The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC into a $10 Billion Industry by Michael Thomsen

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC into a $10 Billion Industry by Michael Thomsen https://amzn.to/3NGBV0d A cultural and business history of the UFC, tracing the unlikely rise of mixed martial arts from what was derided in the ‘90s as “human cockfighting”—more violence than sport—to a global pop culture phenomenon. Senator John McCain once decried mixed martial arts as “human cockfighting,” while the New York Times despaired that the sport offered a “pay-per-view prism” onto the decline of western civilization. But the violent spectacle of cage fighting no longer feels nearly as scandalous as it did when the sport debuted in 1993. Today, it’s spoken of reverentially as a kind of “human chess” played out in real-time between two bodies and the UFC is one of the most valuable franchises in the world, worth more than any team in the NFL, NBA, or MLB and equal to what Disney paid to acquire Marvel Comics. Once banned in thirty-six states and hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, the UFC has evolved into a $10 billion industry. How did cage fighting go so mainstream? A rollicking behind-the-scenes account of one of the most spectacular upsets in American sports history, Cage Kings follows the desperate fighters, audacious promoters, fanboy bloggers, fatherly trainers, philosophical announcers, hustling sponsors, and three improbable twentysomething corporate titans on a darkly comic odyssey to normalize a new level of brutality in American pop culture—and make a fortune doing so. Stylishly written and poignantly observed, the book offers a provocative look at how the hollowing out of the American dream over the past three decades and the violence endemic to modern capitalism left us ready to embrace a sport like cage fighting. About the Author Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Aeon, Forbes, Al Jazeera America, Adult, Talking Points Memo, Los Angeles Review of Books, Complex, The Paris Review n+1, Bookforum, The Believer, The New Republic, Kill Screen, The New Inquiry, and The Millions.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome big show my family and friends we're so certainly appreciative that you have joined with us today in the uh holy macrimony of the chris vosh show the giant cult

religion this guy it's not a cult don't don't don't start doing that chris the giant podcast in the sky 14 years 1400 episodes two to three new podcasts a day of the most brilliant minds we can book on this show like literally we day of the most brilliant minds we can book on this show like literally we only take the most brilliant of minds and then there's me so there's that anyway guys uh we're gonna be talking about the ufc today and the story behind the ufc you may have heard of it it's a giant uh it's a giant federation of uh some stuff that goes on so we're gonna get into it and find out what it means and what it's about and how it was built and how the ufc turned into a 10 billion dollar

industry in the meantime go to goodreads.com fortunes chris voss youtube.com fortunes chris voss linkedin.com fortunes chris voss over on tiktok where chris voss won and the chris voss show podcast as well see See what we're producing over there. I'm talking to people daily like I guess you're supposed to over there. I don't know. You're talking about stupid stuff. I will not dance on that. That will not happen. He's the author of the latest book that just came

out June 20th, 2023. Cage Kings. How an unlikely group of moguls, champions, and hustlers transformed the ufc into a 10 billion billion billion as it be industry uh and that's just one there's into a 10 billion dollar industry people are going to be double tripling the billion when they search for it on amazon so don't do that uh michael thompson is on the show with us today and he'll be talking

to us about his amazing insight research in the book. He is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Aeon, Forbes, Al Jazeera America, Adult, Talking Points Memo, Los Angeles Review of Books, Complex, The Paris Review, N Plus One, Book Forum, The Believer, The New Republic, Killscreen, The New Inquiry, and The Millions. the paris review and plus one book forum the believer the new republic kill screen the new inquiry and the millions and now he's reached the pinnacle's career the chris faugh show welcome michelle michael how are you i'm great thank you for having me sorry there you go i'm glad we could finally just cap off you know just the pinnacle of your resume there yeah absolutely i should have shortened the list i was getting a little bored myself listening to all those. You do four. Stop at

four. There you go. I don't think we have anybody from Slate or Al Jazeera or America on. We should look into that and see what's going on there. So give us a.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. A.com? Or.net or whatever Twitter.

I largely just operate on a gmail at this point given up having a port i have a portfolio site but okay i have a twitter account that i never really look at or use that often anymore but you know all right well best thing to do is just to go to the amazon link on the chris voss show and order up the book and then you can send him a nice you can tell him what you think of him on the review there you go does that work that work good sure uh so uh what motivated you want to write this latest book and i think you have two or three books don't you yeah well sorry i i wrote kind of a essay collection about like love and dating and stuff like 10 12 years ago and then i had a essay in an anthology about um american cities where i wrote about the city i grew up in fresno uh which coincidentally is one of the most fervent um one of the most fervent mixed martial arts fan towns according to one one recent uh audience

survey um so i i the book had a couple of different sort of stages originally i wanted to write a history of prize fighting across you know a couple hundred years to kind of look at the way um how different sort of eras sort of gravitated to violence in different ways and how they presented it um culturally and then you know over the course of about a year and a half that kind of whittled down i got some very helpful suggestions from my editor at simon and schuster's like why don't you just tell the history of one time and place instead of stretching it out across you you know, all of these things. You might be able to go deeper if you just sort of focus a little more narrowly on just this time and place.

And so, I mean, the UFC was the most obvious choice in part because I'd been a fan my whole life. I was a junior in high school when the first one came out and it kind of every stage in my life, it's always sort of been there in the background, partly because I was, I was always interested in martial arts and boxing and fighting. And also partly because they were interested in people like me, my demographic, I was their target audience and I was sort of curious about what made, you know, my generation my specific age cohort

so valuable to companies like the UFC why what what kind of business were they building out of a kind of audience of people like me what was the sort of mechanisms behind the scenes that that made that work financially so there you go that that's interesting that you mentioned the span of time and the arc of generations. Because I grew up with boxing. I grew up with Muhammad Ali and Frazier. And who did I just do an imitation of? I always forget his name. But I grew up watching ABC, Wide World of Sports.

Yeah, me too. Crow. Why can't i remember uh i can't remember the the famous uh abc announcer who you know he was he was co-sell how it goes sell yeah this is how it goes sell um and i i i just i thought he was the greatest dude ever and of course you know watching those fights those the muhammad ali and his prime, just something else to behold. And then generationally, weirdly, my brother never got into it, but he got into World Wrestling Federation, WDF. I still to this day think it's real, or he thinks it's real, I think this day which may explain his uh who he votes for and as a president um and then uh and then you as you mentioned uh you know you you kind of came of age

under ufc so it's interesting kind of how uh that develops as time has gone by yeah i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of back and forth between the worlds of pro wrestling and the UFC too. I think Josh Gross, who wrote the history of the Muhammad Ali versus Antonio Inoki fight, he sort of fished out of the archives, but apparently Vince McMahon's senior, Vince McMahon's dad, who sort of got the WWF off the ground and turned it into a juggernaut. In the 60s, he used to use the phrase mixed martial arts to promote the WWF and pro wrestling. So it's an idea that's got a long history. And the Fertitta brothers in 2000, when they brought the company and took it over,

they used a lot of the WWF at that time. It was pre-WWE. They used a lot of the legal framework for how that business was structured for fighter contracts and just revenue modeling to see how they could make the UFC a success. There you go. And your title of the book is

How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions, and Hustlers Transform the UFC. Give us a 30,000 overview of the book, if you would, please, kind of top-down so we'll get the deets yeah sure I you know my my glib way of describing it was kind of war and peace for the tribal tattoos and cargo shorts generation suburban men the cargo shorts. Wow. Shots fired. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you know,

if you know, you know, if you know, you know, yeah. It's, it's a sprawling kind of story. It spans multiple generations.

It starts in the nineties when the business environment was very different. The whole plan for the company was a very different plan than what we know of today as a UFC. But it kind of just, you know, tries to chart and track the lives of both the fighters involved in the UFC and the people running the UFC and how, you know, in parallel, you know, the company shaped each of their lives and ambitions and what they hoped for. And that's, you know, Dana White or Bob Meyerowitz or Art Davey,

or, you know, the Furtita brothers on the sort of corporate side. And then on the fighter side, I picked four main fighters that kind of spanned the company's whole sort of history up to the sale in 2016 it's randy couture nick diaz and his brother nate ronda rousey and then conor mcgregor is sort of the big finish do you get into dana white much i mean yeah absolutely the guy that sure yeah yeah it's the last word in the book how were they friendly to you did they give you any interviews or any space time um the ufc cooperated a bit they gave me a few interviews and i i went out to vegas a few times to talk um kind of off the record just about what the book was what i was interested in like what are you writing yeah you know to feel me out and you know i got to visit the offices a little bit

that office is massive out there isn't it that facility yeah i kind of described it in the book in the epilogue i sort of write about one of those trips it's it feels almost like a military compound like you're in a green zone or something it's like a big sort of barrier around it there's like a big quarter mile parking lot before you can get up to the and then it's just this cube in the middle of nowhere. It's out in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty much, I think you just described Vegas actually. So yeah,

there's another book just about Vegas. There you go. That could be the next one. Yeah. The parking spots of Vegas. Uh, you know, what's interesting to me is you,

you talk about the rise of this thing and it went through a couple of kerfuffles that almost seemed like it was going to kill it and put out a business. And I think this is why books like yours in the story makes it much more salient and interesting because this wasn't just like an overnight success story. It was like, Hey, we're going to do this. And boom, At one point, they started doing the fights, and you'll, I'm sure, fill me in better on this, but they were banned in many states. How did that play in some of the details that you uncover in your book?

Yeah, I think that's one of the interesting things I kind of tried to tease out in the first chapter a little bit was kind of how small an operation it was initially like anyone that maybe has worked in the entertainment industry like before i started writing i worked in the movie industry for a while and like you know the way that sort of movies and tv shows are designed to be able to scale up very quickly for like a five or six week shoot and then just evaporate again into like a producer and an assistant sitting on a studio lot that's kind of the world the ufc came out of where you know it was a very small

you know the company that financed it originally or partially financed it um semaphore entertainment group um you know they're a subsidiary of bmg the big music conglomerate. And, you know, their sort of idea was that they were supposed to find original pay-per-view programming. And you know, they had a pretty small staff and they found Art Davy who was pitching this idea for what would become the UFC.

And they kind of just put it together in a matter of months. Davy had been working on it on his own for a couple of years at that point. But by the time he got their backing, it went, I think, within seven or eight months from them being interested. I think he had called them in March of 1993

and they targeted an October sort of live broadcast. And so the whole thing, you know, it was a really small number of people and a really short period of time and they just ran with it. And so they were not at the point of like doing exhaustive legal research or anything like that. They were just sort of like getting over every hurdle as quickly and simply as possible. And, and, and it was interesting how the put, how big the pushback was i think when it first launched um you know i mean you see this with the uh the establishment of you know i i lived in utah during skiing when

they finally came out snowboards and oh my god that was heresy and you know they were getting banned and kicked off the off the uh off the slopes and banned from skiing. And then years later, they finally adopted it. And I think boxing was so big back then. The World Wrestling Federation, I don't know if they opposed it, but I believe it was the boxing commissions and stuff that were like, this is not going to fly. Is that how it worked?

Yeah. I mean, it initially started. And there was an ambiguity with a lot of boxing commission. That's why they launched in Denver because there wasn't a commission there to interfere one way or the other. So they couldn't get approval or not. So, but as soon as people realize that's how they were operating, then a lot of States, a lot of local politicians, you know, some just sort of cynically for PR wins, but others out of kind of a genuine moral conviction, really started to try and oppose

the sport. But initially, the UFC had a number of early wins in court, because courts would rule that because it was such a new sport, the laws sort of defining how athletic commissions operated they didn't actually have um the ability to to you know oversee mixed martial arts because it's you know they're the way their laws were written were about boxing about you know other sports they don't specifically mention mixed martial arts you cage fighting. So a lot of courts early on said, like, you know, you don't have authority to stop this under the specific law that governs the commission. And they figured that pretty quickly,

and that's when you had this sort of cascade of state legislatures sort of correcting that loophole pretty quickly and then putting pressure on the pay-per-view providers. And I think starting in 97 that's when all the pay-per-view providers pushed the ufc off to kind of appease john mccain and then you know the only place you could get ufc from 97 to 2001 was um satellite pay-per-view which is like 20 of the amount of homes that you had with linear cable pay-per-view which is like 20 of the amount of homes that you had with linear cable pay-per-view and they they really struggled and then you have a quote from the book senator

mckean john mckean once this derived decried martial arts as human cock fighting um you know i told you in the pre-show my friend at club axis Access, Corey Draper, used to hold the UFC fights when they got banned everywhere. And Utah has loved it, man. They caught on to it really quick. And my models from my modeling agency used to be the model girls, the card girls or whatever. And I've got plenty of photos of that. I never even photos of that. I, I never even thought of it, but, um, uh, what was interesting was watching him cause I would get ringside because I, you know, they were my girls.

And so it was, you know, you're like, Hey, I get ringside. But I remember it was hard to, it was hard to deal with, uh, with the violence level of it. Cause you weren't used to it. And I felt, I felt stuck in the mud, like, you know, I Muhammad Ali boxer, there's just, there's something of class to it, which there probably isn't. It's two men beating each other to death. Um, but I remember watching it and I remember telling the joke that I've told ever since that, that, well, now I know what a prison grape looks like. Uh, it's just the violence and men crawling around with each other on the floor and, and

just, it, it didn't seem, it seemed to be way more violent to me. And I think it is, uh, than boxing, but it was hard to wrap my head around me. Basically is what I'm saying. I had a hard time with it. I think a lot of people did. And, uh, I don't know what that means or what, how that's pertinent, but, uh, it was something that I think people kind of struggled. Maybe we had to come to an agreement with that as a society go.

Yeah. Okay. Let's let this roll. Yeah. I mean, I think there's still, you know, some debate about whether it's more or less violent,

you know, the MMA people say it's, it's less violent than boxing because it's less about head trauma. And, you know, there's a lot of sparring is grappling sparring. It's not, you know, just striking sparring. It's less about head trauma. And, you know, there's a lot of sparring is grappling sparring. It's not, you know, just striking sparring. It's more of a mix and gloves and, you know, allow you to transmit head trauma.

It takes a lot more force with gloves on to knock someone out than with the four ounce gloves. I would, in the end of the the day i think they're both probably equally violent i think the ufc was just a new form of violence that people weren't used to and there was a sort of barbarism to especially the early shows where you know um you know i kind of quote in the in the book that you know people were pulling each other's hair out in the first UFC. And the commentator, Kathy Long, who was a world champion kickboxer, who was doing color commentary, was like, wow, you can see just tufts of hair falling down into the octagon there. That's not something you see every day.

But that was legal, too. There was a period where groin strikes were legal. You had some absurd kind of moments of two guys just on the ground, just taking turns just like walloping each other's crotches fridays at my house yeah it's true that's the wife um the uh you know i and and and and when you really think about it like you mentioned it is a bit high-minded to say well it's more violent i mean i was i paid for the pay-per-view or i watch what's his face chew off a guy's ear what was that fight um evander holyfield yeah and uh yeah that was that was a bit violent uh in fact i think evander holyfield probably uh got the brunt of that one so uh they

they tend they're doing this thing and then they meet i believe the vegas people right uh yeah so um the original owner of the ufc bob meyerowitz was trying to get the company back on cable sort of in a desperate push and he was going all over the country trying to get athletic commissions to sanction it and sort of um undo some of the political damage that had come out of their sort of first couple of years of runaway success where they were kind of making more money than they were prepared to, I think initially even. Um, and Lorenzo Fertitta was the youngest member of the Nevada state athletic, uh, commission, um, at that time. And so he was one of the people that, um, Bob Meyeritz and a lobbyist

he brought with him was trying to persuade to um let the ufc hold events in nevada because he had been told by some cable operators that if he got a big state a state that had a boxing legacy like nevada that was as respected as the Nevada commission was, you know, for whatever you take that for. If he could get that, something like that, then they would consider putting it back on regular pay-per-view and sort of save him from the satellite kind of limbo zone he was in. And, you know, that would turn the money pipe back on. That would help him be able to start turning a profit again.

And tell us about the Fertittas because I mean, it was this, it was this a kind of a linchpin moment where legitimate money comes in and kind of, well, a big money comes in and kind of legitimizes them and, and, and that kind of helps move the needle. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I think that's the big catalyst. So the Fertitta brothers, Lorenzo and Frank the needle? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the big catalyst. So the Fertitta brothers, Lorenzo and Frank the third, they, they are heir to station casinos, um, which is the,

the first major locals gaming casino in Las Vegas. Their father, Frank jr started it in the mid 1970s, uh, with the idea that this would just be a casino for local people. It wouldn't be a tourist attraction. It was off the strip. It was out in the middle of nowhere on Sahara Boulevard. And all it would be was sort of bingo, slot machines, some light table games, and just a friendly, low-key place for people to kind of let off steam.

And over a few decades decades it sort of transformed into a giant billion dollar a year business so by 2000 which is the year that they um they took over the ufc the end of 2000 that same year station brought in almost a billion dollar i think it was 980 million million in revenue for the year. I think at that point they had something like 16 different casinos around Las Vegas, all off-strip, all in the sort of suburbs. All off-strip, all local. Yeah, and they really controlled it.

So they had deep, deep pockets, and they had even deeper access to credit and banking, and they had a lot of connections politically. And they had a lot of, one of the people they wound up hiring later on came from the Nevada Attorney General's office. Another person they hired to help deal with athletic regulations was Mark Ratner, who was another member of the Athletic Commission in Nevada. So, you know, they had a lot of cachet with people that Bob Meyerowitz didn't. And sort of like I was saying earlier that, you know, about how small an operation the UFC originally was. And that's sort of part of how they got in so much trouble is that, you know,

they had more success than they were prepared to really deal with sort of politically, legally, financially, it's sort of just all happened all at once. And, you know, they're trying to solve seven different problems, big problems when they're really only equipped to do, you know, one or two at a time. But the Fertittas had money, they had capital, they had reputation that allowed them to deal with all seven of those problems simultaneously. And it, it wasn't a threat to their livelihood. You know, they could lose $7 million when they're making $980 million from the gaming

business. You know, that's, that's not a sort of fundamental threat to their, to their wellbeing the way it was for Semaphore. There you go. And it just goes through this whole arc and, and now it's you know it's just huge mainstream they make a lot of money what are some of the most uh more surprising maybe stories or teasers or tidbits you can give us maybe that you you found in the book that you were just like wow people are really gonna be mind blown when they read about this yeah that's a tricky question i have to think about that for a while. Part of it because it's such a complicated story. I mean, one of the hard parts about writing the book was

trying to condense the history of a company which now is like, you know, 400 some employees big not counting Endeavor and, and all the other how to make that a sort of coherent vision. So, I mean, a lot of the things that I found most memorable were really like character moments. Here's what I actually had to cut this out of the book, but I spent some time with Nick and Nate Diaz's boxing coach, Richard Perez, who I think is just a great guy. And I love talking with him, but he's a guy that's, you know, he doesn't get a lot of notoriety in MMA circles, but he was, he's such an interesting character.

He was, he was thrown out of his house when he was 14 because he was epileptic and his father was deeply religious. So he thought when his son was having seizures, he was being possessed by demons. He was completely freaked out by it. So he kicked him out and his father had also been a pro boxer and he had brought up all his kids to learn how to box.

He brought them to the gym with them, you know, when they were younger. So when Richard found himself out on his own for the first time, um, boxing was the only way he knew how to support himself. So he would make money by offering to be a sparring partner. He'd spar for 25 bucks a session with guys in Fresno, which is my hometown. That's where he grew up too. And just, you know, as a teenager, completely alone, that was his one way of sort of not ending up homeless or on the streets. And then, you know, that led him to eventually being a boxing coach. Um, and even that, you know, he, he coached world champions, but he never made enough from it that he was able to quit his day job so when he met Nick and Nate he was still working as a high school janitor and then just going to the gym at night to train fighters and

it's stuff like that those kind of details that sort of like the human kind of circumstance that lead people into fighting and and what kind of characterizes that the relationship people have over a lifetime in fighting sports that to me was was the most meaningful like it that's the stuff that sticks with me after having gone through this whole six-year process of reporting this stuff out there you go yeah the the um and then even with the for tds they they had trouble with uh, there was financial issues for them when the fall of that, I think it was the 2008 crisis where they've kind of extended themselves, 2008 housing crisis. Because I remember they had several projects under works for the station casinos. They were building like, I don't know, a station casino, like 7-Elevens at one point. I think it was projected. I remember the, I think it was the North Las Vegas

one that got them kind of overextended and in trouble, I think, when they were building it. Yeah, that had just opened when the collapse happened. They had just gone public, too. And they had, so they had or they had gone, sorry,

they had gone private. So they had to buy back all their shares. And they took on a huge amount of debt to do that. And then they wound up right when the crisis hit. That was about a year before the real estate collapse. And so they couldn't service their own debt. So they had to go into bankruptcy proceedings. Yeah. Crazy. Crazy story. couldn't service their own debt so they had to go into bankruptcy proceedings yeah crazy crazy

story and and somehow the ufc just keeps building through this all and just keeps going uh i think dana white survived a few different uh i don't know moments or i think there was some i think sometimes there was something either said or different things that happened i know a couple of fighters have gotten in trouble i think there's one in trouble right now um and there's a lot of it yeah there's a lot of interesting characters doing interesting things with maybe a little too much testosterone or maybe some other things going on um but yeah they it seems like they you know they just keep plowing through and and keep growing and and um uh it just appears there's no end in sight. In fact, I think it's technically bigger than boxing right now.

Is boxing even still a thing anymore? I guess it is for lightweight and medium. I don't even care for lightweight and medium. Like I said, I guess I'm just an old guy who's on the lawn going, get off my lawn, kids. I mean, I still love the heavyweights, you know, all that fighting. When I see the little guys fighting, I'm like, well, that's cute.

But, I mean, people love it, so what do I know? Yeah. It's, you know, it's a common theme in the UFC, too. One of my best friends only watches heavyweight fights. Yeah. Okay, so I don't feel so bad then. I'm not that old stick of a mud.

If you grew up watching fucking Ali and Frazier and all the greats from back in that day, it was an extraordinary time to live through. And the fighting, when you've seen the rumble in the jungle, when you've seen the rope-a-dope, you know, and watching, what's-his-face spar just verbally with, you know, they were always arguing, the announcer from ABC, Wide World of Sports,

how it would sell, always arguing and sparring with uh with momily it was just a magical time of history um and the characters were just seem larger than life and you know i mean i i could tell that the wf was fake i had to sorry did i break anybody's feelings did i did i tell somebody santa claus isn't real uh so there's that uh anything more you want to tease out of the book michael before we go and before I finish assaulting anybody who likes wrestling at this point? I don't know.

I'm not really a teasing kind of person. I like spoilers. I'll just tell you how it ends. Well, I mean, technically you've got a couple books you can work on for this going on here and on there. I think Dana White's an extraordinary, interesting guy. Would you frame him as a consummate leader, visionary, entrepreneur, endless promoter?

Is he really that dude can you really look at the UFC and say this thing made it because of him it made it in the form that it's currently in because of him I think it would have survived

regardless I think that's one of the myths that gets told a lot that MMA wouldn't exist without UFC and Dana. And they were, you know, the Fertittas and Dana White were certainly central to MMA getting formed in, in the state that it's currently in.

But, you know, even when the UFC in the late nineties was going through its difficulties, pride was massive in Japan. There was a massive global audience growing. That's part of what made it such an appealing acquisition target for the Fertittas, I think. They knew they were getting an underpriced asset for $2 million.

$2 million? Yeah. I remember that. That's coming back to me. Wow, $2 million. Barrett Meyerowitz offered him 50% for a million dollars. And they said, we'll take the whole thing for two. Wow.

But part of what made that such a good deal is in Japan, you were having 10, 20 million people watch Pride events. And so that doesn't translate to American revenue per se, but there's still enough of a spillover audience and enough of a kind of cultural memory. And even separate from the UFC, you had this whole new generation of regional fight promoters like your friend you're talking about. King of the Cage was going on in California.

IFC had been going on. IFC actually had the first free televised MMA event, I think in all the United States, which was a broadcast on a local affiliate in Alabama in advance of one of their shows down there in, I think, 98 or 99. But there was this, you know, you know, there's a whole host of people working on these sort of knockoffs and follow-ons from the original UFC success.

So there was a real churn there in the market, you know, and there was things were catching. It was slowly kind of building and bubbling up. It was just whether that would have led to you know the state of mma today that we have that we're all familiar with with one unified sort of coherent brand which is something you don't have in boxing you know that's part of you know one of the struggles that boxing has had is sort of like there's nowhere to go to follow a coherent you know narrative about who's fighting who and why. So that's what I wanted to really write about in the book,

is not whether they saved MMA, but how their efforts created MMA that we know today in the particular form. There you go. Yeah. Maybe it'll be as big as that new thing they have out where you slap each other in the face so you see that thing yeah is that part of ufc are they the ones that are that's the fratitas and dana white damn man i believe john mulkey is involved as the old cfo

from the ufc i've started watching i started watching some of those things and i'm just like holy crap that looks like a man the the football people are like wow that's more you know who's the pittsburgh steelers uh um old quarterback from the 70s terry bradshaw i mean he sounded like i think at least uh somewhere under a hundred uh concussions i think in his I don't know. He doesn't remember either. But you watch that and you're just like, that looks like a concussion problem the NFL had. I don't know, man. Whatever, man. Whatever works, man.

I guess, I don't know. There's a few people I think I'd like to see do a slap fight, at least with me and my enemies. Evidently, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have announced they might do a cage fight. Yeah, I mean, that's one you'd rather see them do a slap fight

than a cage fight. I mean, I would pay to not watch them. Yeah, because they're just going to pull each other's hair pretty much and, I don't know, take swipes at each other with their HP calculators or something. I don't know what goes on their pocket protectators or something. I don't know what goes on their pocket protectors or something. I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe they'll just take turns going in deep diving submersibles that aren't certified and see how that works. There's that. That was the whole celebrity boxing from the early 2000s. If you remember, Fox used to play like Tom Arnold, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And Screech, what's his name dust and diamond and tanya harding do um i forget who the the match-ups were but yeah there was a period where you think it was tony harding in a kneecap i think uh versus kneecap something like that there's a whole series yeah i mean it's You know, I, anytime I see cage fighting, I just think of that, uh, that movie, uh, Thunderdome, you know, two men enter one man leave. Uh, God bless that show. Uh, so thank you very much for coming on the show, Michael. We really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. And I think people are really, of course, going to join the book because there's so many fans for this, too, as well.

I appreciate it. I hope so. There you go. Worked very hard on it. There you go. I hope people like it. So we don't have a dot-com or a plug, so people just click the link on the Chris Voss Show. You'll see it, of course, posted everywhere.

Order the book where refined books are sold. Cage Kings. How an unlikely group of moguls, champions, and hustlers transformed the UFC into a $10 billion industry. What an incredible story. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortunes Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Fortunes Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortunes Chris Foss, and find us over at TikTok at Chris Foss 1 and the Chris Foss Show podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out, man.