Talk is Jericho
Release Date: 05/02/2018
Recap By: Caitlin Lavelle
DIRECT LINK TO LISTEN/DOWNLOAD
Timestamps
0:00- Introduction (Podcast starts at 0:33)
1:32- Interview with Matt & Nick Jackson, The Young Bucks
2:34- The Young Bucks compare working on the Independents to working in NJPW
4:12- The Young Bucks on their friendship with Kazuchika Okada
6:48- The Young Bucks on the darkest point of their career
7:40- The Young Bucks on their changed attitudes and almost quitting.
9:20- The Young Bucks on joining NJPW & the Bullet Club
13:55- The Young Bucks reveal the meaning of FTRR
15:35- The Young Bucks on A.J. Styles, Gallows & Anderson Leaving NJPW for WWE
17:00- Ad Read
18:44- Interview Resumes
20:00- The Young Bucks on their merchandise empire
21:20- The Young Bucks on Hot Topic
28:30- The Young Bucks on Joining WWE
32:00- The Young Bucks on the Scrub Room
33:20- The Young Bucks on the WWE Invasion and the Cease and Desist from WWE
39:18- The Young Bucks on Jimmy Jacobs
46:45- The Young Bucks on PWG
49:05- The Young Bucks on All In
1:00:55- The Young Bucks on whether they’ll go to WWE
1:06:45- Outro
0:00- Introduction (Podcast starts at 0:33)
In this episode of Talk is Jericho, Jericho talks to the Young Bucks, Matt & Nick Jackson. This conversation was recorded at the Tokyo Dome Hotel just prior to Wrestle Kingdom 12 in January 2018.
1:32- Interview Begins
2:34- The Young Bucks compare working on the Independents to working in NJPW
Matt & Nick say, “We do more of the independent shows. It’s such an intimate atmosphere. Every weekend, it’s typically a thousand people. And we’re usually featured as the big names. We never open shows anymore. It’s fun when we come to New Japan. We’re the opening match and we’re actually bad guys. It’s good, though, because it humbles us. We can act like actual heels.”
4:12- The Young Bucks on their friendship with Kazuchika Okada
Matt & Nick say, “We were best friends with him. He’s the reason we got a job in New Japan. We looked out for him.” The Young Bucks describe a situation in TNA where someone suggested Okada cut himself, and say that Okada was scared. The Young Bucks say that Okada approached them and Alex Shelley to express his concern, and that the three of them agreed with Okada that it was unnecessary and went to bat for him with TNA management. The Young Bucks say that Okada remembered this, and that from that point on, they were close. Nick describes that Okada, “ribs me still to this day. He puts my gear on at every show. Shoes, kneepads, tights, everything.”
Jericho tells a fun story of buying Jado & Gedo hot dogs in 1993 in Mexico when they were new in town and didn’t have any money, and remarks on the irony that they’re now effectively his bosses here in 2018.
6:48- The Young Bucks on the darkest point of their career
The Young Bucks describe the darkest point of their career as the end of their run in TNA, and the beginning of their second (failed) run in ROH. The Young Bucks say, “They (ROH) allowed our contract to end. (Jim) Cornette was in charge at that point. They didn’t even want to negotiate. They left us at home. The reason we were given at the time was our West Coast flight was too expensive, which cracks me up, because now we’re like (to ROH), remember back in 2011 when you screwed us?”
7:40- The Young Bucks on their changed attitudes and almost quitting.
The Young Bucks say, “We changed our attitudes. We were yes-men, like ‘what can we do for you?’ and ‘I’ll do it sir!’ We never questioned anything. We were so shy. It opened us up a lot more, like screw this, we’ll do this on our own.”
Matt says, “I was ready to quit. I was having a kid. It wasn’t because I fell out of love with wrestling. It was, I’m having a child, I need money.”
Nick says, “I always told Matt this; I think there’s a reason why we’re in this business. I don’t think we would be in it for ten years without doing something important.”
9:20- The Young Bucks on joining NJPW & the Bullet Club
The Young Bucks say Okada reached out and let them know that Tiger Hattori wanted to talk to them, and that’s what got the ball rolling for them to join NJPW. They tell Jericho that they used to come to Japan for Dragon’s Gate from 2008-2010. They describe this as their first break and attribute this experience to developing their hybrid Lucha/Japanese/American style.
The Young Bucks explain that they were put into the original Bullet Club after about 4-6 months of its existence in NJPW, and that it was a perfect fit.
13:55- The Young Bucks reveal the meaning of FTRR
If you watch the Being the Elite YouTube series, you may be familiar with this video, which set off Internet speculation as to the meaning of the term ‘FTRR’. In this segment, the Young Bucks reveal to Jericho that FTRR doesn’t mean anything, and that it was just a random group of letters that the Bullet Club spontaneously came up with while filming the webisode.
15:35- The Young Bucks on A.J. Styles, Gallows & Anderson Leaving NJPW for WWE
The Young Bucks say, “It was sad to see (them) leave, because that’s our family. And wrestling is so weird, you kind of just stop talking to them. We text like once a month, but it’s not what it used to be.”
“They didn’t smarten us up until the day before the dome. We found out with everyone else (that they were leaving NJPW). We were kind of blindsided, actually. We had just signed a contract with ROH. A.J. pulled us aside and said, ‘Please tell me you guys don’t have any contracts’, because he wanted to bring us over, too. I don’t know if that would have happened, but that was his idea.”
17:00- Ad Read
18:44- Interview Resumes
20:00- The Young Bucks on their merchandise empire
The Young Bucks say, “I literally run it from my home with my wife. She does pretty much everything. We just did taxes, and we were blown away to find out how much we did for the year. We did more on just Young Bucks merch than we ever did on wrestling just last year.”
21:20- The Young Bucks on Hot Topic
The Young Bucks say, “Initially it was just going to be us, Kenny and the Bullet Club Logo (at Hot Topic). They did a test run of that in June (2017), and it did so well that now it’s in every store. My Twitter timeline is flooded with people buying the shirt. To this day it blows my mind.”
Jericho shares a fun story of calling his local hot topic (Citrus Park Mall) to see if they had the Alpha Club T-shirts in stock.
The Young Bucks say they also went down to their mall to purchase their T-Shirts, and say that it’s cool for their families to see their merchandise in the mall.
At 25:50, the Young Bucks announce that they will be the first non-WWE wrestlers to be featured as Funko Pop! figures.
They also reveal that they made an attempt to own the Bullet Club name, and that they were only about a month late in filing for ownership.
28:30- The Young Bucks on Joining WWE
The Young Bucks say, “Historically, tag teams aren’t really the main feature. What, were the Hardy Boys the last big thing there? That’s the thing, would you want to put in 10 years there and get to the point where the Hardy boys were? There’s a lot of weighing of options, but you can make top dollar there and you can’t do that doing what we’re doing.
The Young Bucks talk a bit about doing extra work for WWE earlier in their careers. They say, “Now it seems very easy to get signed. At the time, it was impossible. Now, everybody gets signed everywhere.”
32:00- The Young Bucks on the ‘Scrub Room’
Matt says they’re close to Jimmy Jacobs, “from ROH. The guys who didn’t really party after the shows, we would call it the scrub room. It was me, Nick, Jimmy, Sammy Zayn, Seth Rollins, Kevin Steen. We’d order pizza and just talk about the business for 7 hours. Bryan Danielson, too.
33:20- The Young Bucks on the WWE Invasion and the Cease and Desist Letter from WWE
“We had that planned for 6 months, maybe even longer. We were going to originally do it with the Hardy Boys. It wasn’t going to be an invasion, though, it was going to be something similar to that. We were going to be outside of WrestleMania (33, Orlando). It was going to look like they were going to head into the building to do something, and we were going to take their titles. They were the TNA champs at the time. We were actually going to do a story with TNA and ROH, we were going to cross promote. Everything got changed, they got signed.”
Axs TV suggested the WWE invasion idea to the Young Bucks, but New Japan shot it down. They decided to do it on the YouTube show. The Young Bucks pitched it to Adam Page, Marty Scurll and Cody (& Brandi Rhodes), and they were excited about it.
The Young Bucks say, “our limo driver said, ‘Let’s see if I can drive in to where all of the trucks are (at the WWE show).” They allowed it. I was like ‘Oh my god, we’re in!’ They bought it, because it looked realistic. We got a couple of shots. The way it was edited it looked like we were there for hours causing mayhem.”
39:18- The Young Bucks on Jimmy Jacobs
The Young Bucks say, “(Jimmy Jacobs) sees us outside the building, he jumps on Matt and I, gives us a hug. At that point he hadn’t seen us in two years. He takes the selfie. I tell him- we have this on film- ‘Do NOT tweet that, you’ll get fired.’ He’s like, ‘I’m not gonna tweet that.’ Ten minutes later he tweets it.
“The next day, we get the (cease and desist) letter. I was almost shocked. I was like, don’t they realize we’re just gonna make this something bigger for us?”
“It got so big that Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer DM’ed us and said he would take this (case) on for free. He said we took care of his grandkids at a show in Atlanta. We were blown away.
“About a year before that, we were like, it’s time to move on from the ‘suck it’ gesture and the ‘too sweet’. We wanted to cut it out anyway. This made it even easier.
“Cody said, ‘What if Triple H walks up?’ I said, ‘That’d be great!’ We know so many people over there. We were getting texts the whole time, like, ‘what are you guys doing?’
46:45- The Young Bucks on PWG
The Young Bucks say, “It’s home. We feel like we owe Super Dragon, the owner of the company, a lot. He pretty much found us. He put us on the map. We always pushed us to the main event at his shows. We started getting booked everywhere because of him.”
49:05- The Young Bucks on All In
The Young Bucks say, “that was Cody’s baby. It started as a joke pretty much. If anybody could do it, why can’t we do it? There’s people that have approached us trying to fund the whole thing, and we’re like, no, we want to try it on our own. Everybody wants to be involved with this thing.”
Jericho says, “If it is in the states, and it does do 10,000, Vince McMahon is going to flip his wig. If you guys can do that, that’s crazy.”
The Young Bucks say that both ROH and NJPW are cool with All In and want to help out.
On whether Daniel Bryan or CM Punk will be involved (note: this was recorded before Daniel Bryan was cleared to wrestle for WWE), the Young Bucks say, “I think it would be nice to have someone like that. I think that would be the cherry on the top. Cody thinks it would be nice to just do it with the guys we have now.”
1:00:55- The Young Bucks on whether they’ll go to WWE
They Young Bucks say, “I don’t know, man. No matter how big we get, that will always be a question that lingers on in our career, as well as Kenny (Omega). The way we’re going now, we could probably quit in five years. We could literally quit tomorrow and do something else. We’re in a good spot.
“At this point, it’s not a goal. We don’t need it. It’s always something we just can’t answer, because we don’t know the future.
“If tomorrow’s my last match, and we can’t wrestle ever again after that, I’d be so happy with what we’ve done. We’ve built an empire. The Young Bucks empire. It’s like, man, what else could I want? The last missing piece would be going there (WWE) and doing a run or something.”
1:05:48- The Young Bucks on their children’s books
The Young Bucks just signed a contract to do their first Children’s book. Matt is writing it with the same publishing company that did Colt Cabana’s book. Hopefully it will be released in 2018 under the name Superkick: The Heart of a Champion.
1:06:45- Outro
Rating: 9/10
The only thing that keeps this podcast from being a 10/10 is that fact that the interview is a few months old. Jericho has a very interesting conversation with one of the most popular and influential acts in professional wrestling today. This is a must listen.
Writer Bio
Caitlin is a wrestling fan who hopes to one day discover that she is the illegitimate daughter of Vincent Kennedy McMahon and the rightful Anonymous RAW General Manager. Until then, she’ll keep on living in Orlando, Florida with her husband and son.
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