Young Bucks: “Matt and Jeff Hardy are the biggest box office tag team act in the history of the business”

The Young Bucks, Matt and Nick Jackson, were interviewed for Chris Van Vliet’s YouTube channel and podcast this week.

They talked about their new book, “Killing The Business: From Backyards to the Big Leagues.” They also talked about how they wrote the book on their iPhones, what the biggest surprise has been for them in AEW, who they think is the best tag team of all time, if they have plans to feud with each other, how much the AEW Dynamite ratings mean for them, and much more.

Here are some highlights:

Nick Jackson was asked what the biggest surprise of AEW has been to them:  “The hard part is keeping everyone happy because you don’t even realize it until you get into management. But, it’s hard to keep a lot of these wrestlers on the same page because obviously there are a lot of egos in wrestling. You want the wrestlers to be happy and that’s something that’s hard but it’s manageable. We’ve learned that you can’t always be the good guy so at some points you have to be the bad guy. Our nature is to be real nice, so we’ve learned you sometimes can’t be and I think that’s probably the hard part for me. I always want to be a babyface.”

Matt: “I think my biggest challenge that I’ve learned throughout this process is how difficult episodic weekly television is because where we come from on the independents and even in Japan, sometimes you would just have to come in and have one big match every couple months and then you move on to the next town. Here, it is a different animal. It’s not just wrestling. You can’t just go in and depend on your matches. You have to stay interesting every week. Not only that, for us, we get to manage an entire roster of men and women and try to keep them interesting as well. That’s hard. That’s a tough task. When you only have two hours of TV a week plus Dark which actually helps out, but two hours of television every week you are responsible for and you have this many people. The other factor that you don’t even think about because you don’t have to think about, is the ratings. The minute by minute ratings is something that Tony Khan pays close attention to. That’s sometimes difficult because the artist in me says don’t worry about the minute by minute. We have to think of the long game. That’s how I think. He’s more of a numbers cruncher guy and he will go off of those stats. It’s constantly trying to come up with compelling, interesting television that also will get a rating. Sometimes those two don’t go together. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a week or two and do something that maybe people might not be compelled or gravitate to immediately, but maybe in four to six weeks they will get it and it will then create a bigger rating. That’s difficult, in wrestling especially.”

Matt talked about his goal:  “I think as far as short term projects, I would like to have a full length documentary on our lives…One thing is I always want to have the best match every single night.  I’ll never be happy if I’m in second place…Our goal is to always be the hot tag team and the best tag team in the world and maybe one day people will say we were the greatest of all time.”

Nick added:  “That’s my last goal in wrestling is to be known as the best tag team of all time.  It’s a hard goal to get to.  You have to have high goals.  It’s an impossible thing to accomplish because wrestling is an opinion.  Everyone has an opinion on things and it’s not an actual factual thing because it’s predetermined.  I want at least some people to say we were the greatest of all time.”

Matt said:  “Matt and Jeff Hardy are the greatest ever. There are so many ways to measure that. I know we say that is an opinion, but at the same time, this is a box office business and Matt & Jeff Hardy are the biggest box office tag team act in the history of the business. Can we ever reach those numbers that they hit? I don’t know because it’s a different time now. We are talking the Attitude Era when those numbers were insane and people were buying merchandise everywhere. But hey, dream big, and if one day people compare us to them, and they already do compare us to them, but if they say we are better than them, than what a crazy accomplishment that is.”

Click below to check out the full interview.

If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Chris Van Vliet with a h/t to PWrestling.com for the transcription