Dana White: The Man Behind the UFC

I 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.”

They 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?

100%. 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.

The 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.

But 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.”

Exactly 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.

The 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.

Talk about the first few events. How many events do you guys put on a year now?

We do about 43 or 44 events a year. When we bought the company, we were doing 5, which seemed like a lot.

The fact that you were doing less meant that you were learning slower, too. Was there just no way you could do more than 5?

Oh, 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.

We 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.

One 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?

Right.

That trough.

We 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.

We 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.”

So, they put up the $2 million.

Yeah.

I think you got 10% or 20% of the company, and then your job was to run it, right?

Right.

Now it sounds like they were investing a couple more million every year.

Well, this was like 4 years in, I would say.

What was the revenue back then?

“Get out there and see what you can sell it for.”

Was it making $10 million a year in revenue, and you guys were spending another $10 million?

Yeah, 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.

All 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.

All 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.

So, anything you could put a UFC logo on.

Right. We talk about it now, Lorenzo and me, and we think those guys were probably laughing at us when we left.

Lionsgate was like, “These idiots just gave us a couple million dollars for nothing.”

You’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.

I’m friends with Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter.

Mhm.

She’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.

He’s still in the public eye.

They’re still relevant, and people will watch them. People care, and they’re great movies.

But they sold us all the rights back. Cheap, too.

What 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.

Well, 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.”

I’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.”

He always says it’s pretty amazing what a good night’s sleep can do for you. They hung in there.

Our 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.

Yeah.

Our goal was to get it on free television, which everybody thought was impossible. Right around 2004 or 2005, reality shows started becoming big.

Everybody 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.

This 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.

My big thing was that, right around the same time, The Contender had come out. It was the most expensive reality show ever.

Mark Burnett’s the guy who did Survivor, right?

Boxing. Yeah, he did Survivor. Mark Burnett’s done everything. He did Trump’s show.

The Apprentice?

Yeah.

Okay.

So, 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.

If 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.”

The 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.

Let 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.

You’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.”

For 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.

I 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.

But 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.

We’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.

Yeah.

If it’s over and it sucks, then we’ll both probably agree that it sucks.

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How 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?

We 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.

So, they said no, or “Not interested,” and then you come back and say, “We’re going to pay for production.”

Yep.

So, at that point, they’re just distribution. What’s there?

100%. There’s no downside to them.

You took the risk away from them.

Yeah. They had spent a shitload of money on a bunch of content that didn’t work.

But that means you own the show, right?

At the time, it was the last $10 million investment we were going to make in the UFC.

Whoa.

Yes.

So, if it didn’t work out—

That’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.

Then, 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.

That’s insane.

Yeah.

So, the fight ends, you go out in the alley, and they’re like, “No, no, no. We want to renew with you guys.”

“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.

But 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.

When you had this fight with Forrest Griffin, what venue were you in?

The Thomas & Mack is UNLV’s stadium. We were at the small venue right next door to it. It was called the Cox Pavilion.

A couple hundred people?

3,500, 4,000, something like that.

3,000 to 5,000.

Think about the growth in your company from that to now.

Our 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.

It’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.

You’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.

Technology has been great to us.

I 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—

“Oh my God, yeah. That sounds huge. That sounds like it’s going to be real fucking big.”

Good for you. And then you’ve embraced them.

Yeah.

Was television the vast majority of the revenue for the business when you did this deal with Spike?

Yeah, 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.

Coming 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.

Power Slap’s reality show is at, like, 50 million views on YouTube, so it’s still a home run. The format is incredible.

You 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.

I 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?

Trillions of dollars in revenue and nothing exists at the end of the day.

You 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.

Exactly. 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.

With Paramount, too? They get everything.

They get everything.

Well, for, like, $8 billion—

The UFC is on Paramount, yeah.

And 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?

When 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.

This is before Spike, though?

It 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.

If 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.

And I did take it pretty seriously then, because when those checks started rolling in from DVDs, it was like, “Holy shit.”

Millions of dollars.

And 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.

Literally nobody knew me then, so I’d go there, grab our shit, and put it in the front of the fucking store.

So, 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?

Yeah.

Yeah, 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.

Yeah.

Right? 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.

If 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.

I 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.”

But 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.

When 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?

I’m shocked Netflix didn’t win this bid.

Yeah, 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.

Can you say any more about the negotiation? What was that like, dealing with them?

It 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.

We 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.

I’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.

He calls himself Philippe Dauman. He’s from fucking Jersey. His name’s Phil Dooman. One of the biggest douchebags of all fucking time.

We 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.

We 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.

That 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.

That’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?

Yes.

First of all, he should sponsor the UFC.

I’ve met him.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, we’ve met.

He’s just like you, because you get off on being told, “Dana, you can’t do it.”

Right.

He 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.”

And high school kids. My kids—

Oh, no, no, now—

That’s all my kids ate when they were in high school.

Yeah. 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.

He 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—”

Literally. And now he owns over 90% of the company. It’s like, what is he selling? Fucking chicken fingers?

Funny you say that, because Lorenzo Fertitta always used to say to me, “You were put on this earth to do this.”

There’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.”

It’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.”

Dead-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.

There 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.”

Even 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.

Back 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.”

But 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?”

I 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.”

A million? That’s it?

Yeah, $3 million. We put up $3 million.

We 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.”

Now 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.

First event.

It’s been profitable since the first event.

First event. Okay, explain what you did differently.

Well, 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.

I 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.

Now, 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.

Everybody 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?

100%. 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.

People 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.

So, what I care about is the live, in-house experience—

Tailored to what you want—you, as a single individual.

Yeah.

You’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.

There 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.

What happens when you see something you don’t like?

I 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.”

I’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.”

You 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.

I heard the story of you kicking through a fucking door. What was that?

The production team. Those were the guys I told you about at the beginning of the interview—the ones I fired.

Okay, so explain what happened.

We 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.

I 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.

Well, 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.”

We 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.

I 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.

So, 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.

MrBeast 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.

That’s my whole production team right now. Literally, my whole production team.

Now 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.

My 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.

I 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.

Yeah, I’ve heard you shout her out on a few of the podcasts, too.

Animal.

Yeah. How many years did it take you to do that? How many people did you have to turn over? What was that process like?

I 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.

There’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.

We 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.

So, 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—

I’ve watched over 10,000 fights in the last 25 years, not including fights that I’ve watched that weren’t mine.

That’s incredible.

Yeah.

I 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.

Yeah, there’s no doubt about it.

Really?

Yeah. 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.

Now 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.

So, 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.

It’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?

People don’t understand that entrepreneurs come and seek out your advice. You’re on the fucking board of Meta, for God’s sake.

So, right here, normally you guys rip my fucking room apart here.

Tell them what you see, because they can’t see it. This is not a normal podcast.

Yeah, 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.

Every 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.

Why do you like talking to entrepreneurs so much?

I 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.

So, 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.

I'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.

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I'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?

The 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.

I'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.

Then 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.

Especially 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.

They're human beings on planet Earth. They're not like all of us. They're wired differently, which is what makes them special.

You 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.”

The 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.’”

If 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.

I don't know what any of those are. Look, I want to hear about that in a minute.

That's 9 brands right there that, if you're an influencer—

Now, 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.

When 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.

You 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?

No, it's like a simple genius.

Mm-hmm.

It 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.

Larry 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.”

I just thought that was beautiful. That guy's stupid? He's landing rockets.

I 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?

I 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?”

I 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.

I 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.

Uh-huh.

Can you say more about that?

First 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.

For 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.

Now, Lorenzo's done. He's out. He doesn't want to do the second deal, so he puts the business up for sale.

Yeah.

Okay. 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.

Nothing. 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?

Spike: $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.

It'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.

You 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.

I 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.

It's crazy that it took Netflix so long to get into sports. I was saying it way before they did.

The thing is, streaming’s great. Right now, I don’t watch a lot of TV.

Yeah. Well, you seem to be a little busy.

Almost none, right? Something’s really got to get me to watch it. And I was saying this before the Paramount deal.

Yeah.

Way 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.

So 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.

Yep.

Exactly. So it always made sense for streaming platforms to go after sports.

And as they continue to scale and they’re global, exactly what you said: the numbers are going to keep going up.

100%. 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.

I’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.

It’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.

The 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.

Very true. I love it.

Yeah, it’s crazy. So—

I 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.

Yeah.

What was your response to the people that criticized you?

Well, 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?

What’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.

But 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.

You don’t have to know.

Here, right now, we’re in.

But 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.

If 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.

You 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.

100%. 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?

No, that isn’t the way it worked, and that was way before AI. Whatever the new technology is, we’re on it.

I 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.

I’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.

I’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?

Yeah. 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.

Billionaires 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.

I 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?’”

You’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.

I 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.

Then 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.

Then 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.”

If 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.”

You 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.”

Give me some examples of people that you thought of as cautionary tales.

People who don’t value their employees. I’ve seen a lot of them.

I 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.

Yeah.

You offered to give up all of your compensation.

Yeah.

Why?

My 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.

I 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.”

My 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.

I 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?

A couple weeks. So, I’m fucking going. We’re going no matter what. Now, I have the Khabib versus Tony Ferguson fight.

Which time, though?

[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.”

Brooklyn 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.

So, 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?”

Anyway, 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?”

The 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.”

Oh, wow.

Then 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—

—in town.

—and our business grew. It just fucking blew up and went through the roof.

How 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.

Right. 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.

The 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.

And 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.”

Very fucking true.

Sponsors 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.

We 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.

It 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.”

Then 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.”

So, 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.”

We 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.”

Coming 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.

One 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.

The 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.

The 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.”

I 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.

Yeah. 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.

All 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.”

Assuming 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?

Not 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.

It’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—

I saw that clip, too.

It makes it worse.

Yeah, which makes sense.

Yeah.

It’s like, I never take in any negativity. I literally block it. I call it noise, and I block all that noise out.

We’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?

But 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.

I 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.

What 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.

He 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.”

Then 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.”

He had positive affirmations, and he'd hang them up everywhere. He'd brainwash himself into this positive thinking that you were just talking about.

I cut negative people out of my life so fast, and it doesn't matter who you are.

Listen, 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.

He'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.

But 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.”

That 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.”

So, 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.

Dude, 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.

I'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.

Let 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.

So, 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.

I 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.”

So, I reach out to Rogan, and we hit it off immediately. In Rogan's rise, he's gone through some shit personally, too.

[GASPS]

You 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.”

[SNORTS]

Who 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?

Then, 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.

I'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.

What 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?

The 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.

You'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.

To 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.

Loyalty.

Yes, which is the most important thing in the world to me. Dana, thanks for doing this.

That was awesome, man. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

I 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.