Dana White, UFC

32:40And, you know, this whole thing, which I ended up firing all of them. So how long does it take you to get your, because now you essentially have a team that thinks very similar to you, where you have to make very few changes. They understand and adapt it to your taste. how long does that process take to go from you guys don't know what the hell you're doing to I almost have like a bunch of clones of myself. Mr. Beast calls it like cloning himself. And like his editors, his thumbnail designers, he used to do all that stuff and then he works with them for so long they kind of can read his mind. That's my whole production team right now.

33:06Literally my whole production team. So now we'll go into, we have a screening room over here and they'll set up meetings with me. We got to go through screening stuff. very rarely do I have to change one fucking thing. My guys are so talented and so good and so on point with everything that they do. It's just, once you build, once you build this trust, confidence, whatever you want to call it with your team, and you have to have a bunch of sick animals that are just wired the way you are and, and, and incredibly talented. And I literally have a whole campus full of those kind of people right now from the art department to the production team to PR to I mean you name it that's an animal over there seriously fucking animal animal yeah I've heard you shot her out on a podcast too fucking animal yeah how many years did it take you to do that how many people did you have to turn over like what was that process like I don't know the exact answer to that but um not a lot of turnover in my in my on my production side these guys have been with me forever including you know the rock star head of production Craig Borsari but um there's been like one guy that I absolutely love that was on our production team and he left to go, you know, what we talked about, you know, go make it on his own.

34:39And he actually came to me about a year ago and said, listen, I have this whole concept. I think this could be big and everything else. And we helped him do it. We helped him build this thing and he's, he's, he's doing it right now. So I've always had great relationships with, with my team and and uh there hasn't been much turnover not in the key positions anyway the positions that work directly with me not a lot of turnover so when i listen to all your stuff one thing i'm curious about uh and i want to ask you selfishly it's like without a doubt you're one of the biggest fight fans in the world you love fighting but i almost watched over like 10 000 fights in the last 25 years not including fights that i've watched that weren't mine that's Incredible.

35:25Yeah. I almost feel like you're starting to, or maybe you have a lot. I almost feel like you love entrepreneurship as much and maybe even slightly more than you love fighting. Yeah. There's no doubt about it. Really? Yeah. If you look at what I'm doing, right. First of all, what I've done has never been done. And lots of people have tried to do it. Really wealthy people, really smart entrepreneurs and other spaces have all tried to do this. now built this incredible business then we just went public with TKO now I'm gonna try to rebuild boxing right and we just launched a jujitsu league and launched slap so every way that you can kick somebody's ass, you know, I am in that business.

36:20We're going to build the biggest combat sports company to ever exist. And that will probably ever exist. That's my goal in the next 10 years. It's not just that you're going to build the biggest combat organization. You already have, but it's going to be much bigger. But people don't understand that like entrepreneurs come and like seek out your advice. You're on the fucking board of Meta, for God's sake. So right here, normally you guys rip my fucking room apart here. Tell me what you see because this is not a normal podcast. Yeah, I said this looks like fucking CBS or Fox or something. So when you come in, my office is connected right here.

36:52This is my bar. So this is where I have most of my meetings. Usually there's four chairs here. Every day, multiple times a day, entrepreneurs come in here and pitch me something like fucking Shark Tank. And I give lots of people advice. I connect people with other people that I think they could do business with or I get involved myself. Why do you like talking to entrepreneurs so much? I love hearing different people's ideas. I love young people that are willing to take a shot and aren't afraid to do it. And literally, I mean, I should have my assistant figure out how many of these I do a year, but it's multiple times a day, every fucking day.

37:39And even on Saturdays and Sundays. So I sit in this room and listen to people's pitches all the time about the businesses that they want to build and their ideas. And usually you have these guys that will connect people to people and they want to be paid or a piece. I've connected more fucking people, you know, that have done things together and been successful. I'm not looking for anything other than I hope they all win. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority.

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38:53He said, we built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world deal is trusted by over 40 000 companies and growing fast learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com forward slash senra that is deal.com forward slash senra i'm curious the difference in quality of entrepreneur and when you started because i've heard you say like uh on a few other podcasts like some of these people are just so soft like some of these younger entrepreneurs don't understand how hard and difficult you you literally had to like the UFC would have died if it wasn't for you like can you say a little bit about the difference in like the the mentality that you see the greatest line of all time is you know I want to start my own thing because I want to set my own hours and I want to you know take days off and I want oh Jesus Christ you should just stay where you're at and keep working for somebody else because that's not how it works you know I've been doing this shit forever I could have retired, you know, 10 years ago.

40:03Every day when you get up and you're an entrepreneur, you go to war literally every day. Somebody's trying to fuck you. Somebody's trying to take what you have. You know, somebody's trying to tear down your business literally every day. Then you have the problems that pop up, you know, especially, and I know this sounds insensitive, but it is what it is. When your product is human beings and you have almost a thousand of them, not even including your employees, they have personal problems. They have injuries. They have things going on. There's always something wrong and always something that needs to be fixed every minute of every day.

40:47Especially the people you have, they're fighters. They choose to get into essentially their underwear in front of millions of people and fight, you know, beat the shit out of each other. You think you can control them? It's impossible. They're the most unique human beings on planet Earth. They are not like all of us. They are wired differently, which is what makes them special. You have this unique combination of almost like, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, like micromanager, but also like give a lot of freedom to the people. So like, you don't even try to, there's two, there's two things that come to mind, Right.

41:22Where it's like, you know, oh, John Jones is in the club in Vegas. What are you going to do? And you're like, he's a fighter. Like, there's nothing I can do about it. But also what I thought you were really smart on and ties to what we were talking about earlier. It's like you always adopt new technology early. You understood the power of like these TikTokers, these YouTubers, some podcasters. And you essentially just I've heard from them. Dana just gives us access to events and you know how to build an audience. You know how to make content. What the hell am I going to tell you? You just say, come to the events as much as you want, and then make whatever you want.

41:53If you think about this, I have UFC, Power Slap, Boxing, Jiu-Jitsu, the WWE, PBR, plus me in the Fertitta Zone, Slap, SLS, Skate League, and Nitro Circus. I don't know what any of those are. I want to hear about that in a minute. Well, there are nine brands right there that if you're an influencer. Now, if you're an influencer, when I started a note of this, I told Linnae, I don't know, five, six years ago. The media does not have the influence anymore. They're gone. Nobody trusts them. They're all full of shit. They're always lying and they don't have the trust of the people the way that they used to.

42:44These young kids are the influencers. They actually have the influence. And when you think about it, they have to get up every day and create content. You're a content creator. It is not easy to do. And you have to go viral. And you're competing with shitloads of other young people that are doing the same thing. You show up to any of my events, I give you full access. Film what you want. Create what you want. The other thing is most people that deal with content creators, they try to tell them, you have to do this, this, this. What the fuck do you know about creating content, right? Let these young, talented people who are unbelievably creative do what they do when they want to fucking do it.

43:34How hard is that? No, it's like a simple genius. It reminds me of you mentioned the Ellisons earlier and just like how aggressive they are and obviously well capitalized. And I saw this clip recently on X where Larry Ellison was talking, Larry Ellison mentored Elon Musk. So like Elon says, like, you know, he's one of the smartest people. He's one of the few people that Elon goes to for advice. And Larry Ellison is in this conversation with this like reporter for like a newspaper. And the reporter is trying to tell Larry that Elon is dumb. And he's like, have you landed a rocket on a, have you ever landed a rocket, much less a rocket on a boat?

44:05Like, show me what you have done. And I just thought that was like beautiful. It was like, that guy's stupid. He's landing rockets. I say that all the time. my biggest problem with the media, who the fuck are you and what the fuck have you ever done? Nothing. You're nobody and you've never done anything ever. Nobody's ever depended on you for a paycheck. Who are you to criticize anybody? I was just saying at the press conference in Winnipeg on Saturday, you have all these people on the internet talking about what we should be doing with our business? I said, holy shit, you guys are fucking brilliant.

44:46PFL, Bellator, 1FC, many, many other failing companies. Why don't they just fucking hire you guys? You guys have the answers for everything, right? It's just, I can't even read this shit because it's so dumb. And I realized these guys know nothing about this business, yet these are the people that are covering it. It's fascinating to me that anybody listens to any of these people. I heard you say one time that you always laugh when people start talking about like the business of UFC because they don't know anything about it. Can you say more about that? First of all, everything that we've done over the last 25 years has never been done before.

45:28And we continue to do things that have never been done before. There's a vision for this business and literally none of them know it. They have no idea. They can look at, oh, this company and these guys did this and somebody did this in the past. We're doing none of that shit. We're doing the exact opposite. So for you to criticize, I guess everybody can criticize and say, oh, this won't work. What have we done in the last 25 years that hasn't worked?

45:59Now, fucking Lorenzo's done. He's out. He doesn't want to do this anymore. So he puts the business up for sale. We sell for 4.025. This is 2016. Yeah. Okay. We sell for 4.025 billion, right? No TV deal. We're coming up to the end of our Fox deal. We have no TV deal. Nothing. Every fucking buddy out there. They overpaid. The UFC has peaked. The UFC is this. The UFC is that. all the same fucking guys that are talking shit right now that's what they said okay spike 35 million dollar deal fox 100 million dollar deal espn three billion dollar deal and now here we are 7.7 for seven years, everybody, they, they, they fucked Paramount, they Paramount overpaid, just all the same fucking shit from the same fucking losers.

47:07It's just, it's crazy. It's just like, you have to block all this noise out. These people are fucking zeros. Everybody that talks about this business and, and, and, and, and has an opinion on it are zeros. They've never done anything in their fucking life except talk and it's always the same shit because these are all people that have no vision no clue no whatever you you know they're all talking this shit and and 2016 and look where we are 10 years later wait and see where we are in 10 more fucking years i was gonna say the numbers are only gonna keep going up look at the streaming it's like streaming services it's just gonna be all be sports.

47:52The subscriber count is scaled so high. The demand is going to be insatiable for things like essentially that you make. I was surprised that it took Netflix so long to get into sports. I was saying it way before they did. The thing is, is that streaming's great. Right now, I'm like, I don't watch a lot of TV. Yeah. Well, you seem to be a little busy. Almost none. Yeah. Right? Something's really got to get me to, And I was saying this before the Paramount deal. Yeah. Way before. So much so that people are like, Paramount did the deal with him just because of how much he talks about Landman and Mobland.

48:30Landman is one of the greatest television shows that I've ever watched ever. And Mobland, you know, classic Guy Ritchie, unbelievable. So when you think about those two shows, I can go watch the whole season tonight or I can watch it three years from now. It's always going to be there. sports live sports is a destination you have to watch it now yep exactly so it always made sense for streaming platforms to go after the sports and as they continue to scale and they're global exactly what you said the numbers are going to keep going up 100 and i'm so glad that you and i are having this conversation that this all ended up happening remember everything that was said today on this podcast and let's talk again in five years i'm talking about all these you know literally losers that talk about this sport and absolutely know nothing about what they're talking about and if you if you if you check the temperature right here today paramount overpaid same shit that they said 10 years ago about wme overpaying for the the sport.

49:45It's peak. It's this, it's that they don't have the talent. They don't have the stars. They don't have the, this, they don't have the, that it's fascinating to me that any of these people that have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to the business, because this isn't like some, uh, some other, like the hotel business where it's all the same shit. Everything we're doing has never been done before. And over the next five to 10 years, Everything we do has never been done before either. And watch what we do in the next five to 10 years. The reason this will never stop, this is true today.

50:20It was true 100 years ago. It'll be true 100 years from now. If it's working, the numbers always get bigger than the people involved can possibly imagine. Very true. I love it. Yeah, it's crazy. I love that we're having this conversation. You just got shit the other day because I guess you guys used like some AI video in one of your promos. Yeah. What was your response to the people that criticized you? Well, the response was I did a whole commercial in AI after that for the White House. My response is, why don't you just shut the fuck up and watch the fights? Fuck do you care what we're doing technology wise?

50:56And what's the difference between we were using green screens before that too, right? And we still have to hire people to do this stuff. Let me tell you what's not happening. I'm not downstairs doing the fucking AI shit. We have people that are doing it. but it's the future. It's coming. Is it going to be as big as everybody thinks? Is it going to last? I don't know. You don't have to know. But right here, right now, we're in. But do you see how rare that is? You've been running the UFC for 26 years, something like that? Yeah. It's like you stay on top of it over and over again. If you just analyze what you do, you're just like, what's the most valuable medium to use for the product that I have to make the product that I have spread to more people?

51:35That answer is going to change. You thought DVDs were going to be, not just you, but DVDs are going to be around forever. Cable TV is going to be around forever. You couldn't have fucking predicted streaming in 2005. 100%. And we did a commercial, I don't know, over 10 years ago for the Conor McGregor-Jose Aldo fight. It was incredible. It was on the strip, you know, and they end up meeting out in front of MGM and all these Brazilians and all. Do they think that we really had all those fucking people out there and that we really did that? No, that isn't the way it worked, and that was way before AI.

52:07Whatever the new technology is, we're on it. I want to go back to the fact that you love entrepreneurship as much as fighting or maybe even more. One thing, the reason that we started the show, people are a little confused what we're doing. It's just like, this is a love letter to capitalism. I'm the son of a Cuban immigrant. My dad was literally born in Cuba. My grandfather fled Castro. That one decision changed the trajectory of my entire life. Just him deciding not to stay in this fucked up place and come to America and then me be born 30 years later or whatever the case was. I've heard you a few times, and I think you call them dummies, about these young kids that seem to be attracted to, you know, hating billionaires or being anti-capitalistic.

52:43Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. It's funny because if you look at the situation that California is in right now, right, and all these billionaires are trying to figure out how to get the hell out of there. Billionaires are very important to the ecosystem of the United States. You know what I mean? The amount of money these guys pay in taxes. How do you think everything stays afloat? How do you think the state comes up with the money to fix the roads and build the highways and, you know, infrastructure in every city in America comes from billionaires, millionaires, the middle class, and people who work their asses off and pay their taxes?

53:21That's where all the money comes from. I was just doing an interview, I won't say, but two days ago. And they were walking around looking at my office and looking at the gym. And the woman was like, you know, there's hard times right now. Some people are going through it. And don't you think if they're going to see this and be like, well, if they're going to see this and be like, you know, oh, this is terrible that this guy had. You're not it. And you're never going to be it. You got the victim mentality and you're never going to be that person. What you should look at what I have is say, that guy barely graduated high school, right?

54:02And believed in something, did all the right things. If that guy can do it, I can do it. That's how you should think. And I know that there are many different types of people out there. Like I said, there's the nine to five guy that, you know, he wants and there's nothing wrong with it. You want to work nine to five, you want Saturday, Sunday off and every holiday, because that's the life you want to live. Good for you. And then you have the guy who's going to come in and, uh, grind in the business and, and, and, and run a department and, you know, do very well for himself and, uh, is a part of building something like this.

54:41And then you got the guy that's like, yeah, I'm not working for anybody. I'm going to go out and I'm going to, I'm going to make it happen for myself. And, you know, if you look at somebody, I've looked at many people and never, ever have I looked at somebody who's had incredible wealth, built unbelievable businesses and said, yeah, fuck that guy. I've always said, wow. You know, and you can learn lots of different things from lots of different people in different industries and, and, and, uh, what they built and how they built it and, you know, uh, And you can look at other guys and say, I don't ever want to make that mistake.

55:19I don't think that's right. Give me some examples of people that you thought of as cautionary tales. That don't value their employees. People that don't value their employees. I've seen a lot of that. I don't think people understand what you were willing to do during COVID. How wrong you thought it was that everybody was laying everybody off. You offered to give up all of your compensation. Yeah. Why? Yeah. So my thing was this, you know, I was in a situation where I wasn't going to lose any of my money during COVID. Yet these people who come in here every fucking day and grind with me and there were a lot of people that were going to get laid off.

55:54And a lot of people whose salaries were going to be cut, bonuses and all these other things. And I said, yeah, fuck that shit. We're going through COVID. I'm not a brick and mortar business, right? all I got to do is find a place where I can go put on a fight and beam beam it to uh ESPN that's all I had to do and uh you know my team was all ready to fucking storm the beach with me man nobody was saying no we're not going to work during COVID too dangerous and we're scared I'm not saying people weren't scared. Everybody was willing to go. Men, women, everybody. Brian Halligan founded HubSpot 20 years ago, and he has this line about AI that I keep thinking about.

56:41He said, most companies are using AI to make their teams more productive, but the companies that will thrive make the company itself the intelligence. And that is exactly what HubSpot does. HubSpot gives you AI that works, AI that actually knows your customers and your business. Your AI needs to know what you know, your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't. HubSpot connects AI to your real customer data. So when it writes an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in. And it knows that they already contacted support twice this month.

57:13And that's when you start seeing actual results. Visit HubSpot.com to learn more. That's HubSpot.com. I remember when the NBA canceled their season that was probably an oh shit moment for you how long from that moment until you get you did the thing with Abu Dhabi how long did it take you to find a place in the world to go a couple weeks so I'm fucking going we're going no matter what now I have the um Habib versus Tony Ferguson fight which time though it's fucking crazy you know that that's crazy you know that the last time it's at Brooklyn the Brooklyn arena and I'm telling these guys don't fucking pull this on me don't pull this fucking fight we're gonna go I don't care if there's no fans whatever Brooklyn calls and says yeah we're not gonna do it I said I'll never ever fucking come to your arena again just so you know that you know because we were doing MSG in Brooklyn I said I will never hold another fucking fight in your arena ever again.

58:17Cool? Cool. They fucking pull it. So, um, I got my fucking lawyer calling every place in America. Cause once it all started to shut down, it was all going quick. So quick that I would be here in the office. We'd get something done. I live 20 minutes from here. By the time I got home, my lawyer would call me and go, they just fucking bailed. I'm like, what? Anyway, so this is my thought process during this time. I don't know how fucking long this COVID shit's going to go on and how long the country's going to be shut down, but here's what I do know. At ESPN, which is a sports network, the bean counters are eventually going to sit down and they're going to go, okay, Let's see what we got here.

59:10We got the NFL. We got Major League Baseball. We got the NBA. We got the NHL. We got the UFC. And we got the guys who throw the fucking beanbags into the fucking holes, okay? Who are we cutting first? Fucking UFC is going to be the first fucking money that's going to get cut. So I'm going to figure out how to go through COVID. All my employees are going to stay intact and all this shit. But Iger says, I'll pay you every fucking dime, no matter how much COVID lasts, whether you do no events or you put on all 44. Oh, wow. That we were getting paid no matter what. So I could have just said, fuck it.

59:55Let's all stay home and see how long COVID fucking lasts. But no, we fucking, we went out and we pulled killer fucking numbers for ESPN. Your only game in town. And our business grew. It just fucking blew up and went through the roof. How fast do you do a deal with Abu Dhabi? Because people don't understand. Sheikh Tak Noon is also like, these guys are obsessed with jujitsu. He's a black belt in jujitsu. Right. And they've been incredible partners to us since the day we met them. So, yeah, we end up talking to them. We go to Yaz Island. And we built the only real bubble that existed during COVID.

1:00:31Like the people who moved into Yaz Island from UAE lived there for months and never went home and saw their family. So they were all clean. We made sure that all of our athletes and everybody that went over to work, they were tested multiple times. We chartered our own planes. We flew over there. It was the only true bubble that existed in sports at that time. All the other ones were bullshit. And dealing with them, they can call the shots. I heard you on a podcast and you were saying like you were trying to do some deals with these people and they're like you had a meeting and then they called you like a day later and they mentioned like, hey, we spoke to our board.

1:01:10And you're like, nope, we're not doing a deal. Like I'm not – it doesn't matter. If you have to go and ask permission to somebody else, like we are fundamentally incompatible. Very fucking true. So sponsors during this time, you know, we had great relationships with all of our sponsors. but like any relationship in life, you don't know who's who until the shit hits the fan. Friends, girlfriends, husbands, work, all these people, you know, when things are good, everything's good, but who's around and who's really real and there and, you know, a real partner, you don't know that until shit gets really bad.

1:01:59and uh we had this partner that was a good partner all through good times and then as soon as fucking any the whole not only covid but that whole crazy woke era that happened when people were getting canceled and all that other shit we had a company that literally was calling here every fucking five minutes, man. And it started with, I posted a video supporting Trump on my social media. And they called and they said, you need to take that down. And I said, are you out of your fucking mind? Who the fuck are you to call me and tell me who to vote for? It's not coming down and don't ever fucking call me and tell me who to vote for again.

1:02:47Then they called again, then they called again. Then they called again. And then basically when our deal was up, one of the guys who worked there, who was sort of my, my day-to-day that I would talk to, and I like him still today. Now our deal's up and we're shopping. And he calls me and says, Hey, I'm in town. Can I come by and see you? I'm like, yeah. So he comes in my office and he says, Hey man, I got to let you know, my board of directors is losing their patience with you and I go you guys got some fucking balls man I'll give you that have a seat we fucking sit down in my office and I went through the whole thing and uh he says Dana this is a you know says the number of the deal and I said no I understand and here's what you can do you know back on your plane take that number roll it up into a tiny little ball and shove it up your board's ass.

1:03:44And then coming out of COVID and that whole woke era, I was like, I'm only going to be in business with people that I'm aligned with. So I didn't end up doing another deal with them. One of the keys to, I think, your longevity and some of the best advice I've heard you give other entrepreneurs is the fact like the first thing you have to do before anything else, like you have to know yourself, right? Figure out who the hell you are. You clearly know who you are. The second thing is then you've got to know what you actually want to do. And if you know who you are and what you want to do, then you just wake up and you just get after that goal every single day.

1:04:17The perfect example illustration of this is where I think I don't doubt anything you said when I heard somebody ask you, hey, let's say Lorenzo doesn't call you back after that. This is the art you are done. You have to sell the company for seven to eight million. And your response was like, I'd get up the next day and figure it out. But I was going to be in this business. I'm not there's no fucking plan B. I'm going to do this. And I think that knowing who you are, what you want to do, and you just do it every day, like that's the key to being, like to having the longevity that you've had. Yeah, I've never thought about if something doesn't work out, like, oh, no, I'm going to, I don't even think like that.

1:04:55Never even crosses my mind that something's not going to work. I just keep going until it does work. This is what all entrepreneurs think. There was this viral moment between another podcaster and Jensen Wong of NVIDIA, and he was asked like a question. And he's like, that's a loser premise. Like, I don't think like that. Assuming like I'm going to lose this market or not be able to beat this competitor. It's like, of course he thinks like that. He's running a four, he founded a$4 trillion company that he's been running for 33 years. You think he wakes up thinking he's going to lose? No, it's true.

1:05:24There's this Bruce Lee quote where he talks about never say negative things about yourself or what you're working on or what you're doing, even if you're joking, because your body doesn't know the difference. It's like this whole thing about, and I saw Rogan talking about this thing when he was talking to some psychologist about if you just sit around and talk about your fucking problems all the time, you know. I saw that clip too. You never, you know. It actually makes it worse. Yeah. Which makes sense. Yeah. It's like, I never take in any negativity. I literally block a cullet noise and I block all that noise out.

1:06:06Like we're talking about, like these guys who report on what we're doing that have no clue what we're doing. Why would I want to hear anything they would have to say? They're zeros. They've literally never done anything in their life, especially in this business. Why would I listen to anything that they have to say? But you said something earlier. It's really important. This is all intuition. This is your gut. This is your instinct. This is like you're the born entrepreneur. I just did this episode on my other podcast where I read Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote two autobiographies. Wrote one when he's 76.

1:06:45That's interesting. The more interesting one is the one he published in 1977 when he was 30 years old. Okay? It's called Arnold, the Education of a Bodybuilder. But what recently popped in my mind, he literally talked about that. There was 30 bodybuilders in the entire country when he started to become a bodybuilder in Australia. His parents think he's a fucking weirdo. His friends think he's a weirdo. He says, once you said something negative, he'd cut you out. He would cut his parents out of his life. That was the negative. He's like, I don't want to hear any fucking negativity. Then what he would do, he literally would write letters, right?

1:07:13Say, Arnold, like, you're going to be the best bodybuilder in the world. You're like, positive affirmations. And he'd hang them up everywhere. And he'd brainwash himself into this positive thinking that you were just talking about. I cut negative people out of my life so fucking fast. And it don't matter who you are. Listen, after this, you got to get connected to Todd Graves and just spend, first of all, he should be sponsoring the UFC. He's got plenty of money to spend. so he could be a big partner for you and he's spending money everywhere. But he started that company, he was 23. He used to live in a shitty apartment, right?

1:07:40Behind the Raising Canes. He'd work all day, then go home, try to rest for a little bit, look out the window. When the drive-thru got backed up, he'd run back out. This is some shit you would do. But then when he's rich now, he buys the fucking apartment building and then he redoes his apartment just exactly the way it was when he was 23 years old. But the entire fucking wall, he had printed out positive affirmations and he says stuff like, a man of passion rides a mad horse. That fucking sounds like you. Nothing ever happens until someone pursues a vision fanatically. He was literally brainwashing himself as an early 20s that this will work.

1:08:11This has to work. There is no plan B. So I'll sort of walk you through what you're saying. I mean, Lene, right? I mean, my office, the gym, it's all the same shit that you just said as we go this way in the building. It's exactly what I do too. I literally have all this shit on the walls every day that speaks to me. Dude, thank you very much for doing this. If you don't mind, I might harass you every like six to 12 months if you want to run this back. And really just talk about entrepreneurship, talk about building the business. You have so much genius. I've been following you for a decade. 2016 is when I found the UFC because of Rogan's podcast.

1:08:49He wouldn't shut up about it. Let me just tell you a quick Rogan story. And I've told some of this before, but think about this. So we buy the company. The company is based in New York. I got to fly to New York, go in the offices and go through, me alone, go through every fucking document, videotape and everything in there to figure out what's coming to Vegas and what I'm going to throw away. So the whole walls are fucking covered with tapes. I have a VHS and I'm literally popping tape after tape after tape after tape. And then Ivory Keenan Wayans had a talk show and he's got Joe Rogan on. and Joe Rogan starts talking about UFC and fighting.

1:09:30And at the time he's doing Fear Factor, which is a massive show on television. And it just fucking clicked with me. I go, this is the fucking guy I need right here. I need him to do commentary. He's educated on martial arts. He's not afraid to talk about controversial shit. This is my guy. So I reached out to Rogan and we hit it off immediately. And, um, you know, in Rogan's rise, you know, he's gone through some shit personally too, you know, where I've had people call and say, Hey, you know, whether it's sponsors or whoever, you know, you got to do this to Rogan. And I'm like, like the, don't ever fucking call me.

1:10:14Who the fuck are you to call me and tell me who I'm going to fire or do whatever to, first of all, Joe Rogan did the first 12 fights for us for free, right? Then when you talk about technology, at the time I flew all over the country and I met with every sports editor at every newspaper because when we bought this company, newspaper was the king. And these guys were all 60, 65 years old, ball and stick sports. And every once in a while, boxing will get a space in the paper. There wasn't enough room and these guys didn't get it and never got it. And I'm like, well, in the next five or six years, these guys will all be gone and there'll be younger guys that come in who'll get it more.

1:11:01But what we had to do is radio was still very relevant. So, you know, you drop into these markets from the East coast all the way through the Midwest into the West Coast during drive time and then do the same thing going home. So what we learned really early is that fighters are bad radio, okay? They don't show up on time. They sound like they're still fucking sleeping. The list goes on and on. The only two that were really good at doing radio were me and Joe Rogan, right? The problem with me is nobody knew who the fuck I was. So what we would do is we would switch. I do UFC 30. Rogan would do UFC 31.

1:11:46I'd do UFC 32. Rogan would do 33. And you'd have to get up at three o 'clock in the morning. We both lived on the West Coast. We'd have to get up at three o 'clock in the morning. They'd drop us into the markets on the East Coast from six to whatever. And we would literally go all around the country doing the same interviews over and over and over. And Rogan and I did this for years to actually explain to people how much Rogan has dedicated. I mean, you said you heard about it on his podcast has, has been a key instrumental part of this company. And for anybody, I don't give a fuck how much money you, you, you have, uh, sponsored or whatever.

1:12:32Yeah, no, nothing's happening to Joe Rogan. loyalty. Yes, which is the most important thing in the world to make. That was awesome, man. Appreciate that. Pleasure. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders. Thank you.