Dana White
speaker
1,304 appearances
17 recordings
16 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard 17 Jun
Dana White’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
I was in a contract negotiation with Bob Meyerowitz, 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. Wow. And we got into this contract dispute over Tito's contract and Bob Meyerowitz 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 like flipped out. When 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 Meyerowitz, 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 Meyerowitz 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. And you've said that you fought a lot of battles during that time. 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.
Let me tell you about this. I mean, I want to say it was the Netherlands. I don't remember exactly where. It could have 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?
So there was a guy. I want to 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 going to kill me. Like legitimately. Legitimately going to kill me. Yeah. You punk motherfucker. I'm going to 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. Oh, man. Especially back then.
yeah but yeah but i mean this is the type of shit that went on in the early days that this guy 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 uh
corrupt uh the guys that work for in-demand pay-per-view at the time uh 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 then he comes over and starts running direct tv who we always had a great relationship with and he's the reason we left direct tv 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. Yeah, it's just everybody you deal with is shady.
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 Barone, where Phil Barone, we did an interview with him, and Barone 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 going to leave this in. We're going to 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. I said, I don't give a shit. This is what we're doing. We're going to 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 because the fight's coming up. I go, wait till you see this fucking interview with Barone. 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 literally 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.
I 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 uh But it was the wild, wild west, man.
Well, that's the thing too. I mean, 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. And 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, you know? Um, 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? I want to 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 want to – Talk about what I've accomplished in the last 25 years of my life. I've been really good at building teams.
Well, you have to have the vision. Without the vision, there's nothing. So that's sort of what I do. Yeah. I am the vision part of this thing. We're going to open a PI in Mexico. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. And then you build the team to come in and help execute.
Well, the secret to success, I would say, first of all, is passion and consistency. You have to love what you do. You have to get up every day. I get here every day at 9.30 in the morning. When we sold... In 2016, a lot of people in the company made a lot of money and they all took off and they retired, right? Other than the Fertittas, I made the most money. I'm still here.
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