 it's hard to imagine that the UFC is turning 30 years old later this year thanks to the ultimate fighting championship terms like tapping out and mixed martial arts are now household terms behind it all was UFC president Dana White recently Michael Ozanian sat down with the emperor of the octagon to discuss UFC's first 30 years Dana what is the 30th anniversary of UFC what do you mean to you you know obviously it's it's been amazing for me it's been a great ride and I don't I don't look at these milestones the way that I probably should because I'm always looking at what's next and what's still possible and what still needs to be done but you know to to have been here for 30 years and I've been around for like 23 of them is is uh it's pretty amazing yeah I want to get to the future because there's a lot happening real soon but I just want to go back because I know you know when the frikita brothers came in in 2001 and bought UFC for two million dollars I mean the thing is teetering on bankruptcy you know it's a famous story that everybody knows but as we look at it now it's it's a 12 billion dollar so enterprise and you know there's a great story here of building an enormous brand and going against the odds to do it as you look back today what would you say were the key things in the success of building this business well we we we stuck to our guns we we built a a business that we believed you know we were big fight fans from day one boxing fans and uh there were a lot of things that I liked about boxing a lot of things that I didn't like about boxing so I used both in the way that that the UFC was built we stacked cards not just one fight we're selling at the at the end of the night the card is stacked with tons of gray fights uh you know you don't have to build up these guys with this mystique of you know they're 49 and 0 with 47 knockouts and if they lose one that's the end of the the whole mystique and they're done you know these guys fight the absolute best from top to bottom all the way up to the to the championship so when somebody wins the title you absolutely know that that's the best guy in the world because even when you have you know guys in boxing who are world champions there's multiple world champions with different sanctioning organizations who don't fight each other and you know you never really know who's the best that's not the case here when you think about boxing in the old days they did fights in vegas atlantic city madden square garden and sometimes la we literally took our fights everywhere all over the world to every major city in america uh you name it we we exposed the product to everybody over the last 23 years there's a lot of excitement about this uh putting ufc and wwe into one enterprise and and having it be publicly traded you know spun off from endeavor and publicly traded by the end of this year i would imagine uh even though the two will still be run independently as promotions but but when you have two really strong brands like that are there a lot of possibilities in terms of synergies in terms of sponsorships you know licensing other things outside of the ring if you will yeah i think that when you look at the synergies between the two companies i'm going to do what i always do when i continue to run this business the way that i always have they will continue to run their business the way they always have an obviously ori and endeavor are going to add a lot of value over there on the sponsorship licensing side and whatever else it may be but then when you start talking about you know when we roll into cities you could have you know a city that wants ufc wwe and you could do uh bull riding that same weekend i mean there's just you know when you look at you know the parent company and all the things that we're creating and building inside the parent company it's uh this thing's going to turn into a sports juggernaut how are you viewing ufc's possibilities right now in terms of potential media rights yeah well we've always been big risk takers obviously back in the fratida days and now with the ori and wme days too because when you think about it at that time when we did the deal with espn plus we were butting heads really badly with direct tv and the cable systems out there and they basically pushed us to the point ori and i had talked and we said you know what let's just go espn streaming you know we were going on to a streaming platform which was incredibly risky at the time even though you were doing it with disney and espn massive risk these guys are launching this thing we were basically you know helped them launch espn plus but we were so tired of of the cable side and the satellite side being basically pigs i mean you know for so many years we decided to to just go for it and dive into the streaming and doing it with espn plus my goal and my dream for this thing is i believe that there's no ceiling on fighting i think that when you have the right fight in the right place in the right time you know the whole world wants to watch and pretty soon that's going to be a reality where we will all be watching the same fight at the same time and how many viewers are you gonna have i mean there's eight billion people on earth so what is the number let's get into some brand extension here power slap which would stop uh you know it's separate from ufc i understand it's your baby um tell me what was the genesis of power slap so i am like 2016 1718 i'm going through social media and i start to see these slapping events on there you know coming out of poland and russia and i'm like this is crazy so i start to take a deeper dive i start to look into it and on youtube this thing looks like it's shot on a flip phone and it's filmed in a barn and it has 350 million views i'm like that's like a justin beaver video how does this thing have this many views so i was fascinated by it so i end up reaching out to my my go-to guys the fritida brothers and i said listen i'm into this thing i think i want to do it and they said if you're in we're in then the pandemic hits so you know i'm facing all these challenges with the ufc at the time and then as soon as we come out of the pandemic uh i i told those guys i'm ready to do this do you want to do it so we did and and the thing is the absolute juggernaut on social media we did the first season we you know we filmed it you know we have this this blueprint or formula or whatever you want to call it on how to launch this stuff it works every time you know you create these reality shows uh that that lead into a finale and that's how you start to build stars and start to build a sport and i did it again i mean the social media numbers i don't know my team sent them over to you it's insane on tiktok isn't it it's just like the demographics as i was looking at the numbers it seems the demographics are a little younger perhaps than ufc but there's a pretty big crossover but the numbers on tiktok are absolutely insane think about this we're about this thing has existed for like six months and if you look at the numbers that we're pulling i mean just on let me get into this so so during the same time period as the nhl was in the middle of their uh uh conference finals right when you look at total videos with over a million views for the nhl was six powerslap had 31 total videos with over two million views the nhl had one powerslap had 20 we beat them in views 25 million to 90 million right now think about game four through seven for the celtics and the heat massive right historic games and total video views over a million for the heat they had 20 the celtics had 29 powerslap had 31 total views they had 65 million we had 90 million i mean if we did half of what they did it would be a story but to beat these guys at this point in time and right now on instagram powerslap has almost a million uh followers right the golden knights don't have a million followers and and and they've been to the to the stanley kepp finals twice and they've they got a six year head start on this and i could go on for days i mean when i when you talk about how this stuff works on social media you you almost think you think we're lying that the numbers are so big it's astonishing but when you look at this it sounds like uh you saw some parallels between the very early stages of ufc when you jumped in and this and sort of the same sort of criticism people saying why it wouldn't work but yet the same reasons why you thought it really would work it was identical identical it literally the exact same criticism the negativity the press going after it and attacking it you know politicians you name it it was it was identical to the ufc so i've been in this position before you know i don't fold or crack and these type of situations fought through all the noise and now in six months we have turned this into a profitable business and this thing is is on its way how is this journey though changed you the most significant ways because it must have been some ways yeah i i mean i've listen i'm still a lot of people that worked at the ufc you know we had sort of like a a small microsoft type deal here you know what i mean in 2016 when we sold a lot of people that worked here that had been here early on cached out and they all took off and you know didn't work again and or took you know five six years off and are starting to you know die back in and do some stuff i've been in the trenches the whole time you know i i i get here every day at 8 30 in the morning i don't leave till 7 um you know i'm taking on more more responsibilities like with the power slap and other things that i'm involved in with the fratida brothers and and uh i love it i love every minute of this though the way that this is has changed me i i guess i would say is that um you know obviously i've learned a lot about business and people and you name it but i've had a blast well listen man i love you i i can't thank you enough for your time because i know how crazy and busy you are and uh i just hope that as power slap and other stuff continues to keep succeeding you know maybe in the not too distant future we could check in again quickly and give us an update here for the sports money show i appreciate the support very much thank you buddy good to see you