AEW’s Young Bucks Say Being The Elite Became ‘Burnout City’ [Exclusive]

When you talk to a wrestling fan about the Young Bucks, at least half the time they’ll bring up Being The Elite. In its heyday, the Young Bucks and their friends would produce travel vlogs and skits — many of which amassed over a million views on YouTube. When Matt and Nick turned heel, they took a break from the weekly webisode series. As a diehard BTE consumer, I know first hand the withdrawals that ensued the day that BTE went on hiatus.

That first Monday afternoon without a new episode had every Elite fan in mourning. It was replaced with ‘Being The Dark Order’ before it was abandoned completely. Then, one day, BTE subscribers received a YouTube notification about a new video upload. Is it real? Are our eyes deceiving us?

While it wasn’t much, it was something, and in these trying times, it’s better than nothing.

As an outsider, it’s hard to put yourself in a performer’s shoes. But the reality is the Young Bucks were producing episodes once a week for 52 weeks for 7 years straight. They were constantly coming up with new ideas for content all while wrestling full-time and taking care of their families.
In an interview with VICE, Matt and Nick detail “reviving” BTE and how they’ll handle it going forward.

Reviving Being the elite

“Doing it and not setting a schedule where it’s like, ‘Hey, we have to have a certain episode at Monday at 9 o’clock, West Coast.’ If we want to film something, we’ll film it,” Matt admits. “If we have an idea, we’ll do that, and we’ll just release it whenever we feel like. That’s been kind of fun and I feel like the fans haven’t pressured us into coming back full time, so [that] helps it as well. So just being loose about it has helped.”

“And like you said, having a long break after doing it every week was burnout city, you know? I know Matt felt the same way,” Nick adds. “So the way we’ve been doing it right now has actually been a lot more fun, because we don’t feel like we’re pressured into doing it.”

Matt compares the old BTE filming schedule to that of filming reality television and that made it “resentful.”

“Yeah, I feel like we feel compelled to shoot something, we just shoot it, and then we release it. For so many years it was like, ‘It has to be 30 minutes every week.’ That’s a lot of content every week. So it felt like essentially we were shooting a reality show on top of a full-time wrestling schedule. You kind of resent it.”

We joked that the YouTube algorithm has changed so much over the years and that the AdSense isn’t even an incentive to push out videos anymore.
“We didn’t even make money doing this! This is literally our passion [laughs]. In many ways we owe BTE a lot of our career,” Matt says. “It was probably the biggest thing that we’ll ever be a part of, personally. That’s what launched our careers into the stratosphere. To be able to do that, BTE had to come first and wrestling almost had to come second. It was our livelihood though it was our career, right? Now, like you said, it’s fun again.”

As far as where they see BTE heading in the future? They don’t want to make any big promises right now.

“We don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver. We’d rather under-promise and over-deliver,” says Matt. “So as long as we’re having fun we’re going to keep documenting and doing stuff because I think years from now this will be fun to look back at and our kids could look at it and be like, ‘Oh, this is what uncle Nick and my dad were doing for all those years. This is really stupid or this is really interesting.”

Check out our full interview with the Young Bucks and, as always, stay tuned for news on AEW.

The post AEW’s Young Bucks Say Being The Elite Became ‘Burnout City’ [Exclusive] appeared first on VICE.