Dana White recounts fleeing Boston's South Boston crime family to Las Vegas, where he turned the UFC from a $40 million debt into a powerhouse by self-funding The Ultimate Fighter and rejecting boxing's "going out of business sale" model. He contrasts this with Saudi Arabia's intervention in boxing, details winning $16.5 million at Caesars Palace, and champions building a loyal team over corporate bureaucracy. Ultimately, White argues that sustainable success requires investing in fighter safety and fostering a culture where performance is rewarded, proving that niche sports and aggressive business strategies can disrupt traditional industries. [Automatically generated summary]
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Roger Mayweather Wedding Tape00:15:03
A few years in, I got the phone call one day and he's like, I don't know if we can keep doing this, man.
You're upside down $40 million.
This is what.
Wow.
Speaking of Connor, is this marketing on Connor's behalf?
I will tell you this.
I don't give a fuck what anybody says.
Ali, Connor, both level when it comes to mental warfare.
A month and a half later, we own the UFC for $2 million.
It's worth what now?
$12, $13 billion.
If I brought up Jake Paul, pretty much everybody in the room and the other room wants to see Jake Paul get knocked out.
Did you help set that up?
Because I know you're close with Tyson.
God, no.
I want to go to Caesar Palace.
I'm in this war with them right now.
Since Jan 1, I beat them for $16.5 million.
I've been clipping them from anywhere from $800 to a million a night.
When I lose, I'll go guns a blazing and go through my whole credit line, which is $6 million.
You've lost $6?
Yeah.
So I'll lose $6 million.
Well, I'm still up $10 million on them.
Where's my phone?
Can you guys hear me in the other room?
Bring me my phone if you can hear me.
Why?
What do you got?
What do you got?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to Flagrant.
Today we're here.
We're here with the big man.
It's Dana White in the building.
Yeah, Dana White is in the building.
Finally, long overdue.
Okay, I did a lot of research, obviously, for this because I want to, you know, go in depth.
I came across something.
I don't know if this is true or not, but it's out there on the internet that you were, there was like a hit on you or something in Boston by Whitey Bolger.
Is this true?
It's not true.
That is not true.
So how does this story even get out?
Why are you sort of like that, but it wasn't Whitey Bulger and it wasn't whatever.
Okay.
So back in the day in Boston, Whitey Bulger ran South Course.
Okay.
Yeah.
Legit.
I mean, you've seen the movies.
You've seen all the shit.
And, you know, it was like living in South Boston at that time was like another fucking, like these guys didn't know what century it was, man.
It was crazy.
Why?
And there were rules in that town.
Like, you didn't call the police.
And they later ended up finding out he was working with the FBI.
So people that did call the fucking police, he would know that he fucking did it.
You know, and he was working with the FBI against other mob guys for shit like that.
It's fascinating story.
But when you live there, yeah, you didn't do that shit.
One of his guys, you know, said that I owed him money.
Did you owe money?
No, I didn't owe money.
I didn't even know him.
I didn't even know him.
I didn't know nothing.
And, you know, it got to the point where, you know, I got a phone call one day at the house that I lived in and basically said, you got till Sunday to fucking pay us.
Sunday at one or whatever the number was.
And I said, or what?
And they're like, are you going to find out?
So I literally hung up the phone, picked it back up, and called Delta and got a one-way fucking ticket to Vegas.
And that was a wrap.
And what's crazy about it, when you look at, you know, how everything played out in my life, including, you know, the purchase of the UFC, had that not happened, I wouldn't have been in Vegas at the time that all this was going on.
Oh, wow.
When you look back on your life, and I'm sure everybody on this fucking couch and everybody watching can do it.
You say, holy shit, this happened, that happened, this happened.
And at that time.
What if it was really for Titta?
If you don't move to Vegas, you're fucking dead.
Well, that's crazy too, because when I got out there, I was on the grind when I was in my 20s.
And I quit drinking when I was 21.
I stopped drinking and I only focused on work and what I wanted to do, right?
So random.
You quit 21.
I had this fucking idea.
I quit bossing.
That shows you what I was doing.
But we had the fake IDs and all that shit.
I'd already done all that shit.
He'd been drinking for 19 years.
It was good.
I got it out of my system before I was 21.
So I had this blanket policy.
You know, when you get into your 20s, everybody starts getting fucking married.
All your friends.
I didn't go to anybody's wedding.
Blanket policy.
Wow.
You were getting married.
Love you.
I'll send you a gift.
I'm not going anywhere.
Wait, why?
Why would you refuse to go to the most important day of their life?
It's time consuming man.
It's weekend, somebody's getting married.
You know what I mean.
I guess i'm happy for you, but i'm not going.
So I uh, you would have hated my wedding, that's the thing.
Then you got these people that do the destination wedding.
Okay, i'm out.
So you this.
There's this kid named Adam Corrigan that I grew up with in in Vegas right, And he had money.
I didn't have money.
And he was always a good dude.
He would pick me up and drive me to school every day.
Like would drive me to school every day.
So when you think about in high school, to get up and get me and drive me to work, this dude had to wake up an hour earlier every day to drive me to school.
Never forgot that.
People who do things for me like that, I never forget.
He was getting married.
So there was no fucking way I wasn't going to go to his wedding.
I go to his wedding, and who do I run into?
The Fertita brothers.
Wow.
I haven't seen in fucking years.
Lorenzo Fertita comes up to me and says, hey, how you been?
And this and that.
Good.
You know, we hadn't seen each other since high school.
You guys went to high school together.
That's the other thing a lot of people don't even fucking realize.
You guys knew each other originally.
From high school.
So then I don't talk to him.
And it's like me and Lorenzo knew each other in high school, but we weren't friends.
It's not like we hung out and did whatever.
We knew each other.
So he says to me at the wedding, I hear you're doing this boxing thing.
I just got on the athletic commission.
I would love to come train with you.
I said, let's do it on Monday.
He came and trained with me on Monday, and we've been together ever since.
So the one fucking wedding that I go to.
Imagine where you'd be if you go to all the ways.
Yeah, you should have gone to the next one.
The president of 1994.
And the president ruling the world.
He'd be Jeff Bezos.
Thank God.
For all of our sakes, you didn't go to any other wedding.
We have a chance.
Okay.
So you guys, like, and you're training, you're training him in boxing.
Right.
Because you were training people.
You were running boxing gyms as well.
Exactly.
So there was a gym.
When I first came back to Vegas, there was a gym called United Champions.
And it was me, this guy named Nick Onekick, who was a Muay Thai trainer, and Roger Mayweather.
Austin 3.
Out of here.
Austin.
Austin 3.
I've been in the Mayweathers for decades.
Yeah.
30.
And was Roger as wild back in the day?
Roger was a fucking maniac.
Okay.
So people, just to put this in perspective, Roger trained Floyd because Floyd and his dad, they had some sort of...
His dad was in jail.
So his dad was in jail.
So while he was in jail, his uncles, you know, Roger and Jeff took care of Floyd.
Yeah, Jeff was much younger though.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Jeff was younger than Roger.
Yeah.
So those guys, you know, sort of took Floyd under their wing and helped Floyd out while the dad was in jail.
Well, his dad was in jail.
So that's how me and Floyd became close and got to know each other, you know, early on.
And yeah, so it was me, Roger, and Nick Onekick that worked out of United Champions.
Wow.
Sorry, can I ask you about your first time meeting Floyd?
What's your impressions of him?
What do you think of him?
Yeah, I liked Floyd.
You know, Floyd came out of the Olympics and was a charismatic, good-looking kid, you know, talented.
And yeah, I like Floyd.
Wow.
It's funny when I first go ahead.
No, no, I don't, I don't want to fast forward, but like the Floyd-Connor fight now is an even crazier event, but we can get to that later.
Right.
So no, Floyd and I have known each other for a long time.
And, you know, when I first met Floyd, he lived in an apartment that top rank used to put a lot of their fighters in.
He lived in this apartment down on, I want to say it was off Flamingo.
And, you know, he just started to make some money.
So, you know, I went over his Pasasi was showing me all the sweaters that he bought and all the things.
You know, Floyd's always been that guy.
He likes to shop and he likes to buy clothes.
And, you know, it started the minute he made his first dollar.
Right, right.
Okay, so you're in this gym.
I imagine tons of characters and everything rolling through the gym.
Like, what is your period of ingratiating yourself to these guys?
Yeah, so what would happen?
We had a real weird fucking dynamic there because I was training like businessmen and housewives and shit like that.
And then you got fucking Roger Mayweather.
100%.
I mean, there were, you know, the fights would break out in this fucking gym.
And I'll never forget.
So there was this heavyweight and his name was Tracy.
And him and fucking Roger Mayweather got into it one day in there.
And Roger had fucking jeans on and the shirt takes his fucking shirt off and like, we're fucking fighting.
So they get up into the ring and they put gloves on and Tracy and Roger Mayweather start fucking fighting.
Tracy's a heavyweight.
He's a pro.
Roger fought at what, 147?
Exactly.
Roger's fucking rail.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they're fucking banging.
Yeah, yeah.
Banging in there, right?
So the bell rings and Tracy stops punching and Roger fucking blasts him and says, no rounds, motherfucker.
Wow.
And they just keep fucking going.
And then what eventually happens is the heavyweight gas is out and Rogers fucking just beats the fucking shit out of him to the point where everybody had to jump in the ring and fucking break it up.
Stop it.
Yeah, that was the kind of shit that went on there on a daily basis.
What would you say?
And then you had Nick Onekick, the Muay Thai guy's fucking crew that was in there.
That crazy shit would happen.
It was just, it's fucking nuts.
The whole fight world, the real fight world is a crazy fucking business.
And why were you drawn to this?
I've always liked it since I was a kid.
But do you like, did you like chaos and shit?
I love everything about fighting, man.
And it's not just, I was a huge boxing fan, obviously, but boxing, martial arts, you know, fucking the fight after school at the park.
I mean, all that type.
Oh, I'm fucking because you were getting kicked out of the middle of the day.
I didn't miss one fucking fight that happened after school at the park.
Were you involved?
Were you some, but mostly watched.
I watched a lot of fights.
Yeah.
I like fights, man.
I just always have.
Okay.
It's what I love.
I mean, look how long I've been doing this and I still love it.
I can't wait for this weekend.
Yeah.
There's a there's yeah, there's a well, we'll get we'll get to that later.
There's a really cool story about you that I think that has been confirmed, but it was told by a mutual friend.
And it was about when Rogan was going through one of his like many cancellations.
And, you know, maybe some people at the network were like, I think we got to set this guy aside.
And what I heard was that you said, if he goes, I go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I never talked.
So Lex Friedman, I did his podcast and apparently he was there when this all went down, but this has never been talked about or brought up or whatever and would have never been talked about if Lex Friedman didn't bring it up.
But yeah, when Rogan was going through his thing, you know, it was at the peak of this cancel cultural shit going on, right?
And I was like, yeah, fuck that shit.
First of all, it's easy to look at things, you know, like when you look at Rogan and Rogan makes shitloads of money.
He's got the biggest podcast in the world and all this shit.
But back in the day, so when we bought the UFC, the UFC was based in New York.
So the offices were here.
You know, it was illegal to put on the offices were here.
Bob Meyerwitz, the owner, is from New York and the offices were here in New York.
So after we bought the company, I jumped on a plane and I flew out here and I had to go through the office and figure out what I was going to bring to Vegas and what I was going to leave.
What was worth it?
Well, they had a room that was just full of fucking tapes, right?
So I had to go through each fucking tape and watch every tape to make sure it wasn't something important.
So I pop in this tape and it's the Keenan Ivory Wayne show.
He had his own talk show.
I remember that.
And they had fucking Joe Rogan on.
And Keenan Ivory Wayne says to him, you're into this ultimate fighting stuff, huh?
And Rogan starts going fucking off on the UFC, Maurice Smith, and what he would do to all these action stars and all this stuff.
And this is the fucking Fear Factor guy.
You know what I mean?
And the way that Joe talked and how passionate he was, I go, this is the fucking guy that I need.
This is the fucking guy.
It just hit me, right?
So I reach out to Rogan and we start going back and forth.
And I said, I would love you to come in and be one of the commentators.
And Rogan's attitude was, so wait a minute.
So you're saying I can come over there, sit in the best seats in the house and watch the sport that I love for fucking free?
Yeah.
I'm in.
So at the time, financially, we were getting fucking murdered.
Rogan did the first 12 or 13 shows for free.
Wow.
For free.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's stoked.
He's and killed it.
And the thing that I loved about Joe Rogan was when you were sitting there and watching Joe Rogan on TV and he was on the mic, he wasn't one of these HBO fucking goofball talking fucking heads that were being paid.
You felt that this dude not only knew what he was talking about, but loved what this is about.
And that began the relationship with me and Joe Rogan that now has been coming up on 20 something years.
And so you think that you're going to fucking cancel Joe Rogan and you're going to, and I'm going to just say, okay, no, I will fucking quit this job and leave and go do something else before you're going to try to fucking.
I loved it.
And the whole cancel thing, you know, I just literally just talked about this a couple days ago with, you know, if you're in the right place in your life and who the fuck's going to cancel you?
Yeah.
The only people that, the only ones that can really cancel you are your fucking family and your friends.
Yeah.
Fuck all these other people.
Yeah, yeah, strangers.
Fuck your life.
Who gives a shit?
Yeah, yeah.
What any of these fucking people think.
Dude, it's so funny how serendipitous your life is.
You get kicked out of Boston, luckily.
You go to a wedding randomly and meet the guy.
You're looking at tapes.
Did you look through every single tape?
I went through every fucking tape in that building.
Because you have to clear out a hoarder's supply closet.
Well, you have to make sure you're not throwing away something that's actually valuable that you need in the future.
You know what I mean?
Okay.
But I had to determine what we were going to keep and what we weren't going to keep.
Did you get anything else out of those tapes?
I mean, it's all worth it if you got Joe, but anyway.
I mean, if you look at what became of Joe Rogan and how important he is to the sport, without a doubt, the most valuable tape that I watched that day.
Absolutely.
Okay.
You were saying the business was losing money like crazy.
Do you ever sit down with the Fertitta brothers and go, okay, let's buy this.
This can be something.
Why do you even feel it can be something?
Buying The UFC For Millions00:16:01
Like, take me through this lot.
I'll tell you a crazy story.
So at the time, I was managing guys, right?
Boxers and MMA fighters.
What boxers do you have?
I had any guys out there?
And how did that happen?
Yeah.
It's fucking crazy.
Somebody else just asked me this question too.
How it happened, I don't know.
I always had this thing where I don't know.
People would come to me and ask me to help them with, you should see my office now.
Like every day, a majority of my day is taking meetings with people that are building businesses and want to ask if I will be a part of their.
It's like fucking shark tank at my office every day.
I'm literally in there and people are pitching me their business ideas.
And oddly enough, before I had ever really done anything, I owned gyms and was in the training business.
People have always come to me and asked me to help them do something.
So it happened in the fight world.
I had these gyms and I was training people and fighters would come to me.
Derek, fuck Derek.
What's your last name, Derek?
I got Derek a fight with Roy Jones Jr.
I did the deal for that fight.
Derek Harmon.
I got Derek Harmon the fight with Roy Jones.
I negotiated that deal and did all that.
Before we bought the UFC, that was the biggest thing I had ever done before we bought the UFC.
This is Roy's heyday.
Are you telling your fighter, like, go out there, give it your best shot?
No, this is a, you know, let's see how much money we can get for this fight.
Fucking Roy Jones.
Roy Jones is going to get all the money.
You're going to make a couple million bucks and get in there and try to fucking beat him.
Guys, we got to do dates real quick.
Indianapolis, June 7th and June 8th this weekend.
After that, we're in Raleigh, North Carolina, Raleigh, however you guys say it, June 21st and 22nd.
Buffalo, the 28th and 29th.
Jacksonville, July 26th and 27th.
And Hawaii.
I want to announce this.
I'm coming to Honolulu August 29th and 30th.
Those dates and more, go to akashing.com for tickets.
I love y'all.
Thank you guys.
Everybody's coming to shows.
It's great.
I'm just very thankful.
Thank you guys.
Love you.
Let's get back to the show.
So you start, you're managing some of these guys, these MMA guys.
Do you feel MMA's popularity rising or do you see this like white space where you're like, okay, I can turn this into something?
Yeah, I don't think that we saw the popularity rising.
What we saw was, first of all, we started taking jujitsu, me and the Fertita brothers.
We took jiu-jitsu.
We fucking fell in love with Jiu-Jitsu.
Frank, actually, the oldest brother.
We were out one night at the Hard Rock and we saw John Lewis, who was the only guy in Vegas at the time that had a jiu-jitsu studio.
And Frank's like, that's that ultimate fighter guy.
I said, I know him.
And he's like, I've always wanted to learn ground fighting.
I said, let's go talk to him.
We talked to him.
We set up a meeting session on Monday.
And me, Frank, and Lorenzo all went and became addicted.
We started training four or five days a week, trying to rip each other's fucking heads off and arms off.
And sorry, did you just know him because the fight world is that small?
Yeah, I knew him just from being in the fight world in Vegas.
And through John Lewis, he started bringing in BJ Penn, fucking Chuck.
We started to meet all these guys and we started training with them and we became obsessed.
And then we went to a UFC event and me and Lorenzo were literally sitting in the crowd going, imagine if they fucking did this and imagine if they did that.
This thing could be big.
I mean, they didn't sell merchandise.
They didn't have programs.
They didn't fucking do anything.
They didn't really care about the live event.
They just focused on the pay-per-view, the television side.
And we just saw a lot of opportunities.
The other thing that we saw was the boxing guys all had the same story.
We came from the mean streets of such and such.
And if it wasn't for boxing, we'd be dead or in jail.
That was like every guy's story.
You meet these guys.
I mean, if you...
I'm a science teacher from Nebraska.
There's all these people.
We came from different places that all had different stories, right?
And the thing that I loved is if you were involved in martial arts growing up, you came for money.
That's true.
Because it was expensive to put your kids in martial arts.
Or you graduated college because you wrestled.
So we had, you know, if you look at Chuck Liddell at the time, right?
If you thought about what the stereotypical ultimate fighter looked like, it was Chuck Liddell.
The Mohawk, the Chinese writing on the head, the goate.
He looked like a fucking accenter, right?
The guy graduated with honors from Cal Poly with an accounting degree.
Wow.
Right?
I mean, you didn't have any of those stories in boxing.
So one of the things that we really loved were the stories, that there were different storylines for these guys that would appeal to different groups of people.
You know what I mean?
Okay, so you guys make the offer.
What's the offer?
And how do you even approach them?
So here's what happened.
So I was representing Tito Ortiz at the time, right?
And Tito, my boy.
Tito had got fucked over by them because he showed up to a fight and he was supposed to be paid a certain amount of money.
Well, the fight didn't do well.
So right before the fight goes off, they went back and told him, yeah, we're not paying you what we told you we were going to pay you.
We're going to pay you this instead.
And he's like, well, then I won't fucking fight.
And they said, then don't fight.
Doesn't matter.
We don't care.
We're not going to make any money on this event anyway.
So they're hamorriding money.
So Tito had to fight.
So he fought.
So I'm going in, negotiating his new contract, and I'm trying to get them to pay him the money that they fucked him on on that fight, right?
So finally, the owner blows up on me and says, you know what?
There is no more fucking money.
I don't even know if I can put on the next event.
I literally hung up the phone, picked it back up, called the Fertida brothers and said, I think the fucking UFC is in trouble.
I think they're going to go under.
And I think we could buy the company.
And I think we should.
So Lorenzo fucking reached out to Bob Meyerwitz.
And, you know, a month and a half later, we owned the UFC for $2 million.
Now, I don't want to hold it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hold on.
Okay.
So you buy it for two million.
It's worth what now?
Now?
Yeah.
$12, $13 billion.
Okay.
Okay.
It sounds great now, but we went through a lot of shit to get it.
That's what I want to hear.
How long was the UFC around before that day?
Like before you bought it?
Well, now, we bought it back in 2001.
So we've owned it for 23, 25 years, whatever the fuck it is.
It's been around for 30 years.
Started in 94.
I think a question, I don't want to count your pockets, but 2 million back then seems like a lot of money.
You guys own some gyms, whatever.
How do you get that money together?
What's that process like you're taking out loans?
Well, now he just said, what a great return on your money.
Absolutely.
At the time when we bought it for $2 million, we were literally the fucking red-headed stepchild of the Fertita portfolio.
Like every, you know, smart fucking, you know, numbers fucking geek that worked for the Fertidas hated this investment, thought it was ridiculous, and that the Fertidas were going to lose all their money.
Every fucking one of them.
There's a lot of people that run around now claiming, oh, the UFC, I believe.
Yeah.
Nobody fucking, there were three guys that believed in it.
Me, Frank, and Lorenzo.
That was fucking it.
Yeah, okay.
And basically what we had to do was start to think about this too.
When we bought it, none of us had ever fucking done production.
We'd never put on a fucking show in our lives.
Okay, so are you outsourcing?
Are you reaching out to boxing guys?
No, here's what we knew.
We were huge fans.
We were fight nerds.
We knew what we wanted.
Now it was just a matter of building it.
And the problem is, number one, when you want to do what we did, and number two, when you want to do what we did and you don't know what the fuck you're doing, it's expensive.
Right.
So every time you put on a show, it's a couple million bucks.
So are you losing immediately?
A few years in, you know, you're upside down $40 million fucking dollars.
This is what I think the perception of the UFC is immediate success.
You guys buy it, Chuck Liddell, Tito, they start banging away.
Then this Connor McGregor guy comes around and everybody's a billionaire says it's done.
I want to know the most you're, you're down 40 million at one point.
So we're probably by 2004, we're upside down $40 million.
And we're only doing five events a year.
And explain to me what that means.
That's like you're losing money on the shows you're putting on.
You're losing money on what the deals you're doing.
So we're losing money on the shows.
We're losing money on overhead, you know, the expenses for the office and employees and every way that you could possibly lose money in a business.
We're fucking losing money.
What keeps you going at this point mentally?
Because 40 million is, I know you got a lot of willpower.
40 million is 40 million.
Understand this too.
Think about this.
So when we bought the UFC, right?
We basically bought those three letters and an old wooden octagon and we had like 13, 14 fucking contracts.
That's it, right?
The old owner had sold away the home video rights, the video game rights, and all that shit.
Lionsgate Entertainment owned all that shit.
Probably one of the fucking craziest stories that's never been told is you want to talk about people not believing in the fucking UFC and thinking that this thing was not going to work.
We went to Lionsgate, right?
To negotiate to buy the rights back to all of our fucking intellectual property.
The fucking everything from t-shirts to video games to action figures, everything that you can throw a fucking UFC logo on.
Now, if you're Lionsgate, why the fuck would you sell that?
Yeah.
Right?
The bigger you make the business, the more money they make.
100%, right?
That's how much people didn't fucking believe.
We went in and negotiated the rights.
And when we walked out of that fucking office, they were probably like, these poor fucking jerk-offs are going to pay us, you know, $3 million over the next fucking four years for these rights back.
And, you know, you got some, again, a numbers guy who doesn't fucking believe in anything.
You know, not just that, but he's like, if you look at our books over the next three years, we're going to add these numbers.
Imagine if Lionsgates wouldn't sell us those rights back.
How much fucking money they'd be making right now off, you know what I mean?
It's, it's incredible.
So you're down 40.
Tell me the moment.
Oh, and by the way, when we bought these rights back, that's when the DVD business went like this.
So we're putting out these fucking DVDs.
That's what I remember people watching it originally.
It wasn't pay-per-view.
The first fucking checks we started to get were from DVDs.
You know, when the DVD business took off, you know, we were getting $2 million fucking checks off of DVDs.
Does that help and float you?
Like, I'm still.
No, it didn't help float.
You know, it was the only revenue coming in at the time.
Because you put on, just so I can understand, and the people homecond it, you put on an event, you would create a DVD of the event, and then you would sell these DVDs to the people that couldn't watch it on pay-per-view or whatever.
100%.
Got it, got it, got it.
And then we started doing compilation shows, best knockouts, best missions, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And that shit sold really well.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, yeah, what I'm still trying, because as a comic, there's a period where you don't think you're going to make it.
I'm broke.
I'm not 40 million in debt.
What is your mentality as you are upside down 40 million?
What are you thinking?
What's your emotional state?
What's your, I think you're with your wife at the time.
What's that?
Yeah, I was always just on the fucking grind.
I go into work every day and I keep my head down.
I'm fucking going forward.
I mean, if you look at what we've done, I get to work at 8:30, 9 o'clock in the morning every day, and I leave the office at 8 o'clock, 8.30 every fucking night.
So that's always been my drive, my focus, my mentality, whatever the fuck you want to call it.
But I got the phone call one day from Lorenzo.
Yeah.
And he's like, I don't know if we can keep doing this, man.
This is fucking, you know, get out there.
What year is this?
What year is this?
2004.
So 2003, you buy.
One.
So one, you buy.
2004, you get the phone call.
Okay, how does the phone call call?
2004.
You need to leave Vegas.
Get out there.
There's less debt over there.
I mean, it's too brand.
Whitey, I need to come back there, right?
Now I see how white he both.
So, yeah, get out there and see what you could sell this thing for.
So I start making calls.
Oh, fuck.
And I call him back at the end of the day and I'm like, six or seven million.
He's like, okay.
Did you lie?
Did you get like a $60 million offer?
Six, seven is what I felt we could sell it for.
And he says, all right, I'll talk to you tomorrow.
So he hangs up the phone and I'm like, this is a fucking rap.
This is fucking, it's over.
The next morning, I'm driving to work and he calls me and says, fuck it.
Let's keep going.
Wow.
That's awesome.
So we start working really hard on trying to figure out how to get on fucking television because we think that that's the key to success.
We believe that if we get on free television, more people will see this, love it like we do, and it'll work.
And is that Spike?
So, well, then Spike TV.
Let me jump ahead.
If there was another moment that changed things.
You're dead on.
So what happens is, I want to say it was the Nashville network or whatever it was before it was Spike.
They switch it to the men's network, Spike TV.
And we're like, if this isn't a fucking slam dunk for us, right?
What's more of a men's show than fucking UFC?
So we go and pitch the guys on it.
Spike hates it.
They don't like it.
And we remember that day, we talk about it all the time.
These guys were, it was in LA and they were going to the fucking Dodgers game that day and they could not get out of this fucking meeting fast enough to go see the Dodgers play.
And we called them back a few days later and said, because it was going to cost $10 million to produce the show, The Ultimate Fighter.
Because reality shows were hot at the time.
So we came up with this concept for the reality show and that's what we pitched them on.
So we called them back three days later and said, well, what if we put up the 10 million ourselves?
They like that idea better.
So I'll tell you what else is incredible.
So because, again, nobody believed.
You retain everything for me.
So we put up the money.
We retain 100% of all the rights.
So we own everything lockstock and fucking barrel.
Do you remember what their reservations were at the time?
Great question.
It's just nobody, nobody fucking believed in this thing and nobody thought it was going to be fucking big.
And, you know, it's sort of become my thing.
It's what I fucking love to do.
It's the same thing with PowerSlap.
This thing got shit on.
This thing's been around for 15 months.
It's a $750 million business.
And it fucking crushes it.
Yeah.
We have all this.
It fucking crushes it.
I knew it was going to come up.
You brought it up.
I didn't bring it up.
I literally just got off a fucking call with one of the networks talking about it.
But it fucking absolutely fucking dominates social media.
So here's the thing about this is that it's impossible when you know someone's going to get slapped to not watch.
It's literally like if you're on scrolling on social media and I come across the clip, it's impossible.
I see a giant Samoan guy and a black dude looking at him and he's just biting down on something.
I'm going to fucking watch.
That's what happened to me when I started looking at this stuff in like 2018.
It was on Instagram and this stuff was coming out of Russia and Poland.
And I was like, what the fuck is this?
Right.
So I take a deeper dive into it and looks like it was filmed on a flip phone in a barn somewhere.
Nielsen Ratings And Social Media00:10:20
They're literally slapping over a barrel and it's got 350 million views on YouTube.
And at the time, that was like a fucking Justin Bieber video.
And I was like, what?
What if I did this?
Made it an actual sport, got it sanctioned and put good production value behind it.
The answer is fucking billions of views.
Billions of views globally.
And it destroys.
Think about this.
We started this thing 15 months ago.
Right.
And right now on YouTube, we have more subscribers than NHL, MLS, NASCAR, PGA, Barstool Sports.
We have over a billion YouTube views, right?
Eight of the top 12 largest YouTube shorts against other major sports are PowerSlap.
And four of the top five largest YouTube shorts on UFC's channel.
We're number one, two, three, and four on UFC.
And when you think about Connor McGregor, Ronda Rousey, Brock Lesnar, all the big stars, this thing absolutely dominates.
We have more followers than every single professional sport.
Every professional sports team, we have more followers than them.
In 15 months, more than like Real Madrid or like these soccer teams?
I don't know about the soccer teams, but I would say yes.
Every fucking sports team, we have more followers.
So I would say yes.
Yes.
Did you acquire the IP or did you just create your own?
No, we created our own and started.
You know, there were a couple of fucking leagues out of Poland and Russia.
So we just, I just started our own.
And why didn't you do that with UFC originally?
Like, why would you purchase those three letters and the wooden artists?
Well, the UFC fell on my lap.
I mean, I was in the middle of that call.
Yeah.
And we could buy the thing for $2 million.
Why would you not buy the UFC?
You know what I mean?
We probably wouldn't have gone out and started our own league.
But the thing fell on my lap.
Yeah.
Okay.
We can get to PowerSlap in a little bit.
I just want to go through the UFC.
Back to the share.
But the similarities between what's going on with the money.
This is why you believe in it so much.
So when people go to the bottom.
No, I want you to, I want you guys to wrap your fucking brains around this.
When I talk about PowerSlap, you're all dismissive.
Like, nobody's not.
The UFC was fucking worse.
The UFC was worse.
Worse.
And now I know how to motivate you to do anything.
I just got to tell you, it's not going to be a lot.
Dana, this thing sucks.
No, I'm not hard enough.
This happens.
Hey, David Day.
We got to bring PowerSlap.
We're on the phone today with the network.
Dana, you won't go to Turkey and get hair.
You won't get a hair transplanted turkey, Dana, no matter what.
I promise you.
You won't make this the biggest podcast episode.
I love the number one episode of this.
I love it.
Okay, you love being told no.
You love being told it's not going to be a lot of time.
You know, it's easy when I hit you with fucking numbers.
You can't.
There's no, you care if you do.
We have more views than any Taylor Swift video ever posted.
Oh, now you're talking about the Swifties, bro.
PowerSlap has more.
Swifties step up.
We have more views than any fucking Taylor Swift post.
Imagine you got 10.
And there's one.
There's other stats that I can hit you with that are just fucking.
You got to get Taylor into a PowerSlap, dude.
But they're unbelievable.
But when you look at this thing from a business perspective and you look at the numbers, you know what I mean?
But we're talking about guys fucking slapping each other.
You guys are like, let's talk more about the UFC.
The UFC was worse.
When we would walk into a room, nobody wanted to hear the fucking UFC.
The UFC is fucking gross.
You don't fucking hit somebody and jump on top of them and start beating them.
It's disgusting.
It's fucking this, that, and everything.
That's the same thing they're saying at that PowerSlap.
100%.
Yeah, yeah.
And I remember the early days of UFC.
My dad is like a lifelong boxing fan.
Used to go to Ali's camp in the Poconos, interview all the guys.
Like he used to work for NBC and lifelong boxing fan.
He saw some UFC early and he said this.
He goes, I know this makes no sense, but it's too violent for me.
And this is like, saw Sugar Ray Robinson driving around New York City when he was a kid.
Loves boxing.
But it seemed too violent for him.
100%.
So on average, 10 to 12 boxers die a year, right?
In boxing.
This is what I've tried to explain to.
Years.
Never a death or serious injuries in the UFC.
And this is what I tried to explain to him.
Sure, you know all these stats, but this idea, people didn't realize that the gloves, which we thought protected the boxers, actually can cause more 100%.
And all the sparring, but more importantly, it is the sparrow.
These guys don't, but I don't think a lot of give enough.
Yeah, it's like the old sparring wars that they used to do.
Like, I'll talk to some of the guys, like I was talking to Max Holloway, and he's like, Yeah, I don't really spar that much anymore.
And like, a lot of guys have limited it, and maybe they just have incredible timing and they can get away with it.
Where certain guys they just need to get in there and they need to get the work in, but but that will take years off your fucking heart.
100%.
Yeah, the micro concussions, right?
And the other fucking thing that they never do in boxing is every time you put on a boxing event, it's a going out of business sale.
They're trying to grab as much money as they possibly can.
You don't reinvest in the sport.
But one of the big expenses for us that we spend shitloads of money on is health and safety.
So if you take these guys and you put them through the proper medical testing before they fight, you have the proper testing there.
And then so many times when we watch a crazy fight, we're like, send them straight to the fucking hospital.
No fucking PR, no nothing.
As long as you spend the money medically, you make it as safe as you possibly can.
Okay, what is the turn?
Spike TV?
So yeah, at Spike TV, you bought the rights for 10 million.
So Spike TV, we put up the 10 million bucks and we launched the Ultimate Fighter.
The Ultimate Fighter fucking tickets.
Immediately?
Yeah, immediately.
By episode five, we're pulling such massive fucking numbers.
It's fucking.
So, again, you know, sort of the, I don't know, this is the way that shit has always worked out with me.
But the things that run away fucking hit.
Now, when you have runaway hits on networks, you're on fucking billboards, buses.
They're doing ads.
The fucking president of the company gets fired halfway through the fucking season.
Okay.
So every fucking thing we thought was going to happen or whatever, plus we're a time buy.
We bought our way onto the fucking thing.
We're getting nothing.
Nothing.
So you're the biggest show on the network.
No promo from the network.
The new guy comes in.
You like him?
We're the biggest new show in the network because the WWE was on there at the time.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
So we're the biggest, we're the biggest fucking hit they've ever had that's homegrown on Spike TV.
Got it.
Right.
All their other shit flops, right?
We're fucking homegrown home runs.
Okay, before we're getting zero love.
Okay, before you talk about this, this is the first time you've had positive reception for this thing that everybody says is not going to work.
100%.
Do you call people and you go, fucking?
No, not yet.
Take us there.
Take us there.
Not yet.
Take it there.
So we're sweating it the whole fucking season right up to the finale.
You know, we have no new deal.
These guys have fucking promised us nothing.
We have nothing.
We go into the finale.
The finale starts out.
Diego Sanchez runs through Kenny Florian like it was nothing.
All the fights have been fucking meh.
Then Forrest and Stephan Bonner come out in the main event and just start going fucking toe to toe, knock down, drag them out.
The fucking people are stomping their feet in the arena.
It sounds like a train's going through the fucking place.
It goes right to the fucking decision.
You know, they read off the scorecards.
Forrest Griffin fucking narrow inches it out and wins the fight.
I give them both a fucking contract.
Place is going crazy.
Oh, by the way, the crowd is chanting one more round, one more round, all this shit.
And during that, you know, it was like three to four minutes of that fight.
So this is before computers.
This is before social media, all that shit.
People are picking up their phones, calling their friends, going, Are you watching this fucking fight right now on Spike TV?
It has a lot of time.
Oh, it spiked during the fight.
During the fight.
Oh, because it's Nielsen ratings.
You can time where the spikes are.
Oh, shit.
We had more people watching than the masters on CBS at like three minutes during that fight.
So literally, we don't know all that that night.
We just know something special just fucking happened here.
I didn't give a fuck if we re-signed the deal with Spike or whatever.
I knew we had it.
The Spike executives literally pull us out in the alley at the arena because we're at the small little Cox Pavilion.
It's called the Cox Pavilion.
And we go out in the alley.
We do our television deal on a fucking napkin in the alley.
No way.
For our new Spike TV.
Do you know what you're asking for immediately going in?
No, it's just sort of all played out in the alley out there.
So you do the short form right there.
We're signing on.
It's going to happen.
We'll do it.
This is like a handshake.
So they're shaking in their fucking boots.
They see the Nielsen.
They see the ratings probably spike.
Everybody's going fucking crazy.
Well, this is right out of the fight.
Taping.
This is literally that night.
That night, we go right out into the alley and fucking.
No, he's saying when it comes to the money.
You weren't getting Nielsen rating back to him.
Two months later.
Oh, that new game later.
Yeah, you weren't getting Nielsen rating back for fucking, you know, this was on a Saturday.
You weren't getting the real numbers till Wednesday.
So they just felt it.
They're like, you knew this is going to be.
If you were in that fucking building that night, you knew something special just happened.
Wow.
Yeah.
Did you talk to Forrest after?
Like, dude, that was crazy.
Like, what was that really like that?
No, I think, well, then, you know, I mean, that was a wild ride for everybody.
Cause if you look at how that thing blew up, Forrest Griffin obviously became a huge pay-per-view star.
Nobody knew who the fuck he was going into season one.
And now he's our biggest pay-per-view star.
And he's still working with you.
And you got Chuck and Tito and all these other guys, right?
And obviously, you know, that season, the coaches were Chuck and Randy.
So that was fucking huge.
They became big.
And yeah, that was it.
It just from that fucking night on.
And pay-per-views start after that?
Hell yeah.
And the first, so that's the moment you get out, you get into the, what is it, the black.
The Best Fight Ever00:10:14
Well, no.
You dig.
We dig out of the red.
So the first, no, we just knew something special happened that night and that we had something.
Sorry, what year is this?
So then this is 2005.
Okay.
So then it was probably in 2006 or seven.
I can't remember which it was.
2006 or seven.
We're in a fucking budget meeting.
And let me tell you what you didn't want to be in.
We're budget meetings the first five years of fucking USA.
So we're in this budget meeting and Lorenzo is up writing on his whiteboard.
And I'm looking at it and I'm like, wait a minute.
Does that say I'm going to make a million dollars this year?
No.
He's like, yeah.
So six or seven, we started to climb out of the fucking hole out of the $40 million fucking deal.
Okay, you start making money.
There's got to be another plateau that you hit.
Is it with talent?
Is it with change in a deal?
Is it like a specific guy?
Well, what starts to happen then is you start to, you know, it becomes a real business.
Now you start figuring out how to run this.
You know, we're doing things in the combat sports world that have never been done.
Everything we're doing has never been done.
Think about boxing, right?
Tell me if there's ever been a business in the history of the world that has made trillions, trillions of dollars.
And at the end of the day, there's nothing there.
There's nothing there.
That's what you mean by going out of business sale, right?
There's not like a league.
Yeah.
Right.
You have different promoters.
They're negotiating with each other.
Sometimes they're keeping their fighters from fighting each other.
I mean, how often growing up was there an Aram fighter that wouldn't want to fight against who was a golden boy that would always be with you?
Well, you couldn't get Riddick Bo and Lennox Lewis to fight each other.
He'd all throw the fucking belts in the trash or fucking this and that and all this other shit.
It took fucking Saudi Arabia to make these fucking fights that are going on now.
Yeah.
Because you got guys that don't give a shit what it costs.
They're like, fuck it.
I want to see.
You got this guy, you know, Shake Turkey that's like, I want to see this fight.
I'm going to make it happen no matter what the fuck it costs.
And they don't care if they make money.
There's never been a scenario like that.
I mean, the pinnacle of boxing was HBO.
And HBO would throw some of this money around to make the big fights happen.
But even HBO got to a point where you'd have guys who are house fighters, right?
Whether it's Roy Jones or whatever.
And they're just fighting guys.
None of the big fights were really happening then either.
It took fucking Saudi Arabia to make it happen.
We built a business where every fucking weekend.
You see the fights that you want to see.
Because you're invested in both fighters that are fighting.
Yep, exactly.
I think that's a big difference.
We're invested in everything.
Yeah.
You didn't see every boxing.
Everybody fucking wins.
At the end of the day, two fighters come in and somebody's going to win and somebody's going to lose.
But if you lose, it doesn't mean you're dead.
It's the end of your fucking career.
Boxing got to a point where if you lost the fight.
It's over.
Yeah.
So you fight it.
And then what I noticed was, this is what I started to look at.
HBO had a guy that they signed and he could lose fucking three fights in a row.
And he'd still sign a massive fucking deal.
Ricardo Majorga.
Nope.
Are we talking about a good Arturo Gotti?
Oh, Arturo, of course.
Of course.
Arturo Gotti.
I mean, there's been a few of those, but gone.
Arturo Gotti would fucking lose, but he'd sign another big deal with HBO.
You know why?
Because people didn't give a fuck whether they loved how he fought.
They loved how he gotta got to fight Floyd Mayweather.
He should not, with all the respect, Rosen Peace, but he should not have been fighting Floyd.
And we watched it.
He was a blood and guts fucking guy that people loved.
And I said, you can build a business around guys like this.
Guys that go in and give it all they fucking got, win, lose, or fucking draw.
People want to see good fights.
Because you know what people are fucking tired of?
Seeing multi-millionaires run around in circles and not fight so that they can move on to the next big fucking payday that they didn't earn or deserve.
Okay.
One thing I notice about UFC that I think separates it, there is a reward structure.
I think Chail put this the best, actually.
You don't tell fighters what not to say because when you tell people what not to say, you are telling them what to say and you don't believe in telling them what to say.
Fact.
And I don't believe in controlling other fucking human beings.
Here's the thing that I think UFC does really well.
And I want to know if this is like conscious effort.
There is a reward system that's built into UFC that oftentimes induces the most exciting product.
So it's, you could look at it at the most simple level, which is like, hey, there's a best fight bonus.
Both of you guys get it.
You were involved in the best fight.
You both get it.
So it makes people show up and go, I'm going for it today.
Now, is this, how do we make it more interesting?
Let's bonus it out.
Do you come into this going, trying to fix this problem in boxing?
I'm saying, when is this problem solving starting?
Let me tell you this.
If you know that you're going to go in and you're going to make $30 million, all right?
It's guaranteed.
It's in the bank.
$30 million.
All you got to do is win.
And maybe you can get $35 million for the next fight.
I'm on the bicep.
You don't have to be.
Exactly.
You can fucking do everything you can to avoid a fight and just make it to that next fucking payday.
That's what ended up happening with boxing.
And, you know, what we did is we built incentive to go out and fucking perform.
And that's how you build a brand and that's how you build a sport.
And that's how you build.
I'll give you another perfect example that's fascinating is fighters are the most paranoid people in the world.
All of them.
Completely paranoid.
You know, we'll set up a fight and they're like, oh, he wants me to fucking lose.
You know what I mean?
He wants this guy to fucking win.
They have this type of paranoia.
And you saw it recently with Dustin Poirier.
So we made the St. Denis fight, right?
As soon as the fight goes out, all the people are going, oh, they don't like Poirier.
They're trying to get Poirier killed.
Poirier kind of freaked out a little bit.
Like, what the fuck?
Poirier goes in there.
Dog.
And look what he fucking does.
Look what he does, right?
He wins the fucking fight.
Nobody, it's like sometimes we'll make a fight, and fans or media will go, This is a shitty card.
It hasn't happened yet.
Yeah.
Who the fuck are you?
What they say about 300.
Who the hollow?
Who the fuck are you to say this is a shitty card before it fucking happens?
Listen, when the card's over, I'll be the first one to tell you the card fucking sucked, right?
Yeah, you can't judge anything till it happens.
And when you get in these positions, like what it happened in boxing for years, like Poirier thinking we wanted him to lose, he goes out and it's he fucking, you know, this is legendary shit that takes you to another level and makes you great.
And where is he this fucking Saturday?
Championship.
He's fighting for the fucking world title.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
Because he went out and took that fucking St. Denis fight.
Everybody thought he couldn't win.
I feel like I feel like we've been manipulated or we're scorned from watching so much boxing.
And again, I'm a boxing guy.
I came from boxing.
I watched every single fight growing up.
I'm obsessed with boxing.
Me too.
And I'm watching fights and I'm like, okay, this is a tune-up or this is a tomato can or this is whatever.
If it was boxing, if it was boxing, my mentality would be like, oh, they're saying that Poirier's done.
Now he's going to be a gatekeeper.
And this is who we're going to use.
He's a stepping stone for St. Denis.
Exactly.
And St. Denise is going to be our new star.
So we're taking the boxing mentality.
If you take the mentality that the best thing for the UFC is that the fights are most interesting, it's not if St. Denis wins or if Poirier wins.
It's that the fight is most interesting.
Yeah.
And if you look at it through that lens, then you'll also understand Ian Gary versus MVP.
MVP's second fight in, you're like, whoa, whoa, you the boxing mind is, well, you might have a new star here.
And then this other guy's a star.
One of them is not going to be a star if they lose.
So in boxing, you would keep these two as far away as far as exactly.
We do the exact opposite.
Okay.
So you have all these media guys like going into 300 media guys that come the fucking guys that are on the internet, whatever you want to call these guys.
I don't call them journalists.
I was skeptical of 300.
They fucking know nothing about this sport and they know even less about the business of this fucking sport.
So, you know, I literally just drown out all that fucking noise about people who think they know what they're fucking talking about.
Okay.
Because literally none of them do.
And on the business side, we're doing shit that's never been done before.
I'm going into the fucking sphere in September.
Why?
Why am I doing it?
I don't have to fucking do this.
How much money I've already spent on this thing?
The video.
I'm $14 million in on this fucking show.
And it's not till September.
On just the video stuff?
Because the video stuff is the most expensive.
Yeah.
Dude, this is going to be fucking, I'm telling you.
And the reason is it's never been done before.
Nobody's ever done a live broadcast out of the fucking sphere.
Right?
And when you look at you two and these other guys that spend the money to go in there, it's amortized over 40 events.
That's what they're doing.
They're doing 40 fucking shit.
It's a month-long residency for that reason.
I'm doing one night.
I got to come in and we got to figure this whole fucking thing out in one fucking night.
Okay.
And this is going to be a fucking love letter to the Mexican people.
Right.
I have this thing.
Huge boxing fan.
So I have this thing with Mexicans, man.
When you tell somebody, I got goosebumps telling you this right now.
When you tell somebody you fight like a Mexican.
It's the biggest fucking compliment you could ever fucking give somebody, right?
Some of the baddest motherfuckers that have walked the face of this earth have been Mexican.
And the sphere show is on Mexican Independence Day.
And it's going to be the greatest fucking love letter to the Mexican people of all time.
Oh, they're pulling up.
I'm so fucking excited.
Do you have the whole card?
Yeah.
I'm not saying shit about the card until Daniel.
Give us a name.
Game of all the best Mexicans that we have there.
And it's pretty much guaranteed they're all going to be there.
Plus.
Bespoke Box Subscription Service00:02:56
Is there a BMF title?
Plus some big guys that aren't Mexican.
I like your style.
I like your style.
A BMF title wouldn't be bad either.
Best Mexican fighter.
Never know.
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Ranking Mike Tyson Fights00:15:06
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So when you're deciding these fights, the fights that oftentimes the public look at through a boxing lens and go, they're setting this guy up to fail.
Is the mentality, and did you start this early on?
If we don't put our prospects up against each other, we're just going to have easy wins and it's going to be boring like boxing.
When you get to the fucking top five, top three in the UFC, you've been through the fucking gauntlet.
So, you know, right now in boxing and always in boxing, WBC, IBF, WBA, da-da-da-da-da, right?
You go, well, who's the best?
And none of these guys are going to fight each other.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know who the, if you are the fucking champion, there's no fucking questioning who the best is because you've already run through, you know, the baddest fucking people in the world in your weight glass.
And now I understand why you get annoyed by media because I remember when Sean was, Sugar Sean was coming up and he was getting that.
There was this narrative that like he was being protected, right?
And I remember, matter of fact, Sean was with us in Phoenix.
I think we were doing a show in Phoenix and we watched, no, no, no, what did we watch?
We watched, was it the KG fight?
I think so.
No, I think it was Jaini Garcia.
But yeah, but and he was getting this like rep like, oh, they're being protected.
They're protecting their golden goose, whatever.
And I remember, it's so funny.
I remember the Yan fight.
I was like, oh, they're done with him.
They're going to feed him to Jan.
They don't think he's got it.
That's my mentality coming from boxing because that's what you would do if you were a boxing promoter.
Right.
And then him getting that dub changed his trajectory.
So maybe that's what you got to do.
Maybe you got to put him into the fire immediately.
100%.
100%.
If you make it into the fucking UFC, right?
You're not fighting easy fights.
Yeah.
There is no feeding the golden goose.
And how the fuck is he the golden goose?
When we just fucking found it.
There's no incentive.
He's never won a fucking world title.
You know, you don't know.
You fucking test these guys.
Sorry to interrupt.
There was this, there was this idea with boxing, I think, which was like...
Well, now they're saying it about, oh, Jesus, Bo, Bo Nichols.
Now they're saying about Bo Nickel.
Oh, Bo Nichols fucking.
It's like, now I'm just saying.
They said the same thing about Connor.
Because you're like, because you're like, I'm making the best fights.
And then when I do make the best fights, you say that I'm throwing someone out.
And when it's that, when he wins easily, you're like, I'm protecting him.
So you're like, I can't win no matter what fight I make.
And they're the interesting fights.
So I understand you go there and you go, fuck the media.
Okay, now it makes sense because they'll never be happy.
They have to find a way to get it.
And it's not even that they'll never be happy.
They don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, the great, it's one of the, it's one of the irritating things, but it's one of the greatest things about the business too.
Why?
Because let's say I came on here today, right?
And I wanted to talk to you guys about the big cricket game this weekend.
All right.
I know.
Yeah.
You'd be the only fucking one.
My point is when you talk about fights, everybody has an opinion because everybody thinks they're a fucking expert.
Nobody thinks they're an expert about fucking cricket.
Okay.
And some of these other sports.
But fighting, everybody has an opinion.
One reason or another.
You don't like his fucking attitude.
Like if I brought up fucking Jake Paul, pretty much everybody in the room and the other room wants to see Jake Paul get knocked out.
So you're hoping, you know, you got the reason why you hope Tyson would pull this offer.
Did you help set that up?
Because I know you're close with Tyson.
God, no.
God, no.
When this fight happens, Tyson will be 58 fucking years.
I'm worried about him.
Under any circumstances, a fucking almost 60-year-old man shouldn't be fighting a 27-year-old fucking guy under any circumstances, even if it's Mike Tyson.
So it's just, it's fucking ridiculous.
Now, do you think he can pull it off?
Do I think Tyson can land a shot?
Yeah.
If Tyson hits him.
But if Tyson lands it, like, what happens to the internet?
My biggest Tyson knocks out.
Biggest problem with the Jake Paul thing is and how this plays out is when he actually fought somebody who was a boxer, who had the same type of record he has, who is his age, Tommy, and who is his size, he fucking lost.
Yeah.
So they're never going to go that fucking route again, right?
Close fight.
And then they're trying to pull this whole narrative like when people, I saw some guy the other day say, when are you going to stop fighting gimmick fights?
You're going to call Mike Tyson a gimmick?
Yeah.
It is a gimmick fight, but I find it.
I would never fight anything else but gimmick fights if I'm him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he has to make a fight.
If you can keep getting paid, right?
Tens of millions of dollars, you do it.
So then why are you so confused?
If you've got people that are fucking dumb enough to pay for that shit, fucking, you know.
It's on Netflix, you don't even have to pay now.
Huh?
It's on Netflix.
You don't have to pay.
Brilliant move, too, because you don't have to go pay.
Everybody has fucking Netflix.
Just turn it on.
I'll turn it on and see what happens.
So why are you so against the flight?
Is it really just because of Mike Tyson?
I love Mike Tyson.
Okay.
He's fucking almost 60 years old.
So you just worry for him.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But even though you see the way he's training and the way he looks.
My back is killing me today.
Killing me.
I have no idea why.
I guess it's because I'm 54.
You know what I mean?
That's raising.
I'm 54, so I guess that's why my back is fucking killing me today.
Yeah.
So Mike is.
This guy's 27.
He's in his fucking prime as a human.
Yeah.
And just fuck him.
But the internet is.
And I love Mike.
And nobody wants to see Mike get beat by this fucking jerk off.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
That's the thing.
I think no one wants to see Mike lose.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think.
Well, also, you and Mike are close, right?
Yeah, I fucking love Mike Tyson.
Yeah.
Mike Tyson was one of the guys that I fucking idolized growing up and one of the guys that made me love boxing as much as I do.
Didn't you tell me a story?
Was it you to tell a story about like, you know, you, Mike was going to do something.
You're like, let me make some calls for you.
And then you like got shark weeds?
Yeah, when he was fighting.
He was fighting.
And I said, don't fight.
I'll fucking, I'll help you make money doing other shit or whatever.
So I got him, I got him a show on Shark Week and he's like, so wait a minute.
Let me get this fucking straight.
So I've been fighting my whole life.
This is what I fucking do.
You're worried about me so you're going to throw me in the ocean?
He's making his point.
He's like, fuck you, dude.
I didn't think about it that way.
So apparently, the day that they shot that episode of him on Shark Week, everybody on set was fucking terrified because he was so freaked out by the whole shark thing.
He was literally ready to beat the shit out of everybody on set.
I probably shouldn't have gotten him a shark week show.
That was probably a bad idea.
I want to go back to what you're saying, what we were talking about earlier with interesting fights.
I don't think I know anything about fighting.
I know I know nothing about fighting.
What do you look at and say, this is an interesting fight?
What is that criteria for you?
So a couple of things.
You take styles.
Styles make fights.
So stylistically, you try to put together the best fights that you possibly can.
You got some up-and-coming guys.
Like you'll get a guy like Micah St. Denis or Sean O'Malley, some of these kids that are so talented that they're blowing through guys that are on their level.
So then you start to think, is he ready for this guy who might be a top 15 ranked guy?
Is he ready for a 13?
Is he ready for this?
And there's only one way to find out.
You got to test him.
So you got to look at a guy's age.
You know, once you get these kids that are undefeated, right?
And they're, I'll give you an example.
Perfect example.
This one plays out exactly right.
You have Ian Gary, who's undefeated, been the UFCO for a while, taking on the older MVP, right?
Who just came in and beat Kevin Holland.
Very exciting.
Either way, this is going to go.
Ian's undefeated, you know, and he's in the rankings now.
And on his way to a possible title shot.
MVP comes in.
He's been fighting in another organization, just beat Holland.
You know, England versus Ireland.
Big.
Yeah.
There's so many different little woods and parts to go in.
But these two, who's going to win that fight?
That's the thing.
It's just a hard.
Who the fuck knows?
Yeah.
The UFC is going to win that fight.
You know what I mean?
Right?
Okay.
So you don't know who's going to win is what makes that fight so fucking great, right?
When you do these fights in boxing, right?
Yeah.
All you have to do, you don't have to know one fucking guy involved in the fight.
You don't even have to know who they are.
Go look at the odds.
Whoever the guy is that's the favorite, and it's usually by a huge number, it's guaranteed that guy's going to fucking win.
In the UFC, there are no fucking guarantees, no matter what the odds are, who they are, or what the deal is.
You know, St. Denis, I'm sure, was a huge favorite in the Poirier fight.
Yeah.
Poirier fucking walked through him.
Okay.
What do you do when you have a fighter that has a boring style, but is incredibly good?
Depends on what that style is.
And that style is usually wrestling.
These guys that can lay you down and, you know.
So what you do is you try to match them up with a guy who's got really good takedown defense.
So it stays on the feet.
Or the guy can get back up.
So what you want to do is you take the guy who's the dry humper and fucking goes in and does that to you, and you find a guy who has great takedown defense and good hands.
So now he has to see if he has hands.
And if it does get down to the, okay, wow, That's interesting.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm curious, how did you learn the importance of storytelling?
I know more about like lower ranked UFC guys than I do about the highest ranked boxers ever.
And I don't think that's an accident.
So where did you learn that from?
Who inspired that?
And then how did you start to implement it?
So it's one of the things that we try to do early on.
I mean, no matter what your fucking story is, right?
There's always some type of storyline in a fight.
And that's what you have to get people sold on more than a fight.
I can tell you this fight's going to be great or whatever, but you have no rooting interest.
You want to create a rooting interest.
I mean, I just did it.
I just did it with my bull.
So my bull was taking on a fucking cowboy.
My bull's buck rate at the time was like fucking 88 or 89%, right?
This is Twisted Steel?
Yeah.
And the cowboy that he was going up against that night had beat him already and rode him.
What's his name?
I can't remember.
I can't remember what his name was.
But going into that thing, if he rides my bull, he gets ranked into the top 10 and could go to the finals and all this shit.
So it's basically, you can make anything a fight, right?
And create a rooting interest.
Then people go, I don't give a shit about bull riding, but holy shit, this is Dana's bull.
He's beat everybody in the last however long.
This guy actually rode him once.
If he rides him again, he fucking, you know what I mean?
Now there's an okay, I'm interested in this.
I want to see if this guy rides him or doesn't ride him.
Was that something you always knew or did that develop?
No, no, I've always been into it.
You always have to create a reason for somebody to fucking care to watch something.
That's why the show works on Spike.
Yeah.
It's like you got into the characters on the show.
Well, it's like the Olympics.
You know what I mean?
When you go into the Olympics, you don't know any of these fucking kids.
It doesn't matter.
You know, right there's a storyline behind it.
And there's, you know, the other thing is what's at risk?
What's at risk here?
What do we, well, it's America versus fucking, you know, England or America versus this or that.
Who's the American person?
Why do I care about them?
And who's the English person?
Why do I, I don't want to like them so that the American will win or vice versa.
I mean, you always have to have what's at stake.
So you're intentional with that when the fighters are young.
Exactly.
So you're building them up from young.
Yep.
So if you look at what we do with the contender series, which is the best fucking show on TV, the best unsigned fighters in the world come in, and it's not about winning.
I don't give a fuck if you win or lose.
I want to see who you are.
I want to see what you got.
It's about this is your fucking job interview and you have three fucking rounds to show me who you are.
And these fucking kids come in and they fucking go.
And in that, we tell their story, who they are, where they come from.
So before you ever set foot in the UFC, if I sign you, millions of people have already seen you fight.
And it's the same thing with looking for a fight.
When I go on the road looking for a fight, millions of people see these kids fight before they ever set foot in the UFC.
So we already start the storytelling before they even get in the UFC.
Is there anything that the UFC does to either help or incentivize the fighters to show their personality?
Because we see people like McGregor, Stylebender, like they sell themselves in tandem with how the UFC helps us.
I don't give a fuck if you're a deaf mute.
Okay.
Oh, really?
I could care less.
That does not matter to me.
Are you a bad motherfucker?
Wow.
Are you a bad motherfucker?
If you get somebody that has the Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey, you know, Sugar Sean type of personality, it's just a home run.
That's just a plus.
God, that's unfortunate.
You know what I mean?
But in this sport, you can't do anything based off, oh, let's see what their personality is like.
Are you a bad motherfucker?
If you're the baddest motherfucker in the world, people don't give a shit about your personality.
They want to see you fight.
Khabib.
Exactly.
Okay, what about, that's right.
He's a pious, religious dude, and people will tune on to everything.
And he's like, okay.
Now, what about speaking of, speaking of Connor, is this marketing on Connor's behalf?
The video of him partying?
I don't know.
I honestly don't know.
You know, he opened a bar out there.
But is he like, I'm going to leak a video in my bar?
It seems sandbags.
It could be controlled, right?
It's in my bar.
I'm partying.
I'm with my people.
Everything is.
And then it comes out now.
Chandler's like, oh, maybe he's not taking this that serious.
Maybe I could take my foot off the gas.
I'm just, or is this he's actually not taking it serious?
I will tell you this.
John Jones Mental Warfare00:15:13
And I don't ever like to compare people to Muhammad Ali because to me, he's the fucking, you know, and fuck what he did in fighting just as a human, what that guy accomplished, right?
But I don't give a fuck what anybody says.
Ali, Connor, both level when it comes to mental warfare.
Really?
The two best of all time when it comes to mental warfare.
That's why it just seemed so.
Wait, break that down?
I will watch.
Like, Ali would get into that.
I don't know Ali, but I wonder why you.
If you look back at Ali and you look at what he did to George Foreman in Africa, you look at what he did to Joe Frazier, I mean, throughout his entire fucking career, Joe Frazier fucking hated Muhammad Ali so fucking badly.
You know, he'd show up at his camp outside and fucking do all his shit.
He would predict rounds.
He would come up with fucking incredible poems and sayings and things that he would do leading up to the fight.
And then you look at Connor McGregor.
He's picked rounds.
He's fucking, I mean, the mental warfare that this guy had on so many of his fighters.
Oh, Aldo.
He wanted to tear his head off going into that fight.
100%.
And he would make these guys play into his game, get into their heads, fucking embarrass them and, you know, outwit them in every way, shape, and form.
The Eddie Alvarez fight going into Madison Square Garden, you know.
He is literally at Ali's level when it came to mental warfare.
So then when you see a video like him at the club leading up to a fight, do you get upset seeing that?
Or is it part of the war thing?
At the end of the day, I'm at a place right now with like the Conor McGregors and the John Joneses where, you know, they've sort of laid the foundation of their legacy and what they have and they've made a shitload of money.
And it's at the point now where when these guys do show up and fight, it's fun.
It's fun when they show up and fight.
The greatest fight, listen, I'm going to say it right here, right now.
The greatest fighter to ever live, ever, is fucking John Jones.
When you look at John Jones has never lost a fight.
UFC handboxing or just ever.
Wow.
Because when you really think about fighting, put two guys in a room and who fucking comes out?
John Jones walks out of that fucking room every time.
And, you know, it's almost like, you know, when you see John on camera and if you were in here talking to John Jones, it's almost uncomfortable for him to do this shit.
But John Jones beats the fuck out of people, right?
And when you talk about truly right now in Islam, I love the Islam and everything.
The fact that John Jones is number two on the pound for pound list is fucking, it just goes to show how fucking stupid the media votes on that.
Yeah.
Then it just goes to show you that they have no fucking idea.
They know nothing about this fucking sport.
John Jones has never lost a fight ever.
And when you talk about what it really means to be pound for pound, you know, Volkanovsky moved up and it was a very fucking close fight the first time.
John Jones moved up and absolutely fucking decimated the greatest heavyweight that was out there right now.
He doesn't go for that fucking arm bar.
He beats Francis Singagno and becomes the heavyweight champion.
John Jones walked through him like it was fucking nothing.
And when you really think about what pound for pound means, John Jones is the pound for pound best.
When you watch the video of him and Cormier and they don't know that they're alive and being filmed.
And Cormier says, I ought to come over there and spit in your fucking face right now.
And John Jones says, I would fucking kill you.
I'm not saying I'd fucking, I would fucking kill you.
John Jones has like German Shepard dogs that he fucking that do all the attack shit, shoots guns.
John Jones has a very fucking dark side to him.
Right.
And when you talk about who the baddest motherfucker in the world is, I like your example of how bad he is.
You put his two dogs.
I'm just telling you, John Jones, during the craziness.
Of all the things that he has, but he's got German Shepherds.
This guy's in a fucking shot.
But he's the guy with German Shepards.
He's that fucking guy.
He's not this fucking like when all the craziness was going on during the pandemic and everybody was rioting and all the shit was going on.
He was ready.
Do you know that John Jones was like downtown, like ripping spray paint cans out of kids' hands and fucking fuck up my town?
I'll beat your fucking ass.
Get the fuck out of here.
Like John Jones is the fucking baddest dude to ever fucking to ever be involved in conversation.
Is that what most fighters probably, if they were honest, would admit?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think John Jones is one of those guys that isn't going to really be appreciated till he's gone.
And then everybody's going to go, holy shit.
But the guy's never lost a fight.
He's the youngest champion ever in UFC history.
I think he was 23.
He's in his 30s now.
And he's fought fucking everybody.
And he's never lost.
What do you want for John for the rest of his career?
Like, do you want the Aspinall fight?
Do you want to?
I mean, listen, what I want and what's going to happen are two totally different things.
I don't know.
That's the other thing with dealing with John Jones.
You don't know what's going to happen.
But, you know, he fights Steve Amiochic, the greatest of all time versus the greatest heavyweight.
You see how that plays out?
If John Jones wins and he fights Aspenall, and if he beats Aspinall, it's just like, what do you say?
I don't, I'll go toe-to-toe with anybody for the rest of my life.
I'm already saying it now, that he's the greatest ever.
You know, when you think about all the greatest boxers and all these guys that did shit.
Who's your number one boxer by you?
You get in a room this big, John Jones can fucking grab you.
That's it.
And once he puts his fucking hands on you, you're done, man.
And if you're in a scenario where it's only one guy's walking out of the room and this guy gets on top, he's dropping fucking.
Let's not even talk about illegal shit that you can do.
Yeah.
You do not want to fuck with John Jones.
He's got German Shepherds.
You know what I mean?
And I mentioned he's got like German Shepherds and shit like that.
He's like, all into that shit, too.
This dude will fucking kill you every way that you can possibly be fucking killed.
Okay.
I mean, that's just it.
Wow.
Do you remember the first time you heard the name John Jones?
And did you know he was a bad man the first time you saw him?
No.
But once he started fighting, you know, he's a young kid, comes in, starts fighting.
It was when I'm trying to think of the fight now that happened.
I can't fucking remember the first one.
I talked about this about a year ago, but then when I really noticed John Jones, you know, we already knew that he was tough and a star, but he was walking through people.
And a lot of times you'll see these guys that walk through guys.
Then once they get tested and they get pushed and adversity comes, they break.
Then came the fight with, ah, Jesus Christ.
Swedish kid.
Yeah, Gustafson.
Yeah, Alexander.
Gus Gustafson, right?
So him and Gustafson fight and Gustafson takes him into the fucking deep water and he's hitting him with fucking elbows and all this fucking shit.
And now that we look back on John Jones, we know the real shit that was going on.
That's the other thing.
If you want to fuck with John Jones, he was partying and doing fucking crazy shit through his entire camps.
He was doing shit that most people couldn't get up and go to fucking work the next day, let alone get into a fucking five-round title fight with the baddest people in the world.
That's what he was doing at this time.
And he fucking gets into that Gustafson fight.
And that's when I really started to say, this dude might be one of those.
Special.
Is there a time where you guys have to step in and go, hey, you're going to ruin everything if you don't get your life together?
Do you try to do that?
Like, do these guys listen in those moments?
You're dealing with grown men that are wired completely different than everybody in this fucking building, let alone the room.
And probably everybody in this fucking city block.
And you can't babysit these guys.
It's like, you know, oh, how can you keep them from spending their money?
You can't.
How can you keep them from doing this?
You can't.
How can you, you know, we do the best we can to help these guys, you know, in every way, shape and form in their personal life and professional life.
But you're dealing with grown men that are wired completely different than the rest of the world.
Yeah.
I think that's the part that's hard for most people to realize is the wiring because they're putting their own expectations on a fighter.
And that fighter is waking up and that day begins very differently.
Well, you know what's crazy is so many people say to me, you know, when you talk to people that aren't real fight fans and aren't in the fight world, I feel sorry for these guys.
You know, it's crazy.
They feel sorry for you.
You'll never experience that level of everything.
Plus, you get in a fucking, you wake up every day and get in a car and sit in bumper to bumper fucking traffic and you sit in a cubicle every day and you never achieve the type of things that these people, these guys fight one time, then they go fuck off and do whatever they want to do until they think they want to fight again.
And then they come back and, you know, and they test themselves against literally all the best in the world.
You're saying when they're practicing, when they're training, or you're saying when they actually go in and fight the fight.
They're always testing themselves in front of the entire world, you versus another person on the world stage.
You know, you put yourself out there like that.
It takes a very unique, special type of person.
I mean, what do you think John Jones is walking around every day knowing that there's 7 billion people on the planet and there's not another person that could beat him up?
Yeah.
I could let you know.
That's how I want you to feel.
Like, what does that do to your fucking head?
Yeah, it's crazy.
There's not another human being.
Like, who's the Hussein Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter?
Like, he must feel pretty good knowing he's the fastest.
Right.
Imagine knowing not a single human being could beat you up on the planet.
It's fucking crazy.
It's true.
And the funny thing is with most guys, most guys think they can fight and they fucking can't.
You know what I mean?
Most guys, most fucking guys that are walking around out here right now.
That's the nice thing about life.
Think they can.
And a guy like fucking John Jones and the Khabibs and the fucking, you know, these guys in the world would literally walk right through fucking almost every guy on the planet.
Isn't that fucking I see those cauliflower eaters?
Yo, you got it, brother.
You got it.
You got it.
Yeah, that's more scary than like a red bandana.
Yeah.
Well, the scary thing is about like UFC guys, it's like Sean O'Malley.
If Sean O'Malley didn't do all the crazy shit with the hair and the clothes and all that shit, and he looked normal, 100% of guys that saw Sean O'Malley would think they could whoop his ass.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah.
Skinny, tall, loves video games.
One fucking punch.
Game over.
Yeah.
That kid hits like a fucking truck.
Oh, he does.
So, yeah, it's fight business is pretty fascinating.
Okay, we're almost there.
You, business takes off.
People are loving it.
It's still not as big as boxing.
When does it take the step past boxing?
And what does that feel like?
So, do you envision it even?
Like, you're creating a new sport.
Do you envision it being bigger than the thing that you spent most of your life doing?
Well, that's the other thing that everybody told me.
This will never be bigger than boxing.
This will never be bigger than boxing.
We know how to motivate Dana.
It is very easy to motivate.
You'll never quit gambling.
So one of the things that I started to notice about boxing was it started to fall apart at an amateur level.
I was involved in the amateurs back then, and it was really dirty and fucking corrupt.
And, you know, then you saw NBC drop the box offs.
Remember, they used to have the Olympic box offs before the Olympics?
Yeah, Floyd fought on NBC.
Oscar De La Hoya.
I mean, all these guys that were moving up, they all fought on NBC to lead into the Olympics.
They got rid of it.
Once it starts to fall apart at an amateur level, and we were gaining traction and starting, you know, more people, if you're a younger guy, you were going to train in MMA instead of fucking.
Yeah, I remember that shit starting to happen amongst my friends.
Like, oh, I'm going to go train MMA instead of boxing.
It was my friend's kids.
That's when I noticed it.
My friend's kid started taking jiu-jitsu.
And I was like, what?
Because when you're young, you like take taekwondo or karate or something.
100%.
And when he said, yeah, I put my kid in jujitsu, I was like, oh, it's out of here.
I was like, UFC's out of here.
And that was our biggest thing.
Our thing was, you know, I grew up in an era where like fucking John Wayne movies, you'd fucking, you'd hit a guy, he'd go down.
You didn't jump on him and start beating the shit out of him.
You stood him back up and you fucking hit him again, right?
It was like, it was unfair.
It was unmanly.
It was whatever you want to call it to jump on a guy and start beating his ass.
Then the other problem was we were like, how is anybody going to understand what's going on in the ground with the jujitsu?
So two things.
Joe Rogan, yeah, who was instrumental in the commentary because he would start telling you what was happening before it actually started to happen, right?
And he was Joe's good at talking, setting him up for an arm bar, expressing and explaining things and laying it out.
And then jujitsu just took off like fucking wildfire.
Everybody started taking jiu-jitsu.
So now there's an education about what's happening on the ground, and you don't have these people confused and it looks like they're just hugging.
100% know what they're setting up.
Okay, okay.
So you lift the IQ of the audience.
And like I said, I felt like boxing started to fall apart at an amateur level.
It was completely falling apart.
And I felt like we started to gain traction.
And I grew up in the 80s and 90s.
You know, I grew up, I mean, went through high school and graduated.
And I always felt then that every, it was like all old money.
Old money was the only way you could.
And to try to be bigger than like established companies like boxing was impossible.
And everybody would tell you it was impossible.
That's not the case these days.
Because of social media and the internet, it's changed everything.
I mean, you really blew up during COVID.
Yeah.
You were doing those videos during COVID when there was no other, you know, you did that yourself.
Well, we all did it.
But I'm saying you didn't need whoever helped you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You didn't need a fucking network or an agent or somebody to fucking believe in you.
You were innovative.
Yeah.
You were talented.
And you figured out how to, how to fucking get on there and do it.
That shit couldn't happen back then.
True.
So I remember people coming into my office saying, I want to show you this is the new thing.
This is called streaming.
So you're going to be able to stream videos on the internet.
And I was like, okay.
So they play this video and it'd go buffering, buffering, buffering, play three seconds, buffering, buffering, buffering, play three.
Streaming Wars During COVID00:03:12
I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, this is going to be real fucking huge.
This sucks.
Look at how fast technology caught up.
And now, I mean, 20 fucking years ago, this didn't exist.
Yeah.
Right.
I was just telling fucking Rogan yesterday.
I was in LA and Rogan hits me up and says, Hey, would you be on my podcast?
I was like, The fuck is a podcast?
Right.
And he explained it to me.
It's these, we shoot these shows and we just put them up on the internet.
I'm like, okay, good luck with that.
Yeah, I'll come do your podcast.
He's the biggest fucking podcaster in the world.
And now all I do are fucking podcasts.
The podcasts are like the new, you know, leading up to a fight.
I would do all this media.
I'd go on radio tours and do the morning news and do these shows.
Now it's all podcasts.
This is this is the new media.
So if you look at all the disruptors that are going on in the last 20 years, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, taxi cabs were going to go away.
Yeah.
I'd be like, you're out of your fucking mind.
That business is going to be here till the end of time.
And the list goes on and on and on.
There has never been more opportunity in this world than there is right now because of technology.
It's fascinating.
And to me, when you look at my business, if you look at my business, right?
Everybody, I always got to hear that's the other thing.
The UFC is peaked.
Pay-per-view is dead.
Fucking all the fucking shit that these people talk that they know no idea what they're fucking talking about.
Our big fucking dream and goal for me and the Fertita brothers was a match.
So if I'm doing the fight this Saturday from Jersey, right?
I got to have my ESPN deal.
I got to go cut deals in fucking Canada, Mexico, all over the world, right?
We have all these different television deals.
We're getting to a point now.
When I grew up, there was channel three, channel five, channel eight, and channel 13.
Then by the time I was in high school, there was cable.
We had like 33 channels.
Then there was a billion fucking channels, right?
Now streaming.
You're getting, you got fucking Amazon, Netflix, fucking ESPN, Disney.
You know, over the next several years, the players, there's going to be a channel three, channel five, channel eight, channel 13 globally.
Back to the beginning.
Who will they be?
Yeah.
Who is who's going to win this fucking battle?
So when you think about my business, right?
We dreamed of a day where everybody could watch the same fight at the same time on the same channel.
Now, there's 8 billion people in the world.
What's the fucking ceiling on this?
Holy shit.
What's the fucking ceiling on this?
It's massive.
That's the shit that gets me up every fucking morning.
And then again, I bring it back to PowerSlap.
When you talk about PowerSlap, you know, you have a lot of people that go, I fucking don't like it.
I hate it.
I don't give a fuck.
There's 8 billion people in the world and lots of other people fucking like it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's just, it's fucking a complete game changer with streaming.
In 16 months, this thing has become a global fucking business.
That's what's so fascinating.
And how much time you have become a global fucking comedian.
It's because of fucking streaming.
Absolutely.
And the internet.
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Strengthening MMA In India00:06:36
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Are there some cultures that make it difficult to break into either on like a social level or like a political level, like into India or even China?
Yeah, but it doesn't, you know, one of those crazy.
We've been trying to get India.
The UFC in India for a long time, just, you know, PowerSlap is fucking massive.
Is it really?
How can you have massive in India, Southeast Asia, fucking China?
Brazil already has like two knockoff leagues down there, and it started in Russia and Russia and Poland.
Why is it so big in India?
Did you ever see the thing that they do where they run and slap each other?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's like a sport there.
It's like a wrestling wrestler.
And here's the thing about PowerSlap.
It's like to some people that aren't like you guys have embraced the UFC and the fighting culture and learned a lot about it.
To other people that don't know, they still don't know what's going on in the ground and things like that.
Everybody knows what slapping someone in the face.
It is the 100 dash of fight sports.
Yep.
Everybody has slapped someone in the face.
Everybody's been slapped in the face.
Everybody gets it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's fun, snackable fucking content.
And now you got the guy, the people doing like the, see the guy where the head spins around.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
And then you have the guy with the robot.
And you can't, those aren't even included in our numbers.
Those are doing hundreds of millions of views.
Yeah.
How do you find those guys?
Like, how do you find the PowerSlap guys and how do you train them?
So originally what happened was this did exist at a lower level.
So what I did is I just went in and bought up all the fucking leagues that were already happening, brought those guys into PowerSlap, right?
And now that there's money in it, like there's real money in this.
Guys are buying houses and cars and boats and fucking, there's real money.
I got 27 fucking sponsors in PowerSlap.
So once real money comes in, people start taking it seriously.
Again, in the early days of MMA, these guys were fighting for free.
They didn't get paid.
It actually cost them money to fight in the UFC, right?
Or these other organizations.
These guys were doing it for free.
Now they're making money at it.
Now guys come in and get evaluated at the PI.
They're going through training and it's all about torque and velocity and speed and all this shit.
So once you make it a real sport and money becomes involved, everything, the level just starts to go like that.
Are there any UFC guys that want to go try it?
We have an announcement coming out soon.
Within the next couple of days, you're going to start to see other athletes from other sports and, you know, shop put.
I was just going to ask, like, have you got celebrities or influencers in the dating map?
But imagine, you know, imagine college football.
How many, how many badass, fucking, powerful athletes there are in college football that don't make it to the pros.
And, you know, you can make real money here.
Are there some people?
Kendrick, just are there some people?
If I was like, because I haven't watched a ton of PowerSlap, if I was interested in getting into it, is there a specific face-off or is there a specific guy that I should be looking at?
So what's starting to happen now is if you watch the reality show that we have on it, our reality show has done 40 million fucking views online.
You know what I mean?
So the guys that we have that coach, when we do the reality show, we have guys that are coaches.
So what's starting to happen is like the early days.
I don't know if you guys know this much about MMA, but in the early days, there were only a couple of places you could go train for MMA.
Pat Militich had a camp that he was training people from.
AKA, which is where Habib and Cormier and all those guys came from.
And who was the other big camp at that time?
There were like three of them.
So it was very incessant that they were all training together at some point and going to different things.
Now, I mean, it's fucking everywhere.
And you're going to see that now in PowerSlap.
There's going to be camps where you go and then eventually it will grow and get bigger and bigger and bigger.
It's literally it's fucking identical.
Everything is identical to when we started the UFC.
Is there a way to defend at all in it?
So can you strengthen your neck?
Can you strengthen yourself?
That I don't do, but they do.
So after comparison, F1 drivers, like they do a bunch of necks.
That's exactly what you guys are doing.
So neck work, work on your shoulders and traps.
Yeah, face, all that stuff.
Because, yeah, the idea is you're just allowing yourself to get hit.
You can't do anything in defense.
This will evolve and the training will become, you know.
Yeah, as there's more money, and you're going to get more guys in the middle.
100%.
And the big problem with the UFC in the early days is there was no real training for mixed martial arts.
You had fucking, you know, guys that were kickboxers, guys that were wrestlers.
Then they were like, well, how does it all blend together?
What they used to do is they used to have a kickboxing class, a wrestling class, a jiu-jitsu class, that they didn't have to run all around town.
And then they started to build these camps.
And then the training evolved to MMA training that it is today.
And it still continues to evolve.
Yeah.
But it is cool that you see guys that come up with MMA as their discipline.
Like it used to be singular discipline.
It was a kickboxing guy that learned these other things.
So true.
And now there are guys who are MMA guys.
And almost like instinctually, they're rolling into wrestling, into striking.
Yeah.
It's now there's camps all over the world.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, you had three fucking camps when we bought this.
Even with Izzy's camp.
Like you look at the 100%.
Look at what they've done in a very short amount of time.
Place in New Zealand.
Absolutely right.
I remember the first time that I went to London, there was like one guy who had this little tiny fucking gym as big as this place that he was trying to train MMA guys out of.
Now, look at what the sport is.
When we went to Australia for the first time, which is perfect example of what you're saying, there was one fucking guy in the country, Elvis Sinesik, that knew MMA, and that was it.
Him and his buddy that he trained with, Anthony, I can't remember Anthony's last name, but there were two guys in the fucking country, right?
Now there's multiple world champions out of that fucking area and, you know, tons of people in the top 10, et cetera, like that overnight.
So wait till PowerSlap's been around for five fucking years.
15 months in.
Buying A Hockey Dealership00:04:34
Question.
Wait and see the difference in five years.
Is this in addition to all the time you have to UFC, you're just adding to your workload?
Are you offloading stuff?
How is that?
Yeah, no.
So I, so I own PowerSlap with the Fertida Brothers.
And I called those guys up and said, I'm into this fucking slap thing.
I think we should do this.
You win?
He goes, I'm fucking in.
So we did it again.
And we also own a company called Throw One.
Me and the Fertida Brothers, which is Ridiculousness that's on MTV.
We own that.
We own SLS games.
You can't fucking miss, huh?
We own Nitro Circus.
Yeah.
And we own Travis Pajana's Nitrocross, which is electric car racing.
We're actually, after 4th of July, I do 4th of July at my house in Maine.
I'm flying a NASCAR.
We're doing a deal with NASCAR.
We're going to be the electric series for NASCAR.
We're working on that deal right now.
So is your passion building businesses?
I like taking niche sports.
You know how many times I've been offered deals like, hey, we got an NBA team coming to Vegas.
We like to talk to you.
We got this and that.
So those kind of businesses, they're like toys for multi-billionaires, right?
Multi-billionaires buy these things and they lose money on them.
This is it for fucking.
But the equity grows over decades.
And then when they fucking die, the family sells the fucking team or Cuban just sold, you know, he bought it for a few hundred million for a few billion.
I like taking niche sports that people don't think work and making them fucking work.
That's what I like to do.
Were there any businesses you tried to scale but didn't work exactly how you wanted?
Yeah, I'll tell you, the only business I've ever failed at was we bought a during the crash in 9 and 10.
Yeah.
I'm driving to work one day and all the fucking car dealerships are closed.
You remember the bottom fell out in the market.
The housing market fucking collapsed and all that shit happened, right?
And I'm like, there's lots of good fucking people who need a car, especially in Vegas, and don't have the credit now because the fucking house foreclosed or whatever it is.
So I bought a car dealership.
Let me tell you what.
It was a fucking shit show.
And the only thing that fucking saved me, me and my partner did it, me and one of my best friends, we bought it together and tried to run this thing.
And I didn't lose on it.
And the only reason I didn't lose money was because I bought the fucking land.
So I bought the dealership itself.
I bought it outright.
And I own the dealership.
Getting fucking murdered on the car side of the business.
What were the cars?
Fucking murdered.
What was the brand of car?
It was used cars.
So we could sell it.
It was a used car dealership.
Yeah.
And we're getting fucking murdered, right?
People are fucking taking the cars and not paying for them.
So we got to go fucking repossess them.
And before we get it back, they destroy the fucking car.
So it is the shittiest, dirtiest business.
You wonder why when you go into these car dealerships, these guys are so sorry.
I'm telling you right now.
You need John Jones to repo.
People you fucking deal with that fucking will not pay their car payments or unfucking believable.
And they'd rather destroy the car than fucking pay for it.
So we're getting fucking murdered.
So we decide an exit strategy to get out of it.
Now the world changes and everything starts to go this way again.
And I own the fucking land.
So when we sold the car dealership, we made all our money back.
On the land itself.
Yeah.
So somebody just got rid of the car dealership.
100%.
What did they build there?
If real estate didn't go back like this, I would have gotten it.
Yeah, that's the thing about real estate.
You should have turned those cars into MMA rings.
Off of his question, is there a business that you could have invested in, didn't, and regret it?
Like I think Mark Huban and U.S.
So that was the Malouf family that owned the pops.
They were absolutely instrumental in the Golden Knights coming to Las Vegas.
And I love the Malouf family.
They're fucking great people.
I've always had an incredible relationship with them.
So they first came to me and said, hey, we're bringing hockey to Vegas and this and that.
And I was like, hockey in Vegas?
Yeah.
Yeah, that ain't going to work.
Golden Knights is fucking massive.
They've already won fucking championships and everything else.
Turning Cars Into MMA Rings00:02:53
But again, that's a sport that's already established.
I don't even think that would get you going.
You like taking the niche sport and blowing it up.
Hockey's already one of the biggest.
Yeah, and I didn't really get the hockey thing in Vegas.
I didn't see it coming.
But yeah, I could have invested in that and I didn't.
But as far as like, nobody's ever come to me and been like, yeah, we're going to start this thing called Google.
And I didn't invest in it.
There's never been anything like that.
I'm curious on the topic of people pitching you ideas.
I mean, you were saying people just come in at Shark Tank.
What is the one mistake that people make when they pitch you an idea that makes you immediately go, nah, I'm good?
No, nothing really.
It just depends on the product.
I'll tell you an interesting one.
This fucking guy just came in and met with me.
He's from New England.
He already owns the business and it's fucking kicking ass, but he's looking to expand and he needs relationships not just here in the United States, but globally.
So he takes rice, husks of rice.
You know, I didn't even know rice had a husk, but rice have husks on them.
And basically, when they get rid of the husk, it's it's fucking waste and it's a problem like any other type of waste.
He's figured out how to turn rice husks into wood.
So you wouldn't know the difference between a fucking real wood floor or wood paneling in the house or roof or whatever from the wood that's made from this husk.
Like he could do that.
I don't even know what the fuck that is.
I've seen this.
They've done it with like sugarcane paper.
Like all waste from aggro is like huge.
If they could like solve that, you're saving.
So what's starting to happen is we're starting to get to a place in the world where the population and everything, if we keep fucking smoking trees the way that we are, you know what I mean?
We're going to have a fucking problem 50 years from now.
It's going to be a fucking huge problem for humanity and the planet.
And this guy has figured it out how to do it.
And the bigger, the bigger problem is like Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi and these countries like that that are spanning and like building these fucking unbelievable places.
He can actually go in there and do it with this wood that you would, it's just as durable as good wood.
It looks exactly the same.
Any type of wood that you would put in, they can mimic with these rice husks.
Unbelievable.
What a fucking business.
And not only is it a brilliant fucking business, but it's great for the fucking planet.
It's great for humanity over the next 50 years.
So Lorenzo and I are taking a deeper dive.
So he pitches you and your immediate excitement, you tell Lorenzo.
I literally picked up the phone and called Lorenzo and I said, we need to take the front of the guy.
Yeah.
I mean, he's got to be so excited.
Well, the guy has a real business now, but this guy has something really special.
This can really be big.
So that is the excitement.
At the end of the day, you are an entrepreneur that loves building businesses, especially when people think that there's no chance.
So you almost need that, the monkey on your back.
Love For Caesars Casino Company00:15:13
I do.
I hate to fucking admit that, but I do.
But it's extra motivation.
These people that, you know, I love negativity.
Yeah.
I love negativity.
I love it.
I fucking love it.
Go in the comments section and shit on me and tell me where they can't happen.
It's like the stuff that fucking wakes me up.
Explain blackjack to me then.
Here's the other thing.
I need to understand.
And like when you said UFC 300, did you see the video that I came out?
Of course.
I'm a low road guy.
I always take people.
And I love, you know, you have these smug fucks on whatever who act like they fucking know what they're talking about.
And there's nothing better than just showing them that they have absolutely.
Okay, so explain to me the gambling.
You love it.
Yeah.
You, it like, even when I see you talk about it at press conferences, you are like excited about it.
Like you're happy you get a question about even now you're smiling.
Explain to me, one, the feeling of it.
Is it close to anything else?
Yeah, it's right up there with everything that I love.
Fucking like, you know, take the, I'll give you an example.
Like I'm in a position where I'll be home.
Let's say my family's out of town, right?
And I got Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Now I could fucking jump on the plane and I could go anywhere and I could literally do anything.
I want to go to Caesar Palace.
That's what I want to fucking do.
And throw down.
I literally fucking go in there.
And what I love about Caesars is Caesars, when you're a fucking big player, like Caesars treats big players right.
You know, I didn't like the setup I had.
They literally built a fucking room for me.
Is this the room that we see in a lot of last YouTube videos?
The Frontidas, every casino, the Fertida's open, they build me a room.
Every fucking casino.
Okay.
So they literally built me this fucking room.
Like Caesars is old school.
They don't have TVs.
They put a fucking TV in there, literally like a fucking embedded in the wall.
And like overnight, they come in and do this shit.
I didn't like the fucking chair I was sitting on.
They got me like one of those gaming chairs, you know, for kids that played video games for fucking hours.
You know, exactly, exactly.
They put a dining room table in there because I'll order food from the different restaurants.
And I go in there.
And what I love about Caesars is they treat their players right and they do everything the right way.
They don't ever sweat the fucking money ever.
What does that mean?
You'll go into some of these casinos and if you win.
The fucking pit bosses have shitty fucking attitudes and it's always negative and they're always trying to, you always feel like fighters get paranoid.
Yeah, yeah.
Gamblers get paranoid too.
Like, oh, these motherfuckers are trying to, like, there won't be somebody at the cage to give me my money because they wanted me to fucking wait and see if I'll keep playing and fucking lose.
Just all these little things that if you are a fucking gambler, you know what I'm talking about, right?
Caesars has none of that shit.
And every one of the fucking dealers want you to win because I take care of fucking all the dealers.
And there's just, it's a good vibe and a good energy.
And I play baccarat and Caesars Baccarat is fucking packed wall to wall with Chinese.
Chinese have good fucking gambling vibes, man.
Chinese are fucking absolute degenerate fucking baccarat players.
No mush.
No mush.
They will sit there from fucking six o'clock at night till 10 o'clock the next morning playing baccarat.
They're all upbeat and fucking good energy and I fucking love it.
So what I love about, those are all the things that I love about Caesars Palace in Vegas.
And then the other thing is, oh, and the thing with Caesars too is if you're a big player, every Christmas, they have this, they open up all their ballrooms and the ballrooms are packed with fucking snowmobiles, motorcycles, TVs, electronics, jewelry, clothes, everything.
And you can go in there and shop for Christmas and do whatever.
So Lene, who's my head of PR, she's in the other room here.
I give her the stuff and she goes and she gets all the stuff and gives it to the employees, my employees.
So we use all my fucking points to shop for the employees at UFC.
And that's another thing I love about them.
But the other thing is that the biggest casino company in the United States, they have 44 casinos.
And I love the fact that it's me versus them every fucking night.
I go toe to toe with the biggest casino company in the world.
And I'm in this fucking war with them right now.
Since Jan 1.
Since Jan 1, I'm in this war with them.
I've been playing baccarat.
And I beat them for $16.5 million.
Wow.
Since January 1.
Since Jan 1.
So every night is like this fucking war.
And I've only, since Jan 1, I've only lost to them twice, but I'm still, I have such a fucking big lead on them.
They need me to get murdered.
Bad.
Bad.
Do you ever go on tilt or whatever?
Is that the term?
On tilt?
Or a ticker term for sure when you're emotional.
When you just, you just can't stop tilting.
Or do you, are you very diligent about the way you've gambled where you've gone?
I'm usually very diligent, but I'm not going to say there's not been a couple times.
And those are the times that I lose when you fuck up and you stick around a little longer.
A little too long.
You should have.
Yeah.
Okay.
To bring this back to UFC, that event, the energy.
So think about this too.
This is what I love too.
This is not a game.
By the way, this is a gambling question I'm going to ask you.
So there's this is the biggest casino company in the country, right?
And I'm on a fucking run that six o'clock the next morning, emails are flying around the fucking company.
Like, this motherfucker beat us again.
This motherfucker beat us again.
And you love the fact that you're driving them fucking crazy.
I love it.
I love it.
And the other thing that I love about, it's the Carano family that owns this, that owns Caesars.
I don't know.
Get a Carano.
What?
Yeah.
The Carano family owns Caesars Palace.
I didn't know that.
They own the biggest casino company in the country.
Gina Carano, the UFC fighter.
And now she makes films.
She was on Mandalorian and she got kicked off because I think she didn't want to get back to the whole civilian.
Yeah, that's Gina Carano.
Wow.
I didn't know her family.
Oh, I know.
She lost her family.
Her father is Glenn Carano.
And yeah, they own all the casinos.
And the thing that I love about them too, they're so fucking classy about how they do everything with whatever.
I'll run into them in the hallways when they're in Vegas.
They live in Reno, but when they're in Vegas, I'll run into them and they couldn't be classier about it.
And just classy, good people.
So I love war with them and support them.
You know what I mean?
And if I'm going to lose, I want to lose to classy, good fucking people like them or the Fertidas.
You know what I mean?
It's fun for me.
It's what I love to do.
Final fight, first spike TV final between Bonner and Forrest.
The whole card you said was okay.
You're going into that final fight.
The contract is dependent on this final fight.
The card was not great.
Right.
You were saying that earlier.
It wasn't okay.
It was not great.
That.
Okay.
The excitement of going into that final fight.
Is that the same as when you're on a run?
No, I would say the excitement after that fight and how I felt after that fight, I knew, I knew no matter what happened, we had it.
That's the baccarat run?
Every night when I walk in to Caesars and I walk into that high limit room, I'm fucking amped up and I can't play.
Same feeling.
Do you know who would play?
Here's the biggest thing.
It's easy to talk about the wins and winning.
It feels good.
It's much like fighting.
It's the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows when you lose.
But I've been gambling for so long that I've been able to manage that.
Like when I get my ass kicked, you know, some people can't handle it and they go into a deep, dark depression.
And they all of a sudden, I don't give a fuck.
I get up the next day.
I look at 2024 as a war.
Okay.
This year is a war for me.
And these are all little battles that are fought inside the war.
Some nights I win, some nights they win.
But where do we end up at the end of the year?
And it's just, it's what I really, really love to do.
Have you beaten them for a year?
Have you beaten?
Have you anything?
Yeah.
So you go through, at the end of a year, you're either get decimated and you're fucking whatever, or you beat them by a margin.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Or you're even.
But that feels good.
That's just what I like to fucking do.
Yeah.
What's the most you ever won in a day and the most you ever lost in a day?
So I literally have won.
So what I do in a day is I keep my day at a million bucks.
Okay.
So if I win a million, conservative.
Yeah.
I leave.
I've been clipping these guys for a million a night.
Oh, you mean you stop at the million?
Yeah.
When I beat them for a million.
So for the last, since Jan 1, I've been clipping them from anywhere from 800 to a million a night, right?
When I go into play.
And when I lose, I'll go guns a blazing and go through my whole fucking credit line.
Which is $6 million.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Wow.
You've lost six?
Yeah.
Do you know how much you lost?
Hold on, hold up.
Let's stop here.
No.
All time?
I don't know.
The wins and me and Hunter were talking about this the other day.
All-time wins and losses.
And you're talking, you know, probably 20 years of hardcore real gambling.
Yeah.
You lose six.
You walk out of there.
What is the first thing you do?
It's usually late, so I go home and go to bed.
No milkshake, no nothing, no like sugar high to make you feel better.
No?
I fucking just another day.
Shake it right.
$6 million.
Go home, go to bed, get up, go to work the next day, and then figure out what the next game plan is.
But I'm in a position right now with these guys where they're in a unique position because I'm up 16.5 on them.
So if I keep winning, it just keeps getting worse.
So I'm eventually going to lose.
It's eventually going to happen.
And when I lose, I'll lose $6 million.
So they know that.
They're waiting for the big drops.
100%.
So I'll lose $6 million.
Well, I'm still up fucking 10 million on them.
I got to go on a really bad fucking run for them to catch up to me.
How much skill is there in Baccarat?
It's 50-50.
Oh, it's the closest statistical game in the, it's more than blackjack?
Exactly.
Way more.
What's weird?
Okay.
This is what's fascinating.
That's why Asian play it.
As far as Baccarat, Baccarat has the best odds, yet they'll let you play more money on that than they will on.
You can bet $300,000 a hand on Baccarat from them.
And Blackjack $75,000.
Blackjack's way harder to win.
Do you know how many multiple nights you're going to walk in to a blackjack game and win a million?
Fucking zero.
Fucking zero.
Have you asked?
But Baccarat?
Have you asked why they're a little bit more?
I'm not thinking of Baccarat.
$300,000 a hand, right?
And your number's a million?
You win three hands and you're out.
And this is your week.
You're excited.
You're ready to dive in.
You're ready to walk away after three hands.
Oh, fuck yeah.
When you have a million dollars.
You got the war.
Is it 2024?
Where's my phone?
Hey, can you guys hear me in the other room?
Bring me my phone if you can hear me.
What do you got?
What is something?
Whatever it is on the street.
We have the intro to this episode.
Okay.
Wow.
I bet you that actually goes in the favor of the house in some cases because I wonder if people, like their competitive spirit, they're like, oh, this is the chance I can win.
So they're willing to bet more.
I wonder.
Like, I wonder if it drags or pulls in a certain subset of gamblers.
You know what I mean?
That place is full of sickos every single night.
Yeah, that's fair.
Have you built relationships with some of these people?
Because it's got to be the same guy.
The high roller.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When I walk in, we're fist bumping everybody and shit.
And when people see that I'm winning, they'll run over.
I see somebody winning.
This was the other night.
Wow.
That's a million dollars on the table right there.
Wow.
Jesus.
What's a tip?
That's a million $25,000.
What's a tip to a dealer when you're winning a million dollars?
So every time I play, no matter what I play, I tip the dealers 10,000.
And then this is in the back room.
Wow.
Oh, you're walking out with cash.
Holy shit.
That's a million dollars right there.
Actually, that's 1.1.
Magnet.
You see him walk in and you know you're leaving with 10,000 that night.
That's crazy.
Wow.
Yeah.
The only winner in the casino is a guy who's home.
Wow.
That's what a million dollars looks like.
1.1.
Wow.
Wow.
Do your kids gamble at all?
$1,137,000.
Son, he just runs.
So I can show you.
I can just keep going.
Here's the next one.
Here's another one.
I mean, back to back every night.
I could just keep showing you fucking videos.
Of the multiple of a million dollars.
That's the other one.
That's the night before.
Wow.
What are some of the shady things that the shitty casinos will do to try to rip people off?
There's so much shit.
I wish I could remember the name of this fucking casino.
It was up in Niagara Falls piece of shit casino that I went to.
This is why you don't want to play at those type of casinos.
So I had a host up there and he's like, yeah, come play or whatever.
You know, we'll give you a million dollars.
I said, I want a million dollars in credit.
And they're like, no problem, no problem, this and that and everything else.
So I get up there, I start fucking playing and I lose 300,000, right?
And right when we got there, he brings me the credit thing and it's for 300.
And I sign it.
And I'm like, I thought we were a million.
Yeah.
He's like, I'm going to keep every, if you lose, hopefully you don't.
I'll just keep bumping it another.
I lost the 300 and they denied me the rest of the credit.
Get the fuck out of here.
Motherfucker got me to go there and told me he was going to do something and didn't do it.
And if I fucking, I wish nobody's ever asked me this before.
I wish I remembered the name.
But if you, any of those casinos in Niagara Falls, fuck them.
Don't ever play at those places.
They're all dirty, shady, shitty fucking places, man.
If you really want to gamble, right?
And you live anywhere, jump on a fucking plane and fly to Vegas.
Vegas is, first of all, there's a shitload of competition, right?
There's casinos up and down the fucking strips, whatever.
They're going to treat you right.
They're going to give you the best fucking deals you get.
They're going to give you a discount on your losses.
If you lose, they give you a percentage of your money back.
You can negotiate that type.
But there's all kinds of things you can negotiate.
Bruno Mars Gambling Deals00:06:57
Is that like depending on it?
100%, depending on what type of player you are.
But if you're a consistent, good player, the casinos in Las Vegas are going to take such good care of you that none of these fucking shitholes outside of Vegas could ever even compete with.
So if you're going to go lose, I don't give a fuck if it's $2,500.
Jump on a fucking plane to Vegas and make a weekend out of it.
They'll treat you better.
And you have a better, your odds are better of winning.
I didn't realize that the casinos could actually be shysters about it.
100%.
Well, Mickey Mace, he like exposed a lot of like games and stuff.
I've seen him on YouTube.
Have you seen that guy on YouTube?
No.
If he says that he found a way to game Baccarat and that some casinos have like banned him from it, because there are different ways to do it with blackjack.
There are guys who like counted cards and stuff.
I wrote a book about this.
Not in Vegas.
They've been you in Vegas.
Even the ones that they say they banned, you know, that I'm banned from.
Yeah.
What banned means is, so the Palms.
I beat the Palms for $1.6 million, right?
This is years ago.
They dropped my credit limit.
You know what I mean?
So you're not banned.
But you can't gamble the way you can.
But they're basically saying, beat it, get lost.
Without saying, oh, you can't play here anymore.
If somebody's claiming they were banned, they fucking cheated or they did something fucking dirty or they just don't want, you're a guy that they don't fucking want in there.
It's not because you're that fucking good.
What happens is when you consist, what makes me dangerous is bankroll and I will fucking go in there and I'll play three fucking hands and leave.
That's what makes me dangerous.
They don't like that kind of thing.
You're looking at big picture.
100%.
Listen, if I'm a guy that flies in for the weekend and do whatever, I'm coming in every fucking night, right?
And I'll clip you for three fucking hands and leave.
They don't like that kind of play.
That's not what happened to the Palms.
The Palms, I legit beat these guys at Blackjack for $1.6 million over 23 trips.
So in 23 times, I went 23-0 against them and beat them for $1.6 million.
So they dropped my limits on what I could bet.
They wouldn't let me bet that much anymore.
Can you negotiate with them on the flip side?
Like, yo, I just won 2 mil, but how about you only pay me 1.2 and I can do something for you guys?
Like, is there ever a reverse negotiation that happens?
Oh, hell no.
I take every fucking time out of that fucking black.
If I lose, lose.
You pay me less and I do something for you.
Who knows if the guy owns something in politics?
We could work out a deal.
If I'm clipping you for a million a night, you guys just give me $250 and I won't come.
I wish I could negotiate that deal.
But no, but anybody who's saying they're kicked out of a fucking place because they're full of shit.
They don't literally kick you out unless they catch you fucking cheating.
If you're a fucking cheater, they kick you out.
What they do is they drop your limits.
So, you know, it's harder to fucking win.
If you can only bet, you know, if you can bet $300,000 a hand and you go in and win three hands and fucking leave, right, consistently.
Yeah, fuck that.
And they say, you know what?
We're only going to let you play $100,000 a hand.
Now, if you lose $1 million, if I lose a million playing baccarat, I'm only three hands away from being back up.
If you lose a million at $100,000 a hand, you're going to win 10 hands on a fucking rope.
And that's not going to happen statistically.
You know what I'm saying?
Do you have any stories?
Like, you don't say who, but like with high rollers.
Like, I'm sure you're with like oligarchs and princes and like big tech CEOs.
Like, do you have stories where you saw a guy and you're like, that guy's crazier than me?
Like, he's doing stuff that I've never seen people do.
A big loss or something.
I think that if you fucking really, there's only a couple guys in the world here in the United States and in Vegas that play like I play.
MJ?
You got any MJ stories?
Oh, I've heard tons of Jordan stories, but I've never actually seen it.
I'll tell you this, though.
Charles Barkley, Charles Barkley's a gambler too.
Charles Barkley came to PowerSlap and the one that we did at the Durango and I have a big gambling party after.
And he fucking beat him for like $650,000.
No way.
Yeah, Barkley beat them for like $650,000.
He crushed it.
I love that.
Yeah.
What about, did you hear that?
I don't want, you know, it's...
Well, these influencers too.
Aiden Ross.
Yeah.
So Aiden Ross comes to PowerSlap and Aiden Ross will play.
Fucking Aiden Ross.
This kid's what, 22?
Yeah.
He goes on fucking, he's up a million.
He's down 750.
He's up a million five.
Oh, my God.
In a fucking PowerSlap weekend.
Aiden Ross is hardcore.
He plays hardcore too.
What about, did you hear the rumor about Bruno Mars?
I don't know how much is true about these rumors.
There's so many fucking stupid rumors.
First of all, you have to put things into perspective.
For Bruno Mars to lose that kind of fucking money, right?
First of all, what's he worth?
You know what I mean?
Bruno Mars prints fucking money.
I mean, the guy has a fucking show in Vegas.
In Vegas that he plays consistently.
Have you ever seen Bruno Mars play live?
Unbelievable.
Unbelievably talented.
He's unbelievable.
It is one of the greatest live shows you will ever see.
When you're watching Bruno Mars and his team play, you're like, there's no fucking place on earth these guys would rather be than right here, right now.
It's an incredible, great show.
I don't care if you don't know one Bruno Mars song.
And you do know them.
The guy makes shitloads of fucking money.
And of course he fucking gambles.
I'm sure he does.
But to say that the guy is down this much and he owes the casino, you hear a lot of bullshit fucking rumors.
Is there anybody that you find is bad luck and you don't want to gamble?
100%.
Wait, are you gambling?
There's guys.
This is so true.
This is why I was talking about Caesars Palace.
When you go into Caesars Palace Baccarat fucking high limit room, right?
It is fucking wall to wall with Chinese people that are fucking like straight out of China, like straight from China.
And I learned the game by watching them.
I've studied them playing the game and watching and all this shit, and it's fascinating.
But they have a good energy about them and they are very superstitious.
Like certain animals that you might have on your fucking shirt or get that shit.
There's tons of different shit that the Chinese are very superstitious about.
And I don't know why.
I just, I love the fucking energy that these people have when they're in there.
So you, you know, and when the dealer flips the cards and they're all screaming, monkey, monkey, monkey, and they're fucking slapping the table.
It's fucking awesome.
There's just an energy level in there.
That is fucking awesome.
And yes, you get some fucking guys that walk in and you just, you get that vibe from them.
This is, this is fucking the real life Eddie fucking mush, this guy.
Could be anything.
The wrong animal, the fucking wrong attitude, the way he looks, the way he plays, things he says.
Do you ask him to leave?
No, you just get the fuck away from him.
You move to another area and you get away from, yeah, the Eddie Mush.
Yeah, it's that's fucking real.
Wow.
Yeah, there's real Eddie Mushes out there.
What are your other superstitions?
Is there like a pair of shoes you wear?
Howie Mandel Poker Pressure00:15:42
Is there like a tie or something?
I have to have a vibe with the casino.
When you walk in, there has to be this vibe in the place, and you have to vibe with the dealer.
My biggest superstition is when you get a shitty fucking dealer that has a bad attitude and you're like, this motherfucker wants me to lose.
Yeah, yeah.
That's sort of my thing.
Okay.
Okay.
And so they probably set you up with the people you like now.
Yeah.
I have this thing where I'm very fortunate in my life and I take care of people.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Whether it's dinner or this or that, the people who are handling your food or your drinks or whatever it might be, I take care of people.
And it's the same thing in the casinos.
So normally in places that I play regularly, everybody's on my team.
You know what I mean?
Loyalty, very important to you.
It's huge.
It's everything to me.
The people that have had your back from early on, are they still in your life?
And do you make sure of that?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm still hanging out with people that I went to high school with.
You know, my circle's very small.
And it's like when we were talking about canceling, like people trying to cancel.
I don't give a fuck what everybody else thinks or what they're doing or whatever.
There's a very small group of people whose opinions matter to me.
And three of them are my fucking kids.
You know what I mean?
Those are the only people that can cancel you.
Yeah.
You know, you're some fucking dip shit on some fucking networker.
Yeah.
I'll tell you this the other day.
I was talking to, I won't call these guys out on this, but I was talking, we were talking about a deal with a group of people who are they make shitloads of money, but they're looked down upon.
Okay.
Yeah.
And booze.
So I was talking to them about it.
I was talking to them about a deal.
Yeah.
Right.
And the guy who's one of the big guys in the company called me back and said, you know, we talked to our board of directors and I'm already out.
You're asking permission.
You're asking permission.
If you have a fucking board of directors.
Why am I talking about the fucking, it's just like, I've dealt with that shit before.
Yeah.
Fuck you.
Yeah.
And your board of fucking directors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the shit that's fucking, you know, you get a group of fucking uppity douchebags in a fucking room that are going to determine the way that something goes or how you're going to do business or who you're going to do business with or something that's going to go on.
You already lost me.
So he didn't want to do this thing, but he wants to do a few other things with me.
We're going to do nothing together.
Because you have to deal with that.
We're going to do nothing together.
I'm not doing a bureaucracy.
Yeah.
Don't talk to your fucking board of directors.
Yeah.
You guys are already a fucking pussy company that I don't want.
You're a bunch Of fucking pussies.
Here's a question I've been thinking this whole time.
What is it about you that you think number one thing that makes you so successful about you?
Like, what is it you?
I felt like listening to this other podcast.
I'm like, maybe he understands human nature in a way that's very deep.
But I want to just ask you, what do you think it is that's made you so successful?
I don't know.
Listen, I get up every day and I work hard.
I mean, that's that.
You have to work hard, man.
Yeah, but I believe in.
I guess if you look at all the things that go on in the outside world and all the people that tell you what you can't do and what's not possible, I've built a team of people that I have got on board with me that agree with me and say, there's nothing we can't fucking do.
You know what I mean?
And when you build a fucking team of can-dos instead of can't do's, like the sphere, right?
I said we can fucking do this.
And I think this is going to be fun, challenging, and an experience that we will all look back on and 10 years ago, we fucking did that and we were first, just like COVID.
You know what I mean?
And the list goes on and on.
There were a lot more reasons why I went through COVID.
My team is one of them.
And COVID never really made sense to me.
So I don't know.
I just built a team of can-do's, not can't-do's.
That's awesome.
We fucking, why?
I say again, why, why am I doing the sphere?
It's expensive.
It's literally fucking, my guys are working on this 24-fucking seven.
It's tough because that's what we do.
We kick fucking ass and we do things first and we do things that people say can't be done.
And that's what I love to do.
I love that.
Dana White, ladies and gentlemen.
Brother, thank you so much for being here, man.
This has been awesome, dude.
It's great to meet people that exceed the expectations you have for them, man.
You have absolutely done that.
Thank you.
Congratulations on all your success, too.
Thank you.
I'm very happy we could keep you here longer than the Howie Mandel podcast.
Answer that.
What was that set up with you and how it had to be?
So what happened was I did the Sage Steel podcast when she called me Charlie.
Okay.
How did we not talk about both of these?
I have so many clips.
I got to cook that much.
So, first of all, I love her.
She asked me to be her first guest on the podcast.
So I go out there.
Now, the studio is owned by Howie Mandel, where these podcasts take place.
She was signed to Bill Maher's podcast company.
Yeah.
And they're all done.
They're in Howie Mandel's studio.
So we get done with the podcast, and Howie Mandel walks in.
And he's like, I've 100 podcasts a week happen here.
I've never watched any of them.
I watched a whole podcast.
Love who you are, what you stand for, and all this stuff.
And we hit it off.
We start talking.
Great dude.
So he's like, let me show you around the studio.
So he's fucking got, he's involved in all kinds of shit.
He owns social media companies and all this other stuff.
Howie Mandel owns a lot of shit that people don't realize.
Smart guy, great guy.
So we're walking through and stuff.
He goes, would you do me a favor?
That's great.
And I said, yeah, what's up?
And he's like, would you come in and get up and walk off my podcast?
I go, I would be fucking honored to walk off your podcast because I'm so fucking sick of doing podcasts.
So we go in there and do it, right?
And he's like, take this to the grave.
I said, done.
I'll take it to the grave.
Right?
So I go do this thing with the Nelk Boys.
Yeah.
Right.
We're doing this monkey bomb fucking tour.
Yeah.
The whole fucking crowd starts chanting, fuck Howie Mandel.
Fuck Howie Mandel.
I go, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Time out.
I can't do this.
Yeah.
Howie Mandel's the greatest fucking dude ever.
Sorry, Howie.
It's just when I go out and people start fucking shitting on the guy, and I'm sure he could give a flying fuck.
Yeah, yeah.
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it.
So Howie Mental is fucking awesome and everything else.
And the other thing that we started to talk about that I wanted to tell you too.
I do this show called Looking for a Fight, and we go out and we go into different cities and we see what the city has to offer food-wise, entertainment, and all this other stuff culturally.
And then we go to fights.
So we like to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations.
I wrote a bull.
I wrote a real PBR bull.
Jumped in the fucking ocean with sharks in the middle of fucking Florida, which is one of the dumbest things I've ever done other than bull riding.
And the worst thing that I ever fucking did was stand-up comedy.
So we came up with this.
I'll never forget it, Dave.
Me, Matt, and Dean had to write our own jokes.
And I was like, this will be fun because we'll go into a comedy club.
I've been to comedy clubs.
There's fucking six people sitting in there.
People are up until like a big comic shows up.
There's a fucking handful of people in there.
And you go up and you tell your jokes.
So we did this thing.
They promoted that we were going to be there.
Oh, fuck.
The club fucking sold out.
Right?
This is in LA.
Club sold out.
We pull up.
There's a line down the fucking street.
So I fucking, I can't tell you a time that I've ever been this fucking nervous.
It's funny.
And the amount of pressure on it.
And just so you know, I fucking cheated too.
I had Tony Hinchcliffe write my fucking joke.
Pick the good one.
Pick the good one.
Matt and Dean wrote their own jokes and had to get up to me.
I almost, I'm not even kidding you.
I public speak all that there's, I'll public speak.
I'll be driving to the thing and I'll call my secretary and go, what am I talking about at this thing?
Oh, okay.
And I go into it.
I've never felt this way before.
I almost fainted before I went on fucking stage.
So when it was over and I got through it, I'm like, I will never, ever fucking do this again.
Until.
Until.
Until Brady calls me.
So thank God I had already had that experience.
Oh, yeah.
Stand-up comedy is the most underrated fucking thing of all time.
Let's go.
I've done it all.
You know, as far as business goes, and then on these TV shows just fucking around doing shit.
Yeah.
There is nothing harder than going into a room.
Now, let's go into the Brady Roast.
All the baddest comedians in the world and ones you didn't see.
Fucking Chappelle was there.
Chelsea Hanlon was there.
There's a guy from fucking England was there.
Oh, Jimmy Carl.
Carney motherfucker.
Exactly.
All there too.
And there's 12,000 people fucking live.
And then it's your time.
And here comes the camera right in your fucking face.
Now, here's the thing.
If you're public speaking and you fuck up, you recover.
You pull it together.
You fuck up telling a joke.
It's a downward death fight that you will never be able to pull yourself out of because you're not a professional comedian.
It's hot.
You start sweating.
There is no amount of fucking pressure ever in my life.
And it's live.
I'll tell you this, too.
You know how much I love gambling.
And it's live.
One time I had a million dollar hand out there between splits and everything else.
And the amount of it, there's not, that doesn't even compare to doing stand-up fucking comedy, man.
Fuck that shit.
I've done it twice.
Remember, I said it here.
You will never see me do any of that shit ever again.
You killed me.
You won't see me ever written.
You killed me.
But you know what I did?
I studied.
I studied to the point of I was starting to go insane.
I studied so hard because you can tell some of these people, like even Kim Kardashian is relying on the teleprompter.
Fuck the teleprompter.
I'm worried.
What if the teleprompter get glitches or the writing's too small or something fucking happens?
I knew my shit inside and out.
Do you remember when you remember when we spoke before?
And I started.
So Rogan calls me.
Rogan's like, hey, Dana wants to run by a couple lines for this thing.
I was like, yeah, yeah, give him my number.
Yeah, well, what happened was you and I were DMing.
We were DM.
And you were going fucking ghost on the DM for a minute.
And I was like, oh, fuck.
I got a roasted dude.
Well, Nikki Glazier stole my fucking joke.
She didn't steal your joke.
You had the same joke.
Yeah.
But she was going before me.
And they went to her and they told Nikki Glazier.
They said, Dana White has this joke.
She goes, Fuck him.
I'm on before me.
And I'm like, you're a professional.
You have 300,000 jokes.
And you're fucking murdered at that moment.
You're going to take my one joke and I have three.
You know what I mean?
I'm like, I'm fucked.
I need help.
I got a fucking car.
He's on the way.
He calls me up.
He goes, all right, let me just go through these things.
And he goes, he goes, fucking Nikki stole my joke.
He's like, none of us have even done jokes yet.
You're before me.
I know.
You know, she's like, I'm going before him.
Fuck him.
What's he, you know?
So tell him another joke.
The jokes are all funny.
And I remember the first one was the, my name's Trans, and all I get is 60 seconds, right?
I remember hearing the joke, and I remember going, I would go, listen, he's nervous.
I was like, all right, maybe we can work out something else.
That's like a 50-50.
Either the audience is into it and they love it or not.
And I remember I called you back and I was like, hey, I don't know about that joke.
I remember you go, Schultz, are you fucking with me right now?
I can't take this when you're going to give me a different thing to say in the beginning.
And I go, well, listen, I don't want you to bomb.
And that joke might be a 50-50.
And I think it states that you don't really care and you don't give a fuck.
And then I remember you go, wait, what do you mean?
I go, well, they might not laugh.
Well, he says, he says, you're not going to get the reaction you think you're going to get.
And I go, oh, I'm going to get the reaction.
I know what they're.
I go, I don't give a fuck.
I wanted to come out and just punch everybody right in the face.
You said, I just want them to know that I don't give a fuck.
I was like, oh, well, they'll know that.
Dana's okay with that.
50-50.
Honestly, I thought they were going to fucking boo me.
Bro, I'm the joke ready to get booed.
Yeah.
It just, the amount of fucking pressure on now, that you did very well.
I think you did very well.
That's great.
And also a weird situation because your back is to the audience.
You're in the he's at the front row.
I'm talking to the you can't even deliver to them and see them laughing, which kind of motivates you.
So you're laughing.
I was talking to the deus.
Yes, which is the hardest people to impress because we're like at least we laugh for a living.
Exactly.
No, it was good.
Yeah, it's fucking good.
Let me tell you what.
Very underrated how fucking how much pressure.
I'm not even fucking joking.
Yeah.
My body was fucked up for like three days after that.
Like my body was fucked up.
I didn't feel good for three days after that.
I didn't feel right.
It literally the amount of pressure to get up and tell fucking jokes.
Yeah.
You know, and you're telling jokes to fucking comedians.
Oh, not to mention the fact, let's just say, you know, a handful of the best comedians in the world have been going for an hour before you fucking go out there.
All right.
Yeah.
That's also true.
And you have to make people fucking laugh.
Yeah, they're tired.
But the other thing was with mine is I didn't want to have that.
So I sort of when this, when something like this happens, what they do is for weeks, when you say yes, you get on calls with producers and comedians and everybody.
Now, they're writing jokes for fucking Tom Brady, Gronk, Edelman, fucking Belichick.
And the list goes on and on and on, right?
Mine's 60 seconds.
I'm not a patriot.
I'm not one of these fucking guys.
I'm getting the piece of shit crumb jokes that fall on the fucking floor.
And most of them are UFC based that most of the fucking people wouldn't understand anyway.
I'm like, fuck this shit.
I'm not relying on these guys to write.
So I went out of house and started talking.
I'm talking to Bill Burr.
I'm talking to fucking you.
I'm talking to fucking guys that can really guide me and help me in this thing.
The Tom Brady running one was great.
Yeah, yeah.
I used to think you were from Boston.
Then I saw you run.
I knew you were from San Francisco.
That was great.
That was great.
Bill Burr.
Really?
Bill Burr.
Let's go, Bill.
Bill Burr.
Now he's the one to go to.
Bill is a man.
But it was good shit.
I'm glad you did it.
Thanks.
It was the fucking, it's sexy in the line of fire.
That's another thing.
I thought, this is what I thought, because sometimes with these award shows, people come in to do their thing, and then they leave and they get a seat filler.
That's what I thought Kim was going to do.
I'll give Kim credit.
She stayed there.
And they didn't tell me she was going to be there.
If they did, I would have had something.
But she was there for the whole time.
So I give her credit.
I'll tell you what else I give her credit for.
She's not an actress.
She's a fucking reality star.
And I am not an actor.
I do reality too, right?
So when you do reality, you go in and do what you fucking do.
Then you have to do some interviews and shit like that.
It is not even fucking remotely close to acting.
She got up there and you could tell she was reading her teleprompter.
She didn't really have that dial in.
Bill Burr Award Show Booing00:01:47
They started booing the fuck on her.
And you know what?
She fucking powered through it.
She didn't notice.
You know what I mean?
She fucking powered through it.
She made it.
She was dead.
Say what you want about Kim Karnashi.
She took it like a fucking champ.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It is weird because they say with public speaking, you're supposed to imagine the audience naked.
And with her, it was the opposite.
But people don't understand when you go up there and you try to fucking, you have to try to make people laugh.
She tried to tell a funny story about Tom and everything else.
She had funny jokes.
And she's getting booed.
She's the only fucking like woman there speaking that isn't a professional fucking comedian.
And you start getting booed and she fucking handled.
See, I was ready to get booed.
That's why my second joke was I was ready for the booing.
And it turned out the other way.
We're going to get you back up again.
I fucking guarantee you you will never.
We'll never get you back up again.
No, no, you'll never do it again.
Hey, hey, you will never do it.
You will never do it.
You'll never do it.
Dana White can't do it again.
Nobody believes it.
Dana White can't do comedy.
He can't do hell specialist.
Bro, you're the fucking man.
Anything else that we could tell the people about?
Anything else the good people need to know?
Obviously, fights coming up.
Anything that you're really excited about?
Guys that we should be looking into?
I'm excited about everything, man.
Everything that I'm doing, I fucking absolutely love to the core.
And I'll do this till the day I drop.
Can I ask you a serious question?
Yeah.
Were the Chinese guys at the baccarat table the ones that told you about the rice stalks?
No.
No.
Is that why you're doing it?
Is that why?
There's a buddy of mine from Boston named Roberto.
He runs all the clubs and restaurants in Boston, and he knows a bunch of people.