Television Sports Rights with Pat Crakes | Pollock & Thurston

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He is the head of Craig's Media, a former executive at Fox Sports, a heavy hitter joining us today. Pat Craig's is with us, and Pat, thank you so much for taking some time to join us. I have done my research into you, and Pat, you are maybe as smart of mine as we are about to pick here, not setting goals too lofty here, but I mean, I'm very much looking forward to speaking to you today. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, guys. I appreciate the compliments. I'm certainly a hitter. I don't know about heavy. I certainly can hit you. I'll hit you. I'm not quite sure how much damage I'll do, exactly, but I appreciate that. It's great to be here on the, what I would consider the Dick Cavett of Combat Sports Show here in the 2020s. I will give all that credit to one Brandon Thurston. He is pro wrestling, Dick Cavett. I feel he would certainly take that moniker. I wanted to start this sort of big picture, Pat, as we are looking, obviously me and Brandon kind of come from the professional wrestling side of things, but when we see the NBA rights that are going to be such a massive deal coming up in the next few years, what are some of the stories or rights deals that excite you, that you are following with the most interest at the moment, as we seem to always be in such an interesting time period when it comes to the linear versus streaming model. And there seems to be a lot of appetite for people for digging in and learning more about this. Yeah, look, I think it's safe to say that sports media overall has never been more valuable, and that's across every kind of faucet that exists, right? Whether it's telecasting events, whether it's in commentary, whether it's in owning venues and live events. There's been a lot of investment and value that has been created over the past 10 years in sports media. It's an attempt to try to draft off of the increase in kind of what I would call the experiential economy. Music's part of that, travel's part of that. It got disintermediated by COVID, of course. But the truth of the matter is, is that folks have kind of learned to kind of view their leisure time as kind of valuable, so they want to spend it doing things, right? Things they enjoy, things they entertain them that's going to places, that's watching things that they find exciting. So sports media fits into that, and it's drifted upward along with that. So capital has obviously flowed there, and that finds its way into media rights, which are the apex way in which sports media kind of displays its valuation. Because without the ability to reach mass audience, brands can't be built. You can't make, you have tons of fans. Most NFL fans have never been inside NFL stadium. Most UFC fans haven't gone to a fight. The way they primarily end, even ones that do go regularly to events, they primarily interact with most of these sports through media, right, in particular through telecasting of live events. So yeah, I'm excited to see how NASCAR and the NBA do. I'm also excited to see how both elements of TKL are going to do, which includes the UFC and the WWE. And when Nick Con did an interview a few weeks ago with Light Shedd, he mentioned how his view is sort of that, the sort of the middle tier of sports properties in media, they might be under pressure soon. But properties above that, he apparently includes WWE in that, they'll be okay, at least in the near term. So I was wondering if you have a view on that, and what would these middle tier properties be that he's thinking of? So for me, I tend to group sports media properties into three buckets. Tier one, two and three. And tier one is anyone who can get somebody else to pay them for their media rights, which basically ensures them in getting a multi-year contractual amount of economics, right, which changes your business fundamentally. Tier two would be kind of media properties that deliver reasonable audiences, have large segments that pay a lot of attention to them. And maybe sometimes they give a small rights fee or a rights fee, but they have other aspects of their business model where they take more risk, but they execute on. So a great example of this would be another endeavor property, like the pro bull riders who endeavor bought for $100 million, they built their business on a time by media kind of model, endeavor bought them, they didn't abandon that model. Today, they're worth a billion dollars. They still do time buys with CVS, right? National Hot Rod Association fills into that. So these are, and sometimes tier two has become tier ones, and the UFC is an example of a tier two that became a tier one, right? And then tier three is kind of everybody else who can create tremendously viable models. There's never been more of them. They buy media time, where they find ways to organize and hold their events. And it's never been a better time to be a tier three property. I mean, think of all the diverse, just turn on your programming guide, if you have linear television on any Saturday or Sunday, and look at all the different sports networks, and you'll find everything from corn hold, rock climbing, to new, you know, slap fighting. Slap fighting, yes, slap fighting, yes, slap fighting, America's new stingiest sport. Slap fighting, yes, is out there. And these folks use different kinds of models, but they don't get rights fees to build value. And that's kind of the buckets I put them into. And I think what Nick's talking about is actually completely tier one. And tier one's got maybe 10 to 15 sports in the United States. It's the smallest group, right? And in that bucket, there's one property that lives by itself, the NFL. They kind of transcend everything. Okay, so they're their own, they take them out. They they're not in the sample for anybody. Really, they're not, they're their own thing. And I think what Nick was talking about was, you know, there's different grades of tier one, right? There's some people like the NBA who are going to double their media rights or do 50 to 60% on their media rights, because they deliver millions of viewers with all this inventory across an eight month period to include playoff games. They air on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Friday nights. Everybody wants to be on Saturday. But you know, if you can deliver millions of viewers on a Tuesday night gives you tremendous value, the NBA, you know, is going to get their their value. But at the lower end of the tier one kind of category, there are sports media properties that get media rights, but they may not grow their rights. The problem isn't so much losing their rights. The problem is what is there's been a large anticipation among most tier one sports media properties that they would do. Very large rates increases. If you went, if you went back five years ago, and you and you were a tier one sports media property, across the board, you were probably expecting to double your media rights in your next negotiation. And I think what Nick's talking about is thanks to the decline in the pay TV bundle, which was a fabulous system, a natural monopoly system that basically was enormously profitable for 30 years and threw off a great amount of economic value and content costs followed that. That's stopped, right? That system is in decline, secular decline. And the new system that's replaced it or is right now working incrementally to it, but is becoming going to probably replace it, the digital distribution, which streaming is the main way to do it, does not produce the kind of profits that the natural monopoly pay TV bundle did. As a matter of fact, it really produces none right now when you look at it all in. There's examples of people who make a great living streaming, including first mover on the entertainment side, Netflix, but they had to borrow tens of billions of dollars. And quite frankly, the economics aren't that fabulous of that business. And that's a feature not a bug of streaming. And so the revenue isn't as big as it used to be, but the content costs haven't adjusted. So those have to do something. Either revenues got to go up somehow to some replica of multiple of the old system or content costs have to adjust. And that doesn't mean that the NFL goes backwards and the NBA goes backwards or the UFC or the WW ego backwards. But what it might mean is that you don't get all the growth you want or we go flat. And as we've seen examples of it already, on the entertainment side, it's very obvious. Everybody's cutting back on content spend, right? On the sports media side, take a look at a property like Thursday night football. So the NFL is its own thing, right? But it's established packages of which Thursday night football is a late stage Pete bundle package, right? That never really had a true home. It didn't have anybody inside the established system that wanted it. So it turned to a new incremental provider in Amazon who gave it a great bump up off a $650 million. And it left the established system and the established players were not sorry to see it go. They just simply couldn't drive any value with it. That's counter narrative to when the idea that the Amazon's and the apples of the world, we're going to outbid everybody for this content. They haven't outbid anybody for any content. What they've been doing is that in taking the pieces of the content inside the established system, the established system doesn't want anymore. Thursday night football goes behind the Amazon multiple paywalls and its viewing goes down 40% because there's some kind of hit to take for that, right? But the league got their money, so they're happy and Amazon's happy because they're experimenting. Major league soccer, major league soccer wanted $300 million to establish partners. They said no, so it pivoted to Apple. It gets $250 million, but Apple represents less than a month or so, a minute is consumed across all platforms of video minutes. So the reach has to go down. So there's a price to pay for doing that. That doesn't mean it's wrong. It doesn't mean it's not the future. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is you have to take risks because you're doing something new. So when Nick was talking about what was going to happen with the media rights fees of some properties unlike the UFC or the WWE, he was talking about that reduced growth or no growth or having to accept some kind of change in the business model from the established reach and rights to conditional rights with unproven or uncategorized reach, right? And figuring out a new model which can be risky. And the Pac-12 is a great example of this. Here you have a Power 5 conference. I know UFC and UCR are living, but still there's probably, you know, when this this year's top 25 for college football preseason, there'll be three or four of those teams in that conference that are staying that'll be in the rankings and they're having trouble finding a home to grow their media rights. So I think that's what Nick was talking about. I see the world exactly the way he does for the reasons I explained. We've got this revenue content cost mismatch. Something's got to adjust. It doesn't mean people have to go backwards, but at the very least it means that the growth has to stop or decelerate. When you're looking at a lot of these different entities from an ESPN on downward, from the outside looking in, it feels as though for years it has been this embracing of streaming being the future and pushing your audience towards that. And now it seems like there's a bit more of just what you outline that, hey, we're trading in one fantastic business for a lesser one, at least, and it seems that there is a bit of a realization. Is that similar to what you've observed, that there's sort of a look at where cable is going and is streaming going to be at least in the next decade, as big as projected a few years ago? Yeah, how can you say streaming is the future, but it's not going to be the same business? That's what's really happening. And originally, the thesis was this is going to be kind of a one-for-one value shift. And it's not going to be that problematic. It's going to happen fast. And there'll be lots of new players that were not what I call non-traditional who built their businesses digitally on businesses outside of media, like Apple on Amazon. And they're just going to buy this stuff because it makes sense to use as marketing for their services. And then the established media companies will also follow along. And the truth of the matter is the business just doesn't generate the economics of the old one. And that's because the old one was like a utility. It was a natural, but had local rate regulation, government accusations in its profits. You're not going to recreate that on the digital side. And everybody's coming to that conclusion. All the contents fractionalized everywhere. And because it doesn't make any money, the prices of everything that were once cheap have to go up on the digital side. And but then you say, well, we can fix it through consolidation. Well, the government may not let you consolidate. The government in the UK just stopped the the Activision Microsoft merger this morning. Was it overestimated because people do the market just expected more subscribers than we've got now and Netflix is basically leveling off? Yeah, look, I think what happened was is that Netflix kind of took the folks who pay a lot of attention to media but aren't really inside it. Wall Street, much of the media itself that reports on business and things like that. Netflix looked like something that was early Netflix looked like this is what the future looks like. All these subs, they're all loyal. They're consuming a lot of content. They're generating a lot of economics that you can borrow against, which is what Netflix did to get the content. And everybody kind of thought, well, that's just going to be what the business is. And this looks fabulous. The truth of the matter is though that when you look back on it now, you see that it was kind of a head fake. Netflix is a fabulous business, one of the most important business stories in American history, probably world business history. And the truth of the matter is, is that the Netflix that launched its streaming service, you have launched with the content library of near, you know, a huge content library of near everything, cheap prices off the back of one of the most successful mailholder businesses of all time that they auto enrolled everyone in. Does not exist anymore. A lot of the library content, which is the most viewed we've learned inside of streaming services have been cobbled back by the media players with their 100 year libraries, right? And they have, they've launched their own services that are like one fifth of the old pay TV bundles content costs with no sports. And they're all struggling in Netflix itself. It's, you know, it's sub sub growth is has basically ended in the United States. They make some sub growth, but it's streaming became a mature business overnight. The second everybody else showed up, which kind of is characteristic of not having an economic mode around the business directionally. And it's very expensive to make the content. The content costs haven't gone any lower, having a bunch of players that want to now develop content exclusively for this new distribution system means there's competition for scarce talent. Because the truth, the matter is, is that when you look at entertainment content or sports media content, most of it is an elite level. I mean, most of the entertainment content ever created guys is not worth watching. There was a reason why when I was at Fox on the entertainment side, the commission 30 pilots a year, because maybe one or two of them is going to work. And that's when you had only, you had five or six media companies that kind of work together cooperatively, competitively cooperation to do development. So, you know, the idea that you can just spend a bunch of money and crank out content because you got some viewing data is quite frankly, been challenged. And same thing on the sports side, some things are worth paying a lot for and some things are not worth paying as much. And when the pay TV bundle was around and everybody was in it and it was going up and the economics were growing every year, well, you kind of just paid the bills for the content made sense. Now, everybody's having to take a harsh look at it because at the end of the day, you just can't lose money forever on these things. I mean, on the entertainment side, it seems like everybody loses $750 billion every quarter more than they did before. That's going to slow down now because everybody's taking the acts of the development budgets, but it's given pause to what you spend on sports for for for standalone streaming. And by the way, Amazon and Apple aren't looking to bail out the media business. They didn't get their their their hundred billion dollar cash balance sheets by making bad decisions. This is this is largely an experiment for them. They're trying to sort out where the value is. And these companies enter and exit experiments billion dollar experiments all the time. They could exit media tomorrow and they would be fine with it. They could do lots of things. They could buy one of those guys. They don't really know exactly how the value between investing in media and their other businesses are going to work. They think there's something there, but I'll give you a great example. When I left Fox, I went to the music business for multiple years, did decently there. When I came in, everybody was like, oh man, Ticketmaster is going to get crushed by Amazon. Amazon is going to crush Ticketmaster. They got all this data. Now, I'm a data guy. I started out a data guy who became a programmer and a strategist and and and and and negotiate. And so I know all about data. I love data, but this idea is somehow because you've got data you win. It's how you use the data. And a lot of data isn't useful. And you know, I having more data is not necessarily better data. That said, I'd like to have more data. But the six months after everybody was telling me that they exited the ticketing business because they couldn't compete with Ticketmaster. And by the way, after we did our first couple shows in Enviva, I understood why because Ticketmaster was our partner. Because Ticketmaster knew what they were doing. And they could give you things that nobody else could give you, including Amazon. So these companies invest lots of money and take lots of risk and experiments. And and they're not necessarily going to be the solution to the problem. And the big media companies are probably they have to stay and invest in these digital platforms. But the point is well taken, John, the question is, how much do you invest in the new platform while trying to keep the old platforms economics going so you can build the new platform? And how long is that going to take? And nobody knows the answer to that. I wanted to also go back and look at, you know, with WWE and UFC, you can see so many parallels in how these businesses are run and why they are so attractive to networks. You having firsthand knowledge, seeing the UFC coming to Fox in 2012, how did you view that property at the beginning of that deal and seeing what it exploded into and then being sold in 2016? Well, I want to say regarding endeavor in the UFC, I'm one of the I joined the links of elite people who have been thrown out of Aria Emmanuel's office. So I just want to say I've been thrown out of a meeting with Ari, along with like Randy Ferrer and Eric Shanks and Mike Hopkins. So I've got some guys as low as Ricky Guy and that me. You're trying to warn them about the streaming business was a cause of this. I didn't know sitting next to Aria kind of was like a wild, like, hi, I can't, I'm great. It's so exciting to be here today. Right. And he threw us all out. But anyway, that was different. You don't see negotiation. Anyway, you know, I look, I thought that the UFC was a great investment when Fox partnered with them. Eric Shanks had developed that relationship when he was at direct TV. He brought it over with him. And it was a very successful partnership. It was one of the key cornerstones of being able to turn speed into Fox Sports 1, which was a multi-billion dollar valuation exercise for for 21st century Fox 21 CF at that time now Fox. And so, you know, we, we believed and saw the value. But you know, we were strictly licensing the content. And I think one of the things that ESPN was able to do that Fox wasn't able to do, was that they were able to offer, though Fox did try to look at this and try to figure out a way to do this, they, they, with ESPN, plus they were able to put together a successful way to air pay per views, pay a large enough license fee to endeavor in the UFC, that, that meant that the UFC could take the risk of operating individual live events off the table for themselves, which they were still doing with their Fox. And they could focus in on simply running the business, right? ESPN pays them a license fee and accepts kind of the risk on the pay per views. And then the UFC on participates on the upside over a certain threshold. And that is a great model. And if you listen to anything already says, he always talks about stable cash flows. And that's a stable cash flow. So, you know, the UFC was able, that was always possible for somebody to monetize with UFC ESPN figured out how to do it. It really basically gave ESPN plus a reason to exist in the early years of that deal. And the UFC has been able to expand and maintain the quality of their content because they control basically most of the quality mixed martial arts, fighting in the United States and in the world. And Dana can make the fights that matter in an efficient manner. So, you know, it was great to be a part of helping build that. Dana and Craig Borsary have a great people to get to know and work with. But they made the right move and go into ESPN because it enabled them to focus more in on building the business, which is making great fights and servicing the fans and learning less about risk on every single pay per view. ESPN took that risk off the table, but they the rights fee they did. So in this next generation, in this next rights fee negotiation that's going to probably start at the end of this year, I would look for them to do that even more. And that's where it gets interesting because certainly ESPN is a great home for the UFC. But because of the worldwide pay per view possibilities, one of the non-traditional digital players, this may actually be an acquisition that makes a lot sense to them. For Disney to look at purchasing UFC? Well, for the Disney, Disney to re-up and renew, yes. But for Apple and Amazon, you know, the pay per view aspect of the UFC and even the WWE on a worldwide basis has to be very appealing because that's something that sits inside, that's something they can actually do, right? So you think about an Apple if they acquired UFC rights on a worldwide basis, they could offer the pay per views on every, you know, they could lever their device penetration in a way that is synergistic to their creation of devices and their core business, which they're, you know, they're a device manufacturing company. So how do those pay per view? I think those pay per views have good synergy with that. I think it's the same with Amazon and the products that they offer. So it's going to be very interesting. You know, the non-traditional players, aside from Thursday night football, haven't really knocked the park out with any real strategic acquisitions, right? It hasn't, they haven't fit the narrative, right? Five years ago, Facebook was good on the NFL. That was literally it. That was literally, I think I was quoted in some NBC news article about when I first started consulting after I was done with Envivo about how Facebook was clearly going to have the entire NFL. Clearly, clearly. Brooklyn was going to book on, or bid on WV and they were doing the Smash Challenge at the time. Yeah. And I express skepticism, but when I think about the pay per view business, about the WWE and the UFC, I think that that adds, that has some synergy with what both those two non-traditional digital players, it fits into their other businesses as a marketing tool really efficiently. So it's going to be a new WVB back to pay per view. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think you could see somebody take a run at it, try to get it away from Disney, assuming the nature of the back and rights allow that, right? Which are always important to know back and rights are the rights that the person you have to deal with has to match an offer or as an exclusive window, they get a right or first refusal, you have to bring a deal to them, right? Before you can go out and negotiate with anyone else, but I think it's going to be very interesting with both the UFC and the WWE, because I think they are going to attract some interest from a non-traditional digital player. I think they will. And this is the peak off the old beginning, I think March 2026 and the UFC deal will expire someplace close to that. So they will be, their new favorite word is co-terminus, as well, and they may be negotiated together. Yeah, I don't know about that. So that's interesting, right? And I knew that, I mean, you could say that, but I just don't think that the UFC will wait for the WWE unless they're going to stay with their current partners. So if you're going to sync them up together and try to do them as one deal, I, that so first of all, that might take some people off the table. That's just a lot of lumber. So one of the things we're going going back to the things that John brought up earlier, you know, as we start having to be more selective of where we place strategic levels of capital, if you do that kind of investment, you probably can't do an investment somewhere else. And when you look at your portfolio, one of every media company to include Amazon, Apple, and whomever has a portfolio. And their portfolios are slightly different, or in some cases, very different. And if you invest in one thing you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily able to invest in something else. And so that takes your ability to probably acquire something else off the table, right? So you can do it. So I don't know if that'll happen, Brandon, I get that. Because it would be so expensive to get them together. They're a year apart, it'd be expensive. Maybe in the future, right? Maybe you do like a four or five year deal with one and you'd say come up later. So that option's there for you. But depending on the nature of the back and rights, I would suspect that there's strong that the UFC would stay with Disney. So I think that they're going to have people interested. And with the WWE, I would think that there's strong reason for them to stay with NBC. The question is, will I stay with Fox? And that was going to be my next question is that so much is under this umbrella of NBC Universal and even the unique promotion that on Fox, they are directing you to their monthly event on Peacock as well. And how you look at this two hour block and kind of like boxes, thoughts of like what replaces this programming and has this, is this a relationship they want where so much is under a competitor of like the SmackDown, just be something that NBC Universal would want to take all of this in house. Yeah, well, look, the SmackDown has done two million viewers on Fox on Friday night. It's broadcast television. It's huge exposure. It fits into the portfolio of what Fox is currently doing, which is largely live sports and news. So it fits a real strategic, it's a good strategic fit. The Gang at Fox has a lot of folks who love wrestling. And I think that they really treat it well. I mean, you're not going to be able, if you leave that kind of ecosystem, if you're the WWE, you're not going to be able to place it somewhere else. I don't think, right? Exactly. The problem is, I think for Fox is, you know, to really allocate a lot of strategic capital, they need strong advertising. But what they really need is the ability, for example, if they're going to keep it on Friday night, to get distributors to give them some kind of retransmission feedback for it, for the broadcast affiliate. So you get some fee-based revenue there. And it's, they don't have that right now. They haven't been able to secure that from the distributors. So, so with that, I'm talking more about how that's, how that works. You and I have a conversation probably a couple of years ago where you basically taught me how these revenue streams work and that there's obviously advertising, which everybody talks about, the ad rates that that raw SmackDown get. But many, especially the NFL, right? They, they, the networks that air the NFL have agreements with the cable industry, satellite carriers to, we guarantee you that we're going to carry the NFL and you're going to pay us X amount of dollars for that. If I'm, if I'm getting that right, what you're saying is, WWE doesn't have that, at least for SmackDown. Yeah. So, so the way it works with any pay TV channel or the any broadcast channel today is basically you say, look, I've got this entity that broadcasts this portfolio of content. And I think it has value. I think it has an overall value than there are elements inside of it that I think we should talk about also having their own value. So in the case of ESPN, ESPN has the college football playoff. So ESPN has all this content and the pay TV distributors say, okay, that's worth a certain value. And then ESPN says, well, look, I also have the an MBA conference final in the college football playoff. I think they're worth, you know, if I make $9 a month, I think they're worth a dollar more than that, right? Or I think they're worth a dollar of that. So that's the and the distributors say, okay, we agree to that. And we there these deals are and that those deals apply to any pay TV channel and they also apply to broadcast television networks with a local affiliates negotiate fees with distributors that in the case if the if the media company owns them, they directly get those fees. And in the case of it's a broadcast affiliate, right? Because like Fox has 200 affiliates, they only own about 48 of them. They kick back a portion of their retransmission fees called reverse retransmission comp to the network. And that's how the NFL is paid for. The NFL is almost all most of that new NFL deals almost all driven by retransmission fees, which are similar to pay TV fees, but a little, a little different because broadcast technically reaches everybody with a with a TV home in the United States. So you have greater reach about 10 or 15 million more homes than pay TV. So ABC reaches 10 to 15 more million people, million homes than ESP yet. So, and that's what the real money is now because those are still remain the highly viewed, right? Even though the viewing has gone down, they're the highest viewed outlets and the and the viewing on those broadcast networks put streaming to shame. They beat the living crap out of it on an average minute viewing basis still. So distributors find value there. So in the case of SmackDown, you see when the two million, two million viewers every Friday night, you see the advantage of reach in prime time on broadcast television. Advertisers recognize that reach, right? You're reaching a lot of people. They're younger, blah, blah, blah. We'll pay for that. The distributors haven't yet said, you know what? We think that's worth enough that we want to say we're giving you eight bucks a month for your affiliates and now we want to give you eight dollars and 50 cents. Now, one of the tricks is you when you negotiate with a distributor, you're negotiating your portfolio. So sometimes properties come along with a real apex property like the NFL. But if you're Fox and you're paying a lot of money for the WWE and you do your P&L, you know, how many revenue sources do you have? You've got a right speed that you're paying that goes out. Then you've got your advertising. But then you've got a big hole because you have no fee revenue. Typically for the top properties, advertising is 30% of what you're paying in your right speed. The rest of it comes back from retransmission or pay TV fees from distributors, which are multi-year contractual. So advertising, remember, is cyclical every year you do it over. Okay, that's why in recessions, advertising revenue goes down. So it's hard to plan for it. It's variable. But when you do a contract with pay TV distributors for fees, they come in regardless of the economy. They're multi-year. The check arrives. And that gives the business stability. So that's why the biggest properties that draw the most viewers or the most valuable distributors get large rights fees because the pay TV distributors will pay up that viewing on multi-year basis contractually instead of just relying. And then you don't have to rely only on advertising, which is cyclical. So for Fox, the trick is do they think they can start getting some value out of fees with this? Or are they doing well enough with their investments in the NFL and the big 10 with retransmission fees that they don't need to worry about that with the WWE? And they want to keep it there because definitely the WWE is going to want to bump. And also for Fox, when they get done with the WWE, they have a NASCAR negotiation, NASCAR strategic to them. NASCAR gets them pay TV and retransmission fees. And then they have to turn around and begin to look at Major League Baseball. So these are the kind of things you think about. If you're managing a portfolio of content at a media company and you have to figure out what you're going to pay for, you're not going to pay for. So it'll be interesting to see it. My inclination is Fox will want to keep this. But the truth, the matter is they may decide that they don't have to because of some of the other investments they've made. And if I'm NBC, there's some incentives to look at taking the whole thing. And that may become an opportunity for them. And also much like the UFC, if I'm an Amazon or an Apple or any other digital, carmax.com, whoever decides to get into media, there may be some value to acquiring a property like the WWE because of the opportunity to read you pay per views on a scale basis worldwide. And it would seem from the WWE side and sort of what you've outlined here is that reach probably has a lot more importance than five years ago when you're looking at this. F1's an example as well, sticking with ESPN when reportedly they had a larger monetary offer on Netflix. And there's a lot of synergy there with drive to survive. But reach has a high premium. And I would state that with the loss of cable homes, broadcast outlets are something a lot that just are escalating in value, I would say. Well, you bring that up, right? So Fox and ESPN and Amazon are managing portfolios. Well, the WWE is managing a portfolio too. So they've got content. They've got different partners. They've got different types of vehicles. They do different kind of audience profiles, different kind of economic models that flow through that. And your point about reach is well taken. I mean, your WWE Fox is huge. I mean, we're on broadcast television for two hours in prime time, 51 or 50 weeks out of the year. And the amount of promotion, they're a good partner in Fox. They're a good partner, right? They treat us as core. That's it. Something else to it. They treat us as core. They pay us a lot of money. And we can promote all our other content. To your point that we can promote stuff on peacock. And you know, how do we replace that? And the answer is NBC might be able to offer them some. Right. That's one of the things that makes NBC so interesting, because NBC has broadcast, pay TV and streaming assets. They have what I call the try cast distribution system. Fox doesn't, Fox doesn't have a streaming platform. They have to be, but it's not quite like what the sub feed slash ad supported model of peacock. So, so, so, so, so the WWE has to look at its portfolio as well. And you're losing Fox. Are they okay with that? Are they okay with losing reach? Right? Or can they find another partner that would be prepared to give them a night of prime time in the same kind of all out way Fox does, which is hard to see, but maybe NBC could make that offer. If anybody could, probably NBC could. Before we wind things down, I did want to touch a bit about the portfolio of Warner Brothers Discovery. And they house AEW wrestling, which performs very well on Wednesday nights. They currently have four hours of original programming per week. They look to be adding another program on Saturday nights. And when we're talking about these giant rights fees, a bargain, when you look at the performance they have, how familiar are you with AEW? And do you feel that they are something that as Warner Brothers Discovery are trying to slash all of these costs, that it's a, it eats up a lot of hours at a relatively low cost for them. Yeah, I think AEW is a good example of what makes sense for the new WBD. This is a success story for them. They basically manufactured this content. And it's been successful. And so as they look into the future, the beauty of it is, is that it mince as well with digital assets. So they're going to take the Euro-Sport model that they own in Europe, and they're going to bring something like it to the United States. And they're going to create their own Tri-Cast system, right? The best they can. They won't have broadcast. But who knows what's going to happen in media realignment, right? But the truth of the matter is, the AEW is great content for them. And the manufacturing of it was inspired. And they, and it made a lot of sense for them to do. So they have to feel very successful with that. Obviously, you know, the, the, the interesting thing about wrestling is it, it has all the elements and advantages of live, live television and sports, but it also has all the greatness of scripted programming, but also all the risks with scripted programming, which is, you know, sometimes the storylines don't work, right? Right? And so, you know, it's, it's, I always tell people wrestling is interesting because you have to have writers, right? And you have to be able to create compelling stories. And, you know, most sports manufacturers are on their own. And so you need both of them. And then you need talented athletes on top of it, right? I mean, very talented athletes. So, so I, I view that as a major success. It's a great example of what people have to do more of. I think as we go forward, media companies probably will look to do that. But, but it's been a major success story for them. And they're going to absolutely continue to do it. I probably imagine at some point they'll try to find a way to create more hours, in particular for digital assets that they probably plan to launch in the United States. Do you have a, a prediction on what AW might get? They're going to expire probably in 2024. They're currently getting about $44 million in the average annual value. And that's, you know, that's what about a quarter of what say SmackDown gets for two hours on, on Fox. It's not doing the same rating, of course, it's doing about half the viewership. But that's, you know, a quarter of the value, about half the viewership. Or it, and how much does one extra bidders come into play and just the, the legacy of the brand, W is a much longer, you know, a much longer lasting brand and the AW is very new. Just like how much, how much do those things weigh in? I think one of the interesting things for the AW will be what, what, what happens with the WWE for the WWE goes away from broadcast television, right? And your turn, you know, you, you, you, there's less places to find wrestling now on the best distributed networks, right? The Fox are for AW, if they smack that. I don't know, I, it could open up a relationship with Fox, maybe not on the broadcasting network, but it could open, it could open it up with, with, with the other Fox assets. But I think, I think the AW, if I was sitting at Turner, you know, I'd be looking at trying to figure out a way to whether there's a larger investment for us here, right? And a lot of that's going to have to do with what their plan for streaming digital distribution is in the United States. And what they believe investing in the AWE and making it bigger and larger can do with pay per views and, and, and their own proprietary library content. Because there's an opportunity there to own this stuff. The one thing about wrestling that, that is important is that the library seems to be pretty, pretty evergreen, right? And, and, and so, you know, you can mine that. And, and, and a couple more years here, there's going to be a real extensive library for the AWE that you can build, you know, some kind of platform offer. So I think they're going to do better than what they're doing now. The question is, what will Turner do? And it's hard for me to see Turner walking away from it, with a WBD rocking away from it. But at the same time, you know, you get zazzed a lot these days, guys, over there. But by the time they get to the AWE, he will have been done right signing what he believes the costs are. And they'll get a clean, the nice thing for the AWE is that they're going to get a clean look with a WBD that's kind of got its cost side in order. And they'll be able to do a real valuation exercise. They'll be at a triage mode, and they'll be looking for places to invest. And they're going to get a look at that. And that might be the opportunity for AWE. The SLED MBA coming up. The, the LUDU AW, AWE is expiring like a year before, MBA, I think. All right. So what year is AWE? So sometimes I get a little... And it's 24. And I think MBA is expiring 25. Yeah. So the, so the, so I don't know when the exclusive negotiation would have for AWE. But the exclusive negotiating window for MBA is well before 25. So, so they, you know, obviously, but even you think about the investment, right? The MBA investment is going to be much more significant than the AWE investment, even if the AWE investment tripled by the annual basis. So I feel like the AWE investment is kind of like, if we're going to be in the live media business here at the WBD, you know, we should maybe figure out a way to do this, right? And, and then the MBA is kind of a different thing. The MBA is one of these things where you have like, we're going to invest multi-billions every year for eight years in this. And that's kind of a different conversation. So I don't know if the AWE is impacted much by what happens with the MBAs. Matter of fact, if I were AWE, I would, and I wanted to stay with Turner, I'd want Turner to keep the MBA because it means that, you know, the WBD is committed to live sports. Well, Pat, this has been a, just a tremendous discussion. It has been great to, to pick your brain for as long as we have had you. I think we will have to do a return visit. We will come knocking at some point in the months to come because this stuff is certainly fascinating to discuss and all the different balls that are going to be in the air. But thank you so much for joining us. And I hope we can do it again sometime. Yeah, absolutely guys. Thanks for having me. Great questions. I really enjoyed it. I'm happy to talk. Good job. All right. Thank you very much. First time we talked that I learned so much and I've been relying on our conversation ever since for, you know, talking points on my other podcasts. Well, I appreciate a great deal, Brandon. I a little out from volleyball, you want Twitter and I appreciate that. Thank you. All right. Thanks very much, Pat. Have a great one. We'll talk soon. Okay, guys. Take care. A change of season is the perfect time to change your luck. Update your prescription and choose from the wide selection of brand name frames and state of the art lenses at Pearl Vision. They work with all major vision plans, including IMED. Plus, they'll cover the cost of your insurance copay or your eye exam. Schedule your family's eye exams at PearlVision.com. Valid prescriptions required valid participating locations, restrictions, apply Texas Extra Seed Store for details and July 31st, 2023 exams available at the Independent Doctor of Optometry at or next to PearlVision. Some doctors employed by PearlVision. For the ones finding new ways to ensure the job always gets done. For the ones wearing many hats. For the ones who are hands-on, even from far away. 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We're going to be having an exam for all the listeners now at the end where we are going to go through that. I learned a ton just listening to all of that. This is somebody that was an executive at Fox for years in the rooms for a lot of these negotiations. And you know, from like my perspective, somebody like right up close and personal with the UFC deal at Fox during during his tenure there and throwing out a lot of interesting scenarios there. But one being that, you know, as we have discussed Brandon, like AEW is a great, great value for Warner Brothers Discovery. And it's been backed up by their commitment of just adding on more hours of content with this yet to be announced Saturday show expected to be the next two hours. Yeah, it's going to be more content, more hours. We were talking about it on Sunday. It's still even when you add in, so we got two hours for Don and like another one for Rampage up to three. If assuming the Saturday show is just one hour, you're up to four hours of in-ring content, not counting all access or things like that. That's, you know, just want smack down a long five weekly than yet. And I see that seven. I mean, just to compare the two wrestling companies, AEW would still be well behind the weekly hours of WWE. But yeah, we're in this era, I think, where tonnage, we heard the word, the buzzword tonnage. That is, we give them tonnage. We give them more and more hours of content. And there's a cost to that, I think, like, are you, it's going to wear down your fans is going to dilute your ratings in your other shows. But it's something that these things, that's networks want because it'll probably do a better rating. I would think at least certainly at first that Saturday show is going to do a better rating than the rerun movie that they're going to play, you know, this coming Saturday. So we'll see how it goes. And there's also the other side of this whole coin of these escalating rights fees and the amount of money being sunk into these, you know, streaming outfits. And we're seeing that directly this week with the latest ESPN layoffs. I think I saw the figure that of the past, like five series of layoffs that this has been pretty much every other year, it's something like 1,300 jobs that have been, you know, that have been lost during all of this. And that seems like that's going to be a continual theme for a lot of these broadcasters as they're looking at all of this. Before we. A little while, but I just just really think it comes to mind following that conversation is we've focused so much on somebody buying a new or last several months, obviously. And if you look at the sort of relatively nascent state that a w is in, if you're a wbd, although you are in this justly conservative mode since it's a bear manager, wouldn't you want to own a w because it's. It was one of the subjects I think has not been talked about enough is the idea of where you see a UFC. And if you were Disney, would you not have wanted to have bought UFC back in 2019 when this deal started versus now that it would probably be out like UFC has just grown to such a mammoth degree. WWE has grown to such a mammoth degree. AEW is still in a relatively embryonic stage that the idea of buying it outright now, like what would that valuation be for AEW? It would be something I think any broadcaster would be looking at and Warner Brothers discovery. I mean, I don't know what their idea of like acquisitions would be given their current state, but I would think like that's a natural conversation. You know, you know, if you're Tony Khan and Chad Khan, you don't need the money. You know, you've got, I believe the cons have way, way more than enough money to finance this indefinitely. Are there other advantages that the AWS entity would gain by being owned by WBD? I don't know, but that's something to think about. You know what I was thinking of this week, just in regards to Cody Rhodes and such that what a what an interesting what if if you know Cody and the elite end up getting some kind of equity stake when this started because that was one of the questions when AEW started, like if them getting some kind of points and it was made clear at the beginning that they did not have any equity stake, but it would have made Cody's exit a lot more tricky. And certainly you would not have had this fear of losing these talents that if they have stake in the company, it's a much more you're tied in that much more and what this could sell for. Even if you're talking like one to five percent of the company among those guys. Right. I mean, even think about that from W's perspective, if Cody leaves, if he did leave AWS a talent, if which we don't think he does, he had points in AEW still. Do you want to hire somebody who has an interest in your confidence? It certainly sounds like a financial confidence interest. Let's talk a bit about this lawsuit that was filed on behalf of former WWE writer Brittany Abrahams, Brandon, both of us have had a chance to go through this suit. And it's there's quite a lot to it. So it's a civil suit. Brittany Abrahams worked with the company from November of 2020 until April of 2022. And the defendants listed in the suit are WWE Vincent Stephanie McMahon, senior writers Chris Dunn and Jen Pepperman, lead writers Mike Heller, Ryan Callahan and Christine Loubrano, who is their SVP of creative writing relations. And she is claiming discriminatory treatment, harassment, hostile work environment, wrongful termination, and unlawful retaliation against the plaintiff due to her race, color, and gender. She was one of the few black writers on the staff, along with Kyla Silver's, who is also listed as one of the witnesses in this suit and goes over several instances, including dialogue that was written for Bianca Balaire, a storyline involving Reggie dressing up in drag, which never did get onto television, but was pitched in a slack chat. And then others involving a Shane Thorne, who would be given a hunting gimmick, where he would be hunting wrestlers and would go to hunt Reggie and putting him in a cage was discussed. We also had, and this is the one that will probably get a lot of attention was the idea of a love triangle involving Aliyah, Angel Garza, and Mansoor, now of the maximum male models, where Mansoor would have a deep dark secret. And one of the writers pitched the idea, what if his secret is that he was behind the 9-11 attacks? That's what the complaint says. And there's there's other town mentioned that Apollo Crews using the Nigerian accent, which we did see. Yes, there's a there's mention of the of the comments or a line that that Bianca Balaire was scripted to say something about taking her earrings on. And Bianca Balaire complaint, like that is you had Bianca Balaire allegedly complaining multiple times about not wanting to state this line. And also hearing from black performers that that felt like they were not being heard and issues with their portrayals. So this is this is very much a suit that does sort of look at the the writing for minorities for people of color in this company and who are in these rooms, what voices are being heard. I don't know what ultimately this case will result in, but it is going to lead I think to an examination of just the the writers room as well. It raises questions just, you know, what's the demographic make of the writing team? We think it's some somewhere upper 20 people were on the writing team. My impression for years and years is that there were few women on the writing team that seems to have changed. If only going by the names in this complaint there are at least some women. But I think it raises questions about how many people of color on this writing team that's writing content for a very diverse cast of talent. Yeah, and I think that there are, you know, degrees to this, like you can certainly look at things that are just outright can be classified as racist. And I think there's also more nuanced things just in terms of, for instance, a a white writer that is not going to be from from the same sort of upbringing, the same kind of experiences that a performer that is a minority has not been through and that you are writing for. And it's just a case of ignorance or just unaware of those experiences as well. But it's it's an interesting case to look at. And the final thing was just her dismissal that came just after WrestleMania last year and essentially being reprimanded over taking one of those commemorative chairs that you can get ringside at WrestleMania that she stated several of the writers took, including herself, and then was reprimanded over and then terminated on April the 7th, believing that she was singled out over this. So it's a case that has a lot to it, but very much examining the writing process. We will see where this is going to go. She is seeking punitive and declatory damages and seeking a trial for this, which I don't know if that's how horrible reach her termination is framed by her as as retaliation for her pushing back against ideally looking at this is just yeah, the reason for them to get rid of her is yeah, right? Just a just a front to give give them some reason to fire her and she presents all these other situations in which writers had previously taken a WrestleMania commemorative chair without consequence. But but this was something that she was reportedly fired over. We also have an email from Nick Khan. Do you want me to read this email to you, Brandon? We are all fortunate. What's all here? This is from Nick Khan, courtesy of PW Insider. We are all fortunate. We are all fortunate to be three years, one month and 14 days removed from the moment where stay at home orders were put in place. So definitely was he was getting on Google like when can we make this three year period sound the absolute longest? You break it down by year, month and day. How many hours since that stay at home order? How many seconds they're ticking? Business is shuttered some permanently and sports seasons canceled. Of course at WWE and thanks to all of you, we continue to move forward never missing a week of production in the safest way possible. As I have had the good fortune of meeting with so many of you over the last few months is become apparent to me that our business thrives on creativity and an unparalleled work ethic. All of us physically together as a part of that as such, we will be going back to what has always been the case prior to COVID, which is a return to five days a week in office. Nothing replaces our ability to interact with one another as we collectively continue to build and represent our company. We will all connect better and be better. Monday, May 1st, we will start our full-time return to office. For those based in Stanford, our first group has moved to our new HQ and the rest of us will be there shortly. We thank you for your patience with this process. If you have not seen it yet, it's a spectacular workspace that we believe you will be quite proud of. Thank you for all, Nick. Come back where our disgraced chairman will be there on a daily basis, and it's better that we're all interacting on a daily basis. Yeah, so I was told there was an employee survey some months back. I believe some time after Vince was gone and employees were surveyed about among other things, how they felt about flexible work or work from home. Since you might expect it was very popular, so I think to at least to some degree, this is being met with someone happiness with the employees. You can view it as maybe what's applies to this concert. Let's find out who's really enthusiastic about being here in this workplace. If people quit, you probably don't have to pay them a severance. You're probably going to lay off a lot of people when the merger starts to really go into effect. No, they said everything's going to be run just like before, Brandon. It's just we're under new ownership. That's it. Business as usual. You're right though. If this does curb any percentage of people that do not want to come back to work, it does lessen what are inevitable that these cuts are coming. They also have this giant new headquarters that they have sunk millions and millions of dollars into. This was a project pre-pandemic and one that they obviously want bodies in these headquarters. This is something many businesses are going through at the moment. There's been a lot of resistance. The idea of these giant headquarters and office spaces, it does make me wonder 10 to 15 years from now what the office space culture is going to be when we have gone through. When you're talking about cuts and just financial cutting, people that can work at home, that can be viewed as an asset for many businesses as well. New headquarters is costing a lot. It's something that's discussed every earnings call. I'm sure it'll be discussed again next week. To some degree, you probably feel like, well, might as well justify the cost. It's not something that they likely should need or would have planned if they knew that they were going to definitely do a merger like they have because the last thing you need when you're going to cut a lot of people is a lot more out of the space. The last question before we let you go, Brandon, what is the topic from season four of the Arc side of the ring that has your interest? Have you seen the 10 confirmed topics? I have seen it and that's a reminder to myself. I saw you tweeted earlier. We've got Chris Candido and Tammy Sitch, Magnum TA, Adrian Adonis, Don't Wake the Clown. They don't specify which Don't Wake the Clown. I assume this is going to be a Matt Bourne-centric episode. Junkyard dog, Marty Jeanetti. I hope they bring in the modern day don'ts, the donks, the donks that Alabama don't, and all the donks that are working in these. Then now forever together, donk. Marty Jeanetti, Bambam Vigolo, Abdulla the Butcher, Bash at the Beach 2000. One of these is not like the other and the Graham family, Eddie Graham, Mike Graham. Bash at the Beach 2000. It just kind of sticks out like this is there's going to be a lot of depressing stories in this season. Then there's Bash at the Beach 2000, which maybe that's there for some levity. I'm sure we'll get into the results and talk about it. He can magnetize. That seems like one of the topics here that's not been done quite a bit. He's seen. He's obviously still around. The Graham family is like you have not had a really deep look at Eddie Graham. There was a championship wrestling from Florida documentary a few years ago that high spots did, but it is, if you're not familiar, it's such a sad story. Eddie Graham, the famous promoter, killed himself in 1985. Then his son, Mike Graham, first of all, his son, Mike Graham's son, took his life. Then two years later, Mike Graham took his own life. You have three generations of death here. It's just a horrible story. I can't imagine this one is not going to be a very much in the vein of the Von Eric story. It's a lot of the observer tribute book here. We're getting all the subjects of people who have died at three young ages in wrestling. There you go. That's coming up May 30th, Vice TV. We'll have that. But Thursday nights, it is the Thursday 30. And we have got Brandon Thurston coming at you where I'm sure that there will be many more stories to come over the next 48 hours. Are we going to get 30 minutes dissecting CM Punk's travel log from Monday from Florida to Chicago into the Allstate Arena out of the Allstate Arena and to his local home, I guess, to watch the NHL playoffs at night. I don't think he's being tracked, but we'll see. There's a big announcement coming out tonight on Dye and Light, right? What's the big announcement? Big announcement. What's the dropdown menu state? What are we going to be talking about tonight from Tony Khan? This isn't the new TV show. I would think that they're going to wait until May 17th, until the upfront reveal. What if he announces we have a new show, but we're not going with collision. It is AEW tonnage. That'd be good to go. I haven't seen a trademark font for that though. There you go. Dynamite and tonnage. Co-terminus AEW flagships coming your way, potentially. Well, I want to give all credit to Brandon Thurston, who brought Pat Craig's onto the show. I was very much looking forward to this discussion with him. I had to go back and learn a bit about Pat Craig's. I'm like, what an interesting life that this man has had. He served in the military, then goes to Fox Sports, rises up the ranks. That's quite the career pivot. He's just somebody who's suggested to me a couple of years ago that I get in touch with. This was in the height of the key demo debate, I guess. I needed someone of credibility to explain to me whether the key demo really mattered or how it mattered, why it mattered. Does P2 plus this whole viewership matter as well? That's where he explained to me and all the other things that, sort of what we were talking about earlier in terms of carriage fees or retransmission fees that programs help networks and their portfolio of networks. I just imagine a big portfolio of networks make deals with, say, direct TV or your local cable system to pay them for the right to carry USA Network or Fox or you name the entire portfolio or conglomerate of networks when they make those deals. What do you think? In some world, that's where it was. P2 plus matters to that extent. If wrestling companies are able to contribute to that, which is kind of an open question, I think. There could be ways in which RAN or SmackDown contribute to that. Maybe it's a considered sports programming that contributes to a minimum of X hours of sports programming that the network has to provide to the carrier. All of these deals will be different. You know, Fox has a bunch of different deals across the US and so does every other conglomerate I would imagine. What do you think the average citizen in Buffalo would react if they got their notice from their local carrier that your cable fee has gone up? 25 cents because SmackDown has been renewed and you are now required to pay an extra quarter for WWE wrestling? Do you think they have that muscle that they'll be like, can't go without my Friday night? SmackDown. Depends on the age. I think older people will hold on to the bend the longer younger people are more apt to, in general, to cut it. And we'll see how long it takes before those core cutting numbers back home. Next week, Brandon and I are going to be back because it's a very busy day on Wednesday. Brandon and I will not be reviewing wrestling on Taku, but we will be talking about the Q1 earnings report that WWE will be holding. Cross my fingers, it is still scheduled for 8 30 in the morning. We are planning to be live next Wednesday. It's going to stay that well. I'm hoping so because we are planning to be live at around one Eastern this same time slot next Wednesday. We'll go through the earnings call, the weather or not Vince McMahon is there. I'm thinking not, but who knows? This will be the first call since the merger. So I'm sure Nick Khan will be in fine form. We will see if he is in light shed form or if he is just in regular media appearance, Nick Khan mode. I'm thinking the latter. I think the latter will be, of course, there will be prepared statements and then there will be Q&A. And I'm sure you will answer all questions carefully. It's amazing the power of Brandon Ross's words of, you guys know I interviewed Nick Khan, right? Boom. The Nick Khan interview is on, it's a treasure trove there that we found. So was, all the aggregators covered that, was that not behind like a paywall or a log in wall, because everybody links to it? Everyone linked to it. I thought it was behind a paywall. Me too. But I don't know. I mean, I think everybody, I think you covered it first or, you know, actually knew a plan again, typed up something on it, you know, wrote something on it. And everyone flowed from there. It's uncovering the light shed media call with Nick Khan, which was quite the interesting chat. So we will have plenty of Nick Khan to speak about next week. You can follow patreon.com slash WrestleNomics, where you get the WrestleNomics 30 every Thursday with Brandon and the pro wrestling industry report for 2022. Brandon's graphs in fine form, breaking down every single company, every metric you could want. This is stuff that I think executives at every company would want to be signing up for to figure out how their business is doing. This is certainly, I imagine, a labor of love Brandon that you put into this, but it's excellent. I cannot recommend it enough to people. In other years, it has been upward of submitting pages last year. This year, it's 20 something pages. I, yes, I'm releasing an annual report here in late April. I didn't think I was going to get it done. I think I was just busy with other stuff and reporting ratings and reporting on the merger and other stuff that was going on. So I didn't know how I was going to get it done. And then I selected replies when you know that somebody sent me was like, hey, do you have anything that compares to W and A.W. I was like, you know what, let me just make up a bunch of slides real quick. And it's always something that I think is going to take like this will take an hour or something. And then it ended up being in the only few days of the company. One suggestion, I think, for future years, I think you need to have the cover figure, much like WWE puts out who will Brandon put on the cover each year? That opens up an intellectual property can of worms. I'm going to monetize and sell a PDF that contains a picture. Who owns that picture? No, no, a drawing, okay? Separate art. Drawing. Yes. Does a drawing count on someone's likeness, though? Should it be getting royalties for that? I think that's, you could pay the artist. We could all do a little fundraiser. We could get you artwork. And then we could put Roman Reigns right next to Tony Khan, and they're both holding up the one. And that could be, that could be year 2023 and beyond. On that note, we are going to sign off a big thank you to Pat Craig for joining us. And all of you, we hope you enjoyed this discussion. The spreadsheet is growing. I have added some more names. The brand is going to seek out. We, yeah, we have years worth of guests, everyone, that we are going to go through. So lots of interesting people, and we are open to suggestions as well. So that's going to wrap things up. We are back tonight, myself, and waiting with rewinded dynamite. We will be live here on this channel on the Post YouTube at 10 Eastern following dynamite in Sunrise, Florida. So we will speak with you then. And that is going to wrap things up. Thank you for tuning in. A change of season is the perfect time to change your luck. Update your prescription and choose from the wide selection of brand name frames and state of the art lenses at Pearl Vision. They work with all major vision plans, including IMED. Plus, they'll cover the cost of your insurance copay or your eye exam. Schedule your family's eye exams at PearlVision.com. Valid prescriptions required valid participating locations, restrictions apply, Texas Extra Seed Store for details, and July 31st, 2023 exams available at the Independent Doctor of Optometry at or next to Pearl Vision. Some doctors employed by Pearl Vision.