Dana White joins Meta’s board after Mark Zuckerberg recruited him for his "backbone," citing UFC’s business savvy, while dismissing MSNBC as a "cartoon" and praising Trump’s post-election resilience—calling his 2024 success "divine purpose." He contrasts Biden’s press secretary’s struggles with Trump’s relentless energy, noting global relief among Russians, Ukrainians, and Arabs over Trump’s return. On Meta, White avoids outright censorship battles but pushes for "common sense," like privately educating UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell instead of firing him, while defending Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition as a "superhero" move against government hostility. He criticizes the NBA’s softness compared to Jordan’s era and compares his UFC dedication to aging promoter Bob Arum, ending with Tucker Carlson’s YouTube suppression complaint. [Automatically generated summary]
No, I'm not shocked, because I have this sort of gut thing I have, and when I first started watching it, what's crazy is, two nights ago, we did the event here, and the guy who won the world title was the guy that got me into it.
When I started watching this stuff a few years ago, this guy named Dumpling, out of Siberia, Russia, okay?
You have the best job.
I'm not kidding you.
I'm not kidding you.
When we first paid him, I think he wanted $25,003 goats.
I don't know the answer to that question, but he got $25,003 goats.
That was the first dumpling from Siberia.
the guy who got me into this became the world champion here in saudi arabia i think it seems more painful than getting punched I don't know about that.
What you're going to watch tonight, listen, you take a minimum of three slaps and slap, you're going to see shins to the face, elbows, kicks, slams.
I know, and have been for a long time, and that became pretty obvious late in the campaign when, even though you're not political, you wound up kind of associated with Trump just because you know him so well.
Do you think he's changed since July when he got shot?
Yeah, I think that, listen, at the end of the day, as resilient and as tough as this guy is, you know, when you almost get assassinated the way that he was, I think it messes with you a little bit.
And the thing about him is, I talked to him, I was flying to Italy.
It's just not even, it's not humanly possible, but he did.
But then after that, he flew the next day to the RNC in Milwaukee and literally never rested, never took a break, never...
Stayed out of the limelight after almost getting shot, and I don't know, I just felt like it, for him, it affected him, but he made a complete recovery from that thing.
At the Power Slap event the other night, you know, there are fans here and I was talking to people and taking pictures and stuff and people were saying to me, you have to tell Trump to stop this war.
And in Russia and Ukraine, I think the Russians and the Ukrainians, maybe not Zelensky, but I think most Ukrainians, I've never met a Ukrainian that's not for Trump.
Well, did you ever notice that every time I have Trump at a UFC event, every fighter walks over to him and, you know, pays respect to him and all the fighters love him from all over the world.
And it's been a huge sigh of relief since the election.
I think what you saw, not just Zuckerberg, I think you see all the guys from Silicon Valley now that are, you know, having dinner with Trump, showing up at the inauguration and creating a relationship with him.
I feel like a lot of these people were, during the woke, nutty madness that we went through, you know, I guess I would call it during the COVID era and a little before that, are also relieved that it's over.
And I think a lot of people, there was very few people, there was a handful of people that actually stood up against this and weren't afraid to face...
I don't know.
Whatever we might have faced during that thing.
A lot of people got canceled.
A lot of bad things happened to a lot of good people during that time.
But there was a handful of people that stood up to it.
Then he comes in, we sit down, we have dinner, and we probably talk for four hours.
And I walked away from that first meeting liking Mark.
And we started to create a relationship from there.
We talked, and he's a UFC fan.
We became friends.
Then the whole Elon versus Mark Zuckerberg fight thing that was going on at that time, that was real.
And I was in the middle of it, and I had a blast doing the negotiations with that thing, talking to Elon for an hour every night, talking to Mark an hour every night.
About the fight, where it would be, what weight classes, this, that, what could you do, what couldn't you do?
And I was literally doing conference calls.
With the government in Italy to do this thing in the Colosseum in Rome.
And, you know, for the right number, the Colosseum was going to let us do that fight there.
And then eventually, you know, it started to fall apart.
But while it lasted, it was fun.
And through that, Mark and I became even closer and then I flew from Italy to the RNC. I spoke at the RNC, and I flew back to Italy on my vacation with my family, and I got a text from Mark that said, hey, can you talk for a minute?
Called him back, and he said, this is what he said to me.
I think you're a great businessman.
You always seem to be on the right side of everything, and my company needs a backbone.
I would be honored if you would sit on the board for Meta.
The beginning up until today of my relationship with Mark and, you know, I know a lot of people think, my sister, my sister is as far right, my sister's like you, as far right as you could possibly get during the COVID era.
Well, I do think it was, I mean, we're just watching it from afar, not talking to you about it, but I thought the one thing that everyone knows about you is you're opposed to censorship.
You're clearly, I mean, again, this week you came out and you said one of your fighters said something you thought was disgusting and you hated, but you're not firing him.
Like, you've kind of taken a stand against censorship very publicly again and again and again.
You know, Facebook is known for censorship, so probably a good thing they're putting you on the board.
Like, what's going to happen when you're sitting in a meeting like, we need to censor stuff we disagree with?
What my theories on AI are and how we should, you know, I know my role there.
And I've already been in it.
I mean, we've already had some situations and some things that we've dealt with.
My first board meeting, actually, in person, You know, up in Silicon Valley is a week after.
I fly from here to Sydney.
We have a fight next Saturday.
Then I fly home and like a week later is my first board meeting where we're not on Zoom.
So, yeah, I'm not...
I know what my role is.
I'm the type of guy, I will speak at this thing when I can add value and when I think I... You know, I got a lot to learn.
Never been on a board before.
Run a big company now that deals in hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.
A lot of the things that I do are by, I guess I would just say gut and how I think we should handle it.
It's not like, again, my head of PR, she's brilliant and I respect her very much, but it's not like the other night when I found out What Bryce Mitchell had said.
It's not like we got a bunch of lawyers on the phone and we didn't.
You know, I did.
I got on Google and I started looking up World War II and, you know, remind Bryce Mitchell on what a piece of shit Hitler was.
Okay?
And why he's not a good guy and why you wouldn't want to go fishing with him.
And that was it.
I saw people saying, I don't ever read canned statements.
Nobody writes anything for me.
And lawyers are never involved when I go out and speak.
I'm writing down stats from World War II. I wrote them down so I wouldn't forget.
But nobody writes anything for me.
Everything is exactly how I feel about it.
Whether you like it or not.
I don't care.
I don't care if you like it.
I don't care if you don't like it.
This is my company and I'll run it the way I want to.
So when you say you know your role at Facebook and you say Zuckerberg said to you, I need spine on my board, do you feel like your role is to oppose censorship at Facebook?
No, I don't think that my role is to oppose censorship.
I think that there's going to be decisions that need to be made on the fly.
It's already happened.
I mean, I've already been involved in...
A few things already in just a short time that I've been there, and I give my opinion on what I think should be done and how it should be handled.
Everybody that I've met on the board already, they're all actually really good people and smart people, and we've all had really good interaction so far.
So I'm actually really liking it.
It's going to be my first board meeting.
It's a two-day thing.
I don't know how long we're going to sit in there in these board meetings, but that'll be different and new for me, a new experience for me.
But my interaction with all the other board members has been really, really good so far.
So I'm looking forward to it.
And I think that when I can add value, I will speak up.
And at the end of the day, Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta, and he'll make the final decisions.
It's brilliant in the way that he brings people in that he likes and respects and wants to hear from, and everybody gives their opinion, and at the end of the day, Mark Zuckerberg makes the decisions.
So if you are in some country, whatever country, that has Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is, and something gets posted and stays up that they don't like, they'll fine them.
So what, I mean, you say that for the next four years, social media in this country following the lead of Elon is likely to be open and free and less crazy, more common sense oriented, less woke, etc.
But when people ask me about idols and heroes and all these kind of stuff, I've had people who've had influence on me, like Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson and lots of other people growing up.
But Michael Jordan?
Michael Jordan to me is...
I've never met Michael Jordan.
And I don't want to meet Michael Jordan.
I don't ever want to meet him.
I am the biggest Michael Jordan fan ever of his mentality.
The way that he...
I like killers, man.
And Michael Jordan was a killer.
And the stuff that his teammates say about him, that everybody says, I love, love it.
And the NBA just isn't like that.
You haven't seen that since Kobe.
You know?
It just...
It just doesn't have that.
When you go back and think of the NBA from the 80s and 90s and all the different stars that you could remember from back then and how it was just a tougher game.
You know what I mean?
It was a lot tougher.
And so many fouls and flopping and all the stuff that happens today isn't what the NBA used to be and what made the NBA big.
No matter what walk of life you're in, once you get to a certain level of success, you have to be a certain type of person to stay hungry and get out and fight every day.
When we sold in 2016, 99% of the people said that I was going to retire and walk away.
I'm not wired like that.
I love Michael Jordan.
Let me tell you what you think.
No, that's the way that I'm wired, too.
I'm still out building new brands and doing shit that I don't need to be doing, but I do it because I love it.
But yeah, I could see how many people in a sale like mine in 2016, you never see that guy again.
No, but that is actually kind of a big question since there are an awful lot of people in our country, you know, because there's so much money floating around, just kind of checked out.
They got too rich.
Like, do you ever check up on them to see what happened to them?
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now.
Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
That way you'll have a much higher chance of hearing actual news and information.