Front Burner - How the UFC became a stage for Trump

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

At Donald Trump’s election victory event in 2024, he was flanked on stage by a collection of family, senior staff, and Ultimate Fighting Championship president and CEO, Dana White. The UFC has, in many ways, functioned as the sporting arm of the MAGA movement. Fighters and the organization itself have pledged incredible support to Trump, and the President has become a ringside fixture at fights. This union is set to culminate later this month with a cage fight scheduled to be held on the White House south lawn. Luke Thomas is an MMA journalist and host of the Morning Kombat podcast. He joins the show to talk about the upcoming White House fight, Trump’s decades-long presence in the world of combat sports and how the UFC - once maligned as a bloodsport - became one of the most important cultural institutions in the conservative movement.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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That's some audio from Donald Trump's victory party on Election Day in 2024. This is karma, ladies and gentlemen. He deserves this. They deserve it as a family. On stage were family, Trump officials, and the president and CEO of a billion-dollar combat sports empire. That man is Dana White of the ultimate fighting championship or UFC. That's whose voice you just heard. The UFC has been described as the sporting arm of the Mag of Movement.

Fighters have pledged incredible support to Trump, and the president has become a ringside fixture. And the culmination of all of this is set to be held at the White House later this month. A cage fight on the South Long. This is a little different for these political people. and but these are real these are real warriors. Now, Trump's story with the UFC in combat sports is decades long, but in recent years, the politics of the UFC have crystallized into something more right-wing and more radical.

And their events have become a landing spot for conservative leaders from Canada to the U.S. to Russia and beyond. Luke Thomas is an MMA journalist and host of the Morning Combat podcast. Today, he joins the show to talk about Trump's White House fight and how a once marginal so-called bloodsport became one of the most important cultural institutions in the conservative movement. Luke, Kate, it's great to have you. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. We should begin with the fact, I think, that there is currently a structure on the White House lawn that looks to me at least like a pair of kind of stars, star-spangled banner arches, literally growing out of the White House. lawn, it's, it's enormous. Also a little bit like a roller coaster maybe. And all of this is part

of the set for a UFC fight, which is to be held on the White House lawn and on Donald Trump's birthday later this month. And just talk to me a little bit more about this event and its origins. Yeah, well, as you describe it, it is certainly huge. I live in Washington, D.C., and I've lived here, I've had the strange honor because most people here are quite transient, but I've been here since the 80s. I have certainly never seen anything quite like this. There have been obviously a million things that over time have been constructed on the National Mall, which is just on the other side of Constitution Avenue. The Washington Monument is right there. I could start this answer in 2016. A lot of people will say, you know, for example, U.S. President Dana White is Helbik, the claim

that he's not political and people will often respond with, well, how can that be? He spoke at three different Republican national conventions, including having the last role before the president himself came out, which is unusual for anyone other than the spouse of the president. I'm in the tough guy business. And this man is the toughest, most resilient human being that I've ever met in my life.

But that really does not, this is, that is largely a ceremonial, but interesting, but ceremonial fact. The beginning of the UFC White House story is January 6th. January 6th,

as we all recall, you can call it a riot, you can call it an insurrection. It may be some combo of the two. It was this terrible event for American democracy. Donald Trump at that time hits his lowest poll numbers. He leaves the office. He doesn't even go to Joe Biden's inauguration. You see him at CPAC one month later, briefly, and then you see him about six months after that for another CPAC event.

But the first non-CAC event he goes to is the trilogy between Dustin Poirier and Connor McGregor. And what you end up finding out is that through a series of these events where he shows up, he gets a special walkout. The commentators talk about how great he is. The fighters quite literally jenniflected before him. Making his way to the world famous Octagon flanked by UFC CEO, Dana White, 45, soon to be 47, president-elect Donald Trump. He's constantly on camera. He's not sitting the suite. He is ringside. He gets his own kid. This is true. His own kid rock walkout music. And what you'll notice that ends up happening is a rehabilitative act begins to happen around Trump. Certainly not the UFC's not the only originator of this, but they're one of the key

architects, certainly outside of the political world. And also just think realistically, if you're running a Donald Trump campaign, which I'll get to in just a second, you can have a lot of money. Where can you go to buy this kind of exposure? The answer is nowhere. So then leading up to the election, he's still going on these routine visits to UFC events, including around times where he's being indicted, around where he's being convicted. All of it is happening in close succession. They propel him back to office. And this is their political reward.

This is what this event exists as. That is its entire identity. They're trying to make this out to be something like, you know, Trump is such a fight fan that this would happen. I don't like Trump in any capacity whatsoever. I will admit, however, he is a real fight fan. I don't think that's very much in dispute. But it's got nothing to do with it. This is about leveraging the power of the presidency and the federal government to reward people who helped return this political project to power.

That's so interesting. I don't know if I've ever heard anybody lay out so clearly the central role that they think the UFC played in his rehabilitation. That was fascinating. You know, this event on the White House lawn, in what ways do you think the U.S. President sees this event as beneficial to him right now? Well, his poll numbers, I mentioned that the lowest they were during the first Trump administration was from a Gallup poll in January of 2021, right on the right on the edge here around January 6th. And they hit 34%. Now, Gallup, interestingly, does no longer do presidential polling, I think, out of fear for retribution from the president himself. but other folks do. So it's not an apples to apples comparison what I'm about to say, but it gives you

some idea of the problem. His current approval rating, according to a you gov poll, is 34%. So we're either at or pretty close to the bottom of where he was, circa January 6th, just as before we recorded this podcast, just an hour or two before this, it was revealed that Iran is walking away from negotiations. This guy is struggling. I think his critics might say he is setting the world and the country on fire, but even his own supporters.

And you can see this in polling, for example, with young men, one of the audiences, the UFC was very effective in helping to, you know, getting to a hard to reach portion of the electorate. He has, his polling has collapsed with them. It's collapsed with Latinos. It's collapsed with a lot of people who are willing to give it a shot following Biden. It is really, really in a bad place. He needs wins.

He needs wins. And I think he loves what the UFC audience in part had done for him, but what those UFC broadcasts do to magnify his strength with various communities, to magnify his identity as a guy who is macho, to magnify any kind of way. I mean, the amount of reputation laundering and image improvement that is available through these things, it's very difficult to specifically quantify in units that I can share with you on a chart, but look at what Trump is doing. Look at the level of investment he is allowing to be made in this process. This tells you exactly what he thinks of how good this treatment is for his

image. You know, you've been reporting on combat sports for nearly two decades now, right? And on the USC specifically for much of that time. And for a long time, I know both mixed. martial arts and the UFC were viewed as a kind of public taboo, right? It's something that was undignified in a way, a blood sport. At one point, it was banned in large parts of the U.S. Former U.S. Republican Senator John McCain famously referred to it as human cockfighting. And can you just talk to me about what the UFC was like at the beginning and the role played by current CEO, Dana White? Yeah. So just to set the tone, the UFC as a thing in its early stages, started in 1993.

Dana White does not enter the picture until 2001. So it should be noted, there is a significant and real portion that happens before he gets there that he has really nothing to do with. It should also be noted that the UFC's turnaround did not happen until 2005. And it's strictly the result of their appearance on Spike TV with what was then considered a very novel act, which was the Ultimate Fighter reality show. Do you want to be a fighter? That's the question. That's why I'm here.

It's not about cutting weight. It's not about living in a fucking house. It's about do you want to be a fighter? It's not all signing autographs and banging broads when you get out of here. So the reason why I bring this all up is to say there's a life of UFC before Dana White ever gets there. There's a bit of a life afterwards where they're still struggling mightily to turn it around. It was really only that thing in 2005 that did it. The early UFC was barbaric. I mean, most of the criticisms people made about it were quite real.

There was very few rules. You could do hair pulling. There were some things you couldn't do, you know, the worst of the worst, like eye gouging and whatnot. But what ended up happening, what the critics really missed about it was that it was answering an age-old question, which was what works in a fight. And a lot of different martial arts have very different competing ideas about this. And it wasn't until you removed the rules within each of those composite sports, taekwondo, karate, whatever, jujitsu, you name it. You remove all those rules and you basically create an open system where anybody can use anything. And when you did that, you got some really interesting answers about what we thought worked in fighting and what didn't.

That is what propelled it forward. But it could not figure out a way very effectively to make itself palatable to regulators during a long stretch of its time until about the year 2000. And they really got, that's when they got, for example, they got put in New Jersey at a Trump facility before Dana White even gets there. It was actually the different owners who were. the ones to get that. It had nothing to do with Trump. It was just that New Jersey had a very, very prestigious commission. So for them to be able to do it was a sign that they were running towards regulation that they were trying to clean up their act and they were making some progress. They get bought out in 2001 with Dana White and his billionaire friends and partners,

the Frater brothers, Lorenzo and Frank Fortita. And again, they do not have immediate success, but they are trying to run further and further towards regulation. I will give Dana White and the regime he came from credit, they went a very long way trying to go state by state by state to get as everything regulated as possible. It took quite a long while to get there. And then they hit paydirt in 2005 with the advent of the ultimate fighter.

But it took a long time for the act to get cleaned up. It took a long time to convince regulators. And it was not a very linear process. There were fits and starts the entire way. And just Dana White as a character here and as a really central figure, How does he compare to the commissioners or presidents of other major sports organizations like the NBA or NFL or NHL? He doesn't in any way.

People want to give him that role because they're trying to find some kind of, you know, North Star that they can recognize in sporting architecture as a way to understand him. Let me tell you something I've learned two decades covering combat sports, not just MMA. This is true about boxing as well. these are not sports as extensions of sporting culture. That is not what these are. These are sports as extension of vice culture. And once you understand that difference, it changes the way you see everything.

Dana White is not a commissioner in any sense that anyone would ever understand. He's a fight promoter. Let me just say this as clearly as I possibly can. Okay. I don't care which fight promoter it is, and especially if they're good, fight promoters, it would be extremely unwise to believe anything they say at any point ever

without double checking. That is what we're talking about here. You actually can't even be good at the job unless you're professionally quite gifted at lying. And so he, I'm not saying that's his only skill. There's a lot more that goes into it. There's talent identification. There's forming deals with television companies. There's changing how the sport is seeing. in the public. There's a lot that goes into it. But when people try to compare him to like Roger Goodell and whatnot, it's like, I'm not saying that Roger Goodell doesn't play fast and loose with the truth, but there is a very different relationship he has with the world and the media than Dana White. Anyone at any level who promotes fights for a living is absolutely not entitled to the benefit of

the doubt on anything they say ever, ever. And I think, I think if you understand him in the way that people in the fight business understand him, the good. Goodell or the Adam Silver comparisons, they make no sense. And did you say earlier that you have to think about it as vice culture? Can you just tell me more about what you mean by that? I looked up the history of regulation in various states. So the MMA is, well, MMA inboxing. The way it works is if you want to put a fight on, pick a city, let's say Atlanta, right?

You want to put a fight on in Atlanta. You have to go to the Georgia Commission to do that. So there's a state-by-state commission system that grants, hey, do your cornermen have license. Do you as a fight promoter have license? Like all these kinds of things, but it's a state-by-state model. And the reason why that is important to understand is, I looked up the history of like some of the earlier ones and like, for example, New York's commission, which is also quite important. And it came around, you know, pre-depression era United States when there was a problem with too much gambling and, you know, unscrupulous fight promoters taking advantage of athletes or whatever

you want to call them back at the, you know, in the early part of the 20th century. Like, this is where it comes out of. When polite society leaves, impolite society fills in. And this is why, for example, historically, the mob has also always been associated with boxing. These are not unfair association. So when you understand this is not the cousins so much of basketball, but the extension of like casino culture, it makes a lot more sense about who comprises this activity. Let's see if Toronto advisors know their group insurance providers. Oh, excuse me. Who has extensive expertise in both traditional group benefits and special risk solutions?

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No, not at all. In fact, quite the opposite. They made, you know, it's funny, right? They made a pitch before the ultimate fighter, but it really kicked into high gear after the ultimate fighter of maximum palatibility. You know, yeah, of course, probably more young men are going to watch MMA than other demos. But one thing that they really wanted to drive home was that they had something special for everybody. They really wanted to cast a really wide net.

And part of what that meant was having governmental relations that knew that, you know, like all rich and powerful people do on some level, which is you're going to have to play the levels and just see what works. So, for example, they were quite famous for the fact that they had a very good relationship with, he's obviously deceased now, but Senator Harry Reid out of Las Vegas, in fact, the airport is named for him there. He was a famous fight fan. I don't know how many UFC events he ever went to, if any, but they had a good working relationship with him, let's say. Or if the governor of Nevada was either Republican or Democrat, they would work with him. It's really not until 2016 where White sort of declares his allegiance to Trump and then begins to steer the organization in that direction that you get a much clearer political partisanship that's viewable.

Yeah. You know, I know that in the world of combat sports, the WWE is kind of looked down upon, but I do think it's important to bring up because in many ways, this is where Donald Trump's relationship with fighting as a kind of spectacle really begins. The WWE's marquee event, WrestleMania, was twice held at a Trump property in the late 80s. And Trump himself was a character in WWE fights, like coming out into the ring and perform. performing alongside wrestlers. Donald Trump is in a world he is not familiar with. This is not real estate. And just something I found particularly interesting is the degree to which some have argued that the world of wrestling may actually be responsible for the way that Trump came to present himself in public

over the years in wrestling. As you'll know, there's this concept called K-Fabe, which is essentially about the theatrical element of pro-wrestling with the blatant least-stage fights and exaggeration. storylines that are presented to the audience is real. And there's this article that argues that Trump would not have been president without K-Fabe. Let me just read you a quick bit of it.

Donald Trump was portraying the pro wrestling character Donald Trump. He was cutting promos, like doing the equivalent of what a WrestleMania would be against Jeb Bush. He would give them all nicknames, like The Rock gave wrestlers nicknames. He was demeaning them. And do you think it's true that there's like a certain performance element to all of this that endears itself to Trump in some way? That's a great question.

And I'm not a big pro wrestling fan, to be very clear. I have nothing against it, but it's not for me. But my understanding is he's in the WWE Hall of Fame, right? So sort of consider that for a second. We're not just talking some kind of marginal figure in that space. Somebody at least has some history on top of that. You'll also note he put his hat in the ring and for a time was working essentially as a fight promoter, for example, to get the Holyfield and Foreman fight at one of his casinos and had to really

aggressively get after it to do it. I think we've staged the most successful fights. We've done better than anybody else at staging the event. We have an incredible arena. Nobody can compete with the arena we have. And I think that's the primary reason they came to us. They love the way we do it. And I don't think I have anything.

So like going back to my previous warning about fight promoters, when you understand Trump in that capacity, I would hope that some people might reflect on exactly what that means. But to get to the pro wrestling side of it, I mean, the reality about pro wrestling that I've learned about it from being at least adjacent to it for quite a long time is that their tactics are not accidental. It all is extremely effective. And the reason why you note that, or I should say why I note that is because I've seen people in MMA borrow different versions of it as ways to propel their career and not everyone is able to make use of it, But they play on certain fundamentals about working with audiences, about what it means to fly your flag brazenly in one particular direction or to manipulate the media as a conduit in a way where you're

trying to sell an identity. Like, this is all very effective. It is very, very, when you're good at it, it's really quite good. Yeah. You know, you talked earlier about all that the UFC has done for Donald Trump. What would you say that Donald Trump has done for the UFC? It's a great question, and it's not too difficult to understand. I mean, first of all, I think that they were, again, this was largely just a Dana White venture that he was doing in 2016 when he was speaking at the RNC.

The UFC did make a, by the way, a documentary, and this is true if your audience hasn't heard this, it's a pro-Trump documentary called Combatant in Chief. They've since taken it down. You might be able to find a copy, but not anywhere that they normally warehouse it. And in this documentary, they try to make the argument that if it wasn't for Trump hosting, you know, early UFC shows with Dana White and his pals in New Jersey, that it wouldn't have succeeded. I want to be very clear. There's not an ounce of truth to that. There's absolutely zero to that whatsoever. But aside from the myth making, you know, like what is what is being transacted here?

So UFC number one has a parent company called TKO. And TKO is currently as we speak, pressing legislation through Congress. it has already passed out of the House. It's now gone to the Senate. It's called the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act. MMA has virtually no legislation covering it to protect its athletes. Boxing has at least a little bit. You might ask, hey, how come boxers make more than MMA fighters?

One of the key reasons is because of these protections that they are put in place. And it's called the original version. It's called the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, which, by the way, John McCain famously figures into this. He's the one who put it into place. I won't bore you with the details except to say, Congress took up a labor bill this year, which would basically take away the provisions that protect boxers now in terms of being able to audit their promoter, in terms of being able to not be stuck in coercive contracts, you name it. They want to peel it all away. I got told by sources on the Hill that the White House was pushing Congress to do this.

Okay. So right away, there's that. And that this will enable them if they get it, it will at least enable them the opportunity to monopolize boxing. What would it basically allow them to do? it would allow them to run boxing the way that they've run UFC. That's the first. Second of all, look at the amount of attention this event is getting on the White House. If an MMA event is covered just by MMA media, it's not that big.

If it's MMA media and then traditional sports media, that's pretty big. But if it's MMA media, sports media, and political media, that's a level of product growth and attention. They don't have anything on the roster that could do that. Like there's literally nothing they could do to juice their product. to get it like this. This is a showcase beyond anything they could possibly ever produce organically. I can see why they would want something like this

to say nothing of, by the way, staying out of the way of FTC or DOJ, antitrust scrutiny. I mean, the levels of benefit here are extraordinary. I want to talk to you a little bit more about how politics has kind of, crept its way into the UFC over the years. I mean, watching it over the years, it wouldn't be out of place to see fighters using the octagon as a stage for their own politics. There have been

fighters like Colby Covington, who essentially turned himself into a kind of pro-Trump mega-troll. Thank you so much, Mr. President. You gave me the dragon energy when you shook my hand on Sunday at your rally. And it doesn't matter if King Kong was in front of me, I was not going to lose after getting to shake your hand and beat your arm. Who was railed against, like, Black Lives Matter or fighters like Connor McGregor, who actually went on to run for public office in Ireland, or Jorge Masvedo, who campaigned for Trump as part of the, quote, fighters against socialism tour. We either re-elect President Trump and keep America great. Amen.

But we let Joe Biden destroy the greatest country the world has ever seen. We've also seen the politics of places like Israel, the Russian territory of Dagestan and the racial politics of South Africa. come up as well. Is there a part of you this surprised when you see these kinds of things happen or is it just like generally expected at this point? I mean, at this point, how could it be a surprise? You know,

it was, I mean, some of this is kind of very hard to get around because the reality is the fight game is built on identity and everybody knows it. Now, there could be many different identities that go into that, whether

someone is from that city or not, whether as someone of a certain racial category, or not even that. Sometimes it can just be a national one. For example, truly, one of the great rivalries in boxing is when Mexican fighters fight Puerto Rican fighters. This is a phenomenal rivalry. So, I mean, partly these kinds of tensions are going to be, at least relative to the other sports, much more front and center.

And I think having some understanding of that is important. I think the thing for me is not so much that you've seen fighters take up personal advocacy, that is to me less surprising thing. It's that the ways in which the sport itself has become a vector for right-wing politics. So here's a great example. Like, if you look in American top team, one of the very best teams in the world, in fact, if not the very best team, like their record of achievement is beyond compare, quite frankly, in terms of how many elite fighters they've produced. And the fighters there held a rally for Ron DeSantis when he was running for re-election for governor of Florida.

That actually happened in that facility itself. Governor Ronda Santis in the fighting cage, literally, holding a campaign rally at American top team. More to the point, my local MMA promotion was running against, or I was trying to promote the cause of the Republican contender who was running against Abigail Spanberger. Spanberger ultimately won for governor in Virginia, but they were like actively trying to promote through these channels, like the ways in which it has begun to mobile. and advocate for right-wing elected causes rather than just people having a place for expressions

of their own political identity. That, to me, has been the difference. And the UFC set the tone for all of this by just giving, not just enthusiastic support of Trump, but making Trump valorization a key part of the UFC experience. Is there you think a world in which there is a kind of naturally right-wing or conservative appeal baked into the structure of the U.S. FC or even like fighting as an industry. Like worth mentioning here in Canada, our own conservative leader, Pierre Pahliav, has attended UFC events to great applause as well. But like the UFC is an intensely individualistic sport. Fighters are essentially independent contractors. There are a few guarantees. Fighters are largely responsible for for building their own brands and

their own teams. And in some ways, it kind of resembles this pure capitalist model. And do you think there's something about MMA itself or the business of fighting that lends itself more naturally to certain political worldviews, or do you think I'm kind of stretching it there? There's no stretching this at all. This is on the money completely. I've looked into this question a lot, and there is simply no denying whatsoever that even under the most non-specificly political terms available, that the general composition of the people who comprise the MMA industry, and again, to the extent how many people are watching in that direction is a little bit more debatable, but certainly within the industry itself would be, you know, predominantly right wing.

I mean, exactly how much would be hard to say, but there's just no question, whether it's a psychological makeup of what they are attracted to or whether it's, you know, violence for sport that can begin to be more, you know, appealing to certain audiences versus others. You can get into that, but here's a simple way to understand this. I looked into this question myself. And what I found was that in the early part of the 20th century in the 1930s, 30s, the guy who was responsible for the popularization of jiu-jitsu, both in Brazil and, by extension, his son, Hoise Gracie was the one who competed in the original UFC one. Helio Gracie was, you know, sort of the grandfather of jujitsu, which again, it's like this precursor sport to making the UFC happen.

And he was involved, and this is not even up for debate, like in an openly fascist party in the 1930s that they're called the Integralist movement. They were basically believed that the Catholic Church should just run. both law and society. And this was, this was like a very, like, open association. And so, like, the point I'm trying to make here is there is clearly something that runs through this sport that either pulls from this audience or tracks it or both. I don't, I'm not really bothered by that. My argument has never been that, oh, here's the problem is that people politically disagree with me. The problem is when these forces were mobilized to return to office the most extreme political project of my 46-year-old life. And now he has set the world on.

fire and the country on fire and interrogating where those fires started and who contributed to them, I think, is an extremely important exercise. Yeah. And I mean, kind of to what you're saying there, Trump is far from me the only leader accused of authoritarianism to take a liking to the UFC. There's also leaders like Ramzan Karov, the leader of Russia's Chechnya region, who is an incredibly brutal authoritarian guy, Vladimir Putin, who is said. to be a black belt in judo.

Also the likes of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Do you think these links are coincidental? Is this all unrelated? Or what do you think this appeal is ultimately about? I mean, recall earlier that I mentioned that, you know, combat sports, and again, this is not just MMA, but combat sports generally are an extension of vice culture. This is what I mean. It's like, it doesn't mean that just be like, oh, to be a part of this culture, you have to be engaging in

you know, the sort of traditional kind of sinful vices like gambling or drinking or something. And yeah, that, of course, attracts that audience as well. But it's more than that. It's the kind of sort of violent world that gets attached to all those kinds of things. So to me, like Ramzan Kadirov being attached to it, and he has a profound one where they've got his own gym and it's named after his father and there's like a whole slogan around it. And it's like a factory for talent. And, you know, I mean, that's a whole different thing.

even by itself, but like these are like the kinds of people, these are the kinds of people that this world, broadly speaking, I'm talking about the MMA world or the boxing world, these are the kinds of people that they get traffic through these worlds. The boxing had its own problem with Daniel Kinnahannan. Why was the rumble in the jungle in Kinshasa? Why was it there? It's because a dictator paid to put it there. Why was it in, why was the thrill in Manila in Manila? A dictator paid to put it there. This has always been the case for combat sports. And the last thing I would say about it, about just this DNA is that you have to understand something. If you're really rich, like really rich and you've got a terrible reputation, my best advice to you would be to get into combat sports because they're going to launder your reputation better than any place on Earth. And again, this is wide across combat sports. Why do you think Mark Zuckerberg went to MMA to get like his image? spruced up in that way. I don't know if that's working for him, but you're right. Okay.

He did do that. He might be so nerdy, radioactive that, like, actual improvement is not even, like, possible, but such that it is, it's going to be there. This is a world that says, we don't really care who you are. Do you want to come here and hang out and spend money and just be here? Fine. Here's the door, walk on in and just look at what kind of world that attracts. Luke, you know, just to end today, I wonder what you might say to someone that is, like,

never really maybe interrogated MMA or looked into it in the kind of critical, serious way that you've been talking about today that may be quite turned off by some of what we've talked about. Would you say that there is room in the world of MMA fandom for someone that rejects some of the ideas and principles that we've just been discussing? I don't know how to answer that anymore, to be honest with you. What I can tell you was this. the sport that is there now is making a very, very, very different pitch than the one that I fell in love with. And people are ultimately going to pick what feels right for them. I know plenty of people who have something more approximating my politics that aren't necessarily bothered by what the UFC has done. And I kind of respect there's going to be a difference of opinion on that.

So like ultimately people will make their own choices. But for me, the pitch at the time that I really got into it was basically like we've got this really innovative kind of the little engine that could story. And we think that this can be a dynamic thing for the sport world. And we think it can be something that can be for all people. Here comes Rhonda Rousey at 2014. You're starting to see little girls at UFC events. That was the MMA that I understood. I think this version, what I would offer to people is make up your own mind.

but you should be clear-eyed exactly about what this is and then decide whether that fits within your personal enjoyment or moral parameters. Okay. Luke, this was great. Thank you so much. I can talk to you all day. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts. Thank you.