As noted, former WWE Superstar Ryback (The Big Guy) recently appeared as a guest on The Shining Wizards Podcast for an in-depth interview. Below are some of the highlights.

On his podcast, Conversation With The Big Guy: “It was something that was part of the whole grand scheme of things from the very beginning when I made the decision to leave WWE. I had started planning for that years in advance. Its from listening to different audio books on all the car rides and I’m really big on self help books, but books on becoming an entrepreneur in business. I have a very oriented business mindset. Branding yourself, and everything I’m doing ties in together and the podcast was a way for me to have a platform to communicate with my fans outside of social media and just realizing how important podcasting is right now and moving forward in the future. And not only to promote everything I got going on, It gives me a voice and allows me to control the perception of how I want my fans to hear and see me. Where as I don’t have someone telling me we want you to do this and that, because this is how we want people to view you and see you. And we don’t want to give you this opportunity because we don’t want people to see how you are in this situation. Now, there’s nobody telling me no anymore. I have 100% control on the podcast and Pat (Buck) talk about this all the time and is our greatest asset with everything we got going on. It’s the most fun I have each and every week doing that with Pat. It’s a conversation that we have and we can talk every day and I told him that I think we need to do this and he agreed and we’ve grown every week and we’re approaching 70,00 listens a week. Hopefully we’ll break 100,000 here really quickly and just continue to grow. The biggest satisfaction I get from this is actually…wrestling is great and giving people entertainment through wrestling is great, but actually being able to provide real life help for people in their lives…There’s nothing…no better feeling than that.”

On the finish of his match with Mark Henry at WrestleMania 29 and more: “No, it didn’t make any sense to me and it bothers me to this day that I even let that happen. And I talked about it with my whole ankle situation. It was one of those things, and that was kind of Vince’s nail in the coffin to try and really burry the Ryback babyface character before they turned me heel the next night with Cena, which was the loudest reaction I got up to that point. It was 7 months of straight losses on pay-per-views and that was running red hot and they took that momentum and transferred it over to The Shield with no payoff for me. I spoke with Vince for 30 minutes before the WrestleMania PPV with the understanding that I was going over that night before the heel turn with Cena which would have made sense from a booking standpoint. One, picking Mark Henry up in the way I pick guys up for the Shell Shock, is no easy task. He’s such a large human being, and I not only had to pick him up once, I had to pick him up once and then fall on my face. Essentially they wanted me to look like I f—ed up my own finishing move. If you don’t believe what I’m saying about all these past incidents, just look at that one night. Logically from a creative standpoint with a have a babyface as hot as I was in that period…just imagine them booking Roman Reigns to embarrass himself, ya know what I mean? He’s red hot in a babyface role, or a Dean Ambrose or Seth Rollins to look like they f—ed up on their own. All the guys, I remember, the guys that I’m close with up there go “you should not do this” and I was like what do you want me to do? I’ve already voiced my concern and he told me, “this is gonna be your first excuse as a heel that you couldn’t cut it. And it was just him lying. It was what it was. And luckily, if you look at that next night at Raw when I turned on Cena, the crowd was with me more than ever after seven horrible months of booking in a top position. It sucked. I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t bother me to this day. Because I know how hard I worked for everything and stuff like that doesn’t come along all that often. We had something really special. But I’m still the same guy. My work ethic is still the same. That’s why I chose to ultimately leave.”

Check out the complete Ryback interview at ShiningWizards.com.