AEW world champion Chris Jericho recently spoke with Sports Illustrated ahead of tonight’s Revolution pay per view from the Wintrust Arena in Chicago Illinois, where Le Champion defends his title against Jon Moxley. Highlights from the interview can be found below.

The risk of leaving WWE and going to AEW paying off:

I left WWE to come here. Even though I wasn’t signed at the time, I worked there, then I worked three matches in Japan and then signed with AEW. It was much more of a risk because if this didn’t work, I was leaving behind a lifelong career in WWE. Having said that, it’s also a certain style and a certain way that they do things there that you just have to go with, and it was starting to get to the point where I didn’t want to do that anymore. When I went to Japan, I realized wrestling can be fun again. Not that it wasn’t fun, but the creative freedom I had there was one of the reasons I came to AEW. The money’s great, everything’s great, but the creative elements and the fact that we’re starting something from scratch at the highest of levels. There’s never been a wrestling company ever that started as big as AEW.

Our very first show was on one of the biggest cable networks in the world in front of 14,000 people at a sold-out arena in Washington, D.C. It doesn’t get any bigger than that. It’s not that we built our way up, or that someone bought the company from someone else or it was a family business that morphed over the years. This was a big deal, the big leagues right from the start, and that was very scary, cool, and exciting. Now we’re in the Wild West. A weekly TV show is not easy to do, and we have a whole lot of people that have never done one. But everyone hit the ground running and made it a success.

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WWE being the ones who initiated a war between the two promotions:

We’re not the alternative, we’re an option. If you don’t like what you’re seeing on one side of the street, now, for the first time in 20 years, there is something happening on the other side of the street. You can make a choice. We didn’t come into this with the mentality of, ‘We’re gonna crush ’em!’ They did, and they’re getting their asses kicked every week. It’s probably embarrassing for them.

Recruiting Jon Moxley to AEW:

I recruited him. I don’t even think he knew what AEW was at that point. He is a guy that I knew would be big for us, but I never expected he would be this different, and I mean that in a good way. This is not the guy who was Dean Ambrose. Dean Ambrose is a f—ing nothing compared to this guy. There is a fire inside of him, a creativity, he’s free. This is my job as champion. I make stars. I’m already a star. Mox is a star. This company may have started on my back, but six months later it’s now on a bunch of backs, and that was the idea.