And, you know, sometimes—most of the time it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s just the way it goes sometimes. But if you look at MJF, we literally had an angle for 366 days, a year and a day. Literally.

I would say that was the beginning of MJF’s true ascension to being what he is now, you know? I mean, it really was.

He’d worked with Cody for a bit, which was good, and then we did our thing. So, you know, if you look at any of the guys who are now our basic main event superstars, I mean, when I worked with Will Ospreay at Wembley, he wasn’t even signed to AEW yet. We were hoping to get him to sign. Now he’s a champion.

There you go. Same with Bandido. When I had the first match with Bandido, that was a really great match. He gets signed to AEW. Now he’s a champion, you know, and this is the idea.

I don’t have to win ever again. Sometimes I do because if not, then you’re just losing all the time, which isn’t great for stories. But, you know, it doesn’t matter if I win or lose. It’s about putting on the best performance and putting on the best match and helping guys or girls find something maybe that they didn’t quite know that was there just yet.

And suddenly, you help. That’s what people did for me.”

And if I’m in, if I’m not in, if it’s tribalism, if it’s politics, I get that too, man. I’ve been in this business 36 years. I understand how it works. It’s not personal. I’m not insulted.

And if I finish my career with AEW and become the first inductee, the second inductee, or the 10th inductee into the AEW Hall of Fame, that’s great, too. But I’m in the Hall of Fame in my head and in the heads of anybody that appreciates the work that I’ve done.

That’s good enough for me, man. It really is, you know? I don’t need anything else than that, you know?

I’ve had a real blessed life in that I’ve got a chance to travel around the world doing what I always wanted to do and making people happy by doing it or getting people angry by doing it, which is, the same thing.

That’s Hall of Fame all across the board, you know?”

The moment he left the room, Joe and I looked at each other like, ‘All right, how are we going to make it work?’ We had a conversation. We had to reshuffle the deck and move this there, move this there, get rid of this, and add this. Then we went back and told Tony, and he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.’

He’s happy, and we’re going to make it great. It’s completely different from what we originally wanted to do, but he’s the f*cking boss. He’s the one who tells us what he wants. And if you don’t like it, you go make $8 billion and start your own wrestling company.

And that’s what a pro does. That’s what you do. And it’s not always the way you want it. But I’m not the boss.”

Thanks to the Norwegian Pearl. Thanks to Sixthman. Thanks to Tony Khan for facilitating this. But this is monumental.

We had a Dynamite that we taped. This is live. You’re going to see the whole—I mean, probably the biggest AEW roster that we’ve ever had. You have a chance to see whoever Tony books that night for Collision. They’ll be on the boat. Now, they might leave later on that night, but the point is, the cruise is going to start off with an actual all-star Collision lineup. And then we’ll have the section of AEW performers that want to stay for the whole cruise.

But then we’ve got the entire rest of the roster that you already can see have signed up. And we’ve got the Jericho Men’s Oceanic Tournament. We’ve got the Women’s Oceanic Tournament for our Oceanic Championship belt that we created for the boat. We’ve got MicroMania. You can almost do everything if you really squeeze it all in.

Or maybe there’s some things you have to wait until next time. And that’s kind of how I put together the cruise, where it’s a nonstop barrage of entertainment and fun and things to do. And when you’re done, you’re almost like, ‘Oh, my gosh, like, I need a vacation from this vacation.’

Ben [Pac] was on the second cruise. He had a great match with Mox on that cruise, which I think was actually on the taped Dynamite that we had.

So we’re gonna dedicate this cruise to Pac and to Ben Satterley. We did it with Jay Briscoe when he passed away. He and Mark wrestled each other on the very first Jericho Cruise. So, you know, you got to pay tribute to the fallen brothers and sisters, especially the ones that came on the cruise. We’ll always—we’ll think of something just to make sure that everybody remembers the man that was Pac.”

The Rock, Stone Cold, Undertaker, Mankind, Triple H, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit. And that’s just off the top of my head. Kane. There’s nine right there off the top of my head without even really thinking too much about it. There’s probably three or four others that I could throw in there.

Big Show—there’s 10 right there. That shows you that there’s a lot of great talent in wrestling today, but main event stars, main event draws, main event, like, almost iconic characters that are still super popular today because of that timeframe—we don’t have that now.

You have a lot more eyeballs on it because of platforms and streaming, but if you look at the main event names then, they can’t be touched.

So that’s probably why that era is so critically acclaimed and so positively remembered, because of just the name value of those stars that were all there at the same time.”

You can see it in the numbers, tickets sold, the ratings.I think last week, were very close to the ratings that they were right before HBO Max became a platform for us.

So, if we’re doing those same ratings, plus there’s the HBO Max, that would tell me, common sense would say we’re doing bigger ratings now than we were doing three or four years ago.

I think that’s because no matter what’s going on around us, we keep our noses to the grindstone and worry about what we’re doing and what kind of matches and quality of matches and variety. We’ve never been a WWE light. We’ve been AEW since day one, and that’s never changed. And sometimes you like it and sometimes you don’t, but we’ve never changed it.”

Then, of course, when you get back in the ring, you never lose it, but you never know. What’s my cardio going to be like? How am I going to be moving? [Especially when you’ve got someone like Ricochet on the other side of you.] But that actually worked out great because he is so athletic and so acrobatic.

I got in there and realized I didn’t really lose a step either. So, he was the perfect first opponent to have. It was a great storyline because he’s an awesome heel. He knows how to be a heel, and that helped me kind of reimagine what a babyface Jericho was like.

So yeah, I couldn’t be happier with the first couple months of this return—just how it’s been accepted and how much fun it’s been. That’s the point, Renee. At this time, if I’m not having fun, I don’t want to do it. It has to be fun, and this has been a lot of fun all across the board.”