Triple H on How WWE Evolved: Trump, The Rock, and the Rise of the Antihero

14-time WWE World Champion, a two-time Royal Rumble winner, and now he's behind the scenes running World Wrestling Entertainment. Welcome to the Netflix Era. Whether it be a mentor, a leader, or an executive, his love and passion for this industry hasn't changed. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the WWE's Paul Levesque.

All right, yeah. Thanks for coming. Welcome. The audience may not know this, but I'm a big professional wrestling fan going back to my childhood in Memphis, Tennessee. 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. 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. It was really a wrestling town. Growing up, 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. It's a thrill to have you here.

Since then, you've transitioned into being the chief creative officer at WWE and had a huge business career. I think we want to talk to you about both those things. Maybe let's start with your career as a performer. I don't know if people understand everything that goes into being a WWE Superstar, but first of all, you've got to be a tremendous athlete. You're a stuntman 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. You've got to be 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 a difficult thing. One of my tasks now in my job is finding that next generation of stars, right? We have a robust program through college athletics, through an NIL program, and through a lot of different avenues where we find talent. But the key to it really comes down to charisma and your innate ability to connect with people.

One of the things about WWE that I think is remarkable is that it's a combination of everything: the athleticism, the showmanship, the charisma that you have to have, and the media skills that we teach from day one coming in the door. All of it. When you leave WWE, whether you've been there for a long time or if you've had any level of success, you are so well suited to do just about anything in life.

I truly feel like, for a lot of people, sometimes it can be a lot less about all the things you know and how good you are at them than about 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 leadership, right?

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 of WWE.

Yeah. I mentioned this to you backstage, but, similar to David, I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. There really wasn't any professional sports. Ultimately, we got the NHL.

As big a pop as Memphis.

My father and I—one of the few things that we were able to bond over was wrestling. You and then your whole progression, where you started off as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, which is really what David is like now, and then you became more of the Triple H heel.

I wanted to ask you a question about exactly what you just said. I want you to walk us through the characteristics of these 2 individuals who have had very vibrant careers in wrestling: Donald Trump, who's now in politics, and The Rock, who people say may actually go into politics later. What you just said is that it's an incredible breeding ground for charisma and connecting with people.

Yeah, I mean, I think if you go back through history, even in politics, and you look at the person who gets elected in every presidential cycle, it's the most charismatic person on that stage who gets elected president. The issues are important. All the 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. They're picking who is charismatic to them.

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

The Rock is the same way. That connection with people is really—in my mind, it is what drives the planet.

In wrestling, there are basically heels and babyfaces, or faces, or some variation, right? In today's world, there are very few people who are all the way good or all the way bad. That started to change in the Attitude Era.

I remember in the '80s, when I was growing up, Hulk Hogan was this superhero-type babyface. I weirdly always rooted for the heels.

You're more fun.

Then Stone Cold Steve Austin came along, and he was kind of a heel, but all of a sudden everyone was rooting for him. What happened there? Did something change in American society, or did the product get more sophisticated?

I think people became more savvy to how the world really works. Nobody's perfect. I don't think there's anybody that is—well, I shouldn't say anybody. There are certainly people that are just evil in the world, but most people, the average person, are really good, but somewhere in there there's some stuff that maybe isn't, and vice versa on that.

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, that leads to the best heel, right? Because if 90% of the world disagrees with you, but you believe, "No, you're all wrong. I see this, and it is right," you can run down that road.

You're not just trying to be the curl-your-mustache bad-guy heel tying people to the railroad tracks. It's real. You feel it, and it's real, and it's why you want to get to that place, right or wrong, for most people. The shades of gray—I don't know that we necessarily lead society, WWE. I wouldn't want to think that, but I think we reflect it.

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 take a character and say, "Well, we need to talk about the Middle East somehow. So, okay, we have the Iron Sheik." You create these characters that would reflect the geopolitical tension of the time.

Did you find that that was harder to do in this generation, or is it harder to do now just because there are still so many potholes?

Absolutely. I just think that if you stereotyped somebody into a particular place, a lot of the world would rebel against that—not in a positive way, right? And maybe sometimes people have no real reason to have a position on either side of that.

The one thing about WWE is that 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. It's supposed to let you come to an event for 3 hours and just turn off and enjoy entertainment, and some type of representation of the world that is around you.

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

So then, can you contrast and compare WWE with MMA? 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 a lot of the zeitgeist, especially among younger generations of men.

Do you feel pressure to make it more physical or more like MMA? Or how do you think these 2 things play—what role do they play, I guess, maybe in American society?

I think they're total opposites. MMA is competitive. It's competition. That's what it's based on. Though, 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.

If Conor McGregor came out of retirement tomorrow and said he's fighting in 4 months, it would be massive, right? The amount of people that would gravitate towards that, the ticket sales, the viewership would be intense.

When's the last time he fought? And when's the last time he won?

Mhm. I couldn't even tell you. It's been forever.

What people are buying is that cult of personality, right? It's the same in our business. We tell stories. People within our business sometimes take this wrong, but we don't write the shows based on, "That'll be a great match."

We write them based on the stories that we can create: the protagonist, the antagonist, how they work with each other, and telling stories that can resonate with people—maybe they've experienced something in their real life, some type of fantastical version of that.

So, is there a writers' room?

There is a writers' room. We have a large staff of

Yeah.

There's a show right now on Netflix called Unreal, and it is, for the first time ever, a look behind the scenes at what we do. We let cameras into the writers' room. We let them backstage at our shows. So, you see the production of the shows. You see what goes into it.

There are months of planning that go into this stuff. We're looking now at WrestleMania in Vegas in April, 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? I would say we're much more akin to 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 to, you know, MMA.

At the end of the day, in MMA—or, you know, UFC—you're booking matches, and the interest is that guy's really good, he's really good, and I'm not sure who's going to win. Let's put them together. When you get the right personalities involved, then it explodes.

Paul, I'm going to go back to this iconic Attitude Era, which is also what we call it when Chamath has his third glass of red wine at the poker game.

Yeah. It gets a little spicy.

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

Yes. This does take a toll on your body. Although you're not making full contact, 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 weigh at max weight—200 to 300 pounds of just muscle, landing? What happens to your knees, your back, the whole thing?

It's a physical business. We have a few sayings in our business. One, it isn't ballet. And that's not to knock ballet, because I couldn't do that, though many people would want to see me try. It's a physical business, and no one walks away unscathed.

Right?

But we have probably one of the most robust medical programs in athletics. We're scanning constantly for everything, physically as well as head injuries—everything. We're way on top of that. It didn't necessarily used to be that way, but as things have improved, we've gotten there.

The trick in our business is to make it look incredibly physical without being incredibly physical.

It's been Sacks's dream all this time to be involved in wrestling. He was telling us when we were doing the show notes yesterday during the rehearsal. He feels like it was a career path he didn't get to take. So, is there any way, given what you've done, that you could lift Sacks right now? Who wants to see him lift Sacks? Come on now. Come on.

There was a pitch for me to do that here and put David through this table.

I just want to see you lift him.

Although, when I approached him about it, he said he was holding out for a bigger moment in the Oval Office. So, we're not going to do it here.

Come on now. I mean, you know that you can break Freeberg in half. He weighs 110 pounds wet, out of the shower. But Sacks did the Ozempic and added 10 pounds of muscle. How easily can you lift that man?

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

Let's lift him. Come on. He's talking about your fandom, but he's walking around back here with a handheld speaker, and he had his own entrance music. His entire run backstage, he's been running around like he's getting ready for the main event of WrestleMania before he came out here.

So, you're saying you want to lift me? Hey. All right.

Okay. Let me ask a question on the business of wrestling. You have to sign a waiver.

Yeah. 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, and those industries are seeing revenue and profits escalate. Then traditional broadcast fiction is kind of dying. The margins aren't there, and the viewership is down. How does the bifurcation work for your business—digital and the content stuff that you're doing digitally versus the live? Is digital still going to be a growing piece of the business for some time, do you think, or is it really a live experience?

It's a live experience, but I think all those things lead you to the live experience. Where do you tell the stories that get you to want to go to the live event? We tell those stories across digital platforms. We have right around 1 billion social media followers across the globe. We're one of the largest social presences. I'm not a stat guy, so I'll screw some of this up, but we're the No. 1 YouTube channel across all sports. I'm not sure where we're at, but we're in the top 10 of YouTube channels across everything. Our social presence is second to none.

Do those monetize on their own?

They do monetize, but we also see them as drivers to everything else. Our product now, Raw, airs domestically in the U.S. on Netflix, but the show is viewed globally on Netflix everywhere else. Outside of the U.S., Raw, SmackDown, and all our shows are on Netflix globally. Monday nights are on Netflix globally. Tuesday nights, NXT—which is our sort of Triple-A baseball or our college football, if you would—airs on The CW across broadcast. Friday nights, we're on USA with NBCUniversal still. We have Saturday Night's Main Event on Peacock.

Does your audience still have an affinity for live? Are they still big into it?

1,000%. Our biggest events are PLEs. We just made a game-changing announcement that we're moving them over to ESPN starting here soon, and nobody does large-scale builds to events like ESPN does. That will be massive for us.

We've always been in the forefront of that. When WrestleMania started, it was closed circuit. We pioneered closed-circuit entertainment, where you would go to a theater and watch a broadcast. We pioneered the pay-per-view industry. When streaming was just coming into play, we were one of the first movers into it. We had our own WWE Network, when it was kind of Netflix and us.

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, went over to Peacock, and now we're on Netflix. We're on ESPN. We're across the board.

Can you just bring us behind the scenes in this negotiation? You 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?

The beautiful thing about us is, with the amount of content we do, we're live 52 weeks a year. When you talk about a content company that puts out entertainment, we're live Monday nights for 2 to 3 hours, depending on the evening, on Netflix. Tuesday nights are 2 hours on The CW. Friday nights are 2 hours, and half the year it's 3 hours, on USA. Once a month, we have a 3-hour-plus PLE. Saturday Night's Main Event is quarterly or more per year. That's all live. That's all content that we're putting out on a regular basis.

To go back to the live-event experience, our ticketing and live-event experience numbers are off the chart, and that's global. We were just in Paris. 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 30,000-plus people there. Then we did Monday Night Raw from Paris in that same stadium, with a little over 20,000 there for television the next night. We came straight back to the U.S. It's every single week, that amount of live content.

That's incredible. 500 hours a year.

Yeah. The way to see us is live. This will date me, but if anybody is a fan of the band KISS, KISS in the '70s was the hottest live act in the world, but they weren't selling albums. 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. It exploded, when live albums didn't sell anything, because it captured them live.

It's the same for us. 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 them to what we do live. We bring them to WrestleMania. We bring them to a stadium show. We bring them to an arena event. When you have 30,000 people to 50,000, 60,000, or 80,000 people in a stadium going insane—

Bananas. It is electric. There is no way that you leave there and go, "Eh." Do you think that's the antidote to social media?

I think social media leads you to it, but I think for a lot of people—and this is just my fear—I think COVID started to maybe show people that objects aren't where it's at, that experiences are where it's at, especially shared experiences.

When you talk about your relationship with your dad, that was your thing. I hear that all the time.

50% or more of our audience comes with a child, comes with a family member. 40% of 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.

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. I see what I clearly see as a grandfather with his kids and his grandkids sitting all together, freaking out over the show. You know that grandfather was into Bruno Sammartino, the dad was into The Rock or Stone Cold, and the kids are now into Roman Reigns or Rhea Ripley. It's amazing, and it binds families together. It gives them something to enjoy together.

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

That, to me, is it. The rest of it is amazing. You're at the White House for the presidential fitness challenge being relaunched.

Yes. We've talked a lot on the pod about this next generation: maybe too many screens, too many video games, and not enough in-person activity. Obviously, fitness is a big problem there. So how do we get these kids off the computers, get them doing physical activity, and really enjoying life?

When we grew up in the '80s, we didn't have screens; we were out in the streets. We were free-range kids. Everybody on this stage, I'm going to say, your parents sent you out the door and said, "Come back when the streetlights turn on." That was in Brooklyn, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's what you did, right?

That's how you grew up, how you lived, and the experiences that you had, figuring out how to entertain yourself. The boredom led to creativity. It was very physical, and you grew up physical. We need to change that back for people and get them to realize that there's enjoyment in that physicality and there's success in that physicality.

One thing for me, when I was a kid and I first wandered into the gym, was learning who Arnold Schwarzenegger was. I consider him one of the great American success stories of all time. 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'll follow that blueprint. I'm going to be like Reg Park. 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 do right."

He saw this blueprint, and he did it. I saw that same blueprint for me, right? What taught me to do those things was athletics. It started with the physical. You both came up with it.

Physical. The gym does not lie to you, right? Yes. If you go in the gym—

At that gym, you either work hard. You wouldn't like it, Jacob. Eat right. Eat right.

Why don't you want to do the bench press after this? We can do it—me, you, and my dummy. But actually, let's talk about that blueprint first.

A fitness challenge right here, right now.

Let's go. Let's go. We'll do an All-In fitness challenge. Let me ask you: you had a blueprint in your mind. I remember—I've seen you interviewed before—and when you were coming up in the business, you were learning from guys like Shawn Michaels and Ric Flair. You were a student of the game, and then you incorporated that into your character. Your character was called The Game, and then it hit another level.

So you clearly were leading the development of that character, and I think that took it to another level when somehow the character and yourself hit some sort of center.

Yeah, yeah, joined.

I guess what does that do in terms of the creative friction that you deal with now running the talent? They have their own blueprints in their mind about where they want to go with their career, but you, running the overall creative, have a direction for where they want to go. How much friction does that create?

It doesn't create friction; it creates a partnership, which is what I love. One of my 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?" That's not the conversation of, "Well, I want to be the champion." Okay, everybody does. What is your story, and how do we tell it?

Which of these other talents can have a story that goes against your arc and combine with their arc to tell a great story, right? Once we start to riff those things, today's world is different. You go back 40 or 50 years: Ivan Koloff was a Canadian guy who 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, "He's from Canada." It doesn't work. They know the truth.

So today you have to blend who you are in real life with the character that you play and blur this line of the fourth wall: "Was that real? Do these guys really not like each other?" While you're putting it together backstage, we're all agreeing on where we want to go, and then we tell this story where people cannot tell what's real and what's fantasy. That's when it gets magical.

Ladies and gentlemen, let's give it up for Triple H. All of that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Phenomenal. Phenomenal. Thank you, sir.