NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Adrienne Ma.

And I'm Daryan Woods.

Darian, have you ever watched pro wrestling before?

I had a friend who was into it, so yes. Okay, so you've seen it

before. How would you describe it to somebody who's never seen it? I would say it's kind of like

scripted acrobatics that mostly has an audience of teenage boys. But a lot of teenage girls,

and let's be honest, a lot of adult men and women, too.

Right. That's true.

Here's how Kazim Famoyeide describes pro wrestling.

It's, in essence, a TV show. It's a violent soap opera.

Kazim is a co-host of the Masked Man show, which is a podcast about pro wrestling.

Like, it's combat sports, it's all that, but it's also entertainment.

It's also storylines, also the big personalities that bring you in.

For a long time, Kazim says admitting you liked pro wrestling could be a little embarrassing and earn you some judgmental looks for people who just didn't get the appeal of muscle-bound dudes and spandex

pretending to body slam each other. But in recent years, Kazim says it feels like that's changing.

It's very much entrenched in pop culture everywhere. And it doesn't seem like a weird thing to

like anymore. It just sort of feels like one of the other major sports.

And this week, pro wrestling took another big step into the mainstream, as World Wrestling

Entertainment, WWE, which for years ran on cable TV, debuted on the world's largest streaming

platform, Netflix.

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