Select Answers: Danielson Status, Sami Zayn Politics, Tony Khan Media Training?

Welcome to Select Answers, a short feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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Hi SRS, with Bryan Danielson appearing on tv again and traveling overseas with the company, do you happen to know if he’s signed a new contract with AEW, or is he just working on a per diem basis?

I don't know about a contract, but he is pretty firmly with All Elite Wrestling and has made it clear that's where he wants to be and where he wants to work. He'd told me during our interviews that he wasn't interested in returning to WWE for the time being.

Does Sami Zayn get pushback from the WWETKO higher-ups due to his public political stances being generally contradictive to what the company tends to support?

When I would ask internally, WWE sources claim that they don't get any heat for saying things like that. In fact, when I asked about Reigns and Triple H's Trump comments around WrestleMania, and CM Punk's Elon Musk comments, I was told that those talent were free to speak on what they want. How true that is tough to determine, but I haven't heard of any issues from that perspective. Maybe they just haven't made it to me.

Have you heard anything about Tony K getting media coaching/training? I’m very impressed with his diplomacy lately when asked about WWE questions. His answers, and Twitter account, used to fly off the handle.

I don't know about specific media training, I think he's just exercising more restraint based on experience. A few years ago, he indicated that there were coordinated trolls joining together to jump in on AEW topics, and that effectively got exposed, but it took years. He's mentioned bots, and counter programming, and WWE going after AEW contracted talent but the reality is, when fans are being tribalistic, they don't particularly care. I think AEW has realized that focusing on making their show better is the way. AEW also brought in Adam Hopkins a couple of years ago, which was a great move. He was with WWE for over 25 years in their PR department, so there isn't a lot that he hasn't seen.