Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Right-Wing Takeover of Combat Sports Is Upon Us

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Donald Trump's comfort zone. Coercive deals. Saudi funding. In the era of American favor-trading, a company called TKO Group Holdings is dominating the fight game. (Welcome, Zuffa Boxing.) And as longtime MMA dean Luke Thomas dares to explain, UFC boss Dana White may be in denial — and it may not be good for fans or fighters — but it pays to be in bed with a transactional regime.• Subscribe to "Morning Kombat" with Luke Thomas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. I'll just say it outright. TKO should be broken up. Flat out should be broken up. Right after this ad. I do like to see what your mentions are like these days. They're a graveyard.

It's funny some months ago, I did the podcast of Demetrius Johnson, famous fighter. And he'd asked me some of the reservations I had about the modern product. And I had just kind of mentioned in passing that, it's got a little too right wing for me. And this set off a firestorm. How much do you get, Luke Thomas, can you please just stick to sports? Yeah.

Like, you know so much about MMA. You're a dean of the sport. That is a, that's a touchy subject. And it's really weird because it's, like, it's very obvious that it's right wing, and they are in denial about it. And I guess they think that me talking about it in that way is blasphemous or something.

I'm not quite sure. Yeah. The denial is so fun. I mean, again, not necessarily fun in your mentions, but fun as just a psychology experiment. Like, what is going on there? I have a little bit of Insight, maybe. Yeah. I was thinking about this, and I was looking this up.

When Joe Rogan opened his comedy club in Austin, Texas, I'm not sure how long ago, for a few years at this point. There was a lot of fanfare about it. And he did a bunch of interviews. Comedy mothership. Comedy mothership, yeah. They were asking him, hey, what's it like to be the first anti-woke club for comedy in the country? And he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not anti-woke.

You know, there's not woke and then anti-woke. There's just woke, and then we're a return to normalcy. And I think that there is a problem with self-identification, because there's clearly support for right-wing ideas, support for right-wing candidates, support for right-wing billionaires on his show, support for any number right-wing conspiracy theories, you name it. And then if you ask them if they're right-wing,

they'll be like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm more like some kind of loose association of the men. We exist on a spectrum. Yes. And it's like, I don't... I don't think so. I don't think so. So I think it's a lot of people who don't accept that.

And then the other part is people who are like, you're very... Yes, MMA is very, very right-wing. Why do you even care? And the answer is because it's become a vector for right-wing politics in the country. So I just got to acknowledge that some of you out there may already be rolling your eyes at yet another lib dissecting politics and Joe Rogan. and the UFC. But our guest today, Luke Thomas,

happens to come with a particular letter of recommendation. I think you have a very unique perspective, and thanks for coming, man. Thanks for the invite, and let's do it again. The whiskey was great. I'm happy to come on anytime. It was fun. Thank you. Thank you.

It was six years ago that Luke Thomas talked to Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan experience for three and a half hours. and they talked entirely about MMA, and it went great, honestly. It's just what happens when you've been in a relationship with a sport for three decades. But on Saturday, April 11th, the same day, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Pakistan, failing to end the war with Iran, which, you know, might have deserved the president's attention. There was Donald Trump, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at UFC 311.5. 37. In Miami, Hobnobbing with U.S. President Dana White and U.S.C. commentator Joe Rogan.

Great to have President Trump with us here tonight. We all, of course, will celebrate his 80th birthday, June 14th at UFC Freedom 250 on the White House lawn. Great to have you in the building tonight, Mr. President. At which point, the story that Luke Thomas has been covering, the thing that has now cost him actually, to the sport he loves the most, became one of the biggest stories in the entire world. I do want to just start with just like your origin story to introduce you to people who don't know anything about the sport. When and how did your relationship with mixed martial arts in your life begin?

The first time was in the summer of 1994. I'm 46, for the record. And my parents were divorced. My dad, I grew up in Washington, D.C., and then my mom moved away, so in the summers I would come back to D.C. And I spent time there, and I had, like, nothing to do. Just nothing to do. This is in 1994. There's, like, no internet.

What's young Luke Thomas like as a kid at this point? A nerd, a loser. Not that interesting. I've been this tall since I was 14. I was going to say, you're a heavyweight. Yeah, I'm 6'4, about 280. I'm a large man. And I wasn't quite as big, but I was certainly as tall.

And I just had nothing to do. And then a family friend of my dad's came over and was like, you got to see this skinny Brazilian guy tearing everybody up. This guy had owned a martial arts school and was just blown away by him. And my dad was cool with it because he was friends with, even though it was quite violent, he was friends with this guy. And then I saw it and it was like, you know. And I kind of fell out of it a little bit through high school

and then the early part of college, picking it back up at the end of college, which I graduated in 2002. And then soon thereafter, I got right back into it. But you made a noise. say, noise, what did you see that made you react that way?

If you weren't around in the 90s, you'll probably miss the really important contribution that it wasn't known as MMA then. In fact, it had no name, and then the early name that was given to it was NHB, no holds barred. They quickly moved away from that after a time,

but what you have to understand is back in the 90s, there were a lot of competing claims, from what we call TMA, traditional martial arts, Taekwondo. And Taekwondo's real, it's an Olympic sport, judo too, but then a bunch of ones you never heard of, you know, Safta and bare-knuckle this,

and there was guys who claimed to be ninjas who fought in early UFC. A uniformed officer with the Omaha, Nebraska Police Department, Steve Jenham is not your typical cop. He's a third-degree black belt in the art, Toga Korearu Ninjitsu. And there was a lot of, like, spiritual mysticism claims that kind of went along with it at the side. same time. In other words, people were making a bunch of claims about what worked and what

was the best and whatnot. And then this skinny guy who did not look particularly athletic or big or strong was demolishing everybody. Hoys Gracie is who I'm referring to specifically. And he was doing it with, you know, essentially leverage and manipulation, which we now know to be Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And there's a whole story about how Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu came to be. Essentially, it's a guy, one of the sort of the founding fathers of the Gracie family, Elio Gracie, taking the parts of judo that were usable, but adapting it for a smaller guy. And it was just a revelation because the core insight was

all of these things that we thought were, oh, this works and that works. And there is some kind of, maybe some people thought there was a mystical element to some of it. It all went away. Joe Rogan actually does have a really interesting quote where he said... Martial arts have evolved more in these 30 years than they have in the past 30,000 years.

And there's something to be said for that. I mean, that might be a little bit of hyperbole, but there is a core insight there, which was all this stuff that we thought were we didn't know which one was better. Well, now we started to get some clues about it. Which is all to say that we could talk about the finer points of technique and the evolution of the sport as a matter of it being a sport.

And so when does it first sink into your mind that, oh, wait a minute, this thing, which I love and adore, on its merits, would become a major influence, a major vector of influence on American politics. Relatively recently, you know, Dana White did speak at the 2016 Republican National Convention, but even then, there wasn't necessarily a whole lot to it beyond he was speaking for his preferred candidate.

And also, 2016, you have to remember, was a phenomenal year for the UFC. So to set the tone on that one, there are obviously four quarters every year. either had a rousy or a Cona McGregor fight every quarter that year. And that's also the year that they sold to Endeavor or WME or whatever. So that was a monster year for them. So I didn't think much of it in that sense because A, the sport was thriving and B, it just didn't have this kind of downstream effect. But it was after the beginning of the pandemic, there was obviously some changes that were

happening then. And really, it's not even that. It was frankly after January 6th. It was the summer after January 6 where Trump emerges, it's in the same weekend, was at a CPAC event in Dallas, I believe, and then also it was the trilogy in July between Connor McGregor and Dustin Porriere in Las Vegas, and he shows up there. The guy who just tried to steal the election is choosing to rehabilitate slash reintroduce himself

to the country using your sport. Yeah, that's right. And it's always fascinating how and when a person who is immersed in scandal, chooses to pop up again because that was, yeah, six months after January 6, 2021. But then you go to when he gets charged by a grand jury on 34 felony counts. And where does Donald Trump go at that point? UFC 290 in Vegas.

Yes. President Donald Trump with us here for UFC at 290. And the support that he has in this arena tonight, this brief is going to blow up. And then May 2024. It's found guilty on the aforementioned 34 felony counts in his hush money trial. And, yeah, two days later, where is he? UFC event.

He's in the building and the former president getting a standing ovation from the assembled masses here at UFC 302. The presentation, when we say that he pops up, it really is underselling what it's like when Donald Trump is brought out. I mean, I've seen TNT broadcast where they'll interview Obama about some basketball-related query,

for a, you know, LeBron's playing or whatever. This is not that. So what happens is, and it would depend on the time in which he would do it, typically it would be between the prelim and the main card, but he would walk out with Dana White, and sometimes Elon Musk would be with him, sometimes Tucker Carlson. Making his way into the building,

one of the bigger mixed martial arts fans, I know President Donald Trump, taking his octagon side seat for UFC to 990. And again, it still didn't dawn on me that we were headed for this place. But people are like, well, you know, Trump is there and who cares? And it's like on some level that is true. But more to the point, what it did was it gave license down the food chain inside of MMA for people to lean into these preferences.

So even locally, for example, at the last election, my local MMA promotion in the Washington, D.C. area was trying to rally for the Republican gubernatorial candidate. there was a rally at American Top Team, like, arguably the very best gym in the world. And some of the athletes there rallied for Ron DeSantis at that facility. So the point I'm trying to make is it didn't just rehabilitate Trump post-January 6th. It kind of set this tone throughout the sport for advocacy in that particular direction. Yeah, it is hard to imagine a more politicized sport ever. But if you say that to the fans, they'll tell you you're crazy.

Well, if you say it to Dana White, he will say, I'm not really a political person. that's a big misunderstanding. And obviously politics is very polarizing. Was there ever hesitancy or consideration of perhaps like, you know, having an event at the White House and maybe a certain part of a fan base that is not leaning into those politics or the administration? Yeah, I don't think like that. It's not like I'm out here saying, I mean, even if you look at any of my speeches

at the Republican convention, they're never political. I'm never talking about one side or the other side. this guy is a very good friend of mine, and that's it. Thank you. And he's a big fan of the sport. But even the video in 2020 to the RNC. And remember, President Trump may be the only president in modern times who has actually done everything he said he would do during his campaign.

There's this quote that I love from Ronald Reagan, where he said, there isn't any problem we can't solve. If government will give us the facts, tell us what needs to be done, then get out of the way and let us have at it. And then July 2024. Yes. In fact, for folks who may not know or remember this, when the president speaks at the convention, he's the last one, obviously,

for many, many days. And the person who typically brings out the president or the top candidate is the spouse, typically. And it was not the spouse. It was Dana White. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am Dana White. I am the CEO and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

So two weeks ago, I got a call from President Trump asking me if I'd be willing to speak tonight. And on election night, when Trump wins, Dana White is with him in his election night party, but like on the stage and in fact spoke to the crowd at the arena. So this is what I mean. People will say things. well, like, you know, didn't, for example, the NBA lean into any number of, like, social commentary. Oh, sure, in the pandemic, they have the jerseys and they said things, which of course is true. But, like, there's a couple differences.

One, the players basically elected to do that. That's one. And two, remember, Trump was not just, yes, he was a former president. He was a candidate. This is not taking a guy who is holding office and like, hey, you know, it's the president. Let's give him a few minutes on air. This is trying to use mainstream political capital. essentially to return a guy to office who had tried to use a fake elector scheme to steal a presidential

election. Like, there is no comparison to the NBA or the NFL whatsoever. This is a sport as an instrument of a campaign and to use the UFC, which was not always mainstream, but now has the ability to really speak to this larger and larger audience that is correlating with the business success of the sport. It's very interesting to me to watch you cover a sport as it's ascending, and you have seen the before and the during and the after, and simultaneously you're seeing a level fundamentally of conflict of interest at the very top. Because at some point, I wonder when it occurs to you, Luke, as you're watching this happen, oh, wait a minute, the reasons these things are happening politically around my sport, they're not for the benefit of the sport specifically. Wow, that's a tough one to answer.

So, for example, people will make the argument that it's true. This is a true fact that when the UFC was sold in 2001 and it was purchased by Dana White and his two partners, Lorenzo and Frank, for Tita, it is true that the first two events that essentially happened under that new leadership regime happened at Trump's casino in Atlantic City. That is true. But this idea that, like, that was the day that they forged their friendship. know. And in fact, when there was a rival promotion, circa 2008 or nine, called Affliction, remember those garish T-shirts that everyone used to wear? Who could forget? Who could forget? I've tried. It has haunt me in my memories. But Donald Trump was, like,

the face of that, to a degree, anyway. And there was events at, like, Trump Plaza and whatnot. And he was even saying, we're going to take care of our athletes, kind of intimating that the competition didn't. He said, we have the best fighters and whatnot. There's also a documentary shout-out to a guy named Bobby Razak called American Promoter. He has an interview with Dana White, where Dana White kind of dismisses, this is years ago, obviously, but he dismisses Trump trying to get into MMA, like, you're just another also-ran. So this idea that, like, there was, like, a linear growth of their relationship

from that day forward is simply not true. The point I'm trying to make is, at some point, they come back around, and they realize there's great transactionalism that is possible here. Things that we want to be able to do, he's going to be able to facilitate vice versa. We want someone who's in charge of the regulatory apparatus here that can cover us in a way that maybe somebody else would not.

So this is where I do by some degree of what Dana White says when he says, I'm not all that political. I don't think he necessarily is an expert on what's happening in Washington, D.C., as a matter of legislation, as much as he is now actively involved in the passing of certain laws. It does seem like transactionality, though, is what is embedded into his DNA. I would challenge a little bit the idea that he has no political,

political priors. In fact, if you look at like the history of the UFC, Dana White had a, and the whole UFC organization had a great relationship with Senator Harry Reid, who was from Nevada, the airport is named after him, known Democrat, and they had a good relationship with him, and he was a fight fan. So there was a time when they would kind of just, you know, do the thing that all powerful people do, which is you play both sides to see what you're going to get out of it. But the partisan turn that he made, I think was partly related to the COVID protocols and what he saw as the world making, you know, restrictive choices that he did not agree.

with, but then more to the point, I think that they saw that they had an empire that they wanted to create. And if you have someone like Trump in power, the antitrust or regulatory scrutiny goes away to say nothing of what kind of legislation you could later get passed. And Trump is, if nothing, a vessel for power-hungry people who want favors done for them. It's just his MO. It fits kind of nicely. Well, it also reminds me that a lot of people have embraced the outright corruption of this era because it works. Andy McCarthy, who is not a hardcore left winger,

had a series of posts about this in National Review. He thought that Biden had engaged in, you know, multi-million dollar fraud, essentially to enrich himself. And he was like, it's nothing compared to Trump. And this is a guy who's an attorney, who worked in various White Houses. And even he was saying to himself, he could not believe the scale of it,

the guy's willingness to do political favors has to be acknowledged. And meanwhile, the UFC, the rights deal is 1.1. billion dollars a year now. This is Paramount Global and Skydance. What's your analysis of how we're at this part of the story? This is my opinion. Okay, so take it for what it is worth. There is no way Paramount is going to make their money back on UFC. Not only they're not going to make their money back, they're going to take a bath. So the way it worked was the UFC had signed a, let's say, a seven-year deal with ESPN, and that meant they got all their inventory. And that includes smaller

programs like the Ultimate Fighter, a prospect series called Contender Series, blah, blah, blah. but it includes basically 30 fight nights. Those are the ones that might take place at their own apex, might be on the road, and then 13 numbered events. And these are the premier ones that you tend to know about as the UFC events, right? And they were all through ESPN Plus.

They were on pay-per-view and whatnot. And the way it was being reported at the time was that they were trying to break up the deal as they head into their next one. So they wanted Netflix to buy what they could, and then they were going to maybe sell back the rest to ESPN. But Netflix was like, we only want the numbered events.

We don't really want the rank-and-file ones, which makes sense for Netflix's business model. And so they were trying to see if they could make that work. And some of the industry projections around that time were around 800 million per year, if they could split it up, maybe a little bit higher even than that on the really high end. And then, as you indicated,

the Skydance merger happens with Paramount, and all of a sudden, here come the Ellisons, who are regime-aligned, regime-friendly. Of course, Dana White is regime-regem. allied and regime friendly. And they give them $1.1 billion a year for seven years. I just don't understand even with how many subs they can pull or what the ads are they can show how they can possibly make their money back. And so what this smells like to you is a set of ulterior motives beyond merely, oh, this is a live rights deal that metricically makes sense. This smells to you like

we want to be in business with the right people during this particular. era of, yeah, top-down politics. That's right. I mean, consider what you get if you sign with UFC. You get, as I mentioned, you get those 43 events plus more pieces of content. You now also get the Zufa boxing side, which is the boxing side of the larger parent company. You're getting, I mean, they're talking about maybe doing, we'll see, maybe as many of those

annually as they do UFC events, I think that's a little bit getting ahead of it. But nevertheless, they can scale up to a significant degree. And you're going to get to go and have an event. event at the White House, and you're going to get potentially laws passed in your benefit to make that boxing even more lucrative. Like, there's a lot of reasons, certainly, why I could understand you would want to be aligned with people at this particular moment in time who are going to have, let's put it euphemistically, the regulatory wind at their back.

Yeah. Which is all to say that what Dana White wants, seemingly out of all of his business dealings with Donald Trump, is not just the widest possible birth for the UFC to operate with impunity. He wants the ability to remake combat sports in his image. I cannot overstate this. This is, to me, maybe the critical point. When I first got into the sport, there was a menagerie of different MMA promotions. And many of the...

You should understand. Many of these are fly-by-night. They're going to last for a year or less, sometimes even just one event. But there was certainly a wide array of them, Rumble on the Rock, icon, Superbrawl, UFC, U.S., Pride, WEC, Strike Force. Oh, I once went to a Strike Force event at the Playboy Mansion. Yes, so you did that one? Because I got an email and it was like, yeah, I will pretend to be something more than what I was.

I almost went to that. I almost went to that. And certainly there was numerous boxing promotions. And I want to be clear. So you had, again, some of them work, some of them don't, some of them are great, some of them are bad, some of them are exploitative. But there at least was this menagerie of different elements. Competition. Competition.

And now we are facing a world whereby 2028, it is at least conceivable. that the same company has a monopoly or certainly a dominant firm in professional wrestling, clearly has a monopoly in MMA, and is very likely to have a monopoly in boxing. And that's not all. They're also getting into sport jiu-jitsu as it's beginning to take off as well. They have a thing called UFC BJJ. So not only do you have a potential monopoly in all of these verticals,

you've got one company who owns all of the monopolies. And it's TKO. And to me, this is like straight out of bottom. Black Mirror dystopian. The reason you're on this show right now is because I looked up and realized I am way late to explaining what is happening in sports. If you don't tackle the premise of what non-regulation in combat sports has looked like, you are failing to understand what is the reality of how business is done in one of the last

remaining mainstream cultural institutions left, which is sports. You know, one of the things that really kind of stands out to me about this whole thing is that MMA essentially grew in what is almost exclusively an unregulated place. And then because that monopoly got so big, it is now able to take all of its institutional advantages and now try and take over a sister-related sport because the FTC looked at the UFC two times during the Obama years and both times decided that we're just going to leave it alone. And I think that that ended up being an extremely consequential. decision. We should point out that the UFC has faced antitrust lawsuits quite recently in terms of

his treatment of workers, in terms of what the concerns are from would-be unionized athletes that seemingly will never unionize. How do you paint the picture? Man, in order to keep it simple, I think I would say that there are a series of regulations that Congress has passed in 1996. and 2000 as well. And these regulations inside of boxing do a number of things to essentially act as labor protections for the boxers. But to basically just paint the picture, literally none of those exist in MMA. Zero, nothing. It grew from a category that they hadn't even considered when they passed the legislation.

MMA existed obviously in 2000, but no one knew it was going to turn into what it turned into. It was barely hanging on by a thought. Right at that point anyway. The John McCain quote famously. Human cockfighting, he called it. I mean, this was a barely legal sport. In fact, the things that the regulatory apparatus does in boxing to protect the boxers, they now, A, want to change it.

And B, because none of those forces exist in MMA, they basically get to set the terms of how this all goes. So I've covered boxing when I was at Sports Illustrated. I've covered big fights. The idea that any sport is, looking and in fact yearning for the regulation of boxing is such a farcical premise. I'm not sure I agree anymore because if there is a sport that has been famously predatory, famously predatory, just a model of dysfunction. It would be boxing, right? There's simply no denying. But then when you see, like, the way in which the UFC has pitched itself is like we're the antidote

to boxing, all the things that get in the way of why boxing doesn't. work, we're going to solve for that. And that sounds really nice. Number one guy doesn't want to fight number two guy. UFC's like, we're just going to make number one versus number two. That's a real thing. Oh, but just that though, right? The idea like where electric and boxing is acoustic, a big part of what Dana White's sales pitch was was through top-down governance, we can make a better product. That's right. Through just basically sheer force of will and the ability to do several things, coercive contracts, that's one of them. They can, control rank and title. That's another one. Everything you're saying, it has, of course, led people to

think, is this legal? Is it legal to prevent competition in the way that you have described it? And so this was last year, early 2025, you get a $375 million settlement to resolve two antitrust class action lawsuits. This is both against ZUFA, which is the overarching parent company we should explain in a second here further. But these were suits that allege the suppression of fighter pay in violation of antitrust laws. And over 1,200 fighters were covered. It spanned 2010 to 2017. What was sort of the reaction from inside of the sport when, wow, that seems like a big number? It was a bit mixed. I want to say something, too, like understand how the UFC operates. Again, it operates above board. But just to help you understand this, the UFC by boxing's laws

is illegal. You could not do it. It would, under numerous different rules. It would not, it's not allowed at all. So just understand, like, what we're talking about, how different the environments are here. There is no equivalent to Dana White in boxing. It's not possible. Under the current way, which is sort of broken up and there's shared power, it's not possible. You mentioned the $375 million. Basically, Zufa, UFC, TKO, admitted no wrongdoing, and they didn't have to. And there was a whole way in which they assigned who got what. Anderson Silva, by the way, in the end, got like $10 million from all of this. one of the greatest fighters ever.

Yeah, one of the greatest fighters ever from a different generation. But he ended up getting a bunch. Brock Lesnar got a bunch. Ronda Rousey got a bunch. Conrader got a bunch. But the idea is you're asking, how was 375 million taken? Honestly, not that great. It's kind of funny.

On the antitrust side of the world, folks who follow big antitrust cases, they were looking at this being like, that is a historic settlement. But if you looked at what the plaintiffs, the fighters were claiming, they wanted a lot more. They wanted a whole lot more. And not just that they want more money, they wanted changes to the contract. And there's actually ongoing lawsuits to achieve it. They wanted something called injunctive relief. And what they basically believe is that the contracts that the UFC has, these coercive contracts,

what is a coercive contract? We should define it. Very simple way to understand it is if I'm the promoter and you're the fighter, I have a guy on my roster who's the champion and you want to fight them. If I tell you that you have to sign with me long term, you have to sign a five-fight deal to get a firefight deal. to get a fight with him, that is a coercive contract. I am making you do a long-term play with me

in order to get to him. To fight for the title, you've got to go through me. That's a coercive contract. And there's other problems with what they had. For example, like the UFC is accused of buying rival promotions just to shudder them, like deeply anti-competitive practices. And so they were claiming they wanted a lot more and they wanted injunctive relief.

But the suit had been going for 10 years. Zufa fought it too thin. nail every step of the way. And I think they and the lawyers eventually came to their place where they were like, this is a huge settlement. Let's just do it. And then these other lawsuits that aren't really about money, but about changing contracts, let's keep those in play. So for people who are not familiar with just how unions, we talk about unions a lot on this show, how unions in both boxing and MMA work, there aren't any. There's nothing. Why? Oh, that is a painful answer to give. I have watched people try to unionize MMA fighters.

Some of the reasons why it has failed. We're talking like guys from baseball. I remember Scott Boris. He tried. There was a sort of a fighter-led version of this called Project Spearhead as well. The fighters didn't want to do it. They thought that their votes would get back to UFC, and they were fearful of retribution. And you can say that was irrational or not, but it played a role.

Dana White, in specific, though. What is his attitude towards unions? He's not Bernie Sanders. let's put it that way. So, I mean, even amidst, for example, even amidst this great surge in 2015-2016, when Rhonda Rousey's there and Connor McGregor's taken off, you still couldn't fight in New York State.

And part of that was that the folks in New York State, according to Dana White, were listening to the Las Vegas Culinary Union. And those unions in Las Vegas had gotten sideways with the Fertitas who had owned station casinos. But you couldn't run the UFC the way it's run if there was a robust players association or players union, fighters union, even in a diminished state relative to, let's say, the NFLPA,

it would be a complete obstruction to the way in which they do business. And so here's how the business works and how the money breaks down. So let's say that for the sake of simplicity, in the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and MLB, owners and players haggle over roughly a 50-50 breakdown of revenue. But in the UFC, the fighters' share of this growing financial, pie in the age of that billion-dollar paramount deal is... If I can be the most charitable, no more than 20%, probably somewhere closer to anywhere from 13 to 18%, depending.

And as for who management is here, it is also important to know that UFC's parent company is now a publicly traded company that was Voltron just three years ago and is now the biggest player in combat sports and entertainment by far. And its name is TKO Holdings. Currently, it houses WWE and it houses UFC and it houses Zufa Boxing. And we will get to Zufa Boxing in just a second year. But you should know that TKO's co-founders are Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood Super Agent and former head of the agency Endeavor.

And you guessed it. The former head of the W.E. Vince McMahon. Yes, Vince McMahon was a part. I mean, he got pushed out a little bit, obviously. On account of being, you know... Allegedly quite horrible. Yeah, allegedly at the middle of a sex trafficking scandal.

Yeah. And then, you know, it's kind of funny. I mentioned this the other day to someone. The guy who's the chief operating officer, you hear from him more on, like, the calls when they talk about their earnings. Mark Shapiro. Oh, that's former executive vice president of ESPN.

Yeah, and also Mark Shapiro was the guy Dan Snyder hired to rebuild. to rebuild six flags. And so you just get like this weird kind of corporate private equity structure at the top driving decisions with Dana White acting more these days in something of a figurehead role. But as for the corporate future of Zufa boxing, this project that Dana White has been selling to sports fans everywhere, it may not surprise you to learn that one incredibly important source of money

is a country that has been trying to become known as more than just an oil-based economy for a few years now, and is also currently trying to reassess its financial interests in LiveGolf as we speak. But for now, this brings us to another very important person, Turkey Al-Al-Al-Sheek, the co-founder of Zufa boxing, with Dana White, who is also known as the chairman of Saudi Arabia's General Entertainment Authority. They've been to Saudi Arabia, the UFC, but they don't take their premiere events there. They take very good ones, but not their very best ones.

In boxing, it's a completely different ballgame. They pay for the biggest fights. They bring all the fights there. And in fact, they've had such an influence that I think if you get sideways with the people who run it, they'll drive you out of boxing. And more to the point, they were draining the American and UK market big time. They were taking all of the best fights, and they wanted to put them in Riyadh or various other places as a way to, like, diversify their economy, add entertainment to it, the whole nine yards. We all know that. And it has destroyed the American market.

It has destroyed the U.K. market because all the premier got, dude, they had Canelo fight there for Cinco de Mayo. What are you doing? Canelo is not just the biggest star out of Mexico. He's the biggest star in boxing and certainly the biggest American star. I realize he's Mexican, but you know what I'm saying? The idea that you celebrate Cinco de Vio in Saudi Arabia is as good a summary of the synthetic nature of what sports are like now. They're following the money. They're following the money rather than, this is one of these private equity sort of extraction influences I'm talking about.

How do you not go to what can arguably be called the motherland of the sport? and instead you're going, no disrespect to Baku, Azerbaijan, I'm sure it's a nice place, but you're there because people are paying you to show up, and what does this do to the integrity of the product? Let alone the price of the product, by the way, from tickets to subscription fees, as everything in sports gets more and more and more expensive. Which leads us to another question that Dana White and TKO holdings

do not want media members to ask. My point is simply, should fans be rooting for this? I will tell you, Pablo, I will tell you, one of the things that has broken my heart a little bit, to be perfectly honest with you, is I just watched people stop asking questions about Saudi Arabia's human rights record. I watched people in media begin to just be quiet about it and go along for the ride. And you understand it. Like, you know, there's not many jobs in this industry. I get.

I get the intent. People are trying to feed their families. I totally get it. But I'll just say this. The willingness to walk away from your right to tell the truth, the ease with which people did it in this professional context shocked me. And it shocked me to my core. And I don't understand fundamentally.

I don't understand what is the point of the truth if you are not allowed to say it? I'm allowed to think it. I'm allowed to look at it. and I'm not allowed to discuss it? What value is the truth in a world where it is merely observational? I don't want to live in that world, and I do my best not to. And the question then becomes if you're a fan, if you're a customer, if you're an everyday person who's trying to think about, like,

how do I spend my money? Where should I spend my money? Who do I trust? It's one thing if you're getting an unprecedented quality of the thing you love the most. And the cost might be, yeah, but these guys are, icky. But I get my favorite thing. The question I have is like,

really, like, who's winning? Who gets to win in this era? The promoter. The promoter is winning. Saudi Arabia is winning. All right. I got a quick staff for you. Most employers are sorting through something like 250 resumes for a single job opening, which is a lot of scrolling,

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And so this brings us to the Muhammad Ali Revival Act. Holy Jesus. In closing, the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act provides us with a chance to make history. Once enacted, this legislation will be celebrated for decades to come. So let's join together in a spirit of bipartisanship and revive one of America's greatest sports and the name of one of America's greatest athletes, Muhammad Ali. I yield back. American Boxing Revival Act.

No, excuse me. The Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act. American boxing revival. It's quite a tongue to us twitters. So for people who aren't familiar, I mean, when we see the rise of Zufa boxing and you see Turkey-A-Lashik standing next to Dana White as they are celebrating the bright, brave new future of combat sports, they're doing it through the American legislative system. So for people who don't remember what is being allegedly revived, what was the American? What was the the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act that was passed in the year 2000.

We should say up front, you know, you hear the expression, timing is everything. I will say that TKO's timing on this is superb. Because now years after the market has been so thoroughly drained, there's no argument that like, oh, boxing's super healthy, right? That's not really the argument. Oh, boxing's been dying for as long as I can remember. And now it's at a point where they're trying to figure out a way forward. So let me just set the groundwork here.

It's funny. You mentioned John McCain earlier, who had called MMA human cockfighting. He's also at the center of this situation as well. So in 1996, there was the Professional Boxing Safety Act. On the one hand, the 1996 Act is really about health and safety standards. You know, do we have the right kind of pre-fight screening? are people looking at blood tests and EKGs and all the things you would need to do

to get a proper screening ahead of time. There's more to it than that, but think of it on those terms. And then comes the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act. This is the one that's currently on the books. This is not the physical side of what they're doing. This is the labor and exploitation side. Because as you can well imagine, as you indicated, the exploitation from the promoter to the boxer is storied.

And it kind of comes from actually a little bit further back than that. in the 1960s, the Department of Justice broke up one of the boxing monopolies in New York, and they had kind of kept up with what was happening in the industry. Legislatively, there was some hearings in the 70s and 80s, even into the 90s. McCain kind of picks up that mantle.

I bring this all up to say, it started as a DOJ breaking up of a monopoly. The Ali Act is the inheritance of that. And the Ali Act does a bunch of different stuff, but the way you should understand it is, one, it bans coercive contracts, which we've talked about already. It requires discharges.

disclosure of what a promoter make. So if the promoter used to be, if they made a million dollars on the show, they'd pay you 50,000, you didn't know if you were actually making a million or not. You just thought, oh, 50,000, that looks great. I'll take that. So it created some financial transparency, so these boxers have some way to assess their worth. And then it also created some firewalls. So, for example, with some exception, you can't be a manager and a promoter at the same time. Also, in MMA, the promoter can own the title. So, for example, if you fight in the UFC, you can become the UFC heavyweight champion. But Francis Ngano won it and then walked away from it, but he couldn't take his title.

Now, if he was in boxing and he was the WBC champion, he leaves, let's say, Eddie Hearn's matchroom and he wants to go sign with Bob Aram. He goes as the WBC champion, which radically improves how much money he can make. The new act is designed to undo all of those pillars. So, look, I want to acknowledge that it. boxing, you know, we called it forever, alphabet soup. It's like, what are they, okay, WBO, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, WBC, all these different names. What do they do? Think of it this way. If you're a boxer, you don't want the promoter getting to say who's good and who gets shots. Because maybe the promoter likes you, maybe they

don't. Maybe they like another guy. What you're looking for is a third-party independent validator. And so, part of what the Ali Act did, for example, was create a set of criteria for how the sanctioning bodies should rank. It took away the ability for promoters to give money to sanctioning bodies. They used to be a whole thing. So guys would get ranked, and then they'd get fights. They didn't deserve. But the idea is, someone is out there with an, in theory, in theory, with an independent ranking and an independent title that the promoter doesn't control that can say, Pablo Torre is the number one contender and we can show it to you right here. That's the value of them.

Right. And of course, historically, rife with all sorts of scandal and allegations of corruption and all of that. But the point being that by law, there were structural demands placed to be firewalls against anti-competitive practices. And that was something. When you say that they're trying to, that Dana White and Zufa Boxing is trying to undo that, I should point out that Dana White, when he talks about this stuff, says, quote, zero changes to the act in question. Well, let's be clear. There will be zero changes to the Muhammad Ali Act. Not one word will be changed in the Muhammad Ali Act. We're going to add on to it. That, in fact, nothing needs to change. We're just making it so that we can bring our better business model

to save a sport that he says he also loves. It's so funny to me that they're like, oh, this is, our system works really great. It's like the one that sued you guys for $400 million, that one? That's the one you're talking about? It's very, very funny to be. The idea that they're not changing the Ali Act, I cannot overstate this, is one of the most Orwellian things I've ever heard in my life. What they're trying to do is really simple to understand.

It is true that they're looking at the Ali Act and they're saying, okay, we don't want to just say, get rid of it. Because it is, it's got Muhammad Ali's name on it. So instead, they have more of a clever approach. What I want you to imagine is, what could we do to the Ali Act so that we could just basically run boxing the same way we run UFC? That's what they're doing. They have a model, and I'm sure we'll talk about it here, called the UBO, the Unified Boxing Organization. This is put forward in this American Revival Act.

If you look at the original Ali Act, Patrick English, one of the original authors of the Act, was like, this is designed with no one firm in particular. or it's designed to just benefit the industry generally. This legislation, in my opinion, is clearly designed to benefit one entity because the way in which you qualify for becoming a UBO, so for example, you have to have provided training facilities, you have to be able to run your own anti-doping program, there's a whole list of things. Like, most promoters cannot even come close to affording that, including even established ones, but the UFC can.

And so it's this architecture to ensure. introduce into the Ali Act. If you don't sign with a UBO, the Ali Act stands as such. They are not changing it in that capacity. But what I'm trying to explain to folks is, they're introducing architecture into the Ali Act to create wholesale exemptions to all the things the Ali Act is trying to do. You're saying that a separate but equal system may not actually hold water? And I was in those hearings and they kept, it's like, dude, I used to work. And I... Wait, wait, tell me about the hearings. Oh, my God. You were there? You were at the hearings?

I went to both them at the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill. What was the scene like? Oh, my God, bro. It was, I was the only media member. I was the only one both times. Which already says everything you kind of need to know, but please. I just couldn't believe it. I was the only one.

But we have a very exciting hearing today. And the topic of today's hearing is to examine the current state of the box of the boxing industry and show how HR 4624, the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, can help usher in a new golden age for the sport. Basically, they were a sham. It was with the House Educational Workforce Committee. If you're asking, like, where is the American Boxing Revival Act? It passed out of committee.

It passed on the House vote. It's in the Senate, but it's in committee, and they haven't even taken it up yet. We'll see. But it was a House Educational Workforce Committee, and that is a committee, obviously, because the Republicans are in control, they had one speaker, Patrick English, who was one of the original architects of the Ali Act, and then they had a series of guests that were all in favor of the new act, including a UFC executive, including Muhammad Ali's late wife, including the head of the California State Athletic Commission, which is, I've lost basically all respect for all the state

athletic commissions, but certainly if you were to rank the prestigious ones, California is going to be at the top. And in any event, the amount of lobby is, you have to be. I saw there for TKO was shocking. I think there were more lobbyists there than congressmen at one point. How could you tell who was a lobbyist? Well, who's surrounding Lonnie Ali. And I had a friend actually who,

so I had a friend who I ran into there who knew a bunch of the lobbyists and introduced me to them. And it's funny, one of them, he's a nice guy. He's a nice guy. He's a nice guy. Really bright guy. Very successful. They're professionally nice guys.

They're professionally nice guys. He was like, oh, how would he feel about this legislation? I'm like, I hate it. And he was like, but this legislation's so good. and I'm like, I cannot overstate to you. TCO, they didn't just pay for a lot of lobbying. They paid for a lot of lobbying at the highest level that you can buy it. And I'd also be noted, by the way, there have been times in the late 2000s and even the late 2010s where folks were talking about, A, establishing a federal commission that would have oversight over everything,

or our current, or I guess he's acting DHS secretary Mark Wayne Mullen, a former MMA fighter. That's right. Before he, he was always Maga, of course, but before he became like hardcore Maga in 2017, he partnered with a bunch of MMA fighters to see if they could get the Ali Act extended to MMA and it didn't go anywhere. Guess who lobbied against both of those? Guess who lobbied against both of those? In a stunning reversal that is certainly hearkening back to his days as a wrestler in Oklahoma, I'm guessing that Mark Wayne Mullen was happy to talk about. He eventually got out of the way. He became a senator, and the fighters I know who were trying to get that legislation extended,

they went back to him. And, you know, I'm not sure exactly what he told him, but the way it was explained to me was he was just not interested anymore. But, you know, UFC has kind of had their thumb on the scale for a long time. They're savvy, right? I mean, these are people like, this is what I mean. Like, you know, again, look at, oh, it's a fight promotion. How seriously should you take it?

These people are not fucking around, man. Oh, but listen, the connective tissue here and why we started with what has happened to UFC is that Dana White, in his favor trading with Donald Trump, is amassing, not just financial capital, but political capital. And he is clearly more and more experienced in how to get things done under this administration. And the question is, where does he choose to spend that political capital and who does he get into business with? And in this case, I'm going to make sure that the TKO Group Holdings Incorporated PAC, whose filings we pulled, is making donations to... Jackie Rosen, the senator, and Dan Sullivan, the center, both of whom are members of the Setted Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. And so there is a bipartisan sheen around

this movement. And what is being hidden to everybody, it seems, except for you who dared to show up, is this is so deeply consistent with what is fundamentally anti-competitive labor practices. If there's one lesson, I've learned in MMA and combat sports generally is that I'm not sure how much people care about the athletes. I mean, I don't want to besmirch fans who really care about the fighters that they like or have there been good promoters who really looked out for the guys. Of course. Of course. I'm not impugning that at all. But the longer I'm in, man, like, you know, who's looking out for the fighters? Is it the people trying to change the laws to take away their labor protections? I don't think that it is.

Is it the sponsors who pledge to give them a certain amount of money? And then when it comes time for the bill to be due, they're long gone. And then who's looking out for these guys when their career is over? Sometimes it's not even their family. It's certainly not going to be the fans that were there when you were headlining 10 years ago or whatever the case may be. And honestly, even the fighters themselves sometimes collectively, as we talked about, don't look out for themselves. Like part of the way in which, it's hard for me to accept this, but it's true. Part of the way in which combat sports functions is by everyone taking a charge.

chunk out of the fighter and not necessarily giving any piece of that back. And it's just been painful to watch, to be honest with you. Yeah. I mean, I think back to the story you told when I asked you, how did you fall in love with this sport? And it's, well, I started marveling at a human being doing something extraordinary. And now, when you're thinking about, okay, how do we feel about the athletes we're watching, we have in this country, perhaps as a species, we have this pretty remarkable ability to disassociate what would be a fundamental human concern from this is the product I signed up for. The reality is, man, like, I've seen these guys on the other end.

Not just one year after they're gone, not just five years, but ten or more. And not just the M.MA, too. Oh, my God, man, I was at a fight not too long ago, and I saw Riddick Bow there. My belief is very simple. Like, people often ask, like, why do you try to pursue these ends? and the way that you're doing them. And one answer is like, if you're the guy in there taking the brain damage,

shortening your life, affecting your quality of life, risking your life in certain cases, people die, you should get the majority of that money. That should go to you. Like, you are the one with the skin in the game. I'm not there to go look at an empty ring or an empty cage.

I'm there to go see elite talent do marvelous things. And it's an exploitation game to a degree, I certainly grant. But if it's going to be that, the least we can do, the least we can do is say they should get the majority of this. And it just seems like no one agrees. There is no feeling in sports like fight night. Because to me, and this is my own personal expression of my own psychology,

someone's humiliation, someone's life is actually on the line. the stakes cannot be more undeniable. And you can quibble about how much money that they're owed as an economic argument. But to the point you raise, they are owed fairness as much as you can deliver it to them. They are owed, as you mentioned, transparency. And I found out, by the way, that, like, the White House leaned on that committee to push that legislation through. I'm sure they're going to be leaning on the Senate committee to kind of hustle it through so they can get that signed. You know, the boxing revival act.

It just seems like so many parts from the Senate. the regulators who I don't trust anymore, to the promoters who have no checks on their behavior whatsoever, to our federal FTC and DOJ folks kind of asleep at the wheel, not helping to create a fairer economy. The working man, I just don't know who's got their back anymore. You've said now a number of sentences where if you're to isolate them and replay them later, it would be very hard to tell whether you are talking about the sport that you love that you've been covering for decades now or anything else that's happening in our country right now. This effort to undo the Ali Act, this is part of a larger effort that you're seeing now at

deregulation, right? We're tearing apart clean water laws. We're tearing apart clean air laws. We're rolling back financial laws that we had put in place after the 2008 crash to protect various financial instruments or you name it. This is, they're tearing the rebar out of the concrete to redo this. And it's all part of this orgy of deregulation. I'll just say it outright. TKO should be broken up. Flat out should be broken up. One of the things that was really disheartening to me was how bipartisan this bill passed out of committee. It was 30 to four. Ilhan Omar voted for it, which was quite disappointing if I can tell you the truth. They're going to win. They're going to win. But my job is, I'm not here to be like, I'm going to put a stop to this. I don't think I can.

I think this train has left the station. But when my time in this sport is done, I would like to be able to have a conversation with the people that I love and even with myself and say, what did you do when you had an opportunity to say what the truth is? What is the point of the truth if you are not allowed to talk about it? I can only hope that the next group that comes after my time will do something about it because mine failed.

Luke Thomas, I don't know how many microphones you're going to get to say this stuff into in the future. Yeah, this is probably it right here. They're coming for me now. But I appreciate you saying all that into this one in our studio. Anytime, Pablo. Thank you. This has been Pablo Torre finds out. A Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.