Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh - Dana White on McGregor’s Future, Defeating $40-Million Debt, & How he BEATS the Casino
Episode Date: June 5, 2024YERRR we got UFC's own Dana White in the building to break it all down for us: how the UFC came to be, his biggest gambling wins and losses, who the greatest EVER is, and much much more. INDULGE 00:0...0 Intro 00:58 Whitey Bulger was after Dana? 3:16 Pure focus on work, fug your wedding + bumping into Fertittas 5:57 Dana running gyms with Roger Mayweather + 1st impressions of Floyd Mayweather 8:00 Roger Mayweather fighting heavyweight + real fight world is crazy 9:46 Why is Dana drawn to fight sports? 10:23 Dana would have resigned from UFC bcos of Rogan + Rogan’s loyalty 14:52 Dana managing boxers 17:17 Learning jiu jitsu, different storylines + seeing true potential of UFC 19:58 Approaching UFC to buy it for $2m + down $40m in the hole 24:29 Lionsgate owned all the IP, they didn’t believe at all + DVD helped a little 26:29 Dana’s mentality during all of this + hearing offers to sell UFC 28:19 TV was the savior, Spike TV initially hated it + putting up all the money 30:04 Power Slap makes MONEY 33:51 Dana’s motivator, UFC felt too violent + sparring is the killer 36:42 The Ultimate Fighter changed everything + that Final was insane 41:17 Starting to climb out the hole + Saudi saved boxing 45:22 UFC incentives the right performances + The Sphere show incoming + WE LOVE MEXICO 55:21 Deciding the right fights + media doesn’t know what they’re talking about 58:36 Mike Tyson should never have been fighting Jake Paul 1:01:58 What’s the criteria for good UFC fights? Styles makes fight 1:05:04 Learning how to tell compelling stories + incredible personalities are a bonus 1:09:10 What is Conor McGregor doing? Elite mental warfare 1:11:40 Jon Jones is the greatest fighter ever + P4P makes no sense 1:17:25 Intervening to protect fighters + you have no idea about their mentalities 1:20:51 UFC surpassing boxing, impact of Jiu Jitsu + Rogan’s commentary 1:24:06 The internet truly changed it all + we’re gonna see massive consolidation 1:30:45 Breaking into markets, Power Slap’s massive in India + finding talent 1:35:57 MMA is its own discipline + gyms all over the world 1:37:14 Dana manage his portfolio + Building niche sports 1:38:45 Dana’s biggest business failure + regret in not investing in… 1:42:10 How to pitch Dana on business + Dana loves negativity 1:45:24 Caesar’s the place, The Chinese LOVES gambling + Dana LOVES taking their money 1:53:27 The most Dana has won and lost + Baccarat’s odds are the best out there 1:58:17 Dirty tricks casinos use, LV treats you right + when you’re banned, means something out… 2:03:14 Charles Barkley loves gambling, bad luck people + superstitions 2:09:46 What makes Dana so successful? 2:11:46 Howie Mandel walkout was planned 2:13:56 The worst thing Dana ever tried… 2:16:10 The Brady Roast recap, no more stand-up EVER + Kim K was a G
Transcript
Discussion (0)
A few years in, I got the phone call one day and he's like,
I don't know if we can keep doing this, man.
You're upside down $40 million.
This is what I'm talking about.
Speaking of Conor, is this marketing on Conor's behalf?
I will tell you this.
I'm gonna give a fuck what anybody says.
Ali, Conor, both level when it comes to mental warfare.
A month and a half later, we own the UFC for $2 million.
It's worth what now?
$12, $13 billion.
If I brought up Jake Paul, pretty much everybody in the room
and the other room wants to see Jake Paul get knocked out.
Did you help set that up?
Because I know you're close with Tyson.
God, no.
I want to go to Caesar Palace.
I'm in this f***ing war with them right now.
Since Jan 1, I beat them for $16.5 million.
I've been clipping them from anywhere from $800 to a million a night.
When I lose, I'll go guns a blazing and go through my whole credit line, which is $6
million.
You've lost $6 million? Yeah. So I'll lose lose six million while I'm still up in ten million on them.
Holy s***.
Where's my phone?
Can you guys hear me in the other room?
Bring me my phone if you can hear me.
What do you got?
I'm sweating something.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to Flaker.
Today we're here.
We're here with the big man.
It's Dana White in the building.
Yeah, Dana White is in the building.
Finally.
Long overdue. Okay, I did
a lot of research, obviously, for this
because I wanted to go in depth.
I came across something. I don't know if this is
true or not, but it's out there
on the internet that you were, there was
a hit on you or something in Boston
by Whitey Bulger. Is this true?
It's not true. That is not true.
How does this story even get out there?
Sort of like that, but it wasn't whitey bulger and it wasn't whatever okay so back in the day in boston whitey bulger ran
south of course okay yeah legit i mean you've seen the movies you've seen all the shit and you know
it was like living in south boston at that time was was like another fucking uh like these guys
didn't know what century it was
man it was crazy why and there were rules in that town like you didn't call the police and
they later ended up finding out he was working with the FBI yeah so people that did call the
fucking police they he would know that he fucking did it you know and he was working with the FBI
against other mob guys and shit like that it It's a fascinating story. But when you live there, you didn't do that shit.
One of his guys said that I owed him money.
Did you owe him money?
No, I didn't owe him money.
I didn't even know him.
You just picked a random guy.
Never nothing.
And it got to the point where I got a phone call one day at the house
that I lived in and basically said,
you got until Sunday to fucking pay us. Sunday at 1 or whatever the number was and i said or what and they're like
you're gonna find out so i literally hung up the phone picked it back up and called delta
and that was a wrap and what's crazy about it when you look at you know how everything played out in my life including you
know the purchase of the ufc had that not happened i i wouldn't have been in vegas at the time that
all this was going on oh wow when you when you look back on your life and i'm sure everybody
on this fucking couch and everybody watching can do it you say holy shit yeah this happened
that happened this happened yeah and at that time what if it was
really for titta if you don't move to vegas well that's that's crazy too because when i when i got
out there you know i i sort of had i was on the grind when i was in my 20s and like i quit drinking
when i was 21 i stopped drinking and i only only focused on work and what I wanted to do, right?
So, man, you quit drinking at 21.
I had to.
I quit at 21.
That shows you what I was doing.
But we had the fake IDs
and all that shit.
I'd already done all that shit.
He'd been drinking for 19 years.
It was good.
I got it out of my system
before I was 21.
Yeah.
So, I had this blanket policy.
You know, when you get into your
20s everybody starts getting fucking married all your friends i didn't go to anybody's wedding
blanket policy wow you were getting married love you i'll send you a gift i'm not going anywhere
why why would you refuse to go to the most important day of their life because it's fucking
time consuming man it's fucking weekend somebody's getting fucking married you know what i mean
i guess i'm happy for you but i'm not going that's so funny i uh you would have hated my wedding
that's the thing then you got these people to do the destination wedding okay i'm out
so you this there's this kid named adam corrigan that i grew up with in vegas
right and he had money i didn't have money and and he was always a good dude he would pick me up
and drive me to school every day like would drive me to school every day so when you think about
in high school to get up and get me and drive me to work this dude had to wake up an hour earlier
every day to drive me to school.
Never forgot that.
People who do things for me like that, I never forget.
He was getting married.
So there was no fucking way I wasn't going to go to his wedding.
I go to his wedding.
And who do I run into?
The Fertitta brothers.
I haven't seen in fucking years.
Lorenzo Fertitta comes up to me and says, hey, how you been?
And this and that good.
You know, we hadn't seen each other since high school.
You guys went to high school together.
That's the other thing a lot of people
don't even fucking realize.
You guys knew each other originally.
From high school.
So then I don't talk to him.
And it's like me and Lorenzo knew each other in high school,
but we weren't friends.
It's not like we hung out and did whatever.
We knew each other.
So he says to me at the wedding, i hear you're doing this boxing thing i just got on the athletic commission i would love to come train with you i said let's do it on monday he came
and trained with me on monday and we've been together ever since so the one fucking wedding
that i go to imagine where you'd be if you'd go to all the weddings. Yeah, you should have gone to all the weddings.
You'd be the president of America.
And the president of America.
The ruler of the world.
You'd be Jeff Bezos.
Thank God.
For all of our stakes, you didn't go to any other wedding.
You have a chance.
Okay.
So you guys, and you're training him in boxing.
Right.
Because you were training people, you were running boxing gyms as well.
Yeah, exactly.
So there was a gym, when i first came back to vegas there was a gym called united champions
and it was me this guy named nick one kick who was a muay thai trainer and roger mayweather
out of here hold on so you've known the mayweathers for yeah decades yeah 30 and was roger as wild back
in the day roger was a fucking maniac okay so people just to put this in perspective roger
trained floyd right because floyd and his dad they had some his dad was in jail oh so his dad was in
jail so while he was in jail his uncles you know roger and jeff yep took care of floyd yeah yeah he was much younger yeah exactly jeff
was younger than roger yeah yeah so those guys you know sort of took floyd under their wing and
helped floyd out uh while their dad was in jail well his dad was in jail so that's how me and
floyd became close and got to know each other you know early on and and uh yeah so it was me roger
and nick one kick that worked out of United Champions.
Sorry, can I ask you about your first time meeting Floyd?
What's your impressions of him? What do you think of him?
I liked Floyd. Floyd came out of
the Olympics and was
a charismatic, good-looking kid.
Talented.
Yeah, I like Floyd.
It's funny, when I first... Go ahead.
I don't want to fast-forward,
but the Floyd-Connor fight now.
Oh, fuck, yeah.
Is an even crazier event, but we can get to that later.
Right, yeah.
No, Floyd and I have known each other for a long time.
And, you know, when I first met Floyd, he lived in an apartment that Top Rank used to put a lot of their fighters in.
He lived in this apartment down on, I want to say it was off Flamingo.
And, you you know he just
started to make some money so you know i went over his house he was showing me all the sweaters that
he bought and all the things you know floyd's always been that guy yeah he likes to shop and
he likes to buy clothes and you know it started the minute he made his first dollar right right
okay so you're in this gym i imagine tons of characters and everything rolling through the
gym like what is your period of ingratiating yourself to these guys?
Yeah, so what would happen is we had a real weird fucking dynamic there
because I was training businessmen and housewives and shit like that.
And then you got fucking Roger Mayweather, 100%.
I mean, there were fucking, you know,
fights would break out in this fucking gym.
And I'll never forget.
So there was this heavyweight and his name was Tracy.
And him and fucking Roger Mayweather got into it one day in there.
And Roger had fucking jeans on and a shirt.
Takes his fucking shirt off and like, we're fucking fighting.
So they get up into the ring and they put gloves on and tracy and roger mayweather start fucking fighting tracy's
a heavyweight he's a pro roger fought at what 147 exactly roger's fucking yeah right yeah and
they're fucking banging yeah banging in there right so the bell rings and Tracy stops punching and Roger fucking blasts him and says, no rounds, motherfucker.
And they just keep fucking going.
And then what eventually happens is the heavyweight gasses out and Rogers fucking just beats the fucking shit out of him to the point where everybody had to jump in the ring and fucking break it up.
Stop it.
Yeah, that was the kind of shit that went on there wow on a daily basis right what would you and then you had nick one kick the muay thai guys
fucking crew that was in there that crazy shit would happen with it was just it's fucking nuts
the whole fight world the the real fight world is is a crazy fucking business and why were you
drawn to this i've always liked it since i was a kid but
do you like did you like chaos and shit like i love i love everything about fighting man i and
it's not just i was a huge boxing fan obviously but boxing martial arts you know fucking the fight
after school at the park i mean all that type oh i'm fucking because you were getting kicked out
of school one fucking fight that happened after school at the park were you involved were you some but mostly watched i
watched a lot of fights uh yeah yeah i like fights man i just always have okay it's what i love i
mean look how long i've been doing this and i still love it i can't wait for this weekend yeah
yeah yeah there's a uh there's yeah there's a well we'll get we'll get to that there's a really
cool story
about you that I think that has been confirmed, but it was told by a mutual friend. And it was
about when Rogan was going through one of his like many cancellations and, you know, maybe
some people at the network were like, I think we got to set this guy aside. And, and what I heard
was that you said, if he goes, yeah yeah i never talked so lex friedman
i did his podcast and apparently he was there when this all went down but this has never been
talked about yeah or brought up or whatever and would have never been talked about if lex friedman
didn't bring it up but yeah um when rogan was going through his thing uh you know it was at the peak of this cancel culture shit going on, right?
And I was like, yeah, fuck that shit.
First of all, it's easy to look at things, you know,
like when you look at Rogan and Rogan makes shit loads of money.
He's got the biggest podcast in the world and all this shit.
But back in the day, so when we bought the UFC,
the UFC was based
in New York. So the offices were here. Even though it was illegal to put on the plate?
Yeah, but their offices were here. Bob Meyerowitz, the owner, is from New York and the offices were
here in New York. So after we bought the company, I jumped on a plane and I flew out here and I had
to go through the office and figure out what I was going to bring to Vegas
and what I was going to leave, what was worth it.
Well, they had a room that was just full of fucking tapes, right?
So I had to go through each fucking tape
and watch every tape to make sure it wasn't something important.
So I pop in this tape, and it's the Keenan Ivory Wayne show.
He had his own talk show.
I remember that, yeah.
And they had fucking Joe Rogan on.
Yeah.
And Keenan Ivoryne says to him you're into this uh this ultimate fighting stuff huh and rogan starts going fucking off on the ufc um marie smith and what he would do
to all these action stars and all this stuff and this is the fucking fear factor guy you know what
i mean and the way that joe talked and how passionate he was i And this is the fucking fear factor guy. You know what I mean? And the way that Joe talked and how passionate he was,
I go, this is the fucking guy that I need.
This is the fucking guy.
It just hit me, right?
So I reached out to Rogan
and we started going back and forth.
And I said, I would love you to come in
and be one of the commentators.
And Rogan's attitude attitude was so wait a
minute so you're saying i can come over there sit in the best seats in the house and watch the sport
that i love for fucking free yeah i'm in so at the time financially you know we're getting fucking
murdered rogan did the first 12 or 13 shows for free for free yeah yeah and he's stoked he's and killed it and yeah and the thing that i
loved about joe rogan was when you were sitting there and watching joe rogan on tv and he was on
the mic he wasn't one of these hbo fucking goofball talking fucking heads that were being paid yeah
you felt yeah yeah that this dude not only knew what he was talking about, but loved what this is about.
And that began the relationship with me and Joe Rogan
that now has been coming up on 20-something years.
And you think that you're going to fucking cancel Joe Rogan
and I'm going to just say, okay?
No, I will fucking quit this job and leave
and go do something else before you're going to try to fucking.
I loved it.
And the whole cancel thing.
Yeah.
You know, I just literally just talked about this a couple of days ago with, you know, if you're in the right place in your life and who the fuck's going to cancel you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The only people that, the only ones that can really cancel you are your fucking family and your friends.
Fuck all these other people
yeah yeah strangers in your life who gives a shit yeah what any of these fucking people think dude
it's so funny how serendipitous your life is you get kicked out of boston luckily you go to a
wedding randomly and meet the guy you're looking at tapes did you look through every single tape
or i went through every fucking tape in that in that building yeah because you have to clear out a hoarder's supply closet well you have to
make sure you're not throwing away something that's actually valuable that you need in the
future you know what i mean okay but i had to make i had to determine what we were going to
keep and what we weren't going to keep did you get anything else out of those tapes or i mean
it's all worth it if you got joe but i mean if you look at what what became of joe rogan yeah yeah and how
important he is to the sport yeah without a doubt the most yeah valuable tape yeah that i watched
that day you're okay you were saying the the business was losing money like crazy do you have
a sit down with the fortito brothers and go okay let's buy this this can be something why do you
even feel it can be something like take me through this lot
i'll tell you a crazy story so at the time i was managing guys right boxers and and mma fighters
what boxers do you have i had uh any guys i would know and how did that happen yeah
this is fucking crazy somebody else just asked me this question too
how it happened i don't know I always had this thing where, I don't know, people would come to me
and ask me to help them.
You should see my office now.
Every day, a majority of my day
is taking meetings with people
that are building businesses
and want to ask if I will be a part of them.
It's like fucking Shark Tank at my office every day.
I'm literally in there
and people are pitching me their business ideas.
And oddly enough, before I had ever really done anything i owned gyms and it was in the
training business people have always come to me and asked me to help them do something yeah you
know so it it happened in the fight world i had these gyms and i was training people and fighters
would come to me um Derek, fuck Derek.
What's your last name, Derek?
I got Derek a fight with Roy Jones Jr.
I did the deal for that fight.
Derek Harmon.
I got Derek Harmon the fight with Roy.
I negotiated that deal and did all that.
Before we bought the UFC, yeah.
That was the biggest thing I had ever done
before we bought the UFC.
Now, this is Roy's heyday. Are you telling your fighter, like, go out there, give it your best
shot? No, this is a, you know, let's see how much money we can get for this fight. Fucking Roy Jones.
Roy Jones is going to get all the money. You're going to make a couple million bucks and get in
there and try to fucking beat him. Guys, we got to do dates real quick.
Indianapolis, June 7th and June 8th this weekend. After that, we're in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Raleigh, however you guys say it, June 21st and 22nd. Buffalo, the 28th and 29th. Jacksonville,
July 26th and 27th. And Hawaii, I want to announce this. I'm coming to Honolulu,
Hawaii. I want to announce this. I'm coming to Honolulu, August 29th and 30th. Those dates and more. Go to akashsingh.com for tickets. I love y'all. Thank you guys. Everybody's coming to
shows. It's great. I'm just very thankful. Thank you guys. Love you. Let's get back to the show.
So you start, you're managing some of these MMA guys. Do you feel MMA's popularity rising,
or do you see this white space where you're like, okay, I can turn this into something?
Yeah.
I don't think that we saw the popularity rising.
What we saw was, first of all, we started taking jiu-jitsu, me and the Fertitta brothers.
We took jiu-jitsu.
We fucking fell in love with jiu-jitsu.
Whose idea?
Frank, actually, the oldest brother.
We were out one night at the Hard Rock, and we saw John Lewis, who was the only guy in
Vegas at the time
that had a jujitsu studio. And Frank's like, that's that ultimate fighter guy. I said, I know
him. And he's like, I've always wanted to, uh, to, to learn ground fighting. I said, let's go
talk to him. We talked to him. We set up a meeting, uh, uh, session on Monday and me, Frank and Lorenzo
all went and became addicted. we started training four or five
days a week trying to rip each other's fucking heads off and arms off and and sorry did you just
know him because the fight world is that small yeah i knew him just from being in the fight world
vegas and um through john lewis he started bringing in bj penn fucking. We started to meet all these guys and we started training with them
and we became obsessed. And then we went to a UFC event and me and Lorenzo were literally sitting
in the crowd going, imagine if they fucking did this. And imagine if they did that, this thing
could be big. I mean, they didn't sell merchandise. They didn't have programs. They didn't fucking do
anything. They didn't really care about the live event event they just focused on the pay-per-view the television side and we just saw a lot of
opportunities the other thing that we saw was the boxing guys all had the same story we came from
the mean streets of such and such and if it wasn't for boxing we'd be dead or in jail that was like
every guy's story you meet these guys i mean you- I'm a science teacher from Nebraska.
Yeah, there's all these-
Well, they all were from different places
that all had different stories, right?
And the thing that I loved is
if you were involved in martial arts growing up,
you came from money.
That's true.
Because it was expensive to put your kids in martial arts.
Or you graduated college because you wrestled.
So we had, you know, if you look at Chuck Liddell at the time, right?
If you thought about what the stereotypical ultimate fighter looked like, it was Chuck Liddell.
Yeah.
The mohawk, the Chinese writing on the head, the goatee.
He looked like a fucking axe murderer, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The guy graduated with honors from Cal Poly with an accounting degree wow right i mean yeah
you didn't you didn't have any of those stories in boxing so one of the things that we really
loved were the stories that there were different storylines for these guys that would appeal to
different groups of people you know what i mean okay so you guys make the offer what's the offer
and how do you even approach them yeah so here's what happened so i was
representing tito ortiz at the time right and tito boy you're my boy tito had got fucked over by them
because he showed up to a fight and he was supposed to be paid a certain amount of money
well the fight didn't do well so right before the fight goes off they went back and told him
yeah we're not paying you what we told you we were going to pay you we're going to pay you this instead and he's like well then i won't fucking fight and
they said then don't fight doesn't matter we don't care we're not going to make any money on this
event anyway so they're hemorrhaging money so tito had to fight so he fought so i'm going in
negotiating his new contract and i'm trying to get them to pay him the money that they fucked him on on that fight right so
finally the owner blows up on me okay and says you know what there is no more fucking money I don't
even know if I can put on the next event I literally hung up the phone picked him back up
called the Fertitta brothers and said I think the fucking UFC is in trouble I think they're
going to go under and I think we could buy we could buy the company and I think the fucking UFC is in trouble. I think they're going to go under. And I think we could buy the company.
And I think we should.
So Lorenzo fucking reached out to Bob Meyerowitz.
And a month and a half later, we own the UFC for $2 million.
Now, I don't want to count.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
OK, so you buy it for $2 million.
It's worth what now?
Now?
Yeah.
$12, $13 billion.
OK.
OK. That's a good return? Now? Yeah. $12, $13 billion. Okay. Okay.
That's a good return.
Okay.
Okay.
It sounds great now, but we went through a lot of shit to get here.
That's what I want to hear.
How long was the UFC around before that day?
Like before you bought it?
Well, now, we bought it back in 2001, so we've owned it for 23, 25 years, whatever the fuck it is.
It's been around for 30 years.
Started in 94. Question, I don't want to count your pockets, but 2 million back then seems like
a lot of money. You guys own some gyms, whatever. How do you get that money together? What's that
process like? You're taking out loans. Well, now he just said, what a great return on your money.
Absolutely. At the time when we bought it for $2 million dollars we were literally the fucking redheaded stepchild of
the fortita portfolio like every you know smart fucking you know numbers fucking geek that worked
for the fortitas hated this investment thought it was ridiculous and that the fortitas were going to
lose all their money every fucking one of them there's a lot of people that run around now
claiming oh the ufc i believe yeah nobody, there were three guys that believed in it. Me, Frank and Lorenzo.
That was fucking it. And basically what we had to do was start to think about this too. When we
bought it, none of us had ever fucking done production. We'd never put on a fucking show
in our lives. Okay. So are you outsourcing? Are you reaching out to boxing guys?
No, here's what we knew.
We were huge fans.
We were fight nerds.
We knew what we wanted.
Now it was just a matter of building it.
And the problem is, number one,
when you want to do what we did,
and number two, when you want to do what we did
and you don't know what the fuck you're doing,
it's expensive, right?
So every time you put on a show, it's a couple million bucks.
So, you know.
Are you losing immediately?
A few years in, you know, you're upside down $40 million fucking dollars.
This is what I'm talking about.
Wow.
Because I think the perception of the UFC is immediate success.
You guys buy it.
Chuck Liddell, Tito, they start banging away.
Then this Conor
McGregor guy comes around and everybody's a billionaire. So it's done. I want to know
the most you're down 40 million at one point. So we're probably by 2004, we're upside down
$40 million. And we're only doing five events a year. And explain to me what that means. That's
like, you're losing money on the shows you're putting on. You're losing money on what? The deals you're doing?
So we're losing money on the shows.
We're losing money on overhead.
You know, the expenses for the office and employees.
And every way that you could possibly lose money in a business, we're fucking losing money.
What keeps you going at this point mentally?
Because $40 million is...
I know you got a lot of willpower.
$40 million is $40 million.
Understand this, too.
Think about this.
So when we bought the UFC, right?
We basically bought those three letters
and an old wooden octagon
and we had like 13, 14 fucking contracts.
That's it, right?
The old owner had sold away the home video rights,
the video game rights and all that shit.
Lions Gate Entertainment owned all that shit.
Probably one of the fucking craziest stories
that's never been told is,
you want to talk about people not believing
in the fucking UFC
and thinking that this thing was not going to work?
We went to Lionsgate, right?
To negotiate, to buy the rights back
to all of our fucking intellectual property.
The fucking everything from t-shirts to video games to action figures,
everything that you can throw a fucking UFC logo on.
Now, if you're Lionsgate, why the fuck would you sell that?
Yeah.
Right?
The bigger you make the business, the more money they make.
100%, right?
That's how much people didn't fucking believe.
We went in and negotiated the rights and when we
walked out of that fucking office they were probably like these poor fucking jerk offs
they're gonna pay us you know three million dollars over the next fucking four years
for these rights back and you know you got some again a numbers guy yeah who who doesn't fucking
believe in anything you know not just that but he like, if you look at our books over the next three years,
we're going to add these numbers.
Imagine if Lionsgate wouldn't sell us those rights back.
How much fucking money they'd be making right now
off, you know what I mean?
It's incredible.
So you're down 40.
Tell me the moment.
Oh, and by the way,
when we bought these rights back,
that's when the dvd
business went like this so we're putting out these fucking dvds that's that's what i remember
people watching it originally it wasn't pay-per-view the first fucking checks we started to get
were from dvds yeah you know when the dvd business took off you know we were getting
two million dollar fucking checks off of dvds that help and float you? Like, I'm still curious. No, it didn't help float.
It, you know,
it was the only revenue
coming in at the time.
Because you put on,
just so I can understand,
and the people at home
can understand,
you put on an event,
you would create a DVD
of the event,
and then you would sell
these DVDs to the people
that couldn't watch it
on pay-per-view or whatever.
A hundred percent.
Got it, got it, got it.
And then we started doing
compilation shows.
Best Knockouts,
Best Missions,
you know, all that kind of stuff.
And that shit sold really well.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, yeah.
What I'm still trying to, cause as a comic, there's a period where you don't think you're going to make it.
I'm broke.
I'm not 40 million in debt.
What is your mentality as you are upside down 40 million?
What are you thinking?
What's your emotional state?
What's your, I think you're with your wife at the time.
What's that?
Yeah. I was always just on the fucking grind.
I go into work every day and I keep my head down.
I don't even fucking going for it.
I mean, if you look at what we've done,
I get to work at 8.30, 9 o'clock in the morning every day.
And I leave the office at 8 o'clock, 8.30 every fucking night.
So that's always been my drive, my focus, my mentality,
whatever the fuck you want to call it.
But I got the phone call one day from Lorenzo.
Yeah.
And he's like,
I don't know if we can keep doing this, man.
This is fucking, you know,
get out there and-
What year is this?
What year is this?
2000, 2004.
So 2003, you buy.
One.
So one, you buy.
2004, you get the phone call. Okay, how does the phone call okay how does the phone 2004 and you
need to leave vegas get out there there's less debt over there you know i mean two grand
now i see how whitey bill
so um yeah get out there and see what you could sell this thing for so i start making calls
oh fuck and i call him back at the end of the day and i'm like six or seven million
he's like okay did you lie did you get like a million dollar offer six seven
is what i felt we could we could sell it for he says, all right, I'll talk to you tomorrow.
So he hangs up the phone and I'm like,
this is a fucking wrap.
This is fucking, it's over.
The next morning I'm driving to work
and he calls me and says, fuck it.
Let's keep going.
Wow.
That's awesome.
So we start working really hard
on trying to figure out how to get on fucking television.
Because we think that that's the key to success.
We believe that if we get on free television,
more people will see this, love it like we do, and it'll work.
And is that Spike?
So, well, then Spike TV.
Don't let me jump ahead.
If there was another moment that changed things.
You're dead on.
So what happens is, I want to say it wasashville network or whatever it was before it was spike
they switch it to the men's network spike tv yeah and we're like if this isn't a fucking
slam dunk for us right what's what's more of a men's show than fucking ufc so we go and pitch
the guys on it spike hates it uh They don't like it. And we remember
that day, we talk about it all the time. These guys were, it was in LA and they were going to
the fucking Dodgers game that day. And they could not get out of this fucking meeting fast enough
to go see the Dodgers play. And we called them back a few days later and said,
because it was going to cost $10 million to produce the show, The Ultimate Fighter.
Because reality shows were hot at the time.
Of course.
So we came up with this concept for the reality show
and that's what we pitched them on.
So we called them back three days later and said,
well, what if we put up the 10 million ourselves?
Wow.
They liked that idea better.
Yeah.
So I'll tell you what else is incredible.
So because, again, nobody believed in this thing, right?
You retain everything.
So we put up the money.
We retain 100% of all the rights.
So we own everything lock, stock, and fucking barrel.
Do you remember what their reservations were at the time?
Great question.
It's just nobody fucking believed in this thing
and nobody thought it was going to be fucking big.
And it's sort of become my thing.
It's what I fucking love to do it's the
same thing with powerslap this thing got shit on this thing's been around for 15 months it's a 750
million dollar business yeah it fucking crushes it yeah yeah we have all that
i knew it was gonna come up then i said that you brought it up i didn't bring it i literally just
got off a fucking call with,
uh,
with one of the networks talking about it,
but it,
it fucking a pretty good network.
Absolutely fucking dominates social media.
So here's the thing about this is that it's impossible when you know,
someone's going to get slapped to not watch.
It's literally like if you're on scrolling on social media and I come across
the clip,
it's impossible.
I see a giant Samoan guy
and a black dude looking at him and he's just biting down on something. I'm going to fucking
watch. That's what happened to me when I started looking at this stuff in like 2018, it was on
Instagram and this stuff was coming out of Russia and Poland. And I was like, what the fuck is this?
So I take a deeper dive into it and it looks like it was filmed on a flip phone in a barn somewhere.
They're literally slapping over a barrel and it's got 350 million views on YouTube.
And at the time, that was like a fucking Justin Bieber video.
Yeah.
I was like, what?
What if I did this?
Made it an actual sport, got it sanctioned and put good production value behind it.
The answer is fucking billions of views.
Billions of views globally.
And it destroys, think about this.
We started this thing 15 months ago, right?
And right now on YouTube,
we have more subscribers than NHL, MLS, NASCAR, PGA,
Barstool Sports.
We have over a billion YouTube views, right?
Eight of the top 12 largest YouTube shorts
against other major sports are Power Slap.
And four of the top five largest YouTube shorts
on UFC's channel.
We're number one, two, three, and four on UFC.
And when you think about Conor McGregor,
Ronda Rousey, Brock Lesnar, all the big stars,
this thing absolutely dominates.
We have more followers than every single professional
sport every professional sports team we have more followers than them in 15 months more than like
uh real madrid or like these soccer teams i don't know about the soccer teams but i would say yes
every team we have more followers so i would say yes yeah every fucking sports team we have more followers so i would
say yes yes did you acquire the ip or did you just create your no we created our own and started you
know there was there were a couple of fucking leagues out of poland and russia um so we just
i just started on and why didn't you do that with ufc originally like why would you purchase those
three letters and the wooden well the ufc fell on my lap i mean i was in the middle of that call yeah and we could buy the thing for
two million dollars why would you not buy the ufc you know what i mean um we probably wouldn't have
gone out and started our own league but but the fact that the thing fell on my lap yeah okay but
we can get to power slap in a little bit i just want to go through the ufc back to the uh the
but okay similarities between what's going on with that right now.
This is why you believe in it so much.
So when people go...
No, I want you guys to wrap your fucking brains around this.
When I talk about Power Slap, you're all dismissive.
Like, uh...
Nobody's dismissive.
The UFC was fucking worse.
I need that.
The UFC was worse.
Worse.
Now I know how to motivate you to do anything.
I just got to tell you, it's not going to work.
Hey, Dana, this thing sucks.
I know, I know.
This happens every day.
Did I bring power slaps?
We're on the phone today with the network.
Dana, you won't go to Turkey and get hair.
You won't do it.
You won't get a hair transplant in Turkey, Dana, no matter what.
I promise you. You won't do it. You won't get a hair transplant at Turkey Day no matter what. I promise you.
You won't make this
the biggest podcast episode ever.
You won't make this
the number one episode ever.
I love it.
Okay, you love being told no.
You love being told
it's not going to happen
and it's out of your mind.
You know, it's easy.
When I hit you
with fucking numbers,
you can't really...
There's no...
You can't refute it.
We have more views
than any Taylor Swift video
ever posted.
Oh, now you're talking about the Swifties, bro. Powerslap has more... Swifties, refute it. We have more views than any Taylor Swift video ever posted. Oh, now you're talking about the Swifties, bro.
Power slap has more.
Swifties, step it up.
We have more views than any fucking Taylor Swift.
Imagine you got Taylor in one.
There's other stats that I can hit you with that are just fucking.
You got to get Taylor into a power slap, dude.
But they're unbelievable.
But when you look at this thing from a business perspective and you look at the numbers, you know what I mean?
But we're talking about guys fucking slapping each other. guys are like let's talk more about the ufc the ufc was worse when we would walk into a room nobody wanted to hear the fucking ufc
the ufc is fucking gross yeah you don't you don't fucking hit somebody and jump on top of them and
start beating them it's disgusting it's it's it's fucking this that which is the same thing they're
saying about power 100 yeah and i remember the early days of usc my dad is like lifelong and start beating them. It's disgusting. It's fucking this, that, and everything else. Which is the same thing they're saying in that car.
100%.
Yeah, and I remember the early days of UFC.
My dad is like lifelong boxing fan.
Used to go to Ali's camp in the Poconos,
interview all the guys.
Like he used to work for NBC.
And lifelong boxing fan.
He saw some UFC early and he said this.
He goes, I know this makes no sense,
but it's too violent for me. And he, this is like, saw Sugar Ray Robinson driving around
New York city when he was a kid, like loves boxing, but it seemed too violent for him.
A hundred percent. So I think about this on average, 10 to 12 boxers die a year,
right? In boxing. This is what I've tried to years never a death knock on or serious injury in the
u.s and this is what i tried to explain so i'm sure you know all these stats but this idea people
didn't realize that the gloves which we thought protected the boxers actually can cause more
100 and all the sparring but more importantly it is the spot a lot of people i don't think a lot
of give enough yeah it's like the the old sparring wars that they used to do.
I'll talk to some of the guys.
I was talking to Max Holloway, and he's like,
yeah, I don't really spar that much anymore.
And a lot of guys have limited it.
And maybe they just have incredible timing, and they can get away with it,
where certain guys, they just need to get in there,
and they need to get to working.
But that will take years off your fucking life.
100%.
Yeah, the micro-concussions, right? And the other fucking thing that will take years off your fucking 100 yeah the micro concussions right
and the other fucking thing that that they never do in boxing is every time you put on a boxing
event it's a going out of business sale they're trying to grab as much money as they possibly can
you don't reinvest in the sport but one of the one of the big expenses for us that we spend
shit loads of money on is health and safety so if you take these guys and you put them through the
proper medical testing yeah before they fight you have the proper testing there and then so many times when we watch a crazy
fight we're like send them straight to the fucking hospital yeah no fucking pr no nothing yeah as long
as you spend the money medically yeah it's it's you know you make it as safe as you possibly can
okay what is the turn spike tv so yeah we. So yeah, we're at Spike TV.
He bought the rights for 10 million.
So Spike TV, we put up the 10 million bucks
and we launched the Ultimate Fighter.
The Ultimate Fighter fucking takes off.
Immediately?
Yeah, immediately.
By episode five,
we're pulling such massive fucking numbers.
It's fucking, so again, you know,
sort of the, I don't know.
This is the way that shit has always worked out with me.
But the things that Runaway fucking hit.
Now, when you have Runaway hits on networks,
you're on fucking billboards, buses, they're doing ads.
The fucking president of the company gets fired
halfway through the fucking season.
So every fucking thing we thought was going to
happen or whatever plus we're we're a time buy yeah we bought our way onto the fucking thing
we're getting nothing nothing so you're the biggest show on the network no promo from the network the
new guy comes in you like him we're the biggest new show in the network because the wwe was on
there at the time fair enough fair enough so yeah we're the biggest we're the biggest fucking hit they've ever had that's homegrown on spike tv got it right
um all their other shit flops right we're fucking homegrown home run okay before we're getting zero
love okay before you talk about this this is the first time you've had positive reception for this
thing that everybody says is not going to work 100 do%. Do you call people and you go, fuck you?
No, not yet.
No, not yet.
Okay, okay, okay.
Take us there.
Not yet.
Take us there.
So we're sweating it the whole fucking season
right up to the finale.
You know, we have no new deal.
These guys have fucking promised us nothing.
We have nothing.
We go into the finale.
The finale starts out.
Diego Sanchez that's right runs
through Kenny Florian like it was nothing all the fights have been fucking meh then Forrest and
Stefan Bonner come out in the main event and just start going fucking crazy toe to toe knock down
drag them out the fucking people are stomping their feet in the arena it sounds like a train's going through the fucking place it goes right to the fucking decision um you know uh they read off
the scorecards forrest griffin fucking narrow inches it out wins the fight i give them both
a fucking contract place is going crazy oh by the way uh the crowd is chanting one more round one more round all this shit and during that
you know it was like uh three to four minutes of that fight so this is before computers this
is before social media all that shit people are picking up their phones calling their friends
going are you watching this fucking fight right now on spike tv it as it a live point oh it's
spiked during the fight during the fight oh because it's Nielsen ratings. You can time when the Spikes are.
Oh, shit.
We had more people watching than the Masters on CBS
at like three minutes during that fight.
So literally, we don't know all that that night.
We just know something special just fucking happened here.
I didn't give a fuck.
If we re-signed the deal with Spike or whatever,
I knew we had it.
The Spike executives literally pull us out in the alley
at the arena,
because we're at the small little Cox Pavilion.
It's called the Cox Pavilion.
And we go out in the alley.
We do our television deal on a fucking napkin in the alley.
No way.
For our new Spike TV deal.
Do you know what you're asking for immediately going in or not
just sort of all played out in the alley out there so you do the short form right there we're signing
on it's gonna happen we'll this is this is like a handshake fucking so they're shaking in their
fucking boots they see the nielsen they see the the the ratings probably spike everybody's going
fucking crazy well this is right after the fight taping this is literally that night yeah but but
i'm saying that night we go right out into the alley and fucking before it's taping. This is literally that night. Yeah, but I'm saying it's on. That night. We go right out into the alley
and fucking...
No, he's saying when it came on,
when it got broadcast
two months later.
Oh, so you wouldn't get away later.
Yeah, you weren't getting
Nielsen rating back for fucking,
you know,
this was on a Saturday.
You weren't getting
the real numbers till Wednesday.
So they just felt it.
They were like,
this is going to be it.
If you were in that fucking building
that night,
you knew something special
just happened.
Wow.
Yeah.
Did you talk to Forrest after?
Like, dude, that was crazy. Like, what was that really like that no i think well then you know i mean that
was a wild ride for everybody because if you look at how that thing blew up forrest griffin obviously
became a huge pay-per-view star nobody knew who the fuck he was going into season one and now he's
our biggest pay-per-view star and he's still working with you and you got chuck and tito and
all these other guys right and obviously you know that season the the coaches were chuck and randy so that was fucking huge they
became big and uh yeah that was it it just from that fucking night on and pay-per-views start
after that oh yeah and the first so that's the moment you get out you get into the what is it the black well no you dig
out of the red so the first no we just knew something special happened that night and that
we had something sorry right here is this so then this is 2005 okay so then it was probably in 2006
or seven i can't remember which it was 2006 or seven we're in a fucking budget meeting and let
me tell you what you didn't want to be in.
We're budget meetings the first five years of fucking US.
So we're in this budget meeting and Lorenzo is up writing on his whiteboard.
And I'm looking at it and I'm like, wait a minute.
Does that say I'm going to make a million dollars this year?
No.
And he's like, yeah.
So six or seven, we started to climb out of the fucking hole.
Out of the $40 million fucking.
Okay, so you started making money.
There's gotta be another plateau that you hit.
Is it with talent?
Is it with change in a deal?
Is it like a specific guy?
Well, what starts to happen then is you start to,
you know, it becomes a real business.
Now you start figuring out how to run this.
You know, we're doing things in the combat sports world that have never been done.
Everything we're doing has never been done.
Think about boxing, right?
Tell me if there's ever been a business
in the history of the world
that has made trillions, trillions of dollars.
And at the end of the day, there's nothing left.
There's nothing left.
That's what you mean by
going out of business sale right there's not like a league yeah right you have different promoters
that are negotiating with each other sometimes they're keeping their fighters from fighting
each other it's i mean how often growing up was there an aram fighter that wouldn't want to fight
against who was a golden boy that bob would always be with well you couldn't get uh riddick bow and
and lennox lewis to fight each other uh He'd all throw the fucking belts in the trash or fucking this and that and all this other shit.
It took fucking Saudi Arabia to make these fucking fights that are going on now.
Because you got guys that don't give a shit what it costs.
They're like, fuck it.
I want to see.
You got this guy, you know, Shake Turkey that's like, I want to see this fight.
I'm going to make it happen no matter what the fuck it costs. Yeah. And they don't care if they make money. There's never
been a scenario like that. I mean, the pinnacle of boxing was HBO. Yeah. And HBO would throw some
of this money around to make the big fights happen. But even HBO got to a point where you'd
have guys who are house fighters, right? Whether it's Roy Jones or whatever. And they're just fighting guys.
None of the big fights were really happening then either.
It took fucking Saudi Arabia to make it happen.
We built a business where every fucking weekend,
you see the fights that you want to see.
Because you're invested in both fighters that are fighting.
Exactly.
I think that's a big difference.
We're invested in everything.
Yeah, you didn't see that in boxing.
Everybody fucking wins. At the end of the day day two fighters come in and somebody's gonna win
and somebody's gonna lose but if you lose both of them are signed it doesn't mean you're dead
yeah it's the end of your fucking career boxing got to a point where if you lost the fight it's
over yeah so you fight and then what i noticed was yeah this is is what I started to look at. HBO had a guy that they signed, and he could lose fucking three fights in a row.
And he'd still sign a massive fucking deal.
Ricardo Mayorga.
No.
Are we talking about a good?
Arturo Gatti.
Oh, Arturo, of course, of course.
Arturo Gatti.
I mean, there's been a few of those, but gone.
Arturo Gatti would fucking lose, but he'd sign another big deal with HBO.
You know why?
Because people didn't give a fuck
whether he loved it.
They loved how he fought.
They loved how he fought.
Those Mickey Ward fights.
A hundred percent.
Arturo Gatti got to fight Floyd Mayweather.
He should not, with all due respect,
rest in peace,
but he should not have been fighting Floyd.
And we watched it.
He was a blood and guts fucking guy that people loved.
And I said,
you can build a business around guys like this.
Guys that go in and give it all they fucking got.
Win, lose, or fucking draw.
People want to see good fights.
Because you know what people are fucking tired of?
Seeing multimillionaires run around in circles and not fight
so that they can move on to the next big fucking payday
that they didn't earn or deserve.
Okay.
One thing I noticed about UFC that I think separates it,
there is a reward structure.
I think Chael put this the best, actually.
You don't tell fighters what not to say.
Because when you tell people what not to say,
you are telling them what to say.
And you don't believe in telling them what to say.
Fact.
And I don't believe in controlling other fucking human beings.
Here's the thing that I think UFC does really well.
And I want to know if this is a conscious effort.
There is a reward system that's built into UFC that oftentimes induces the most exciting product.
So you could look at it at the most simple level, which is like, hey, there's a best fight bonus.
Both of you guys get it.
You were involved in the best fight. You both get it. so it makes people show up and go i'm going for it today
now is this how do we make it more interesting let's bonus it out do you come into this going
trying to fix this problem in boxing i'm saying when when is this problem solving start let me
let me tell you this uh um if you know that you're going to go in and you're going to make $30 million,
it's guaranteed, it's in the bank, $30 million.
All you got to do is win, and maybe you can get $35 million for the next fight.
I'm on the bicycle.
You don't have to be exact.
You're going to fucking do everything you can to avoid a fight
and just make it to that next fucking payday.
That's what ended up happening
with boxing and you know what we did is we built um incentive yeah to go out and fucking perform
yeah and that's how you build a brand and that's how you build a sport and that's how you build
i'll give you another perfect example that's fascinating is fighters are the most paranoid
people in the world.
All of them, completely paranoid. You know, we'll, we'll set up a fight and they're like,
oh, he wants me to fucking lose. You know what I mean? He wants this guy to fucking win. They have this type of paranoia and you saw it recently with Dustin Poirier. So we made the St. Denis
fight, right? As soon as the fight goes out, all the people are going, oh, they don't like Poirier.
They're trying to get Poirier killed.
Poirier kind of freaked out a little bit.
Like, what the fuck?
Poirier goes in there.
Dog.
And look what he fucking does.
Look what he does, right?
He wins the fucking fight.
It's like sometimes we'll make a fight and fans or media will go,
this is a shitty card.
It hasn't happened yet.
Yeah.
Who the fuck are you?
What'd they say?
About 300.
Who the fuck are you to say this is a shitty card before it fucking happens?
Listen, when the card's over,
I'll be the first one to tell you the card fucking sucked, right?
Yeah.
You can't judge anything until it happens.
And when you get in these positions, like what, it happened in in boxing for years like poirier thinking we wanted him to lose yeah he
goes out and it's he fucking you know this is legendary shit that that takes you to another
level and makes you great yeah and where is he this fucking saturday championship he's fighting
for the fucking world title yeah okay you know I mean? Because he went out and took that fucking Saint Denis fight.
But everybody thought he couldn't win.
I feel like we've been manipulated or we're scorned from watching so much boxing.
And again, I'm a boxing guy.
I came from boxing.
I watch every single fight growing.
I'm obsessed with boxing.
Me too.
And I'm watching fights and I'm like,
okay, this is a tune-up or this is a tomato can
or this is whatever.
If it was boxing,
if it was boxing, my mentality would be like,
oh, they're saying that Poirier's done.
Now he's going to be a gatekeeper
and this is who we're going to use.
He's a stepping stone for Saint-Denis.
And Saint-Denis is going to be our new star so we're taking the boxing mentality if you take the mentality
that the best thing for the ufc is that the fights are most interesting it's not if saint
denis wins or if porio wins it's that the fight is most interesting yeah and if you look at it
through that lens then you'll also understand ian gary versus mvp mvp second fight in you're like whoa you the
boxing mind is well you might have a new star here what and then this other guy's just one of them is
not going to be a star if they lose so in boxing you would keep these two as far away yeah yeah
exactly yeah we do the exact opposite okay so you have all these media guys like going into 300
media guys the fucking guys are on the internet whatever you want to these media guys like going into 300 media guys the fucking guys
are on the internet whatever you want to call these guys i don't call them journalists i was
skeptical of 300 they fucking know nothing about this sport and they know even less about the
business of this fucking sport yeah yeah so you know i i literally just drown out all that fucking
noise about people who think they know what they're fucking talking about okay because literally none of them do and on the business side we're doing
shit that's never been done before i'm going into the fucking sphere in september yeah why yeah why
am i doing i don't have to fucking do this how much money i've already spent on this thing the
video i'm 14 million dollars in on this fucking show because and it's not till september on just
the video stuff because the video stuff?
Because the video stuff is the most expensive.
Yeah.
Dude, this is going to be fucking, I'm telling you.
And the reason is, it's never been done before.
Nobody's ever done a live broadcast out of the fucking sphere.
Right?
And when you look at you two and these other guys that spend the money to go in there,
it's amortized over 40 events.
They're doing 40 fucking shows.
It's a month-long residency for that reason.
I'm doing one.
I got to come in,
and we got to figure this whole fucking thing out
in one fucking night.
That's awesome.
Okay?
And this is going to be a fucking love letter
to the Mexican people, right?
I have this thing.
Huge boxing fan.
So I have this thing with Mexicans, man.
When you tell somebody, I got goosebumps telling you this mexicans man when you tell somebody i got goosebumps
telling us right now when you tell somebody you fight like a mexican it's the biggest fucking
compliment you could ever fucking give somebody right yeah some of the baddest motherfuckers
that have walked the face of this earth have been mexican yeah and the sphere show is on mexican
independence day and it's going to be the greatest fucking love letter to the Mexican people of all time. They're pulling up.
I'm so fucking excited.
Do you have the whole card?
Yeah.
I'm not saying shit about the card until we get there.
Give us a name, Dana.
Give us a name.
Think about all the best Mexicans that we have on the contract.
And it's pretty much guaranteed they're all going to be there.
Is there a BMF title?
Plus some big guys that aren't Mexican.
I like your style.
A BMF title wouldn't be bad either.
Best Mexican fighter.
Never know.
All right, guys, let's take a break for a second.
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Now let's get back to the show.
So when you're deciding these fights, the fights that oftentimes the public look at
through a boxing lens and go,
they're setting this guy up to fail,
is the mentality, and did you start this early on,
if we don't put our prospects up against each other,
we're just going to have easy wins
and it's going to be boring like boxing.
When you get to the fucking top five top three in the ufc you've
been through the fucking gauntlet so you know right now in boxing and always in boxing wbc ibf wba
right you go well who's the best and you know these guys are going to fight each other yeah
i don't know who the if you are the fucking you know champion yeah there's no fucking questioning
who the best is because you've already run through, you know,
the baddest fucking people in the world in your weight class.
And now I understand why you get annoyed by media
because I remember when Sean was, Sugar Sean was coming up
and he was getting that, there was this narrative
that like he was being protected, right?
And I remember, matter of fact, Sean was with us in Phoenix.
I think we were doing a show in Phoenix and we watched,
no,
no,
no.
What did we watch?
We watched,
was it the KG fight?
I think so.
No,
I think it was Haney Garcia,
but,
uh,
yeah,
but,
uh,
and he was getting this like rap,
like,
Oh,
they're being protected.
They're protecting their golden goose,
whatever.
And I remember,
it's so funny.
I remember the Jan fight. I was like, Oh, they're done with them. They're going to feed them to Jan. They I remember, it's so funny. I remember the Jan fight.
I was like, oh, they're done with him.
They're going to feed him to Jan.
They don't think he's got it.
That's my mentality coming from boxing
because that's what you would do
if you're a boxing promoter.
And then him getting that dub changed his trajectory.
So maybe that's what you got to do.
Maybe you got to put him into the fire immediately.
A hundred percent.
A hundred percent.
If you make it into the fucking immediately a hundred percent if you make
it into the fucking ufc right you're not fighting easy fights yeah there is no feeding the golden
goose and how the fuck is he the golden goose no tomato when we just fucking found him he's never
won a fucking world title you know you don't know you fucking test these guys sorry there's this
there's this idea with boxing i think which was like well now they're saying it about um uh oh jesus christ bo bo nichols now they're saying
about bo nichol oh bo nichols fucking you know it's like now they said the same thing about car
because you're like because you're like i'm making the best fights and then when i do make the best
fights you say that i'm throwing someone out and when it's that when he wins easily you're
like i'm protecting him so you're like i can't win no matter what fight i make and they're the
interesting fights so i understand you go there and you go fuck the media okay now it makes sense
because they'll never be happy they have to find a way and it's not even that they'll never be happy
they don't know what the fuck they're talking about yeah yeah you know the great it's one of
the it's one of the irritating things but it's one of the greatest things about the business too why because let's say i came on
here today right and i wanted to talk to you guys about the big cricket game this weekend
all right i know yeah you'd be the only fucking one okay my point is when you talk about fights
everybody has an opinion yes because everybody thinks they're a fucking expert.
Nobody thinks they're an expert about fucking cricket and some of these other sports.
But fighting, everybody has an opinion.
One reason or another, you don't like his fucking attitude.
If I brought up fucking Jake Paul, pretty much everybody in the room and the other room wants to see Jake Paul get knocked out.
So you're hoping, you know, you got the reason why you hope Tyson would pull this off.
Did you help set that up?
Because I know you're close with Tyson.
God, no.
God, no.
When this fight happens, Tyson will be 58 fucking years old.
I'm worried about him.
Under any circumstances,
a fucking almost 60-year-old man
shouldn't be fighting a 27-year-old fucking guy
under any circumstances, even if it's Mike Tyson.
So it's just, it's fucking ridiculous. ridiculous now do you think he can pull it off
do i think tyson can land a shot yeah tyson hits him but if tyson lands it like what happens to
the internet my big tyson knocks out my biggest problem with the jake paul thing is and how this
plays out is when he actually fought somebody who was a boxer,
who had the same type of record he has, who is his age.
Tommy.
And who is his size.
He fucking lost.
Yeah.
So they're never going to go that fucking route again, right?
Close fight.
And they're trying to pull this whole narrative.
Like when people, I saw some guy the other day say,
when are you going to stop fighting gimmick fights?
Are you going to call Mike Tyson a gimmick?
Yeah.
It is a gimmick fight. But I found him, I would never fight gonna stop fighting gimmick fights you're gonna call mike tyson a gimmick yeah it is a gimmick fight but i find him i would never i would never fight anything else but gimmick fights and find them yeah yeah i mean he has to maybe you can keep getting paid right
tens of millions of dollars you do it like so then why are you so concerned if you got people
that are fucking dumb enough to pay for that shit the fucking you know it's on netflix you don't
even have to pay now huh it's on netflix You don't even have to pay now. Huh? It's on Netflix.
You don't even have to pay.
Brilliant move, too, because you don't have to go pay.
Everybody has fucking Netflix.
Just turn it on.
I'll turn it on and see what happens.
So why are you so against the flick?
Is it really just because of Mike Tyson?
I'm not against it.
I love Mike Tyson.
He's fucking almost 60 years old.
So you just worry for his health.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
But even though you see the way he's training and the way he looks, he still looks.
My fucking back is killing me today.
Killing me.
I have no idea why.
I guess it's because I'm 50 fucking four.
You know what I mean?
That's reasonable.
I'm 54, so I guess that's why my back is fucking killing me today.
Yeah.
So Mike is in 10-10.
This guy's 27.
He's in his fucking prime as a human.
Yeah.
And it's fucking ridiculous.
But the internet explodes i love mike and
nobody wants to see mike get beat by this fucking jerk off you know what i mean yeah that's the
thing why i think no one wants to see mike lose yeah yeah i think well also you and mike are close
right you yeah i fucking love mike tyson yeah mike tyson was one of the guys that i fucking idolized
growing up and one of the guys that made me love boxing as much as i do
didn't you tell me a story was it you to tell a story about like you know you mike was gonna do
something you're like let me make some calls for you what and then you like got shark week yeah
when he was fighting he was fighting and and uh i said don't fight i'll fucking i'll help you make
money do another shit or whatever so i got him i got him on Shark Week. And he's like, so wait a minute.
Let me get this fucking straight.
So I've been fighting my whole life.
This is what I fucking do.
You're worried about me, so you're going to throw me in the open?
He's like, fuck you, David.
I didn't think about it that way.
So apparently, the day that they shot that episode of him on Shark Week,
everybody on set was fucking terrified.
Because he was so freaked out by the whole shark thing, he was literally ready to beat the shit out of everybody on set.
I probably shouldn't have gotten him a Shark Week show.
That was probably a bad idea.
I want to go back to what we were talking about earlier with interesting fights.
I don't think I know anything about fighting.
I know I know nothing about fighting. what do you look at and say this is
an interesting fight what is that criteria for you so a couple of things you take styles styles
make fights so stylistically you try to put together the best fights that you possibly can
you got some up-and-coming guys like you'll get a guy like a St. Denis or a Sean O'Malley.
Some of these kids that are so talented that they're blowing through guys that are on their level.
So then you start to think, is he ready for this guy who might be a top 15-ranked guy?
Is he ready for a 13?
Is he ready for this?
And there's only one way to find out.
You got to test them.
So you got to look at a guy's age you know once you get these kids that are undefeated right and they're i'll give
you an example perfect example this one plays out exactly right you have ian gary who's undefeated
been the ufc for a while taking on the older MVP, right?
Who just came in and beat Kevin Holland.
Very exciting, very, you know,
either way this is going to go,
Ian's undefeated, you know,
and he's in the rankings now
and on his way to a possible title shot.
MVP comes in, he's been fighting in another organization,
just beat Holland, you know,
England versus Ireland.
There's so many different little pieces and parts that go in.
But these two, who's going to win that fight?
That's the thing. It's just hard.
Who the fuck knows?
The UFC is going to win that fight. You know what I mean?
So you don't know who's going to win is what makes that fight so fucking great, right?
When you do these fights in boxing, right?
Yeah.
All you have to do, you don't have to know one fucking guy involved in the fight.
You don't even have to know who they are.
Go look at the odds.
Whoever the guy is that's the favorite, and it's usually by a huge number,
they win.
It's guaranteed that guy's going to fucking win.
Okay. In the UFC, there are no fucking guarantees,
no matter what the odds are, who they are,
or what the deal is.
You know, Saint Denis, I'm sure,
was a huge favorite in the Poirier fight.
Poirier fucking walked through him.
Okay, what do you do when you have a fighter
that has a boring style,
but is incredibly good.
It depends on what that style is.
And that style is usually wrestling.
Yeah.
These guys that can lay you down and, you know.
So what you do is you try to match them up with a guy who's got really good takedown defense.
So it stays on the feet.
Or the guy can get back up.
So what you want to do is you take the guy
who's the dry humper and fucking goes in
and does that to you,
and you find a guy who has great takedown defense
and good hands.
So now he has to see if he has hands,
and if it does get down to the,
okay, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm curious, how did you learn the importance of
storytelling? I know more about like lower ranked UFC guys than I do about the highest ranked
boxers ever. And I don't think that's an accident. So where did you learn that from? Who inspired
that? And then how did you start to implement that? So it's one of the things that we try to
do early on. I mean, no matter what your fucking story is right there's always some type of storyline in
a fight and that's what you have to get people sold on um more than a fight i can tell you this
fight's going to be great or whatever but you have no rooting interest you want to create a rooting
interest i mean i just did it i just did it with my bull so my bull was taken on a fucking cowboy
my bull's buck rate at the time was like fucking 88 or 89%, right?
This is twisted steel?
Yeah.
Yeah, PBR.
And the cowboy that he was going up against that night
had beat him already and rode him.
What was his name?
I can't remember.
I can't remember what-
Probably Brazilian guy?
What his name was.
But going into that thing, if he rides my bull,
he gets ranked into the top 10
and could go to the finals and all this shit.
So it's basically, you can make anything a fight, right?
And create a rooting interest.
Then people go, I don't give a shit about bull riding,
but holy shit, this is Dana's bull.
He's beat everybody in the last however long.
This guy actually rode him once.
If he rides him again, he fucking, you know what I mean?
Now there's an, okay, I'm interested in this. I want to see if this guy rides him or doesn't ride him was that
something you always knew or did that develop yeah no i i've always been into it you always
have to create a reason for somebody to fucking care to watch something that's why uh the show
works on spike huh yeah the show it's it's like you got into the characters on the show
well it's like the olympics you know what i mean when you go into the characters on the show. Well, it's like the Olympics.
You know what I mean?
When you go into the Olympics, you don't know any of these fucking kids, right? It doesn't matter.
You know, red, white, and blue.
But there's a storyline behind it.
And there's, you know, the other thing is what's at risk?
What's at risk here?
What do we, well, it's America versus fucking, you know, England or America versus this or that.
Who's the American person?
Why do I care about them?
And who's the English person?
Why do I, I don't want to like them
so that the American will win or vice versa.
I mean, you always have to have what's at stake.
So you're intentional with that when the fighters are young.
Exactly.
So you're building them up from young.
Yep.
So if you look
at what we do with the contender series right which is the best fucking show on tv yeah the best
unsigned fighters in the world come in and it's not about winning i don't give a fuck if you win
or lose i want to see who you are i want to see what you got yeah it's about this is your fucking job interview and you have three fucking rounds to show me who you get after it these fucking kids come in and
they fucking go and in that we tell their story who they are where they come from so before you
ever set foot in the ufc if i sign you millions of people have already seen you fight so it's the
same thing with yeah with looking for
a fight when i go on on the road looking for a fight millions of people see these kids fight
before they ever set foot in the ufc so we already start the storytelling before they even get in the
ufc is this anything that the ufc does to either help or incentivize the fighters to show their
personality because we see people like mcgregor Stylebender. Great question. They sell themselves in tandem with how the UFC helps us.
I don't give a fuck if you're a deaf mute.
No, really?
I could care less.
That does not matter to me.
Are you a bad motherfucker?
Wow.
Are you a bad motherfucker?
If you get somebody that has the Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey,
Sugar Sean O'Malley type of personality,
that's just a home run that's
just a plus god that's you know what i mean but in this sport you can't you can't uh do anything
based off oh let's see what their personality is like are you a bad motherfucker if you're the
baddest motherfucker in the world people don't give a shit okay about your personality they want
to see you fight khabib exactly okay what about that's right he's a pious religious dude and people will tune on to every anything okay now what about um speaking
of speaking of connor is this marketing on connor's behalf the video of him partying is he i don't know
i honestly don't know um you know he he opened a uh a bar out there, Black Fork. But is he like, I'm going to leak a video in my bar?
It seems it could be controlled, right?
It's in my bar.
I'm partying.
I'm with my people.
Everything is.
And then it comes out.
Now Chandler's like, oh, maybe he's not taking this that serious.
Maybe I could take my foot off the gas.
I'm just, or is this, he's actually not taking it serious.
I will tell you this.
And I don't ever like to compare people to Muhammad Ali
because to me, he's the fucking, you know.
And fuck what he did in fighting,
just as a human, what that guy accomplished, right?
But I'm going to give a fuck what anybody says.
Ali, Conor, both level when it comes to mental warfare.
Really?
The two best of all time when it comes to mental warfare.
That's why it just
seemed so wait break that down i won't watch so muhammad ali ali would get it if you know i know
ali but i wonder why if you look back at ali and you look at what he did to george foreman in africa
you look at what he did to joe frazier i mean throughout his entire fucking career
joe frazier fucking hated muhammad ali so fucking badly you know he'd show up at his camp outside
and fucking do all this shit he would predict rounds he would um I mean he would come up with
fucking incredible poems and sayings and things that he would do leading up to the fight and then
you look at Conor McGregor he's picked rounds he's fucking I mean the mental warfare that this guy had
on so many of his fighters oh Aldo he wanted to tear his head off going into that 100 percent yeah and and and he would make these guys
play into his game get into their heads fucking embarrass them and and and uh you know out with
them in every way shape and form uh the eddie alvarez fight going into madison square garden
you know um he is literally at Ali's level
when it came to mental warfare. So then when you see a video like him at the club leading up to a
fight, do you get upset seeing that? Or is it part of the warfare? At the end of the day,
I'm at a place right now with like the Conor McGregors and the John Joneses where, you know,
they've sort of laid the foundation of their legacy
and what they have, and they've made a shitload of money.
And it's at the point now where when these guys do show up and fight, it's fun.
It's fun when they show up and fight.
But the greatest fight, listen, I'm going to say it right here, right now,
the greatest fighter to ever live, ever, is fucking John Jones.
When you look at John Jones,ones has never lost a fight ufc and boxing or just ever wow because when you really think about fighting
put two guys in a room and who fucking comes out john jones walks out of that fucking room every
time and you know it's almost like you know when see John on camera, and if you were in here talking to John Jones, it's almost uncomfortable for him to do this shit.
But John Jones beats the fuck out of people, right?
And when you talk about truly right now in Islam, I love Islam and everything.
The fact that John Jones is number two on the pound for pound list is fucking,
it just goes to show how fucking stupid.
The media votes on that.
Yeah.
Then it just goes to show you that they have no fucking idea.
They know nothing about this fucking sport.
Jon Jones has never lost a fight ever.
And when you talk about what it really means to be pound for pound,
you know, Volkanovski moved up and it was a very fucking close fight the first time.
Jon Jones moved up and absolutely fucking decimated the greatest heavyweight that was out there right now.
He doesn't go for that fucking arm bar.
He beats Francis Ngannou and becomes the heavyweight champion.
Jon Jones walked through him like it was fucking nothing.
And when you really think about what pound
for pound means yeah john jones is the pound for pound best when you watch the video of him and
cormier and they don't know that they're alive being filmed oh my god and cormier says i had
to come over there and spit in your fucking face right now and john jones says i would fucking kill
you i'm not saying i'd fucking i would fucking kill you john I'm not saying I'd fucking, I would fucking kill you.
John Jones has like German shepherd dogs
that he fucking,
that do all the attack shit,
shoots guns.
John Jones has a very fucking dark side to him, right?
And when you talk about
who the baddest motherfucker in the world is.
I like how your example of how bad he is,
is two dogs.
I'm just telling you,
John Jones,
during the craziness.
Of all the things that he has.
He's got German Shepherds.
This guy's a black guy with German Shepherds.
You know what I mean?
He's that fucking guy.
He's not just fucking like,
when all the craziness was going on
during the pandemic
and everybody was rioting
and all this shit was going on.
He was ready.
Do you know that John Jones was like downtown,
like ripping spray paint cans out of kids' hands?
Fucking my town.
Maintaining order.
I'll beat your fucking ass.
Get the fuck out of here.
Like, John Jones is the fucking baddest dude to ever fucking,
to ever be involved in comedy.
And is that what most fighters probably, if they were honest, would admit?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think John Jones is one of those guys
that isn't going to really be appreciated till he's gone and then everybody's gonna go holy
shit but the guy's never lost a fight yeah he's the youngest champion ever in ufc history
i think he was 23 he's in his 30s now yeah and he's fought fucking everybody and he's never lost
who do you what do you want for john for the rest of his career? Like, do you want the Aspinall fight?
Do you want...
Yeah, I mean, listen, what I want and what's going to happen are two totally different things.
I don't know.
That's the other thing with dealing with Jon Jones.
You don't know what's going to happen.
But, you know, he fights Stipe Miocic, the greatest of all time versus the greatest heavyweight.
You see how that plays out if Jon Jones wins and he fights Aspinall.
And if he beats Aspinall, it's just like-
What do you say?
Can't say anything else.
You don't, you don't.
I'll go toe to toe with anybody for the rest of my life.
I'm already saying it now that he's the greatest ever.
You know, when you think about all the greatest boxers
and all these guys that do shit.
Who's your number one boxer, by the way?
You get in a room this big, Jon Jones can fucking grab you.
That's it.
And once he puts his fucking hands on you, you're done, man.
And if you're in a scenario where it's only one guy's walking out of the room,
and this guy gets on top of you, you're dropping fucking.
Let's not even talk about illegal shit that you can do.
Yeah.
You do not want to fuck with Jon Jones.
He's got German Shepherds.
You know what I mean?
And did I mention he's got like German Shepherds?
And shit like that.
He's like all into that shit too.
This dude will fucking kill you
every way that you can possibly be fucking killed.
Okay?
I mean, that's just it.
Wow.
Do you remember the first time you heard the name Jon Jones?
And did you know he was a bad man the first time you saw him?
No.
But once he started fighting, you know, he's a young kid, comes in and starts fighting.
It was when, I'm trying to think of the fight now that happened. I can't fucking remember the
first one. I talked about this about a year ago, but then when I really noticed John Jones,
you know, we already knew that he was tough and a star, but he was walking through people.
And a lot of times you'll see these guys that walk through guys then once they get tested and they get pushed and and adversity comes they
break then came the fight with um um ah jesus christ swedish kid uh yeah uh good gustafs oh
yeah yeah alexander right so him and gustafson fight and gustafson takes
him into the fucking deep water and he's hitting him with fucking elbows and all this fucking shit
and now that we look back on john jones we know the real shit that was going on that's the other
thing yeah if you want to fuck with john jones he was partying and doing fucking crazy shit yeah
through his entire camps.
He was doing shit that most people couldn't get up and go to fucking work the next day,
let alone get into a fucking five-round title fight with the baddest people in the world.
That's what he was doing at this time.
And he fucking gets through that Gustafson fight. And that's when I really started to say, this dude might be one of the best.
Special.
I really started to say this dude might be one of the special.
Is there a time where you guys have to step in and go,
Hey,
you're going to ruin everything. If you don't get your life together,
do you try to do that?
Like,
do these guys listen in those moments?
They're dealing with grown men that are wired completely different than
everybody in this fucking building, let alone the room.
Probably everybody in this fucking city block.
And you can't babysit these guys.
It's like, oh, how can you keep them from spending their money?
You can't.
How can you keep them from doing this?
You can't.
We do the best we can to help these guys in every way, in every way, shape and form in their personal life and professional life. But
you're dealing with grown men that are wired completely different than the rest of the world.
Yeah. I think that's the part that's hard for most people to realize is the wiring. Because
they're putting their own expectations on a fighter. And that fighter is waking up and that
day begins very differently. Well, you know, it's crazy. So many people say to me, you know, when you talk to people that aren't real fight fans
and aren't in the fight world, I feel sorry for these guys.
You know what's crazy?
They feel sorry for you.
You'll never experience that level.
Of everything.
Yeah, yeah.
Plus, you get in a fucking, you wake up every day and get in a car and sit in bumper-to-bumper
fucking traffic, and you sit in a cubicle every day, and you never achieve the type of things that these people—
These guys fight one time, then they go fuck off and do whatever they want to do until they think they want to fight again.
And then they come back and, you know, and they test themselves against literally all the best in the world.
You're saying when they're practicing, when they're training, or you're saying—
When they actually go in the world. You're saying when they're practicing, when they're training, or you're saying when they actually go in and fight.
They're always testing themselves
in front of the entire world.
You versus another person on the world stage.
You put yourself out there like that.
It takes a very unique, special type of person.
I mean, what do you think John Jones
walking around every day knowing
that there's 7 billion people on the planet
and there's not
another person that could beat him up yeah i can let you know that's how i feel like what does that
do to your fucking head that's great there's not another human being like who's the usain bolt the
jamaican the sprinter like he must feel pretty good knowing he's the fastest right imagine knowing not a single human
being could beat you up on the planet it's fucking crazy it's true it's true and the funny thing is
with most guys most guys think they can fight and they fucking can't you know what i mean yeah most
guys most fucking guys are walking around out here right now that's that's the nice thing about like
think they can and the guy like fucking john jones and the khabibs and the fucking you know these
guys in the world would would literally walk right through them fucking almost every guy on the
planet isn't that fucking i see those cauliflower ears oh he's like yo you got it brother you got
it yeah that's more scary than like a red bandana. Yeah. Well, the scary thing is about like UFC guys,
it's like Sean O'Malley.
If Sean O'Malley didn't do all the crazy shit
with the hair and the clothes and all that shit,
and he looked normal,
100% of guys that saw Sean O'Malley
would think they could whoop his ass.
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah, skinny, tall, white dude, loves video games.
One fucking punch.
Game over.
Yeah, that kid hits like a fucking truck.
Yeah, he does.
So yeah, fight business is pretty fascinating.
Okay, we're almost there.
You, business takes off, people are loving it.
It's still not as big as boxing.
When does it take the step past boxing?
And what does that feel like?
So what's interesting is-
Do you even envision it even?
Like you're creating a new sport.
Do you envision it being bigger
than the thing that you spent most of your life doing?
Well, that's the other thing that everybody told me.
This will never be bigger than boxing.
This will never be bigger than boxing.
We know how to motivate Dana.
It was very easy to motivate Dana.
You'll never quit gambling.
One of the things that I started to notice about boxing It was very easy to motivate them. You'll never quit gambling.
So one of the things that I started to notice about boxing was it started to fall apart at an amateur level.
I was involved in the amateurs back then and it was really dirty and fucking corrupt.
Then you saw NBC drop the box-offs.
Remember they used to have the Olympic box-offs the, uh, Olympics. Yeah. Floyd fought on NBC, Oscar de la Hoya. I mean, all these guys
that were moving up, they all fought on, on, on NBC to lead into the Olympics. They got rid of it.
Once it starts to fall apart at an amateur level and we were gaining traction and starting, you
know, more people, if you're a younger guy
you were going to train in mma instead of fucking yeah i remember that shift starting to happen
amongst my friends like oh i'm gonna go train mma instead of boxing it was my friend's kids
that's when i noticed it my friend's kid started taking jujitsu and i was like what because when
you're young you like take taekwondo or karate or some shit. And when he said, yeah, I put my kid in jujitsu, I was like, oh, it's out of here.
I was like, UFC's out of here.
And that was our biggest thing.
Our thing was, you know, I grew up in an era where like fucking John Wayne movies, you'd fucking, he'd hit a guy, he'd go down.
You didn't jump on him and start beating the shit out of him.
You stood him back up and you fucking hit him again, right?
It was like, it was unfair. It was un unmanly it was whatever you want to call it to jump on a
guy and start beating his ass then the other problem was we were like how is anybody going
to understand what's going on in the ground with the jujitsu so two things joe rogan yeah it was
fucking instrumental huge in in the commentary because he would start telling you
what was happening before it actually started to happen. Right. And he was, Joe's good at talking
for an arm bar expressing and explaining things and laying it out. And then jujitsu just took
off like, like fucking wildfire. Everybody started taking jujitsu. Um, so now there's an education
about what's happening on the ground and you don't have these people confused and it looks like they're just hugging.
A hundred percent. You know what they're setting up. Okay. Okay. So you lift the IQ of the audience.
And like I said, I felt like boxing started to fall apart at an amateur level. It was
completely falling apart. And I felt like we started to gain traction. And I grew up in the 80s and 90s.
You know, I grew up, I mean, went through high school and graduated.
And I always felt then that everything, it was like all old money.
Old money was the only way you could.
And to try to be bigger than like established companies like boxing was impossible.
And everybody would tell you it was impossible.
That's not the case these days because of social media and the internet it's changed everything i mean you really blew up during covid yeah you were doing those videos during covid
when there was no other yeah you know you did that yourself well we all did it but i'm saying
you didn't need yes we didn't need i'm not talking about whoever helped yeah yeah you didn't need a fucking network or an agent or somebody to
fucking believe in you yeah you were innovative yeah you were talented and you figured out how to
how to fucking get on there and do it that shit couldn't happen back then true so i remember
people coming into my office saying i want to show you this is the new thing. This is called streaming.
So you're going to be able to stream videos on the internet.
And I was like, okay.
So they play this video and it go buffering, buffering, buffering,
play three seconds, buffering, buffering, buffering, play three.
I was like, oh yeah, yeah, this is going to be real fucking huge.
This sucks.
Look at how fast technology caught up.
And now, I mean, 20 fucking years ago,
this didn't exist. Right. I was just telling fucking Rogan yesterday, I was in LA and Rogan
hits me up and says, hey, would you be on my podcast? And I was like, the fuck is a podcast?
Right. And he explained it to me. It's these, we shoot these shows and we just put them up on the internet i'm like okay good luck with that um yeah i'll come do your podcast he's the biggest
fucking podcaster in the world and now all i do are fucking podcasts and podcasts are like the new
you know leading up to a fight i would do all this media i'd go on radio tours and
and do the morning news and do these shows now Now it's all podcasts. This is the new
media. So if you look at all the disruptors that are going on in the last 20 years, if you'd have
told me 20 years ago, taxi cabs are going to go away, I'd be like, you're out of your fucking
mind. That business is going to be here until the end of time. And the list goes on and on and on.
There has never been more opportunity in this world than there is right fucking now
because of technology.
It's fascinating.
And to me, when you look at my business,
if you look at my business, right?
Everybody always got to hear,
that's the other thing.
The UFC has peaked.
Pay-per-view is dead.
Fucking all the fucking shit
that these people talk
that they have no idea
what they're fucking talking about.
Our big fucking dream and goal for me and the Fertitta brothers was a match so if I'm doing
the fight this Saturday from Jersey right I gotta have my ESPN deal I gotta go cut deals in fucking
Canada Mexico all over the world right we have all these different television deals we're getting to
a point now when I grew up there was channel Channel 3, Channel 5, Channel 8, and Channel 13.
Then by the time I was in high school, there was cable.
We had like 33 channels.
Then there was a billion fucking channels, right?
Now streaming.
You're getting, you got fucking Amazon, Netflix,
fucking ESPN, Disney.
You know, over the next several years,
the players, there's going to be a Channel 3,
Channel 5, Channel 8, Channel 13 globally.
Back to the beginning.
Who will they be?
Yeah.
Who's going to win this fucking battle?
So when you think about my business, right?
We dreamed of a day where everybody could watch
the same fight at the same time on the same channel.
Now, there's 8 billion people in the world what's the fucking
ceiling on this holy shit what's the fucking ceiling on this it's massive yeah that's the
shit that gets me up every fucking morning and then again i bring it back to power slap when
you talk about power slap i you know you have a lot of people that go i fucking don't like it i
hate it i don't give a fuck There's 8 billion people in the world.
And lots of other people fucking like it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's just, it's fucking a complete game changer with streaming.
Yeah.
In 16 months, this thing has become a global fucking business.
That's what's so fascinating.
And however much time, you have become a global fucking comedian.
It's so great.
Because of fucking streaming.
Absolutely.
And the internet.
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Drink responsibly. Delivery and promotion is available only in select markets. are there some cultures that make it difficult to break into either on like a social
level or like a political level like into india or even china yeah but it doesn't you don't want
one of those crazy we've been trying to get india the ufc in india for a long time just you know
and that power slap is fucking massive is it really how can you know in india southeast asia
fucking china um brazil already has like two knockoff leagues down there and it started in
russia russia and poland um why is it so big in india did you ever see the thing that they do
where they run and slap oh yeah yeah that's like a sport there it's like a wrestling you know wrestlers yeah and and here's the thing about power slap it's like
to some people that aren't um like you guys have embraced the ufc and and and and uh you know the
fighting culture and learned a lot about it to other people that don't know they still don't
know what's going on in the ground and things like this. Everybody knows what slapping someone in the face is. It is the 100-meter dash of fight sports.
Yep.
Everybody has slapped someone in the face.
Everybody's been slapped in the face.
Everybody gets it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's fun, snackable fucking content.
And now you've got the people doing like the—
see the guy where the head spins around?
Yeah, yeah, that was crazy.
And then the other guy with the robot.
And those aren't even included in our numbers. Those are doing hundreds of millions spins around. Yeah, yeah, that was crazy. And then the other guy with the robot. And those aren't even included in our numbers.
Those are doing hundreds of millions of views.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How do you find those guys?
Like, how do you find the PowerSlapp guys, and how do you train them?
So originally what happened was this did exist at a lower level.
So what I did is I just went in and bought up all the fucking leagues that were already happening, brought those guys into power slap. Right.
And now that there's money in it,
like there's real money in this guys,
guys buying houses and cars and boats and fucking there's real money.
I got 27 fucking sponsors in power slap.
So once real money comes in,
people start taking it seriously.
These again,
in the early days of MMA,
these guys were fighting for free.
They didn't get paid. It actually cost them money to fight, to fight in the early days of mma these guys were fighting for free they didn't get paid it actually cost them money to fight to fight in the ufc right or these other organizations
these guys were doing it for free now they're making money at it now guys come in and get
evaluated at the pi they're going through you know training and you know it's all about torque and
velocity and speed and all this shit so once you make it a real sport and
money becomes involved everything the level just starts to go like are there any ufc guys that are
that want to go try it we have an announcement coming out soon
but you're going to start to see other athletes from other sports and you know
shot put i was just gonna ask like have you got celebrities
or influences in that'll happen but imagine you know like imagine college football how many how
many badass fucking powerful athletes are in college football that don't make it to the pros
and you know you can make real money here wow are there some drake and kendrick just
are there some people if i was like because i haven't watched a ton of power slap if i was
interested in getting into it is there a specific face off or is there a specific guy that i'm
looking at so what's starting to happen now is if you watch the reality show that we have on it
our reality show has done 40 million fucking views online you know what i mean so the guys that we
have that coach when we do the reality show we have guys are coaches so what's starting to happen
is like the early days i don't know if you guys know this much about MMA,
but in the early days, there were only a couple places
you could go train for MMA.
Pat Miletic had a camp that he was training people from,
AKA, which is where Habib and Cormier
and all those guys came from.
And who was the other big camp at that time?
There were like three of them okay so it was very uh incestual that they were all training together at some point and
going to different things now i mean it's fucking everywhere and you're gonna see that now in power
slap there's gonna be camps where you go and then eventually it will grow and get bigger and bigger and bigger it's literally it's it's fucking identical everything is identical to when we started
the ufc is there a way to defend at all in it so is can you strengthen your neck can you strengthen
your like that i don't do but they do, what'd you say? F1 drivers.
Like, they do a bunch of, like, neck work.
That's exactly what these guys are doing.
So, yeah.
Network.
Neck work.
Job.
Work on your shoulders and traps.
Yeah, face.
All that stuff.
Because, yeah.
The idea is you're just allowing yourself to get hit.
You can't do anything in defense.
This will evolve.
And the training will become, you know.
Yeah, as there's more money
and you're going to get more guys.
A hundred percent.
And the big problem with the UFC in the early days
is that there was no real training for mixed martial arts.
You had fucking, you know, guys that were kickboxers,
guys that were wrestlers.
Then they were like, well, how does it all blend together?
What they used to do is they used to have a kickboxing class,
a wrestling class, a jujitsu class, you know know that they'd have to run all around town and then they
started to build these camps yeah and then it's the training evolved to mma training that it is
today and it still continues to evolve yeah but it is cool that you see guys that that come up with
mma as their discipline right like it used to be singular discipline. A hundred percent. As a kickboxing guy
that learned these other things.
So true.
And now there are guys
who are MMA guys
and almost like instinctually
they're rolling
into wrestling,
into striking.
Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
And now there's camps
that are all over the world.
Yeah, yeah.
You know,
you had three fucking camps
when we bought this.
Even with Izzy's camp,
like you look at the-
A hundred percent.
Look at what they've done
in a very short amount of time. In new zealand absolutely right i remember the first time
that i went to london there was like one guy who had this little tiny fucking gym as big as this
place that he was trying to train mma guys out of now look at where the sport is yeah when we went
to australia for the first time which is example of what you're saying, there was one fucking guy in the country,
Elvis Sinisek, that
knew MMA, and that was it. Him and his buddy
that he trained with, Anthony,
I can't remember Anthony's last
name, but there were two guys
in the fucking country, right?
Now there's multiple world champions
out of that fucking area, and
tons of people in the top ten, etc.
Like that overnight so
yeah wait till power slap's been around for five fucking years and you feel 15 months in thank you
yeah question wait and see the difference in five years are you is this in addition to all the time
you have to ufc you're just adding to your your workload are you off loading stuff how is that
yeah no so i so i own powerap with the Fertitta Brothers.
And I called those guys up and said,
I'm into this fucking slap thing.
I think we should do this.
You in?
He goes, I'm fucking in.
So we did it again.
And we also own a company called Throw One,
me and the Fertitta Brothers,
which is Ridiculousness that's on MTV.
We own that.
We own SLS Skate League.
You can't fucking miss, huh?
We own Nitro Circus. Yeah. we own that we own sls you can't fucking miss huh we own uh we own uh nitro circus yeah and we own
travis patana's nitro cross which is uh electric car racing we're actually i'm after fourth of
july i do fourth of july at my house in maine i'm flying a nascar we're doing a deal with nascar
we're going to be the electric series for nascar wow oh that's we're working on that deal right now so is your passion
building businesses i like taking niche sports you know how many times i've been offered deals
like hey we got an nba team coming to vegas we'd like to talk to you we got this and that
so those kind of businesses like are for multi they're like toys for multi-billionaires right
multi-billionaires right multi-billionaires
buy these things and they lose money on them so is it for but the equity grows over decades and
then when they fucking die the family sells the fucking team or you know or cuban just sold you
know he bought it for a few hundred millions for a few billion um i like taking niche sports that
people don't think work and making them fucking work. That's what I like to do.
Were there any businesses you tried to scale but didn't work exactly how you wanted?
Yeah.
I'll tell you, the only business I've ever failed at was we bought a—
During the crash in 9 and 10. I'm driving to work one day
and all the fucking car dealerships are closed.
You remember the bottom fell out in the market,
the housing market fucking collapsed
and all that shit happened, right?
And I'm like, there's lots of good fucking people
who need a car, especially in Vegas.
And don't have the credit now
because the fucking house foreclosed or whatever it is.
So I bought a car dealership. Let me tell you what, it was a fucking shit show.
And the only thing that fucking saved me, me and my partner did it, me and one of my best friends,
we bought it together and tried to run this thing. And I't lose on it and the only reason i didn't lose money
was because i bought the fucking land so i bought i bought the dealership itself i bought it
outright and i own the dealership yeah getting fucking murdered on the car side of the business
what were the cars fucking murdered huh what was the brand of car um no it was used cars so you can sell it was a
used car dealership yeah and we're getting fucking murdered right people are fucking
taking the cars and not paying for them so we got to go fucking repossess them and before we get it
back they destroy the fucking car so yeah this is the it is the shittiest dirtiest business you
wonder why when you go into these car dealers yeah guys i'm telling you right now you need john jones to repo because the people you fucking deal
with that fucking will not pay their car payments are unfucking believable and they'd rather destroy
the car yeah than fucking pay for it so we're getting fucking murdered so we decide an exit
strategy to get out of it now the world changes and everything starts to go this way again.
And I own the fucking land.
So when we sold the car dealership, we made all our money back.
On the land itself.
Yeah.
So somebody just got rid of the car dealership.
100%.
What did they build there?
If real estate didn't go back like this, I would have got fucking death.
You should have turned those cars into MMA rings rings off of his question is there a business that you could have invested in
didn't and regret it like i think mark human and yeah i'll touch so that was uh the the um
the maloof family yeah that own the palms yes they were absolutely instrumental in uh the golden
knights coming to las vegas and I love the Malouf family.
They're fucking great people.
I've always had an incredible relationship with them.
So they first came to me and said, hey, we're bringing hockey to Vegas and this and that.
And I was like, hockey in Vegas?
Yeah.
Yeah, that ain't going to work.
Golden Knights is fucking massive.
Yeah.
They've already won fucking championships and
everything else so but again that's a sport that's already established i don't even think
that would get you going you like taking the niche sport and blowing it up yeah he's already
one of the yeah and i didn't really get the hockey thing in vegas i didn't see it coming so
yeah uh but yeah i i could have invested in that and i didn't um yeah but as far as like
nobody's ever come to me and been like uh yeah, we're going to start this thing called Google.
And I didn't invest in it.
There's never been anything like that.
I'm curious on the topic of people pitching you ideas.
I mean, you were saying people just come in as Shark Tank.
What is the one mistake that people make when they pitch you an idea that makes you immediately go, eh, I'm good?
Nothing really.
It just depends on the product.
I'll tell you an interesting one.
This fucking guy just came in and met. I'll tell you an interesting one. This fucking guy
just came in and met with me. He's from New England. He already owns the business
and it's fucking kicking ass, but he's looking to expand and he needs relationships, not just
here in the United States, but globally. So he takes rice, husks of rice. I didn't even know
rice had a husk, but rice have husks on them.
And basically when they get rid of the husk,
it's fucking waste.
And it's a problem like any other type of waste.
He's figured out how to turn rice husks into wood.
So you wouldn't know the difference
between a fucking real wood floor
or wood paneling in the house or roof or whatever
from the wood that's made
from this husk like he could do that i don't even know what the fuck that is i've seen this they've
done it with like sugarcane paper like all waste from agro is like huge if they could like solve
that you're saving so what's starting to happen is we're starting to get to a place in the world
where the population and everything if we keep fucking smoking trees the way that we are you
know what i mean we're
gonna have a fucking problem 50 years from now it's gonna be a fucking huge problem for for
humanity and the planet and this guy has figured it out how to do and the bigger the bigger problem
is like saudi arabia and abu dhabi and these these countries like that that are spanning and
like building these fucking unbelievable places he can actually go in there and do it with this wood that you would—it's just as durable as good wood.
It looks exactly the same.
Any type of wood that you would put in, they can mimic with these rice husks.
Unbelievable.
What a fucking business that is.
Yeah.
And not only is it a brilliant fucking business, but it's great for the fucking planet, and it's great for humanity over the next 50 years. So Lorenzo and I are taking a deeper dive. So he pitches you and your immediate
excitement, you tell Lorenzo. I literally picked up the phone and called Lorenzo and I said,
we need to take a look at this. In front of the guy? Yeah. I mean, he's got to be so excited.
Well, the guy has a real business now, but this guy has something really special.
This can really be big.
So that is the excitement.
At the end of the day, you are an entrepreneur that loves building businesses, especially when people think that there's no chance. Yeah.
So you almost need that, the monkey on your back a little bit.
I do, I do, I do.
I hate to fucking admit that, but I do.
But it's extra motivation.
These people that, you know, I love negativity. Yeah. I hate to fucking admit that, but I do. But it's extra motivation. These people that, you know,
I love negativity.
I love negativity.
I love it. I fucking love it.
Go in the comments
section and shit on me and tell me where
it can't happen. It's like the stuff that
fucking wakes me up.
Explain blackjack to me then.
Explain gambling. I need to understand.
And like when you said UFC 300,
did you see the video that I came out with?
Yeah, of course.
I'm a low road guy.
I always take the low road.
And I love, you know,
you have these smug fucks on whatever
who act like they fucking know what they're talking about.
And there's nothing better than just
fucking showing them that they have absolutely no idea.
Okay, so explain to me the the gambling you love it yeah
you it like i even when i see you talk about it at press conferences you are like excited about it
like you're happy you get a question about even now you're smiling explain to me one the feeling
of is it close to anything else yeah it's it's it's right up there with everything that i love
fucking like you know take the i'll give you an example like
i'm in a position where i'll be home let's say my family's out of town right and i got friday
saturday and sunday now i could fucking jump on the plane and i could go anywhere and i could
literally do anything i want to go to caesar palace that's what i want to
fucking do and throw down i literally fucking go in there and what i love about caesars is
caesars when you're when you're a fucking big player like caesars treats big players right
you know i didn't like the setup i had they literally built a fucking room for me is this
the room that we see in a lot of like youtube videos the fratitas every casino the
fratitas open they build me a room every fucking casino okay so um they literally fire built me
this fucking room like caesars is old school they don't have tvs they put a fucking tv in there
literally like a fucking embedded in the wall and like overnight they come in and do this shit
i didn't like the fucking chair i was sitting on they got me like one of those gaming chairs you know for kids that play video games for a
fucking hour you know exactly exactly um they put a dining room table in there because i'll order
food from from the different restaurants yeah and i go in there and what i love about caesars is
they treat their players right and they do everything the right way they don't ever sweat
the fucking money ever what does that mean you'll go into some of these casinos and and if you win the fucking pit bosses
have shitty fucking attitudes and it's always negative and they're always trying to you always
feel like like fighters get paranoid yeah yeah gamblers get paranoid too like like oh these
motherfuckers are trying to like there won't be somebody at the cage to give me my money because
they wanted me to fucking wait
and see if I'll keep playing
and fucking loot.
Just all these little things
that if you are a fucking gambler,
you know what I'm talking about, right?
Caesars has none of that shit.
And every one of the fucking dealers
want you to win
because I take care of fucking all the dealers.
And it's just,
it's a good vibe and a good energy.
And I play Baccarat
and Caesars Baccarat
is fucking packed wall to wall with
Chinese.
Chinese have good fucking gambling vibes,
man.
Chinese are fucking absolute degenerate fucking Baccarat players.
They will sit there from fucking six o'clock at night till 10 o'clock the
next morning playing Baccarat.
They're all upbeat and fucking good energy. And fucking love it so what i love about those are all the things that i love
about caesar's palace in vegas and then the other thing is oh and the thing with caesar's too
is if you're a big player every christmas they have this they open up all their ballrooms and
the ballrooms are packed with fucking snowmobiles motorcycles tvs electronics
jewelry clothes everything and you can go in there and shop for christmas and do whatever
so lenay who's my head of pr she's in the other room here i give her the stuff and she goes and
she gets all the stuff and gives it to the employees my employees so we use all my fucking
points to shop for the employees at ufc. And that's another thing I love about them.
But the other thing is that the biggest casino company in the United States,
they have 44 casinos.
And I love the fact that it's me versus them every fucking night.
I go toe to toe with the biggest casino company in the world.
And I'm in this fucking war with them right now.
Okay.
Since Jan 1, since Jan 1, I'm in this war with them.
I've been playing Baccarat,
and I beat them for $16.5 million.
Since January 1?
Since Jan 1.
So every night is like this fucking war,
and since Jan 1, I've only lost to them twice,
but I'm still, I have such a fucking big lead on them.
They need me to get murdered.
Bad.
Bad.
Do you ever go on tilt or whatever?
Is that the term?
On tilt?
It's a poker term for sure when you're emotional.
Where you just can't stop.
Or are you very diligent about the way you gamble?
I'm usually very diligent, but I'm not going to say there's not been a couple times and those are the times that i lose when you when you fuck
up and and you and you stick around a little a little too long you should have yeah okay
to bring this back to ufc that event the the energy so think about this too okay this is what
i love too this is not a by the way this is a gambling question i'm gonna ask you this again
so there's there's this is the biggest casino company in the country right and i'm on a fucking
run that six o'clock the next morning emails are flying around the fucking company like
this motherfucker beat us again this motherfucker beat us again this and you love the fact that
you're driving them fucking crazy i love it i love it and the other thing that i love about it's the carano family that owns this that owns caesars i don't know cheetah carano what yeah
the carano family owns caesars palace yeah i didn't know that they own the biggest casino
company in the country and gina carano the ufc fighter she was and now she's uh makes films
she was on mandalorian and she got kicked off
because I think she didn't want to get vaccinated or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's Gina Carano.
I didn't know her family owned it.
Oh, no, she lost it.
Her father is Glenn Carano.
And yeah, they own all the casinos.
And the thing that I love about them too,
they're so fucking classy about how they do everything with whatever.
Like I'll run into them in the hallways when they're in Vegas.
They live in Reno.
But when they're in Vegas, I'll run into them,
and they couldn't be classier about it.
And just classy, good people.
So I love going to war with them every day.
You know what I mean?
And if I'm going to lose,
I want to lose to classy, good fucking people like them or the Fertittas.
You know what I mean? It's fun for me. It's what I love to lose to classy good fucking people like them or the Fertittas you know what I mean
it's it's it's it's fun for me it's it's what I love to do it's it's final fight first spike tv
final between Bonner and Forrest the whole card you said was okay you're going into that final
fight the contract is dependent on this final fight.
The card was not great.
Right. You were saying that earlier.
It wasn't okay. It was not great.
Okay. The excitement of going into that final fight, is that the same as when you're on a run?
No, I would say the excitement after that fight and how I felt after that fight, I knew no matter what happened, we had it.
That's the Baccarat run?
Every night when I walk into Caesars and I walk into that high limit room, I'm fucking amped up and I can't wait to play.
Do you know who carried you?
Here's the biggest thing.
It's easy to talk about the wins and and winning and it feels good
it's much like fighting it's the highest of the highs yeah and the lowest of the lows when you
lose but i've been gambling for so long that i've been able to manage that like when i get my ass
kicked you know some people can't handle it and they go into a deep, dark depression and they all listen. I don't give a fuck. I get up the next day. I look at 2024 as a war. Okay.
This year is a war for me. And these are all little battles that are fought inside the war.
Some nights I win, some nights they win, but where do we end up at the end of the year?
And it's just, it's, it's what I really, really love to do.
Have you beaten them for a year do have you beaten them for a year
have you beaten that whole year yeah so you go through at the end of a year you're either
get decimated and you're fucking whatever or you beat them by a margin yeah exactly
or you're even but that feels good that's what I like to fucking do. Yeah.
What's the most you ever won in a day and the most you ever lost in a day?
So I literally have won.
So what I do in a day is I keep my day at a million bucks.
Okay.
So if I win a million.
Conservative.
I leave.
I've been flipping these guys for a million a night. Oh, you mean you stop at the million.
Yeah.
When I beat them for a million a night. Oh, you mean you stop at the million. Yeah. When I beat them for a million.
So for the last since Jan 1, I've been clipping them from anywhere from 800 to a million a night.
Right?
When I go in and play.
And when I lose, I'll go guns a blazing and go through my whole fucking credit line.
What's your credit line?
Which is six million.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Wow.
Yeah.
You've lost six? Yeah. Do you whoa wow yeah you've lost six yeah do you
know how much you lost hold on hold on let's stop here no all time i don't know the wins along me
and hunter were talking about this the other day all time wins and losses and you're talking
you know probably 20 years of hardcore real gambling yeah lose six, you walk out of there,
what is the first thing you do?
It's usually late,
so I go home and go to bed.
No milkshake,
no nothing,
no like sugar high
to make you feel better?
No.
No?
I fucking...
Just another day.
Shake it right off.
Six million.
Go home,
go to bed,
get up,
go to work the next day
and then figure out
what the next game plan is.
But I'm in a position right now with these guys
where they're in a unique position
because I'm up 16.5 on them.
So if I keep winning, it just keeps getting worse.
So I'm eventually going to lose.
It's eventually going to happen.
And when I lose, I'll lose 6 million.
So they know that.
They're waiting for the big drops.
100%. So I'll lose $6 million.
Well, I'm still up
fucking $10 million on them. I got to go on
a really bad fucking run
for them to catch up to me. How much skill is there
in Baccarat? It's 50-50.
Oh, it's the closest statistical
game. It's more than
Blackjack? Exactly. Way more.
What's weird, this is what's fascinating
as far as baccarat baccarat has the best odds yet they'll let you play more money on that than they
will on you can bet three hundred thousand dollars a hand and what's the justification from them and
and blackjack 75 so and why blackjack's way to win. Do you know how many multiple nights you're going to walk in to a blackjack game
and win a million?
Fucking zero.
Fucking zero.
Have you asked?
A baccarat?
Have you asked why they do that?
Here's the thing with baccarat.
300,000 a hand, right?
And your number's a million?
You win three hands and you're out.
And this is your week.
You're excited.
You're ready to dive in.
You're ready to walk away after three hands?
Oh, fuck yeah.
When you have a million dollars. You got it. It's the war. It's excited. You're ready to dive in. You're ready to walk away after three hands. Oh, fuck yeah. When you have a million dollars.
You gotta walk.
It's the war.
It's 2024.
Where's my phone?
Hey, can you guys hear me in the other room?
Bring me my phone if you can hear me.
Wow, what do you got?
What do you got?
I'm playing something.
Whatever it is, I wanna see.
We have the intro to this episode.
Okay.
Wow. I bet you that actually goes in the favor of the
house in some cases because i wonder if people like their competitive spirit they're like oh
this is the chance i can win so they're willing to bet more i wonder like i wonder if it's if it
drags or pulls in a certain subset of gamblers you know what i mean that place is full of sickos
every single night so yeah that's fair have. Have you built relationships with some of these people?
Because it's got to be the same guy.
Yeah, the high roller.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When I walk in, we're fist bumping everybody and shit.
And when people see that I'm winning, they'll run over.
I see somebody winning.
This was the other night.
Wow.
That's a million dollars on the table right there.
Wow.
Jesus.
What's a tip?
That's a million twenty-five thousand right there.
What's a tip to a dealer when you're winning a million dollars?
So every time I play, no matter what I play, I tip the dealers ten thousand.
And then this is the room in the back room.
Wow.
Oh, you're walking out with cash.
Holy shit.
That's a million dollars right there.
Actually, that's 1.1.
Imagine, you see him walk in
and you know you're leaving with $10,000 that night.
That's crazy.
Yeah, the only winner in the casino
is a guy who's...
Holy shit. Wow, that's what a million dollars looks like's crazy. Wow. Yeah, the only winner in the casino is a guy who's that's the peeler.
Wow, that's what
a million dollars looks like?
1.1.
Wow.
Wow.
Do your kids gamble at all?
1,137,000.
Son, he just
rounded down to 37,000.
I can just keep going.
Here's the next one.
Here's another one.
I mean, back to back every night night i could just keep showing you fucking videos of war of a million dollars that's that's the other one that's the night before wow what what are some of
the shady things that the the shitty casinos will do to try to rip people off there's so much shit
i wish i could remember the name of this fucking casino.
It was up in Niagara Falls,
piece of shit casino that I went to.
This is why you don't want to play at those type of casinos.
So I had a host up there and he's like,
yeah, come play or whatever.
You know, we'll give you a million dollars.
And I said, I want a million dollars in credit.
And they're like, no problem, no problem,
this and that and everything else. So I get up there, I start fucking playing
and I lose 300,000, right?
And right when we got there,
he brings me the credit thing and it's for 300.
And I sign it.
And I'm like, I thought we were a million.
Yeah, he's like, I'm gonna keep every,
if you lose, hopefully you don't,
I'll just keep bumping into another.
I lost the 300 and they denied me the rest of the credit.
Get the fuck out of here.
Motherfucker got me to go there and told me he was going to do something and didn't do it.
And if I fucking, I wish, nobody's ever asked me this before.
I wish I remembered the name.
But if you, any of those casinos in Niagara Falls, fuck them.
Don't ever play at those places.
They're all dirty, shady, shitty fucking places, man.
If you really want to gamble right
and you live anywhere jump on a fucking plane and fly to vegas vegas is first of all there's a
shitload of competition right there's casinos up and down the fucking strip downtown whatever
right yeah you're going to treat you right they're going to give you the best fucking deals you get
they're going to give you um a discount on your losses if they if you lose they give you a percentage of your money back
you can negotiate that type but there's all kinds of things you can negotiate is that like depending
on you can or anybody 100 depending on what type of player you are but if you're a consistent good
player the casinos in las vegas are going to take such good care of you that none of these fucking shitholes outside of vegas could ever even compete with so if you're gonna go lose i don't
give a fuck if it's 2500 jump on a fucking plane to vegas and make a weekend out of it they'll
treat you better and you have a better your odds are better of winning i didn't realize that the
casinos could actually be shysters about it.
100%.
Well, Mickey Mace,
he exposed a lot of games and stuff.
I've seen him on YouTube.
Have you seen that guy on YouTube?
No.
He says that he found a way to game Baccarat
and that some casinos have banned him from it
because there are different ways to do it with blackjack.
There are guys who counted cards and stuff.
I read a book about this.
Not in Vegas. They ain't ban know you in vegas even the ones
that they say they banned you know that i'm banned from yeah what band means is so the palms i beat
the palms for 1.6 million dollars right this is years ago they dropped my credit limit you know
what i mean so you're not banned you know but you can't gamble the way you but they're basically saying beat it get lost it without saying oh you can't play here anymore if somebody's claiming
they were banned they fucking cheated or they did something fucking dirty or they just don't want
you're a guy that they don't fucking want in there it's not because you're that fucking good
yeah what happens is when you when you consist what makes me dangerous is bankroll and i will fucking go in
there and i'll play three fucking hands and leave yeah that's what makes me dangerous they don't
like that kind you're looking at big picture 100 listen if i'm a guy that flies in for the weekend
you're right and do whatever you know i'm coming in every fucking night right and i'll clip you
for three fucking hands and leave they don't like that kind of play.
That's not what happened to the Palms.
The Palms, I legit beat these guys at Blackjack
for 1.6 million over 23 trips.
So in 23 times, I went 23 and 0 against them
and beat them for 1.6 million.
So they dropped my limits on what I could bet.
They wouldn't let me bet that much anymore.
Can you negotiate with them on the flip side?
Like, yo, I just won two mil,
but how about you only pay me 1.2
and I can do something for you guys?
Like, is there ever a reverse negotiation that happens?
Oh, hell no.
I take every fucking dime out of that fucking place.
Yeah, that's a lose-lose.
You pay me less and I do something for you.
Well, who knows if the guy owns something in politics.
We could work out a deal.
If I'm clipping you for a million a night,
you guys just give me 250 and i won't come i wish i could negotiate that deal um but no but anybody
who's saying they're kicked out of a fucking place because they're good they're full of shit
they don't literally kick you out unless they catch you fucking cheating if you're a fucking
cheater they kick you out what they do is they drop your limits so you know it's harder to fucking win if you can only bet you know if you can bet 300,000 a hand
and you go in and win three hands and fucking leave right consistently yeah fuck that and they
say you know what we're only going to let you play a hundred thousand a hand now if you lose a million
dollars if i lose a million playing baccarat i'm only three hands away from being back up if you lose a million dollars, if I lose a million playing Baccarat, I'm only three hands away from being back up.
If you lose a million at $100,000 a hand, you're going to win 10 hands on a fucking row.
And that's not going to happen statistically.
You know what I'm saying?
Do you have any stories, like, you don't have to say who, but like with high rollers?
Like, I'm sure you're with like oligarchs and princes and like big tech CEOs.
Like, do you have stories where you saw a guy and you're like, that guy's crazier than me?
Like, he's doing stuff that I've never seen people do.
Or a big loss or something.
I think that if you fucking...
Really, there's only a couple guys
in the world here in the United
States and in Vegas that play like I play.
MJ? You got any MJ stories?
Oh, that's good. I've heard tons
of Jordan stories, but I've never actually
seen it. I'll tell you this, though. Charles Barkley...
Charles Barkley's a gambler, too.
Charles Barkley came to Power Slab,
and the one that we did at the Durango,
and I have a big gambling party after,
and he fucking beat him for like $650,000 that night.
No way.
Yeah, Barkley beat them for like $650,000.
He crushed it.
I love that.
Yeah.
What about, did you hear that?
Well, these influencers, too.
Aiden Ross. Yeah. So Aiden Ross you hear that? Well, these influencers too. Aiden Ross.
Yeah.
So Aiden Ross comes to Power Slap
and Aiden Ross will play.
Fucking Aiden Ross.
This kid's what, 22?
Yeah.
He goes on fucking, he's up a million.
He's down 750.
He's up a million five.
Oh my God.
In a fucking Power Slap weekend.
Wow.
Aiden Ross is hardcore.
He plays hardcore too.
What about, did you hear the rumor about Bruno
Mars? I don't know how much is true about these
rumors. There's so many fucking
stupid rumors. First of all, you have to
put things into perspective. For Bruno Mars
to lose that kind of
fucking money, right? First of all, what's it
worth? You know what I mean? Right. Bruno
Mars prints fucking money. I mean, the guy
has a fucking... A show
in Vegas. In Vegas that he plays consistently.
Have you ever seen Bruno Mars play live?
Unbelievable. Unbelievably talented.
Un-fucked. He's unbelievably talented. It is one of
the greatest live shows you will ever see.
When you're watching Bruno Mars and his team play,
you're like, there's no fucking place
on earth these guys would rather be than
right here, right now. It's an incredible, great show.
I don't care if you don't know one Bruno Mars song.
You do know them. The guy makes shitloads of fucking money,
and of course he fucking gambles.
I'm sure he does,
but to say that the guy is down this much
and he owes the casino,
you hear a lot of bullshit fucking rumors.
Is there anybody that you find is bad luck
and you don't want to gamble with?
100%.
Wait, are you going to look?
There's guys. This is so true true this is why i was talking about
caesar's palace when you go into caesar's palace baccarat fucking high limit room right yeah it is
fucking wall to wall with chinese people that are fucking like straight out of china like straight
from china yeah and i i learned the game by watching them I've studied them playing the game
and watching and all this shit and it's fascinating
but they have a good energy
about them and they are very superstitious
like certain
animals that you might have on your fucking shirt
or there's tons of different
shit that the Chinese are very
superstitious about
and I don't know why I just
love the fucking energy
that these people have
when they're in there.
So you,
you know,
and when the dealer flips the cards
and they're all screaming,
monkey, monkey, monkey
and they're fucking slapping the table.
It's fucking awesome.
There's just an energy level in there
that is fucking awesome.
And,
yes,
you get some fucking guys
that walk in
and you just,
you get that vibe from them.
This is, this is fucking the real life Eddie fucking Mush, this guy.
Could be anything.
The wrong animal, fucking wrong attitude.
The way he looks, the way he plays, things he says.
Do you ask him to leave?
No, you just get the fuck away from him.
You move to another area and you get away from, yeah, the Eddie Mush.
Yeah, that's fucking real.
Wow.
Yeah, there's real Eddie Mushes out there.
What are your other superstitions?
Is there like a pair of shoes you wear?
Is there like a tie?
Is there something?
No, I have to have vibe with the casino.
When you walk in, there has to be this vibe in the place.
And you have to vibe with the dealer.
My biggest superstition is when you get a shitty fucking dealer that has a bad attitude
and you're like this motherfucker wants me to lose yeah that's sort of my thing okay okay
and so they probably set you up with the people you like now yeah i i have this thing where
i'm very fortunate in my life and i take care of people you know what i mean yeah i whether it's
dinner or this or that the people who are handling your food or your drinks or whatever it might be
i take care of people and it's the same thing in the casinos so normally in places that i play
regularly everybody's on my team right you know what i mean loyalty very important to you it's
huge it's everything to me The people that have had your back
from early on, are they still
in your life and do you make sure of that?
Yeah, I mean I'm still hanging out with people that I
went to high school with
you know, my circle's very
small and it's like when we were talking
about cancelling, like people
trying to cancel, I don't give a fuck
what everybody else thinks or what they're doing
or whatever, there's a very small group of people
whose opinions matter to me,
and three of them are my fucking kids.
You know what I mean?
Those are the only people that can cancel you.
Yeah.
You know?
Some fucking dipshit on some fucking...
Who cares?
You don't know.
You know what I mean?
Some networker.
I'll tell you this the other day.
I was talking to...
I won't call these guys out on this,
but we were talking about a deal with a group of people who are
they they make shit loads of money but they're looked down upon okay yeah and jews
i was talking to them about a deal. Yeah. Right?
And the guy who's one of the big guys in the company called me back and said,
you know, we talked to our board of directors and I'm already out.
You're asking permission.
You're asking permission.
If you have a fucking board of directors. Why am I talking to you?
It's just like, I've dealt with that shit before.
Yeah.
Fuck you. Yeah. And your with that shit before. Yeah. Fuck you.
Yeah.
And your board of fucking directors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the shit that's fucking, you know, you get a group of fucking uppity douchebags.
Yeah.
And a fucking room that are going to determine the way that something goes or how you're going to do business or who you're going to do business with or something that's going to go on.
You already lost me.
So he didn't want to do this thing, but he don't want to do a few other things with me. We're going to do business with or something that's going to go on you already lost me so he didn't want to do this thing but he don't want to do a few other things with me we're going to do
nothing together because you have to deal with that we're going to do nothing together i'm not
doing the bureaucracy yeah talk to your fucking board of directors yeah you guys are already a
fucking pussy company that i don't want you're a bunch of fucking pussies here's a question i've
been thinking this whole time i
what is it about you that you think number one thing that makes you so successful about you
like what is it you i felt like listening this other podcast i'm like maybe he understands human
nature in a way that's very deep but i'm i want to just ask you what do you think it is that's
made you so successful i don't know listen i i get up every day and I work hard. I mean, that's
that. I work hard, man. Yeah. But I, uh, I believe in, I guess if you look at all the things that go
on in the outside world and all the people that tell you what you can't do and what's not possible,
I've built a team of people that I have got on board with me that agree with me and say,
there's nothing we can't fucking do. You know what I mean? And when you build a fucking team
of can-dos instead of can't-dos, like the sphere, right? I said, we can fucking do this.
And I think this is going to be fun, challenging,
and an experience that we will all look back on and 10 years ago, we fucking did that and we were first,
just like COVID.
You know what I mean?
And the list goes on and on.
There were a lot more reasons why I went through COVID.
My team is one of them.
And COVID never really made sense to me.
So I don't know.
I just built a team of can-dos, not can't-dos.
That's awesome.
We fucking, why, I say again, why am I doing this fear?
It's expensive.
It's literally fucking, my guys are working on this 24 fucking seven.
It's tough because that's what we do
we kick fucking ass and we do things first and we do things that people say can't be done
and that's what i love to do i love that dana white ladies and gentlemen
brother thank you so much for being here man uh this has been awesome dude it's great to meet
people that exceed uh the expectations you have for them man you have absolutely done that thank
you i i'm great guys on all your success, too.
Thank you very much.
I'm really happy we could keep you here
longer than the Howie Mandel podcast.
Answer that, answer that, answer that.
Was that set up with you and Howie?
It had to be set up.
So what happened was,
I did the Sage Steele podcast when she called me.
Okay, so how did we not talk about both of you?
I was so rogue.
So first of all, Sage Steele, our good friend.
I love her.
She asked me to be her first guest on the podcast.
So I go out there.
Now, the studio is owned by Howie Mandel,
where these podcasts take place.
She was signed to Bill Maher's podcast company.
Yeah.
And they're all done there in Howie Mandel's studio.
Got it.
So we get done with the podcast and Howie Mandel walks in
and he's like, I've 100 podcasts a week happening here.
I've never watched any of them.
I watched a whole podcast.
Love who you are, what you stand for and all this stuff.
And we hit it off.
We start talking.
Great dude.
So he's like, let me show you around the studio.
So he's fucking got got he's involved in
all kinds of shit he owns social media companies and all this other stuff howie maddell owns a lot
of shit that people don't realize smart guy great guy so we're walking through and stuff he goes
would you do me a favor that's great and i said yeah what's up and he's like would you come in
and get up and walk off my podcast i go i would be fucking honored to walk off your podcast
because i'm so fucking sick of doing podcasts so we go in there and do it right and he's like
awesome take this to the grave i said done i'll take it to the grave right so yeah i'm walking
around i go do this thing with the nelk boys yeah right we're doing this monkey bomb fucking tour yeah the whole fucking crowd starts chanting fuck howie mandel fuck howie mandel i go whoa whoa whoa
time out i can't do this yeah howie mandel's the greatest fucking dude ever
sorry howie it's just when i go out and people start fucking shitting on the guy
and i'm sure he could give a flying fuck, I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it.
So Howie Mandel's fucking awesome and everything else.
And the other thing that we started to talk about that I wanted to tell you too,
I do this show called Looking for a Fight.
And we go out and we go into different cities
and we see what the city has to offer food-wise, entertainment,
and all this other stuff, culturally culturally and then we go to fights so we like to put ourselves in uncomfortable
situations i wrote a bull i wrote a real pbr bull yeah jumped in the fucking ocean with sharks in
the middle of fucking florida which one of the dumbest things i've ever done other than bull
riding yeah and the worst thing that i ever fucking did was stand-up comedy. So we came up with this thing.
I'll never forget it, David.
Me, Matt, and Dean had to write our own jokes.
And I was like, this will be fun because we'll go into a comedy club.
I've been to comedy clubs.
There's fucking six people sitting in there.
Until like a big comic shows up.
There's a fucking handful of people in there.
And you go up and you tell your jokes.
So we did this thing. They promoted that we were going to be there the club fucking sold out yeah right this is in la club sold out we pull up there's a line down
the fucking street so i fucking i i can't tell you a time that i've ever been this fucking nervous and the amount
of pressure yeah yeah and just so you know i fucking cheated too yeah i had tony hitchcliffe
write my fucking joke you picked a good one you picked a good one matt and dean wrote their own
jokes and had to get up i almost i'm not even kidding you i public speak
all that there's i'll public speak i'll be driving to the thing and i'll call my secretary and go
what am i talking about at this thing oh okay and i go in and do it yeah i've never felt this way
before i almost fainted before i went on fucking stage right so when it was over and i got through
it i'm like i will never ever fucking do this again. Until. Until.
Until Brady calls me.
So, thank God I had already had that experience.
Oh, yeah.
Stand-up comedy is the most underrated fucking thing of all time.
Let's go.
I've done it all.
You know, as far as business goes.
And then on these TV shows just fucking around doing
shit, there is nothing harder than going into a room and fucking, now, let's go into the
Brady roast.
All the baddest comedians in the world, and ones you didn't see.
Fucking Chappelle was there.
Chelsea Handler was there.
Yeah.
Who's the guy from fucking England was there.
Oh, Jimmy Carr.
Barney motherfucker.
Brilliant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All there too. Yeah, yeah. And there's 12,000 people fucking England was there. Oh, Jimmy Carr. Bernie motherfucker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All there too.
Yeah.
And there's 12,000 people fucking live.
Yeah.
And then it's your time.
And here comes the camera right in your fucking face.
Now,
here's the thing.
If you're public speaking and you fuck up,
you recover.
You pull it together.
Yeah.
You fuck up telling a joke.
It's a downward death.
Now you will never be able to pull yourself out of because
you're not a professional comedian.
It's hot. You start sweating. There is no
amount of fucking pressure ever in my
life. And it's live.
I'll tell you this, dude. You know how much I love gambling.
And it's live.
One time, I had a million dollar
hand out there between splits and everything else.
And, you know, the amount of it, there's not,
that doesn't even compare to doing stand-up fucking comedy, man.
Fuck that shit.
I've done it twice.
Remember I said it here,
you will never see me do any of that shit ever again.
You killed it.
You won't see me ever again.
You killed it.
But you know what I did?
I studied to the point of, i was starting to go insane i
studied so hard because you can tell some of these people like like even kim kardashian is relying on
the teleprompter yeah fuck the teleprompter i'm i'm worried what if the teleprompter get you know
glitches or the writing's too small or something fucking happens i knew my shit inside now do you
remember when you remember when
we spoke before and i said so rogan calls me rogan's like hey daniel wants to run by a couple
lines for this thing i was like yeah yeah give him my number yeah well what happened was you and i
were dming yeah yeah yeah and you were going fucking ghost on the dm for a minute and i was
like oh fuck i got roast to do too well nikki glaaser stole my fucking joke. No, she didn't steal your joke.
You had the same joke.
Yeah, but she was going before me.
And they went to her and they told Nikki Glaser,
they said, Dana White has this joke.
She goes, fuck him, I'm on before him.
And I'm like, you're a professional.
You have $300,000 in jokes
and you fucking murdered it that night.
You're going to take my one joke and I have three?
You know what I mean?
I'm like, I'm fucked.
I need help.
I got to fucking dance.
So I was in the car.
It's on the way.
He calls me up.
He goes, all right, let me just go through these things.
And then he goes, fucking Nicky stole my joke.
He's like, none of us have even done jokes yet.
What the fuck did he do?
You're before me.
I know.
She's like, I'm going before him.
Fuck him.
What's he doing?
Too bad.
Tell me you got another joke.
The jokes are all funny.
And I remember the first one was the, my name's Trans and all I get is 60 seconds, right?
I remember hearing the joke and I remember going, I would go, listen, he's nervous.
I was like, all right, maybe we can work out something else.
That's like a 50-50.
Either the audience is into it and they love it or not.
And I remember I called you back and I was like, hey, I don't know about that joke.
I remember you go, Schultz, are you fucking with me right now?
I can't take this when you're going to give me a different thing to say in the beginning. And I go, well, listen, I don't want about that joke i remember you go schultz are you fucking with me right now i can't
take this when you're gonna give me a different thing to say in the beginning and i go well listen
i don't want you to bomb and that joke might be a 50 50 and and i think it states that like you
don't really care and you don't give a fuck and then i remember you go wait what do you mean i go
well they might not laugh but he says yeah he says you're not gonna get the reaction you think
you're gonna get and i go oh i'm gonna get the reaction you think you're going to get. And I go, oh, I'm going to get the reaction. I know what the reaction is.
I don't give a fuck.
I wanted to come out and just punch everybody right in the face.
You said, I just want them to know that I don't give a fuck.
I was like, oh, well, they'll know that.
Dana's okay with 50-50.
Honestly, I thought they were going to fucking boo me.
I was getting ready to get booed.
Yeah, you know, it's just the amount of fucking pressure on.
Now, you did very well.
You did great.
I think you did very well.
You did great.
And also, a weird situation because your back is to the audience.
You're in the, he's in the front row.
Right, I'm talking to the.
You can't even deliver to them and see them laughing, which kind of motivates you.
So, your laugh.
I was talking to the deus.
Yeah, which is the hardest people to impress.
Because we're like, oh, at least we laugh for a living.
Yeah, exactly.
No, it was good.
It was fucking good.
Let me tell you what.
Very underrated how fucking, how much, I'm not even fucking joking.
Yeah.
My body was fucked up for like three days after that.
Like my body was fucked up.
I didn't feel good for three days after that.
I didn't feel right
it literally the amount of pressure to get up and tell fucking jokes yeah you know but you want to
tell them jokes to fucking comedians oh not to mention the fact but let's just say you know a
handful of best comedians in the world have been going for an hour before you fucking go out yeah
all right yeah that's also true and you have to make people fucking laugh they're tired but the other
thing was with mine is i didn't want to have that so i sort of when this when something like this
happens what they do is for weeks when you say yes you get on calls with producers and comedians
and everybody now they're writing jokes for fucking tom brady gronk edelman fucking uh
belichick,
and the list goes on and on and on, right?
Mine's 60 seconds.
I'm not a patriot.
I'm not one of these fucking guys.
I'm getting the piece of shit crumb jokes
that fall on the fucking floor,
and most of them are UFC-based
that most of the fucking people wouldn't understand anyway.
I'm like, fuck this shit.
I'm not relying on these guys to write,
so I went out of house and started fucking, I'm talking to Bill Burr. I'm not relying on these guys to write. So I went out of house and started fucking,
I'm talking to Bill Burr.
I'm talking to fucking you.
I'm talking to fucking guys that can really guide me
and help me in this thing.
The Tom Brady running one was great.
Yeah.
I used to think you were from Boston.
Then I saw you run.
I knew you were from San Francisco.
That was great.
Bill Burr.
Yeah, really?
Bill Burr.
Let's go, Bill.
Bill Burr. Now, he's the one Let's go, Bill. Bill Burr.
Now, he's the one to go to.
Bill's the man.
But it was good shit.
I'm glad you did it.
Thanks.
It was the fucking, it's the second hardest thing I've ever done.
And you sat there in the line of fire.
Yeah.
That's another thing.
I thought, this is what I thought, because sometimes with these award shows, people come
in to do their thing, and then they leave and they get a seat filler.
That's what I thought Kim was going to do.
I'll give Kim credit.
She stayed there, and they didn't tell me she was gonna be there if they did i would have
had something but right she was there for the whole time so i give her credit i'll tell you
what else i give her credit for she's not an actress she's a fucking reality star yeah and
i am not an actor i do reality too right yeah so when you do reality you go in and do what you
fucking do yeah then you have to do some interviews and shit like that it is not even fucking remotely close to acting yeah she got up
there and you could tell she was reading her teleprompter she didn't really have that dialed
in yeah they started booing the fuck out of her and you know what she fucking powered through it
she didn't even notice you know what i mean she fucking powered through it she made it she was
saying what you want about kim kardashian she took it like a fucking champ yeah yeah yeah it is weird because they say with public speaking you're supposed to
imagine the audience naked and uh with her it was the opposite but people don't understand when you
go up there and you try to fucking you have to try to make people laugh she tried to tell a funny
story about tom and everything else she had funny jokes jokes. And she's getting booed. She's the only fucking, like, woman there speaking
that isn't a professional fucking comedian.
Yeah.
And you start getting booed, and she fucking handled it.
See, I was ready to get booed.
That's why my second joke was, I was ready for the booing.
And it turned out the other way.
We're going to get you back up again.
I fucking guarantee you, you will not.
We're going to get you back up.
No, no, you'll never do it again.
Hey, hey, hey. You will never do it again you will never do it you'll never make it never do it daniel white can't do comedy
he can't do it bro you're the fucking man anything else that we could tell the people about anything
else the good people need to know obviously fights coming up anything that you're really
excited about guys that we should be looking into? I'm excited about everything, man.
Everything that I'm doing, I fucking absolutely love to the core.
And I'll do this till the day I drop down.
Can I ask you a serious question?
Yeah.
Were the Chinese guys at the baccarat table the ones that told you about the rice stalks?
No.
No.
Is that why you're doing it?
Is that why?
There's a buddy of mine from Boston named Roberto.
He runs all the clubs and restaurants
in Boston and he knows a bunch of people.
He knew this guy and connected us.
So it's real.
Just want to make sure.
Anyway, you're the fucking man. Thank you, brother.
Appreciate you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much.
That was great.