Matt Cardona was recently a guest on Insight with Chris Van Vliet.

Highlights are below.

On wanting to be WWE Champion: “I’ll put it out there, one goal that I’ve been saying for a long time is to win that WWE championship. That’s not a lie. I’d be lying to you right now. Listen, when I got released, the goal was not to get back to WWE. It wasn’t like, oh, what can I do to make them notice me? What can I do to get back to WWE? You can’t think like that. I certainly can’t. But I would be lying if I said, I never want to wrestle at Madison Square Garden again, or I never want to have a WrestleMania match. Of course I do, because WWE is number one. So not saying, you know there’s this, this plan to go back as soon as possible. But before I hang up the boots, I’d love to go back at least one time, for sure.”

On if conversations with WWE have happened: “Listen, I appreciate you asking me this, but here’s the truth. Like, if I were to go back, I wouldn’t reveal it here. And if I wasn’t going back, I wouldn’t reveal it here, because I want people, I want people talking. So, the more they talk, you know, the more people are talking about Matt Cardona, the better for me. I’m the internet champion, then now and forever. So let them talk.”

On wrestling Nick Gage: “No, I knew that it was, I knew this is gonna be a big night. I wore all white, I knew I was gonna bleed, right? Of course, deathmatch, light tubes, glass, you’re gonna bleed. But my white shirt turned like maroon red. And there’s one point in the match, I superplex Nick through this pane of glass, and there’s like, it’s blood coming out of my arm but it’s like ooze. It’s so thick and disgusting. And the referee was concerned, once the referee was concerned, then I was like concerned. So then like, you know, I started getting lightheaded. We finished the match, I won, long story short, I’m the deathmatch king, but holy sh*t. And, you know, there’s no medical team backstage at the Showboat Casino in Atlantic City. There was this nurse, I think, you know, she was a nurse, she stitched me up, did a horrible job. She did her best with what she had, and she told me yeah, these stitches are dissolvable don’t take them out. Of course, they were not. I got infected; it was brutal. It was the aftermath that hurt the most because I flew right away cross country to Disneyland, I had a big Disneyland trip planned. So, John Carlo, if you know John Carlo is, he worked for GCW, works for AEW now, he didn’t have any bandages. So, I just went to his hotel room and he taped towels around my body. That’s how I flew cross country, and I did all the rides at Universal and Disneyland.”

On not wanting to be tied down to one promotion: “Well, I mean, the AEW thing, listen, it’s not like they offered me a deal and I turned it down. That’s not what happened. What happened? I don’t exactly know. I did a couple shows there. I thought I was gonna be offered something, I wasn’t. Okay, now I gotta move on, you know? I just don’t want to be tied down anywhere. In WWE, not that had handcuffs on by any means, but I was there for so long. That’s when I was 20 years old, when did we get fired? 2020. So I was there for like 14 years, it’s a long time. So now it’s my chance to make my own schedule and be my own boss and branch out and do all these other things. Whether it be grow the Major Wrestling Figure podcast, or, you know, I just did The Last Match Musical, I did a f*cking musical, you know, all these things I’m getting to try now. I just don’t want to be tied down anywhere. I don’t want to [go] ‘Hey, Okay, can I do this?’ I don’t want to do that.”