Former WWE Star Cody Rhodes recently had an interview with Sports Illustrated while promoting Northeast Wrestling’s Holiday Havoc event in Waterbury, Connecticut this Friday. Below are few highlights from his interview:

His recent comments about wanting to face Daniel Bryan:

“I’m the son of the ‘American Dream’. Of course I’m a dreamer. My dad had no fear. As a promoter and businessman, he had no fear. I’m 32 and entering the prime of my career, so why would I be afraid? I’ve found these friends and businessmen in the Bucks, and I believe the business cannot continue to go on the path it’s going. It has to continue to change, and there have to be people who are going to change it. I really can’t claim to be any of that until we fill this joint up, but I am not afraid of what we are about to do.”

On racism and confederate flag controversy:

“It bothers me, but even surprises me when racism pops up. I had a fan tweet to tell me he’d been a fan for a long time, but he had the Confederate flag as his profile picture. I said, ‘Hey man, you’ve got to get rid of that,’ and he did, but what surprised me about that interaction was the amount of apologists who defended what the Confederate flag actually stood for. That always surprises me–that there are still apologists, essentially, for racism. We don’t need to be educating people on the Confederate flag, it just needs to be gone. In Germany, there are not swastikas on every corner. That part of their past is history and they’ve progressed. I’m always shocked when I see apologists for racism, which has no place. We’re all in this together. Why would we ever divide?”

Bullet Club’s Raw invasion:

“It made a bigger impact than we imagined it was going to have, I actually got in the car with my wife, Marty, and Hangman [Page] right after, and I said, ‘Just so you know, this is going to change a bunch of stuff.’ Marty was like, ‘No, I don’t think anything will come of it,’ but then the amount of stuff that came out of it, which is public with a cease and desist, and there were a lot of entertained fans and pro-WWE fans who were disappointed.”