Daniel Bryan on Vince McMahon not getting his generation, WWE's lack of competition, facing Brock Lesnar and more!

Not that he ever really left WWE's street team, but Daniel Bryan has been doing a lot of media since he announced his return for Royal Rumble and then became the point man for the company's press push on the move to Thursday nights for Smackdown.

He gets into a lot of very interesting topics in his talk with Mike Mazzarone and Brett Buchanan over at Alternative Nation.  He covers some of the same ground on his injury and what his return will look like that was the core of the Bleacher Report piece we wrote about yesterday.  Then, as Bryan's trainer HBShizzle might say, stuff got riz-eal.

Asked for his take on Vince McMahon's already infamous "brass ring" speech from The Steve Austin Show on WWE Network, the Beard indicated that his boss' perception of millenials is related to a lack of understanding on the part of McMahon's generation:

You know it's funny, because one of the things that he had mentioned was, he said something about the Millennials not having any ambition, right.

It's funny, because the WWE does this personality test with some of their more successful superstars, where they rank you on all of these scores, like your desire for power, and your personality, and all that kind of stuff. One of the things they ranked was ambition, and it's funny, because in this personality assessment, I got the lowest score for ambition that the lady had ever seen. So they do it on a percentile basis, so from 0 to 100, I was in the bottom 1 percentile of ambition.

It's funny because the lady was like, ‘How on earth are you so successful given that you seem to have no ambition?' I said, ‘Well, that's where there's a flaw on the test. I have no ambition for what society says is important as far as things like money, and all that kind of stuff.' What I am ambitious about is I want to be the best wrestler that I can possibly be, and I think there's some sort of mistake in generations, as far as what he thinks as far as our generation lacking ambition.

Our generation just wants different things than what his generation wants, and I think that's a societal thing as well. There's an older generation of people who say, ‘No, you guys should want this, you guys should want this, you guys should want this.' Whereas our generation, a lot of us say, ‘No, we don't want that, we want something different, and a lot of the things that you guys wanted, are the reason that the world is messed up. We need to change our value system.'

So that's it, that's a very different take on what's going on.

Siding with Stone Cold that part of the issues is WWE's current lack of real competition for talent, DB also uses that to bring up something he's been rumored to not do a lot of (and that someone like Roman Reigns is also catching fan heat for) - standing up to Creative:

But people do need to stand up and say, ‘No, this isn't what I want, I want to do this. This is me, this is how I want to present myself on television. This is how I want to be within WWE, this is how I view professional wrestling, this is what I would like it to be.' People have to have the courage to come up and say that.

But the hard thing is, he was talking about the Attitude Era and how things were different, well things wouldn't have been that much different if there wasn't a WCW. Like guys could say, ‘Hey, I don't want to do this. If you want to fire me fine, because I'm going to go to WCW and make just as much money.' That doesn't exist right now.

It's people who are okay with like, ‘Hey, my life without WWE, is as good as my life with the WWE.' They have to be able to say, ‘Okay, if I'm going to say this is what I want to do, or else I'm taking my ball and going home.' They have to have some sort of plan for when they take their ball and go home, they have something else to do, which is hard, especially when you have a family, and all that kind of stuff.

While he's careful to not take a stance in opposition to Vince (he calls the podcast "a very interesting look into the mind of Vince McMahon"), he is open to throwing some praise to his kayfabe nemesis, Triple H.  And though he says they haven't talked a lot about the capital-'B' business, he thinks they have similar visions:

I have never actually talked to him about his vision for the future of wrestling, and that is actually something I should talk to him about, because we think a lot alike in a lot of ways.

I like what he's done with NXT, I think NXT is an awesome show. That last special that they did was an awesome product.

I think Hunter is very intelligent wrestling wise, like he knows wrestling, he knows what works wrestling wise. I'm not exactly sure what are his ideas, and what aren't his ideas within the WWE, but I want to say two of the most successful current acts that happened in the last year, like The Shield and the Wyatts, I think those are Triple H ideas, but I'm not exactly sure, as far as their execution and that sort of thing.

The only way I can really gauge him is by what happens on NXT, and NXT is a wonderful product, it might be the best wrestling product out there. I love watching that show, and I think they've chosen some pretty awesome guys to be the stars of that show: Sami Zayn is incredible, Adrian Neville is incredible, Finn Balor is incredible, Hideo Itami, who used to be KENTA, and I wrestled on the independents and Japan, he's incredible. So they've got some incredible talent down there, and they're doing some really good stories.

The man who never lost the WWE Championship also does his best worked shoot pitch for a match against the current WWE World Heavyweight Championship, a match I and a lot of you desperately want to see:

I truly believe that if I wrestled Brock Lesnar in the main event of WrestleMania 31, for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, it might be the most physical, realistic, style of pro wrestling match that has ever been seen in the United States. Whether it would be the most physical, realistic pro wrestling match that has ever happened, I don't know, because there's been a lot of awesome stuff like that in Japan. But it would just be something very, very different from what people are used to seeing now in WWE, and I think we need something like that, something that feels like a spectacle. I think it would be incredible.

Head on over to Alternative Nation and give the whole thing a read.  Bryan also talks CM Punk, Randy Savage and Sting.  And a little Metallica.

Thoughts on his "interesting thoughts" about McMahon and the generation gap, Cagesiders?  Are you 'interested' in a future WWE run by Triple H with Daniel Bryan in his ear?  How about The Beast vs. The Beard?