Jon Moxley’s reaction to Seth Rollins’ comments will probably surprise you

There’s a good interview with Jon Moxley making the rounds, where AEW and New Japan’s Death Rider sat down with “The Store Horseman” of Los Angeles’ The Comedy Store to talk wrestling and life.

It’s more than an hour in length, and the big takeaway is that this is a much happier Mox than the one who talked to Chris Jericho and Wade Keller the week before and after his debut at AEW Double or Nothing. The former Dean Ambrose is optimistic about his future at All Elite where “there are far fewer cooks in the kitchen” than at WWE. But he’s talking about his relationship with Vince McMahon more like Dave Bautista and Jericho recently described theirs:

“But he’s actually really easy to talk to. Yeah, he wants - he likes to discuss stuff and have feedback and stuff. I mean, we started butting heads eventually, cause we just couldn’t get on the same page, you know what I mean? But even then, there’s no like personal animosity or anything like that. We just kind of speak different languages. It was like a mutually beneficial relationship for six years, eight years, or whatever. Then it’s just like, ‘Okay, I gotta go do this, you go do that, cool.’”

He expressed optimism for his old co-workers now that Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff have been hired as Executive Directors of Raw and SmackDown, and more or less sounded exactly like a fan when discussing their prospects:

“I just hope Vince lets them do their ideas. It’s not just ‘I made him head of creative, but I’m telling him what to do’ type of thing.”

Mox also agrees with his friend Roman Reigns that AEW is not competing with WWE:

“This is not the Monday Night Wars... it would be a fool’s errand to try and take them down, it wouldn’t be good for the wrestling business to try and take them down...”

It was Moxley’s answer when asked about Seth Rollins’ criticism of his exit that most drove the point about his new attitude home, however. After one of the hosts read the quote from Rollins’ interview with SI where Seth said it was “a little presumptuous of him to get on a podcast and talk down about the company that gave him such opportunities”, Moxley replied:

“There’s this episode of Frasier I was thinking about... the dog, Eddie, is really depressed, and he’s all sad, mopey, and they don’t know what - he won’t eat, you know, they don’t know what’s wrong with him. The vet doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. So they hire a dog psychiatrist to examine him, and then the comedy ensues for the next 26 minutes. But then at the end of the episode they find a toy was like stuck under the couch. And then all of a sudden everything’s good! He’s like ‘oh!’ [hopping up and down] and he’s not depressed any more. It was just the toy, the thing that he likes to do...

For me like, that’s all it was. Now that the fog has continually lifted more and more, and I kind of realize how deeply unhappy I was there, that I didn’t realize at the time because I was like ‘well, I’m making a bunch of money and it seems like it’s going good!’ Now I’m like - I’m kind of realizing how much it effected me. But now it’s like ‘oh! I found my toy under the couch - pro wrestling - again. It’s all good!’

Even like when I did that podcast, that was like a couple weeks removed... I hadn’t debuted at Double or Nothing yet, it had just been months of me being silent while everybody else is talking about my career, my life and everything, telling me what I’m gonna do, and where I’m gonna go, and what’s happening. Cause I just stayed silent the whole time. So that was a frustrating time, to hear everybody else talking about you, when they don’t know what the f*** they’re talking about. So it was like my first words - I was a little jumpy. Like, it was like, pretty emotional, you know?

But it’s almost like you have a fight with your wife or girlfriend or whatever, then you have some sex and then the next morning you’re like, ‘what were we fighting about? Oh that’s so stupid.’ Now it’s like, whatever it is, a month or two later, I could never replicate that podcast cause I’m like ‘what? what was I - it’s all good’ [laughs].”

He never directly answers the question, because there’s no need to address Rollins’ comments. Double or Nothing was his toy, Fyter Fest “some sex”, and now it’s on to G1 Climax!

Check out The Store Horsemen’s entire talk with Mox here.