Dana White Built the UFC From What He Loved — and Hated — About Boxing

Dana White does not ease into the argument. The night Khabib Nurmagomedov beat Conor McGregor, he says, Vladimir Putin was on FaceTime before Khabib even made the locker room. Donald Trump, in and out of office, watches the cards and calls to talk about them. Valentina Shevchenko meets the president of her country every time she goes home. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sit on the same list. "The most powerful people in the world are all obsessed with fighting."

Lex Fridman has White in the UFC offices for a tour of how a nearly dead promotion became a global sport. The conversation will run from Muhammad Ali in a grandmother's living room to a Sphere show on Mexican Independence Day. White's explanation for the famous names is not branding. Fighting, he says, is written into human DNA. Whatever language you speak, if two people start swinging on a sidewalk, every pair of eyes turns.

White's first memory of a fight is an Ali bout at his grandmother's house. Uncles went crazy around the television. The buzz in the room is what he liked, even as a child. Ali and Mike Tyson still fill his office and his home. Asked whether Ali is the greatest boxer, White goes further: he would put Ali as the greatest human being of all time, not only the greatest fighter.

As a fan it is easy to stare at the fists, White says. Look at the man instead: the poems, the stance he took in a dangerous time, the guts to go against the grain. You could be the biggest racist on the planet, he claims, and still have trouble sitting in a room with Ali and not liking him. Fridman calls him all love and humor. White agrees, and adds that Ali used the platform for the right things, the right man in the right place.

Love of the sport arrived later. In 1987, at seventeen, White taped Hagler versus Leonard and watched it "like a million times." He was a huge Marvelous Marvin Hagler fan, liked Sugar Ray Leonard too, and was furious because he thought Hagler got robbed. That anger is what made him study boxing. Then USA's Tuesday Night Fights became a weekly ritual. A lot of what people now see in the UFC, he says — not only production, but feel and style — comes from what he loved about boxing and what he hated, right down to the commentary.

White used to mute HBO Boxing so he did not have to hear Larry Merchant and Jim Lampley. You spent pay-per-view money to watch people you idolized, he says, and then listened to "idiots rip 'em apart" while the fight was happening. He asks a staffer for a phone, pulls up YouTube, and plays Mike Tyson's walk to the ring over DMX — one of the baddest walk-ins of all time, in his view. The announcer talks over it: will Tyson intimidate anyone tonight, will it even matter, the crowd is mixed, his stock plummeted after Holyfield, the knockouts were over second-rate fighters.

White is still furious. You paid to watch Tyson and had to listen to people talk trash the whole way in. First time a lot of fans had heard DMX, and the booth treated it as a problem. He used to analyze every ounce of the television production at an age when he had no idea why he cared. HBO was the gold standard, he says, and in thirty years the only real change was HD. The same commentators stayed. Merchant once fought with Floyd Mayweather in a post-fight interview and said that if he were thirty years younger he would kick Mayweather's ass. Those were the interviews you got after a fighter had been away from family, cutting weight, and sparring for months.

The UFC booth is the opposite design. Joe Rogan has trained and fought and has "the utmost respect for the sport and the athletes." Daniel Cormier is a former world champion who has been through it. Fridman notes that both men still look like big kids who love it. White's rule: the UFC does not hire paid talking heads. It hires people who have been in it, done it, and are super passionate. Fridman jokes that maybe there would be no UFC if HBO had not ruined the Tyson walkout. White does not quite grant that, but he says the product would be different. Those years as a boxing fan helped create what the UFC is today.

Fridman argues that unarmed combat has evolved faster in the UFC's three decades than in the previous three hundred years. White agrees. UFC 1 was martial art versus martial art in 1993. He watched it at a house in Boston, thought a no-rules fight sounded like nonsense until it was on, then drifted away. He was too big a boxing fan, and once wrestlers and jiu-jitsu players started holding on the ground, he lost interest. The conversion came later, on the mat.

White, Lorenzo Fertitta, and Frank Fertitta took their first lesson with John Lewis. White was twenty-eight and remembers thinking he could not believe another human being could do that to him on the ground. They trained three or four days a week, "trying to kill each other," and fell in love with the sport. The first class, he says, is the red pill and the blue pill in *The Matrix*: do you want to keep believing this is the world you live in, or see what the real world looks like? You get dominated. Someone treats you like a little kid. Frank Shamrock once put him in side control; the pressure on his chest made him tap, "like there was a car on my chest," with zero effort from Shamrock. Rolling with someone at that level, he says, is the most humbling experience a person can have, especially as a man.

His early go-to was a guillotine; he was comfortable on bottom. He never liked the gi. Once it came off he felt as if he had no submissions, because he could not grab cloth, so he went all no-gi and stayed there. He thinks no-gi is better than gi for the street, a take that will infuriate some academies. Royce Gracie still blew his mind: Ken Shamrock and the big wrestlers against a skinny guy who beat everybody, the best advertisement Gracie jiu-jitsu could have wanted. If he were putting a daughter in a martial art, the answer is jiu-jitsu plus a little Muay Thai. The selling point he offers is blunt. A woman, no matter her size, can put a guy to sleep in three and a half seconds.

The origin story starts at the Hard Rock. White and Frank Fertitta ran into John Lewis; Frank had always wanted to learn ground fighting. They booked Monday, brought Lorenzo, and that was "the beginning of the end." They started meeting fighters and found the stigma was backwards. Most of the athletes had gone to college because they wrestled. Chuck Liddell looked like an ax murderer with a mohawk and had graduated from Cal Poly with honors in accounting. Matt Hughes was a farm boy who actually lived on a farm. White and Lorenzo kept saying that if this were done the right way, it could be big.

The opening was a contract fight. White was negotiating Tito Ortiz and trying to get Chuck Liddell into the UFC; the old owner, Bob Meyrowitz, did not even want Liddell. Meyrowitz snapped that there was no more money, and that he did not know if he could put on one more event. White hung up, called Lorenzo, and said they might be able to buy it, and should. Within two months they owned the UFC for $2 million. The Fertittas later put in another $44 million. White asks Fridman to look at how many lives that investment has changed in twenty-five years.

The next seven or eight years were, in his phrase, the wild, wild west. He was at war every day. MMA promoters in the Netherlands, he says, were car-bombing each other and shooting up houses with machine guns. When the clothing brand Affliction started an MMA promotion, an owner White remembers as Todd Beard texted him every day that he was going to kill him. White's reply was "fuck you." In Demand pay-per-view was a monopoly run by "not good dudes." One of those men later ran DirecTV; that, White says, is why the UFC left DirecTV and went to streaming.

Production was its own fight. The inherited crew shot a Phil Baroni interview in which Baroni exploded. White thought it was awesome and ordered it left in. The crew called it unprofessional. That night he leaned over to Lorenzo, told him to wait for the interview, and it was not there. He got up, kicked the truck door open, and told them that if they ever did that again he would fire every one of them. He fired them anyway and hired a new crew. In an industry without rules, the founder had to fight the broadcast truck too.

When they bought the company, White and the Fertittas knew "jack shit" about production and had two or three weeks to pull off an event. They learned by diving in. They knew what they wanted; they had to build a team that could execute. White says that if you want to talk about what he has accomplished in twenty-five years, he has been really good at building teams. Vision comes first. Without it there is nothing. He is the vision part: a performance institute in Mexico, a Sphere card, whatever is next. Then you hire people to make it real.

Asked why so many fight promotions fail and his did not, White answers with two words: passion and consistency. He still arrives at 9:30 a.m. When they sold in 2016, a lot of people in the company made money and retired. Other than the Fertittas, he made the most. He is still there. The night before this taping he left at 8:30. He works as hard now as he did then; the difference is that he no longer has to sit through the budget meetings he hated, line by line, while the company lost millions a year.

His advice to people who want to "work for myself" and "create my own schedule" is brutal. If that is the thought process, he says, you are never going to be successful. Early on you are involved in everything. There are no days off, no birthdays, no Christmas. He moved the birth of his second son for a Chuck Liddell fight: the date did not work, so they took the baby by C-section early. He was doing this when he was broke and he is doing it now that he is not, because he loves it. The Sphere is the current version of that bet. It will cost a lot, the angles are weird, most people think it cannot be pulled off, and he wants it because it is hard. The octagon will sit in front of the world's biggest screen, on Mexican Independence Day, with the history of combat in Mexico woven through the show, live on pay-per-view, in the building, and in movie theaters.

Joe Rogan, White says, does not care about money. He did the first thirteen UFC shows for free. The pitch, as White remembers it, was almost a joke: you want me to do commentary, meaning I get the best seat in the house and watch these fights for free? Rogan was in. When the company turned around they made it up to him. White found him on a VHS tape. After the purchase he flew to the old New York office, sat with a mountain of cassettes, and popped in an interview from the Keenen Ivory Wayans show. Rogan was there to promote *Fear Factor* and would only talk about the UFC: what UFC fighters would do to the tough guys from martial-arts movies. White decided on the spot that this was the person he needed: not afraid to speak, knew the sport, and was super passionate about it.

Early on, no media would cover them, so White bought radio. Tours meant 3:30 a.m. wake-ups in Vegas for 6:30 a.m. hits in New York, Boston, and Florida. Fighters were terrible at it: tired, sounding as if they did not want to be there, which is death on morning radio. The only two people who could pull the tours off were White and Rogan. On air and later on the broadcast, Rogan walked viewers through the ground game before it happened: the setup, what came next. People at home started to understand. White calls the impact immeasurable. Rogan is the biggest podcaster in the world, on UFC pay-per-views fourteen times a year, and always talking about the sport.

Fridman tells a story that made him teary. About a year earlier, Rogan was getting canceled over something and people did not want him on the fights. On the phone, White offered his resignation. White's version is short. Anybody who is with him knows: when you are with him, he is with you. It is a two-way street. During COVID he would not lay people off, including people who had been with him for twenty years. "This motherfucker will burn" before he would do that. He cannot speak for whoever comes after him. While he is here, the people who have been with him know exactly what is up, and Rogan knows too.

Lorenzo Fertitta is the other long friendship. White says they work because they have two different personalities. White spikes and dips. Lorenzo does not. You could walk in and tell Lorenzo he just lost $10 million, or just won $10 million, and it never changes. They almost balance each other. The things Lorenzo is really good at and the things White is really good at sit on opposite ends of the spectrum. That even keel mattered when the UFC was losing money and it was unknown whether the company would survive.

The timing of the businesses was luck they could not have designed. Station Casinos was cranking, and casino money funded the UFC. In the 2008–09 crash the UFC was killing it and the casino business was hurting. White comes back to the original check: $2 million, then another $44 million, and a sport that now reaches people in places from which the UFC can get a fighter anywhere on earth. Fridman adds that the company did not only make money. It catalyzed how humans fight.

At the UFC 299 post-fight press conference, White told fighters who complain about even-odds matchups that those are the nights legends are made. Behind the scenes, he says, fighters are a paranoid bunch who decide the company is trying to get them beat. The UFC does not determine who wins. If it did, it would be the WWE. White is "the bells and whistles guy": as many people as possible know you are fighting Saturday, who you are, who you face, and why anyone should care. Once the door shuts, it is on the fighter. In other organizations, he claims, the inmates run the asylum. If stars do not want a fight badly enough, those companies do not push. The UFC books the best matchups it can. Veterans still in the top ten have young killers coming. Everyone thought Dustin Poirier was in big trouble against Benoît Saint Denis. Then Poirier did what he did. "That's what makes fucking legends."

Being a named underdog, White says, is often good for the long-term story. One hundred out of one hundred people "knew" Israel Adesanya would beat Sean Strickland. Then Strickland won. Conor McGregor heard he could not wrestle and could not defend a takedown. Khabib was the favorite; a McGregor win would have put him in the greatest-of-all-time conversation without argument. White was hammered for a promo that included the bus attack. Media said he was pandering to violence. He says he was telling the story of how they got there and how bad the blood was. That, to him, is what the UFC does best: the *why*. Fight week is Groundhog Day: Monday through Saturday, then home Sunday, then Monday again, fifty-two weeks a year. Whatever takes your attention on a Saturday night is the competitor.

Asked who is in the GOAT conversation, White does not pause: Jon Jones. He has never been beaten in the octagon. He destroyed light heavyweight when it was the toughest class in the sport, then won easily at heavyweight. Longevity counts, because the sport passes people by. Dominance counts too, and White's opinion of Jones changed when Alexander Gustafsson dragged him into deep water, hit him with things he had never been hit with, and, White bets, had Jones thinking he was going to die in the late rounds. Jones kept going. Daniel Cormier, White believes, does not get the credit he deserves because Jones beat him twice. Khabib had the potential to be in the running and did not stick around long enough, partly because of injuries; he is still one of the all-time greats.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Conor McGregor, White says, has literally no ugly. If McGregor showed up on time, there would not be one bad thing White could say. Put a gun to his head and demand the bad: the guy does not show up on time, and sometimes he does. McGregor never refused a late replacement and never used a pullout to squeeze another $200,000 or a million. When José Aldo fell out, White and Lorenzo walked into the Vegas rental; McGregor had just woken up in his underwear and said he was going to the gym, tell him who he is fighting when he is done. From the dole and plumbing to a smart businessman, White calls him one of the best partners in the history of the sport, the first legit megastar, the one who set Europe, Australia, Canada, and much of the world on fire. McGregor needed Khabib, Khabib needed McGregor, Jones needed Ciryl Gane. White could line up no-name bums for Jones, the way other organizations do. Then they would have nothing to talk about.

White and Trump are friends, and White discovered the fandom the hard way. After the purchase, venues did not want the UFC. Their first event was at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, twice, back to back, at a moment when the Trump brand was high and the UFC brand, White says, could not go lower. Trump showed up for the first fight and stayed until the last. After that, any good thing in White's career brought a call: congratulations on the *New York Times* front page, I always knew you guys were going to do it. In 2015 or 2016 Trump asked him to speak at the Republican National Convention and said he would understand a no. Everyone told White not to do it. He went anyway, because the man had been great to him. He considers Trump one of his very good friends.

After the election, White would be in the matchmaking room and his secretary would shout that the president was on the phone. Or the car would pick up: this is the White House. Trump wanted to talk about the fight that was coming or the fight that had happened. White's summary is that Trump is the most resilient human being he has ever met, unfazed by the public fire. He has only seen him broken once. The day Ivana Trump died, White called as soon as he heard, and for the first time Trump was "a mess." Asked whether Trump wins the next election, White will not predict. Politics, he says, is the dirtiest, scummiest thing on the planet, dirtier than the early fight game. He is rooting for him. He does not know how it plays out.

Fridman trained with both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and asks whether that fight could have been good. White does not hedge: it would have been the biggest fight ever done. Two of the most powerful, wealthiest men in the world, in a business looked at as geeky, talking about facing each other in the octagon instead of suing each other. White took real time. He had projections and numbers, looked at venues, was on the phone with the Colosseum in Italy. "These guys were serious and this was something that was really gonna happen." For the short window it was alive, he was having a blast.

Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul is a different kind of spectacle. White loves Tyson and is not a fan of anyone fighting at their age, but Tyson is a grown man. White had spoken to Tyson's wife a couple of days earlier: he is taking it seriously and training. Why fight when Tyson already makes money outside the ring and still stops a restaurant when he walks in? White thinks the offers become impossible to refuse. Fighters who get in for the right reason, he says, get in for greatness. The money follows. Others want to be famous and get paid, which is their life; the ones who are beloved and remembered are the ones who wanted to be great. Tyson under Cus D'Amato was a student of the game. Then superstardom turned, and fame is something some people handle and some people do not.

Fame's split screen, for White, is Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar. After their fight on *The Ultimate Fighter*, everything blew up. Griffin dealt with fame well; Bonnar did not. That night the rest of the show was a disaster. Diego Sanchez ran through Kenny Florian in seconds in the co-main, and the undercard was nothing to talk about. Then Griffin and Bonnar went toe-to-toe in a slugfest live on free television, when cable still mattered. People picked up the phone: are you watching this? The numbers climbed. The decision was razor thin. The crowd stomped until it sounded like a train and chanted for one more round. White and the Fertittas gave both men contracts on the spot. "It couldn't have been a more perfect fight at the most perfect time."

Spike TV had been a problem all season. Halfway through, the network president was fired. A runaway hit usually gets commercials, billboards, bus sides in Los Angeles and New York. They got none of that, and did not know if there would be a second season. After that fight, White did not care: they were going to end up somewhere. They did not make it out of the building. Spike signed them in the alley on a napkin. The prize for winning the show was a Kia. Griffin drove it to something like 200,000 miles. White says Kia's biggest mistake was not shooting a commercial with him; the UFC reached out, and Kia blew it.

What people were watching, White thinks, was two real fighters who wanted to win badly enough that the Kia, the contract, and the caution fell away. The best fights in any combat sport happen in the deep rounds, when fatigue makes you doubt yourself, wonder if you can finish the round, and then wonder if you are going to die. Technique flies out. They go on autopilot to fight and win. Fridman, who has competed in jiu-jitsu, says exhaustion makes cowards of us all; the heroic act is to say forget it and keep going. White watches that every Saturday. The people in this sport are a sliver of the population. The ones who make the top five are "incredibly unique, special human beings."

White likes gambling and will say so. Biggest wins: a million-dollar hand one night at Mandalay Bay, and a summer he beat Caesars for $12 million, blackjack. The loss that taught him was at the Rio. Dinner, drinks, the high-limit room, more drinks. He went home thinking he had dropped $80,000. The next day the host called about the suite. White told him not to get comfortable with the eighty grand. Silence, then: you lost $3 million last night. White's credit line was a million and a half. He had made them call the GM and started calling him a pussy. "Yeah, no, that sounds like something I would do." He has not drunk while playing cards since. He frames 2024 as a war, each night a battle, the year the tally. Winning is great in business, sports, and gambling. Losing is never fun, and if a loss puts you in a deep depression, gambling is not for you. If social media does the same, stay off it. You have to take both in stride, strap the shoes on, and go to war again.

Every day you get out of bed, he says, life is standing there to kick you in the face: a flat tire, late for work, anything. You cannot curl up. He straps up for war, knows a bunch of bad things will be waiting at the office, and after that will probably go to the casino and get into another war. He thrives in chaos. People talk about retiring; he asks what he would do. He likes to battle, to win, to come back from losses, to build brands, to set short-term and long-term goals and knock them down. Power Slap has been "shit on" more than the UFC ever was. In thirteen months he calls it the most successful thing he has ever been a part of, and he loves the negativity. "I eat that shit for breakfast." Three or four nights a week he posts the same turn on Summerlin Parkway, the whole city in lights, a moment of gratitude after an incredible day. He cannot tell whether Las Vegas was built for him or he was built for it.

The movie that changed the trajectory of his life is not *Casino*, though that would be his Vegas pick. It is 1985's *Vision Quest*: a kid nobody knew in high school who cuts from 178 to the 160s to take on the scariest wrestler in the room. White recites the classroom poem about the girl in the park who realizes she will die someday, and the people who think they have time and waste it. He recites the Pelé speech from the older coworker who has been riding the kid and then, in a cheap apartment, cries at the thought of a human being kicking a ball into a net while a stadium goes crazy. The movie spoke to him on so many levels that he calls it probably the most underrated film of all time. They held a thirtieth-anniversary screening in Spokane with the cast. He found out after the fact and was furious. He would have flown there in thirty seconds. He was not even into wrestling. He did not need to be. The story is an ordinary person spending a year to take on someone everyone says cannot be beaten — the grammar of a UFC promo.

White is fifty-four and says it flew by. A quote on the gym wall is from *Rocky III*: there is no tomorrow. Get it done today. He is not afraid of death, "not even a little bit," though he does not know if that will hold in a hospital bed. He does not even like to sleep. Life is so good he does not want to go to bed; he wishes he could do twenty-four hours. Watching thousands of fights has taught him something simple. Color, country, language: we are all human beings, and fighting is in our DNA. In Mexico, in the expensive seats, a fight broke out and security never came. The men gassed out, put the chairs back, and sat down. White got up from his table and watched the fight at the fights. That was his thesis going into the purchase. He believed it would work everywhere. "Thank God we were right." Fridman closes with Muhammad Ali: impossible is a big word thrown around by small men, not a fact, an opinion, a dare.