Jon Moxley on why he was upset with Steve Austin.
A few years ago, WWE started doing live podcast episodes of the Steve Austin Show on WWE Network. Guests included Vince McMahon, Paul Heyman, Brock Lesnar, and others. While most of the interviews went smoothly and featured Austin chatting with his guests about a variety of topics, his interview with Jon Moxley (formerly Dean Ambrose in WWE) was an awkward affair that Austin couldn't get back on track after Moxley checked out.
Speaking to Wade Keller of PWTorch, Moxley revealed why he shut down during the interview.
"I don't remember it being very good. I was looking forward to it. I went there on my day off and I was like, 'Cool, we're going to talk wrestling.' A producer called me a week before to prep and was trying to ask super personal deep questions about my childhood. And I was like, 'it's kinda none of your business.' I didn't want to drag up my shit on national television. Within five seconds [of the interview], I'm getting these questions. [Austin] said something that pissed me off and I mentally shut down," recalled Moxley. "I love Steve and had that been a regular interview, I would have hung up on him. I think he wanted me to bury the shit out of everything. But I'm WWE Champion at the time and doing double shots. I'm beat to shit and working my ass off. And guys like Steve will be, 'Why don't you just go off-script?' The whole situation is different than when he was there. He could say 'Austin 3:16,' I get a dumb script. I can't go into all this on this podcast because I'm trying to stand up for my generation and the boys. I just wanted to talk about wrestling."
Moxley continued, "All these Attitude Era guys are calling our generation 'lazy and scared for our jobs.' They don't understand the shit we're dealing with. It's not 1998. I didn't know how to get into that in that setting. I just went to autopilot. I knew what he wanted but I didn't know how to give it to him. We didn't have enough time to get into it all. And I was pissed off because I felt bamboozled by that producer that I told that I was interested in talking about my family."
Moxley recently revealed that he and Austin recently spoke for 30 minutes and the relationship between the two seems to be much better than it was in 2016 when the interview occurred.
