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[Music] 14 time WWE World Champion, a two-time Royal Rumble winner, and now he's behind
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the scenes running World Wrestling Entertainment. Welcome to the Netflix era. Whether it be a mentor, a leader, or an
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executive, his love and passion for this industry hasn't changed. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the
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WWE'se's Paul Lac. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Thank you. All right. Yeah, thanks for coming.
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Welcome. So, the the audience may not know this, but I'm a big professional wrestling
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fan. Going back to my childhood in Memphis, Tennessee. In me Yeah. In Memphis, we didn't have any professional
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sports growing up. All we had was uh Memphis State Tigers basketball and professional wrestling at the Midsouth
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Coliseum on Monday nights. That was pretty much it. Jerry Lawler was so popular in Memphis that he could have
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been elected mayor and I think he almost was. So, it was really a a wrestling town. But, so growing up, I I you know,
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I watched you and WWE and I would say that Triple H was I the premier heel champion, the unstoppable force of the
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whole Attitude era. And uh it's a thrill to have you here. And since then, you've
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transitioned into being the chief creative officer at WWE and had a um huge business career. So, I think we
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want to talk to you about both those things. Maybe let's start with your career as a performer. And I don't know
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if people understand everything that goes into being a WWE superstar, but you've got to be, first of all, you've
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got to be a tremendous athlete. You're a stunt man because you're doing tremendously dangerous things. You have
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to be able to cut promos, which means um you're you're basically an actor, but you also have to write your own
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dialogue, and you've got to be, you know, a charismatic star to all the fans. There's a lot that goes into it.
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How many people are cut out for this type of work? Well, it's it's a difficult things. One
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one of my tasks now in my job is finding that next generation of stars, right? So, you know, we have a robust program
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through college athletics, through an NIL program, through a lot of different avenues where we find talent, but the
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the key to it really is comes down to charisma and um you know, your innate ability to connect with people. It's one
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of the things about WWE that I think is remarkable is it's it is a kind of a combination of everything, right? The
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athleticism, the showmanship, the charisma that you have to have, the um the media skills that we teach from day
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one coming in the door, all of it. when you leave WWE, whether you've been there
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for a long time or, you know, if if you've been at any level of success, you are so well suited to do just about
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anything in life because I I truly feel like for a lot of people sometimes can be a lot less about all the things you
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know and how good you are at them as the charisma to get people to listen to you.
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And then if you put the right people around you, you can have all the things that you need, but people will follow
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that leadership. Right? So even when it comes to politics, it's amazing to me when I walk through the White House, um
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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.
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Um 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. There's really there wasn't any professional sports. Ultimately, we got the NH didn't get as big a pop as
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Memphis. Memphis did. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and my father and I, the one of the few things that we were able to bond
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over was wrestling and you and then your whole progression where you started off
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as Hunter Hurst Helmsley, which is really what David is like now, and then he became more of a, you know, more of
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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
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through the characteristics of these two individuals who have had a very vibrant
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career in wrestling, Donald Trump who's now in politics, and The Rock who people
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say may actually go into politics later. And what you just said is it's an incredible breeding ground for charisma
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and connecting with people. Yeah. I mean, I think if you go back through history, even in politics, and
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you look at the person that gets elected in every presidential cycle, it's the most charismatic person on that stage
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that gets elected president. The the issues are important. The um all the, you know, the the real life day-to-day
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things that are important to people obviously are there, but at the end of the day, they're picking who they like.
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They're picking who connects with them. They're picking who is charismatic to them. Um, you know, Donald Trump was
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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
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embarrassed sometimes. He was okay to put it all out there um and just be him. But he's charismatic. He's larger than
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life. He's not afraid to say what's in front of him, right or wrong. Um, the Rock is the same way. that connection
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with people is really um it's to in my mind it is what drives the planet. So in in wrestling there's basically heels and
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baby faces or faces or some variation right nobody in in today's world there's very few all the
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way good all the way bad right and actually that that sort of started to change in the attitude era I
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remember in the 80s when I was growing up Hulk Hogan was like this superhero type yes you know baby face and then and
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you know I I weirdly always just rooted for the heels uh and then Stone Cold you're more fun
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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
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everyone's like rooting for him like what happened there and like did something change in American society or
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did the product get more sophisticated? I think people became more savvy to how the world really works. Nobody's
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perfect. And I I I don't think there's anybody that is, well, I shouldn't say anybody. There there's certainly people
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that are just evil in the world, but um you know, most people, the average person, there are people that are really
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good, but somewhere in there, there's some stuff that maybe isn't um and and vice versa on that. I think
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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
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what he is doing is right, that leads to the best heal. Right? It because if 90%
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of the world disagrees with you, but you believe no, you're all wrong. I see this
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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
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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
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to get to that place. Right or wrong for most people. So that the shades of gray,
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I don't know that we necessarily lead society WWE. I wouldn't want to think that, but I think we reflect it.
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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
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design. And you take a character and you'd say, "Well, we need to talk about the Middle East somehow." So, okay, we
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have the iron chic, right? And you'd create these characters that would reflect the geopolitical tension of the
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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
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still so many potholes or Absolutely. I I just think that if you stereotyped somebody into a particular
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place, a lot of the world would rebel against that. Yeah. Right. not in a positive way. And and
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maybe sometimes people that have no real reason to have a position on either side
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of that, right? Um the one thing about WWE is we're a fun reflection of the world. It's supposed to be fun. It's
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supposed to be entertainment. It's supposed to be fantastical. It's supposed to um let you come to an event
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for 3 hours and just turn off and enjoy entertainment and and some type of representation of the world that is
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around you. But people get lost in it and they begin to take the representations too seriously sometimes.
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So then can you contrast and compare then maybe WWE and for a long time I had a really hard time because of my
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fascination with wrestling migrating to MMA but MMA has really taken over um a lot of the zeitgeist especially amongst
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younger generations of men. Do you feel pressure to make it more physical or more like it or how do you
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think these two things play in what what role do they play I guess maybe in American society? I think
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they're total opposites. Like MMA is just it's competitive. It's competition. It's that's what it's based on.
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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
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Conor McGregor come along. If Conor McGregor came out of retirement tomorrow and and said he's fighting in four
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months, it would be massive, right? The amount of people that would gravitate towards that, the ticket sales, the
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viewership would be intense. When's the last time he fought and when is the last
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time he won? Mhm. I couldn't even tell you. It's forever. What what people are buying is that cult of personality.
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Right. Right. It's the same in our business. We tell stories. I'm less and and people
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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.
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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 life, some type of
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fantastical version of that. Um, so is there a writer room? There is a writer room. We have a large
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staff of That's awesome. Yeah, there there's a show right now on Netflix um called Unreal and it is for
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the first time ever a look behind the scenes at what we do. We let cameras into the writer room. We let them
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backstage at our shows so you see the production of the shows. You see what goes into it. You know, there's months
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of planning that go into stuff. We're we're looking now at WrestleMania in in Vegas in April and what those matches
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are going to be and how we want to get there. What is the storyline arc that takes us there over time? Um, I would
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say we're much more akin to like the Marvel universe where you're planning out long-term where the movies fit and
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how they go with all the characters than we are, you know, direct MMA at the end
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of the day. Direct MMA is or, you know, UFC, it's you're booking matches and the
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interest is that guy's really good, he's really good. I'm not sure who's going to
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win. Let's put them together. When when you get the right personalities involved, then it explodes.
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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
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wine at the poker game. Yeah. It gets a little spicy. Um, it got very physical and there's this sort of
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backyard wrestling and there's this incredible iconic movie, The Wrestler. Yes. This does take a toll on your body
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although you're not making full contact. What what toll has it taken on your body? What toll does it take when you
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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
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like what happens to your knees your back the whole thing. Yeah. It's a physical business. We have
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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
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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
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walks away unscathed. Right. Right. But we have probably one of the most robust medical programs in
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athletics. Um, so we're scanning constantly for everything. Um, you know, physically as well as uh head injuries,
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everything, right? So we're way on top of that. Didn't necessarily used to be that way. As things have improved, we've
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gotten there. Um, you know, the the trick in our business is to make it look incredibly physical without being
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incredibly physical. That's where I was going with this is, you know, it's been Sax's dream. He was
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telling us when we were doing the show notes yesterday during the rehearsal, it's been Sax's dream all this time to
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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,
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given what you've done that you could lift sacks right now? Who wants to see a whip? Come
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on. Come on. Triple H versus. So, so there was a pitch for me to do that here and put uh David through this
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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
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moment in the Oval Office. So, we're not going to do it here. Oh, come on now. We know that you can
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break freeberg in half. He weighs 110 lbs wet out of the shower. But Sachs, he did the ompic and he added 10 pounds of
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muscle. How how easily can you lift that man? It's called a bump, Jason. I'm not I'm
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not ready to take some bumps here today. One of the things that I found interesting is he's talking about your
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fandom, but he's walking around back here with a handheld uh speaker, but he had his own entrance music his entire
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run backstage, running around getting ready for the main event of Wrestlemania before he came out here.
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So, you're saying you want to lift me, right? All right. Okay. Well, let me ask a a
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question on the business of of wrestling. Um, you got to sign a waiver. Yeah, I I'll sign Steph. Let's go. We
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see a lot of bifurcation happening generally in media and content. The live events are just making so much money,
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whether it's concerts or basketball games, and those industries are seeing revenue and profits kind of escalate.
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And then the traditional broadcast fiction's kind of dying, like the margins aren't there, the viewership's
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down. How is the bifurcation work for for for your business digital and kind of like the content stuff that you're
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doing digitally versus the live and like is digital still is digital going to be
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like a growing piece of the business for some time do you think or is it really a
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live experience? Well, it's a live experience but I think all those things lead you to the live
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experience. So where do you tell the stories that get you to want to go to the live event? We tell those stories
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across digital platforms. We have uh right around a billion social media followers uh across the globe. We're one
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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
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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
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everything. Um you know, our social presence is second to none. those 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 raw airs
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domestically in the US on Netflix but dem um is viewed globally on Netflix every
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place else right so outside of the US Raw Smackdown all our shows are on Netflix globally Monday nights on
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Netflix globally Tuesday nights uh NXT which is our our sort of um AAA baseball or our college football if you would
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that that airs on the CW cross broadcast. Um Friday nights we're on USA uh with NBCU still. We have Saturday
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night's main event on Peacock. We just did Does your audience still have an affinity for live? Are they still big
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into one 1,000%. So our our biggest events are PLE's. We just did a a game-changing
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announcement where we're we're moving them over to ESPN here starting up and you know nobody does largecale
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build to events like ESPN does. So that will be massive for us. Um you know we've always sort of been in the
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forefront of that. When when WrestleMania started, it was um closed circuit, you know, we we
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pioneered closed circuit entertainment where you would go to a theater and watch the broadcast. We pioneered uh
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pay-per-view industry when streaming was just coming into play. We were one of the first movers into we had our own WWE
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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
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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
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Netflix. We're on ESPN. You know, we're across the board. Can you just bring us behind the scenes
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in this negotiation because you guys just signed a huge licensing deal. Maybe you want to tell folks
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the size of it, but how did you bid people against each other and what were the different things that different
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folks wanted? Well, the the beautiful thing about us is with the amount of content we do, we're 52 weeks a year
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live. So, when you when you talk about a content company that puts out entertainment, we are live Monday nights
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uh two to three hours depending on on the on the evening on Netflix. Tuesday nights two hours on CW, Friday nights,
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two hours and half the year is three hours on USA. uh you know once a month a 3hour plus
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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
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putting out on a regular basis um to go back to the live event experience our live event you know our ticketing our
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live event experience numbers are off the chart and that's global we were just in Paris um we did the stadium in Paris
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uh we did Leon France on a Friday night, a PLE on a Sunday night in a stadium in
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Paris, France, where we had 30 plus thousand there, and then we did U Monday Night Raw from Paris in that same
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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
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single week that amount of live content. That's incredible. 500 hours a year. Yeah. But the way to see us is live. Uh,
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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
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live act in the world, but they weren't selling albums. They thought if there's a way we could just get people to
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experience what we do live on an album, it will change the game for us. They did
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a live one. It exploded. When when live albums didn't sell anything because it captured
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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
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partner and they're kind of on the fence or they're not super into what we do, we
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bring them to what we do live. We bring them to WrestleMania. We bring them to a
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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
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stadium going insane, it is electric. there is no way that you leave there and go eh
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you think that's the antidote for social media I think social media leads you to it but
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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
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people that like objects aren't where it's at that experiences same same are where it's at
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and you know especially shared experience so when you talk about, you know, your
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relationship with your dad. That was your thing. I hear that all the time. 50% or more of our audience comes with a
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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
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you want to look at it that way, or entertainment products out there. But the thing that I love the most is when I
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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
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what I clearly see as a grandfather with their kids and their grandkids sitting all together freaking out over the show.
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And you know, you know that grandfather was into a Bruno San Martino and the dad
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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
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amazing. And it binds families together. It gives them something to enjoy together. and those those shared
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experiences. At the end of the day, to me, a car is only worth the value of if you pack it
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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
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it is amazing. You were at the White House for the presidential fitness challenge being
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relaunched. Yes. And uh we've talked a lot on the pod about this next generation. Maybe too
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much screens, too many video games, not enough in person, and obviously fitness is a is a big problem there. So, how how
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do we get these kids off the computers and then get them doing physical activity and really enjoying life?
00:21:51
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
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kids. Everybody on this stage, I'm going to say, right, your parents sent you out
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the door, said, "Come back when the street lights turn on." That was it in Brooklyn. Yeah.
00:22:05
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
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that you had and figuring out how to entertain yourself, right? the boredom leading to
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creativity. Yeah. Um and and it was very physical and you grew up physical. We need to
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change that back to people and and get them to realize that that physicality, there's enjoyment in that physicality
00:22:28
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
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learned who Arnold Schwarzenegger was, who I consider one of the great American uh success stories of all time.
00:22:42
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
00:22:49
to himself, I follow that blueprint. I'm going to be like Reg Park. I'm going to
00:22:53
become the biggest bodybuilder of all time. I'm going to get into Hollywood. I'm going to take over Hollywood. Then
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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
00:23:04
blueprint for me, right? But what taught me to do those things was athletics. It started with the physical. started
00:23:12
with the physical. The gym does not you, right? Yes. If if you go in the gym, no safe spaces at that gym.
00:23:19
You either work hard. You wouldn't like it, J. Eat right. Eat right. You want to do the bench press after
00:23:25
this? We can do it. Me, you, and my organiz. I can organize a fitness challenge right
00:23:31
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
00:23:38
blueprint in your mind. I remember, you know, I I've seen you interviewed before
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and when you were coming up in the business, you were learning from guys like Shawn Michaels and Ric Flair
00:23:46
and you were a student of the game and then you incorporate that into your character. Your character was called the
00:23:51
game. It then hit another level. So you clearly, you know, you were leading the development of that character and I
00:23:57
think got over to another level when somehow the character and yourself somehow you hit some sort of Yeah.
00:24:04
joined. I guess what does that do in terms of the creative friction that you deal with now running the talent because
00:24:10
they have their own blueprints in their mind about where they want to go with their career but you as running the
00:24:15
overall creative have a direction where they want to go how much friction does that create it doesn't create friction
00:24:20
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
00:24:28
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
00:24:34
conversation of well I want to be champion. Okay. Okay. Everybody does. What is what is what is your story and
00:24:40
how do we tell it? And who here uh of these other talent can have a story that goes against your arc to combine with
00:24:47
their arc to tell a great story, right? Once we start to riff those things, today's world is different. You go back,
00:24:54
you know, 40, 50 years, Ivan Kolaf was a Canadian guy that played a Russian because we were in the middle of a cold
00:25:01
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
00:25:06
from Canada, right? It it doesn't work. They know the truth. So today you have to sort of blend who
00:25:14
you are real life with the character that you play and sort of blur this line. blur this line of the fourth wall
00:25:23
of was that real or do these guys really not like each other or is that really you know while you're putting it
00:25:28
together backstage we're all agreeing on where we want to go and then we tell this story that people cannot tell
00:25:35
what's real and what is fantasy and that's when it gets magical ladies and gentlemen let's give it up
00:25:41
for Triple H thank you phenomenal phenomenal. Thank you, sir. [Music]