While “The Learning Tree” has been an incredibly divisive gimmick for Chris Jericho since he debuted the angle during his program with Hook, if there's one performer who is absolutely on board with the story, it's Adam Copeland, the former TNT Champion who is currently mending from a broken tibia at AEW Double or Nothing.

Discussing both his recovery process and the process of reinvention that every professional wrestler must experience at one point or another during their in-ring careers on Busted Open Radio, Copeland put over what he's seen so far from “The Learning Tree,” noting that Jericho has always been a master of finding new ways to remain relevant in professional wrestling.

“It never changed my mentality. Part of me goes, ‘Well, you recreate yourself.' But each injury kinds of adds itself to the character that was already portraying, which to be honest, is not that far removed from me at this point. It's as close as I've been to character and citizen [laughs] than it's ever been. Sometimes, you can try and swim upstream and make it work and all these things, but with my story, because of the injuries, because of the nine years retired, because of the first year that was missed, I don't know how much I change, honesty. I think this was one more instance of grizzled vet fighting back from another one. But then the people let you know, too. I might come back, they might boo me out of the building. I don't know,” Adam Copeland told Busted Open Radio via Fightful.

“Right now, I'm watching [Chris] Jericho, and man, he's so much fun to watch. He's recreated himself again. He's leaned into what the naysayers have said, and he's took it and run, and now he's bringing Bryan Keith and Big Bill with him. He's the perfect person to bring those two guys along and get them the spotlight, get their character. Clearly, they can both do character work. Bryan Keith, he might be one of my favorite characters all of a sudden. I love it. Then here's this seven-foot, 300-pound ripped dude being professor positive. I love it. So there's something to recreation, I just don't know if this is the instance for that with me.”

Is “The Learning Tree” a bit too inside baseball for some fans but incredibly over with wrestlers who “get it?” Or have Jericho and Copeland been working together for so long that they have a vested interest in and a desire to see each other succeed as friends and colleagues? Frankly, it might just be a little bit of both, not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Mike Bailey tells Chris Jericho how he almost signed with WWE.

Turning the page from Chris Jericho the wrestler to Chris Jericho the journalist, “The Learning Tree” recently brought one of the top impending free agents on the scene, “Speedball” Mike Bailey, onto his Talk is Jericho podcast and learned that, before he debuted for TNA in January of 2022, he French Canadian phenom had an agreement in place to land in WWE as part of NXT, only for the promotion to never follow through on their word.

“January 2022 is when I debuted with TNA, with IMPACT then. But it was a long road, even then. When my ban came up, the day, I tweeted a little highlight video that I made, a little announcement my ban was ended and then that got a lot of attention and that got me talking to everyone. That got me signed with NXT for a couple months until they let me go without actually hiring me,” Mike Bailey told Chris Jericho via Post Wrestling.

“After that video came out, I had already been talking with TNA, talked to some people from AEW, talked to NXT, got a bunch of offers, and ended up taking the NXT one. Very excited to be there, they do the background check, they do the visa paperwork, that takes a couple months. Just (a) couple days after I submit the visa paperwork, for this one, you have to go and do a whole career retrospective and all the articles with all your accolades, you have to gather that and send it in. So I worked on that for several weeks, sent it all in. Then I see they're starting to release a lot of people in NXT. They're letting go of people, and the person that had hired me, there were rumors that they had gotten released, so I texted them, and I was like, ‘Hey, is everything okay? Are we good?' And they're like, ‘Oh yeah, no problem. Contract's in the mail. We're sending it tomorrow,' and then the next day, I got an email saying, ‘Hey, due to new hiring guidelines, we're gonna have to stop your hiring process…' Yes, it was (Canyon Ceman that I was talking to).

“I was not like, whatever (he laughed). I was freaking out. I was pretty panicked. Again, this is a big deal for someone like me. I had made some very serious steps to plan my move to Orlando. Uproot my whole life, and then here we are again, so it's like, well, let's see what we can do to fix this, and so I got back in touch with everyone that I had spoken to, and I ended up signing with TNA, with IMPACT.  You made that decision not even two months ago (Bailey said about WWE wanting to bring him in). You haven't even brought me in yet. The only thing I wished is that they had, at least, given me the visa and flew me down so I would have (at) least have something to show for it, but not even me just sitting at home.”

Whoa, so you're telling me there was almost a world where “Speedball” ended up in NXT, in the middle of Vince McMahon's ill-fated 2.0 experiment, no less? Goodness, what would his career look like now had that happened? Well, in the end, it was all for the best, as Bailey has rapidly turned himself into one of the best in-ring performers in the world today with all sorts of fantastic matches on his resume to prove it, and it feels incredibly unlikely he would be in that position today had he been relegated to a mid-card role, or worse yet, signed and then released from NXT.