the closest thing Trump has to an actual friend. Um, SO. Um, I, I, for us, I mean, the, the financial stuff and we, we untangled a lot of this in our book, but some of it we've, you know, it's, it's, nobody has, um, so it's like I actually wrote some of these down. So Linda McMahon donated, so, um, the financial stuff we could date back to the presidential run, and it's, it's extreme. In 2016, Linda McMahon gave Vince's wife, who has a role in WWE. She gave him $7 million for his campaign. I don't know if you remember at the beginning of the campaign in 2015, he was not accepting money. That was the biggest thing. He was self-financing his campaign. Then he did this thing about, oh, well, what if, what if, if an old lady sends me a $1 check, I'm not gonna send it back. A couple of times he tried out, what if I do this, and people booed. Then he just stopped talking about it and McMahon gives him like uh $7 million. Um, SHE became in 2017 to 2019, the administrator of the Small Business Administration for the federal government. She stepped down and had his, she led his super PAC in 2020, uh, the largest pro Trump super PAC. That's a weird thing that should be illegal with campaign finance laws, but isn't because of the first Supreme Court, um. The, um, in 2007 and 2009. 10 years prior to that, the McMahon's donated $5 million to Trump's family foundation. And for years they gave nothing to their own family foundation. I don't know if you remember Trump's family foundation was shut down by the courts because it was fraudulent.

27:38 Neal Hebert: Was that around the time McMahon was trying to run for Senate in Connecticut?

27:43 Jon Cogburn: I think that was after that, which it was after, OK, cool. OK, Google it though. That's, uh, um, so, so that the family foundation is a very weird thing and, and again, that's like 2, You know, 2007 and 2009. What, why are they doing this? Nobody knows. Um, SHE gave over $10 million to his campaign in 2024. She led the American First Policy Institute, served on Truth Social's board, and became co-chair of his transition team. Now she's the head of the, the Department of Education. There's some money stuff that we, we just couldn't figure out and no one has, um, evolving, uh, a large amount of money in the Gulf states. I think I just read that. In the year and a half since Trump's been president, this time, his, his, um, fortune has more than tripled. Their family members getting tens and hundreds of millions of dollars through crypto schemes. There's a lot of golf money from that. There was and

28:38 Neal Hebert: there's also golf money in the WWE as well. So like the, so that's, that's common to both,

28:44 Jon Cogburn: yeah, it didn't because sports watching, I think started with WWE

28:47 Neal Hebert: predates started with their shows from Riyadh because, uh, Prince, is it MLS NBS. Uh, Mohammad bin Salman, uh, was trying to present himself as a westward-looking transformational figure in Saudi. So they started sponsoring huge Saudi shows and using the wrestling content as an ad to go to Riyadh.

29:11 Jon Cogburn: So there's some overlap between and so I. I need to be very careful,

29:16 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, and now they're doing that also with other sports, right? Like for example, in 2023, Cristiano Ronaldo also went there to play soccer and he's now in Al Nasser, so.

29:27 Neal Hebert: Yeah, well, and on top of all that,

29:29 Jon Cogburn: building at this point, like,

29:31 Neal Hebert: yeah, and, and just to build on John's point real quick, if you look at the April 20th, 2026, uh, uh, issue of The New Yorker, they published something on Linda McMahon. It's how professional wrestling prepared Linda McMahon for Trump's cabinet. So we're not the only people talking about this. Like major journalistic institutions are also talking about this.

29:52 Jon Cogburn: But there, there is a weird thing like when, when the Gulf states are maybe overpaying quite a bit for these wrestling matches, the WWE, the people that won that largess are putting money into.

30:03 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I mean, they, they're overpaying everyone. Uh, THEY'RE also overpaying Cristiano Ronaldo. I mean, €200 million per year at his age is just ridiculous.

30:15 Neal Hebert: Well, also, I wanna say for a single show in Saudi Arabia, they make more than an, than an American or a European WrestleMania. Not that they've ever done a European WrestleMania, they've done European Summer Slams, but those shows are the most profitable according to earnings reports from TKO.

30:30 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I'm not sure if they're going ahead with that, but they said that WrestleMania 43 was going to be in Saudi Arabia.

30:39 Neal Hebert: I don't know if they're going ahead with that either because of the war in Iran, but that was certainly their intent. Uh, AND before that they did the greatest royal Rumble in, uh, Saudi Arabia. Shane McMahon win that? That was kind of lame. Um, I think 20

30:53 Jon Cogburn: years from now people are going to figure out something in this golf money and wrestling. And the Trump was, was

31:02 Ricardo Lopes: that the one where, was that the one where Titus O'Neill went

31:08 Neal Hebert: below the roof straight through, I believe so. So I, I actually stopped watching WWE when the Saudi money became too big of a thing. It was, it was a combination of the Saudi money. And um Ronda Rousey, uh, losing to Becky Lynch, but not tapping out. I, I just, for some reason that finish rubbed me the wrong way and I was like, I'm done. I'm done with WWE and I, and at that time AEW was starting, so that's mostly what I watch now.

31:35 Ricardo Lopes: OK, OK, no, that's fair, that's fair, but I mean, going back to Trump and Vince McMahon, I mean, when you look at them in terms of personality, business practices, and improper behavior, what are the main similarities that you see?

31:55 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, can we start that one now and then you can, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, we, we, we, in the introduction of our book, we chronicle a bunch of these, um. There's, there's, there's just a shocking amount of parallels. They both inherited wealth. They both had incredibly difficult, problematic fathers. They're both amazing self-promoters. They both had a history of like just inexplicable business failures and rescue. And with McMahon, it's very hard to figure out where the money came from, from, you know, where did he get the couple of million dollars to buy his father and stuff like that. Um. There are serious sexual misconduct allegations and some, some, you know, Trump had recently was convicted of, uh, with one of them, um, and then there's the, the stuff that man with him finally stepping down, uh, things coming out that are

32:39 Neal Hebert: because of the Janelle Grant lawsuit, yeah, that, that's ongoing.

32:43 Jon Cogburn: Um, THEY both attacked media. They're the only two people in American life who successfully attacked a judge and prosecutors. During McMahon's uh steroids trial, people thought he's crazy, all these lawyers, don't do this, dude. He would publicly go out and attack the judges and prosecutors. That was the macro for Trump doing the same. The phrase you're fired predates The Apprentice. It was used in WWE by McMahon. Um, SO there's this weird similarities between the two and their, their lives. They're both like really problematic with their own daughters, you know, you talk.

33:19 Neal Hebert: WAYS. I forgot about that actually. I forgot

33:22 Jon Cogburn: about that.

33:23 Ricardo Lopes: I mean they're problematic with women in general, right? I mean if you, if you go back and watch certain segments from the attitude era and from the ruthless aggression era, I mean there are many weird things going on there with, with, with, for example, Trish Strathers and. AND yeah, and that whole thing with Ashley

33:49 Jon Cogburn: wrestlers in the history of wrestling. It was just so irritating because you'd want to watch them because they were so good on the microphone and they could actually wrestle, and then you're seeing them being mistreated by this promotion, um, but the, you know, sexual assault during the attitude era was really problematic ways put into the storylines, but one of them was like his daughter was in the storyline. Yeah,

34:12 Neal Hebert: there was a moment where he pitched a storyline where Stephanie got pregnant and it would be revealed he was the father, and Stephanie declined to do that storyline, but I believe, yeah,

34:22 Ricardo Lopes: and then, and then he suggested, and then he suggested the uh her brother Sean McMahon, but but she also, she also declined.

34:31 Neal Hebert: Yeah, I mean, I, I can say as a fan, I wouldn't want to see that.

34:36 Ricardo Lopes: No, no, me neither. I, I, I mean, it's awful, but also, I guess that back then I would have already been, uh, done with, uh, the MacM's on my TV. I mean, it's, it was already too much.

34:51 Neal Hebert: So it lasted like 20 years. But

34:54 Jon Cogburn: I think one of the deepest connections, so there are all these sort of biographical connections and just weirdness connections, but, um, and morally problematic connections. But, you know, one of the things Dylan and I noticed is they both had a way to like, um, Weaponize their own lack of shame and um. You know, they, they would, they would, they, they can turn things that would defeat them into like superpowers. It's, it's, we explore that in a lot of the books. I, I think we'll end up talking more about that in the future, but that, yeah, I remember the weird, the weird similarity, you know, that they, they have in common, and, and we think that like. Trump learned a lot of that from McMahon during the 20 year period when he was

35:33 Neal Hebert: right around the time the grab them by the you know what tape hit. I want to say that was right around the time Trump went to the debate with Clinton, with all of Bill Clinton's sexual assault accusers. To try to get the, and, and, you know, to better or worse, that is what people talked about. They stopped talking about the tape. They started talking about the Clinton's problematic history with uh sexual assault, and all of a sudden this devastating claim became a moot point because they both, they were both suspect.

36:04 Jon Cogburn: But somehow like the scandal becomes part of the story, that keeps people watching. And that's, you know, I, I think Trump is, is social media persona, like he, he. You know, he's winning if the eyeballs are on him if he has the ratings, you know, and that's, that's, that's the cardinal rule in, in wrestling is what gets butts in the seat, you know, it's great if you're a bad guy, people want to come to hate you, you're getting butts in the seat. You're part of the story, and

36:32 Ricardo Lopes: I

36:32 Jon Cogburn: mean, even doesn't hit you the way it does other politicians if that's, yeah, I

36:36 Ricardo Lopes: mean, even sometimes Vince McMahon himself was willing to humiliate himself on TV just to get the butts on seats, right? I mean,

36:46 Neal Hebert: we've got a whole chapter on, on that, right? Like, uh, where we talk about the buffoonery of the authoritarian figure.

36:52 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, we're going to get into that and I mean I guess that we've already talked here about a little bit about the personal business and political ties between them, so I, I also don't want to give the entire book away, so I mean, but, but let me ask you this, do you think that the mannerisms and way of speaking that we see now, now, I mean since 2015, Trump using in politics, do you think that you learned that from. From, uh, participating in wrestling and from Vince McMahon himself.

37:27 Neal Hebert: I think so. I mean, I, I think if you watch his appearances in WWE you can see the seeds of his MAGA personality being sort of incorporated into the storylines or invented on TV in front of us, um, because he, you know, the, the mythology of the good billionaire definitely gets its start with Trump as the person saving WWE for the fans from Vince McMahon. And you know, and that that storyline was, I, I mean it, it was fairly popular at the time. Um, I, I, and same thing with the uma when, when the, the hair versus hair match with Umaga versus, uh, Bobby, yeah, yeah, like. The good billionaire ended up being a, a, a myth that had a lot of cultural cachet. And when he finally decided to turn his grievances against the Obama administration into a presidential run, he already had the blueprint for the character he would play.

38:23 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, and then, and then the storylines, like, there's a corrupt villain, there's a sort of comic book hero, um, and, um, that's promising to do something incredible that's never done before like that. We saw that fictionally in WWE then it became the back row for, uh, the presidential campaigns.

38:41 Neal Hebert: And his timing was brilliant, right? Like in 20, I, I wanna say in 2015, there was an article by a PhD candidate in Chicago, and I cannot locate the blog for the life of me, cause this was several computers ago, who wrote an entire, like, detailed series of blog posts about how he he believed that the end of the neoliberal era was upon us, and that what would be coming would either be populism from the right or populism from the left. And this guy just predicted what would happen in the Trump versus uh Clinton election, the Biden versus Trump election, and then eventually, like, all of it was spelled out of these blog posts, and I cannot find them. So if you are that scholar, uh, who wrote

39:22 Jon Cogburn: that, the next election in England when Labor loses, so we

39:25 Neal Hebert: can, so we can quote you because you were dead on. But I mean, yeah, his timing was impeccable in making an outsider bid for the presidency. Um, I, I, I think a lot of that comes from his understanding of professional wrestling and narrative.

39:41 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, but, but I mean, on, on the topic of cave, uh, I, I mean, maybe actually we should explain for people who are not wrestling fans what Kwave is because they've been hearing this word cave, K fave, K fave, and maybe some of them are questioning, oh, what, what, what the heck is Kwave

39:59 Neal Hebert: so, so there's, there's a really contentious debate. In professional wrestling studies about what KFB is and what KFB isn't, and we try to gesture toward that in the book, we end up being almost originalists with KFab in that we, we just refer to it as the code among people in wrestling to in front of fans, pretend it's real, um, basically

40:22 Jon Cogburn: to not reveal that the outcomes are predetermined because it is real. It's still real to me, damn it.

40:26 Neal Hebert: Yeah, you basically are preserving the audience's suspension of disbelief by not. Giving them visible proof that what they're watching is in some way not on the up and up. And throughout history, this was both enforced and transgressed regularly. You can find, um, exposes of the professional wrestling industry being, uh, predetermined results back to the 19 teens. So, it's like every generation discovers pro wrestling, and then every generation discovers that pro wrestling might not be might not be on the up and up. But it just happens over and over and over again. But we I Believe KFbe comes out of the carnivals. Uh, IN particular, they would have the, the rigged strongman competitions where there'd be a, a strong man, he'd wrestle anyone from the crowd, and the first person that would come from the crowd would be a carnival employee, and he would almost beat the strong man. So then people would start giving money so they could beat the strong man, but the strong man was actually a chute fighter and would choke them out and hurt them for real, or, or if he got in trouble, he would bowl them over near a curtain and someone behind the curtain would hit them with a bat. Right, so, so that's the original cave. We even

41:32 Jon Cogburn: think it became more, it was just much safer for everybody involved, yeah, more and more of it in these carnivals where it's predetermined and the and the term we

41:42 Neal Hebert: we actually think the term comes from carni. Um, IT might be a carnivalization or pig Latin form of fake you

41:49 Jon Cogburn: know the Snoop Dogg talk like the shizzle stuff that's from under, yeah,

41:52 Neal Hebert: yeah, yeah, that's also, that's also related.

41:54 Jon Cogburn: Cafa has phonetically in it fake. THREW a pig light you could go from fake to K fabe. So that's, you know, that's a hypothesis. But

42:03 Neal Hebert: so we, we see Kfabe as largely the, the code that protects the suspend the audience's ability to suspend their disbelief, um. And you can find that throughout most of wrestling. If you listen to wrestlers and wrestler podcasts and books, they tend to take the same. That's why we gesture toward the, the debate in professional wrestling studies, but we end up sticking with something that's fairly recognizable to wrestling fans just because, um, for our purposes and what it describes, we, we think this is, this is a really precise usage. So, so

42:35 Jon Cogburn: can I just, yeah, a lot of scholars that we've learned from, they tend to extend it. Um, SO like, oh, it's a contract between the audience and the, you know, this may be Euro Lane's good, you know, a contract between the audience and the performer to do this, that, the other, and we think that's absolutely right, like because the con the audience has to be complicit in their own suspension of disbelief. We describe that as like. Not the, you know, not what KA is, but like how KA functions in the, in the promotion. So that, that's kind of the difference. It doesn't make a difference, but by your notion of KA, we're able to build on the OK fade. The other thing is that like at some periods of history, KA was ruthlessly invested. So

43:15 Neal Hebert: mid-South dissertation all about it. So in mid-Salvation you're fired like what John described in his origin story. Where he saw the good guy and the bad guy in the same car, Bill Watts of Mid-South, the owner, he would fire any wrestler that broke KApe like that. He would not allow Heels and Baby Faces to stay in the same hotels. So they would actually race after the show to get the nice hotel on the Louisiana Circuit. If the Baby Faces got there first, they would get it. If the Heels got there first, they would get it. But

43:45 Jon Cogburn: if

43:45 Neal Hebert: you

43:45 Jon Cogburn: lost

43:45 Neal Hebert: a

43:45 Jon Cogburn: bar fight, he would, he would fire you, right?

43:47 Neal Hebert: Yeah, that's exactly the point I was gonna say. In Mid-South. If you lost a bar fight, Bill Watts would fire you. He said, why am I paying you? I should be paying the guy who kicked your ass in the bar. Um, BECAUSE you've just exposed that my wrestlers are not tough in real life. So he's like, so the wrestlers would usually go to the bars together so that if something got out of hand, they could protect each other. But again, that's also, you know, that, that ultimately is a way to protect KA because if I was in a bar and I watched. Some random dude beat up Doctor Death Steve Williams, um, that would have crushed me, you know, cause he's Doctor Death. He's supposed to be the best, but he's getting beat up by some random Louisiana, uh, country boy. Like, that, that seems weird to

44:31 Jon Cogburn: me. But the, the, the thing about the collaboration between the audiences, so by, uh, part of my other, the other part of my origin story I'll share my maternal grandfather, um, in college, I don't know, the 1930s. Um, HE, he wrestled under the name Bay Ackerman, and he was a heel in Texas, in local circuits. So he had this thing where, like, at the very end of it, when the, when the, um, you know, he'd be bad, um, The, uh, the good guy would slap him so hard he would have a piece of chalk in his mouth and he'd spit out the chalk, so it looked like he'd slapped the tooth out of his head, go crazy, but like. People would see him with all of his teeth the next week. And so like if you're not an audience, you have to be complicit in it. So it's a, it's a, it's a constant negotiation prior to the absolute breaking of KFB at the Montreal screw job which we have a chapter about, um, but, but that leads to Neil KFbe. So, so KFB is this, it's, it's that code narrowly defined, broadly defined. It's the negotiation to, to preserve fandom. But that's prior to what we call postmodern fanism because remember there's the, the Southern fan, the terminal critic, they've Guthrie and Crystal, the fan, then the postmodern fan. But the fan has to suspend disbelief and KA, you know, and you have to maintain it just not to allow the fan to do this.

45:53 Neal Hebert: And if you want to see some of the, some of the discourse that we gesture toward, you can actually look in the Free Journal Professional Wrestling Studies. I believe it's issue 2 or 3, where KAB was the central topic of the issue. So we went through that and sort of traced where it went. I thought, I thought it was really enlightening, and, you know, although we ended up. Endorsing a form of KAB that's much closer to what wrestlers talk about, that doesn't mean that the discourse didn't mightily inform what we were doing. You can also look at Herbert Blaus, the audience, which for philosophy fans, they're less, uh, familiar with, but that's sort of one of the, the, uh, central books on suspension of disbelief published in recent history. So there's Even our approach in this, we, we talk about this being an interdisciplinary book, but we are taking stuff from performance studies, professional wrestling studies, theater history, theater studies, and combining it with just, not just with analytic philosophy. We once, someone once told us in a presentation, like, oh, it seems like you guys are just taking wrestling and just doing analytic philosophy, and we're like, just is doing a lot of work in that sentence, you know.

46:58 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, but, but look, uh, let me ask you because you said that in the book you talk about the Montreal screw job which happened at Survivor Series 1997 in the match between Brett Hart and Shawn Michaels, but I mean, uh, but sometimes when it comes to, uh, Kwave being irreversibly broken in the history. History of wrestling. Sometimes people mentioned the curtain call in 1996. I mean, uh,

47:26 Neal Hebert: what the difference was that wasn't televised until, until later. So because it only happened in the New York market, all we saw at the time as wrestling fans, if you were watching back then, is all of a sudden Triple H starts losing matches. After being on a huge push, um, all of a sudden he's losing matches and then this guy Steve Austin wins the King of the Ring, um, and then

47:49 Ricardo Lopes: no one and, and you know, and you know, actually, actually, in hindsight, maybe Vince McMahon was grateful for that because it was when he pushed Steve Austin. So otherwise it would have been Triple Agen. We don't know at all what would have happened.

48:04 Neal Hebert: So they're still on its face after the curtain call in Montreal. And for people that don't know what that was, a number of wrestlers were leaving WWF and it

48:13 Ricardo Lopes: was Scott Hall and Kevin Nash.

48:15 Neal Hebert: Yeah, Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, Sean Waltman, uh, and, uh, Paul Leveck, who's Triple H, and Hogan hadn't left yet. Hogan had left already, so they were going join

48:26 Ricardo Lopes: Hogan, yeah, Hogan. It was, was at WWF in '94.

48:31 Neal Hebert: So basically what happened was, uh, Triple H and Sean were staying. Shawn Michaels were staying, and Kevin Ash and Scott Hall were leaving. So they came out to the ring and did a goodbye, where baby faces and heels in front of the New York audience said goodbye to each other. Now, that wasn't televised, so for the fans in Madison Square Garden. And I think Madison Square Garden has a house capacity of a couple 1000. So, ultimately, this was something that they could just pretend didn't happen. Whereas if you look at the Shawn Michaels and Brett Hart double cross, which is what the Montreal screw job is, that's the first time where to understand the storylines of professional wrestling, you have to understand in storyline that professional wrestling is predetermined.

49:14 Ricardo Lopes: Right, but, but I mean the screw job also ended up being one of the main, the main points of inflection in terms of creating the Mr. McMahon character.

49:26 Neal Hebert: Absolutely. So all of a sudden you've got suspension of disbelief is no longer being rigorously protected on television, and in fact, to make sense of that storyline, the only way it makes sense is if you know that the guy who was the announcer, Vince McMahon, actually owned the company. Actually rigged the match and there was a script, they didn't follow the script, and then the script was broken in front of everyone. And that is a vastly different ask of an audience than a traditional wrestling match. Do you want to,

49:56 Jon Cogburn: it would be like being John Malkovich where the John Malkovich character. Was both the character John Malkovich plays in a movie like A Dangerous Liaisons and John Malkovich. Yeah, it's just, it's a really postmodern. So that's the, that's the postmodern film. They have to track two ontologies, the shoot ontology, which is the work ontology, the shoot ontology, the work ontology is the, the, the ontology of the fiction that's being told. The shoot ontology is the ontology of the real world with economic conditions underlying it. It's so like, uh, yeah, the ring announcer says ring the bell, um. And Sean Michael, who was scripted to lose the match, wins it, and then Brett Hart, like, goes crazy and starts doing WCW. And like, what are they,

50:40 Neal Hebert: how

50:40 Jon Cogburn: can you be

50:41 Neal Hebert: a Southern fan after that, right? Like, how can you believe when, when it, when understanding the storyline presupposes that you know it's fake?

50:49 Jon Cogburn: So our, our, our, our deepest sort of like, I, I'm gonna, it sounds like I'm patting myself on the back by saying this, but I'll say insight in the book is that. The important connection between Trump and McMahon. Is 1, the universal breaking of KAB, but 2. We didn't know if like this was gonna destroy WWE. What did they do to save the brand under the conditions of Neo KFbe? And what they did, and that was the most profitable, most butts in the seats period of wrestling ever, was the after breaking KFB and the things the promotion did. That's also the period where Trump isn't, you know, um, watching it and then getting himself involved in it. So it's, it's, it's what the promotion did to profit under the conditions of Neil KFB. Trump has come along and saw. How can you succeed as a politician under the conditions of late era neoliberalism? And where neither party does what they say they're going to do, you know, whatever you vote for, you're going to get austerity. Right. Whoever you vote for, Britain is the worst case of this right now. Um, AND so like what this is fake. They're, they're not doing what they say they're gonna do. Um, THAT lack of confidence that we had at the end of the Obama administration because all the opium got smoked or snorted or whatever you do with opium. Um, YOU know, Trump sees it. It, it was a brilliant realization on his part. But what we've also realized is that the stuff Trump does and McMahon does, you see that around autocrats around the world. This is stuff that just works, um, but it's just particularly focused in WWE because it's a fictional universe interacting with the real world, and then Trump, Trump going for it.

52:36 Ricardo Lopes: So does that have anything to do with uh the fact that Trump doesn't seem to care that much about the truth? I mean that basically he can go on uh tirades that are fact-free or,

52:52 Neal Hebert: I mean, Vince did the same thing, right? Like Vince McMahon has said for, I'm not, I'm not gonna talk about this for long at all, but. After Montreal, all of a sudden the WWE when it switched to its PG era, was like, well, we're a business for kids, and it's like, if you look at the numbers, actually, they're not. They're a business for people between 35 and, and 55 or so. And the highest percentage of children watching was actually during the attitude era, which was the era you don't want kids watching wrestling. But the, the The rebranding of the company around appealing to PG audiences was based on a lie, and that lie is still regularly believed. And I know John, you have a lot to say about this too. So I'm gonna, I'll, I'll defer to you on the rest of you.

53:32 Ricardo Lopes: Let me, let me just say, I, I thought that back in the attitude era, the biggest demographic was between 18 and 35, or did I get

53:41 Neal Hebert: it was, but Because it was a boom period, every demographic was watching. Rob did something like, uh, a 9.8 in the Nielsen's for an Undertaker versus Stone Cold match, which was the highest rating of any wrestling show ever. And so, of course, like the bigger demographics were adults, but because every demographic was up, the most in terms of raw numbers was the attitude error. Um, AND it was decidedly not for kids.

54:08 Jon Cogburn: There's a, there's a political point here that's important, um. I want this like this, I may be misremembering it, but a plurality of viewers. Um, WHERE the largest demographic percentage of viewers during the attitude era were in the United States were adult men who didn't have college degrees and who voted Democrat. Now there probably are not that many adult men in the United States without college degrees that vote Democrat. And the, the promise that, uh, the storylines that WWE told is the same, is the same promise that Trump made in 2015. And so this, this ties to your question about bullshit that I'll get to, but it's a restoration of an economic social contract. So Steve, um, stone Cold Steve Austin, he punches his boss in the face. He's always defeating the billionaires in the story. All the stories that, that we remember are around that with Steve Austin, but it's also there were a lot of sexual, uh, contract with the, with the amping up of sexism. And so a certain demographic that was being dislocated by neoliberalism and offshoring jobs. That's what they wanted to watch, and there are enough of them around that the story Trump told in 2015 was the same. Now there's, there's an important academic, uh, Harry Frankfurt, amazing philosopher, wrote a book called On Bullshit. He defines bullshit as, um, saying things where the, so, so a liar respects the truth. A hypocrite respects virtue. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, because you'll only be a hypocrite because people expect you to be good. Part of Trump's perceived honesty is that he's not a hypocrite. You'll just say things that violate bourgeois morality. But the, the, the lens that people reading Frankfurt tried to read Trump through is that like, oh, he's a bullshitter. He's, um, he's saying things, he's not lying. A lying is I want to convince you of something false. A bullshitter is insensible to truth or falsity. I think that's too crude a reading of what Trump's doing. There is a Steve Bannon thing, flood the zone with bullshit. That's important. Like you just get so much information out there, nobody can tell the truth from falsehood anymore. I don't think that's what Trump's doing. Trump is telling a good story that's going to put eyes on him. He learned that from WWE. He really did that well in The Apprentice with a sort of chaotic energy, and he weaponized that in politics, bringing back a lot of the tropes from WWE. So I, I think that. You, you need this analysis of bullshit to say that often the, the, the pragmatic point of what's being accomplished with the Speech Act isn't to convince somebody of something, it's doing something else. But just saying it's bullshit doesn't analyze what it's doing for him and why it works, cause it's definitely doing something. And there's

56:55 Neal Hebert: no doubt that it does work. I, I, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna talk for long on this, but I was a teenager when Stone Cold Steve Austin was beating up his boss. I was from a rural community in Louisiana. I did not like Babyface or Good Guy pro wrestlers, but I loved Stone Cold Steve Austin, as did. Tons of adolescent male men, because all of us had had power exerted over us in a way that felt unjust, and the hero figure of Steve Austin gave us a sense of the world as it should be. All right, go back, John. What,

57:27 Jon Cogburn: what, what, what, what was Bill Clinton saying at the same time? Like he, he would go to these communities where the, um, the factory had been offshored, right, and the Chinese took our jobs, so they didn't. The Mexicans take our jobs. We sent them over there and we gave them our jobs, and he would tell them like, um, oh well, you're going to be retrained for something, so you. Go to school for like HVAC, but like a small town with no industrial base doesn't need 100 HVAC engineers or that the worst was the creative class. Everyone's gonna program, like everyone's going to design web pages in HTML. That's not an economic base for a country. We've kept it going because people have not many dollars, right? People buy oil with dollars so we could go consumerist, and this is for the, you know, we'll talk about neoliberalism more later, I hope. But, um, at the same time. The jobs are going overseas and you have a lot of like deaths of despair in the United States. Um, THE political class. Wasn't addressing at all, like, uh, the Republicans, oh, we just need to cut taxes more and the government's the problem. Um, Clinton. You know, we're gonna be this creative class, and it's, it's the professional management class who were the bosses of the people of these towns. That boss class is being patted on the back by a party that represents them. During this time, the most popular entertainment is somebody who's punching the. Boss, and it's no accident. And again, it's, it's the restoration of the, of the previous 1950s sexual contract, which is very hierarchical and sexist, you know, really bad. Um, LOOK at how many American women were institutionalized or, you know, on, on, on serious antipsychotic drugs to treat their menopause, you know. When, when I, when I was a kid, you would drive in a, in a rest stop and you'd see older women and their lower jaws would just be moving free like this. That's tardive dyskinesia. Which is a side effect of antipsychotic drugs which were wildly prescribed to miserable housewives during that sexual contract. But, you know, some sort of longing for that, but plus the New Deal economic contract that was ripped away by both parties. And again, that's what Trump ran on. He didn't govern on it. The fact that he didn't govern on it and still got re-elected the second time tells you that like, um. The power to just To have politics be replaced by something where you're just punishing enemies is incredibly powerful. And people will vote against their own economic interests to at least get that, and that's what you've done when you've given up all hope.

59:59 Neal Hebert: And, and the second, the second time Trump got elected, he was very adamant. He's like, no, Project 2025 is not what I'm going to do. Then immediately institutes it, right? That's why, but

1:00:08 Jon Cogburn: he ran on retribution.

1:00:10 Neal Hebert: He did. He did. And but

1:00:11 Jon Cogburn: he

1:00:12 Neal Hebert: didn't run

1:00:12 Jon Cogburn: on the second time.

1:00:14 Neal Hebert: I think that's why his approval rating is so low right now is because in the, the second time he ran, he delivered on the retribution, but he did not deliver on the other stuff that he promised. Yeah,

1:00:24 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, yeah, no, no, before we go on, let me just say that. I mean, back in the attitude era with the Mr. McMahon character and all of that because you were talking about uh Steve Austin punching him in the face. I, I mean, the fun, uh, the most fun part was uh uh Steve Austin stunning Mr. McMahon, but, but, but Vince McMahon should have learned to sell the stunner better because. He was actually a bad, a very bad seller of the stunner. I mean, the best one was The Rock and Mr. Vince McMahon was really, really bad at selling the sun.

1:01:02 Neal Hebert: Vince never wanted to be a character until he had to be a character. In the 80s, he, he, uh, I heard an interview with, uh, Ted DiBiase talking about when he got pitched the Million Dollar Man gimmick. And Pat Patterson, who was Vince's number one guy, told, told Ted, he's like, look, we can't tell you what the gimmick is until you sign, but it's so good Vince McMahon would lace up the boots to do it himself if he could. And that's how, and that's, so Ted DiBiase just called his wife and said, I don't know what's about to happen, but it's about to be big, cause I've been told we're only flying first class from here on out to preserve the illusion. So Vince knew he wasn't a good wrestler. Like he, he wanted to be a wrestler, but it wasn't until the, the Montreal screw job, which actually he, he did a test run of the McMahon character in Memphis, uh, before he became Mr. McMahon with Jerry Lawlor when he hired Lawlor. Um, HE was the evil WWE owner, and apparently he had the time of his life doing it. So when it came time to make the jump. You know, he knew he wouldn't be able to get it done in the ring, but he happened to be in the ring against some of the greatest professional wrestlers the world had, uh the American world had ever seen. So the Rock and Austin could carry him, but you're absolutely right, his stunner sucked. Like, you didn't watch Vince McMahon wrestle because it was gonna be a good match. The, the draw was something very different.

1:02:24 Ricardo Lopes: By the way, you mentioned Pat Patterson. It just came to mind because of the, because of the Epstein files. I mean, was that thing about the pedophile ring ever confirmed, or?

1:02:37 Neal Hebert: It depends on what you mean by confirmed. Um, DID a court of law find him guilty? I don't believe it.

1:02:46 Jon Cogburn: That poor kid killed himself, didn't he?

1:02:47 Neal Hebert: Uh, THE kid killed, the kid ended up committing.

1:02:49 Jon Cogburn: Josie Reisman talks about this and like, um, oh, when they got him not to press charges.

1:02:54 Neal Hebert: They settled. They settled with the kid,

1:02:57 Jon Cogburn: but then the McMahons were like the way they treated this kid was, is horrific.

1:03:01 Neal Hebert: It's monstrous. And I wanna say the, the only fallout that Pat Patterson had is they fired him for a year until the heat went down, then they brought him back, cause Pat Patterson was the guy who booked the Royal Rumble. Um, THAT was his signature match because Patterson came out of the San Francisco circuit, and the big matches in San Francisco were, I believe that was under Roy Shire. I could be wrong about that, but this in, in. California, where Patterson was from, the biggest event of the year was a giant battle royal. So that,

1:03:31 Jon Cogburn: we should tell the listeners about the scandal, and I want to be careful because it's so sensitive. But so, so correct me. So Pat Patterson, was he a booker? What was his?

1:03:39 Neal Hebert: He was Vince McMahon's basically number 2 guy. So he was, if you, if you followed wrestling during the attitude era, he was Jim Ross before Jim Ro

1:03:46 Jon Cogburn: the

1:03:46 Neal Hebert: ringing

1:03:46 Jon Cogburn: boys doing during this period.

1:03:48 Neal Hebert: The ring boys were setting up the ring, and allegedly they would get, they would trade sexual favors for um exposure. That is the allegation. It was never proven in a court of law, so I, I am not speaking to whether that actually happened. The court case was settled, but one of the people that they settled with ended up committing suicide, and it was widely rumored in the industry that this was what was going on, but It never went to a court of law. It was never established as a matter of fact. That's why I'm trying to be very precise

1:04:20 Ricardo Lopes: about. I mean, we're going to come back to that later, but I mean there were many performers that were heavily damaged by WWE. I mean, you have, for example, China. Ashley Massaro, who just recently, I don't know if

1:04:38 Neal Hebert: it was 2020, tragic, like what happened,

1:04:41 Ricardo Lopes: no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I, I mean even China, I mean, I remember back in 2015, Vince Russo interviewing her for his YouTube channel because they were close friends and I, I, I mean she was a mess because she never got closure from that Triple H thing and the way she was treated. By WWE and so on, and she very sadly ended up passing from an overdose, an overdose in 2016. So, you know,

1:05:11 Neal Hebert: and, and I mean, it's something that, you know, people might not be aware of, but the wrestling business for a very long time, um, when we, when people say wrestling is fake, what, what they mean is it's predetermined because there's never a safe way to take a bump. Like, you can do it as safely as possible and distribute your weight across your body, but physically, The doing wrestling is a huge physical toll. And back in the 80s and 90s, the house, the house show schedule, those are untelevised shows, they would work five or six, in some cases, 5 days a week, taking these bumps, getting hurt, even two

1:05:47 Jon Cogburn: days a week is too much. Yeah,

1:05:49 Neal Hebert: and the only way your body could take that for a lot of people who weren't physically gifted is they would start doing steroids, not just For cosmetics, but because steroids are used to heal injuries quickly. But then,

1:06:01 Jon Cogburn: but then like Vince would only book the biggest people. Yeah, they would have to take way more steroids, and so many wrestlers thought like Eddie Guerrero, we, we talk about this in the book, like, uh, you know, they, they take human growth hormone and steroids, and then the heart just like.

1:06:14 Neal Hebert: And I'm working on, I've got an in process paper I'm working on where you can explicitly connect steroid invention with the Cold War. Like it was viewed as a necessary thing to combat Russia, synthesizing uh fake testosterone. Because the, the guy who invented anabolic steroids said, no, this is patriotism. We have to produce athletes that can rival these medicated Russians. Um, SO even then, like the, the use of steroids in the way McMahon would end up using it was the subtext the entire time that the Nazis

1:06:46 Jon Cogburn: had similar compounds because of the, the rec book we read, which is the guy making fun of, he died in a camp, but like one of the, it's very much like a super soldiers, um, but like he, um. He, he comments on the German athletes in the Olympics, like being the paradigms of masculinity but being impotent because of the chemicals they were given. There,

1:07:07 Neal Hebert: there was, yeah, I know when it came time for the Russians to use it, there were people who were so steroided up to use the bathroom, they had to catheterize their, their, uh, genitals. And that is, that, that's a fact. Like they were, I,

1:07:21 Ricardo Lopes: I mean, in the, in the, in the Rocky saga, what was the movie where he fights the Russian guy? Is it

1:07:28 Jon Cogburn: Rocky?

1:07:29 Neal Hebert: It's 2, yeah, it's got to be 2 because

1:07:32 Jon Cogburn: I have a Drago. I,

1:07:35 Neal Hebert: yeah, yeah, Drago,

1:07:36 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, no, because I was just thinking that in that movie they even depict the Russian guy, I mean them injecting things into his body and then Rocky just doing all natural kind of on or whatever, yeah,

1:07:50 Jon Cogburn: yeah, yeah, but, but the, the McMahon like could have lost it all in. A lawsuit, um, I guess like, uh, his role in providing the wrestlers with steroids and the fact that they felt like they had to do it.

1:08:05 Neal Hebert: And McMahon believed he was going to lose. He actually approached Jerry Jarrett, who was the guy that co-ran Memphis for a long time. He brought in Jarrett to be his number 2 in case he went to federal prison. So that was the plan was that if he went to federal prison, Jerry Jarrett, who'd run, and Memphis stylistically was the closest you could get to WWE without it being WWE, um, that was the guy that was gonna take it over because McMahon was convinced he was going to jail.

1:08:32 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, I mean, but so many wrestlers died in their 40s. Um, IT'S because of drug, but when you make them do that multiple times a week, like, it's, you know, and then you make them have like, These ridiculous bodybuilder bodies, um, it's, it's just not a recipe for long life. It's amazing Hulk Hogan lived as long as he did. I mean, it's,

1:08:51 Neal Hebert: it's like until they

1:08:53 Jon Cogburn: he's a real outlier, like so many of them died in their

1:08:55 Neal Hebert: 40s, until the crackdown on, um, steroids that happened after the, the murder-suicide incident with Chris Benoit and, uh, a year after the death of Eddie Guerrero. Um, I want to say something like more than 50 people who wrestled in the 80s and 90s died before the age of 50 just because of uh opiate abuse and steroid abuse. They had enlarged hearts and would frequently suffer heart attacks. And we,

1:09:18 Jon Cogburn: we were watching some old WWE or, or WrestleManias and like talking off how many of them had died. It was, it was, it was so grim. You could literally

1:09:28 Neal Hebert: talk about are dead now from drug use.

1:09:30 Ricardo Lopes: But even nowadays sometimes there are some questionable things because for example, when, when Randy Orton came back at Survivor Series 2023, I mean he was much, much, much bigger than it was before and many people questioned many. QUESTION, I mean, isn't he taking steroids and the same with AJ Stiles when he came back for his final run?

1:09:54 Neal Hebert: I believe, I believe, I do not know this. I believe both companies, AEW, All Elite Wrestling, and World Wrestling Entertainment, no longer test for steroids regularly. Mm, I, that is my belief based on the appearance of certain people and the way appearances change. Uh, I do not have proof of that, but I, I believe they no longer have a wellness policy governing that. They, their wellness policy covers other things, but I believe they are no longer worried about anabolic steroid usage the way they were.

1:10:21 Jon Cogburn: And there, you know, there's no chemicals all the, all the time, like, um.

1:10:26 Neal Hebert: Uh, HUMAN growth hormones, our new,

1:10:29 Jon Cogburn: I gotta make clear that any political things I say are not, don't represent LSU, but like our new Chancellor Dalton, who's been the provost of, of, uh, Alabama, he's, uh, he's a brilliant, like, uh, pharmacology guide. He designed a chemical that's really useful for, um. People on um. People getting chemotherapy that lose muscle mass and it prevents them from losing muscle mass. A bunch of Olympic athletes tested for this drug that he designed years ago because you lose muscle mass when you take, uh, whatever the semaglutides to lose weight. And so they think people are taking them now with the glutides. This pill that's, that's really, really life-saving for cancer patients. People are taking it and so the, the. People in sports are really good at like tracking what the brilliant chemists and come up with and thinking, can we do this and then you get ahead of it. So I, it's possible there's still, I mean, you know way more about this, you know, it's possible they're still doing it, but But I mean there are there are people there that know about the new chemicals that aren't testing for them if they're pushing for that body size.

1:11:36 Neal Hebert: One of the people I cite a lot in my work is the journalist Dave Meltzer, who's the longest tenured journalist covering pro wrestling, and he also was the earliest journalist that covered ultimate fighting. And one of the things he's been consistent on in combat sports is that it is their, their drug testing regime is an intelligence test, um, for an for an athlete. Like you can beat any drug test if you are. Capable of understanding how you are being tested and what you're I'm sorry though,

1:12:04 Jon Cogburn: like when, when they started the wellness policy after the Chris Benoit thing, it was so good. A few months passed and then you got back and people had smooth muscles. You didn't see any knee, and they look like human beings and they can move much better. The wrestling got better. So that's, you know, the, the, I think like some steroid used to heal like that's a, it's a medicine, right? But you didn't have like, like McMahon really pushed people to be like just big and You know, big and immobile.

1:12:30 Neal Hebert: It, it's, it's why when I talk, when people talk about the WWE style, it was a simpler style because simply because the guys didn't move that well, and they had to rely more on psychology and things like that in the matches. Um, THAT'S what my dissertation is on, by the way, it was on the, the use of style in pro wrestling and dance, and I did a lot of interdisciplinary work between philosophy of dance and wrestling. But I, I mean, I think when you talk about the way people are training now, if they are using steroids, I believe there are some people that are using them cosmetically, but I believe most people are using them so they can have more athletic matches and then recover. Because especially with, with no more house shows and, and wrestlers wrestling maybe 2 times a month in some companies, um, you can go a lot crazier in those big matches and then recover. That was how they did it in Japan, because all Japan and New Japan. The touring system in the 90s in Japan, when you had those amazing matches being done in all Japan pro wrestling with like Doctor Death, Steve Williams, Mitsuharu Musawa, Toshiki Kawata, those guys, after every tour, they would go crazy in the last night of the tour because that was usually Kurakan Hall or the Budokan or whatever big place. And then they had three weeks off where they rested. And that's why they could do the physical style they did because they weren't doing the WWE style of 5 days a week wrestling every day.

1:13:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I, and I mean we were talking about how the performers are basically mistreated by WWE. There was also, and I think it at least to some extent it also applied to the Chris Benoit case. There were also the CTE cases, the chronic traumatic encephalopathy cases. I mean with the chair, the chair shots to the head that nowadays shots. Yeah, now, now, nowadays they're, Ben, but, but, but I mean, you, you know what, there are some performers right now that should be a little bit more careful because I don't know if you, I don't know if you've been watching like EO Sky matches recently, but even she's the best in the world. Yeah, but

1:14:30 Neal Hebert: she's, she's taking unnecessary. Risks with those dives.

1:14:33 Ricardo Lopes: No, those suicide dives. I mean just recently in matches against Kyrie and so on, she fell on her neck two or three times that. I mean, I mean, I mean,

1:14:48 Jon Cogburn: even, yeah,

1:14:50 Ricardo Lopes: go ahead. No, go ahead. The

1:14:52 Jon Cogburn: ties to our book is that, um, you know, a lot of this is the political history is late era neoliberalism. And McMahon benefited immensely from the changes in like anti-monopoly regulation, yeah, the way you can lard up a company you buy with the debt and close it, you know, private equity type abuses, um, and, and this had a, this, this hurt wrestlers so bad, um, because the old system, there was a cartel. And basically, Chicago libertarians took over the federal government for anti-monopoly regulations. Um, CARTELS were managed like monopolies, so the federal government enforced, if you work with the promotion, they couldn't sign you to a unique contract. Because is it AWA very wrestling was it was a cartel,

1:15:38 Neal Hebert: I believe it was the NWA in the, in the consent agreement for antitrust laws in the 19 late 1940s, early 1950s. Yeah,

1:15:47 Jon Cogburn: so, so when, when McMahon, he's not part of that. And he's using the possibilities that allow you to make monopolies now. The fact that the cartel was under the older monopoly thing allowed McMahon to have a huge advantage because he could go in, poach the best wrestlers, and sign them to a unique contract where they couldn't wrestle with anyone else, but none of the members of the cartel could sign them to the contracts. So he, he, it was a brilliant thing. He benefited from anti-monopoly law to establish an effective monopoly. WCW came out, they lost. Now AEW is up, so. It's not quite a total monopoly, but in that time period, I forget, this may be Reisman's book, she tracks the amount of money wrestlers made in real dollars, the average wrestler. And under the cartel system they made a lot more didn't they wrestlers, like even jobbers made a living wage and had enough to take care of their own healthcare and stuff, and it just radically goes down and it's barely a living wage. You're doing something really dangerous and you don't have health insurance, and it's one company that's like um gaining all those profits and taking it for itself and giving a lot of money to Donald Trump along the way. Um, BUT, but it was the, this, this neoliberal allowing of a big monopoly, he, he literally like, uh, took advantage of the, of the last vestiges of real anti-monopoly. You know, immiserate the employees. The employees are much worse off. And Ricardo,

1:17:16 Neal Hebert: I think I know the question you're about to ask, by the way. Ask, ask the question. I bet it's, I, I bet I know what it is.

1:17:22 Ricardo Lopes: OK. I was going to ask, do they even have retirement plans?

1:17:25 Neal Hebert: No, because that is the exact question I thought you were gonna ask. Because of the way that wrestling contracts work, wrestlers are technically considered independent contractors. However, Independent contractors, real independent contractors in, in the United States under the law, uh, they are not required to work exclusively for one company. So, an independent contractor might not get employee benefits, but they have so many clients that they're able to get competitive rates and basically use the market to pay for themselves. Wrestlers are the opposite. They're signed to exclusive contracts unless you're in AEW all elite wrestling, which has a Promotional agreement like the cartel system with uh CMLL in Mexico, New Japan Pro Wrestling, Tokyo Tokyo Joshi Pro, GCW, and I think PWG right now. They own Ring of Honor now, right? And they own Ring of Honor. But so those guys can go between any of the cartel promotions, uh, but for the most part in WWE you are signed to an exclusive contract. You can't even do film work without the express consent of the WWE. So they're. Deemed legally independent contractors, but they do not get retirement, they do not get health insurance, um, and they don't get any, uh, they have to budget for themselves. Whereas, I, I wanna say, in, I believe what, what industry insiders have said, like Sean Rosssap, Dave Meltzer, uh, Mike Johnson, etc. IS that ever since AEW has become the 2nd largest and most successful wrestling promotion of all time, wrestler pay has gone away. Up because all of a sudden, WWE has to bid competitively for people. And what we found is that a lot of people will take less money to go to WWE if they grew up watching wrestling and want a WrestleMania moment. And WWE factors in that nostalgia into their deals, whereas AEW typically pays more because they don't have that nostalgia connection. But we're getting the First generation of people now who've come up that want to be in AEW because when they were teenagers, they were watching AEW. Techla, their women's champion, was like, she's, she's a punk, she's really into punk rock. She's also a visual artist who has her own exhibitions and stuff in Florida, and she's like, Oh yeah, since I was a teenager, I've wanted to be an AEW. So we're starting to see it change a little bit.

1:19:41 Ricardo Lopes: Wait a minute. How, how old is she? Because AEW 7. Oh, because I believe started 7 years ago, so, uh,

1:19:50 Neal Hebert: yeah, I, I, I'm gonna double check that online real quick, uh, but I believe she is mid-20s. Um, WELL, she's 33, she's 33. OK, so I might be wrong. Um, WHAT she was watching allegedly was that at least in interviews, she said, so I'm wrong about her age, she's 33, but she did not have that emotional connection to WWE. She grew up in Austria watching, um, local wrestling, European wrestling, and then Japanese wrestling.

1:20:16 Jon Cogburn: Yes, I mean, economically it's weird. I think that we don't quite have this figured out because Because I think Cory Doctorow has this, we don't go into this in the book, he has this doctor of in shitification about how like, um, You know, you can, if you have enough of a monopoly or a cartel, you can basically extract rents by making treating the labor worse, making the product worse, because people don't, that usually happens in the United States when the barriers of entries are too high. So there used to be anti-monopoly about, um, uh, radio stations. You can only own so many radio stations. When they took that off, Clear Channel did the WWE thing and went and took over most of the radio stations. The buried entry to start a newspaper radio station is so hard. It's so high that I can, I can buy a newspaper for $20 million and then like, uh, 80% of the debt can be offloaded onto the thing I bought. And then nobody else is going to start a new newspaper, so I can make it like horrible, treat the labor. I could take the reporters, make it the older reporters. I can't fire them. That's not legal, but I can make them go work in the advertising room until they quit. And I cannot cut all the coverage. This is what you got because we live in a, in monopoly. Nobody's enforcing anti-monopoly laws.

1:21:32 Neal Hebert: And shout out to philosopher Angela Black for pointing this out about radio in the 90s. She, she on social media talked about this, I think, uh, before Doctorow was in shittification because I remember I read it, some comment she wrote. I said, man, remember when radio used to be good?

1:21:46 Jon Cogburn: And she said, Do I think that likeification. He thinks at some point the thing like. Will die. I'm not convinced that these things cannot just go on for zombies forever as long as you can keep the barrier to entry to competitor gone through like the the liberal playbook. But so it's, so it's really strange that if you look at other industries. That WCW was a thing or that AEW. What we're seeing is like this is circuses for the masses funded by billionaires. So like, uh, Ted Turner could start WCW. The barrier to entry wasn't too high.

1:22:19 Neal Hebert: And if you're watching WWE right now, the bread isn't even that good, right? We're getting our bread and circuses, and uh Ricardo and John and I were talking before this. It's a lot of WWE fans right now at the time of this interview, which is May 5th, for sorry to, sorry to, but we're not

1:22:33 Jon Cogburn: getting that much bread. We're getting circuses. Yeah, we're, we're

1:22:35 Neal Hebert: getting the circuses, but they're kind of crappy circuses, and the bread sucks. Yeah.

1:22:38 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, you, you have to pay too much for the tickets and so on. I mean, it's just insane, but anyway, let, let me ask you about this because I get a, a bit, it's a bit weird, uh uh I mean, at least for people who haven't read your book, but why is it that the stroke of the strong man as buffoon, er works?

1:23:02 Jon Cogburn: I think this is one of the hardest things, and we don't, you know, we have sort of 4 tropes that were at WWE that are characteristic of authoritarianism. And as academics, you know, We're, we're interested in truth and we want to understand what's going on. Um, WE, we think that these, these came in WWE. Trump got them through WWE, but they also characterize authoritarianism and the global rise of authoritarianism. It's just Trump was really good at it, and so was Mr. McMahon. So one is cynicism, which we talked about like the OK thing. This is all fake, but I, I, you know, I, I'll tell you that I'm a con man. And you're in on the con with me and we're gonna take these other marks. Everyone can't do that. That's a pyramid scheme. It, it collapses, but whatever, people, that's the reality. Uh, THEN there's

1:23:46 Ricardo Lopes: sexism we've already talked about, yeah, yeah.

1:23:49 Jon Cogburn: So on the buffoonery, uh, this was the hardest one that we had a hard time understanding, and I'll, I'll hand it off to Neil in a second, um, to talk about Vic Man and, and, and, and, and Trump, but the, uh, why would this be effective politically. And I think there's, there's, it's actually there are multiple reasons, um. And, and you see it, we, we look at Hitler was ridiculous, and people made fun of him in very much the same way that Stephen Colbert made fun of, uh, makes fun of Trump. Um, SO there's, there's one aspect that we don't go through the book so much. Take like, uh, the British Epstein, Jimmy Seville, right? He weaponized his own weirdness. Yeah, right. And so, it it, it had two things. One, he seemed less harmful. People could dismiss what he was doing, but 2, he could get away with a lot more, and he could test how much he could get away with. And so I think like uh people are exploitative. Tend to have an ability to. The weirdness is a really powerful superpower. And if you, if you read about Seville, like he, he was the British Epstein, like, you know, just as much. So, um, but also there's, there's a thing that strong men do. Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes. Or your lying eyes. So when Trump first came in, he had Sean Spicer go out and say these were the biggest crowds forever, right? That's part of what authoritarians do. It's so Trump, who's like very feminine, we could talk about that, um, curvy makeup, cemented comb over, hugging flags, dancing to YMCA. He's very funny in the way he talks, like, like, this is ridiculous. There's a little bit of that, like if that's your strong man, you're gonna believe a lot of other stuff. Yeah, but also like. The psychic connection with the strong man. If I am Isa, I feel humiliated. If I am an unemployed steel worker, and Bill Clinton comes to town and tells me I'm gonna succeed because I'll get low-interest loans to learn to program web pages. That's a horrific humiliation. You might as well just spit at me, right? And so I feel humiliated. So I look at Stephen Colbert making fun of Trump, and he's my avatar. And so I wish I had a, Neil and I are thinking about this. We had a clear theory that tied all these things together. It's very effective. And so we see Trump or McMahon doing it when he reinvented himself as the evil boss. The, the psychic revenge on the boss is him being humiliated. And so Trump's kind of seeing this, um, so I don't know. Do you want to talk about it in WWE? ARE there any questions?

1:26:40 Neal Hebert: We've already kind of talked about the WWE aspect. So a thing I've kind of just realized now in this conversation that I want to bring up is there's another important precursor. To the buffoonery of Trump and McMahon that we haven't talked about, and that's Louisiana politics own Edwin Edwards, um, which Ricardo Huey Long before Huey Long before him. So Ricardo, I know you're from Portugal, so I'm gonna keep this brief. Uh, IN, in Louisiana, we had a beloved governor named Edwin Edwards who went to jail for, uh, I believe bribery and fraud, and, um, he actually ran against a Republican candidate who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And the slogan for that election was, vote for the crook, it's important. Um, BECAUSE it was either a felon or an outright racist. And I think that part of Trump's appeal is that he's the honest liar. He's honest about the fact that he's gonna lie to you. And we can trust him to lie. And because we can trust him in that way, he is therefore more trustworthy than most other politicians, because at least he's honest about it.

1:27:43 Jon Cogburn: OK, I, I just, I don't know,

1:27:46 Neal Hebert: John, do you think I'm crazy for finding that connection? It, it might be the case that I am. I don't know.

1:27:51 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, I'm sure I could think of like Earl Long or Huey Long and, and stories.

1:27:54 Neal Hebert: And they both, they both fit into that story too, of the, of the, the Honest Liar. And I wonder if Trump is, his appeals partly drawn on something that, that, you know, cause in Louisiana, politics is sports. Uh, Wayne Parent's book, he's a, a, a professor emeritus at LSU, he talks about it in his books analyzing Southern or Louisiana politics is that we view it like a sports game. And, uh, what's more sporting than pro wrestling.

1:28:18 Jon Cogburn: I mean there's a famous thing where like Earl had promised a tax cut or something and they came to him and say, well, what are we gonna tell these people he said this to him. He was like, oh, tell him I lied. Yeah, you know, there's a great book by AJ Liebling called The Earl of Louisiana about, um, about, about Earl Long and so, yeah, the, the, they, they, they both were like, uh, both Long's and Edward Edwards, you know, and, and, and Edward, you know, like. He would Edwards in that election, he would compare himself to Jesus. He would start to, he would say that, tell them that one arose from among you and use all this language. The press gave him, and in front of the Press Club of Louisiana, he stood up on a chair. He got a bottle of ketchup. He put it on his palms, and he rubbed it on his side. He did this. And like he still got elected in Roman Catholic Louisiana. Yeah, right, it's wild. There's, there's, yeah, there's, there's, there's, you know, I don't know, like Neil and I have like a soft spot for the Longs and uh, yeah, I know,

1:29:15 Neal Hebert: like your uncle, your dad,

1:29:17 Jon Cogburn: your

1:29:17 Neal Hebert: grandfather worked with that. Yeah, my grandpa was the, was one of the, uh, the local bosses of, of the Long Democratic Party. My grandpa had a 2nd grade education, was a field hand, but Because of Long's unionism and stuff like that, Papa got elected. So, you know, when, when Papa died, the Long family sent flowers. Edwin Edwards sent flowers. So apparently they held me when I was a baby at some point.

1:29:40 Jon Cogburn: So he's from Chanton, Louisiana.

1:29:42 Neal Hebert: Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm

1:29:43 Jon Cogburn: as the insane asylum where the Marquis de Sade was,

1:29:46 Neal Hebert: was, yeah, I'm from the, I'm from a rural community called Sherington, which was named after the insane asylum where the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned after the French Revolution. Um, BUT you know, like that.

1:29:56 Ricardo Lopes: Well, I, I mean, I will have to look up all of that later. I mean, but, but, but no, no, no, I was just worried because we have like 30 more minutes and we've been, we've been talking, we've been talking a lot and I, I want to cover at least 3 more topics and then we also have to schedule our next interview just to talk

1:30:18 Neal Hebert: about a pay per view event or something like watching AEW. Pay per view event and then just have a talk about it because I think a lot of the stuff we talk about in the background of the book, we could, we could really show people how it's instantiated in current wrestling even though it's not WWE. I just don't want to watch. I want

1:30:34 Jon Cogburn: a grand unified theory of wrestle rap, so

1:30:36 Ricardo Lopes: that's, well, well, maybe we will have to make you go through the pain of watching, uh, WWE, WWE pay per view, yeah, because I mean we're talking about WWE here. We have to keep it, uh. Uh, I mean in the, in the, in the within the topic, so I mean, let, let me ask you, because there's a 4th trope that you identify in your book having to do with authoritarian regimes and uh pro wrestling or WWE more specifically, that has to do with conspiracy theories. So what role do they play in politics and in Donald Trump's politics specifically?

1:31:19 Jon Cogburn: You what's, what's key to conspiracy theory. Is that Um, but there are true conspiracies like. You know, like Nixon, probably the Epstein with the, you know, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, um, the Iran hostages under Reagan. These were conspiracies. That's not a conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory, um, explains a lot of stuff that bothers you in terms of a tiny cabal of actors. And, um, you know, the, the sort of Marxist position is to look at, um, the, the, the structural conditions in the, in the economics and politics that lead to bad things. The sort of like conspiracy theoristists to look at one person. Now, the hard thing, and Neil and I argued about this a lot, look, like, how much power does one person have? Like, Would Amazon still have existed without Bezos, and there just be another Bezos? Probably like the a lot led towards monopolization politically in the United States. So a conspiracy is like this idea, it's the, the, the, the great man theory of history. On steroids, right, and there's, there's a, there's a reason for that that we go into with, um, probability theory, um, you know, which, what, what, I won't go on to here because it, it, it gets a little too, I'm more interested in what we might, might do about this, which gets us about the Klein Duhan problem we could talk about it in our, in our book. So, so it's, you know, like, like we, the some of the book like Will Summer's book on conspiracy on QAnon conspiracy theory. This stuff is nuts what these people believe. It makes no sense. Like, there's hundreds of thousands of mole scrutiny. Yeah, there's, there's, there's mole children living underground who are tortured and harvested for the adrennochrome that allows people to live forever, and they're cloned. John Kennedy Jr. IS going to come back on a certain day, and all the Democrats are going to be like be killed, and there are all these predictions that are supposedly cue drops or someone with a Q intelligence clearance, they never come to pass. And a lot of people don't give them up. And when people follow these conspiracies, especially during COVID. They would like, like a cult, push away a lot of their friends, the normal people of their life. So there's a lot going on here. Fox News is a problem because like, reliably people have less true beliefs that are, you know, if you believe that there were that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, people who watch Fox News believe that. If you believe that human beings don't cause global warming, Fox News believed that. If you believe that Biden stole the election, Fox News, so that's part of it like we're we're in. You know, like, starting with lies about global warming and things like this, people became, you know, like, uh, programmed to be, you know, to, to believe falsehoods. But how do you get to this theory that there's a, a small cabal of, of, of insiders, usually Jewish, in the conspiracy theory, um, anti-Semitism will crop up in any ideology, um, and who are like controlling everything and You know, so, so that's, that's what a conspiracy theory is. Now, one of the things, this is the most important first thing that, um, oh, I forgot, I just named the author. I named him earlier who wrote this book on Will Summers, great journalist. Will Summers, yeah, the people he interviewed in QAO, the whole thing is around like. The cabal to abuse and torture children, right now, the weird thing is like that actually existed with Jimmy Saville. That actually existed with Jeff Epstein. Most of them weren't concerned about that. It's this weird thing with like a pizza restaurant in the basement that doesn't exist.

1:34:55 Ricardo Lopes: They weren't concerned and they're still not concerned, at least some of them.

1:35:00 Jon Cogburn: They, yeah, it's, it's split down with Epstein. They've lost some of the people because Epstein just was from central casting for a conspiracy. But what Will Summer realizes is that Almost without fail, the women he talked to that were pulled in conspiracy theories, and the men, one of two things happened. And they're Americans. They were crushed by medical debt because we don't have socialized medicine in the United States. And if you get cancer and your insurance company screws you over, like our dear friend Helen De Cruz, who, who died and medicated, um, recently, um, you know, some of these people that aren't covered or they don't have insurance coverage or aren't, they get debt, and it's very hard to discharge that debt under bankruptcy. Thank you, Joe Biden because he made bankruptcy harder to, to get uh with student loan debt. So that's one thing. The other thing was they were victims of sexual abuse as children, but the sexual abuse was always, um, there was never a shadowy cabal. It was almost in every case, either at church or family friends or family members. That's a very hard thing to face if your husband or your boyfriend, so about this is, this is horrific, but about one in 20 men, uh, sexually assault women. The average number of women they assault are 5 women, right? That's. That's a plurality of voters right there, that could shift in the election. But also the people in their lives that have to live with them and convince themselves these are good people, there's tremendous cognitive dissonance dealing with that kind of trauma when you're stuck in a society where the church is doing this, or you're homeschooled, and the homeschooling is to keep anyone adult from seeing the abuse that you're suffering. Yeah. Lots of people escape it, but lots of people don't. They stay in those societies. And what Will Sommer found is the ubiquity of, of badly handled sexual abuse in the United States, and the ubiquity of medical debt. The way people, these were the people who are the biggest victims of conspiracy theories that tells you a made up story that explains your suffering, because you can't face the real cause of it, and the real causes that are structural. You know, uh, neoliberalism, what we've, you know, privatizing medicine, you know, so conspiracies served to some extent, uh, of, you know, a, a, a, a ruling class to keep people from facing their own bases. Now, how does this tie to WWE? The storylines under, under the attitude, we go into a long one, we won't go into here, where it's, it's like, A year at least where you finally end up that like it's McMahon takes off the list and he's been behind all the all the time, the higher power, the higher power storyline. So, so, um,

1:37:47 Ricardo Lopes: that storyline was in 1999,

1:37:50 Neal Hebert: 1999. It was, yeah,

1:37:52 Jon Cogburn: but Trump was constantly the people around Trump they're constantly. You know, it's, and it's very interesting because Marjorie Taylor Greene was probably. The most, you know, cheesebrained on QAnon, um, person in the American life, she has, to her immense credit, she has turned on Trump over the the Epstein cover-up. So, you know, don't, you know, a lot of Dems like we can't talk to her or whatever, like, come on, have some respect. That was immensely difficult for her. She had to like turn away from like tons of people in her life, uh, to do this, so. Um, BUT, but Trump was really skilled and the people around him at like not going all in for the cue on but saying things that were coded to keep them along, then it would go to the queue drops. People around him were really aware of this and, and doing this. And so part of that support was conspiracism. He wasn't as explicit. I don't know. I mean, um. You know, I, I don't know if Salazar, Franco or Hitler, these kinds of dictators, um, I, I, I should know Salazar more than we're talking about Portuguese, and I'm really interested with you if like the living memory of that maybe inoculates the Portuguese against some of these things or the Spanish or the Germans. Um, PART of the problem is though, there's a theory that every 70 years society gets stupid because nobody remembers the previous trauma. Nobody was alive for the previous trauma. And that's why you get like really dumb foreign policy 70 years after a bad war. So, so, but like Hitler, like, yeah, you, it's anti-Semitism, you're blaming the Jews. It's a small cabal. And so, um, um, anyway, this, this seems to be a way. Uh, I'll try to keep this quick, but like, uh, When, when it's harder to extract profits, what do you do? If you're an empire, you do Foco's pendulum. You extract the profits from your own people, and they don't get the, the wage from vampire anymore. That's what neoliberalism was. All the stuff we did after World War II coming home. That's the theory, one theory of neoliberalism. Um, AND so, You know, but, but when, when people are getting poorer. The liberals have a choice, because the liberals are committed to two things historically, one, absolute negative liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of thought. But also they're committed to continued capital accumulation, accumulation of profits. When those two things fight each other. So for social stabilities, liberals will make a deal with the left. That's what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the United States with, with Wallace as his vice president, and we avoided fascism because the liberals and the left worked together. It was different in Austria. Dolphus, I forget his name, the Austrian, oh God, president, prime minister. He put artillery on two blocks of Vienna. To defeat the left Right? And then the Nazis come and kill him. And that's a mistake liberals always make, that when, when profits go down, they've got a choice between continued profit accumulation or commitment to negative liberties. You can't have negative liberties without positive liberties. There's great philosophers on this critiquing libertarianism, but they will give up positive rights. So Roosevelt, the four freedoms, one of those was freedom from want. Right. And there's pictures of this. Look up Roosevelt's four freedoms, but freedom from all was smart. He was a liberal, but he brought. He redefined a positive liberty, a positive right as a negative right. It's freedom from want. So liberals had to support the left under Roosevelt, and we had a New Deal that that kept us from going fascist or communist. Churchill actually did some similar things weirdly in England, the, the, the, the empire. So, um, so as a liberal, you go with the, you, you give up your commitment to negative liberties and then you support fascists to keep extracting profits. And how do you do that? How do you convince people to do that? Conspiracism is part of once it's become fascist. The communists did it too, um, you know, the doctor's plot and things like this. Um, CONSPIRACISM is a really effective way to misdirect people, to give them the psychic wage of apartheid. You may be poor, but somebody's poorer than you, and by a hierarchical system, you're higher than them, you know, that's so conspiracism has this gross history in, in preventing hierarchy and, and fascism. And that just is the history, and QAnon is part of that history and it's part of Trump coming to power. And what's amazing is McMahon saw this in terms of entertainment. Trump saw politics as entertainment. Where the psychic payoff is punishing those you hate. But what McGahn did with conspiracism, I, we think that that trained Trump to like, be smart about weaponizing QAnon for, for his own voting base. Mhm.

1:42:43 Neal Hebert: Yeah. A, a good thing though is it does reveal a possibility going forward of counter narratives. Like if we can find positive counter narratives, um, I think that's, you know, that's what FDR did that you just talked about, um, and I think that the resistance right now in American politics from, uh, centrists and establishment liberals is really kind of terrifying. We, We actually just had our first centrist attempted assassin at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and I think one of the dangers of the current path that

1:43:13 Jon Cogburn: the no, the third, all three of them who tried to kill none that are trying to assassinate. Yes,

1:43:21 Ricardo Lopes: yes, but if you listen to people on the news and On YouTube commenting on that from, from the right, they all say, oh, it was

1:43:30 Jon Cogburn: the radical, the radical people. They're just, they're cheese brained liberals. I mean

1:43:35 Neal Hebert: it's the, the, if you're a liberal and you reject the left wing analysis of structural, uh, of like structural or systemic inequality, all you have left is orange man bad. And if orange man is mad, that's the only, the only thing you have to do is, is they would think, I'm not endorsing this. The only thing that, uh, an orange man bad believer really believes has to happen is you beat the bad people. If you get rid of the bad people, everything will be good. You know, leftists understand that, you know, that is not the case. But it scares me that, you know, if this retrenchment of centrism and, and the sort of neoliberal consultant class is, I, I worry that we're gonna keep seeing. Political violence because they do not have a narrative that explains things for why, why things are the way they are,

1:44:23 Jon Cogburn: or a much more competent Trump at, at doing the autocracy, you know, like, like it's a stormer in England is, it's, it's grotesque. Like, uh, the first thing they, they ran saying they were going to be left and it was going to be better. The first thing they do is fire a bunch of MPs who are trying to vote. Um, THE, the Conservatives have a policy, you only got social welfare benefits in, in Britain for your first two kids. So some Labour MPs felt like we're gonna, we're gonna, we're we're not gonna do like uh Tony Blair stuff. Let's do this. They fired those MPs, right? And then they raised heating bills. Like nobody voted for autograph for like,

1:44:59 Neal Hebert: you know, like talk about not reading the room, right? That's like,

1:45:02 Jon Cogburn: and then, and then now they're trying to like, what are they doing? They, they're trying to co-opt the right on cultural narratives, right? It's so like this is what the what liberals that have no connection or or who was the Epstein guy that was the um um he was he was the British ambassador to the United States under Stormer.

1:45:21 Neal Hebert: Oh, that guy, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't remember his name,

1:45:22 Jon Cogburn: but anyway, he, he was like their Rahm Emanuel, the enforcer. I, I think the end the thick of it was based on him, the, the, yes, I believe it was Doctor Who guy who's, um, so, so like, um, you know, like, and and Farage has a really good chance of winning now. It's like, so I don't think this is going to happen in the United States, but that is a script that we want to be, you know, that, that I, I, I think a Kamala presidency would have been a stormer presidency. Oh yeah, and something even more terrifying, you know. And

1:45:53 Neal Hebert: I'm, I've lost a lot of liberal friends because they're, they're irate that I don't they

1:45:59 Jon Cogburn: hate you on YouTube, on Facebook, Neil, they hate you so much.

1:46:01 Neal Hebert: Oh yeah, on, on, um, they hate that I don't blame Republicans for what's going on because they're doing what they were elected to do. I don't like it. I think it's evil, but I'm very angry at. The people that are supposed to be opposing this who do not have a countervailing narrative, uh, that can meet the moment we are in.

1:46:20 Jon Cogburn: So, so let, let's talk philosophically about a narrative. What a narrative because so the consulting class is always about framing rhetoric, and this is the George Lakoff, who's an impressive linguist. His theory of metaphor is great, but like, oh, you just need a better story. And, um, you know, there, there is, there is a big fight in the, in the, in the DNC, the Democratic Party about this right now. So I think it could go either way. But like a week, so. It's, you cannot if you have like a, a, a family member who watches a lot of Fox News that you cannot convince them, you can't say like, no, that's factually false, and I'll tell you why that's factually false. You can't do that to a Q one person. It doesn't work. Um, THE best thing you can do is sort of listen to them. Sometimes they find out that you don't, there's an assumption that of of the dualism that you must love Biden because you're sometimes they'll listen to you and you could critique the left or the liberals too, but We taught, we tie this to a problem in analytic philosophy just like our, our, our account of the fans and the match, the apology of wrestling comes up of analytic philosophy and analytic philosophy and epistemology, there's a thing called the coin do have problem, and this is simply, you know, in, in science itself, the simplified theory is like, oh, we test the hypothesis, and then the, the experiment tells us whether it's true or false. Well, that almost never happens because, um, you can't just test a hypo you can't test like a scientific law equals mc squared. You have to have. A bunch of other physical theory explaining how the experiment works, and a bunch of auxiliary hypotheses. You need a bunch of simplifying assumptions to make the math doable. You have to cancel infinities and things like that. Um, YOU have to see what the tolerance is for, for vagueness, like, um, and then you have to assume the experiment like blocked out the other forces. But any one of those. Hundreds of thousands of things could have gone wrong besides the thing you're actually testing. So that's why science is falsifiable, but it's hard. But you only falsify a bunch of assumptions. It's never really clear what those assumptions are because experimental work isn't the same thing as a logic program, right? So the client do process, if you want to hold on to something bad enough, you can always just say something else went wrong and keep holding back. And what Neil and I realized is that conspiracy theorists do that. We realized talking to our own family members who we love, you know, who tell us like, oh, all these cops are touching fentanyl and like dying, and like, we'll try to explain the chemistry. We have colleagues who work with these things, you know, like, uh, in the vet school, um, you can't, so. How, how do you, uh, respond to the Quan Duhan problem and what we argue and what we look at with, uh, um, memorial, uh, stories in wrestling that actually did change the material conditions for the wrestlers for the better. Like, a better story isn't the story that's Keeps everything you wanted and like um has better rhetoric. A better story needs to be more true. You have to make sense of a story being more or less true than the other. You can do that philosophically. It should be beautiful and it should be good. It should have, uh, um, it should have an explanation of what's went wrong that's plausible and true and a horizon of something that's better. The Democrats I shouldn't say this as an academic. I mean, I'm an academic. I study this stuff. The Democratic Party has no picture of the future in this country. None. The Labour in England has no picture. Carney in Canada has no picture of the future. He's talking about building data centers and AI. Like, what are you doing? There's no model of the future. He said we're going to save you from the orange bad man. That's not gonna work. We're gonna have to water it with some consultants in Tulsa to do that. So

1:49:59 Neal Hebert: what little they talk about is wildly unpopular.

1:50:02 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, so, so, you know, I, there, there's structural reasons they're doing this. There's interested reasons. It's a whole class. Um, I don't know. There's, but the way to fight. The way to address the Qua Duan party. You have to have a better theory. So why did special relativity replace Newtonian mechanics? Special relativity got everything Newtonio McKennis got right, but it also gets right the orbit of Mercury and the things that it got wrong. That's, that's complicated in science. It, it has to special relativity reduces in a limit of like the, I forget that you can do this a couple of it's to, to infinity, and then if you reduce those to infinity, you get Newtonian mechanics. There's, there's formal things. This isn't rigorous and formal like that because politics isn't, uh, a theory that can be represented mathematically. Um, BUT we think the lesson holds, you know, you, you, you need to have a story that, that, that it is true, good, and beautiful. And um and. We think in wrestling that did happen um in a way that Vince didn't want to happen, but he had to let it happen after the death of, um, well, there were 3 deaths. You, you saw one of them on my pay per view, Owen Hartz, Eddie Guerrero's, and then Chris Benoit, which initially was a home invasion where they all killed and they realized it was a murder-suicide that lasted over 6 days.

1:51:22 Neal Hebert: In the middle of the tribute show to Chris Benoit, where they were airing his matches, they figure out that Chris Benoit was the murderer. You can see the exact moment on that show when they figure it out, and it's when William Riegel is talking, and all of a sudden he's the first talking head. That is serious, somber, and sad, but the others were talking about how much he meant to him. Like, all of a sudden Regal is on TV talking about the child, the children, the wife, and he barely mentions his friend, and it's like,

1:51:52 Ricardo Lopes: I, I mean they, they really made a mess of that also because, I mean, not only because of how they dealt with the tragedy itself, but also even. If you only care about the wrestling, they even completely ruined that storyline where Vince McMahon apparently died and then he was back on Monday night actually

1:52:13 Neal Hebert: called him to find out if he was really dead, by the way.

1:52:17 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I know that. I know

1:52:18 Jon Cogburn: that. But, but they scared, you know, it was a little bit of a misperception though, because, um, the, the, you know, the, the, the use of steroids, human growth hormones, and drugs of, of Benoit. But his finisher was like jumping off the rope and then headbutting somebody

1:52:34 Neal Hebert: on the diving swan dive headbutt was what they called it.

1:52:37 Jon Cogburn: The brain results from his autopsy, like his brain was really shrunk in like areas you need.

1:52:42 Ricardo Lopes: I mean that was probably also the result of CTE. As I was referring to earlier, so yes,

1:52:49 Jon Cogburn: I, I think certainly, certainly if you, we've looked at that, but he had the brain of they did, they did have the health policy with, with, uh, steroids, and like within a month, the bodies changed. They were, they were smooth. There was no the backne that sits and pebbles in the back, um, and the wrestling got better because they can move their bodies more, um, but also they. They're going back on this a little bit. They, they banned some of the head injuries, like, you know, get, get a hit on the head with the head with a chair, so they were aware it was CTE. So Um, but part of it was like Guerrero's death. Guerrero had, had went to rehab and come back and got clean. He was

1:53:27 Neal Hebert: the success story of wrestling. He was the,

1:53:29 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, it, it was when he came back was when he had that amazing feud with Brock Lesnar,

1:53:34 Neal Hebert: right? The latter, and he had the latter match with Rob Van Damme. That was one of the best matches in WWEA history.

1:53:40 Jon Cogburn: Fantastic. But, but then when he died, like, like. The, the salvation story that we were telling about Guerrero, you couldn't tell it anymore because it still killed him. His heart was too big for the human growth hormone. He died of a broken heart, yeah, but they, they sort of like didn't do much after that. But then during Guerrero's, um, so in the memorial shows everyone breaks Kfabe, um, Rey Mysterio takes his mask off. He didn't show his face, and like, but the, the most compelling performance of authenticity was Chris Benoit, and Neil and I watched it in his apartment. And like um we had tears in our eyes because Benoit just started weeping uncontrollably. He couldn't speak.

1:54:21 Neal Hebert: It was like ancient Greek like keening, um, horrifying

1:54:26 Jon Cogburn: was a great wrestler too. And so like somehow that like diverted it or did, you know, whatever, and Benoit had been his, his, his road partner. They slept in the same hotel rooms. And then Benoit does this, and then like the whole thing is broken and what we got out of the memorial show from Guerrero was broken. At that point, like, they could not tell a better story because, because what Neil Cafe does is you take things from the real world, um, and you, you, you put them in the inconsistently put them in the story and keep fictionalized, but they couldn't, so you use that to make the story better, use the world to make the story better, but sometimes the story puts normative constraint. To make the real world better, The Fireside chats at FDR did that in the United States, for example. So the story that WWEE, the only story they could tell at that point to Um, where you could say like Eddie's death was for something and Benoit is not going to happen again or, or it won't be their fault if it happens again was finally for the first time again Pen almost went to federal prison for this, for basically forcing the wrestlers to take steroids, finally having a health policy where the wrestlers won't rest they're too, they, they test them for steroids and then in doing that they have to make the work rate less so you're not just killing them with like constant injuries. And so that for us, our analysis of Kwandu have been stories and narrative, we think from wrestling we can get a little bit of hope for the political moment of what don't repeat what Starmer and Labor's doing that's going to lead to Farage, Farage, I forget the. Um, DEFEATED the fascist guy Farage, Farage in England, Farage, um, you know, yeah, there are other possibilities, and if we're going to follow something in wrestling, let's follow that, you know, like, and I think Memorial has a You know, we do

1:56:19 Neal Hebert: end, we do end with probably the greatest single episode of television in wrestling ever, which was the Brodie Lee tribute that AEW did, um, which, you know, like, if you want to talk about the beautiful, the true, and the good, basically, for people that don't know, a wrestler died unexpectedly, uh, of lung complications, and was that during COVID? This was during COVID, but it was not from COVID. It was, uh, but there's so much about COVID we don't the long stuff regardless, they were gonna do the tribute show and Tony Kahn, the owner of AEW, is a former board poster. We, I posted on the same boards as him in the, in the 2000s and 1990s, so I, I, that's my connection to the owner of a wrestling company, and he did an interview with Dave Meltzer before the show. He said, look, I, at about 3 in the morning, all of a sudden I just couldn't handle it, and he ripped up the show he wrote. And decided he was gonna write a wrestling show to make Brodie Lee's son, Brodie Lee Junior smile. And that was the content of the show. It was a celebration of this kid's dad, with all the people that were allied with his dad being baby faces for the night, being the good guys, and it was all done to give this kid closure for his dad's death. And they paid the money.

1:57:33 Jon Cogburn: And it'd be so easy to never go away that's horrible. They're monetizing the kid. It's not that when you watch it. It's, it's,

1:57:41 Neal Hebert: it's not bad when you watch it. And in fact they, they spend like Tony Kahn says on there, he said, I spent the money needed. So that if someone watches this show on streaming in 90 years, they will hear the correct music and see the correct video because it's important to us that this memorial work. And, uh, you know, like, I, you can't watch it without crying. Uh, I

1:58:02 Jon Cogburn: even I, I, I think it's also, it served as a, as a public affirmation of the different social contract that AEW has with it. Fans, so you, you, when you watch that, you contrast it to the memorial shows and the fakery of a lot of the WWE memorial shows, but you also, you're, you're contrasting the, um, the material conditions of the wrestlers with the WWE wrestlers, and, and I, I, I, I don't know if we said this when Owen Hart fell to his death. Neil saw that live

1:58:29 Neal Hebert: on. I was watching that pay per view. It was the day after I graduated from high school. Owen Hart was my. Favorite wrestler in my adolescence, him and Shawn Michaels. Uh, I liked the heels, and I watched my, my, my favorite wrestler die the day after I graduated from high school. Oh, so,

1:58:42 Ricardo Lopes: so, so you watched Over the Edge 1999 live.

1:58:46 Neal Hebert: My first pay per view that I watched in two years because I went to boarding school, so I didn't have the ability to watch pay per view there because we weren't allowed to have, to have cable and TVs. So I just, it was the day after I graduated high school. I was like, I'm bored. I'll watch this thing. And yeah, I saw Owen Hart die. All of the, all of my friends at the time, because, you know, we were all teenagers. It was a very, we all thought it was very symbolic that my childhood hero died the day I graduated from high school. So, uh, shout out to my friends, you know,

1:59:14 Jon Cogburn: I, I forget that out. Harold Bloom talks about the anxiety of influence. So every artist is sort of like wrestling with their, um, influences. And I, I think like memorial shows, like everyone crafting the memorial show has seen all the other memorial shows. Oh

1:59:28 Neal Hebert: yeah, like the, I, I remember from the Owen Hart show Mark Henry wrote a poem. And it was not a, it was not what a literature professor would consider a good poem, but it was utterly sincere, and you can't listen to this man recite this poem he wrote about his dead friend without, I, I couldn't,

1:59:45 Jon Cogburn: that's still WWE monetizing, yes, their own horribleness, you know, they, they monetized the death of their own wrestler. I, I mean, I mean the fact that more after Chris Benoit, it just, it just broke, and so they had to change something.

2:00:01 Ricardo Lopes: The, the fact that. The fact that back then Vince McMahon decided that the show should go on, I mean, it was just. I mean, I mean, JR was almost in tears. Jerry Lawler was almost in tears. Jeff Jarrett, Debra

2:00:18 Neal Hebert: crying in a match while this happened, like utterly crying in a match. Uh, HEY, is that Coco? Coco Oh,

2:00:27 Ricardo Lopes: OK, OK. So look, let me just ask you because I think that we've run out of time. Here, right? So

2:00:32 Neal Hebert: I do have, it is finals week at rambling, so I do have to quickly eat before students come in and start begging for better grades.

2:00:39 Ricardo Lopes: OK, OK, so look guys, let's wrap up the conversation here. We definitely have to schedule another one at least. So let me just say that the book is again KFib Nation Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump and the New Cynicism, and I will of course leave a link to it in the description of the interview.

2:00:59 Neal Hebert: You can download it for free.

2:01:01 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, yeah, I will leave the, uh,

2:01:05 Neal Hebert: that link. Please, if you're at all interested, download it for free. It's a free ebook. You only have to pay if you want a print copy.

2:01:12 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, OK, so look, uh, Dr. Herbert and Dr. Cockburn, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a fantastic conversation. I really loved it. It's been so much fun. And look, we have to schedule a conversation just to talk freely about wrestling.

2:01:32 Jon Cogburn: Yeah, that would be awesome.

2:01:33 Neal Hebert: And you know, if you ever need to talk about philosophy and Dungeons and Dragons, uh, John and I have published on that as well, and I'm a D&D streamer. So, you know, like, uh, people are, you ever wanna have a conversation about tabletop roleplaying games, we might, we might have to revisit that topic too.

2:01:47 Jon Cogburn: But let's do the wrestling. We got, we got, we, we gotta do wrestling. Yes,

2:01:50 Neal Hebert: we gotta do the

2:01:51 Jon Cogburn: art of wrestling for

2:01:52 Ricardo Lopes: sure. OK, so thank you so much again. Absolutely

2:01:55 Jon Cogburn: it's great meeting you. Thank you. It was awesome. Bye.

2:01:58 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Muller, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingbird, Arnaud Wolff, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forrest Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognon, Michel Jonathan Labran, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Puntervan Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka, Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltontin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolatti, Gabriel P Scortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, and Wisman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophanus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Di Acosta, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Janaertner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank, Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlo Montenegro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.