I Listen So You Don't Have To: Steve Austin Show Ep. 257

Page sits down to talk with Stone Cold
Photo Credit: WWE.com

If you're new, here's the rundown: I listen to a handful of wrestling podcasts each week. Too many, probably, though certainly not all of them. In the interest of saving you time — in case you have the restraint to skip certain episodes — the plan is to give the bare bones of a given show and let you decide if it’s worth investing the time to hear the whole thing. There are better wrestling podcasts out there, of course, but these are the ones in my regular rotation that I feel best fit the category of hit or miss. If I can save other folks some time, I'm happy to do so.

Show: Steve Austin Show
Episode: 257 (Sept. 22, 2015)
Run Time: 1:08:09
Guest: Diamond Dallas Page, part one (19:44)

Summary: Austin is at DDP Yoga world headquarters with the man himself. They take about how Page was always driven to succeed and how a back injury that should have cut short his career gave rise to his yoga empire. Page recalls the waning days of his in-ring career and his younger days as an athlete as well as a troubled childhood and dangerous automobile accident. He explains the importance of delegating, then tells Austin about his struggles with dyslexia and learning to read as an adult. They end by trading stories about acting experiences.

Quote of the week: “My grandmother who raised me — by the time I was three years old, my mother was married, divorced and had three kids. She was 19 at the time. When my parents split up, my brother and sister went to live with my mom, who in turn had my grandmother raise ’em, I went to live with my dad. My dad was a wildman like me. He couldn’t even spell the word father, let alone be one. So I bounced around from one family to another like a pinball. There, no one really picks up on you can’t read.”

Why you should listen: Austin and Page go back about 25 years, and that history and chemistry is evident throughout. The conversation doesn’t linger too long on the yoga front, and for as much as it seems we’ve heard from Page over the last few years, there was a lot of fresh conversation — the car accident memory seemed to catch even Austin by surprise. This is a rather brisk chat as wrestler podcasts go, which is a refreshing change.

Why you should skip it: You’re not going to learn much about wrestling in this chat, so if you’re not deeply interested in Page, you could safely take a pass. Page always comes off as somewhat of a self-loving salesman — perhaps that innate part of his personality is what made his wrestling character so relatable — so it feels like all his stories, harrowing or mundane, ought to be served with grains of salt on the side.

Final thoughts: It really comes down to how much you care about DDP. His childhood traumas and adult dyslexia make for compelling audio, but you have to wade through full-on rhyming sales pitches to get there. Bless both men for not discussing the Spring Stampede match with Randy Savage again, but even without that stale tale, there’s still enough here to give a healthy sense of déjà vu for Page’s other podcast appearances. It’s by no means a bad way to spend an hour, it just stack up with the other live interviews Austin conducted during his stint in Georgia.