{"slug":"dana-white-man-behind-ufc","show_id":"davidsenra","title":"Dana White: The Man Behind the UFC","display_title":null,"title_orig":"David Senra × Dana White","dek":"UFC’s rights-fee progression—from Spike’s $35M to Fox’s $100M, ESPN’s $3B and Paramount’s “7.7 for 7 years”—reframes a $2M near-death acquisition as a compounding live-sports asset. Self-funded The Ultimate Fighter preserved 100% ownership, while Power Slap was profitable since the first event; the monitor is whether White can replicate that model across nine brands over the next 10 years.","lang":"EN","date":"2026-05-10","published_at":"2026-05-10T12:00:06+00:00","duration_min":73,"source_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35IY2ILCAio","source_label":"YouTube","rss_url":null,"youtube_id":"35IY2ILCAio","youtube_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35IY2ILCAio","thumbnail_url":null,"chips":["person:David Senra","person:Dana White"],"provenance":[["SOURCE","YouTube captions"],["SYNTH","claude-fable-5"],["CLEAN","gpt-5.6-luna"],["VERIFY","gpt-5.6-luna"],["PARTICIPANTS","gpt-5.6-luna"],["TRANSLATE","gpt-5.6-luna"]],"title_alt":"Dana White：UFC背后的男人","display_title_alt":null,"dek_alt":"UFC版权费从Spike 3500万美元、Fox 1亿美元、ESPN 30亿美元升至Paramount“7年77亿美元”，显示200万美元收购已成直播体育复利资产。The Ultimate Fighter自掏1000万美元换来内容100%所有权，Power Slap首场即盈利；未来十年能否在九个品牌复制模式仍待验证。","lang_alt":"ZH","tldr_md":"- **Dana White's answer to every \"overpaid\" take is the rights-fee tape: Spike at $35M, Fox at $100M, ESPN at $3B, and now Paramount at \"7.7 for 7 years.\"** He notes the same critics said WME overpaid when the UFC sold for $4.025B in 2016 — \"no TV deal... coming up to the end of our Fox deal\" — and his verdict on the commentariat is categorical: \"everybody that talks about this business... are zeros.\" \"Remember everything that was said today... let's talk again in 5 years.\"\n- **The UFC's capital story is a near-death compounder: bought for $2M, then roughly $10M of revenue against $10M of spend for years, until Lorenzo Fertitta told White to shop it.** White came back with a $6-8M estimate; the next morning Lorenzo called and said, verbatim, \"Fuck it. Let's keep going.\" White's gloss: \"it's pretty amazing what a good night's sleep can do for you.\"\n- **The Ultimate Fighter was a deliberate Trojan horse onto free TV — and paying for it themselves was the accidental masterstroke.** Spike passed until the UFC offered to fund the whole show as \"the last $10 million investment we're going to make in the UFC\"; after the Bonnar-Griffin finale, Spike execs \"took us out in the alley of the arena and we did a deal on a napkin.\" Because Spike did not fund the show, \"we own 100% of everything\" — \"the greatest thing to ever happen to us.\"\n- **White's streaming thesis predates the Paramount deal: scripted content is timeless inventory, \"live sports is a destination.** You have to watch it now.\" He long predicted the world reverting to a handful of global channels — \"channel 3, channel 5, channel 8 and 13, but globally\" — and says the Ellisons won because \"at literally the half yard line, they said, 'Fuck it. We want everything.'\" Netflix was in the process the whole time.\n- **Power Slap is the repeatability proof: $3M from the Fertittas on a gut call from Instagram clips, \"profitable since the first event,\" and Michael Rubin offering $10M blind for whatever White does next.** White lists UFC, Power Slap, boxing, jiu-jitsu, WWE, PBR, Slap, SLS Skate League, and Nitro Circus, with the stated goal: \"we're going to build the biggest combat sports company to ever exist... in the next 10 years.\"\n- **The operating model is founder-taste dictatorship, not delegation: \"There is no committee here...** this is a dictatorship.\" White sits cage-side watching a monitor with a phone to the production truck — \"I can't control what's happening in the octagon, but I can control what you're seeing on television\" — and built a team of \"sick animals that are just wired the way you are\" after literally kicking in the truck door and firing the original Showtime crew.\n- **Serial early tech adoption is the through-line — DVDs, reality TV, streaming, influencers, AI — paired with the humility that no medium lasts.** His one regret is under-milking the DVD era (\"I would have murdered the DVD era\"), and his influencer playbook is pure leverage: full event access, zero notes — \"What the fuck do you know about creating content?... Let these young talented people do what they do.\"\n- **COVID was offense, not defense: ESPN's Bob Iger guaranteed payment regardless, yet White built the Yas Island bubble in a couple of weeks and ran events as \"the only game in town\" — \"our business grew...** blew up and went through the roof.\" The same era hardened his partner filter: when a sponsor's board demanded he delete a pro-Trump post, he told them to take their renewal number, \"roll it up into a tiny little ball, and shove it up their board's ass.\"\n","digest_md":"### 1. The founder is the chief storyteller — and never lies about the product\n- Senra's setup: a founder of a $150M company asked him to help hire a \"chief storyteller,\" and his answer was \"No, that's the founder's job\" — watch White's post-fight press conferences. White's confirmation: \"100%,\" born of contempt for \"CEOs reading canned statements from lawyers... fake phony shit.\"\n- Senra's example of White's authenticity is saying after a fight, \"That fight sucked.\" White explains that promoters used to \"tell you you just saw a great fight when you know you didn't.\" His rule is that fans decide whether a fight is good or bad: \"you don't judge that. You let the fans judge whether the fight is good or bad.\"\n- White contrasts the UFC with The Contender, then the most expensive reality show ever: Mark Burnett's team edited the fights. White's hardcore-fan verdict is that \"you don't ever edit a fight. You let the fight play out.\" The UFC does \"the bells and whistles,\" hands the torch to the fighters, and they have to deliver.\n\n### 2. What $2M actually bought — and the Lionsgate rights heist in reverse\n- The purchase was skeletal: \"all we bought... was those three letters UFC, an old wooden octagon, and some contracts\" — maybe eight or nine fighter deals versus nearly a thousand today. Merchandise, library, video games and DVDs had been sold off to Lionsgate by the dying prior owner.\n- They bought all the ancillary rights back for roughly $2.5-3M. White's retrospective: \"those guys were probably laughing at us when we left\" — finance guys booking easy money — while he contrasts it with Shannon Lee's inability to buy back the Bruce Lee film rights. \"But they sold us all the rights back. Cheap, too.\"\n\n### 3. The trough: five $2M events a year, and one overnight reversal\n- Early economics: events cost \"upward of 2 million bucks a pop times five\" per year, with roughly $10M of revenue against $10M of spend, roster costs rising, and the brothers funding the gap — until, about four years in, Lorenzo said \"I can't keep doing this... Get out there and see what you can sell it for.\"\n- White reported back a $6-8M sale estimate. The next morning, driving to work: \"He's like, 'Fuck it.' Exactly what he said. 'Fuck it. Let's keep going.'\" The episode's most quotable risk lesson is Lorenzo's own: \"it's pretty amazing what a good night's sleep can do for you.\"\n- Context readers forget: at the time UFC \"wasn't allowed on pay-per-view. Porn was on pay-per-view, okay? But the UFC was not allowed\" — and the stated goal of getting on free television \"everybody thought was impossible.\"\n\n### 4. The Ultimate Fighter: a Trojan horse they were forced to own\n- With reality TV booming around 2004-05, the pitch was UFC \"in a reality format and the fights are taped\" — palatable to networks that wouldn't touch live fights. Spike TV, rebranding as \"the network for men,\" was not interested in bearing the cost — until the UFC offered: \"we'll pay for the whole thing, you just put it on your air.\" All risk was removed for Spike; it became pure distribution.\n- That was framed internally as \"the last $10 million investment we're going to make in the UFC... If The Ultimate Fighter didn't work, it's over.\" Instead it was a runaway hit, and at the Bonnar-Griffin finale — a 3,500-4,000-person Cox Pavilion crowd stomping \"one more round\" — \"Spike TV execs took us out in the alley of the arena and we did a deal on a napkin.\"\n- The structural payoff: \"if they would have paid for it, we wouldn't have been in the position... where we own 100% of everything. So while it sucked at the time to put up the next $10 million, it ended up being the greatest thing to ever happen to us.\" White has since re-run the format for Power Slap (its reality show at ~50M YouTube views) and UFC BJJ, and just started TUF season 34 under the new Paramount arrangement.\n\n### 5. The DVD windfall, the regret, and the streaming premonition\n- When DVDs exploded, compilations — Ultimate Knockouts, Ultimate Submissions — brought the first real money: \"when those checks started rolling in from DVDs, it was like, 'Holy shit.'\" Humble-beginnings detail worth keeping: an unrecognized White would walk into the Wow Superstore on Sahara and physically move UFC DVDs into the top-20 display at the front of the store.\n- His honest self-critique: \"If I could go back in now with what I know now, I would have fucking murdered the DVD era\" — more compilations, more seriousness. The meta-lesson he draws: in the moment, \"you expect DVDs to be forever,\" and no medium is.\n- The streaming demo he was pitched in his office — \"buffering, buffering, buffering, plays fine, 5, 10 seconds, buffering\" — echoed his initial dismissal of Rogan's podcast pitch. Yet his long-held dream matched where it went: everyone \"watching the fight at the same time on the same channel around the world,\" a reversion to his childhood channels 3, 5, 8 and 13 \"but globally. So who's it going to be? Paramount, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix.\"\n\n### 6. Phil Dooman, the Ellisons, and why the \"overpaid\" crowd is always wrong\n- The Spike divorce story: loyal as he is (\"we'd have been on Spike TV for 100 years\"), a lunch with Viacom's Philippe Dauman — \"he calls himself Philippe Dauman. He's from fucking Jersey. His name's Phil Dooman\" — ended it. After 15-20 minutes on how rich he was, Dauman claimed \"he built the UFC\" and threatened to \"just build another one.\" The UFC left for Fox; White's verdict was that Dauman was \"one of the biggest brand killers of all time\" across Viacom's legendary networks.\n- The Paramount negotiation, by contrast, was \"great\" — Netflix engaged throughout, but the Ellisons, \"aggressive guys... financially powerful,\" took everything at the half-yard line: \"Fuck it. We want everything.\" Senra cites roughly $8B; White states \"$7.7 billion for 7 years\" in his broader rights-fee sequence and confirms that the UFC is on Paramount.\n- White's standing rebuttal to critics: the 2016 sale at $4.025B closed with no TV deal in place and universal \"they overpaid, the UFC has peaked\" commentary — then Spike $35M became Fox $100M became ESPN $3B became Paramount 7.7. \"These people are fucking zeros... Wait and see where we are in 10 more fucking years.\" His structural point: \"this isn't like the hotel business... Everything we're doing has never been done before.\"\n\n### 7. Power Slap and the live-event playbook, run as a dictatorship\n- Power Slap came from pure gut: watching Russians and Poles slap each other on Instagram in '17-'18 and noticing \"I would stay till the end to see who won. And I'm the most jaded dude in the world when it comes to fighting.\" He raised $3M from the Fertittas — and it's been \"profitable since the first event,\" prompting Michael Rubin's \"whatever you do next, I'm in for 10 million. You don't even have to tell me what it is.\"\n- Why profitable immediately: he already knew the two engines of UFC growth — travel the product globally, and build a live experience nobody regrets. His comparison set: NFL is great on the couch but \"I'm not a big fan of NFL's live experience\"; NBA is only worth the last 5 minutes on TV but \"way better live.\" UFC, he claims, is elite in both formats — and people who attend bring in \"five, six, seven, eight, 10 people\" who become fans.\n- The famous monitor answer: \"I'm not sitting there to watch the fucking fights... I can't control what's happening in the octagon, but I can control what you're seeing on television\" — with a direct phone to the truck. And explicitly: \"There is no committee here... This is a dictatorship. 100% a dictatorship.\"\n\n### 8. Kicking in the truck door — then building a campus of \"animals\"\n- The origin of his production team: the original crew were Showtime guys working on the side for the UFC, and when they ignored his instruction to air Phil Baroni's mid-interview meltdown, \"I literally got up from my seat and went back there and kicked the fucking truck door open... I ended up firing all\" of them.\n- Twenty-five years later the inverse: screening sessions where \"very rarely do I have to change one fucking thing.\" His formula — trust built over years with \"a bunch of sick animals that are just wired the way you are,\" minimal turnover in key seats (rockstar head of production Craig Morselli among them). Senra's parallel: MrBeast \"cloning himself\" into editors who read his mind.\n- The same restraint powers the influencer strategy: with nine brands (UFC, Power Slap, boxing, jiu-jitsu, WWE, PBR, plus Slap, SLS Skate League, Nitro Circus), he gives creators full access and zero direction — because \"the media does not have the influence anymore... These young kids are the influencers,\" and \"what the fuck do you know about creating content?\"\n\n### 9. COVID as offense: Fight Island, bean counters, and the sponsor ultimatum\n- His COVID logic chain, as told: ESPN's bean counters might eventually rank NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, UFC \"and the guys who throw the fucking bean bags into the fucking holes — who are we cutting first?\" So even after Iger guaranteed \"I'll pay you every fucking dime... whether you do no events or you put on all 44,\" White refused to stay home, offered to give up his own compensation to protect staff, and got the whole team to \"storm the beach.\"\n- Execution: after Brooklyn pulled Khabib-Ferguson (\"I will never hold another fucking fight in your arena ever again\"), a deal with Abu Dhabi came together in a couple of weeks. Yas Island was \"the only true bubble that existed in sports at that time. All the other ones were bullshit\" — and being the only live product, \"our business grew... went through the roof.\"\n- The partner-quality lesson from the same era: \"you don't know who's who until the shit hits the fan.\" A longtime sponsor repeatedly demanded he delete a Trump-supporting post; when its emissary invoked an impatient board at renewal, White told him to take the number, \"roll it up into a tiny little ball, and shove it up your board's ass\" — and thereafter: \"I'm only going to be in business with people that I'm aligned with.\"\n\n### 10. Entrepreneurship over fighting, no plan B, and the Rogan loyalty coda\n- Asked directly whether he loves entrepreneurship as much as fighting — this from a man who's watched \"over 10,000 fights in the last 25 years\" — White doesn't hedge: \"Yeah, there's no doubt about it.\" His office runs \"like fucking Shark Tank,\" multiple pitches a day including weekends, connecting people: \"I'm not looking for anything other than I hope they all win.\" His complaint about soft founders: \"I want to set my own hours and take days off — you should just stay working for somebody else... you go to war, literally every day.\"\n- On mindset, he channels Bruce Lee — never say negative things about yourself \"even if you're joking, cuz your body doesn't know the difference\" — and cuts negative people \"so fucking fast, and it don't matter who you are.\" On failure: \"Never even crosses my mind that something's not going to work. I just keep going until it does work.\" Senra maps this onto Arnold Schwarzenegger's written affirmations and Todd Graves brainwashing himself that Raising Cane's had to work; White points at his own walls: \"I literally have all this shit on the walls every day that speaks to me.\"\n- The closing Rogan story: while sorting VHS tapes in the old New York offices, White spotted Joe Rogan on a talk show hosted by someone he names as \"Ivory Kenan Wayans\" and thought, \"This is the fucking guy I need.\" Rogan \"did the first 12 fights for us for free,\" then alternated with White on years of 3 a.m. drive-time radio tours because \"fighters are bad radio\" and nobody knew who White was. When sponsors or others later tried to dictate what should happen to Rogan, White said: \"Nothing's happening to Joe Rogan.\" Dana's closing word was \"Loyalty\"; Senra called it the most important thing in the world to him.\n","transcript_md":"David Senra\n\nI was telling you, dude. I watch your press conferences. I was having dinner with a founder of a $150 million company a couple of days ago. They asked, “Can you help us hire or find somebody to be a chief storyteller?” I said, “No, that’s the founder’s job.”\n\nThey asked, “Do you have any good examples?” I said, “Watch Dana White’s press conferences after the fights.” It’s a perfect example. He’s the biggest fan of his own product. Is that how you describe the way you approach the company you built?\n\nDana White\n\n100%. I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, when I used to see CEOs reading canned statements from lawyers and things like that. It was fake, phony bullshit that I was never into. So, yeah, I’m a huge fan—huge fan—still today, not only of the UFC, but I’ve been a boxing fan my whole life, too. Now I actually get to make the fights that I want to see.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe UFC was close to bankruptcy. You bought it for $2 million with your partners. I want to talk about the fact that you guys went from a $2 million company into maybe a $20 million company. It’s like, “Hey, you missed the part where they went in the hole by tens of millions.” I want to talk about that.\n\nBut you brought up something: “We bought it. We had never done live events. We didn’t do production. We didn’t do anything.” Then I heard you say, “But we were just fans. We were just trying to build the fights that we want to see in the way that we want to see them.”\n\nDana White\n\nExactly right. We were huge fans. We bought the company, and I can’t remember—ballpark, we had about 2.5 or 3 weeks to put on an event. We never knew anything about production, but we knew what we wanted to see.\n\nThe production people who were in place, I didn’t get along well with, so I ended up wiping them all out and bringing in a whole new crew. We just started building, and you learn as you go.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTalk about the first few events. How many events do you guys put on a year now?\n\nDana White\n\nWe do about 43 or 44 events a year. When we bought the company, we were doing 5, which seemed like a lot.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe fact that you were doing less meant that you were learning slower, too. Was there just no way you could do more than 5?\n\nDana White\n\nOh, yeah. We needed those gaps in between, especially after our first event, to really start to dial it in. It was trial and error. We made a lot of mistakes.\n\nWe did some goofy WWE bullshit for a minute there—fireworks, pyro, and all that stuff. Then we ended up finding that perfect sweet spot, which is where we are now. The show is dialed in now. It’s all about technology. When new technology comes out, we always try to be first, or one of the first, to use it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOne of my favorite maxims in the history of entrepreneurship is that excellence is the capacity to take pain. I want to talk about what happened after you bought the UFC. Before you got back in the black and were actually making money, it took you, what, 5 or 6 years?\n\nDana White\n\nRight.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat trough.\n\nDana White\n\nWe bought the company for $2 million. We were doing 5 events a year. In the beginning, the events were way more expensive. We didn’t have all the proper equipment, and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, so events were costing us upward of $2 million a pop—times 5, times 5 years. It gets expensive.\n\nWe started building the roster of fighters, signing more guys, and paying them more money. It got to the point where one night I was driving home and Lorenzo said, “I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep putting this kind of money into my brother and me.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, they put up the $2 million.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think you got 10% or 20% of the company, and then your job was to run it, right?\n\nDana White\n\nRight.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNow it sounds like they were investing a couple more million every year.\n\nDana White\n\nWell, this was like 4 years in, I would say.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat was the revenue back then?\n\nDana White\n\n“Get out there and see what you can sell it for.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWas it making $10 million a year in revenue, and you guys were spending another $10 million?\n\nDana White\n\nYeah, that’s fair. Yeah, in that ballpark. The other thing was, we didn’t own the rights to the merchandise, the library, the video games, or the DVDs, which were big at that time.\n\nAll we bought when we bought the company was those 3 letters—UFC—an old wooden Octagon, and some contracts that we had obligations to. Maybe it was 8 or 9. That’s it: 8 or 9 contracts. We have almost 1,000 guys under contract now.\n\nAll the ancillary stuff was sold off to Lionsgate because the old owner was trying to stay alive. To show you how little people believed in the UFC, we went back to Lionsgate and bought the rights back for—I don’t remember what it was, but it was around $2.5 or $3 million. We bought all those rights back.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, anything you could put a UFC logo on.\n\nDana White\n\nRight. We talk about it now, Lorenzo and me, and we think those guys were probably laughing at us when we left.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nLionsgate was like, “These idiots just gave us a couple million dollars for nothing.”\n\nDana White\n\nYou’ve got these finance guys who are like, “This will look good on the books over the next 2 or 3 years.” We got all our rights back.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI’m friends with Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter.\n\nDana White\n\nMhm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nShe’s been trying to buy the rights back to the Bruce Lee films and everything. They would never sell, even though Bruce Lee died in the early ’70s.\n\nDana White\n\nHe’s still in the public eye.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThey’re still relevant, and people will watch them. People care, and they’re great movies.\n\nDana White\n\nBut they sold us all the rights back. Cheap, too.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat do you think happened overnight? Lorenzo calls you and says, “Man, we’re burning. We’re just dumping all this money. Try to see if you can find a buyer.” Then he calls you back the next day.\n\nDana White\n\nWell, I called him back and said, “I think we could sell it for $6, $7, maybe $8 million,” in that ballpark. He said, “All right, I’ll call you tomorrow.”\n\nI’m literally driving to work the next day, and he calls me. I’m like, “Huh, here we go.” He’s like, “Fuck it.” Exactly what he said: “Fuck it. Let’s keep going.”\n\nHe always says it’s pretty amazing what a good night’s sleep can do for you. They hung in there.\n\nOur goal was to get on TV. For people who don’t understand—because several generations have grown up with the UFC and it’s normal now—at that time, it wasn’t allowed on pay-per-view. As a grown adult, you didn’t have the right to purchase it on pay-per-view. Porn was on pay-per-view, but the UFC was not allowed on pay-per-view. Think about that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nDana White\n\nOur goal was to get it on free television, which everybody thought was impossible. Right around 2004 or 2005, reality shows started becoming big.\n\nEverybody in Hollywood is a bunch of fucking idiots. Nobody has any original ideas. They’re doing remakes and stuff. They always play it safe, and nobody wanted these fights live on TV.\n\nThis was sort of our Trojan horse. You’re watching the UFC, but it’s in a reality format, and the fights are taped. They felt like if anything was bad—or I don’t know what they were thinking was possible—but because the fights were taped, we could take it out.\n\nMy big thing was that, right around the same time, The Contender had come out. It was the most expensive reality show ever.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMark Burnett’s the guy who did Survivor, right?\n\nDana White\n\nBoxing. Yeah, he did Survivor. Mark Burnett’s done everything. He did Trump’s show.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe Apprentice?\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nDana White\n\nSo, The Contender comes out, and it’s the most expensive show ever. But what they did wrong, and where they fucked up, was that they were editing the fights.\n\nIf they had a fight and got back into the edit and said, “This is boring,” or whatever, they would edit it. But that’s the difference between being a hardcore fan and not. I’m like, “Man, you don’t ever edit a fight. You let the fight play out.”\n\nThe fans determine whether the fight is good or bad, and you can’t control that. I call it the bells and whistles. We do all the bells and whistles, and then we hand the torch off to the fighters. They go in, and they have to deliver.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nLet me push you there. This is why I tell founders of tech companies to watch your press conferences, because of the authenticity. I think this is why you have this cool following, and people really try to root for you.\n\nYou’ll say at the end of a fight, “That fight sucked. We thought it was going to be X, and it turned out to be Y.” It’s like, “Yeah, I have eyes. I’m not going to lie to you. That fight sucked.”\n\nFor founders, it’s the same thing: “Yeah, we fucked that up. That was a bad experience. I wouldn’t like that to happen to you, either.” They don’t try to lie.\n\nDana White\n\nI saw that, too, growing up with promoters who would tell you, “You just saw a great fight,” when you know you didn’t just see a great fight.\n\nBut as a fan, if the fight is good, boring—different people like different things. You could take half of the fan base who thinks the fight is boring, and the other half will think it’s great because they like grappling more than striking, or whatever it may be. But you don’t judge that. You let the fans judge whether the fight is good or bad.\n\nWe’ll build the card, and people start talking online: “This fight sucks.” Shut the fuck up. You don’t know if the fight sucks until it happens, right? You might not like the 2 people who are fighting, but you can’t judge a fight until the fight is over.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nDana White\n\nIf it’s over and it sucks, then we’ll both probably agree that it sucks.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. One of the main repeating patterns for great companies and the great founders that I study is that they constantly attack and question their cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5% and one thing that is clear when you study history's greatest entrepreneurs and the great companies that they build is that having a religious dedication to controlling costs actually helps you increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise, and we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. Many of the top founders and CEOs that I know are running their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should, too. Go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow many different networks did you have to pitch until you got one to say yes to the show? And how did you get them to say yes?\n\nDana White\n\nWe were pitching everybody, and at the time, everything in life is about timing. I think it was The Nashville Network that had switched over to Spike TV, which was labeling itself as the network for men. We were like, “Man, if we don’t fit here, where do we fit?” So we go in and pitch these guys. They’re not really interested in what it’s going to cost them, so we said, “Well, we’ll pay for the whole thing. We’ll pay for it. You just put it on the air.” They liked that idea better.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, they said no, or “Not interested,” and then you come back and say, “We’re going to pay for production.”\n\nDana White\n\nYep.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, at that point, they’re just distribution. What’s there?\n\nDana White\n\n100%. There’s no downside to them.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou took the risk away from them.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah. They had spent a shitload of money on a bunch of content that didn’t work.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut that means you own the show, right?\n\nDana White\n\nAt the time, it was the last $10 million investment we were going to make in the UFC.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhoa.\n\nDana White\n\nYes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, if it didn’t work out—\n\nDana White\n\nThat’s it. It’s a wrap. If The Ultimate Fighter didn’t work, it was over. It was the last $10 million investment, which sucked at the time. We were investing another $10 million. But what doesn’t suck is exactly what you just said: the thing was a runaway hit. The numbers just kept going like this.\n\nThen, at the finale, when Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin fought, the fight was over and everybody in the place was stomping their feet, saying, “One more round!” We went up and gave them both contracts. I was like, “I don’t give a fuck what happens. This is it. This is going to end up somewhere.” Spike TV executives took us out in the alley of the arena, and we did a deal on a napkin.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat’s insane.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, the fight ends, you go out in the alley, and they’re like, “No, no, no. We want to renew with you guys.”\n\nDana White\n\n“We want to get a deal done now. We want to shake hands on it.” We didn’t fill out a contract, but here were some bullet points for the deal. We all agreed and shook hands, and there we were.\n\nBut if they had paid for it, we wouldn’t have been in the position that we were in, where we owned 100% of everything. So, while it sucked at the time to put up the next $10 million, it ended up being the greatest thing to ever happen to us.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhen you had this fight with Forrest Griffin, what venue were you in?\n\nDana White\n\nThe Thomas & Mack is UNLV’s stadium. We were at the small venue right next door to it. It was called the Cox Pavilion.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nA couple hundred people?\n\nDana White\n\n3,500, 4,000, something like that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n3,000 to 5,000.\n\nThink about the growth in your company from that to now.\n\nDana White\n\nOur first fight that we did when we bought the company was at the Trump Taj Mahal. We sold 3,500 tickets, and with comps, we had 5,000 people there.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt’s incredible. Okay, so you do this deal with Spike TV. Now, this is the early 2000s. There were barely any iPhones, right? There was no social media. There was none of it.\n\nYou’ve done a really good job, in my opinion, when I study the history of the UFC. It’s like riding these technological waves. You adopt them early, and then you use them as these giant tailwinds. You don’t really resist; you see something working.\n\nDana White\n\nTechnology has been great to us.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI remember you telling the story of Joe Rogan asking you to be on his podcast, and then he described it as, “It’s kind of like the radio, but we put it online,” and you said—\n\nDana White\n\n“Oh my God, yeah. That sounds huge. That sounds like it’s going to be real fucking big.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nGood for you. And then you’ve embraced them.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWas television the vast majority of the revenue for the business when you did this deal with Spike?\n\nDana White\n\nYeah, television was huge. The Ultimate Fighter literally did everything that we hoped it would do. It built a larger fan base. It introduced a lot of people not only to the sport and the brand, but to the fighters.\n\nComing off that show, Forrest Griffin became a massive pay-per-view star for us. Chuck Liddell was one of the coaches, and it did what it was designed to do. When I launch businesses—when I launched Power Slap, I did the same thing. I launched UFC BJJ and did the same thing.\n\nPower Slap’s reality show is at, like, 50 million views on YouTube, so it’s still a home run. The format is incredible.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou guys start telling the stories really, really early. So, before these people are competing on the reality show, you get to know who they are and what’s important to them. They have more varied backgrounds than boxing.\n\nI love what you said. It’s like, when has there ever been trillions of dollars made and nothing’s there at the end, like in boxing?\n\nDana White\n\nTrillions of dollars in revenue and nothing exists at the end of the day.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou guys start telling the story on the show even before they’re signed, and then you keep telling the story over and over again once they get to the UFC. Then they’re on the prelims, and you keep telling the story over and over again over many, many years.\n\nDana White\n\nExactly. And now, I literally just started Season 34 of The Ultimate Fighter. Tomorrow’s the first fight on the show, and I don’t know if there’s ever been more viewership than now with this new deal that we have.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWith Paramount, too? They get everything.\n\nDana White\n\nThey get everything.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWell, for, like, $8 billion—\n\nDana White\n\nThe UFC is on Paramount, yeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd boxing, too. I heard you say one time that there was almost no revenue coming in, and you had stumbled onto—you had all these DVDs. You decided to put these fights on DVDs, and then you did these compilations, which I thought was a genius idea. It was like, “Okay, yeah, I could buy a DVD of a fight, or I could see the best knockouts from this year or the best submissions.” When did you have that idea?\n\nDana White\n\nWhen the DVD business blew up, we started doing Ultimate Knockouts, Ultimate Submissions, and those things sold like crazy back then. The DVD business exploded. That’s really when we started making some real money.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis is before Spike, though?\n\nDana White\n\nIt was around the same time. Yeah, it was around the same time. I think we could have capitalized on the DVD business better than we did, but, like I said, we were young and new to the whole production world.\n\nIf I could go back in now with what I know now, I would have fucking murdered the DVD era. We did really well, but I would have murdered the DVD era. I would have really killed it. I would have created more compilations. I would have taken that part of the business way more seriously than I did.\n\nAnd I did take it pretty seriously then, because when those checks started rolling in from DVDs, it was like, “Holy shit.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMillions of dollars.\n\nDana White\n\nAnd I would literally go up the street to our old offices on Sahara. They used to have a Wow Superstore, and they sold records and DVDs and all that shit. Right when you walked in, they had this huge display, and it was the top 20 DVDs of the week.\n\nLiterally nobody knew me then, so I’d go there, grab our shit, and put it in the front of the fucking store.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, wait a minute, though. I want to hear more about the ideas, but let’s go back to this idea of what you would have done differently. Is it just straight more volume, taking it more seriously, better talent? You were making a couple-million-dollar checks. Could those have been 10 times the size?\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nYeah, we could have made a lot more money, I think, on the DVD side if I had focused more on that part of the business at the time. When you’re in the moment like that, you expect DVDs to be forever.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nDana White\n\nRight? Who sees DVDs leaving and not coming back? We were making great revenue on the DVDs, and you don’t expect that to go away. You expect that to keep coming.\n\nIf you look at our business today, 25 years later, look at how fast technology has gone in just 25 years—from DVDs to streaming. DVDs are gone. Everything is streaming now.\n\nI remember being in my office, and these guys set up a meeting with me. They brought in a computer and said, “This is the future: streaming.” Again, like the Joe Rogan podcast thing, they played it for me. Buffering, buffering, buffering. It plays fine for 5 or 10 seconds, then buffering, buffering, buffering. I’m like, “Oh, yeah. This is going to be real fun to do and watch.”\n\nBut if you look at it from that meeting to where we are today, I always did have this dream that someday the world would continue to get smaller and everybody would be watching the fight at the same time, on the same channel, around the world.\n\nWhen I grew up, we had channel 3, channel 5, channel 8, and channel 13. When I was in high school, they got cable. We had about 30 channels then. I believed we’d go back to channels 3, 5, 8, and 13, but globally. So who’s it going to be? Paramount, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI’m shocked Netflix didn’t win this bid.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah, well, they were in it. We were talking to them the whole time. What an incredible business they’ve built. But the Ellisons are aggressive guys—aggressive guys. Obviously, they’re financially powerful. At literally the half-yard line, they said, “Fuck it. We want everything,” and they went after it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nCan you say any more about the negotiation? What was that like, dealing with them?\n\nDana White\n\nIt was great. It was great dealing with them. It was great dealing with Netflix. It was all a good experience—better than the experiences I’d had in the past.\n\nWe were on Spike TV, right? And killing it. Other than WWE, which was on there for a certain amount of time while we were, too, we were the biggest thing on the network.\n\nI’m a loyal guy as it is. We’d have been on Spike TV for 100 years if they would have had us. So Lorenzo and I end up going to lunch with a guy who was a big executive at the time with the whole CBS–Viacom company. His name was Philippe Dauman.\n\nHe calls himself Philippe Dauman. He’s from fucking Jersey. His name’s Phil Dooman. One of the biggest douchebags of all fucking time.\n\nWe go into this lunch, and we have to listen to how fucking rich he is for the first 15 or 20 minutes. Then he tells us that he built the UFC, and if we don’t like the offer he’s making, he’ll just build another one. That’s literally what he said.\n\nWe left that meeting, and I was like, “That fucking guy built the UFC, huh? Okay, Phil Dooman. We’ll see.” We ended up leaving Spike TV and going to Fox. Everything happens for a reason.\n\nThat guy ended up being one of the biggest brand killers of all time—old Phil Dauman. MTV, fucking—think about all the legendary Viacom networks they had that this guy had sucked the life out of and killed.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat’s a great story. I love that story. Your high risk tolerance, though. Do you guys do any work with Todd Graves? I was asking the team before. Do you know who Todd Graves is, the founder of Raising Cane’s?\n\nDana White\n\nYes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nFirst of all, he should sponsor the UFC.\n\nDana White\n\nI’ve met him.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah, yeah, we’ve met.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHe’s just like you, because you get off on being told, “Dana, you can’t do it.”\n\nDana White\n\nRight.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHe did this show a few months ago, and he’s just like—they told him, a 23-year-old kid, that he couldn’t start Raising Cane’s. His original idea was, “I’m going to sell fucking chicken fingers to drunk LSU students.”\n\nDana White\n\nAnd high school kids. My kids—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, no, no, now—\n\nDana White\n\nThat’s all my kids ate when they were in high school.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. And so now, obviously, it’s different. But back then, he was 23 years old, had no money, literally risked his life on a fishing boat in Alaska, and then maxed out his credit cards. That’s how he funded the first Raising Cane’s, which he built with his own hands. We went to the first one in Baton Rouge. It’s crazy that he built this with his own hands, but there are so many similarities between you two.\n\nHe said on the show, “Entrepreneurs are not taking enough risk. They’re too scared of risk. They need to take more risk. If you truly believe in it—and he believes that God put him on this earth to be good at chicken fingers—”\n\nLiterally. And now he owns over 90% of the company. It’s like, what is he selling? Fucking chicken fingers?\n\nDana White\n\nFunny you say that, because Lorenzo Fertitta always used to say to me, “You were put on this earth to do this.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThere’s nobody else in the world who loves it like you do. We were just talking about how we have a mutual friend in Jared. You were just on the phone with him before. His brother, Josh, has a great quote. He says, “If you want to pick somebody, if you’re going to back somebody, and you could choose the most experienced person, the best person, the person who has the most money, or the person who wants it the most, you always pick the person who wants it the most.”\n\nIt’s very obvious that you want it the most. You even said, I think, when you moved back to Vegas, “I could be a bellman at 35. I could be a bellman at 50. But I can only do this and take the risk when I’m young, when I have nothing to lose.”\n\nDana White\n\nDead-on. It’s so true. Everybody who has an idea or a dream, or however you want to look at it, is afraid to take that dive off. You’re 19 years old, and the problem is that some people are comfortable just being comfortable, right? At 19, you make cash every day, you get a paycheck, you’ve got a 401(k), dental, medical—you check all the boxes there—and some people are just comfortable with that.\n\nThere are other people who just want to say, “Listen, I just want to make a good living. I want Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays off. I want every holiday off,” and all that. Then there are guys who are like, “Yeah, fuck this shit. I can do more than this.”\n\nEven now, I’m 56 years old, and I’m dumping more and more and more on my plate because I believe in it. I know we can do it.\n\nBack in 2017 and 2018, I’m on Instagram, and these guys are slapping the shit out of each other on social media. It’s coming out of Russia and Poland. Things with me are based on gut instinct. I’m watching this stuff, and I’m like, “This is crazy.”\n\nBut what I noticed was that I would stay until the end to see who won. I’m the most jaded dude in the world when it comes to fighting, so I was like, “Fuck, if I’m interested in this and I’m staying, what if I did this the right way—and the same shit we said about the UFC?”\n\nI called the Fertitta brothers and said, “Hey, have you seen this slapping stuff? I’m into it.” Then I said, “How much money do you want?” I said, “I need $1 million from both of you.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nA million? That’s it?\n\nDana White\n\nYeah, $3 million. We put up $3 million.\n\nWe put up $3 million, and it’s killing it. Michael Rubin told me after we launched Power Slap and it started killing it, “Whatever you do next, I’m in for $10 million. You don’t even have to tell me what it is.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNow you’re launching this with a ton more experience, resources, and knowledge of building live events—probably better than anybody else in the world in fighting, right? How fast did you turn that business profitable? Because we’re not even done with the fucking story.\n\nFirst event.\n\nDana White\n\nIt’s been profitable since the first event.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nFirst event. Okay, explain what you did differently.\n\nDana White\n\nWell, I knew everything to do. First of all, the reason the UFC became as big as it did, as fast as it did, was for 2 reasons. We traveled the thing all around the United States and the world, and we built a live event that, when you come to the live event, gives you an experience that very few people get.\n\nI mean, even as big as the NFL is—and the NFL is just fucking massive, right?—there’s nothing better than football season. When football season starts, every Sunday, you’re on the couch and you watch. But I don’t like the live experience. I’m not a big fan of the NFL’s live experience.\n\nNow, the NBA—sitting on the couch to watch a full NBA game on TV, all you have to watch is the last 5 minutes. Go to an NBA game live. It’s way better live than it is on TV. The UFC is an incredible television product, and it’s even better live. So, you get a great experience with both.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nEverybody complains—I’ve heard this so much from people online. They’re like, “Dana has the best seats in the house. Why is he looking at it on a little tiny screen?” Can you explain why?\n\nDana White\n\n100%. So, to finish what I was just saying, nobody walks out of a live UFC event and goes, “Yeah, I don’t ever want to come to one of these again.” Not only do you become a bigger fan when you see it live, but then you bring in 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 people and make them fans, too. Meaning, the people who left.\n\nPeople always say that: “You know, he’s got the best seat.” I’m not sitting there to watch the fucking fights. I’m making sure that I can’t control what’s happening in the Octagon, but I can control what you’re seeing on television. I have a phone there that goes directly to the truck.\n\nSo, what I care about is the live, in-house experience—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTailored to what you want—you, as a single individual.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou’re not running this through a committee. You’re not like, “Oh, let’s talk about whether we should change these graphics or anything.” It’s your taste.\n\nDana White\n\nThere is no committee here. There is no whatever. This is a dictatorship—100% a dictatorship. I’m listening to how loud the music is, whether it’s loud enough or not, and what’s happening in-house. I’m watching what’s happening on TV. I can control all of that. I can’t control the fight and what’s going on in there.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat happens when you see something you don’t like?\n\nDana White\n\nI pick up the phone. There’s a phone that goes right to the truck, and I say, “What the fuck was that? Let’s never do that again. Let’s do this.”\n\nI’m so connected with my team. They know what I want, and they know what I expect. But my guy Zach, who’s the producer, will throw some shit around and try some new stuff. I’ll pick up the phone and say, “That was cool. That wasn’t cool. Let’s keep that. Let’s never do that again.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou have this in common with all of history’s great entrepreneurs, because you always hear from business school, “Oh, you should build up a team. Yeah, you’re going to have to have a good team.” And then you just delegate.\n\nI heard the story of you kicking through a fucking door. What was that?\n\nDana White\n\nThe production team. Those were the guys I told you about at the beginning of the interview—the ones I fired.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay, so explain what happened.\n\nDana White\n\nWe had just bought the company, and Phil Baroni, who’s a maniac, was fighting someone—I can’t remember who. Anyway, Phil Baroni snapped in the middle of the interview. He started freaking out on the fucking interviewer.\n\nI told the guys, “I want this to be the interview when he fucking snaps.” They were like, “You can’t do that.” These guys all worked for Showtime at the time, and I fucking thought that Showtime was the most dogshit production ever in boxing. I used to say it publicly all the time.\n\nWell, these guys were all Showtime guys who were working on the side for the UFC. So, I told them, “This is how I want this interview played out.”\n\nWe were sitting in the arena, and I said to Lorenzo, “Watch this fucking interview.” They didn’t do it. They did what they wanted to fucking do. I literally got up from my seat, went back there, and kicked the fucking truck door open.\n\nI said, “You fuckers, if you ever fucking do that again, I’ll fire every fucking one of you.” There was a lot of language, and I ended up firing them all.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, how long does it take you to get your team to that point? Because now you essentially have a team that thinks very similarly to you, where you have to make very few changes. They understand and have adapted to your taste.\n\nMrBeast calls it “cloning himself” with his editors and thumbnail designers. He used to do all that stuff, and then he worked with them for so long that they could kind of read his mind.\n\nDana White\n\nThat’s my whole production team right now. Literally, my whole production team.\n\nNow we’ll go in. We have a screening room over here, and they’ll set up meetings with me. We’ve got to go through screening stuff. Very rarely do I have to change 1 fucking thing.\n\nMy guys are so talented, so good, and so on point with everything that they do. Once you build this trust, confidence—whatever you want to call it—with your team, you have to have a bunch of sick animals who are wired the way you are and incredibly talented.\n\nI literally have a whole campus full of those kinds of people right now, from the art department to the production team to PR. You name it. That’s an animal over there. Seriously. Fucking animal. Animal.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, I’ve heard you shout her out on a few of the podcasts, too.\n\nDana White\n\nAnimal.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. How many years did it take you to do that? How many people did you have to turn over? What was that process like?\n\nDana White\n\nI don’t know the exact answer to that, but there hasn’t been a lot of turnover on my production side. These guys have been with me forever, including the rockstar head of production, Craig Morselli.\n\nThere’s been 1 guy that I absolutely loved who was on our production team, and he left to make it on his own. He came to me about a year ago and said, “Listen, I have this whole concept. I think this could be big,” and everything else.\n\nWe helped him do it. We helped him build this thing, and he’s doing it right now. I’ve always had great relationships with my team, and there hasn’t been much turnover—not in the key positions, anyway. The positions that work directly with me don’t have a lot of turnover.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, when I listen to all your stuff, one thing I’m curious about—and I want to ask you selfishly—is that, without a doubt, you’re one of the biggest fight fans in the world. You love fighting. But I almost feel—\n\nDana White\n\nI’ve watched over 10,000 fights in the last 25 years, not including fights that I’ve watched that weren’t mine.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat’s incredible.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI almost feel like you’re starting to—or maybe you have for a long time—love entrepreneurship as much, and maybe even slightly more, than you love fighting.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah, there’s no doubt about it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nReally?\n\nDana White\n\nYeah. If you look at what I’m doing, first of all, what I’ve done has never been done. Lots of people have tried to do it—really wealthy people, really smart entrepreneurs in other spaces have all tried to do this.\n\nNow I’ve built this incredible business, and we just went public with TKO. Now I’m going to try to rebuild boxing, right? We just launched a jiu-jitsu league and launched Power Slap.\n\nSo, every way that you can kick somebody’s ass, I’m in that business. We’re going to build the biggest combat sports company to ever exist, and that will probably ever exist. That’s my goal in the next 10 years.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt’s not just that you’re going to build the biggest combat organization. You already have, but it’s going to be much bigger, right?\n\nPeople don’t understand that entrepreneurs come and seek out your advice. You’re on the fucking board of Meta, for God’s sake.\n\nDana White\n\nSo, right here, normally you guys rip my fucking room apart here.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTell them what you see, because they can’t see it. This is not a normal podcast.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah, I said this looks like fucking CBS or Fox or something. When you come in, my office is connected right here. This is my bar. This is where I have most of my meetings, and usually there are 4 chairs here.\n\nEvery day, multiple times a day, entrepreneurs come in here and pitch me something like fucking Shark Tank. I give lots of people advice. I connect people with other people who I think they could do business with, or I get involved myself.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy do you like talking to entrepreneurs so much?\n\nDana White\n\nI love hearing different people’s ideas. I love young people who are willing to take a shot, who aren’t afraid to do it. I should have my assistant figure out how many of these I do a year, but it’s multiple times a day, every fucking day, even on Saturdays and Sundays.\n\nSo, I sit in this room and listen to people’s pitches all the time about the businesses that they want to build and their ideas. Usually, you have these guys who will connect people to people, and they want to be paid or get a piece.\n\nI've connected more people who have done things together and been successful. I'm not looking for anything other than this: I hope they all win.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nDeel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world, so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, \"We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world.\" Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deel.com/cendra. That is deel.com/cendra.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI'm curious about the difference in the quality of entrepreneurs now and when you started, because I've heard you say on a few other podcasts that some of these people are just so soft. Some of these younger entrepreneurs don't understand how hard and difficult it is. The UFC literally would have died if it wasn't for you. Can you say a little bit about the difference in the mentality that you see?\n\nDana White\n\nThe greatest line of all time is, “You know, I want to start my own thing because I want to set my own hours, and I want to take days off.” Oh, Jesus Christ. You should just stay where you're at and keep working for somebody else, because that is not how it works.\n\nI've been doing this shit forever. I could have retired 10 years ago. Every day when you get up and you're an entrepreneur, you go to war—literally every day. Somebody's trying to fuck you. Somebody's trying to take what you have. Somebody's trying to tear down your business, literally every day.\n\nThen you have the problems that pop up, especially—and I know this sounds insensitive, but it is what it is—when your product is human beings and you have almost 1,000 of them, not even including your employees. They have personal problems, injuries, and things going on. There's always something wrong and always something that needs to be fixed every minute of every day.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nEspecially the people you have—they're fighters. They choose to get into essentially their underwear in front of millions of people and fight, beat the shit out of each other. You would think you could control them. It's impossible.\n\nDana White\n\nThey're human beings on planet Earth. They're not like all of us. They're wired differently, which is what makes them special.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou have this unique combination of micromanagement—and I don't mean this in a derogatory way—but also giving a lot of freedom to these people. So you don't even try to micromanage. There are 2 things that come to mind, right? One is, Jon Jones is in the club in Vegas—what are you going to do? And you're like, “He's a fighter. There's nothing I can do about it.”\n\nThe other thing I thought you were really smart on, and this ties to what we were talking about earlier, is that you always adopt new technology early. You understood the power of these TikTokers, these YouTubers, and some podcasters. I've heard them say, “Dana just gives us access to events and knows you know how to build an audience. You know how to make content. What the hell am I going to tell you? He just says, ‘Come to the events as much as you want, and then make whatever you want.’”\n\nDana White\n\nIf you think about this, I have UFC, Power Slap, boxing, jiu-jitsu, the WWE, and PBR. Plus, me and the Fertittas own Slap, SLS Skate League, and Nitro Circus.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI don't know what any of those are. Look, I want to hear about that in a minute.\n\nDana White\n\nThat's 9 brands right there that, if you're an influencer—\n\nNow, if you're an influencer, I started to notice this. I told Renee 5 or 6 years ago, the media does not have the influence anymore. They're gone. Nobody trusts them. They're all full of shit. They're always lying, and they don't have the trust of the people the way they used to. These young kids are the influencers. They actually have the influence.\n\nWhen you think about it, they have to get up every day and create content. You're a content creator. It is not easy to do, and you have to go viral. You're competing with shitloads of other young people who are doing the same thing.\n\nYou show up to any of my events, I give you full access. Film what you want; create what you want. The other thing is, most people who deal with content creators try to tell them, “You have to do this, this, this.” What the fuck do you know about creating content, right? Let these young, talented people who are unbelievably creative do what they do when they want to fucking do it. How hard is that?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNo, it's like a simple genius.\n\nDana White\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt reminds me of you mentioning the Ellisons earlier and just how aggressive they are and obviously well-capitalized. I saw this clip recently on X where Larry Ellison was talking. Larry Ellison mentored Elon Musk. Elon says he's one of the smartest people—he's one of the few people Elon goes to for advice.\n\nLarry Ellison is in this conversation with a reporter for a newspaper, and the reporter's trying to tell Larry that Elon is dumb. He's like, “Have you landed a rocket on a boat? Have you ever landed a rocket, much less a rocket on a boat? Show me what you have done.”\n\nI just thought that was beautiful. That guy's stupid? He's landing rockets.\n\nDana White\n\nI say that all the time. My biggest problem with the media is, who the fuck are you, and what the fuck have you ever done? Nothing. You're nobody, and you've never done anything ever. Nobody's ever depended on you for a paycheck. Who are you to criticize anybody?\n\nI was just saying at the press conference in Winnipeg on Saturday, you have all these people on the internet talking about what we should be doing with our business. I said, “Holy shit, you guys are fucking brilliant. PFL, Bellator, One FC, many, many other failing companies—why don't they just fucking hire you guys? You guys have the answers for everything, right?”\n\nI can't even read this shit because it's so dumb. I realize these guys know nothing about this business, yet these are the people who are covering it. It's fascinating to me that anybody listens to any of these people.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI heard you say one time that you always laugh when people start talking about the business of the UFC because they don't know anything about it.\n\nDana White\n\nUh-huh.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nCan you say more about that?\n\nDana White\n\nFirst of all, everything that we've done over the last 25 years has never been done before. We continue to do things that have never been done before. There's a vision for this business, and literally none of them know it. They have no idea. They can look at, “Oh, this company and these guys did this, and somebody did this in the past.” We're doing none of that shit. We're doing the exact opposite.\n\nFor you to criticize—I guess everybody can criticize and say, “Oh, this won't work.” What have we done in the last 25 years that hasn't worked? No.\n\nNow, Lorenzo's done. He's out. He doesn't want to do the second deal, so he puts the business up for sale.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nDana White\n\nOkay. We sell for $4.025 billion, right? No TV deal. We're coming up to the end of our Fox deal. We have no TV deal.\n\nNothing. Everybody out there said, “They overpaid. The UFC has peaked. The UFC is this. The UFC is that.” All the same shit guys that are talking shit right now—that's what they said, okay?\n\nSpike: $35 million deal. Fox: $100 million deal. ESPN: $3 billion deal. And now here we are: $7.7 billion for 7 years. Everybody—they shit on Paramount. “Paramount overpaid.” Just all the same shit from the same fucking losers.\n\nIt's crazy. You have to block all this noise out. These people are fucking zeros. Everybody that talks about this business and has an opinion on it are zeros. They've never done anything in their fucking life except talk. And it's always the same shit, because these are all people who have no vision, no clue, no whatever.\n\nYou know, they were all talking this shit in 2016, and look where we are 10 years later. Wait and see where we are in 10 more fucking years.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI was going to say, the numbers are only going to keep going up. Look at streaming. Streaming services are just going to be all sports. The subscriber count has scaled so high. The demand is going to be insatiable for things like what you make.\n\nDana White\n\nIt's crazy that it took Netflix so long to get into sports. I was saying it way before they did.\n\nThe thing is, streaming’s great. Right now, I don’t watch a lot of TV.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. Well, you seem to be a little busy.\n\nDana White\n\nAlmost none, right? Something’s really got to get me to watch it. And I was saying this before the Paramount deal.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nDana White\n\nWay before. So much so that people like Paramount did the deal with them just because of how much I talked about Land Man and Mob Land. Land Man is one of the greatest television shows that I’ve ever watched—ever. And Mob Land, you know, classic Guy Ritchie, unbelievable.\n\nSo when you think about those 2 shows, I can go watch the whole season tonight, or I can watch it 3 years from now. It’s always going to be there. Sports—live sports—is a destination. You have to watch it now.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYep.\n\nDana White\n\nExactly. So it always made sense for streaming platforms to go after sports.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd as they continue to scale and they’re global, exactly what you said: the numbers are going to keep going up.\n\nDana White\n\n100%. And I’m so glad that you and I are having this conversation and that this all ended up happening. Remember everything that was said today on this podcast, and let’s talk again in 5 years.\n\nI’m talking about all these literal losers that talk about this sport and absolutely know nothing about what they’re talking about. If you check the temperature right here today, Paramount overpaid—the same shit that they said 10 years ago about WME overpaying for the sport. It’s peaked. It’s this, it’s that. They don’t have the talent, they don’t have the stars, they don’t have this, they don’t have that.\n\nIt’s fascinating to me that any of these people have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to the business, because this isn’t like some other business, like the hotel business, where it’s all the same shit. Everything we’re doing has never been done before. Over the next 5 to 10 years, everything we do has never been done before, either. Watch what we do in the next 5 to 10 years.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe reason this will never stop—and this is true today, it was true 100 years ago, and it will be true 100 years from now—is that if it’s working, the numbers always get bigger than the people involved can possibly imagine.\n\nDana White\n\nVery true. I love it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, it’s crazy. So—\n\nI love that we’re having this conversation. You just got shit the other day because I guess you guys used some AI video in one of your promos.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat was your response to the people that criticized you?\n\nDana White\n\nWell, the response was that I did a whole commercial in AI after that for the White House. My response is, why don’t you just shut the fuck up and watch the fights? Why the fuck do you care what we’re doing technology-wise?\n\nWhat’s the difference? We were using green screens before that, too, right? And people—we still have to hire people to do this stuff. Let me tell you what’s not happening: I’m not downstairs doing the fucking AI shit. We have people who are doing it.\n\nBut it’s the future. It’s coming. Is it going to be as big as everybody thinks? Is it going to last? Is it going to—? I don’t know.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou don’t have to know.\n\nDana White\n\nHere, right now, we’re in.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut did you see how rare that is? You’ve been running the UFC for 26 years, something like that, and you stay on top of it over and over again.\n\nIf you just analyze what you do, you’re asking, “What’s the most valuable medium to use for the product that I have to make the product that I have spread to more people?” That answer’s going to change.\n\nYou thought DVDs were going to be around forever. Not just you—everyone thought DVDs were going to be around forever. Cable TV was going to be around forever. You couldn’t have predicted streaming in 2005.\n\nDana White\n\n100%. And we did a commercial, I don’t know, over 10 years ago for the Conor McGregor–José Aldo fight. It was incredible. It was on the Strip, you know, and they ended up meeting out in front of MGM. All these Brazilians and all—do they think that we really had all those people out there and that we really did that?\n\nNo, that isn’t the way it worked, and that was way before AI. Whatever the new technology is, we’re on it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI want to go back to the fact that you love entrepreneurship as much as fighting, or maybe even more. One thing—the reason that we started the show, because people are a little confused about what we’re doing—is that this is a love letter to capitalism.\n\nI’m the son of a Cuban immigrant. My dad was literally born in Cuba. My grandfather fled Castro. That 1 decision changed the structure of my entire life: him deciding not to stay in this fucked-up place and come to America, and then me being born 30 years later, or whatever the case was.\n\nI’ve heard you a few times, and I think you call them dummies, about these young kids that seem to be attracted to hating billionaires or being anticapitalistic. Can you talk a little bit about that?\n\nDana White\n\nYeah. It’s funny because if you look at the situation that California’s in right now, all these billionaires are trying to figure out how to get the hell out of there.\n\nBillionaires are very important to the ecosystem of the United States, you know what I mean? The amount of money these guys pay in taxes—how do you think everything stays afloat? How do you think the state comes up with the money to fix the roads and build the highways? Infrastructure in every city in America comes from billionaires, millionaires, the middle class, and people who work their asses off and pay their taxes. That’s where all the money comes from.\n\nI was just doing an interview 2 days ago, and they were walking around looking at my office and looking at the gym. The woman was like, “You know, there are hard times right now. Some people are going through it, and don’t you think that if they’re going to see this, they’ll be like, ‘Well, this is terrible, that this guy had all this?’”\n\nYou’re not it, and you’re never going to be it. You’ve got the victim mentality, and you’re never going to be that person. What you should do is look at what I have and say, “That guy barely graduated high school, right? He believed in something, did all the right things. If that guy can do it, I can do it.” That’s how you should think.\n\nI know that there are many different types of people out there. Like I said, there’s the 9-to-5 guy. He wants to work 9-to-5, have Saturday and Sunday off, and have every holiday off because that’s the life he wants to live. Good for you.\n\nThen you have the guy who’s going to come in and grind in the business, run a department, and do very well for himself. He’s a part of building something like this.\n\nThen you’ve got the guy who’s like, “Yeah, I’m not working for anybody. I’m going to go out and make it happen for myself.”\n\nIf you look at somebody—I’ve looked at many people—and never, ever have I looked at somebody who’s had incredible wealth and built unbelievable businesses and said, “Yeah, fuck that guy.” I’ve always said, “Wow.”\n\nYou can learn lots of different things from lots of different people in different industries, what they built, and how they built it. You can look at other guys and say, “I don’t ever want to make that mistake. I don’t think that’s right.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nGive me some examples of people that you thought of as cautionary tales.\n\nDana White\n\nPeople who don’t value their employees. I’ve seen a lot of them.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI don’t think people understand what you were willing to do during COVID, how wrong you thought it was that everybody was laying everybody off.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou offered to give up all of your compensation.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy?\n\nDana White\n\nMy thing was this: I was in a situation where I wasn’t going to lose any of my money during COVID. These people come in here every fucking day and grind with me, and there were a lot of people who were going to get laid off and a lot of people whose salaries were going to be cut, along with bonuses and all these other things.\n\nI said, “Yeah, fuck that shit. We’re going through COVID. I’m not a brick-and-mortar business, right? All I had to do was find a place where I could go put on a fight and beam it to ESPN. That’s all I had to do.”\n\nMy team was all ready to storm the beach with me. Nobody was saying, “No, we’re not going to work during COVID. It’s too dangerous, and we’re scared.” I’m not saying people weren’t scared. Everybody was willing to go—men, women, everybody.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI remember when the NBA canceled its season. That was probably an “oh, shit” moment for you. How long was it from that moment until you did that thing with Abu Dhabi? How long did it take you to find a place in the world to go?\n\nDana White\n\nA couple weeks. So, I’m fucking going. We’re going no matter what. Now, I have the Khabib versus Tony Ferguson fight.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhich time, though?\n\nDana White\n\n[Laughter.] Fucking crazy, you know that. That’s crazy, you know that. The last time—it was at the Brooklyn arena. I’m telling these guys, “Don’t fucking pull this on me. Don’t pull this fucking fight. We’re going to go. I don’t care if there are no fans, whatever.”\n\nBrooklyn calls and says, “Yeah, we’re not going to do it.” I said, “I’ll never ever fucking come to your arena again, just so you know that.” Because we were doing MSG and Brooklyn. I said, “I will never hold another fucking fight in your arena ever again. Cool?” “Cool.” They fucking pulled it.\n\nSo, I got my fucking lawyer calling every place in America, because once it all started to shut down, it was all going quick. So quick that I’d be here in the office, we’d get something done. I live 20 minutes from here. By the time I got home, my lawyer would call me and go, “They just fucking bailed.” I’m like, “What?”\n\nAnyway, this is my thought process during this time. I don’t know how fucking long this COVID shit’s going to go on or how long the country’s going to be shut down, but here’s what I do know. At ESPN, which is a sports network, the bean counters are eventually going to sit down and go, “Okay, let’s see what we got here. We got the NFL, we got Major League Baseball, we got the NBA, we got the NHL, we got the UFC, and we got the guys who throw the fucking bean bags into the fucking holes. Okay, who are we cutting first?”\n\nThe UFC is going to be the first fucking money that’s going to get cut. So, I’m going to figure out how to go through COVID. All my employees are going to stay intact, and Bob Iger says, “I’ll pay you every fucking dime, no matter how much COVID lasts, whether you do no events or you put on all 44.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, wow.\n\nDana White\n\nThen we were getting paid no matter what. So, I could have just said, “Fuck it. Let’s all stay home and see how long COVID fucking lasts.” But no, we went out and pulled killer fucking numbers for ESPN because we were the only game—\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—in town.\n\nDana White\n\n—and our business grew. It just fucking blew up and went through the roof.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow fast did you do a deal with Abu Dhabi? People don’t understand: Sheikh Tahnoon is also—these guys are obsessed with jiu-jitsu. He’s a black belt in jiu-jitsu.\n\nDana White\n\nRight. And they’ve been incredible partners to us since the day we met them. So, yeah, we ended up talking to them. We go to Yas Island, and we built the only real bubble that existed during COVID.\n\nThe people who moved into Yas Island from the UAE lived there for months and never went home to see their family, so they were all clean. We made sure that all of our athletes and everybody that went over to work was tested multiple times. We chartered our own planes, and we flew over there. It was the only true bubble that existed in sports at that time. All the other ones were bullshit.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd then, when you’re dealing with them, they can call the shots. I heard you on a podcast, and you were saying that you were trying to do some deals with these people. You had a meeting, and then they called you a day later and mentioned, “Hey, we spoke to our board.” And you’re like, “Nope, we’re not doing a deal. It doesn’t matter. If you have to go and ask permission from somebody else, we are fundamentally incompatible.”\n\nDana White\n\nVery fucking true.\n\nSponsors during this time—we had great relationships with all of our sponsors. But like any relationship in life, you don’t know who’s who until the shit hits the fan. Friends, girlfriends, husbands, work—all these people, when things are good, everything’s good. But who’s around, and who’s really real and there, and a real partner? You don’t know that until shit gets really bad.\n\nWe had this partner that was a good partner all through good times. Then, as soon as not only COVID but that whole crazy woke era happened, when people were getting canceled and all that other shit, we had a company that was literally calling here every 5 minutes, man.\n\nIt started with me posting a video supporting Trump on my social media. They called and said, “You need to take that down.” I said, “Are you out of your fucking mind? Who the fuck are you to call me and tell me who to vote for? It’s not coming down, and don’t ever fucking call me and tell me who to vote for again.”\n\nThen they called again, and then they called again, and then they called again. Basically, when our deal was up, one of the guys who worked there—who was sort of my day-to-day contact that I would talk to, and I still like him today—called me. Our deal was up, and we were shopping. He calls me and says, “Hey, I’m in town. Can I come by and see you?” I’m like, “Yeah.”\n\nSo, he comes into my office and says, “Hey, man, I’ve got to let you know: my board of directors is losing their patience with you.” I go, “You guys have got some fucking balls, man. I’ll give you that. Have a seat.”\n\nWe fucking sat down in my office, and I went through the whole thing. He says, “Dana, this is a”—you know, he says the number of the deal—and I said, “Well, I understand. And here’s what you can do: get back on your plane, take that number, roll it up into a tiny little ball, and shove it up your board’s ass.”\n\nComing out of COVID and that whole woke era, I was like, “I’m only going to be in business with people that I’m aligned with.” So, I didn’t end up doing another deal with them.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOne of the keys to, I think, your longevity—and this is some of the best advice I’ve heard you give other entrepreneurs—is that the first thing you have to do before anything else is know yourself, right? Figure out who the hell you are. You clearly know who you are.\n\nThe second thing is, then you have to know what you actually want to do. If you know who you are and what you want to do, then you just wake up and get after that goal every single day.\n\nThe perfect example of this is—I don’t doubt anything you said when I heard somebody ask you, “Hey, let’s say Lorenzo doesn’t call you back after that.” He said you were done and had to sell the company for $7 to $8 million. Your response was, “I get up the next day and figure it out. I was going to be in this business. There’s no fucking Plan B. I’m going to do this.”\n\nI think knowing who you are, knowing what you want to do, and just doing it every day—that’s the key to having the longevity that you’ve had.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah. I’ve never thought about, if something doesn’t work out, like, “Oh, no.” I don’t even think like that. It never even crosses my mind that something’s not going to work. I just keep going until it does work.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAll entrepreneurs think like that. There was this viral moment between another podcaster and Jensen Huang of NVIDIA. He was asked a question, and he said, “That’s a loser premise. I don’t think like that.”\n\nAssuming I’m going to lose this market or not be able to beat these competitors—of course he thinks like that. He founded a $4 trillion company that he’s been running for 33 years. You think he wakes up thinking he’s going to lose?\n\nDana White\n\nNot true. There’s this Bruce Lee quote where he talks about never saying negative things about yourself or what you’re working on or what you’re doing, even if you’re joking, because your body doesn’t know the difference.\n\nIt’s like this whole thing—I saw Rogan talking about this when he was talking to some psychologist—if you just sit around and talk about your fucking problems all the time—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI saw that clip, too.\n\nDana White\n\nIt makes it worse.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, which makes sense.\n\nDana White\n\nYeah.\n\nIt’s like, I never take in any negativity. I literally block it. I call it noise, and I block all that noise out.\n\nWe’re talking about these guys who report on what we’re doing that have no clue what we’re doing. Why would I want to hear anything they would have to say? They’re zeros. They’ve literally never done anything in their life, especially in this business. Why would I listen to anything that they have to say?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut you said something earlier that’s really important. This is all intuition. This is your gut. This is your instinct. You’re the born entrepreneur.\n\nI just did this episode on my other podcast where I read about Arnold Schwarzenegger. He wrote 2 autobiographies. He wrote 1 when he was 76. That’s interesting. The more interesting one is the one he published in 1977, when he was 30 years old. It’s called Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder.\n\nWhat recently popped into my mind is that he literally talked about that. There were 30 bodybuilders in the entire country when he started to become a bodybuilder in Austria. His parents thought he was a fucking weirdo. His friends thought he was a weirdo.\n\nHe says that once you say something negative, he cuts you out. He would cut his parents out of his life. That was the negative. He was like, “I don’t want to hear any fucking negativity.”\n\nThen what he would do, he would literally write letters, right? He’d say, “Arnold, you’re going to be the best bodybuilder in the world.”\n\nHe had positive affirmations, and he'd hang them up everywhere. He'd brainwash himself into this positive thinking that you were just talking about.\n\nDana White\n\nI cut negative people out of my life so fast, and it doesn't matter who you are.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nListen, after this, you got to get connected to Todd Graves. First of all, he should be sponsoring the UFC. He's got plenty of money to spend, so he could be a big partner for you.\n\nHe's spending money everywhere, but he started that company when he was 23. He used to live in a shitty apartment right behind the Raising Cane's. He'd work all day, then go home and try to get some rest for a little bit. When he looked out the window and saw the drive-through got backed up, he'd run back out. This is some shit you would do.\n\nBut then, when he's rich, he buys the shitty apartment building and redoes his apartment exactly the way it was when he was 23 years old. On the entire wall, he had printed out positive affirmations. He says stuff like, “A man of passion rides a mad horse.”\n\nThat sounds like you. “Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically.” He was literally brainwashing himself in his early 20s: “This will work. This has to work. There is no Plan B.”\n\nDana White\n\nSo, I want to sort of walk you through what you're saying. I mean, literally, right? My office, the bar, the gym—it's all the same shit that you just said as we go this way in the building. It's exactly what I do, too. I literally have all this shit on the walls every day that speaks to me.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nDude, thank you very much for doing this. If you don't mind, I might harass you every 6 to 12 months if you want to run this back and literally just talk about entrepreneurship and building the business. You have so much genius shit.\n\nI've been following you for a decade. 2016 is when I found the UFC because of Rogan's podcast. He wouldn't shut up about it.\n\nDana White\n\nLet me just tell you a quick Rogan story. I've told some of this before, but think about this. We buy the company. The company's based in New York. I got to fly to New York, go into the offices, and go through—me, alone—every fucking document, videotape, and everything in there to figure out what's coming to Vegas and what I'm going to throw away.\n\nSo, literally, the whole walls are covered with tapes. I have a VHS, and I'm literally popping tape after tape after tape after tape. Then Ivory Kenan Wayans had a talk show, and he had Joe Rogan on. Joe Rogan starts talking about the UFC and fighting. At the time, he's doing Fear Factor, which is a massive show on television, and it just clicked with me.\n\nI go, “This is the fucking guy I need right here. I need him to do commentary. He's educated on martial arts, and he's not afraid to talk about controversial shit. This is my guy.”\n\nSo, I reach out to Rogan, and we hit it off immediately. In Rogan's rise, he's gone through some shit personally, too.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n[GASPS]\n\nDana White\n\nYou know, I've had people call and say, “Hey, whether it's sponsors or whoever, you got to do this to Rogan.” And I'm like, “Fuck. Don't ever fucking call me.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n[SNORTS]\n\nDana White\n\nWho the fuck are you to call me and tell me who I'm going to fire or do whatever to? First of all, Joe Rogan did the first 12 fights for us for free. Right?\n\nThen, when you talk about technology, at the time, I flew all over the country and met with every sports editor at every newspaper. When we bought this company, the newspaper was king. These guys were all 60, 65 years old—ball-and-stick sports guys—and every once in a while, boxing would get a space in the paper. There wasn't enough room, and these guys didn't get it and never got it.\n\nI'm like, “Well, in the next 5 or 6 years, these guys will all be gone, and there'll be younger guys who come in who'll get it more.” But what we had to do was—radio was still very relevant. So, you drop into these markets from the East Coast all the way through the Midwest into the West Coast during drive time, and then do the same thing going home.\n\nWhat we learned really early is that fighters are bad radio. Okay? They don't show up on time. They sound like they're still fucking sleeping. The list goes on and on. The only 2 who were really good at doing radio were me and Joe Rogan. Right?\n\nThe problem with me is nobody knew who the fuck I was. So, what we would do is switch. I'd do UFC 30, Rogan would do UFC 31. I'd do UFC 32, Rogan would do 33.\n\nYou'd have to get up at 3:00 in the morning. We both lived on the West Coast. We'd have to get up at 3:00 in the morning. They'd drop us into the markets on the East Coast from 6:00 to whatever, and we'd literally go all around the country doing the same interviews over and over and over. Rogan and I did this for years.\n\nTo actually explain to people how much Rogan has dedicated to this—I mean, you said you heard about it on his podcast—he has been a key, instrumental part of this company. And for anybody, I don't give a fuck how much money you have, sponsor or whatever—yeah, no, nothing's happening to Joe Rogan.\n\nLoyalty.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYes, which is the most important thing in the world to me. Dana, thanks for doing this.\n\nDana White\n\nThat was awesome, man. Appreciate it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThank you.\n\nI hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast Founders. For almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.","tldr_md_alt":"- **Dana White 对一切“溢价过高”论的回答，都是版权费这条成交记录：Spike 3500万美元、Fox 1亿美元、ESPN 30亿美元，如今 Paramount 则是“7年77亿美元”。** 他指出，同一批评论家在2016年 WME 以40.25亿美元收购 UFC 时也说买贵了——“没有电视协议……我们的 Fox 合约也快到期了”。而他对这群评论者的结论毫不留情：“所有谈论这门生意的人……全是一群零蛋。”“记住今天说过的一切……5年后我们再聊。”\n- **UFC 的资本故事是一家濒死后复利增长的公司：以200万美元买入，多年来收入约1000万美元、支出也约1000万美元，直到 Lorenzo Fertitta 让 White 出去找买家。** White 带回的估值是600万-800万美元；第二天早上 Lorenzo 打电话来说，原话是：“Fuck it，继续干。”White 的总结是：“一觉好睡能给人带来的改变，确实惊人。”\n- **The Ultimate Fighter 原本是登上免费电视的特洛伊木马，而由 UFC 自掏腰包制作则成了意外的关键一步。** Spike 一度拒绝，直到 UFC 提出承担整档节目的成本，称这是“我们对 UFC 的最后1000万美元投资”；Bonnar-Griffin 赛季决赛后，Spike 高管“把我们带到场馆后巷，在一张餐巾纸上谈成了交易”。由于 Spike 没有出钱，“所有东西100%归我们所有”——“这是有史以来发生在我们身上最棒的事。”\n- **White 的流媒体判断早于 Paramount 交易：脚本内容是不会过时的库存，直播体育则是“目的地”。** 你必须现在看。他早就预测，世界最终会回到少数几个全球频道——“3台、5台、8台和13台，只不过是全球范围内的频道”；他认为 Ellisons 胜出，是因为“就在半码线前，他们说：‘Fuck it，我们什么都要。’”Netflix 全程都参与了竞标。\n- **Power Slap 证明了模式可以复制：Fertitta 兄弟凭 Instagram 短视频的直觉判断投了300万美元，项目“从第一场赛事起就实现盈利”，Michael Rubin 还在不知道 White 下一步要做什么的情况下承诺投入1000万美元。** White 列出的版图包括 UFC、Power Slap、拳击、柔术、WWE、PBR、Slap、SLS Skate League 和 Nitro Circus，目标很明确：“我们要打造有史以来最大的格斗体育公司……就在未来10年内。”\n- **运营模式是创始人品味驱动的独裁，而不是授权下放：“这里没有委员会……这是独裁。”** White 坐在八角笼旁盯着监视器，拿电话直通制作车——“我无法控制八角笼里发生什么，但我能控制你在电视上看到什么”；在踢开制作车大门、解雇最初的 Showtime 团队后，他组建了一支“和你一样天生如此、彻底疯狂的动物”团队。\n- **连续拥抱早期科技是贯穿始终的主线——DVD、真人秀、流媒体、网红、AI——同时也承认没有任何媒介能够永存。** 他唯一的遗憾，是没有把 DVD 时代的价值榨到极致——“我本可以把 DVD 时代杀个片甲不留”；而他的网红打法就是把杠杆全部交出去：开放赛事全部权限、不做任何指示——“你他妈懂什么内容创作？……让这些年轻又有天赋的人做他们擅长的事。”\n- **COVID 是进攻，不是防守：ESPN 的 Bob Iger 已经保证无论如何都会付款，但 White 仍在几周内搭建了 Yas Island 防疫泡泡，并把赛事办成“当时唯一的比赛”。** “我们的业务增长了……直接爆发，冲上屋顶。”同一时期也让他的合作伙伴筛选标准变得更明确：某赞助商的董事会要求他删除支持 Trump 的帖子，他让对方拿着续约报价，“揉成一个小得不能再小的球，然后塞进你们董事会的屁股里。”","digest_md_alt":"### 1. 创始人是首席叙事者——从不对产品说假话\n- Senra 开场讲到，一家150M美元公司的创始人曾请他帮忙招聘“首席叙事官”，他的回答是：“不，那是创始人的工作。”去看 White 的赛后新闻发布会就知道了。White 对此完全认同：“100%。”他厌恶“CEO照着律师写好的稿子念……那些虚假、做作的屁话”。\n- Senra 认为 White 真实的一面，是他会在比赛后直接说：“那场比赛烂透了。”White 解释，过去的推广方总会“明明知道你刚看的比赛很糟，却告诉你那是一场精彩的比赛”。他的规则是，比赛好不好由观众决定：“你不要替他们评判。让观众自己判断这场比赛好还是坏。”\n- White 将 UFC 与当时最昂贵的真人秀 The Contender 作对比：Mark Burnett 的团队会剪辑比赛。作为硬核观众，White 的判断是：“比赛绝不能剪辑。让比赛自然打完。”UFC 会负责“铃声、灯光等所有包装”，但最终把火炬交给选手，选手必须自己交出表现。\n\n### 2. 200万美元到底买到了什么——以及反向上演的 Lionsgate 权利劫案\n- 当时买到的东西极其简陋：“我们买下的全部家当……就是 UFC 这3个字母、一座旧木制八角笼和几份合同。”当时可能只有8、9份选手合同，如今接近1000份。商品、内容库、电子游戏和 DVD 等周边权利，已经被濒死的前任所有者卖给了 Lionsgate。\n- 他们随后花了约250万-300万美元，把全部周边权利买了回来。White 回头看说：“我们离开时，那帮人可能还在笑我们。”在他看来，那些金融人士只是做了一笔轻松的现金交易；他还将这件事与 Shannon Lee 无法买回 Bruce Lee 电影版权相比较。“但他们把所有权利都卖回给我们了，而且价格便宜。”\n\n### 3. 谷底：每年5场、每场200万美元，以及一夜反转\n- 早期的经济模型是：每年举办5场赛事，每场成本“超过200万美元”，收入约1000万美元，支出也约1000万美元；随着选手成本不断上升，Fertitta 兄弟持续填补资金缺口。大约4年后，Lorenzo 说：“我不能再这么干了……出去看看这东西能卖多少钱。”\n- White 报回来的出售估值是600万-800万美元。第二天早上他开车去上班时，Lorenzo 说：“Fuck it。”就是这句话：“Fuck it，继续干。”这一集最值得引用的风险经验，来自 Lorenzo 本人：“一觉好睡能给人带来的改变，确实惊人。”\n- 观众容易忘记当时的背景：UFC“根本不被允许上付费电视。色情内容都能上付费电视，好吗？但 UFC 不行”。而把 UFC 放上免费电视，在当时“所有人都认为不可能”。\n\n### 4. The Ultimate Fighter：他们最终被迫自己持有的特洛伊木马\n- 2004-05年前后真人秀正处于繁荣期，UFC 的提案是：“把 UFC 做成真人秀形式，比赛提前录制。”这让那些不愿接触直播格斗的电视网觉得可以接受。正在改名为“男性频道”的 Spike TV 不愿承担制作成本，直到 UFC 提出：“我们来支付全部费用，你们只要播出就行。”Spike 的风险被全部拿走，只剩下分发功能。\n- UFC 内部把这视为“我们对 UFC 的最后1000万美元投资……如果 The Ultimate Fighter 不成功，一切就结束”。结果节目一炮而红。Bonnar-Griffin 决赛在 Cox Pavilion 举行，现场有3500-4000人，观众高喊“再来一回合”；随后“Spike TV 高管把我们带到场馆后巷，在一张餐巾纸上谈成了交易”。\n- 这笔交易的结构性回报在于：“如果当时是他们出钱，我们就不会处在……100%拥有所有东西的位置。所以，当时拿出下一笔1000万美元确实很难受，但最后却成了发生在我们身上最棒的事。”此后 White 又把这一模式复制到 Power Slap，其真人秀在 YouTube 上的播放量约5000万；UFC BJJ 也采用了同样的方式，而在新的 Paramount 安排下，The Ultimate Fighter 第34季刚刚启动。\n\n### 5. DVD 红利、遗憾与流媒体预见\n- DVD 爆发后，Ultimate Knockouts、Ultimate Submissions 等合辑带来了第一笔真正的大钱：“当 DVD 的支票开始滚滚进来时，我们都想：‘Holy shit。’”还有一个很能说明早期处境的细节：当时还没有人认识 White，他会走进 Sahara 大道上的 Wow Superstore，亲手把 UFC DVD 挪到门店入口的前20名展示位。\n- White 对自己的批评毫不客气：“如果我能带着现在知道的一切回到过去，我会把 DVD 时代的价值榨到极致。”他本可以做更多合辑，也应该更加认真。由此他总结出一个更大的教训：身处某个媒介的当下时，“你会以为 DVD 能永远存在”，但没有任何媒介会永存。\n- White 办公室里曾有人向他演示流媒体：“缓冲、缓冲、缓冲，能正常播放5秒、10秒，然后又缓冲。”这与他最初听到 Rogan 提出播客时的反应如出一辙。但他长期以来的梦想，最终正是流媒体的发展方向：让全世界的人“在同一时间、通过同一个频道观看比赛”，回到他童年时的3台、5台、8台和13台，只不过范围变成全球。“那会是谁？Paramount、YouTube、Amazon、Netflix。”\n\n### 6. Phil Dooman、Ellisons，以及为什么“买贵了”那群人总是错\n- White 对 Spike 一直很忠诚，甚至说“我们本来可以在 Spike TV 待100年”。但一次与 Viacom 的 Philippe Dauman 共进午餐后，关系走到了尽头。“他自称 Philippe Dauman。他明明就是从 Jersey 来的，他的名字是 Phil Dooman。”Dauman 花了15-20分钟谈自己有多富，随后声称“是他打造了 UFC”，还威胁要“直接再造一个出来”。UFC 转投 Fox；White 认为，Dauman 是 Viacom 旗下那些传奇频道历史上“最会摧毁品牌的人之一”。\n- 相比之下，Paramount 的谈判“非常棒”。Netflix 全程都参与其中，但 Ellisons “进取、财力雄厚”，在半码线前拿走了一切：“Fuck it，我们什么都要。”Senra 提到的数字约为800亿美元；White 在更广泛的版权费序列中给出的数字是“7年77亿美元”，并确认 UFC 将登陆 Paramount。\n- White 对批评者的固定反驳是：2016年 UFC 以40.25亿美元出售时，手上没有任何已签署的电视协议，外界一致评论“他们买贵了，UFC 已经见顶”。随后版权费从 Spike 的3500万美元升至 Fox 的1亿美元，再到 ESPN 的30亿美元，最终到了 Paramount 的77亿美元。“这些人他妈全是零蛋……再等10年，看看我们会走到哪里。”他的结构性判断是：“这不像酒店生意……我们正在做的每一件事，过去都从未有人做过。”\n\n### 7. Power Slap 与直播赛事打法：一切都在独裁下运行\n- Power Slap 源于一个纯粹的直觉：White 在2017-18年看到俄罗斯人和波兰人在 Instagram 上互扇耳光，发现“我会一直看到最后，想知道谁赢。而我是全世界看打斗时最麻木的那种人”。他从 Fertitta 兄弟那里筹到300万美元，而项目“从第一场赛事起就实现盈利”，这也促使 Michael Rubin 表态：“你下一步做什么我都投1000万美元。你甚至不用告诉我那是什么。”\n- Power Slap 能从一开始就盈利，是因为 White 已经掌握了 UFC 增长的两台引擎：把产品带到全球，以及打造一种没有人会后悔亲临现场的体验。他的比较对象是：NFL 在沙发上看很棒，但“我不太喜欢 NFL 的现场体验”；NBA 在电视上只有最后5分钟值得看，但“现场好得多”。White 认为 UFC 在电视和现场两种形态下都处于顶级，而现场观众会带来“5、6、7、8、10个人”，其中一些人最终会成为粉丝。\n- 那个著名的监视器回答是：“我坐在那里不是为了看他妈的比赛……我无法控制八角笼里发生什么，但我能控制你在电视上看到什么。”他手里有一部电话，直接连到制作车。White 还明确表示：“这里没有委员会……这是独裁，100%是独裁。”\n\n### 8. 踢开制作车大门，然后组建一座“动物”校园\n- White 的制作团队起源于最初那批 Showtime 人员：他们本职在 Showtime 工作，同时兼职为 UFC 制作节目。当他们无视 White 播出 Phil Baroni 采访中情绪失控片段的指令时，“我真的从座位上站起来，回到后面，把那辆他妈的制作车门踢开……最后我把他们全都解雇了。”\n- 25年后，情况完全反过来：在审片会上，“我极少需要改动哪怕一件他妈的事”。他的做法是用多年时间建立信任，聚拢“一群天生和你同频、彻底疯狂的动物”，关键岗位的人员流动极少，其中包括制作负责人、明星级人才 Craig Morselli。Senra 将其与 MrBeast 的做法相提并论：把自己“克隆”成一批能够读懂他想法的剪辑师。\n- 同样的克制也支撑着他的网红策略：面对9个品牌——UFC、Power Slap、拳击、柔术、WWE、PBR，以及 Slap、SLS Skate League、Nitro Circus——他给创作者全部权限，却不给任何方向，因为“媒体已经不再拥有那种影响力……这些年轻人才是网红”，而且“你他妈懂什么内容创作？”\n\n### 9. COVID 是进攻：Fight Island、财务人员与赞助商最后通牒\n- White 讲述的 COVID 逻辑链条是：ESPN 的财务人员最终可能会把 NFL、MLB、NBA、NHL、UFC，甚至“那些把他妈的豆袋扔进他妈的洞里的人”排出优先级，然后问：“我们先砍掉谁？”所以即便 Iger 已经保证“无论你一场不办，还是44场全办，我都会把每一分钱付给你”，White 仍拒绝待在家里，提出放弃自己的薪酬来保护员工，并带着整个团队“冲上滩头”。\n- 执行速度很快：Brooklyn 取消 Khabib-Ferguson 后，White 说：“我这辈子再也不会在你的场馆举办任何一场该死的比赛。”随后，他在几周内与 Abu Dhabi 达成协议。Yas Island 是“当时体育界唯一真正存在的泡泡，其他那些全是扯淡”；而由于 UFC 成了当时唯一的直播产品，“我们的业务增长了……直接冲上屋顶”。\n- 同一时期也让 White 看清了合作伙伴的质量：“事情真正砸到头上之前，你根本不知道谁是谁。”一家长期合作的赞助商反复要求他删除一条支持 Trump 的帖子；续约时，对方派来的代表搬出一个失去耐心的董事会，White 让他拿着报价，“揉成一个小得不能再小的球，然后塞进你们董事会的屁股里”。此后他的原则变成：“我只和与自己立场一致的人做生意。”\n\n### 10. 创业胜过格斗、没有备选方案，以及 Rogan 忠诚度的尾声\n- 当被直接问到，他是否和热爱格斗一样热爱创业——毕竟过去25年他看了“超过10,000场比赛”——White 毫不犹豫：“是的，毫无疑问。”他的办公室“像他妈的 Shark Tank 一样”运转，每天包括周末都会接待多个项目提案，并帮人彼此连接：“我没在找别的东西，我只希望他们都能赢。”他对软弱创始人的抱怨是：“我想自己安排工作时间，还要休几天假——那你就该继续替别人打工……你一旦参战，就真的是每天都在打仗。”\n- 在心态上，他借用了 Bruce Lee 的观点：永远不要对自己说负面的话，“哪怕你是在开玩笑，因为你的身体分不清其中的差别”；而对负能量的人，他会“他妈的立刻清除，不管你是谁”。至于失败，他说：“我从来不会想到某件事可能做不成。我会一直做下去，直到它成功。”Senra 将其与 Arnold Schwarzenegger 写下肯定语句，以及 Todd Graves 通过自我洗脑坚信 Raising Cane's 必须成功的做法联系起来；White 则指着办公室墙壁说：“我每天真的都把这些东西挂在墙上，让它们不断对我说话。”\n- 结尾是 Rogan 的故事：White 在纽约旧办公室整理 VHS 磁带时，看到 Joe Rogan 出现在一档由他称为 Ivory Kenan Wayans 的人主持的脱口秀上，心想：“这他妈就是我要找的人。”Rogan 最初为 UFC 免费解说了12场比赛；后来多年间，他和 White 轮流参加凌晨3点开始的电台跑场，因为“格斗选手不适合做广播”，而当时没有人认识 White。多年后，当赞助商或其他人试图规定 Rogan 应该怎么做时，White 的回答是：“Joe Rogan 什么事都不会有。”Dana 最后的总结词是“忠诚”；Senra 认为，这对 White 来说是世界上最重要的东西。","shows":{"name":"David Senra","hosts":"David Senra"}}