The Broken Skull Sessions interview between WWE Hall of Famer “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and All Elite Wrestling star Chris Jericho dropped on Peacock on Sunday morning. And while the interview spent a great deal of time covering Jericho’s career in WCW and WWE, “Le Champion” didn’t waste any time in praising his new home in AEW. Austin has him early in the interview how he wound up signing with the Jacksonville-based promotion.
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Jericho started off by hinting at why he originally left WWE and his stint with New Japan Pro-Wrestling that began with his feud with Kenny Omega, then described Tony Khan’s sales pitch for the new promotion.
“You’ve been around longer than I have, but you hear this all the time — ‘Oh there’s going to be a new promotion. There’s a guy whose got money…’ — whatever,” Jericho said. “All the time, right? So when I started talking to him I realized there’s something different here about this opportunity to start this new company, a company that could be a very big national, worldwide company. What you need for that is finances, passion, a television contract and you need talent, four to six guys you can build the territory. And talking to Tony, he had the finances, he had the passion.
“Then when we started sniffing around we realized there was a group of guys whose contracts were all coming up at the same time — Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes, The Young Bucks, Chris Jericho, Hangman Page. Guess what? There’s your six guys right there, you can start a company around that. Six legit guys you can build around and Jericho’s got the name value. And these other guys, Cody to an extent, but nobody had really heard of the Young Bucks in the mainstream, or Kenny or Hangman. So where have these guys been? They’re really good!”
Jericho later said that AEW is only competition with WWE by proxy, and that they’re more concerned about their own product. He speculated that part of the reason people have latched onto it is due to it presenting the product in a different way and giving fans more options.
This week’s AEW Dynamite saw Jericho cut a babyface promo alongside The Inner Circle, calling out The Pinnacle to a Blood & Guts Match (their version of WarGames) next month.
