It is Wednesday, October the 18th. I am John Pollock joined as always by Brandon Thurston for always the always busy Wednesday, although not as busy as a last week where we were anxiously awaiting numbers to be disseminated.

I see a whole lot less interest in NXT numbers that will drop in the next hour this week as compared to last.

Yeah, I'm only using one computer today to do today's podcast. So yeah, I'm sure it'll be a lot less interest. Will it be near the number that they did last week? Probably lower, probably a lot lower.

Well, I mean, it's a marathon. You can't judge one week, Brandon. It's the long game that they're playing.

We are going to be getting into a, well, NXT may come up over this next hour, but I promise you, topic that will come up, Panini.

And I know a lot of people, we're going to have some peak viewership today of all you Panini fanatics. You talk about the tribalism between WWE and AEW. In the trading card industry, it's Panini and Fanatics.

And we have a great guest today, Brandon, to break this down to make sense of not one, but two suits that we have, correct?

Yes, I think they're being consolidated according to a filing that just dropped a click an hour ago. I would like to ask our guest, Paul, let's go about it.

Whether the terminology would be correct to say that they are one is counter-suing the other, but there are two dockets on court listener, yes, because WWE is trying to end their contract, terminate their contract with Panini, their trading card licensee, and probably give that license to Fanatics.

But Panini is suing them to keep the contract in place, so that's what's happening.

The trading card frenzy, we will get into Paul who is a great guest and someone that can break all of this down in a pretty entertaining fashion, I think as well.

So for all of you legal heads out there, scrap on a seatbelt and get ready as we go down the Panini fanatics battle.

But we have lots to discuss from the past couple of weeks as or past week, I should say, where we talk about who other than Vince McMahon, he has had quite the last seven days, Brandon, and as you have taken in all of the media information that has been out there,

where does Vince McMahon sit right now? What is Vince McMahon's position in TKO slash WWE? What have you been able to glean from the past week?

Well, according to a sports illustrated article from Justin Brassel, his job is now to oversee the TV deals. No more creative, reportedly, we'll see how long that lasts.

But that appears to be Ari Emanuel's decision, which is consistent with his previous management style to separate the duties clearly.

Yeah, Ari Emanuel, I think gained a, I've got to say, what was the more newsworthy conference of the past month? Was it code or this Bloomberg conference?

I feel like there's a whole separate industry now of these conferences that are starting. It's given, I think we've got to get on the ground floor of this, Brandon, I think we could launch our own conference in the next, that's clearly the way to go if you are a media personality out there.

But I think that this Bloomberg conference certainly generated quite a bit of interest in our world.

Yeah, well, we had Ari Emanuel, and this is with Lucas Shaw, whose work we've talked about before here. He's done some reporting on the WWE, the sale.

We had Ari Emanuel on the first day. We used to just a two day conference, we had Ari Emanuel saying a lot of things that were newsworthy to our world, but including going after the CEO of CAA, Creative Artist Agency, which is another rival talent agency, Ryan Lord, he was going after.

Basically talking about a loss that has been filed against CAA, against Disney, against Miramax related to the Harvey Weinstein, sexual assault allegations.

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