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.

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Thank you.

>> All right. Yeah, thanks for coming.

>> Welcome.

>> So, 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 Midsouth 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. So, it was really a wrestling town. But, so 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. 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 want to 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 got to be, first of all, you've got to be a tremendous athlete. 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 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. So, we have a robust program through college athletics, through an NIL program, through a lot of different avenues where we find talent, but the key to it really is comes down to charisma and your innate ability to connect with people. It's one of the things about WWE that I think is remarkable is it is a combination of everything: the athleticism, the showmanship, the charisma that you have to have, 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 been at 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 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 leadership. 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.

>> I mentioned this to you backstage, but similar to David, I had a growing up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

>> Yes.

>> There's really there wasn't any professional sports. Ultimately, we got the NH didn't get as big a pop as Memphis.

>> Memphis did. Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh, 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 Hurst Helmsley, which is really what David is like now, and then he became more of a, you know, more of the Triple Hel. But I wanted to ask you a question about exactly what you just said. 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.

>> 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 issues are important. All the, you know, 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 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. That connection with people is really, in my mind, it is what drives the planet. So in wrestling there's basically heels and baby faces or faces or some variation. Nobody in today's world there's very few all the way good all the way bad.

>> Right, and actually 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, yes, you know, baby face, and then, you know, I weirdly always just rooted for the heels. And then Stone Cold

>> you're more fun

>> Yeah, it's more fun and then Stone Cold Steve Austin came along and he kind of was a heel but all of a sudden everyone's like rooting for him like what happened there and like 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. And I don't think there's anybody that is, well, I shouldn't say anybody. There's certainly people that are just evil in the world, but most people, the average person, there are people that are really good, but somewhere in there, there's some stuff that maybe isn't and vice versa on that. I think 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 heal. 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. 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 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. So that 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.

>> 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, right? And you'd create these characters that would reflect the geopolitical tension of the time. Do 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

>> 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 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. 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 then maybe WWE 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 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 in what what role do they play I guess maybe in American society?

>> 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 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 and said he's fighting in four 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 is the last time he won?

>> Mhm.

>> 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 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? Telling stories that can resonate with people that maybe they've experienced in their real life, some type of fantastical version of that.

>> so is there a writer room?

>> There is a writer room. We have a large staff of That's awesome.

>> 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 writer room. We let them backstage at our shows so you see the production of the shows. You see what goes into it. You know, there's months of planning that go into stuff. We're 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? 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 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. Let's put them together. When when you get the right personalities involved, then it explodes.

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

>> Yeah.

>> It gets a little spicy. Um, it got very physical and there's this sort of backyard wrestling and there's this incredible iconic movie, The Wrestler.

>> Yes.

>> 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 300 lb of just muscle landing like what happens to your knees your back the whole thing.

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

>> Right.

>> Right. But we have probably one of the most robust medical programs in athletics. Um, so we're scanning constantly for everything. Um, 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. Um, you know, the 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 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. So, is there any way, you know, given what you've done that you could lift sacks right now?

right now? Who wants to see a whip? Come on. Come on. Triple H versus.

>> So, so there was a pitch for me to do that here and put David through this table.

>> I just want to see you lift him though.

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

>> Oh, come on now. We know that you can break Freeberg in half. He weighs 110 lbs wet out of the shower. But Sachs, he did the Ozempic and he added 10 pounds of muscle.

>> How how easily can you lift that man?

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

>> 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, but he had his own entrance music his entire run backstage, running around getting ready for the main event of Wrestlemania before he came out here.

>> So, you're saying you want to lift me, right?

>> All right. Okay. Well, let me ask a question on the business of of wrestling.

>> you got to sign a waiver.

>> Yeah, I I'll sign Steph. 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 kind of escalate. And then the traditional broadcast fiction's kind of dying, like the margins aren't there, the viewership's down. 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 going to be like a growing piece of the business for some time do you think or is it really a live experience?

>> 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 get you to want 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. Um I I'll I'm not a stat guy, so I'll screw some of this up, but uh number one YouTube channel across all sports. Um I I'm not sure where we're at, but we're in the top 10 of YouTube channels across everything. Um you know, our social presence is second to none. those monetize on their own or

>> they they do they do monetize but we also see them as drivers to everything else right so our products now raw airs domestically in the US on Netflix but dem um is viewed globally on Netflix every place else right so outside of the US Raw Smackdown all our shows are on Netflix globally Monday nights on Netflix globally Tuesday nights uh NXT which is our our sort of um AAA baseball or our college football if you would that that airs on the CW cross broadcast. Um Friday nights we're on USA uh with NBCU still. We have Saturday night's main event on Peacock. We just did

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

>> one 1,000%. So our our biggest events are PLE's. We just did a a game-changing announcement where we're we're moving them over to ESPN here starting up and you know nobody does largecale build to events like ESPN does. So that will be massive for us. Um you know we've always sort of been in the forefront of that. When when WrestleMania started, it was um closed circuit, you know, we we pioneered closed circuit entertainment where you would go to a theater and watch the 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 it was kind of Netflix and us um 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. Um we're now on Netflix. We're on ESPN. You know, 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?

>> Well, the the beautiful thing about us is with the amount of content we do, we're 52 weeks a year live. So, when you when you talk about a content company that puts out entertainment, we are live Monday nights uh two to three hours depending on on the on the evening on Netflix. Tuesday nights two hours on CW, Friday nights, two hours and half the year is three hours on USA. uh you know once a month a 3hour plus PLLE uh 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 um 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 um we did the stadium in Paris uh we did Leon 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 U 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. Uh, 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. 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 when live albums didn't sell anything because it captured them live. It's the same for us. I say I 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. And when you have 30,000 people to, you know, 50, 60, 80,000 people in a stadium going insane, it is electric. there is no way that you leave there and go eh

>> you think that's the antidote for social media

>> 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 co that moment in co started to maybe show people that like objects aren't where it's at that experiences

>> same same

>> are where it's at

>> and 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, come 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. 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 as a grandfather with their kids and their grandkids sitting all together freaking out over the show. And you know, you know that grandfather was into a Bruno San Martino and the dad was into The Rock or or Stone Cold and the kids now are into Roman Reigns or Ria Ripley or, you know, um it's it it's amazing. And it binds families together. 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.

>> You were at the White House for the presidential fitness challenge being relaunched.

>> Yes.

>> And uh 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 how do we get these kids off the computers and then get them doing physical activity and really enjoying life? Because when we grew up in the 80s, we didn't have screens. We were out in the streets. We were, you know, 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 street lights turn on."

>> That was it in Brooklyn. Yeah.

>> Yeah. 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,

>> right? the boredom leading to creativity.

>> Yeah. Um and and it was very physical and you grew up physical. 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 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 uh success stories of all time. He he had a blueprint in his mind as a young kid of what he saw. He saw a a bodybuilder named Rege Park and thought to himself, I 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 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. started with the physical. The gym does not you,

>> right?

>> Yes.

>> If if you go in the gym,

>> no safe spaces at that gym.

>> You either work hard.

>> You wouldn't like it, J.

>> Eat right.

>> Eat right.

>> You want to do the bench press after this? We can do it. Me, you, and my organiz.

>> I can organize a fitness challenge right here, right now.

>> Oh, let's go.

>> Let's go.

>> We'll do an all-in fitness challenge.

>> Paul, let me ask you. So, you had a blueprint in your mind. I remember, you know, I 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. 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 Yeah. joined. I guess what does that do in terms of the creative friction that you deal with now running the talent 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 how much friction does that create?

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 want to go where do we want to go with you how do we want to get there it's not the conversation of well I want to be champion. Okay. Okay. Everybody does.

>> 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 to combine with their arc to tell a great story? Once we start to riff those things, today's world is different. You go back, you know, 40, 50 years, Ivan Kolaf 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?

It it doesn't work. They know the truth. 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 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 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

thank you

>> phenomenal phenomenal. Thank you, sir.

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