All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Triple H on WWE's Evolution, the Rise of the Antihero, and the Psychology of Stardom

Starting point is 00:00:01 14-time WWE World Champion, a two-time World 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 W.E's Paul Levack. All right, yeah, thanks for coming. Welcome.

Starting point is 00:00:55 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 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. So it was really a wrestling town. So growing up, I watched you in WWE, and I would say that Triple H was the premier heel champion,

Starting point is 00:01:32 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 W.W.E. Superstar, but you've got to be, first of all,

Starting point is 00:01:56 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, you know, a charismatic start 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? 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 key to it really comes down to charisma and, you know, your innate ability to connect with people.

Starting point is 00:02:42 It's one of the things about WWE that I think is remarkable is it's a kind of a combination of everything, right? 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, 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, sometimes can be a lot less about all the things you're. 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

Starting point is 00:03:29 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 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 wasn't any professional sports. Ultimately, we got the NHEL.

Starting point is 00:03:54 That didn't get as big a pop as Memphis. Memphis is, yeah. And my father and I, 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 the AAA heel. But I wanted to ask you a question about exactly what you just said. And I want you to sort of walk us through.

Starting point is 00:04:18 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, 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 like. They're picking who connects with them. They're

Starting point is 00:05:06 picking who is charismatic to them. You know, Donald Trump was very good in our world of 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.

Starting point is 00:05:42 So in wrestling, there's basically heels and baby faces or faces. Or some variation, right? Nobody in today's world, there's very few all the way good, all the way bad. Right. And actually, that sort of start to change in the attitude era. I remember in the 80s when I was growing up, Hulk Hogan was like this superhero type, you know, baby face. And then, you know, I weirdly always just rooted for the heels. And then Stone Cold.

Starting point is 00:06:09 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 was 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 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 um you know most people the average person

Starting point is 00:06:39 there are people that are really good, but somewhere in there's, 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 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.

Starting point is 00:07:12 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:07:28 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'd take a character and you'd say, well, we need to talk about the Middle East somehow, so, okay, we have the iron cheek, right? And you'd create these characters that would reflect the geopolitical tension of the time. Did you find that that was

Starting point is 00:07:54 harder to do in this generation, or is it harder to do now just because there's 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. 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 WW rea 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 three hours and just turn off and enjoy entertainment and and some type

Starting point is 00:08:36 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 is 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?

Starting point is 00:09:07 What role do they play, I guess, maybe? American society. I think they're total opposites. Like, MMA is just, it's competitive, it's competition, that's what it's based on. Though best when, and you can look at that world, and I don't want to get too deep into their world, but you have a Connor McGregor come along. If Connor McGregor came out of retirement tomorrow and said he's fighting in four months, it would be massive, right?

Starting point is 00:09:33 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? Right? I couldn't even tell you. It's forever. What people are buying is that cult of personality. Right.

Starting point is 00:09:49 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:10:15 So is there a writer's room? There is a writer's room. We have a large staff of... That's awesome. 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.

Starting point is 00:10:30 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 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

Starting point is 00:11:04 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 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 Chimab 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 there's this incredible iconic movie The Wrestler. Yes.

Starting point is 00:11:40 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 were at max weight, 2, 300 pounds of just muscle landing? Like, what happens to your knees, your back, the whole thing? Yeah, it's a physical business. Yeah. We have a few sayings in our business.

Starting point is 00:12:04 One, it isn't ballet, right? 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. So we're scanning constantly for everything. you know, physically as well as head injuries, everything, right?

Starting point is 00:12:35 So we're way on top of that. Didn't necessarily used to be that way, as things have improved we've gotten there. 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 Sax's dream. He was telling us when we were doing the show notes yesterday during the rehearsal, it's been Sachs' 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?

Starting point is 00:13:09 Right now, who wants to see a lift sacks? Come on, now. Come on. Triple H versus. So there was a pitch for me to do that here and put David through this table. I just want to see you lift them. 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.

Starting point is 00:13:30 Come on now. I mean, know that you can break Freedberg in half. He weighs 110 pounds wet out of the shower. But Sax, he did the Ozdenpick, and he 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. One of the things that I found interesting is he's talking about your fandom,

Starting point is 00:13:49 but he's walking around back here with a handheld speaker. He had his own entrance music, his entire run backstage. He's running around. Getting ready for the main event of WrestleMania before he came out here. So you're saying you want to lift me? All right. Let me ask a question on the business of wrestling. You've got to sign a waiver.

Starting point is 00:14:12 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 kind of escalate. And then the traditional broadcast fiction is kind of dying, like the margins aren't there, the viewerships down. How is the bifurcation work for your business digital and kind of like the content stuff that you're doing digitally versus the live?

Starting point is 00:14:42 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 through? to the live event. We tell those stories across digital platforms. We have right around a billion social media followers

Starting point is 00:15:04 across the globe. We're one of the largest social presence. I'm not a stat guy, so I'll screw some of this up, but number one 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. You know, our social presence is second to none, but we-

Starting point is 00:15:25 Do those monetize on their own? They do monetize, but we also see them as drivers to everything else. Right. So our products now, raw airs domestically in the U.S. on Netflix, but is viewed globally on Netflix, every place else. Right. So outside of the U.S., Raw, Smackdown, all our shows are on Netflix globally. Monday nights on Netflix globally, Tuesday nights, NXT,

Starting point is 00:15:53 which is our sort of, AAA baseball or our college football, if you would. 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. Does your audience still have an affinity for live? Are they still big? Oh, 1,000 percent.

Starting point is 00:16:15 So our biggest events, our PLEs, we just did a game-changing announcement where we're moving them over to ESPN 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 WrestleMania started, it was closed circuit. You know, we pioneered closed circuit entertainment where you would go to a theater and watch

Starting point is 00:16:47 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 was kind of Netflix and us, we then realized that over time, that's going to be a tech war that we're not

Starting point is 00:17:05 suited for. It's not what we do. We pulled out of that. We went over to Peacock. We're now on Netflix. We're on ESPN. 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

Starting point is 00:17:20 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 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:17:50 you know, once a month, a three hour plus PLE, Saturday night's main event, 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 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 Leon France on a Friday night, a PLE on a Sunday night in a stadium in Paris, France,

Starting point is 00:18:27 where we had 30 plus thousand there. And then we did 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 U.S. So 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.

Starting point is 00:18:49 This will date me, and if anybody is a fan of the band, 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 live albums didn't sell anything because it captured them live, It's the same for us.

Starting point is 00:19:20 I say this all the time. If we want to make a WWFAN, 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.

Starting point is 00:19:33 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. 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 COVID, that moment in COVID started to maybe show people that, like, objects aren't where it's at, that experiences are where it's at. Yeah. And, you know, especially

Starting point is 00:20:15 shared experience. So when you talk about, you know, your relationship with you, 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. 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. What I clearly see, 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 Bruno San Martino and the dad was into

Starting point is 00:21:01 the rock or stone cold and the kids now are into Roman Raines or Ria Ripley or, you know, it's amazing and it binds families together. It gives them something to enjoy together. and 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, to me, is it. It's the rest of it is amazing. You're at the White House for the Presidential Fitness Challenge being relaunched.

Starting point is 00:21:33 Yes. And we've talked a lot on the pot about this next generation, maybe too much screens, too many video games, not enough in person. And obviously, 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? 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.

Starting point is 00:21:58 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 in Brooklyn, yeah. 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. boredom leading to creativity. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:17 And it was very physical, and you grew up physical. 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. One thing for me, when I was a kid and I first wandered into the gym, and I learned who Arnold Schwarzenegger was,

Starting point is 00:22:36 who I consider 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 follow that blueprint. I'm going to be like Reg Park. I'm going to become the biggest bodybuilder of all time.

Starting point is 00:22:55 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?

Starting point is 00:23:06 But what taught me to do those things was athletics. It started with the physical. It started with the physical. The gym does not bullshit. you, right? Yes. If you go in the gym, no safe spaces at that gym. You either work hard.

Starting point is 00:23:21 You didn't like it, Jake out. Eat, right. You want to do the bench press after this. We can do it. Me, you and Madami. Let's talk about that blueprint first. I can organize a fitness challenge right here, right now. Oh, let's go.

Starting point is 00:23:33 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've seen you interviewed before, and when you were coming up in the business, you were learning from guys like Sean Michaels and Rick Flair, and you were a student of the game, and then you incorporate that into your character.

Starting point is 00:23:50 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 centered. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:05 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. 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? What do we want to go with you?

Starting point is 00:24:32 How do we want to get there? It'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? and who hear of these other talent can have a story that goes against your arc to 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, 50 years, Ivan Koloff was a Canadian guy that played a Russian because we were

Starting point is 00:25:00 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 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

Starting point is 00:25:37 gets magical. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give it up for Triple H. Paul and I. Thank you.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Triple H on WWE's Evolution, the Rise of the Antihero, and the Psychology of Stardom

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