AJ Styles has come around on Fatal Influence.
And he’s also got a theory about the affect the lack of non-televised WWE live events is having on the in-ring abilities of the emerging talent in the company.
During the latest episode of his official ‘Phenomenally Retro’ podcast, “The Phenomenal One” spoke about these subjects.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the episode where he touches on these topics with his thoughts. Also embedded below is a complete video archive of the show.
On wrestlers having trouble calling matches on-the-fly in the ring due to a lack of non-televised live events: “Here’s what’s hard with that now, I think a lot of the older guys who said ‘Nah, we’ll call it the ring, kid’, well, a lot of times they had the ability to wrestle so many different guys and they were able to call it in the ring because they weren’t sidelined by time limits or whatever. You have to hit your times or they’ve wrestled the guy so many times before. Of course you can call it, I could call a lot of things. the more I wrestle one guy ‘Hey man,we’ll just do what we did here’ and boom and it’s that quick but we’re not having live events like that anymore so guys aren’t getting any reps with each other. So I think that it’s going to be a lot harder to call, yeah sure, we can call the basic stuff but sometimes basic isn’t very entertaining and that’s our job is to be as entertaining as we possibly can so I think that’s going to be more difficult as time goes on.”
On the diversity and development of in-ring styles and move sets up-and-coming talents are bringing to the table: “There’s a lot of different styles that we now bring to the ring. It’s not the same. It’s not just shoulder tackles, grab hold, suplex, power slams, not a finish, there’s a lot of different things that, and a lot of different moves that guys and girls do. It’s pretty unbelievable. In fact, when you think about it diving out of the ring and stuff all these things have to take place I don’t know that it could be done like that as well and as flawless as it was back then because it was so basic back then. And that’s another thing that once you get to the ring, there will be some things where we’ll rehearse. And by rehearse, we’re not rehearsing the wrestling. We’re not doing that. We want to see what cameras are going to be in the position that we’re doing a certain thing so we get the best shot on the finish. That’s kind of what we rehearse or maybe somebody does a run in, want to see how everything’s done so that we get the best shot. So those things happen.”
On why he appreciates what Fatal Influence is doing: “Well, what I like about that group is, they look like the kind of people that would bully my daughter. Yeah. That makes me mad. And so I was like ‘Oh, I was like, they’re doing so good, you know, it’s the opposite how I would feel’ but knowing what they’re doing and how they’re doing their job and they’re doing it well ‘This is it.’ And so I’m like, ‘All right, keep doing what you’re doing. This is good. This is good stuff.’”
The latest episode of #ThePhenomenallyRetro Podcast is available now!
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— phenomenallyretro (@the_prpodcast) May 3, 2026
