During the most recent episode of the “83 Weeks” Podcast, Eric Bischoff shot down the idea that he was trying to put the WWE out of business during the heyday of the Monday Night Wars:

On Wanting To Prove That Nitro Was #1 Rather Than Putting The WWE Out Of Business:

The narrative over the past 20 or more years has been how I was so single-mindedly focused on simply putting WWF out of business, and I have said this before, but that is not true. I may have said some outrageous s**t, part of that was to try and motivate people. Part of that was to get my character over because I knew some of that would leak, part of it was me being me. It wasn’t necessarily me wanting to put them out of business; I was focused on being number one. Whether I was number one by a mile and they went out of business, or whether I was number one by a mile and they were a solid number two really didn’t matter to me. Nobody is ever going to believe that, but me, but I really don’t give a s**t at this point in my life, but it’s true.

On What He Was Thinking About When Nitro Was Beating Raw:

While I was happy to have beaten them soundly in the ratings, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, they’re almost dead! We’re so close.’ It wasn’t that; it was just another week of us proving that we were on the right track, we had a great formula. We were getting support from Turner Broadcasting, we were getting interest from sponsors, and the international market place. All of those things that were difficult for WCW to even think about. Nobody could even think about that or have a realistic conversation without people pissing their pants if they were trying to talk about beating WWF in the international market place, or outselling arenas, or having bigger buy rates, whatever. Nobody could have that conversation two, three years up until this point.

On Continuing To Look To The Future Instead Of Focusing On WCW’s Success:

Now that we were actually achieving things that nobody else believed we could achieve, there was a level of confidence, not arrogance and I am not talking about myself I am talking about in the office that all of a sudden people were believing in themselves, and suddenly a rating where we were getting a 3.1 and they were getting a 1.5 all that made us do was that it gave us more confidence that we were on the right track.

You can listen to “83 Weeks” below:

Credit: 83 Weeks. H/T WrestlingInc.