Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck | Lex Fridman Podcast #421

- Khabib beat Conor, Putin was on FaceTime

before he even made it to the locker room.

Trump, sitting president, ex-president,

watching all the fights,

calling, wants to talk about the fights.

Valentina Shevchenko, every time she goes home,

she meets with the president of the country.

The list goes on and on and on.

The most powerful, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg.

I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

The most powerful people in the world

are all obsessed with fighting.

- The following is a conversation with Dana White,

the president of the UFC,

a mixed martial arts organization

that revolutionized the art, the sport,

and the business of fighting.

And Dana is truly the mastermind behind the UFC.

This is the "Lex Fridman Podcast."

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Dana White.

Do you remember when you saw your first fight?

- I think so.

I remember being at my grandmother's house,

and I think it was an Ali fight,

and all my uncles were going crazy during the fight,

and there was just this buzz and this energy in the house

that I liked at a very young age,

and I'm pretty sure that was my first fight.

- Ali was something special.

- Yeah, incredible.

I mean, when you look around,

not just here in the office, but at my house,

Ali and Tyson are everywhere.

- Would you put Ali as the greatest of all time, boxing?

- Well, I would put Ali as the greatest

of all time human being.

I mean, when you,

it's easy as a fight fan to focus on him as a fighter,

but when you focus on him as a human,

and you think about what he meant at that time and place,

the things he said, the poems he came up with,

you know, just the overall brilliance of Muhammad Ali,

the guts, the guts to have the strength mentally,

physically, and emotionally to go against the grain

at the time that he did it.

It was a very dangerous time for him to be who he was.

Yet, because of how smart he was,

and because of his personality,

and how if you sat down with him,

you could be the biggest racist on the planet.

It's hard to get in a room with Ali and not like Ali.

- Yeah, he's all love, humor, all of it.

- 100%.

- And had the guts in the ring,

and the guts to take a stand.

- 100%. - When it was hard.

- He might be one of the all time greatest humans.

You know what I mean?

Just an impactful, powerful human being

who happened to be a great boxer.

- And sometimes the right moment

meets the great human being, that's important.

- I agree with you.

And he was the right guy in the right place

at the right time.

And he's also a guy who used his platform

for all the right things.

- So that might've been your first fight,

but when did you fall in love with fighting?

The art of it, the science of it?

- Yeah, I would say I really fell in love with it.

So I was a senior.

It was 1987, and Hagler-Leonard happened.

And I watched that fight, and I taped it.

And I watched that fight like a million times.

I was a huge, huge Hagler fan.

And I like Sugar Ray Leonard too,

but I was a huge Hagler fan.

And I just remember, I watched that fight a million times

because I was pissed off,

and I felt like Hagler got robbed in the fight.

You know what I mean?

But that was really what made me start

to love the sport of boxing.

- The battle of it, like- - Yeah, I was 17.

And then after that, USA's Tuesday Night Fights

came out on television, it was on every Tuesday night,

religiously, never missed Tuesday Night Fights.

I was there, watched all those fights.

And a lot of the things you see in the UFC,

not necessarily just the production,

but I would say the feel and the style

and all those things are all things that I,

things that I loved about boxing

and things that I hated about boxing,

right down to the commentary.

- You loved and hated? - Hated, yeah.

- [Lex] Hated the commentary.

- Certain things that I loved about boxing,

I incorporated into the UFC.

Things that I hated about boxing,

I made sure that the UFC stayed far away from.

I think, I can't stand Larry Merchant.

Can't stand Larry Merchant.

And I used to watch HBO Boxing and mute the commentary

so that I didn't have to listen to them.

Lampley too, you would spend this money for the pay-per-view

to watch these people that you idolized,

to hear these idiots rip 'em apart

while the fight was happening.

- Oh, they were criticizing. - Yeah, 100%.

- I've gotten used to the UFC,

so I don't, I'm trying to remember looking back.

- It was bad. - It was bad?

- It was really bad.

- But the sweet science, the art of boxing

was beautiful still.

Like the stories they told. - 100%.

I wanna do this with you right now.

Hey, will you bring your cell phone over here

and pull up YouTube?

I wanna do this for you so that you can understand this

and understand where I was coming from.

- For the commentary. - Yeah, at this point in time.

- I have all good memories.

You're gonna ruin it for me.

- Yeah, no, there are nothing but great memories

about boxing, but the presentation and a lot of the things,

but it's how fucking weird is it

that I even cared about this shit at that point in my life,

and that time in my life?

Like what impact could I possibly have on it?

So think about Tyson and how much everybody loved Tyson

at the time, and listen to this, listen to this entrance.

- [Announcer] Of the former undisputed heavyweight champion,

and here he comes, Mike Tyson.

As he heads toward the same ring,

he made his disgraceful exit in June of '96.

- Wow.

One of the baddest motherfucking walk-ins of all time,

by the way.

So what this guy should be doing,

and this is one of the Albert brothers.

Shut the fuck up.

Stay out of the way.

- [Lex] Maybe build him up.

- Or that, or don't say anything.

Just let the fans, that's why we blocked him.

That's why we paid our money.

- You don't need to say anything.

- [Announcer] Scary, imposing music.

Will he be able to intimidate his opponent tonight?

Will it even matter?

I really thought there'd be more of an explosion

by the crowd here, but very mixed.

Even with a win tonight, no matter how one started,

he will still have his detractors.

Following the two fights with Holyfield,

his stock plummeted, the pundits came down hard,

feeling they were duped.

That is knockouts for over second-rate fighters.

Now the crowd erupts more as he gets into the ring.

But it's certainly nothing overwhelming.

- What a dick.

You're right.

I don't remember that.

You're right.

- Imagine, you paid your money to watch Mike Tyson,

and you gotta listen to these fucking jerk-offs

talk shit about him the whole way to the.

First of all, one of the coolest walk-ins ever.

You know, first time anybody had heard DMX.

- Yeah, that's right.

- He's walking into some scary, imposing music.

Will it even matter?

You know, it's just all that kind of stuff.

I literally used to analyze every ounce of the production

that would happen on television.

And at a time when I didn't even know why I was doing it,

but- - But it's in there somewhere.

Like you were thinking about it.

- Right?

So yeah, I hated HBO commentary.

I thought, you know, at the time,

HBO boxing was obviously the gold standard for, you know,

but when you really think about boxing

at that time, their production,

the only thing that changed over 30 years was like HD.

I mean, even the commentators were the same for 30 years.

And then you had the time when Larry Merchant gets up

and literally starts fighting with Floyd Mayweather

during the interview and says,

"If I was 30 years younger, I'd kick your ass right now."

- Oh yeah, I remember that, yeah.

- I mean, these are the interviews

that we have to listen to

when we're trying to watch a boxing match.

- The level of boxing was good.

- Think about a fighter.

Fighter has been gone for months,

away from their families and away from everything,

training, cutting weight, sparring.

Then they go in and they have to fight that night

and then you have to, you know,

if you watch your fight back,

you gotta listen to this bullshit from these guys

and then you get interviewed and your interview is this.

It's just-

- And it's not just about the pay-per-view money.

It's about like, these are legends of humanity.

Like we should celebrate the highest form

of like accomplishment.

'Cause these are like Mike Tyson.

- So you know who goes in there and interviews fighters?

Joe Rogan.

Who has trained and done everything

and has the utmost respect for the sport and the athletes.

Or you got like Daniel Cormier,

who was a former world champion himself

and has actually been through it, done it, knows.

And those are the type of people that we put in the booth,

people that are actually experienced in it.

Not these people who've never been in a fight

in their fucking life.

- Yeah, but they're also both

DC and Rogan are like big kids.

They love it, they really love it.

- Well, everybody does.

I mean, if you look at, it's the difference

between our commentary and what I feel their commentary was.

We don't hire paid talking heads.

We hire people that have actually been in it,

done it, love it and are super passionate about the sport.

And I would say that none of them

that ever covered the sport back then were.

I don't know if that was Marv Albert

or what Albert brother that was,

but he sounded like he's a fan of the sport or anyway.

You got me on this and once I get on this, I lose my mind.

- Maybe we wouldn't have a UFC

if they didn't fuck it up so bad for the Tyson.

- It would be different.

You're not wrong, you're not wrong.

It would be different.

There's no doubt about it.

All those experiences growing up being a boxing fan

helped create what the UFC is today.

- You know, it's interesting

'cause humans have been fighting for millennia

and it seems like with the UFC,

the rate of innovation is just insane.

In these last three decades,

it seems like we've discovered how to do unarmed combat

faster and better than at any time in human history.

- I agree with you 100%.

The first UFC happened in 1993.

Martial art versus martial art.

And now over the last 30 years,

martial arts has evolved faster than, you know what I mean?

And like you just said, combat sports, fighting,

whatever you wanna call it, martial arts,

it has evolved so much in 30 years,

more than the last 300 years.

- What did you think when you saw UFC 1 with Royce?

- I remember everybody talking

that this fight was gonna happen

and there was gonna be no rules and all this other stuff

and we're like, there's no way that's bullshit.

And then we ended up at some guy's house that night

in Boston and watching it and it was happening

and it was fun and it was exciting and everything else.

And then I sort of fell off after that.

The first one I watched, but I was too big of a boxing fan.

Plus once grappling started taking over

and you know, by grappling meaning the wrestling

and the jujitsu guys had just laid there,

you know, I completely lost interest.

It's funny that I'm having this conversation

with you right now because last night,

I was out last night with my friends

and we were talking about,

'cause one of my buddies who's a host here in town

just did jujitsu for the first time yesterday.

And he was like- - Did he get his ass kicked?

- Yeah, yeah, but when you first go in,

our first jujitsu lesson,

me, Lorenzo and Frank was with John Lewis.

And I remember thinking, holy shit,

I can't believe that I'm, you know, 28 years old

and this is the first time I'm experiencing this,

that another human being could do this to me on the ground.

It is such an eye-opening, mind-blowing experience

when you do it for the first time

and then you become completely addicted to it.

And we were training three, four days a week,

trying to kill each other and me and the Fertittas

and that's how we fell in love with the sport.

I think that first time that you do jujitsu,

it's like the red pill and the blue pill in The Matrix.

Do you wanna believe that this is the world that you live in

or do you wanna see what the real world looks like?

- It's just as a real red pill.

- It really is.

- You realize, holy shit,

all that shit talking I've been doing

about me being a badass, you realize you're not.

You get dominated by another human being, you realize no.

And I mean dominate.

I mean completely treat you like you're a little kid.

And then we had the opportunity to roll

with a lot of different guys at the time

because of the whatever.

And we don't have a good relationship at all

but I'll tell you this, Frank Shamrock came in one day

and Frank Shamrock had me in side control.

The pressure that this guy put on my chest made me tap.

Felt like there was a car on my chest

and with zero effort from him.

It was absolutely effortless.

And when you train with somebody that's at such a level

when you're not, it is the most humbling,

mind-blowing experience you can have especially as a man

but as a human being.

- Do you remember, just for fun,

do you remember what your go-to submission was?

- Yeah, so when we first started out and started doing it,

I had a pretty good guillotine in the beginning

so I'd catch a lot of people in guillotines and-

- So you're okay being on bottom?

So like your guard is pretty good?

- Yeah, I was okay with the bottom.

Yeah, I was okay with being on bottom.

I was comfortable there.

But you know what I never liked?

I never liked gi.

Like we started fucking around with a gi in the beginning.

That's how we started.

And then once I took the gi off,

I felt like I had no submissions

'cause I couldn't grab onto anything.

So after that, I went all no gi

and I never wanted to wear a gi.

- And it's fascinating 'cause no gi has become big now

and there's a lot of interesting people.

I got trained with Gordon Ryan

and the level there is just fascinating.

It's become like the science

and it looks like fighting now.

It looks more like fighting

as opposed to with the gi,

sometimes it doesn't quite look like fighting.

And I feel like it's transferable

to actual MMA fighting, no gi stuff.

- Or street.

- Street, yeah. - Right?

I mean, if you start off in your first year,

you're in a gi, man, you better hope

guy's got like winter jackets on or something

if something happens in the street

'cause in my opinion,

I know all the jujitsu fucking people

are gonna go crazy over this,

but in my opinion, no gi is way better than gi.

- That's why I also do judo.

So in the street scenario,

if you're comfortable on the feet

and you can clinch and you can throw,

because most of us wear clothing,

especially in Boston in the winter.

- Right, exactly.

- So if you're comfortable on the feet,

you could still do well there.

The problem with jujitsu

is most people are not comfortable on the feet,

the sport of jujitsu.

Most people kinda wanna get to the ground

as quickly as possible.

So what'd you think of Royce at that time?

Like in the early, like what,

'cause it blew a lot of people's minds

that there's like more to this puzzle.

- 100%, and the fact that you had

like these guys like Ken Shamrock

that were jacked.

And you had all these wrestlers

or the big, massive guys

that they had in the different weight classes

and this skinny little dude like Royce

was out there beating everybody.

I mean, if you look at the way the Gracies played that,

you couldn't have a better advertisement

for Gracie jujitsu at the time.

- But also like for MMA,

because there's just a lot of surprising elements.

A lot of people's prediction was wrong.

- Right. - They didn't think

the skinny guy would win

and they're like, "Oh shit, there's more to this."

- What's the real beautiful thing about jujitsu?

It's like when you talk about,

if you wanted to get your daughter into a martial art,

should I put my daughter into karate

or should I put her into this?

You put your daughter into jujitsu 100%

because it's not about size or strength,

it's about technique.

And you give your daughter a bunch of jujitsu

and a little bit of Muay Thai, you know?

- Yeah, she becomes dangerous.

- It's like the perfect combo.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause you can put your son into anything.

Your son can get in some, you know,

boys are gonna learn how to fight

and they're gonna do whatever, but girls are different.

And the other thing, I mean,

this is the biggest selling point for jujitsu for women.

I mean, when a woman, no matter how big, how small,

can put a guy to sleep in three and a half seconds.

- What's the origin story of the UFC as it is today,

as you have created it

and you and Lorenzo and Fertitta brothers built it?

- It started with John Lewis, you know,

and seeing him, Frank and I were out one night

at the Hard Rock and John Lewis was there.

And he's like, "Oh, that's that ultimate fighting guy."

And I was like, "I know him."

And Frank's like, "I've always wanted

to learn ground fighting."

And I said, "Yeah, I'm interested in it too."

So we went over, we talked to John Lewis

and we made an appointment to wrestle with him on Monday.

- And we told Lorenzo and Lorenzo came with us

and that was the beginning of the end.

We started doing jujitsu

and started to meet a lot of the fighters.

And we were like, at the time,

there was a stigma attached to the sport

that these guys were despicable, disgusting human beings,

which was the furthest thing from the truth.

These kids had all gone to college,

had college degrees, most of them,

'cause they wrestled in college.

And we started to meet some,

we loved the different stories.

You had Chuck Liddell who had this Mohawk,

looks like an ax murderer,

but graduated from Cal Poly with honors in accounting.

Then you had Matt Hughes, who was this farm boy,

literally lived on a farm.

And so there were all these cool stories

with all these good people

that weren't what people thought they were.

And Lorenzo and I always felt like there's something here.

If this thing was done the right way, this could be big.

And what was crazy was I was in a contract negotiation

with Bob Meyrowitz the old owner of the UFC,

over Tito's contract and Chuck Liddell.

They didn't even want Chuck Liddell in the UFC.

I was trying to get Chuck in the UFC

and they didn't even want him.

And we got into this contract dispute over Tito's contract

and Bob Meyrowitz said, "You know what?

"There is no more money, okay?

"I don't even know if I'll even be able

"to put on one more event."

And he flipped out.

We hung up the phone, I literally picked up the phone

and called Lorenzo and I said,

"Hey, I just got off the phone

"with Bob Meyrowitz, the owner of the UFC.

"I think they're in trouble and I think we could buy it

"and I think we should.

"You should reach out to him."

So Lorenzo called Meyrowitz and I don't know how,

I don't remember the timeline,

but within the next two months,

we ended up owning the UFC for 2 million bucks.

- And you've said that you fought a lot of battles

during that time.

- Uh-oh.

I mean, the early days of building this company

and building the sport, it was the wild, wild west, man.

It was crazy back then.

Yeah, I was literally at war every day

with all different types of people.

Plus, traditionally, there's bad people

that are involved in fighting, man.

There's lots of bad people.

And we had to sift our way through that

for the first seven, eight years.

- So in general, there's like corruption

and people kind of steal money.

They're thinking just about themselves,

not the bigger business.

- Well, let me tell you about this.

I mean, I wanna say it was the Netherlands.

I don't remember exactly where.

It could've been Amsterdam.

I mean, MMA promoters were like car bombing each other

and then the other guy shot up the other guy's house

with machine guns.

And that's the kind of shit that was going on.

I'll tell you the story.

So Affliction, do you remember Affliction?

- Yeah. - So there was a guy.

I wanna say his name was Todd Beard or something like that.

This guy used to text me every day

when they started their MMA thing,

telling me he was gonna kill me.

- [Lex] Like legitimately death threats?

- Legitimately gonna kill me.

You punk motherfucker.

I'm gonna fucking kill you.

You don't understand who I am and what I've done

and this and that.

I think this guy would get drunk or do drugs every night

or whatever his deal was.

This guy would call me, text me

and threaten my life every day.

I used to go, "Fuck you."

- You said, "Fuck you."

- Oh yeah, especially back then.

Yeah, but I mean, this is the type of shit

that went on in the early days.

This guy who was one of the owners of Affliction

was like one of the, you know, not a good human.

Let's put it that way.

- What about the business side of it?

It's tough to make money in this business.

- Yeah, we weren't making money.

So, you know, trying to build this thing, corrupt,

the guys that work for In Demand Pay-Per-View at the time

were not good dudes, you know,

and that thing was a fucking total monopoly.

God, I wish I could remember his name right now.

He used to run In Demand and he was a fucking bad guy.

Then he comes over and starts running DirecTV

who we always had a great relationship with.

He's the reason we left DirecTV and said,

"Fuck it, we'll just go streaming then."

Yeah, I don't remember his name.

I'd have to ask Lorenzo.

- So in general, just in this whole space,

there's a lot of shady people.

- Everybody you deal with is dealing

with a lot of different forces

and your hands are in a lot of different businesses,

you know, from the venue business

to the merchandise business to the video game business,

the pay-per-view business, you know,

the list goes on and on of all the different types

of the production business, of all these different,

you know, when I first started this,

we had a production team that was the production team

that was in it before we bought it.

So there was this incident with Phil Baroni

where Phil Baroni, we did an interview with him

and Baroni flips out in the interview

when they're interviewing him and goes crazy

and I thought it was awesome.

So I'm like, "We're gonna leave this in.

"We're gonna leave this interview in."

And the production guys were arguing with me.

They're like, "We can't leave this in.

"This is totally unprofessional."

And I said, "I don't give a shit.

"This is what we're doing.

"We're gonna do this and clip it like this

"and do it like that."

We're sitting in the venue that night

and I lean over to Lorenzo 'cause the fight's coming up.

I go, "Wait 'til you see this fucking interview

"with Baroni."

They didn't fucking do it.

They didn't do it.

These guys were guys that were freelance guys

that worked for Showtime at the time

or something like that. - I would say, yes.

- I literally went, got up from my fucking seat,

went back there, kicked the fucking door of the truck open

and I said, "You motherfuckers.

"You ever do that again

"and I'll fire every fucking one of you.

"Let's just put it this way."

Ended up firing every one of them anyway

and going with a whole new crew.

But these were the type of things

that early on, there's so much stuff.

I mean, I could sit here for fucking three days

and walk you through all the stuff

that used to go on back in those days.

But it was the wild, wild west, man.

- But how'd you figure out,

how'd you know how to deal with all this mess?

First of all, to fire people,

to fire people that aren't doing a good job, all of that.

Like how to be a leader, how to be-

- Well, that's the thing too.

I mean- - Business leader.

- Getting in, in the early days, there was two employees,

me and another girl that worked for me, for my company

before I started doing this.

And then we slowly started to bring people on

and you start to build a team.

Then before you know it, we had 10 people.

I mean, we used to do our Christmas parties back then too.

There'd be eight to 10 people at our Christmas party.

But a lot of it is you learn as you go.

You know what me and the Fertittas knew about production

when we bought this UFC?

We had like, I wanna say we had two or three weeks

to pull off an event.

This is what we knew about production.

- Really? - Jack shit.

So we had to dive in and we had to learn it.

We had to figure it out and we knew what we wanted.

We knew what we liked.

We knew what we were looking for.

It's just about building a good team.

And I think that's one of the things,

if you wanna talk about what I've accomplished

in the last 25 years of my life,

I've been really good at building teams.

- Already have a vision of what you want

the final thing to look like

and then build a team that can bring that to life.

- 100%.

Well, you have to have the vision.

Without the vision, there's nothing.

So that's sort of what I do.

I am the vision part of this thing.

We're gonna open a PI in Mexico.