Dana White, UFC

Dana White grew up watching CEOs read canned statements written by lawyers. He decided early he would never do that. When Lorenzo Fertitta and his brother bought the UFC in 2001 for $2M and handed White a small equity stake and the presidency, the company had five events a year, eight or nine fighter contracts, and no television deal. Previous owners had sold off the merchandise rights, the video library, and the video game licenses just to survive. The company nearly died. Events cost $2M to produce. Revenue covered half the spending. Four years in, Fertitta called White and told him to find a buyer. Fertitta slept on it, called back the next morning, and said: "Fuck it. Let's keep going." What saved the UFC was a reality show. White had watched The Contender and identified its fatal mistake: it edited the fights. You let the fans decide whether a fight is good or bad. Spike TV passed on The Ultimate Fighter. White came back with a new offer: the UFC would pay for everything; Spike would provide airtime. The season finale — Bonner vs. Griffin — ended with the crowd chanting for one more round. Spike executives pulled White into an alley and shook hands on a renewal written on a napkin. Because the UFC had funded the show, it owned it outright. The television deals tell the story: Spike at $35 million, Fox at $100 million, ESPN at $3 billion, Paramount at $7.7 billion. Each time, critics said the UFC had peaked. Each time, they were wrong. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/dana-white Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Axon by AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Founders Are the Best Storytellers (00:01:04) Buying the UFC for $2M (00:02:51) Excellence Is the Capacity to Take Pain (00:07:58) One Good Night's Sleep and "Fuck It, Let's Keep Going" (00:10:53) The Ultimate Fighter: A $10M Bet-It-All Moment (00:13:12) The Napkin Deal With Spike TV (00:22:00) Leaving Spike TV and the Phil Duman Story (00:28:24) First Event Profitable: What He Does Differently Now (00:32:30) Why Dana Sits Ringside Watching a Screen (00:34:07) Building a Team That Can Read His Mind (00:45:10) "Who the Fuck Are You and What Have You Done?" (00:51:55) Selling the UFC for $4+ Billion (00:57:32) Not Cutting a Single Employee During COVID (01:03:30) Firing a Sponsor Who Told Him How to Vote (01:07:45) There Is No Plan B (01:09:00) Joe Rogan: Doing the First 12 Fights for Free (01:12:37) Loyalty Is the Most Important Thing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  I was telling you, dude, I watch your press conferences. I was telling, I was having dinner with a founder of a $150 billion company like a couple days ago, and they're like, hey, can you help us hire or find somebody to be like a chief storyteller? It's like, no, that's the founder's job. And they asked, like, do you have any good examples? I go, watch Dana White's press conferences after the fights. It's a perfect example. It's like, he's the biggest fan of his own product. Is that how you describe the way you approach the company you've built?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  100%. And I grew up, you know, in the 70s and 80s where I used to see CEOs reading canned statements from lawyers and things like that and just fake phony bullshit that I was never into. So, yeah, I've been pretty, and I'm a huge fan, huge fan, still today, not only of, you know, the UFC, but now I've been a boxing fan my whole life too. And now I actually get to make the fights that I want to see.

• 1:04David Senra?

  The UFC was close to bankruptcy. You bought it for like $2 million with your partners. I want to talk about, you know, the fact that you guys went, I was like, oh, a $2 million company into maybe a $20 billion company. It's like, hey, you missed the part where they went in the hole by tens of millions. I want to go talk about that. But you brought up something like, we bought it. We had never done live events. We didn't do production. We didn't do anything. And then I heard you say, like, but we were just fans. We were just trying to build the fights that we want to see in the way that we want to see them.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Exactly right. We were huge fans. We bought the company and I can't remember, ballpark-ish, we had like two and a half, three weeks to put on an event. And, you know, never knew anything about production, but knew what I wanted to see. And the production people that were in place, I didn't get along well with. So I ended up wiping them all out and bringing in a whole new crew and... You know, just started building and you learn as you go.

• 2:01David Senra?

  Talk about like the first few events because how many events you guys put on a year now?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  We do like forty-three, forty-four events a year. When we bought the company, we were doing five, which seemed like a lot.

• 2:12David Senra?

  The fact that you were doing less means that you were learning slower too? Are you just, there's just no way you could do more than five?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. We needed those gaps in between, especially after our first event, to really start to dial it in. And, you know, we made a lot of trial and error. We made a lot of mistakes, things that we, you know, we did some goofy WWE shit for a minute there. And, you know, fireworks and pyro and all that stuff. And then, then we ended up finding that perfect sweet spot, which is where we are now. Now it's all about technology. When new technology comes out, we always try to be first or one of the first to use it. But the show is dialed now.

• 2:51David Senra?

  So one of my favorite maxims from the history of entrepreneurship is that excellence is the capacity to take pain. I want to talk about your, when you bought, after you bought the UFC, but before, I think it takes you, what, five, six years before you guys get back in the black and you're actually making money?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:06David Senra?

  Take us through like that, that like trough.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  We bought the company for two million. We're doing five events a year. You know, in the beginning, the events are way more expensive. We don't have all the proper equipment. We don't know what the hell we're doing. So events are costing us a support of two million bucks a pop, times five, you know, times five years. It gets expensive. And we started building the roster of fighters, signing more guys, paying them more money. It got to the point where one night I was driving home and Lorenzo says, I can't keep doing this. I can't keep putting this kind of money in, me and my brother.

• 3:43David Senra?

  So they put up the two million?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45David Senra?

  I think you got like ten or twenty percent of the company and then your job is to run it, right?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:49David Senra?

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

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Well, this is like four years in, I would say.

• 3:54David Senra?

  What's the revenue back then?

• 3:56Speaker 01

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

• 3:57David Senra?

  Was it making ten million a year in revenue and you guys were spending another ten?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah, in that ballpark. And, but just, you know, the other thing was we didn't own the rights to merchandise, the library, the video games, DVDs, which were big at that time. So all we bought when we bought the company. Was those three letters UFC and old wooden octagon and some contracts that we have that we had obligations to um and maybe it was eight or nine that's it eight or nine contracts. We have almost a thousand guys under contract now. All the ancillary stuff was sold off to Lionsgate because the old owner was trying to stay alive. So to to show you, people can't

• 4:44Speaker 01

  wrap their head around this. Now, how much people didn't believe in the UFC. We went back to Lionsgate and we bought the rights back for like, I don't remember what it was, but it was like two and a half, three million bucks. We bought all those rights back.

• 5:01David Senra?

  So anything you could put a UFC logo on?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Right. And, you know, we, we, we talk about it now, me and Lorenzo, and we're thinking, those guys were probably laughing at us when we left.

• 5:12David Senra?

  Lionsgate were like, these idiots just gave us a couple million dollars for nothing.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  You got these, uh, you know, these finance guys that are like, this will look good on the books over the next, you know, two, three years. And we got all our rights back. And, you know, if you look at the, imagine if Lionsgate still owned all those rights. It's crazy. I I'm friends with Shannon Lee, right? Bruce Lee's daughter. You know, she's been trying to buy the rights back to to the Bruce Lee films and all. They would never sell, you know? Even though Bruce Lee, you know, died in the early seventies, his movies are still relevant and people will watch them and people care and they're great movies. But they sold us all the rights back. Cheap, too.

• 5:50David Senra?

  What do you think happened overnight from Lorenzo calls you, he's like, man, I'm burning, we're, we're just dumping all this money. Try to see if you can find a buyer. Calls you back the next day.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Well, I called him back and said, I think we could sell it six, seven, maybe eight million in that ballpark. He says, all right, I'll call you tomorrow. I'm literally driving to work the next day and he calls me and I'm like, hmm, here we go. He's like, fuck it. Exactly what he said, fuck it. Let's keep going. And he always says it's it's pretty amazing what a what a good night's sleep can do for you. You know what I mean? So they hung in there. Our goal is to get on TV. And again, for people that that don't understand, because, you know, several generations have grown up with the UFC. And it's normal now, but at that time, it wasn't allowed on pay per view.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  You, as a grown adult, didn't have the right to purchase it on pay per view. Porn was on pay per view. Okay, but the UFC was not allowed on pay per view. Think about that. And our goal is to get it on free television, which everybody thought was impossible. Right around 2004 or 5, reality shows started becoming big. So we came up with the concept for a reality show where this was basically, you know, everybody in Hollywood are a bunch of pussies. Nobody's, uh, nobody has any original ideas. They're doing remakes and stuff. They always play it safe and nobody wanted these fights live on TV. So this was sort of our Trojan horse.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  You're watching UFC, but it's in a reality format and the fights are taped. So they felt like if anything was bad or I don't know what they were thinking was possible, but they were taped. So we could take it out, we could, you know. But my big thing was right around the same time, the contender had come out. It was like the the most expensive reality show ever.

• 7:50David Senra?

  Mark Burnett's the guy that did Survivor, right?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Which was boxing. Yeah, he did Survivor. Mark Burnett's done everything.

• 7:54David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  He did, uh, Trump Show.

• 7:56David Senra?

  The Apprentice?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:57David Senra?

  Okay.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  So the contender comes out and it's the most expensive show ever. But what they did wrong and where they fucked up was they were editing the fights. So they would, if they had a fight, and you know, they got, you know, back in the edit and they're like, "This is boring," or whatever. But, but that's the difference between being a hardcore fan and not. I'm like, "Man, you don't ever edit a fight. You let the fight play out, and the fans determine whether the fight is good or bad, and you can't control that." You, you, I call it the bells and whistles. We do all the bells and whistles, and the fighters, we hand the torch off to them, and they go in and they have to, they have to deliver.

• 8:41David Senra?

  Let me pause you there. This is why I tell founders of like tech companies to watch your, your press conferences though, because the authenticity, I think this is why you have this like cult-like following and people really try, like the people like you really try to root for you, right? And it's like, you'll say at the end, "That fight sucked. We thought it was gonna be X, and it turned out to be Y." It's like, "Yeah, I have eyes. I'm not gonna lie to you. Like, that fight sucks." Just like for founders, like, "Yeah, we fucked that up. Like, that was a bad experience. I wouldn't let that happen either." Like, don't try to lie or paper over it.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I saw that too, growing up with promoters that would tell you you just saw a great fight when you know you didn't just see a great fight. But as a fan, if the fight is good, boring, you know, different people like different things. You could take half of the fanbase who thinks the fight is boring, and the other half will think it's great because they like grappling more than the striking, or whatever it may be. But you don't judge that. You let the fans judge whether the fight is good or bad. Like, we'll, we'll build a card, and, and people start talking online, "This fight sucks." Shut the fuck up. You don't know if the fight sucks until it happens, right? You might not like the two people that are fighting, but you can't judge a fight until

• 9:53Speaker 01

  the fight is over. If it's over, and it sucks, then we'll both probably agree that it sucks.

• 10:00David Senra?

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• 10:45David Senra?

  Go to ramp.com today to learn how to help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. How many different networks did you have to pitch till you got one to say yes to the show? And how did you get them to say yes?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Well, we were pitching everybody. And at the time, I mean, everything in life is about timing. I think it was the Nashville network had switched over to Spike TV, which was labeling itself as the network for men. And we're like, man, if we don't fit here, where do we fit, right? So we go in, we pitch these guys, they're not really interested, you know, what it's going to cost them. So we said, well, we'll pay for the whole thing. We'll pay for it, you just put it on air. They liked that idea better.

• 11:30David Senra?

  So they said no or not interested? And then you come back and say, we're going to pay for production?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:35David Senra?

  So at that point, they're just distribution. What's their...

• 11:38Speaker 01

  100%. There's no downside for them.

• 11:39David Senra?

  You took the risk away from them.

• 11:40Speaker 01

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

• 11:44David Senra?

  But that means you own the show, right? Okay.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  So at the time, it's the last $10 million investment we're going to make in the UFC.

• 11:54David Senra?

  Whoa.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:56David Senra?

  So if it didn't work out...

• 11:57Speaker 01

  That's it. It's a wrap. If the Ultimate Fighter didn't work, it's over.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  So the last $10 million investment, which sucks at the time, we're investing another 10 million. But what doesn't suck is exactly what you just said. The thing is a runaway hit. The numbers just keep going like this. And then the finale, when we're at the finale, when Stefan Bonner and Forrest Griffin fought, when the fight was over and everybody in the place was stomping their feet, saying one more round. And that, you know, we go up, we give them both contracts. I was like, I don't give a shit what happens. This is in, this is gonna end up somewhere. And Spike TV execs took us out in the alley of the arena and we did a deal on a napkin.

• 12:39David Senra?

  That's insane.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:41David Senra?

  So the fight ends, you go out in the alley and they're like, no, no, we wanna renew with you guys.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  We wanna get a deal done now. We wanna shake hands on a, you know, we didn't fill out a contract, but here's some bullet points for the deal. We all agreed and shook hands and, and there we were. But if they would have paid for it, we wouldn't have been in the position that we were in, where we own 100% of everything. So while it sucked at the time to put up the next 10 million, it ended up being the greatest thing to ever happen to us.

• 13:12David Senra?

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

• 13:16Speaker 01

  So the Thomas and Mack is UNLV's stadium. We were at the small venue right next door to it. It was called the Cox Pavilion.

• 13:27David Senra?

  Couple hundred people?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  3,500, 4,000, something like that. Three to 5,000.

• 13:31David Senra?

  But still compare, think about the growth in your company from that to now paying, you're playing the best.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Our first fight that we did when we bought the company was at the Trump Taj Mahal. We sold 3,500 tickets and with comps, we had 5,000 people there.

• 13:45David Senra?

  It's incredible. Okay, so you do this deal with Spike TV. Now this is, we're in like early 2000s. There's like no, barely any, there's almost no iPhones, right? There's no social media. There's none of, like you, you've done a really good job of, in my opinion, when I studied the history of UFC, is like riding these technological waves. Like you adopt them early and then you use them as these giant tailwinds. You don't really resist, like you see something working.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Technology's been great to us.

• 14:12David Senra?

  I remember you telling the story of like Joe Rogan asking you to be on his podcast. And then he described it as like, it's kind of like the radio, but we put it online. And you said.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that sounds huge. That sounds like that's going to be real fucking big. Good for you.

• 14:26David Senra?

  And now, but then you've embraced them.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:29David Senra?

  So the, was the TV, the vast majority of the revenue of the business when you did this deal with Spike?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so, so television was huge. And the ultimate fighter literally did everything that we hoped it would do. It built a, a, a, a larger fan base.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It introduced a lot of people, not only to the sport and the brand, but to the fighters. I mean, coming off that show, Forrest Griffin became a massive pay-per-view star for us. Chuck Liddell, who was one of the coaches and, you know, it, it did what it was designed to do. When I launched businesses, like I launched Power Slap, I did the same thing. I launched UFC BJJ, did the same thing. So Power Slap's reality show is at like 50 million views on YouTube. So it's, it's still a home run. The format is, is incredible.

• 15:24David Senra?

  You guys tell, start telling the stories really, really early. So it's like before, these people are competing on the reality show. You get to know who they are, what's important to them. They have more varied backgrounds than like boxing. Boxing tried to do that, but like there was, I love what you said. It's like, when has there ever been trillions of dollars made and nothing's there at the end? Like in boxing.

• 15:43Speaker 01

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

• 15:47David Senra?

  You guys start telling the story on the show even before they're signed. And then you keep, once they get to the UFC, then on the prelims, you keep telling the story over and over again, over many, many years.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then now we're, we literally, I just started.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Season thirty-four of The Ultimate Fighter. Tomorrow's the first fight on the show and I don't know if there's ever been more viewership than now with this new deal that we have.

• 16:14David Senra?

  Is this with Paramount too?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:15David Senra?

  They get, they get everything.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  They get everything.

• 16:17David Senra?

  Well, for the, for like eight billion.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Everything UFC is on Paramount, yeah. And boxing too.

• 16:23David Senra?

  I heard you say one time that you were, there was almost like no revenue coming in and you had stumbled onto like, you had all these DVDs, you decided to put these fights on DVDs and then you did these compilations, which I thought was a genius idea. It was like, okay, yeah, I could, I could buy a DVD of a fight or I could see the best knockouts from this year or the best submissions. When did you have that idea?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Right. So when the DVD business blew up, um, we started doing ultimate knockouts, ultimate submissions. And, uh, you know, th- those things sold like crazy back then. The DVD, uh, business at the time, the DVDs exploded, that's really when we started making some real money.

• 17:01David Senra?

  This is before Spike though.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Uh, it was around the same time.

• 17:03David Senra?

  Okay.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was around the same time. Um, I, and I think we could have capitalized on the DVD business better than we did. But like I said, we were young and new to the, to the whole production world. If I could go back and now with what I know now, I would have fucking murdered the DVD. We did really well, but I would have murdered the DVD era.

• 17:27David Senra?

  Say more about that.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Killed it. I would have created more compilations. I would have, uh, I would have taken that part of the business way more serious than I did. And I did take it pretty serious then, cause we, you know, when those checks started rolling in from DVDs, it was like, holy shit.

• 17:41David Senra?

  These are million dollar, millions of dollars.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Millions of dollars. And, um, I would literally up the street on, on our old offices on Sahara. They used to have a, like a wow superstore and they sold records and DVDs and all that shit. And right when you walked in. They had this huge display and it was the top 20 DVDs of the week. Literally, nobody knew me then. So I'd look, I'd go there and grab our shit and put it in the front of the fucking store. I used to do that kind of shit. That's how, you know, talk about humble beginnings.

• 18:14David Senra?

  So wait a minute, though. So is it just, I want to hear more about like the ideas. But let's go back to this idea like, what you would have done differently. It's just straight more volume, taking more seriously, better talent. Like what? You were making a couple million dollar checks, could have been 10x the size?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we could have made a lot more money, I think, on the DVD side. If I had focused more on that part of the business at the time. And when you're, when you're in the moment like that. I mean, you expect DVDs to be forever.

• 18:42David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Right? Who sees DVDs leaving and, and not, so, so, you know, we're making great revenue on the DVDs. And you don't expect that to go away. You expect that to keep coming, you know? If you look at our business in 2001 to today. 25 years. How fast technology has, has gone in just 25 years from, uh, streaming. DVD is gone. You know, all this stuff is streaming now. I remember being in my office and, and these guys set up a meeting with me. And they brought in a computer and they're like, this is the future. Streaming.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  And again, like the, like the Joe Rogan podcast thing, they played it for me. Buffering, buffering, buffering, plays five, you know, five, 10 seconds buffering, buffering, buffering. I'm like, oh yeah, this is going to be real fun to, to, to do and watch. But if you look at from that meeting to where we are today. I always did have this dream where someday I believe that the world would continue to get smaller. And everybody would be watching the, the fight at the same time on the same channel around the world. Cause when I grew up, we had channel three, channel five, channel eight, channel 13. When I was in high school, they got cable. We had like 30 channels then.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And I believe we'd go back to channel three, channel five and channel uh, 13, but globally. So who's it gonna be? Paramount, YouTube, Amazon, you know, Netflix.

• 20:19David Senra?

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

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they're in it.

• 20:24David Senra?

  Of course they are.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  We were talking to them the whole time and, you know, what an incredible business they've built and, but the Ellison's are aggressive guys, you know, they're aggressive guys. Obviously financially, you know, powerful. And at literally

• 20:46Speaker 01

  the half yard line. They said, fuck it, we want everything. And they went after it.

• 20:52David Senra?

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

• 20:56Speaker 01

  It was great. It was great dealing with them. It was great dealing with Netflix. It was all a, a good experience, better than the experiences we had in the past. So we're, we're on, we're on Spike TV, right? And killing it. We're killing it. We're, we're, other than, because WWE was on there for a certain amount of time while we were too. Other than the WWE, I mean, we were the biggest thing on the network. So I'm a fucking loyal guy as it is. So listen, we, we'd have been on Spike TV for a hundred years if, whatever. So we end up going to lunch, Lorenzo and I, with a guy who was a big executive at the time with, you know, the whole CBS Viacom company. His name was Philippe Dumont, okay?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  So he calls himself Philippe Dumont. He's from fucking Jersey. His name's Phil Duman. But one of the biggest douchebags of all fucking time. We go into this lunch and we got to listen to how fucking rich he is for the first 15, 20 minutes of the lunch. And, and then he, he tells us that he built the UFC. And if we don't like the offer he's making, he'll just build another one. That's literally what he said. And we left that meeting, I was like, that fucking, he built the UFC, huh? Okay, okay, Phil Duman. We'll see. So we end up leaving Spike TV and going to Fox and just everything happens for a reason.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  And, yeah, that guy ended up being one of the biggest brand killers of all time. Old Phil Duman. MTV, fucking, you know, think about all the Viacom legendary networks they had that this guy had sucked the life out of and killed.

• 22:43David Senra?

  As you know, I'm obsessed with studying and speaking to the most focused and intense founders, living or dead. Dana White is a great example of that. And if you watch the episode I put out last week with Adam, the founder of AppLovin', you'll see the same kind of intensity and dedication to excellence. Adam is one of the most focused and intense founders I've ever met, and Adam is driven to build a great product that serves his customers, relentlessly improve that product over time, and to win. And that is exactly what Adam and his team have done with their advertising platform, Axon. Axon connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full-screen video ads

• 23:23David Senra?

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• 24:07David Senra?

  That's a great story. I love that story. You're high risk tolerant, so. Do you guys do any work with, I was asking the team before, do you know who Todd Graves is, the founder of Raising Canes?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:18David Senra?

  First of all, he's sponsoring UFC.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Well, we've met.

• 24:21David Senra?

  Okay.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we've met.

• 24:22David Senra?

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

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:27David Senra?

  He did this show a few months ago, and he was just like, they told him, a 23-year-old kid, he starts Raising Canes. His original idea was like, I'm going to sell fucking chicken fingers to drunk LSU students. And he couldn't-

• 24:38Speaker 01

  And high school kids. My kids-

• 24:40David Senra?

  Oh, no, no, now-

• 24:41Speaker 01

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

• 24:44David Senra?

  Yeah. And so now, obviously, it's different, but like, back then, he was 23 years old, had no money. He literally risked his life on a fucking fishing boat in Alaska, and then maxed- His credit cards. That's how he funded the first Raising Canes, which he built with his own hands. We went to the first one in Baton Rouge. It's crazy. He built this with his own hands. But there's so much similarities between you two. Because he said on the show, he's like entrepreneurs are not taking enough risk. They're too scared of risk. They need to take more risk. If you truly believe in it and you know this, because he believes that God put him on this earth to be good at chicken fingers. Literally. And, and now he owns over 90% of the company. It's like worth $20 billion selling fucking chicken fingers.

• 25:23Speaker 01

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

• 25:28David Senra?

  There's nobody else in the world that loves it. We were just talking that we have a mutual friend in Jared. You were just on the phone with him before. His brother, Josh, has a great quote where he's like, you know, if you want to pick somebody, if you're going to back somebody and you could choose the most experienced, the best, the person that has the most money or the person that wants it the most. So you always pick the person that wants it the most. It's very obvious that you even said, I think when you moved back to Vegas, you're like, I could, I was a bellman. Guess what? I'm going to take a risk because I could be a bellman at 35. I could be a bellman at 50, but I can only do this and take the risk when I'm young and like I have nothing to lose.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Dead on. It's so true. Everybody that has an idea

• 26:13Speaker 01

  or a dream or however you want to look at it. They're all afraid to take that dive off and, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm 19 years old. And the problem is some people are cool with just being comfortable, right? At 19, you make cash every day and you get a paycheck. You got a 501k, dental, medical, you know, check all the boxes there and some people are just comfortable with that, you know? And there's other people too that just want, listen, I just want to make a good living. I want Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays off and I want every holiday off and all. And then there's guys that are like, yeah, fuck this shit. I, I, I can do more than this. And even now, I mean, I'm 56 years old and I'm dumping more and more and more on my plate

• 26:59Speaker 01

  because I believe in it and, and, and I know we can do it. And, uh, you know, back in 17, 18, I'm on, I'm on Instagram and this, and these guys are slapping the shit out of each other on, on social media and it's coming out of Russia and Poland. And, and things with me are by gut. Now I'm watching this stuff and I'm like, this is crazy. But what I noticed was I would stay till the end to see who won. And I'm the most jaded dude in the world when it comes to fighting. So I was like, shit, if I'm interested in this and I'm staying and what if I did this the right way? And the same shit we'd said about the UFC. So I called the Fertitta brothers and I said, hey, have you seen this slapping stuff?

• 27:44Speaker 01

  I'm into it and that and they said, how much money you want? I said, I need a million dollars from both of you.

• 27:50David Senra?

  A million, that's it?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:51David Senra?

  Don't you gamble that more at night?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, we put up three million bucks and it's killing it. Michael Rubin told me after, after we launched Power Slap and it started killing it. Michael Rubin said to me, whatever you do next, I'm in for 10 million. You don't even, you don't even have to tell me what it is.

• 28:09David Senra?

  Now you're launching, you have a ton more experience, resources, the, the knowledge you have of building these live events. Like probably better than, better than anybody else in the world in fighting, right? How fast you turn that business profitable? Cause we, we're not even done with the fucking story.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  First event.

• 28:26David Senra?

  It's been profitable since the first event.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  First event.

• 28:28David Senra?

  Okay, explain what you did differently.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Well, I knew everything to do. First of all, the reason the UFC became as big as it did, as fast as it did, two reasons. We traveled the thing all around the United States and the world. And we built a live event that when you come to the live event, very few people get really good live event experiences. I mean, even as big as the NFL is, and the NFL is just fucking massive, right? And there's nothing better than football season, right? When football season starts every Sunday, you're on the couch and you watch, but I don't like the live experience. I'm not a big fan of NFL's live experience. Now the NBA, right? So I'm gonna try to watch a full NBA game on TV.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  All you gotta watch is the last five minutes. Go to an NBA game live. It's way better live than it is on TV. The UFC is an incredible television product and it's even better live. So you get a great experience with both.

• 29:30David Senra?

  Everybody complains, I've heard this so much from people online. They're like, Dana has the best seats in the house. Why is he looking at it on a little tiny screen? Can you explain why?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. So. To finish what I was just saying again, uh, nobody walks out of a live UFC event and goes, "Yeah, I don't ever want to come to one of these again." So not only do you become a bigger fan when you see it live, then you bring in five, six, seven, eight, 10 people, you know, and, and you make them fans too, meaning the people who left. Um, and then people always do say that, you know, he's got the best, I'm not sitting there to watch the fucking fights. I'm, I'm making sure that I can't control what's happening in the octagon, but I can control what you're seeing on television. And I have a phone there that goes directly to the truck. So what I care about is the live in-house experience.

• 30:20David Senra?

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

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:24David Senra?

  You're not running this through committee. You're not like, oh, let's talk about, should we change these graphics or anything? It's your taste.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  There is no committee here. There is no whatever. This is a dictatorship. 100% a dictatorship. And I'm listening to how loud the music is, if it's loud enough, if it's not, and things are happening in-house. And I'm watching what's happening on TV. All of that I can control. I can't control the fight and what's going on in there.

• 30:49David Senra?

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

• 30:51Speaker 01

  I pick up the phone. There's a phone that goes right to the truck. And I say, what the fuck was that? Let's never do that again. Let's do this. And I am so connected with my team. They know what I want. They know what I expect. But my guy Zach, who's the producer, he'll throw some shit around, try some new stuff. And I'll pick up the phone and say, that was cool. That wasn't cool. Let's keep that. Let's never do that again.

• 31:16David Senra?

  You have this in common with all of History's greatest entrepreneurs because they're always, you're from business school. They're like, oh, you should build up a team. Yeah, you're gonna have to have a good team. And then you just delegate. I heard the story of you kicking through a fucking door. What was that?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  The production team.

• 31:28David Senra?

  Yeah, explain this.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Those were the guys that I told you at the beginning of the interview that I fired them all.

• 31:32David Senra?

  Okay, so explain what happened.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  So we had just bought the company and, uh, Phil Barone.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Who's a maniac was fighting, um, fuck, who was he fighting? Anyway. And Phil Barone snapped in the middle of the interview. Like started freaking out on the fucking interviewer. And I told the guys, I said, I want this. I want this to be the interview when he fucking snaps and and they're like, you can't do that. You know, and these guys were all traditional, these guys all worked for Showtime at the time. And I fucking thought that Showtime was the most dog shit production ever in boxing.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And I used to say it publicly all the time. Well, these guys were all Showtime guys who were working on the side on the UFC. So I told them, this is how I want this interview played out. So we're sitting in the arena and Lorenzo, I said, watch this fucking interview. And they didn't do it. They did what they wanted to fucking do. I literally got up from my seat and went back there and kicked the fucking truck door open. I said, you motherfuckers, if you ever fucking do that again, I'll fire every fucking one of you. And, you know, this whole thing, which I ended up firing all.

• 32:42David Senra?

  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 to understand and have adapted to your taste. How long does it that 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 this stuff. And then he works with them for so long, they kind of can read his mind.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  That's my whole production team right now, literally my whole production team. So now we'll go into, we have a, we have a screening room over here. And, 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.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 33:58David Senra?

  Yeah, I've heard you shot her out on a few podcasts too.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Fucking animal.

• 34:01David Senra?

  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?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Hmm. I don't know the exact answer to that, but um.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Not a lot of turnover 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 loved that was on our production team. And he left to go, um, you know, what we talked about, you know, go make it on his own. And 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 doing it right now.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  So I've always had great relationships with my team and there hasn't been much turnover. Not in the key positions anyway, the positions that work directly with me, not a lot of turnover.

• 35:08David Senra?

  So when I listen to all your stuff, one thing I'm curious about, 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 feel-

• 35:18Speaker 01

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

• 35:24David Senra?

  That's incredible.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:26David Senra?

  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.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no doubt about it.

• 35:36David Senra?

  Really?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Really wealthy people, really smart entrepreneurs in other spaces have all tried to do this. Now, built this incredible business.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Then we just went public with TKO. Now I'm gonna try to rebuild boxing, right? And we just launched a Jiu Jitsu League and launched Slap. So every way that you can kick somebody's ass, you know,

• 36:19Speaker 01

  I am in that business. We're gonna build the biggest combat sports company to ever exist. And that will probably ever exist. That's my goal in the next 10 years.

• 36:30David Senra?

  It's not just that you're gonna build the biggest combat organization. You already have, but it's gonna be much bigger, right? But people don't understand that entrepreneurs come and like seek out your advice. You're on the fucking board of Meta, for God's sake.

• 36:40Speaker 01

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

• 36:44David Senra?

  Tell them what you see, cuz this is not a normal podcast.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I said, this looks like fucking CBS or Fox or something. So when you come in, my office is connected right here. This 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.

• 37:13David Senra?

  Why do you like talking to entrepreneurs so much?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  I love, I love hearing different people's ideas.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  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. And 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 wanna 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.

• 38:08David Senra?

  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. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world. So you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company.

• 38:53David Senra?

  He said, "We built 11 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/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. I'm curious the difference in quality of entrepreneur and when you started? Because I've heard you say like 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.

• 39:33David Senra?

  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 mentality that you see?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  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 is not how it works. You know, I've been doing this shit forever. I could have retired, you know, 10 years ago. Every day when you get up and you're an entrepreneur, you go to war, literally every day. Somebody's trying to fuck you, somebody's trying to take what you have. You know, somebody's trying to tear down your business, literally every day. Then you have the problems that pop up, you know.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Especially, and I know this sounds insensitive, but it's, 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.

• 40:47David Senra?

  Especially your employ, your, 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 would think you could control them, it's impossible.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  They are the most unique human beings on planet earth. They, they, they are not like all of us, they are wired differently, which is what makes them special.

• 41:09David Senra?

  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? Where it's like, you know, oh, John Jones is in the club in, in Vegas, what are you gonna do? And you're like, he's a fighter, like, there's nothing I can do about it. But also, what, what, what I thought you were really smart on, and it ties to what we were talking about earlier, is 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 the events and no, you know how to build an audience, you know how to make content, what the hell am I gonna tell you? You just say, come to the events as much as you want, and then make whatever you want.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Think about this, I have UFC, power slap, boxing, jujitsu, the WWE, PBR, plus me in the Fertitta Zone, slap, uh, SLS Skate League, and Nitro Circus.

• 42:14David Senra?

  I don't know what any of this are, look, I wanna hear about that in a minute.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Well, there are nine brands right there, that if you're an influencer, now, now, if you're an influencer, and I started to know to this, I told Linay, I don't know, five, six years ago.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  The media does not have the influence anymore. They're gone. Nobody trusts them. You know, they're all full of shit. They're always, you know, lying and they don't have the trust of the people the way that they used to. These young kids are the influencers. They actually have the influence. And when you think about, 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. So, 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.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  The other thing is, is most people that deal with content creators. They try to tell them, you have to do this, this, that. What the fuck do you know about creating content? Right? Let these young, talented people who are unbelievably creative, do what they do when they want to fucking do it. How hard is that?

• 43:35David Senra?

  No, it's like a simple genius. It reminds me of, you mentioned the Ellison's 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, 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 rocket on a boat? Like, show me what you have done. And I just thought that was like beautiful, like that guy's stupid? He's landing rockets.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  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. PFL, Bellator, 1FC, many, many other failing companies. Why don't they just fucking hire you guys?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  You guys have the answers for everything, right? It, it's just, I can't even read this shit. Cause it's so dumb. And I realize 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.

• 45:15David Senra?

  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?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  First of all, everything that we've done over the last 25 years has never been done before. And 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? Now, fucking Lorenzo's done. He's out. He doesn't want to do this anymore.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  So he puts the business up for sale. We sell for 4.025.

• 46:10David Senra?

  This is 2016?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:11David Senra?

  Okay.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  We sell for 4.025 billion, right? No TV deal. We're, 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.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Fox, $100 million deal. ESPN, $3 billion 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. It'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.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  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 in, in, in 2016, and look where we are 10 years later. Wait and see where we are in 10 more fucking years.

• 47:45David Senra?

  I was gonna say, the numbers are only gonna keep going up. Look at the streaming. It's just like, streaming services, it's just gonna be all be sports. The subscriber count is scaled so high, the demand is going to be insatiable for things like, essentially, that you make.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  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, I don't watch a lot of TV.

• 48:13David Senra?

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

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Almost none, right? Something's really gotta get me to, and I was saying this before the Paramount deal.

• 48:21David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  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. Landman 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 gonna be there. Sports, live sports is a destination. You have to watch it.

• 48:53David Senra?

  Now.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. So it always made sense for streaming platforms to go after the sports.

• 49:01David Senra?

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

• 49:05Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And I'm so glad that you and I are having this conversation and 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 sport. It's peaked, it's this, it's that.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:18David Senra?

  The reason this will never stop, this is true today, it 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.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Very true. I love it.

• 50:29David Senra?

  Yeah, it's crazy. So.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  I love that we're having this conversation.

• 50:32David Senra?

  You just got shit the other day because I guess you guys use like some AI video in one of your promos.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:39David Senra?

  What was your response to the people that criticized you?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Well, the response was I did a whole commercial in AI after that for the White House.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  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? Every and and when and what's the difference between? We were using green screens before that too. Right? And people, we still have to hire people to to 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.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  But it's the future. It's coming. Is it going to be as big as everybody thinks? Is it going to last? Is it? I don't know.

• 51:16David Senra?

  You don't have to know.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  But right here, right now, we're in.

• 51:20David Senra?

  But you see how rare that is? You're you've been running UFC for 26 years? Something like that? Yeah. It's like you're 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? That answer is going to change. You thought DVDs are 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.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. And we did a commercial, I don't know, over 10 years ago, uh, for the Conor McGregor Jose Aldo fight. It was incredible. It was on the strip, you know, and and they end up meeting out in front of MGM and all these Brazilians. Do they think that we really had all those fucking people out there and that that we really did that? No, that that isn't the way it worked. And that was way before AI. Whatever the new technology is, we're on it.

• 52:10David Senra?

  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 with 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. His, his, 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, you know, 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. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, 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 paying taxes. How do you think everything stays afloat? How do you think the state, uh, comes up with the money to fix the roads and build the highways? And, you know, uh, infrastructure in every city in America comes from?

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Billionaires, millionaires, the middle class and people who work their asses off and pay their taxes. That's where all the money comes from. I was just doing an interview, 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 gonna see this and be like, uh, well, if they're gonna see this and be like, you know, oh, this is terrible that this guy had, you're, you're not it and you're never gonna be it. You, you, you got the victim mentality and you're never gonna be that person.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  What you should look at what I have is say, that guy barely graduated high school, right? And, uh, 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, 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, and there's nothing wrong with it. You wanna work nine to five, you want Saturday, Sunday off and every holiday. Cause that's the life you wanna live, good for you. And then you have the guy who's gonna 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.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  And then you got the guy that's like, yeah, I'm not working for anybody. I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna, I'm gonna 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

• 54:56Speaker 01

  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. I don't think that's right.

• 55:21David Senra?

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

• 55:25Speaker 01

  That don't value their employees. People that don't value their employees. I've seen a lot of that.

• 55:30David Senra?

  I don't think people understand what you were willing to do during COVID. How wrong you thought it was. Everybody was laying everybody off.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:36David Senra?

  You offered to give up all of your compensation.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:39David Senra?

  Why?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  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. And a lot of people's who 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, I'm not a brick and mortar business, right? All I gotta do is find a place where I can go put on a fight and beam, beam it to ESPN. That's all I had to do. And, uh, you know, my, my team was all ready to fucking storm the beach with me, man.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Nope. Nobody was saying, no, we're not going to work during COVID. Too dangerous and we're, we're scared. I'm not saying people weren't scared. Everybody was willing to go. Men, women, everybody.

• 56:36David Senra?

  Brian Halligan founded HubSpot 20 years ago and he has this line about AI that I keep thinking about. He 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. And that's when you start seeing actual results. Visit hubspot.com to learn more. That's hubspot.com.

• 57:22David Senra?

  I remember when the, um, the NBA canceled their season. That was probably an oh shit moment for you. How long from that moment until you get, you did that thing with Abu Dhabi? How long did it take you to find a place in the world to go?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Couple of weeks. So I'm fucking going. We're going no matter what. Now I have the, um, Habib versus Tony Ferguson fight.

• 57:43David Senra?

  Which time though?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  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. Cool? Cool. They fucking pull it. So. Um.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  I got my fucking lawyer.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Calling every place in America, because 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, my thought process during this time. I don't know how fucking long this COVID shit's gonna go on and how long the country's gonna be shut down. But here's what I do know. At ESPN, which is a sports network. The bean counters are eventually gonna sit down and they're gonna go, okay, let's see what we got here. We got the NFL.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  We got Major League Baseball. We got the NBA. We got the NHL. We got the UFC. And we got the guys who throw the fucking bean bags into the fucking holes, okay? Who are we cutting first?

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Fucking UFC is gonna be the first fucking money that's gonna get cut. So. I'm gonna figure out how to go through COVID. All my employees are gonna stay intact and all the shit.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  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."

• 59:48David Senra?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  That we were getting paid no matter what. So I could have just said, "Fuck it. Let's all stay home and see how long COVID fucking lasts." But no, we fucking, we went out and we pulled killer fucking numbers for ESPN because we were...

• 1:00:04David Senra?

  It was your only game in town.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:11David Senra?

  How fast do you do a deal with Abu Dhabi? Because people don't understand Sheikh Taknun is also like, these guys are obsessed with jujitsu. He's a black belt in jujitsu.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  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. Like, the people who moved into Yaz Island from UAE lived there for months and never went home and saw their families. So they were all clean. We made sure that all of our athletes and everybody that went over to work was, 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.

• 1:00:58David Senra?

  And dealing with them, they can call all 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." And 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.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  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...

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Real in there and, you know, a real partner. You don't know that until shit gets really bad. And 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.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  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. Then 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 gotta let you know. My board of directors is losing their patience with you.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  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 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. And then coming out of COVID and that whole woke era. I was like, I'm only gonna be in business with people that I'm aligned with. So I didn't end up doing another deal with them.

• 1:03:54David Senra?

  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?

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:04:04David Senra?

  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. The perfect example, illustration of this is where I think, I don't doubt anything you said when I heard somebody asked 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 or 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.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never thought about if something doesn't work out, like, oh no, I'm gonna, I don't even think like that. Never even crosses my mind that something's not going to work. I just keep going until it does work.

• 1:05:01David Senra?

  This is all entrepreneurs think. There was this viral moment between another podcaster and Jensen Huang 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, or not be able to beat this competitor. It's like, of course he thinks like that. He's running a, he founded a $4 trillion company. They've been running for 33 years. You think he wakes up thinking he's going to lose?

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  No, it's true. There'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?

• 1:05:53David Senra?

  I saw that clip too.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  You never, you know?

• 1:05:55David Senra?

  It actually makes it worse.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, which makes sense.

• 1:05:57David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  It's like, I never take in any.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Negativity, I literally block, I call it noise and I block all that noise out. Like, like 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 any of the, 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?

• 1:06:30David Senra?

  But you, you said something earlier, like, 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, uh, episode on my other podcast where I read Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote two autobiographies. Wrote one when he was 76. That'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 Austria. 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?

• 1:07:13David Senra?

  Say, Arnold, like, uh, you're going to be the best bodybuilder in the world. You're like, he positive affirmations and he'd hang them up everywhere. He'd brainwash himself into this positive thinking that you were just talking about.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:28David Senra?

  Listen, after this, you gotta 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 part of it for you and he's spending money everywhere. But he started that company when he was 23. He used to live in a shitty apartment, right? Behind the Raising Cane's. He'd work all day, then go home, try to rest for a little bit, look out the window. When the drive through got backed up, he'd run back out. This is some shit you would do. But then he, when he's rich now, he buys the fucking apartment building and then he redoes his apartment just this 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. This fucking sounds like you. Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically. He was literally brainwashing himself. It's in early twenties that this will work. This has to work. There is no plan B.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  I'll walk, I'll sort of walk you through what you're saying. I mean, Laney, 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 and.

• 1:08:35David Senra?

  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 just talk about entrepreneurship, talk about building the business. Like you have so much genius shit. I've been following you for a decade. 2016 is when I found the UFC because of Rogan's podcast. He wouldn't shut up about it.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  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's based in New York. I got a flight 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 gonna 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. And at the time, he's doing Fear Factor, which is a massive show on television.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  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 reach out to Rogan and we hit it off immediately. And, 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 gotta do this to Rogan. And I'm like, like the, don't ever fucking call me. Who the fuck are you to call me and tell me who I'm gonna fire or

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  do whatever to?

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  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. But what we had to do is, radio was still very relevant. So,

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  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'd do UFC 30. Rogan would do UFC 31. I'd do UFC 32. Rogan would do 33. And you'd have to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning. We both lived on the West Coast.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  We'd have to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning. They'd drop us into the markets on the East Coast from 6 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 been a key instrumental part of this company. And for anybody, I don't give a fuck how much money you have sponsored or whatever. Yeah, no. Nothing's happening to Joe Rogan.

• 1:12:37David Senra?

  Loyalty.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Yes, which is the most important.

• 1:12:40David Senra?

  Dana, thanks for doing this.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Thing in the world to me.

• 1:12:42David Senra?

  That was awesome, man. Appreciate that.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  No, pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:12:44David Senra?

  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.