Bryan Danielson on Getting Advice From Both Vince McMahon and Tony Khan

In an interview with the The Masked Man Show (via Fightful), Bryan Danielson spoke about advice he would get from both Vince McMahon and Tony Khan while working for WWE and AEW, respectively. Here are highlights:

On getting advice from Vince McMahon: “I try to be very conscious of things because of my respect for Vince and things he would want me to say and things he wouldn’t want me to say. One of the things he first taught me, and this was before I was close with him, was the ability to use silence and to not say something if you don’t have an answer. If somebody asks you a question, ‘well, maybe we could do…’ and you put out maybe not even your best answer. You could just say, ‘Hmmm, let me think about it.’ Sometimes when you talk to him and ask him a question, he’ll sit there and not say a word for 30 seconds or longer, which feels like the longest time in history, but he’s not going to give you a bad answer. He’s not going to give you an off-the-cuff answer. The ability to sit and wait and be patient enough, and even if you don’t come up with it, you get, ‘okay, let me think about that.’ That was one of the earliest lessons I learned from him, but there is no trepidation in the back of my mind that he wouldn’t want me to say that [laughs].”

On what Tony Khan helped him with: “As far as Tony, the things that I’ve learned…I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he said, ‘I think we’re gonna have to spend some time to get that notion out of your head,’ which was a very WWE notion of how wrestling is. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah,’ you have to keep in mind, I was with WWE for 11 years. I thought of myself as very open-minded and outside the box, ‘oh no, that is very WWE thinking, that thing you thought.’ That was one instance.”