It was one of the more amazing parts of an amazing hour and fifteen minutes, and it happened fairly early on in the conversation between Vince McMahon and Steve Austin from their WWE Network interview on December 1, 2014.
WWE has released video of this segment, which is an interesting choice both as a means of promoting the show as a reason for fans to subscribe to WWE Network and as a tool for motivating a locker room that Vince seems to think needs it.
Here's what the boss said in response to Austin saying he thought today's WWE locker room is "trepidatious" and fears "pissing somebody off":
Well, don't piss anybody off. ... You have... this is a different group of guys and gals -- it's millennials. They're not as ambitious, quite frankly. And they're not trepidatious at all. I just don't think they necessarily want to reach for that brass ring. The last person to really reach for that brass ring, in all likelihood was John Cena. There are others coming up now who definitely want to reach for it: (Dean) Ambrose is one of them, Seth Rollins is another one, Roman Reigns is another one, Bray (Wyatt) is another one. So I think you've got some people here chomping at the bit to make a difference but when you're walking around backstage you don't hear as much camaraderie perhaps and laughter as in your era. But then again there are some other things they do. ... I would suggest (this locker room is not as ambitious as the one you were in), correct. It's a different... Again, I said it's millennials. It's a different point of view. If you reach for that brass ring and you fall on your butt... no one wants to fail and there's this feeling, this insecurity, that if you fail you're exposed. I think that's largely pretty much what it is. Because you give everybody the opportunities, you give everyone resources, which you never had. The things that we do now from a television production standpoint, social media. Oh my god, social media is huge. It helps talent in so many different ways. It gives them the tools that you did not have, and other people like you didn't have. It's the utilization of those tools that's very important for talent to use. And they do use them but not in the way you did.
The lack of ambition and short attention span of millennials came up several times in their conversation - is that just Vince's way of explaining why he doesn't understand "kids these days"? CM Punk and Daniel Bryan were afraid to fail and didn't want to grab the brass ring? Did Zack Ryder or Dolph Ziggler not take advantage of the tools of social media?
Thoughts on this piece of tape, Cagesiders? I don't expect any answers from millennials, since you're probably still asleep or instant texting or whatever it is you do.