TNT Champion Adam Copeland has acknowledged that he didn’t watch CM Punk’s entire interview on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani before giving his motivational speech on Dynamite.

“I didn’t, no. I saw clips. I’ve got better things to do, you know? I really do. I got kids. I don’t really care what anybody really has to say,” explained Copeland to VANCOLOUR host Mo Amir in an interview.

From those clips Copeland decided that the younger AEW locker room needed a positive message.

“I realized that our locker room needed a good message. So, last week on our show I went out and kind of spoke to that because it’s a young locker room and it’s a young locker room that, for me, because it’s a different time, now we try and support each other. I came in to locker rooms where it was everybody out for themselves and it was a bunch of great white sharks. And I never subscribed to that. I always subscribed to the Bret Hart school of, ‘No, you can help.’ And you can help young people and you can try and be a positive and show that you don’t got to be a dick. I don’t know how else to put it, I really don’t know how else to put it,” he said.

Copeland also explained that he has ‘better things to do’ than seek out criticism.

“I try and just focus on positives. There’s so many negatives in the world today and they’re both there to find, so why not look to the positives? And to me, our young locker room needed to hear some positives. So, that’s why I went out and did what I did last week but I don’t need to go searching out the other stuff. Like I said, I got a lot better things to do. I got kids to put to bed, I got the Maple Leafs to watch, I got music to listen to,” he said.

Some fans and media have praised Copeland for backing AEW and its talent while others derided the speech for perhaps highlighting, giving credit to CM Punk’s complaints and criticisms of the way AEW is run and managed.

TOP PHOTO: AEW TNT Championship: Christian Cage (c) Vs. Adam Copeland at AEW Dynamite at Centre Bell in Montreal, Quebec, on Wednesday, December 6, 2023. Photo by Minas Panagiotakis, Slam Wrestling,  www.photography514.com

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