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Triple H on WWE’s Evolution, the Rise of the Antihero, and the Psychology of Stardom Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) Introducing Paul “Triple H” Levesque
(0:56) The skills needed to be an effective professional wrestler, understanding the characteristics of President Trump and The Rock
(5:41) The rise of the antihero / heel persona, and why modern wrestling is more morally grey
(8:43) WWE vs UFC: Why they are opposites, star building
(11:21) Physicality of the WWE and how they support wrestlers
(14:13) The business of the WWE: using streaming and social as a funnel for live events, the magic of live WWE
(21:28) Helping America’s youth via physical fitness
(23:35) How the internet forced wrestlers to blend their in ring personas with real-life
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Triple H on WWE’s Evolution, the Rise of the Antihero, and the Psychology of Stardom Podcast Episode Summary
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Triple H on WWE’s Evolution, the Rise of the Antihero, and the Psychology of Stardom Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
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00:04
14 time WWE World Champion, a two time World Rumble winner, and now he’s behind the scenes running World Wrestling Entertainment.
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Welcome to the Netflix
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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. My man. Welcome.
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Thank you, man. All right. Yeah. Thanks for coming.
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Welcome.
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So the audience may not know this, but I’m a big professional wrestling fan going back to my childhood in Memphis, Tennessee. In Mem yeah. In Memphis, we didn’t have any professional sports growing up. All we had was, Memphis State Ai basketball and professional wrestling at the Mid South Coliseum on Monday ai.
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01:15
Sai 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 a wrestling town. But so growing up, Ai I, you know, I watched you and WWE, and I would say that h h h was ai premier heel champion, the unstoppable force of the whole Attitude Era.
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01:35
And, it’s a thrill to have you here. And since then, you’ve transitioned into being the chief creative officer at WWE and had a, huge business career. So I think we sana talk to you about both those things. Maybe let’s start with your career as a performer. And I don’t know if people understand everything that goes into being a WWE superstar, but you’ve gotta be, first of all, you’ve gotta be a tremendous athlete.
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01:58
You’re a stunt meh because you’re doing tremendously dangerous things. You have to be able to cut promos, which means, you’re you’re basically an actor, but you also have to write your own dialogue. And you’ve gotta be, you know, a charismatic shah to all the fans. There’s a lot that goes into it.
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02:14
How many people are cut out for this type of work?
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Well, it’s it’s a difficult thing. One of one of my tasks now in my job is finding that next generation of stars. Right? 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, you know, your innate ability to connect with people.
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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? The athleticism, the show manship, the charisma that you have to have, the, 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, you know, know, if if you’ve been had any level of success, you are so well suited to do just about anything in life because I I truly feel ai for a lot of people, 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.
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03:23
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? 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 ai, how many people in the White House are huge fans Yeah.
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Of WWE.
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I mentioned this to you backstage, but similar to to David, I had a growing up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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Yes.
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There’s really there wasn’t any professional sports. Ultimately, we got the NHL.
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03:53
I didn’t get as big a pop as Memphis.
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03:55
Memphis did. Yeah. Yeah. And my father and I, the one of the few things that we were able to bond over was wrestling. 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 more of a, you know, more of the Triple H heel. But I wanted to ask you a question about exactly what you just sai.
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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 actually go into politics later. And what you just said is it’s an incredible breeding ground for charisma and connecting with people.
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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. The the issues are important. The, all the, you know, the 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 ai, they’re picking who connects with them, they’re picking who is charismatic to them.
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You know, 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. 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.
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That connection with people is really, it’s in my mind, it is what drives the planet.
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05:42
Sai in in wrestling, there’s basically heels and baby faces or faces.
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Or some variation. Right? Nobody in in today’s world, there’s very few all the way good, all the way bad. Ai.
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And actually that that sort of started to change in the attitude era. I remember in the eighties when I was growing up, Hulk Hogan was like this superhero ai. Yes. You know, baby face, and then, and you know, I I weirdly always just rooted for the heels, and then Stone Cold
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06:09
They’re more fun.
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Yeah. It’s more fun. And then Stone Cold Steve Austin came along and he kinda was a heel, but all of a sudden everyone was like rooting for him. Like, what happened there? And ai, did something change in American society or did the product get more sophisticated?
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I think people became more savvy to how the world really works. Nobody’s perfect. And I I don’t think there’s anybody that is, well, I shouldn’t say anybody. There there’s certainly people that are just evil in the world, but, you know, most people, the average person, there are people that are really good, but somewhere in there’s there’s some stuff that maybe isn’t, and and vice versa on that.
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I think Ai have a saying in what I do right now, as as long as the bad guy, the heel, is justified somewhere in his mind that what he is doing is ai, that leads to the best heel. Right? It because if 90% of the world disagrees with you, but you believe, no, you’re all wrong, I see this and it is right.
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You can you can run down that road. You’re not just trying to be the, you know, the curl your mustache bad guy heel tyler 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. So that the shades of gray, I don’t know that we necessarily lead society, WWE. I wouldn’t sana to think that, but I think we reflect it.
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Well, you did a very good job in the eighties and nineties 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. Sai, okay, we have the Ai Sheik. Right? And you’d create these characters that would reflect the geopolitical tension of the time.
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Do you 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? Or
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07:59
Absolutely. I I just think that if you stereotype somebody into a particular place, a lot of the world would rebel against that. Yeah. Right? Not in a positive way. And and maybe sometimes people that have no real reason to have a position on either side of that. Right? 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.
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08:27
It’s supposed to, let you come to an event for three hours and just turn off and enjoy entertainment and 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.
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08:43
So then, can you contrast and compare them maybe WWE, and for a long time Sai had a really hard time because of my fascination with wrestling, migrating to Meh, but MMA has really taken over, a lot of the zeitgeist, especially amongst younger generations of men. Do you feel pressure to make it more physical or more like it or how do you think these two things play and what role do they play I guess maybe ai American sai?
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I think they’re total opposites. Like MMA is just it’s competitive, it’s competition, it’s that’s what it’s based on. Though best when and and you can look at that world and I don’t sana 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 four months, it would be massive. Right?
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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 is the last time you won?
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Mhmm. Ai. I couldn’t even tell you.
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It’s forever. What what people are buying is that cult of personality.
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Right.
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Right? It’s the same in our business. We tell stories. I’m less and and people within our business sometimes take this wrong, but I don’t we don’t write the shows based on 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?
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Telling stories that can resonate with people that maybe they’ve experienced in their real ai, some type of fantastical version of that.
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Sai is there a writer’s room?
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There is a writer’s room. We have a large staff of
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That’s awesome.
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Yeah. There 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 ai Room. We let them backstage at our shows sai you see the production of the shows. You see what goes into it. You know, there’s months of planning that go into stuff.
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We’re we’re looking now at WrestleMania in in Vegas in April and what those matches are going to be and how we want to get there. What is the ai arc that takes us there over time? I would say we’re much more akin to ai 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.
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At the end of the day, direct MMA is or you know UFC it’s your booking matches and the interest is that ai really good, he’s really good, I’m not sure who’s gonna win, let’s put them together. When when you get the right personalities involved then it explodes.
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Paul, I sana 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.
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Yeah.
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It gets a little spicy. It got very physical and there’s this sort of backyard wrestling and there’s this incredible iconic movie The Wrestler.
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Yes.
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11:40
This does take a toll on your body, although you’re not making full contact. What 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, two, three hundred pounds of just muscle landing, ai, what happens to your knees, your back, the whole thing?
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12:00
Yeah. It’s a physical business. Yeah. We have we have a few sayings in our business. One, it isn’t ballet. Right? Yeah. And and that’s not to knock ballet because I couldn’t do that, though many people would sana see me try. It’s it’s a physical business and no one walks away unscathed.
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Right.
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Right? But we have probably one of the most robust medical programs in athletics. So we’re scanning constantly for everything. 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.
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You know, the the trick in our business is to make it look incredibly physical without being incredibly physical.
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12:48
That’s where I was going with this is, you know, it’s been Sax’s dream. He was telling us when we were doing the show notes yesterday during the rehearsal, it’s been Sax’s dream all this time to be involved in wrestling. He feels like it was like a career path he didn’t get to take.
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So is there any way, you know, given what you’ve done, that you could lift sacks ai now? Who wants to see you lift sacks? Come on. Come on. Triple a’s versus
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13:16
So so there was a a pitch for me to do that here and put, David through this table.
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I just wanna
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see you lift him. Though when I
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approached him on it, he said he was holding out for a bigger moment in the Oval Office, so we’re not gonna do it here.
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Oh, come
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on now. I
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mean, no
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know that you can break Freidberg in half. He weighs a hundred and ten pounds wet out of the shower. But Saks, he did the Ozempic and he added 10 pounds of muscle. How how easily can you lift that man?
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It’s called
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it’s called a bump, Jason. I’m not I’m not ready to take some bumps here today.
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Let’s what I wanna do is that
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13:47
ai is he’s talking about your Fanta, but he’s walking around back here with a handheld, speaker Speed s. But he had his own entrance music his entire run back stage. He was running around.
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That’s fair enough. He also was
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told Getting ready for the main event of WrestleMania before he came out
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here. So you’re saying you sana lift me?
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I I
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Alright. Okay. Let me ask you another question on the business of of wrestling.
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You gotta sign a waiver. Yeah.
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Ai signed I’ll sign something. Let’s go.
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14:14
We see
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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 kind of escalate. And then the traditional broadcast fiction’s kind of dying, like the margins aren’t there, the viewership’s down.
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How is the bifurcation work for for for your business digital and kind of like the content stuff that you’re doing digitally versus the live and like is digital still is digital sana be like a growing piece of the business for some time
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do you think or is
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it really a live experience?
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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 meh you to sana to go to the live event? We tell those stories across digital platforms. We have, right around a billion social media followers across the globe. We’re one of the the largest social presence.
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I’ll Ai I’m not a stat ai, so I’ll screw some of this up, but, number one YouTube channel across all sports. Ai not sure where we’re at, but we’re in the top 10 of YouTube channels across everything. You know, our social presence is second to none.
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Do those
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monetize on their own or
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They they do. They do monetize, but we also see them as drivers to everything else. Right? So our products now, Ram airs domestically in The US on Netflix, but the mayor, is viewed globally on Netflix every place else. Right? So outside of The US, Raw, SmackDown, all our shows are on Netflix globally.
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15:49
Monday ai on Netflix globally, Tuesday nights, NXT, which is our our sort of, triple a baseball or our college football, if you would, that that airs on the CW cross broadcast. Friday nights, we’re on USA, with NBCU still. We have Saturday night’s main event on Peacock. We just did Does your
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audience still have an affinity for live? Are they still big at
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16:13
11000%. So our our biggest events are PLEs. We just did a a game changing announcement where we’re we’re moving them over to ESPN. Mhmm. Here starting up and, you know, nobody does large scale build to events like ESPN does, so that will be massive for us. You know, we’ve always sort of been in the forefront of that. When when WrestleMania started, it was closed circuit.
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16:42
You know, we we pioneered closed circuit entertainment where you would go to a theater and watch a broadcast. We pioneered, pay per view industry. 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 ai Netflix and us, we then realized that over time, that’s gonna be a tech war that we’re not suited for. It’s not what we do.
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We pulled out of that. We went over to Peacock. We’re now on Netflix. We’re on ESPN. You know, we’re we’re across the board.
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Can you just bring us behind the scenes in this negotiation? Because you guys just signed a huge licensing deal. Maybe you wanna 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?
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17:27
Well, the the the beautiful thing about us is with the amount of content we do, we’re fifty two weeks a year live. So when you when you talk about a content company that puts out entertainment, we are live Monday nights, two to three hours depending on on the on the evening on Netflix.
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Tuesday nights, two hours on CW. Friday nights, two hours, and half the year is three hours on USA. You know, once a month, a three hour plus PLE, Saturday night’s main event quarterly or more per year. That’s that’s all live. That’s all content that we’re putting out on a regular basis.
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18:04
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. 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.
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18:30
And then we did, Monday ai Raw from Paris in that same stadium with a little over 20,000 there for TV the next ai, came straight back to The US. So it’s it’s every single week that amount of live content.
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18:43
That’s incredible. Five hundred hours a year.
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Yeah. But the way to see us is live. This will date me and if anybody is a fan of the band KISS, KISS when they were in the seventies were ai 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.
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19:10
They did a live one. It exploded. When when live albums didn’t sell anything because it captured them ai. It’s the same for us. Ai say I say this all the ai, if we sana make a WWE fan, if we’re working with a partner and they’re kinda on the fence or they’re not super into what we do, we bring them to what we do live.
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19:31
We bring them to WrestleMania, we bring them to stadium show. We bring them to an arena event. And when you have 30,000 people to, you know, fifty, sixty, 80,000 people in a stadium going insane Bananas. It is electric. There is no way that you leave there and go,
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19:50
You think that’s the antidote for social media?
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19:54
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, that moment in COVID started to maybe show people that ai objects aren’t where it’s at. That experiences
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Sana Simois. Yeah.
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20:10
Are where it’s at.
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20:11
Yeah. And,
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20:14
you know, especially shared experience. So when you talk about, you know, 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 comes with a family member. 40% of our our 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.
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But the thing that I love the most is when I look in the crowd, when I’m running an event, 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 freaking out over the show and, you know you know that grandfather was in a Bruno Sammartino and the dad was into The Rock or Saloni Cold and the kids now are into Roman Reigns or Rhea Ripley or you know, it’s it’s amazing and it binds families together.
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21:13
It gives them something to enjoy together and those those shared experiences 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. That that to me is it. It’s the rest of it is amazing.
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21:29
You’re at the White House for the presidential fitness challenge being relaunched. Yes. 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 fitness is a 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 ai?
Speaker: 2
21:51
Because when we grew up in the eighties, we didn’t have screens. We were out in the streets. We were, you know, free range kids.
Speaker: 1
21:58
Everybody on this stage, I’m sana say, right, your parents sent you out the door, said come back when the street ai turn on.
Speaker: 2
22:03
That was it in Brooklyn. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
22:05
I mean, that’s what you did. Right? And 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. The boredom leading to creativity. Yeah. And and it was very physical and you grew up physical.
Speaker: 1
22:20
We need to change that back to people and and get them to realize that that physicality, there’s enjoyment in that physicality and there’s success in that physicality. One thing for meh, 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
22:41
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 sana be like Reg Park, I’m gonna become the biggest bodybuilder of all time, I’m gonna get into to Hollywood. I’m gonna take over Hollywood then I’m gonna get into politics and I’m gonna do right? Like, he saw this blueprint and he did it.
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23:02
I saw that same blueprint for me. Right? But what taught me to do those things was athletics.
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23:09
It started with the physical.
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23:11
Both kids. With the physical. The gym does not bullshit you. Right? Yes. If if you go in the gym No
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23:17
safe spaces at that gym.
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23:19
You you either work hard
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23:20
you wouldn’t like it, Jake.
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23:21
Eat eat ai?
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23:23
Eat right. But you wanna do the bench press after this? We can do it.
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23:26
Me, you, and my Ai. Sai can
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23:27
organize let’s talk about that ai. I can organize
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23:30
a fitness challenge right here,
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23:31
right now.
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23:32
Meh go. Let’s go.
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23:34
Ai do an all in fitness challenge. Now, Paul, let me ask you. So you had a blueprint in your mind. 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 Shawn Michaels and Ric Flair, and you were a student of the game, and then you incorporate that into your character.
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23:50
Your character was called the game. It then hit another level. So you clearly, you know, you were leading the development of that character, and I think got over to another level when somehow the character and yourself somehow you hit some sort of Joined.
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24:04
Yeah.
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24:04
Yeah, joined. I guess, what does that do in terms of the creative friction that you deal with now running the saloni? 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.
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24:18
How much friction does that create?
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24:19
It doesn’t create friction, it creates a partnership, which is what I love. That one of the favorite parts of my job is to sit down in a room with talent and say, where do we sana go? Where do we wanna go with you? How do we wanna get there? It’s not the conversation of, well, I wanna be the champion. Again, okay, everybody does.
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24:37
What is what is 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 Right. To combine with their arc to tell a great story. Right? Once we start to riff those things, today’s world is different.
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24:52
You go back, you know, forty, fifty 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 ai, he’s from Canada. Right? It it doesn’t work. They know the truth.
Speaker: 1
25:11
So, today, you have to sort of blend who you are, real ai, with the character that you play and sort of blur this line blur this line of the fourth wall of was that real or do these guys really not like each other or is that really, you know, while you’re putting it together backstage, we’re all agreeing on where we sana 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.
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25:39
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give it up for h h h.
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25:42
Alright. Thank you, bro.
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25:45
Thank you.
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25:50
Phenomenal. Phenomenal. Thank you, sir ai.