AEW’s Cody Rhodes recently conducted an in-depth interview with New York Post where he went into detail about various topics of his new company.

On how to make wrestling TV feel fresh:

“To me it’s treating it as live sports. The core to that is characters, and I think characters beam across your television set or devices in ways perhaps people have forgotten. Wrestling used to have these great enhancements matches, these squash matches where you would see these characters and the things he could do. He’d tell you what you had at the pay-per-view event and things of that nature.”

Why AEW won’t be at WrestleMania weekend:

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s WWE’s weekend and we won’t be near it and I’m not being coy or anything of that nature and I’ll extrapolate and tell you why.

“I wrestled Kenny Omega at one of my favorite matches at SuperCard of Honor. I believe it’s last year’s SuperCard. I felt like I broke my back in terms of the amount of physical effort and the amount of mental effort for that match. We had the record for an ROH crowd at the time at the Lakefront Arena. But no matter what we did, it still was there in the back of your mind that all these people are here for WWE this weekend. It still was a piggyback.”

On mocking WWE on BTE:

“If you’re able to have fun with yourself, nobody is safe from BTE. BTE is, on a personal level, super valuable to me because I try to be the most aware person ever and that means aware of the things that are wrong with me and BTE is one of the best things because it’s brought it out. It’s brought out my ego and these silly little things about wrestling.

“I think we take it pretty lightly on WWE. The more we do stuff with AEW, the more we are like, “Well, that joke, we don’t need it.” But there’s some stuff because they have been in power for two decades and even more than that really without any competition, and I’m not dismissing that run TNA had during the Spike time. I’m just saying it was a blip to them versus the situation with the type of backing and the type of partners that WWE thinks we have and they’re right.”