The Ledger, every show

“And the only way it pays off, unless I'm wrong. Now, George Gilder would scream at me. He goes, every technology has created more jobs. This is the only technology at this level of spend. You have to be taking jobs. Jobs have to go away.”

“I'm having my normal every six month meeting, lunch, dinner with Elon, and we're talking about AI. He said this to me, he goes, life cannot be disrupted. And I said, okay. I have two ears. So then we're talking about AI and he goes to me, all right, do you hav…”

“It's kind of like a four-day work week now, probably going down to three. I was seeing Elon and seeing the robots, probably three-day work week for full employment.”

“You know, what it's going to do, whether it be Sora, Grok, all the, it's just going to make production costs, filming, DPs, costumes. I mean, it's just, and then you're going to be able to, Either bring Betty Davis back or Elizabeth Taylor. It's going to happe…”

“Well, we sent the bad letter to Sam. Like stop using the UFC and the WWE and so on.”

“They're gonna have to pay. I think, unless the Supreme Court says something.”

“I don't know how to write an algorithm for AI. I don't know how to build a data center. I'm not in a chip business. I just know how to, Create really great live events, monetize them, have a great user experience. And it's the opposite because data says data c…”

“So if we do that now, I think it can be as big or bigger than the UFC and the WWE and they're big.”

“And what the hand could do beyond, I mean, it's, it does what you and I do. And then he showed me a couple of them that could fight and throw punches and kicks and the balance and the pushing. Unbelievable.”

“Was quote unquote merging with William Morris, forty four million dollars paid out the CFO and Jim Wyatt. They never thought we were going to write a check for twenty million dollars and have the votes to fire them. Patrick Weissel and I did that and got the d…”

“When you look at the potential field of potential candidates for presidents, and there's some, I mean, Gretchen Whitmore, I know Josh, I know a lot of these guys, and they're all very qualified on a global basis. And he is as relentless and as driven as I am i…”

“Dwayne Johnson, Mark Wahlberg, Dana White, Pat McAfee, they're all going to become their own channels. I do believe actually, I don't know if that's in two years. Or in seven years.”

“I think the podcasting business is going to become like the cable business. It's going to become like Oprah.”

“Well, they'll just change. They'll go from PE firms owning. 10%. 35. Yeah. And they'll, instead of, they can only take a billion dollars of debt out. They'll take, they can take two billion dollars. I mean. Yeah.”

“Sam has made a trillion two in obligations. He has eight hundred million subs. Let's just say he does fourteen billion in revenue. We'll probably lose five billion.”

“You'll probably see that reincarnated through people with podcasts, if they want to.”

“Being in the representation business, whether it be Marty Scorsese or Dwayne Johnson or Mark Wahlberg or Peter Berg or Greg, a whole host of my clients, Aaron Sork, enables me to make The deals over at TKO because I'm in the conversation with YouTube, Amazon, …”

“If you have a show that goes into syndication and it gets six million dollars an episode, you can't make five, six hundred million dollars anymore”

“I think a bunch of them are going to have to adapt, and I think for some of them, pricing is going to have to come down, because I don't think the U.S. Domestic market is the right place for them.”

“ESPN fires John Skipper, who was always shining me on that he wanted it. He never wanted it. Bob Iger and Kevin Mayer say we want it cause we're going to go direct.”

“Drive times now are 11 to four across America. Hotel bookings Thursdays way up. And there's a lot of more data points to this. So the weekend starts Thursday now. And we're, you know, 2025, maybe 2027, they start Wednesday.”

“And if we do that, I think fighters are going to make more money because right now you don't know any great fighters. It's not like you can't name one. We think we can do that. And then boxers will make more money.”

“If I'm a betting man, first of all, if I'm a betting man, I'm betting on that dude. I bet I'm on SpaceX, X, XAI, Twitter.”

“I don't believe that business people have legacies. I think Elon will have a legacy. I think, Jeff Bezos will have a legacy. I think Steve Jobs has a legacy. Probably mostly it's, you know, presidents, leaders, maybe some actors”

“He says, I think that the Chernin, they were going to pay, I think it was 1.9 billion. And he said, we're paying two, four. I said two, four. Why don't we pay two, one? He goes, we're going to make it so they can't say no and they can't go back. Cause they don…”

“But the price of sports, for the end user, Is going to be more. Therefore then the price of, there's going to be tiers at Netflix, you know, with the sports bet, which the sports tier you pay, you know, they're going to have to make a decision.”

“There's this thing called energy and energy delivery that I'm not sure yet. Is there for it to be in the next at full AGI capacity?”

“I've started this new business called Mari, trying to make that into the next live nation.”

“My big mistake here a conglomerate. The marketplace just didn't understand it.”

“I don't believe that traditional business is going away for a long time, because a lot of us sports guys have, the NFL, the NBA, has still sold stuff there, plus also sold it to the Amazons of the world”

“That will now start happening With people like you, other podcasters. That, that's just the natural evolution because of where broadcast television is and cable television is. Manufacturers are going to have to get to an audience.”

“I went up to see the robots, because I want to do A UFC fight with his robots and the robots.”

“When we bought UFC on the current trajectory, it was 20 times. If I made the proper domestic deal, I could take, take the leverage down.”

“Comcast didn't want it. Warners didn't want it. And Paramount had not decided what they were going to be.”

“He said, you have to at your age, Ari, now know when you're on the field and know when you're off the field. The problem in the past, It was helpful to a point, but you can't get really successful. I was always on the field.”

“People with taste that know this business that know kind of what an audience, a mass audience likes is hard. And so if you have taste and you're seeing a lot of programming, you can say there's talent there. That actually has value.”

“Well, we, we've started, we've announced the boxing league with Paramount and we do the big kind of like huge super events.”

“One, he loves it. He loves it. I mean, he really does love combat sports. Two is, he's not scared... He is just like a unique individual that, you know, He's not partisan. He's loyal. He has a vision. He backs your play. If you back, you know, he's just that g…”

“We're going to be a lot more distribution. There's only so much content creators at the time. Content was going to change and expand, but there's limited just supply and demand. Prices are going up for creators.”

“When he looks at a balance sheet, he sees a different language than most dudes, like, and sees the value proposition and has been like, not 30% right, like 70% right. That's fucking rare.”

“And I think what's going to happen, you'll have AI companies come in and look at all the data and you won't be able to, nobody's going to, you're going to understand. You're going to triangulate and understand There's something happening over here with this pi…”

“Because Silver Lake just wanted the WW that William Morris to be, he just wanted an endeavor to be an agency. So he was one selling down the events and a bunch of other assets that we wanted to buy at TKO. To pay down the debt and live is where I wanted to be.”

“I don't want to buy a studio. I don't want to buy a sports team.”

“They were making fifteen million dollars a year from spike. And I think the first deal I made at spike was I increased it to 75, something like that. And we made a video game deal, which they never had, you know, after 20 years, you know, it was, we moved it t…”

“Oh, I mean, our pay-per-views were getting like a million views. I mean, it was insane.”

“Cause you know, I put all the chips in the middle for four, four, 4.2 billion dollars in the middle. Clients were investing my biggest investors investing.”

“You're doing it at for the office. You're doing it at Comcast for that's the window. It's five hundred million dollars for the new window.”

“In the Super Bowl, go to Tiffany's and get a blue football and have 10 people with you and get a lecture from Peyton Manning and walk on the field pregame and come out with the team and be on the stage for weigh-ins at the UFC and sit at the table with Dana Wh…”