Triple H on WWE's Evolution, the Rise of the Antihero, and the Psychology of Stardom

Speaker 2 14-time WWE World Champion, a two-time World Rumble winner, and now he's behind the scenes running World Wrestling Entertainment.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Netflix Era!

Speaker 3 Whether it be a mentor, a leader, or an executive, his love and passion for this industry hasn't changed.

Speaker 1 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the WWE's Paul Levesque.

Speaker 1 My man,

Speaker 1 welcome.

Speaker 1 All right, yeah, thanks for coming. Welcome.

Speaker 5 So the audience may not know this, but I'm a big professional wrestling fan going back to my childhood in Memphis, Tennessee.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 5 In Memphis, we didn't have any professional sports growing up. All we had was Memphis State, Tigers basketball, and professional wrestling at the Mid South Coliseum on Monday nights.

Speaker 5 That was pretty much it. Jerry Lawler was so popular in Memphis that he could have been elected mayor, and I think he almost was.
So it was really a wrestling town. But so growing up,

Speaker 5 I watched you and WWE, and I would say that Triple H was the premier heel champion, the unstoppable force of the whole attitude era. And it's a thrill to have you here.

Speaker 5 And since then, you've transitioned into being the chief creative officer at WWE and had a huge business career. So I think we want to talk to you about both those things.

Speaker 5 Maybe let's start with your career as a performer.

Speaker 5 And I don't know if people understand everything that goes into being a WWE superstar, but you've got to be, first of all, you've got to be a tremendous athlete.

Speaker 5 You're a stunt man because you're doing tremendously dangerous things you have to be able to cut promos which means you're basically an actor but you also have to write your own dialogue and you've got to be you know a charismatic star to all the fans there's a lot that goes into it how many people are cut out for this type of work well it's it's a difficult thing one one of my tasks now in my job is finding that next generation of stars, right?

Speaker 1 So, you know, we have a robust program through college athletics, through an NIL program, through a lot of different avenues where we find talent but the the key to it really is comes down to charisma and

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 you know your innate ability to connect with people it's one of the things about wwe that i think is remarkable is it's it is a kind of a combination of everything, right?

Speaker 1 The athleticism, the showmanship, the charisma that you have to have, the

Speaker 1 media skills that we teach from day one coming in the door, all of it.

Speaker 1 when you leave WWE whether you've been there for a long time or you know if you've been had any level of success you are so well suited to do just about anything in life because I truly feel like for a lot of people

Speaker 1 Sometimes can be a lot less about all the things you know and how good you are at them as the charisma to get people to listen to you and then if you put the right people around you you can have all the things that you need but people will follow that that leadership.

Speaker 1 So even when it comes to politics, it's amazing to me when I walk through the White House over the last few months, I've been there quite a few times, how many people in the White House are huge fans

Speaker 1 of WWE.

Speaker 4 I mentioned this to you backstage, but similar to David, I had a

Speaker 4 growing up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Yes.
There's really, there wasn't any professional sports. Ultimately, we got the NFL.

Speaker 1 That didn't get as big a pop as Memphis. Memphis, yeah.

Speaker 4 And my father and I, one of the few things that we were able to bond over was wrestling.

Speaker 4 And you and then your whole progression where you started off as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, which is really what David is like now. And then he became

Speaker 4 more of the Triple H heel. But I wanted to ask you a question about exactly what you just said.

Speaker 4 And I want you to sort of walk us through the characteristics of these two individuals who have had a very vibrant career in wrestling, Donald Trump, who's now in politics, and The Rock, who people say may may actually go into politics later.

Speaker 4 And what you just said is it's an incredible breeding ground for charisma and connecting with people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I think if you go back through history, even in politics, and you look at the person that gets elected in every presidential cycle, it's the most charismatic person on that stage that gets elected president.

Speaker 1 The issues are important.

Speaker 1 all the

Speaker 1 real life day-to-day things that are important to people obviously are there, but at the end of the day, they're picking who they like. They're picking who connects with them.

Speaker 1 They're picking who is charismatic to them.

Speaker 1 Donald Trump was very good in our world of WWE because he was okay to be himself. He was okay to sort of get egg on his face and be embarrassed sometimes.

Speaker 1 He was okay to put it all out there and just be him, but he's charismatic. He's larger than life.
He's not afraid to say what's in front of him, right or wrong.

Speaker 1 The rock is the same way. That connection with people is really

Speaker 1 It's in my mind, it is what drives the planet.

Speaker 5 So in in wrestling, there's basically heels and baby faces or faces.

Speaker 1 Or some variation, right? Nobody in today's world, there's very few, all the way good, all the way bad.

Speaker 5 Right. And actually that that sort of started to change in the attitude era.
I remember in the 80s when I was growing up, Hulk Hogan was like this superhero type

Speaker 5 baby face. And then, you know, I weirdly always just rooted for the heels.

Speaker 5 And then Stone Cold...

Speaker 1 They're more fun.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there's more fun. And then Stone Cold Steve Austin came along, and he kind of was...

Speaker 1 a heel, but all of a sudden everyone's like rooting for him.

Speaker 5 Like what happened there? And like did something change in American society or did the product get more sophisticated?

Speaker 1 I think people became more savvy to how the world really works. Nobody's perfect.
And I don't think there's anybody that is,

Speaker 1 well, I shouldn't say anybody. There's certainly people that are just evil in the world.
But,

Speaker 1 you know, most people, the average person, there are people that are really good, but somewhere in there, there's some stuff that maybe isn't,

Speaker 1 and vice versa on that. I think

Speaker 1 I have a saying in what I do right now, as long as the bad guy, the heel, is justified somewhere in his mind that what he is doing is right,

Speaker 1 that leads to the best heel, right? Because

Speaker 1 if 90% of the world disagrees with you, but you believe, no, you're all wrong, I see this and it is right,

Speaker 1 you can run down that road. You're not just trying to be the, you know, the curlier mustache bad guy heel tying people to the railroad tracks.
It's real.

Speaker 1 You feel it and it's real and it's why you want to get to that place, right or wrong for most people. So the shades of gray, I don't know that we necessarily lead society, WWE.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't want to think that, but I think we reflect it.

Speaker 4 Well, you did a very good job in the 80s and 90s where you would take the geopolitics, I don't know if this was by design, and you take a character and you'd say, well, we need to talk about the Middle East somehow, so okay, we have the iron chic.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 4 And you'd create these characters that would reflect the geopolitical tension of the time.

Speaker 4 Did you find that that was harder to do in this generation or is it harder to do now just because there's still so many potholes?

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I just think that if you stereotyped somebody into a particular place, a lot of the world would rebel against that.
Yeah. Right? Not in a positive way.
And maybe sometimes people that have

Speaker 1 no real reason to have a position on either side of that, right?

Speaker 1 The one thing about WWE is we're a fun reflection of the world. It's supposed to be fun.
It's supposed to be entertainment. It's supposed to be fantastical.

Speaker 1 It's supposed to let you come to an event for three hours and just turn off and enjoy entertainment and some type of representation of the world that is around you.

Speaker 1 But people get lost in it and they begin to take the representations too seriously sometimes.

Speaker 4 So then, can you contrast and compare then maybe WWE?

Speaker 4 And for a long time, I had a really hard time because of my fascination with wrestling, migrating to MMA. But MMA has really taken over

Speaker 4 a lot of the zeitgeists, especially amongst younger generations of men. do you feel pressure to make it more physical or more

Speaker 4 like it? Or how do you think these two things play?

Speaker 4 What role do they play, I guess, maybe in American society?

Speaker 1 I think they're total opposites. Like, MMA is just, it's competitive, it's competition, that's what it's based on.

Speaker 1 Though best when,

Speaker 1 and you can look at that world, and I don't want to get too deep into their world, but you have a Conor McGregor come along.

Speaker 1 If Conor McGregor came out of retirement tomorrow and said he's fighting in four months, it would be massive, right?

Speaker 1 The amount of people that would gravitate towards that, the ticket sales, the viewership would be intense. When's the last time he fought?

Speaker 1 And when is the last time he won?

Speaker 1 I couldn't even tell you. It's forever.
What people are buying is that cult of personality. Right.
Right? It's the same in our business. We tell stories.
I'm less...

Speaker 1 And people within our business sometimes take this wrong, but

Speaker 1 we don't write the shows based on that'll that'll be a great match we write it on the stories that we can create the protagonist the antagonist how does that work with each other telling stories that can resonate with people that maybe they've experienced in their real life some type of fantastical version of that

Speaker 1 so is there a writer's room there is a writer's room we have a large staff of

Speaker 1 yeah there's a show right now on netflix um called unreal and it is for the first time ever a look behind the scenes at what we do we let cameras into the writer's room we let them backstage at our shows so you see the production of the shows, you see what goes into it.

Speaker 1 You know, there's months of planning that go into stuff.

Speaker 1 We're looking now at WrestleMania in Vegas in April and what those matches are going to be and how we want to get there. What is the storyline arc that takes us there over time?

Speaker 1 I would say we're much more akin to like the Marvel universe where you're planning out long-term where the movies fit and how they go with all the characters than we are, you know, direct MMA.

Speaker 1 At the end of the day, direct MMA is, or, you know, UFC, it's you're booking matches and the interest is, that guy's really good. He's really good.
I'm not sure who's going to win.

Speaker 1 Let's put them together.

Speaker 1 When you get the right personalities involved, then it explodes.

Speaker 1 Paul, I want to go back to this iconic attitude era, which is also what we call it when Chamap has his third glass of red wine at the poker game. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It gets a little spicy.

Speaker 1 It got very physical, and there's this sort of backyard wrestling, and there's this incredible iconic movie, The Wrestler. Yes.

Speaker 1 This does take a toll on your body, although you're not making full contact.

Speaker 1 What toll has it taken on your body? What toll does it take when you guys are soaring 10 feet, 15 feet in the air at... I don't know what you are at max weight, 200, 300 pounds of just muscle landing.

Speaker 1 Like, what happens to your knees, your back, the the whole thing? Yeah, it's a physical business.

Speaker 1 We have a few sayings in our business. One, it isn't ballet, right?

Speaker 1 And that's not to knock ballet because I couldn't do that,

Speaker 1 though many people would want to see me try.

Speaker 1 It's a physical business, and no one walks away unscathed. Right.
Right. But we have

Speaker 1 probably one of the most robust medical programs in athletics.

Speaker 1 So we're scanning constantly for everything,

Speaker 1 you know, physically as well as head injuries, everything, right? So we're way on top of that. Didn't necessarily used to be that way.
As things have improved, we've gotten there.

Speaker 1 You know, the trick in our business is to make it look incredibly physical without being incredibly physical. That's where I was going with this is, you know, it's been Sachs's dream.

Speaker 1 He was telling us when we were doing the show notes yesterday during the rehearsal, it's been Sachs's dream all this time to be involved in wrestling.

Speaker 1 He feels like it was like a career path he didn't get to take. So, is there any way, you know, given what you've done, that you could lift Sachs

Speaker 1 right now? Who wants to see you lift Sachs? Come on now.

Speaker 1 Come on. Triple H versus David.
So, there was a pitch for me to do that here and put David through this table.

Speaker 1 I just want to see you lift them. No, when I approached him on it, he said he was holding out for a bigger moment in the Oval Office.
So, what I'm doing is it here. Oh, come on now.

Speaker 1 I mean, know that you can break Freedberg in half. He weighs 110 pounds wet out of the shower.

Speaker 4 But Sachs, he did the Ozempic, and he added 10 pounds of muscle.

Speaker 1 How easily can you lift that man?

Speaker 5 It's called a bump, Jason. I'm not ready to take some bumps here today.

Speaker 1 One of the things that I found interesting is he's talking about your fandom, but he's walking around back here with a handheld speaker.

Speaker 1 But he had his own entrance music his entire run backstage. He was running around.
That's fair enough.

Speaker 1 He was getting ready for the main event of WrestleMania before he came out here. So you're saying you want to lift me?

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Okay. Cool.
Let me ask a question on the business of wrestling.

Speaker 1 You got to sign a waiver. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'll sign seven. Let's go.
We see a lot of bifurcation happening generally in media and content. The live events are just making so much money, whether it's concerts or basketball games.

Speaker 1 And those industries are seeing revenue and profits kind of escalate. And then the traditional broadcast fiction is kind of dying.
Like the margins aren't there, the viewership's down.

Speaker 1 How is the bifurcation work for your business, digital and kind of like the content stuff that you're doing digitally versus the live?

Speaker 1 And like is digital still, is digital going to be like a growing piece of the business for some time, do you think? Or is it really a live experience?

Speaker 1 Well, it's a live experience, but I think all those things lead you to the live experience. So where do you tell the stories that gets you to want to go to the live event?

Speaker 1 We tell those stories across digital platforms. We have right around a billion social media followers across the globe.
We're one of the largest social presence.

Speaker 1 I'm not a stat guy, so I'll screw some of this up, but number one YouTube channel across all sports.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure where we're at, but we're in the top 10 of YouTube channels across everything.

Speaker 1 You know, our social presence is second to none of them. Do those monetize on their own?

Speaker 1 They do monetize, but we also see them as drivers to everything else.

Speaker 1 So our products now, RAW airs domestically in the U.S. on Netflix, but

Speaker 1 is viewed globally on Netflix everyplace else.

Speaker 1 So outside of the U.S., Raw, SmackDown, all our shows are on Netflix globally. Monday nights on Netflix globally.
Tuesday nights, NXT, which is our sort of

Speaker 1 AAA baseball or our college football, if you would, that airs on the CW cross-broadcast.

Speaker 1 Friday nights we're on USA with NBCU still. We have Saturday nights main event on Peacock.
We just did. So does your audience still have an affinity for live? Are they still big and

Speaker 1 1,000%?

Speaker 1 So our biggest events, our PLEs, we just did a game-changing announcement where we're moving them over to ESPN.

Speaker 1 Here starting up, and you know, nobody does large-scale build to events like ESPN does, so that will be massive for us.

Speaker 1 You know, we've always sort of been in the forefront of that. When

Speaker 1 WrestleMania started, it was

Speaker 1 closed circuit. You know, we pioneered closed circuit entertainment where you would go to a theater and watch the broadcast.
We pioneered pay-per-view industry.

Speaker 1 When streaming was just coming into play, we were one of the first movers into, we had our own WWE network. So when it was kind of Netflix and us

Speaker 1 we then realized that over time that's going to be a tech war that we're not suited for it's not what we do we pulled out of that we went over to peacock

Speaker 1 we're now on Netflix we're on ESPN you know

Speaker 4 we're across the board can you just bring us behind the scenes in this negotiation because you guys just signed a huge licensing deal maybe you want to tell folks the size of it but how did you bid people against each other and what were the different things that different folks wanted?

Speaker 1 Well, the beautiful thing about us is with the amount of content we do, we're 52 weeks a year live. So when you talk about a content company that puts out entertainment, we are live Monday nights,

Speaker 1 two to three hours, depending on the evening on Netflix. Tuesday nights two hours on CW, Friday nights two hours and half the year is three hours on USA.

Speaker 1 You know, once a month, a three hour plus PLE, Saturday nights main event, quarterly or more per year.

Speaker 1 That's all live. That's all content that we're putting out on a regular basis.

Speaker 1 To go back to the live event experience, our live event, you know, our ticketing, our live event experience numbers are off the chart. And that's global.
We were just in Paris.

Speaker 1 We did the stadium in Paris. We did Lyon, France on a Friday night.
a PLE on a Sunday night in a stadium in Paris, France, where we had 30 plus thousand there. and then we did

Speaker 1 Monday Night Raw from Paris in that same stadium with a little over 20,000 there for TV the next night came straight back to the US so it's it's every single week that amount of live content that's incredible 500 hours a year yeah but the way to see us is live

Speaker 1 this will date me and if anybody is a fan of the band Kiss Kiss when they were in the 70s were like the hottest live act in the world but they weren't selling albums.

Speaker 1 They thought if there's a way we could just get people to experience what we do live on an album, it will change the game for us. They did a live one.

Speaker 1 It exploded. When live albums didn't sell anything, because it captured them live.

Speaker 1 It's the same for us.

Speaker 1 I say this all the time. If we want to make a WWE fan, if we're working with a partner and they're kind of on the fence or they're not super into what we do, we bring bring them to what we do live.

Speaker 1 We bring them to WrestleMania, we bring them to a stadium show, we bring them to an arena event. And when you have 30,000 people to, you know, 50,000, 60, 80,000 people in a stadium going

Speaker 1 insane,

Speaker 1 it is electric. There is no way that you leave there and go, eh.

Speaker 1 You think that's the antidote for social media?

Speaker 1 I think social media leads you to it, but I think for a lot of people, and this is just my theory, but I think COVID,

Speaker 1 that moment in COVID started to maybe show people that like objects aren't where it's at,

Speaker 1 that experiences

Speaker 1 are where it's at.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you know, especially shared experience. So when you talk about your relationship with your dad, that was your thing.
I hear that all the time.

Speaker 1 50%

Speaker 1 or more of our audience comes with a child,

Speaker 1 comes with a a family member. 40% of

Speaker 1 our fan base is women. We're one of the most diverse sports, if you want to look at it that way, or entertainment products out there.

Speaker 1 But the thing that I love the most is when I look in the crowd, when I'm running an event and I'm in the back and they're panning that crowd on camera and I see what I clearly see is a grandfather with their kids and their grandkids sitting all together.

Speaker 1 freaking out over the show and you know you know that grandfather was into Bruno San Martino and the dad was into The Rock or Stone Cold and the kids now are into Roman Reigns or Rhea Ripley or

Speaker 1 it's amazing and it binds families together. It gives them something to enjoy together and those shared experiences.

Speaker 1 At the end of the day, to me, a car is only worth the value of if you pack it with your family and you go somewhere with it and you remember the ride.

Speaker 1 That to me is it. It's the rest of it is amazing.
You were at the White House for the Presidential Fitness Challenge being relaunched. Yes.

Speaker 1 And we've talked a lot on the pod about this next generation, maybe too much screens, too many video games, not enough in person. And obviously

Speaker 1 fitness is a big problem there. So how do we get these kids off the computers and then get them doing physical activity and really enjoying life?

Speaker 1 Because when we grew up in the 80s, we didn't have screens. We were out in the streets.

Speaker 4 We were, you know,

Speaker 1 free-range kids. Everybody on this stage, I'm going to say, right, your parents sent you out the door, said, come back when the streetlights turn on.
That was there in Brooklyn, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, that's what you did, right? And it's how you grew up, it's how you lived, and the experiences that you had, and figuring out how to entertain yourself. Yes.

Speaker 1 The boredom leading to creativity. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it was very physical, and you grew up physical.

Speaker 1 We need to change that back to people and get them to realize that that physicality, there's enjoyment in that physicality, and there's success in that physicality.

Speaker 1 One thing for me, when I was a kid and I first wandered into the gym and I learned who Arnold Schwarzenegger was, who I consider one of the great American success stories of all time,

Speaker 1 he had a blueprint in his mind as a young kid of what he saw. He saw a bodybuilder named Reg Park and thought to himself, I follow that blueprint.
I'm going to be like Reg Park.

Speaker 1 I'm going to become the biggest bodybuilder of all time. I'm going to get into Hollywood.
I'm going to take over Hollywood. Then I'm going to get into politics.
And I'm going to to do, right?

Speaker 1 Like, he saw this blueprint. He did it.
I saw that same blueprint for me. Right? But what taught me to do those things was athletics.
It started with the physical.

Speaker 1 It started with the physical. The gym does not bullshit you.

Speaker 1 Right? Yes. If you go in the gym.
No safe spaces at that time. You either work hard.

Speaker 5 You wouldn't like it, Jake.

Speaker 1 Eat right.

Speaker 1 Eat right. But you want to do the bench press after this.
We can do it. Me, you and my dad.

Speaker 1 I can organize. Let's talk about that.

Speaker 1 I I can organize a fitness challenge right here, right now. Oh, let's go.

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 5 We'll do an all-in fitness challenge.

Speaker 5 Paul, let me ask you. So, you had a blueprint in your mind.

Speaker 5 I remember, you know, I've seen you interviewed before, and when you were coming up in the business, you were learning from guys like Sean Michaels and Ric Flair, and you were a student of the game, and then you incorporate that into your character.

Speaker 5 Your character was called the game, it then hit another level.

Speaker 5 So, you clearly, you know, you were leading the development of that character, and I think got over to another level when somehow somehow the character and yourself somehow you hit some sort of center.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, joined.

Speaker 5 I guess, what does that do in terms of the creative friction that you deal with now running the talent?

Speaker 5 Because they have their own blueprints in their mind about where they want to go with their career, but you as running the overall creative have a direction where they want to go.

Speaker 5 How much friction does that create?

Speaker 1 It doesn't create friction, it creates a partnership. which is what I love.

Speaker 1 One of the favorite parts of my job is to sit down in a room with talent and say, where do we want to go? Where do we want to go with you? How do we want to get there?

Speaker 1 It's not the conversation of, well, I want to be the champion. Okay, everybody does.

Speaker 1 What is your story and how do we tell it? And who here of these other talent can have a story that goes against your arc to combine with their arc to tell a great story, right?

Speaker 1 Once we start to riff those things, today's world is different.

Speaker 1 You go back, you know, 40, 50 years, Ivan Koloff was a Canadian guy that played a Russian because we were in the middle of a Cold War and it was the easy thing to do, but you couldn't do that character now because the internet would go like, he's from Canada, right?

Speaker 1 It doesn't work. They know the truth.

Speaker 1 So today you have to sort of blend who you are, real life, with the character that you play and sort of blur this line, blur this line of the fourth wall of, was that real?

Speaker 1 Or do these guys really not like each other?

Speaker 1 Or is that really, you know, while you're putting it together backstage, we're all agreeing on the where we want to go and then we tell this story that people cannot tell what's real and what is fantasy and that's when it gets magical ladies and gentlemen let's give it up for Triple H.

Speaker 5 Thank you very much.

Speaker 5 Thank you.