>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour will be made on June 14th of this year on the White House lawn.

For the first time ever, the White House will host a professional sporting event.

June 14th is President Trump's 80th birthday, and he's eager for the spectacle of the Ultimate Fighting Championships.

The UFC bringing their famous Octagon to the White House.

They're calling it UFC Freedom 250, marking not only the president's birthday, but the upcoming birthday of the country.

Trump is close with UFC's Dana White.

He's also connected to a number of other figures from both UFC and the so-called manosphere.

The Paul Brothers, Dictate Brothers and more.

The list goes on.

Last week, he endorsed professional boxer Jake Paul to run for office in the future, saying that Paul is a great guy and would make a great politician.

White is promising a massive spectacle for UFC Freedom 250 thousands of fans and some serious fights.

President Trump is telling people it's the hottest ticket in Washington this hour.

We discussed the meaning of this UFC event happening at the White House and the growing influence of the so-called manosphere in Washington.

My guest is Dr.

Kyle Green, Kyle's associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Suny Brockport.

Welcome back to the program.

>> It's always fun to be here.

>> So as a bit of your credentials, some listeners and viewers might say, oh, you got an academic to talk about the UFC.

You know, it's just going to be this academic discussion.

far from it.

Kyle is a legit UFC head, I think.

And tell me a little bit about your background there.

>> Yeah, so I'll say this is pretty personal.

And in some ways that's what makes it so depressing.

I've been a fan of the UFC since I was young.

My brother was a college wrestler, and so he's eight years older than me.

He brings home a VHS tape of the first UFC, and I watched every single one since then go off to grad school.

I'm interested in sports.

I'm interested in politics.

I'm interested in culture.

I'm interested in gender.

I end up researching the growth of mixed martial arts in the United States.

And I'm specifically interested in all the people, whether they're doctors, grad students, lawyers, construction workers, people who choose to choose to how am I going to spend my time?

I'm going to go to a gym.

I'm going to spend money to learn how to fight.

I'm going to choke people.

I'm going to punch people.

I'm going to kick people.

So I trained alongside people for about seven years.

While I was writing about the growth of this thing.

>> So did you get pretty good?

Did you get pretty trained up?

>> I got I got decent, I got good enough to coach sometimes, and I got good enough to know that I was not going to go to the next level.

And I also got good enough to know it was bad to get hit in the head.

>> How long would I last in an octagon with you?

>> I don't know.

I haven't done it for a while.

I've had a lot of injuries, but probably not long.

>> Probably not long.

Yeah, that's fair for those who obviously know boxing, but maybe don't know UFC, how does it differentiate?

>> So there are rules, but the basic idea is that you can use any technique to beat up the opponent or to make them give up.

So it could be boxing, it could be kickboxing, it could be basically any martial art.

And it's turned out a big part of it is grappling.

So taking the person to the ground, trying to choke them, trying to make them submit through, bending their arm, twisting their knee.

And so it's boxing combined with every martial art.

That's the basic idea.

>> How long does a fight usually last?

>> more and more it goes to a decision.

So a fight is three, five minute rounds.

So 15 minutes.

It used to be you would see more finishes.

sometimes amateur fights are shorter, title fights are longer, but about 15 minutes.

>> And when was that first year when you get that tape from your brother.

>> 1993, 93.

>> It's been around that long.

>> It's been around that long, but it's still relatively young.

So it's in that in-between space, right?

Kind of the age of the people who are paying attention and leading the manosphere.

So it's young enough that we remember the birth of this thing.

We remember it was when it was this controversial, really fringe practice.

John McCain called it human cockfighting.

It wasn't allowed to be shown on any pay per view.

Every athletic commission, all 50 states banned it at one point.

And this is the part of the story when we see the connection between Dana White and Trump.

But this was seen as too violent to esthetically.

just not what we wanted in the United States.

So in many ways it was ostracized.

And then it made this comeback and grew.

And now it's incredibly mainstream.

>> Yeah, very much mainstream.

Covered by ESPN going going to the White House lawn, which we'll talk about in a moment here.

But did it start off as culturally or politically in any direction in its early days in the 90s?

Was was UFC associated with any part of the culture wars or culture itself, or politics?

>> Not not really.

You at least had to dig deeper to find that it was the place for weirdos, in a way, right?

It was.

People found fighting wasn't a normal path to take.

So if you ended up in a gym, especially training, you were searching for something and it could be that you just watched a bunch of martial arts movies and you wanted to test this thing out.

It could be that you saw the UFC and you saw a sumo wrestler fighting a Dutch kickboxer, and you were excited to try it out.

It could be wrestlers looking to stay active, and the main, the unifying feature was there was a lot of conversation going on, and it would be people talking about the world and they'd be using MMA training in combat sport as a way to understand larger issues.

But the ideology was all over the place.

I would find as many people who were libertarians as people who were communist, as people who were traditional Democrats or traditional Republicans.

And that's not true anymore.

>> Yeah.

We're going to talk about that evolution.

Why did you like it?

>> Oh, that's a good question.

>> that's funny.

That might be the hardest question you asked me today.

I, I was someone who grew up playing video games like Street Fighter.

my, like I said, my brother wrestled.

I liked martial arts movies.

And I was curious about the thing.

I was also into sports, I was competitive.

And when I got there, partially, I justified it through research.

So I didn't train before I started doing research.

I was a fan of it, but I didn't train in the thing.

I just found it fascinating.

It is.

And as much as I'm critical of where the culture has gone, it is one of the most creative ways that people can compete with each other.

People can rely on different types of techniques.

You see different levels of resilience.

You see people coming back through adversity.

So it has all the qualities that we love of sport in sport really boil down to its most core feature.

>> It doesn't seem barbaric or slightly Roman Colosseum.

Oh it does.

>> Yeah, yeah.

I'm both critical of the of the appeal and my own attraction to it while I still watch the thing.

>> See, as someone, as a sociologist, as someone who studies other people.

Yeah.

I wonder what you think about your own self, your own sort of bifurcated self in that way.

>> Yeah.

And this is one of the big questions I have.

Even watching football, I struggle to watch football because of the level of damage to the brain.

And if you're watching boxing, you're watching people damage their brains.

If you're watching the UFC, it used to be and it was always argued it was actually better for the brain than something like boxing, because as soon as you got hurt, you'd be taken to the ground, you would be choked, or you would tap out, right?

You would give up before you actually had repeated concussions, boxing, you get knocked down, you get up and you have 10 seconds to recover.

That doesn't happen in MMA.

Boxing, you have more rounds.

It's just constantly getting hit to the head.

Football, you have constant hits to the head, especially if you're on the line.

So we used to including myself, I used to justify and say, well, it's better for the brain than that other thing.

And we still watch it.

But I think as humans, we're really good at consuming things that we know are probably bad for us and bad for the people that we're either producing it or for the people that were actually watching and celebrating.

And I'm a human.

>> So over those seven years when you were training and studying, did you notice any commonalities in the people who were training themselves, who were pursuing that sort of life and that career?

>> Yeah.

So the big commonality, I would say, is people searching for community, because that's one of the big things that I found.

And that was also an appeal for me.

People, when they train together, almost immediately started building community.

And they found other people who they could talk through life issues with.

And I'll tell a really short story.

First time I didn't know if I was going to be doing research on the topic, but I was curious.

So I went to a local MMA gym.

It was a grappling day, first day, get on the mats with a guy who at the time I thought was kind of old.

He was probably our age, right?

So I get in the mats with this guy in his 40s and we grapple for, say, three minutes.

Now.

I had not done this before, so I was exhausted and he wasn't.

He choked me a few times, pinned my pin me on the ground, put my arm behind my back, gave up a few times.

Then we're sitting and recovering and immediately started sharing these stories about how he was going through a divorce.

He had a good job, but he wasn't satisfied with his job.

training really helps him and gives him a focus and gives him a path.

And he was sharing these details with someone that he had met literally five minutes before.

And so as I was sitting there, first of all, just trying to breathe again, but as I was sitting there, I was thinking, there's something going on where this where this guy is immediately treating me like a close friend, even though he knows nothing about me other than the fact that we were sweating on each other and that he had choked me.

That was it.

That's all he knew.

And yet he's telling me about his divorce.

He's telling me about his relationship with his kids.

He's telling me about his job.

He's asking bigger questions about society.

And that was one of the themes that I found over and over and over, for better or worse.

>> Now I want to talk about what you've seen shift over time.

And listeners, if you've got questions, comments today, I still think we're not doing team phone calls.

No.

So no live phone calls, still working on an updated phone system there.

So hang with us for a little while while we do that, but you can email the program as always, Connections at wxxi.org, Connections at wxxi.org.

You can join the chat if you're watching on the WXXI News YouTube channel.

Kyle Green is my guest, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Suny Brockport, someone who not only kind of grew up liking UFC Ultimate Fighting Championships, but trained and studied and spent years kind of getting inside it.

So now UFC is going to be the first ever professional sporting event on the White House lawn.

That's June 14th.

It's President Trump's 80th birthday.

They're calling it UFC Freedom 250, celebrating not only the president, but I'm laughing.

We'll talk about it.

But 250 years of the country.

and I want to kind of make sure that we, we get a little differentiation here so Kyle can respond to the first email we have, if we could hear and it's on the subject of, you know, whether this is truly unique, that UFC is going to the White House.

So Charles writes to us to say so.

In other words, this is the same thing that President Obama did with the White House tennis court for his 50th birthday and other occasions when he invited Kobe Bryant to come play basketball on a makeshift tennis court at the White House.

first of all, same thing or different.

>> I would say different.

>> Okay.

Different.

How.

>> Inviting athletes to the White House is not new.

We've seen that for years and years and years.

Whether it's the every championship team, what's the reward?

You get to go to the White House or simply bringing the athlete because you're starting some new policy, or you're starting some new program for kids.

So you bring that athlete, you hang out with them.

Presidents, politicians have always used sports.

And we could talk more about that.

This is different in the sense that there is this giant event taking place where people are going to be paying both to watch it and to actually go to it.

That wasn't happening with any of the previous events.

So this is actually the sporting event itself happening now.

One of the questions we should ask is who's paying for the thing?

Building a cage, having security, putting on an event is very expensive.

If it's the White House paying for it, then as taxpayers, we should say, why is our money going towards this?

That's it.

Tennis court costs money.

Building a tennis court is cheaper than putting on an event like this.

Kobe Bryant coming.

You're not paying Kobe Bryant right.

He's showing up and you're getting to hang out with him.

You're getting to look like normal guy who loves basketball.

If the UFC is paying for it, then fighters should be angry because they're chronically underpaid.

But there is something different about having a paid event that's going to be nationally televised.

And also there's something different about the sport.

I would say tennis, basketball are traditional sports in the United States.

They are not violent.

This is the most violent sport we have.

And again, as much as I'm a fan, as much as I've participated in the thing, there's something different about watching two people, in this case men, because there's no women on the card.

Which is interesting because in the UFC there's a lot of popular women fighters.

There's only men on the UFC.

250 Freedom Fights card, and there are going to be trying to knock each other out or choke each other.

There's something different about that.

>> Charles goes on to say.

I'm just saying, if I were president, there would be absolutely an outdoor game with the capitals alumni and the cast of Shoresy at the White House.

Right after I made it illegal to get to the front of the line at a convenience store without knowing what lotto numbers you want to play.

Now, that part we can all agree on, Charles.

That should be illegal.

If you wait in line at the convenience store and you still don't know, now you're holding everybody up.

Charles on the money there.

But and I take Charles's point.

If he were president, he'd bring a hockey team.

He'd do fun stuff.

But this is an event for the for the league or the structure of the sport it's in.

It counts.

It's not like bringing Kobe in for a shootaround.

It'd be like telling the current version of the Lakers.

Perhaps we're going to build an arena.

We're going to have 5000 paying fans at the arena.

We're going to have 80,000 plus free tickets for the ellipse nearby, and this will count in the standings.

Like this is a real thing.

That's I think the distinction there.

>> Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.

So it's both the, the actual logistics of the event.

And it's also, and I don't think we can ignore the fact that it's MMA versus a different sport and other leagues wouldn't do that.

Right.

So in the Obama went to basketball games, right?

He went to the Chicago Bulls play.

That's different than bringing the court building the court.

The cage is not going to be there.

A month after.

Right.

So this is not building a tennis court, which then presidents can play on.

Politicians can visit.

That's not this.

This is building an event, having the event and then dismantling it gone.

>> As as a celebration in part of the president himself and his birthday.

>> Yeah.

>> It's not on his birthday.

>> Initially it was going to be July 4th or July 3rd.

And then not surprising shifted.

And now it's his birthday celebration.

So he will bring all the dignitaries, all his friends, leaders from other countries.

I'm sure a lot of tech CEOs, they will get to watch this event.

>> So I want to listen to some of what Dana White had to say.

But before we do that, who is Dana White?

>> Dana White has run the UFC for many years.

Dana White took his position when the Fertitta brothers, who were casino owners in Vegas, bought the UFC, so the UFC was struggling.

The Fertitta brothers buy it.

They put Dana White, who was someone who was involved with boxing out of Boston, in charge.

He's the one who, in a sense, was the face of the UFC.

He helped make the fights.

He helped.

He's a promoter.

He gets out and says, this is why you should watch the thing.

And he's made a lot of money doing that.

>>, and he's become a strong ally of President Trump.

Yes.

>> He has become a strong ally of Trump.

He spoke for Trump when Trump was first running for president.

He spoke for Trump the second time that he ran for president, and the third time.

So he appeared at the RNC.

In each of those cases, his friendship goes back much further.

Again, UFC was this fringe struggling combat sport.

They had to find a place to go.

One of the places they went was Trump provided a home at his casinos.

And so that's when the relationship started.

It was really in exchange, Trump provided a home.

The UFC provided entertainment and that.

And that continued on.

The first time that Dana White spoke at the RNC, he specifically said, hey, I'm not involved in politics.

I don't know about Trump's policies, but I know he's a good guy because I worked with him.

We had a business relationship.

This was transactional.

I mean, Dana White also campaigned first time he campaigned for a politician was actually Harry Reid.

And Harry.

>> Reid from Nevada.

>> Harry, Harry Reid, his Democrat.

Key thing is Dana White wants to get favorable rules and policies for the UFC in Vegas, where he holds a lot of his events.

So he's always treated politics as transactional.

Again, we can see that shift where he himself has become more and more conservative, both following Trump's playbook.

But Dana White in many ways.

And we could talk about this more, has set a model for how Trump has approached politics as well.

>> Now, the word transactional, I think, is key here, because if Dana White operates with a transactional approach to relationships, that's a language that Trump understands 100%.

And so they build this relationship where they say, what can you do for me?

What can I do for you?

What can I get out of this?

Yeah.

Now he's going to be on not only on the White House lawn, but, you know, he's leveraged white has leveraged his friendship with President Trump or his relationship with President Trump into a pretty powerful position, hasn't he?

UFC is not on the fringes of our society anymore.

>> UFC signed a I believe, $7 billion dollar contract with Paramount.

Paramount is led by someone who is trying to curry the favor of Donald Trump.

And so that can't be ignored.

The fact that they gave the UFC their biggest contract ever, putting them on Paramount+ paying more than they probably should have.

In a sense, paying Dana White is part of the way that you impress Donald Trump.

So he's gained he's used that as leverage.

and it really has gone both ways.

I mean, this is kind of silly example, but in some ways, it's an important example.

When Donald Trump joined TikTok, his first video was with Dana White side by side, announcing Trump is finally joining TikTok.

Right?

So this this friendship has gone both ways.

>> So let's listen to Dana White.

TMZ posted this video of Dana White getting interviewed about this upcoming event at the White House.

Let's listen.

>> Dana, a lot's been made of the ticket situation on the White House lawn, and the tickets won't be for sale.

That doesn't mean fight fans can't flock to DC and have a great time.

>> Yeah, you know, I don't know how many UFC fans have actually been to DC, but it's a great city and we're going to have all kinds of activations going on that week.

I mean, the press conference is going to be at the Lincoln Memorial.

and the way that the White House is laid out, you got the White House, you got the South Lawn, and then there's a road and then the ellipse is a park that's right there.

We're going to be ticketing 85,000 people in the ellipse, and the tickets are free.

And we'll announce how we're going to be giving them away soon.

But you should plan on going to Washington, D.C.

for this event.

there's going to be all kinds of activations in the ellipse.

There's going to be music bands are going to be playing and you can actually sit in the park and watch the fight on the screens, but you'll actually see the whole setup.

It's right there.

It will be a very unique, cool experience for fight fans.

And like I always say, this is like a one of one.

>> That's Dana White of the UFC.

Okay, so a couple things here.

First of all, the UFC press conference is going to be at the Lincoln Memorial.

how do we feel about that?

>> I mean, Lincoln famously a fan of MMA, I don't know.

I don't know.

>> I mean, this doesn't seem like it.

Maybe, I don't know.

>> Yeah, I mean, this, this is one of the things that we see with President Trump, right?

There's, there's no symbol that cannot be shifted to be a celebration of him.

And this is fundamentally a celebration of Trump.

>> So at the White House, we're doing a UFC event at the Lincoln Memorial.

We'll do the UFC press conference.

No symbol is too sacred.

>> And and if you've ever I don't know if you've ever seen a press conference for the UFC, but basically how it works is you have the two fighters or you have multiple fighters, but you have the fighters who are going to be competing against each other, and they try to sell the fight.

And what we've seen in recent years, and this is also a shift.

It existed in the past, but it's taken on more of a professional wrestling type character where the fighters basically insult each other and yell at each other.

Now, it might be different because of the place that it's being held.

It could shift.

However, this is what we see.

We say, you know, you're you're weaker than me.

You insult family, you insult religion, you insult politics.

Nothing is off limit.

And so this is how you sell a fight.

So again, if.

>> You think that because of the Lincoln Memorial, maybe they'll be more buttoned up or reserved.

I don't think that's been the history of the modern era of politics.

>> I think you're going to be right.

>> Okay.

Yeah.

Now he's talking about the ellipse, 80,000 plus free tickets that they're going to distribute for fans to be at the ellipse, watching on screens.

What I don't exactly know is the octagon itself on the White House lawn.

Are they going to have I think we've heard like maybe 5000 seats, probably a lot of VIPs.

I assume the president himself.

What do we know about that?

>> there's not a lot of details.

I mean, a lot of this is kind of on the seat of what's expression seat of your pants.

So on the fly is being figured out.

The announce the fights were just announced, which is usually their announce further in advance.

I think it's going to be messy.

That's one of the things that we can get certain, even in terms of announcing how people get tickets.

There's been a lot of chaos around that, where people are excited about the free tickets, but they don't know how to get them.

They don't know where to go.

So this is not surprising.

If we look at how the administration has done a lot of things, things are happening rapidly and they're not that well planned.

>> In our second half hour.

We're going to get to how the culture moved this way, and the power of this shift and the way that it's being leveraged.

But briefly, let me just ask you to kind of set up the second half hour here.

You're an MMA, you're a, you're a fan, you're, you're a UFC fan and you know it.

Well, Dana White says it's going to be fun.

It's going to be a summer night.

Fun.

What's the harm?

>> So the question is, what is the harm of the.

>> What's the harm of doing it at the White House?

>> I think the harm is you're making a choice of of what you want to convey about both the government and the country.

So who do we want to represent us?

What do we want to broadcast as who we are?

And there's being there's a clear statement being made that more and more we've seen the administration lean into traditional, extreme or supervision or superficial versions of masculinity being being the story.

And this is another example of that.

So I think that's the harm.

What's the story we want to tell about society?

Because in a sense, sport both provides, provides a reflection of society, but it also provides a model for society.

It provides.

We like to imagine it's it's the best of what we can be.

That's why we get all our kids into it, right?

We think it's how we teach the values about working hard, the values about teamwork, the values of.

>> Handling failure.

>> Handling failure, perseverance.

So it's what sport do we want to represent us?

The one that we're choosing is a sport where more and more the person celebrated might not even be the best fighter.

It's the loudest fighter.

It's the angriest fighter.

And we're cheering for knockouts.

Not even again.

Why am I a fan?

In part because I like the skill and technique.

I think there's this is a sport that requires such creative understanding of how the body can work.

But what are we looking for?

We're looking for one guy punching the other in the head and them falling to the ground unconscious.

And that's what's being projected into the world.

I think that's a bad thing.

>> Can't I draw a line between the violence that you're describing that's going to be on the White House lawn on June 14th, and the meme ification of the war in Iran.

The video game like approach that literally White House and Pentagon social accounts are putting out edited videos to songs that laughing at blowing up Iranian targets, making it a kind of alpha chest thumping.

We got you kind of.

I mean, isn't there a direct line there?

>> I think I think there really is.

I mean, this is.

>> They're using, again, the most superficial version of masculinity to sell the thing.

Even if we don't know why the war is happening, even if we don't fundamentally understand how much it costs or what the goal is, we know on some level, it's it's making the United States look tough, and it's making the politicians who are doing it.

They want to appear as tough guys.

It's Kash Patel hanging out with UFC fighters and bringing them to train the FBI and getting that photo shoot right.

It's the whole cabinet, not just Trump appearing at UFC events and he's appeared at Trump has appeared at more UFC events than all other sports combined.

This is his happy place, right?

We all have the happy place that we go when we're feeling sad or when our poll numbers are low, and mine used to be happy gut, right?

I would go to happy gut when I was having a bad day.

Trump Trump goes to a UFC event, right?

And he gets his walkout song.

So this isn't Obama appearing at the basketball game.

And at one point they show him on the screen.

>> And he kind of sheepishly.

>> Waves, yeah.

>> This is Trump coming down.

>> Like he gets.

>> There playing his music.

>> They stop.

Kid Rock song, a song by kid Rock starts playing.

Trump walks out.

The commentator say, here comes Trump.

He goes down and shakes Joe Rogan's hand.

He shakes Dana White's hand.

>> Place goes crazy.

>> Place goes crazy.

This is the spot that he goes.

So this is the attachment to masculinity.

I think a lot of the promotion of the war is doing that.

It's the showing violent football hits interspersed with bombs, and now it's key football players Ed Reed and Ray Lewis actually said, don't use us for this.

We don't want to be associated with it.

If he used a UFC fighter knockout, they wouldn't say no.

>> Oh, I think they would be probably cheering it.

>> Oh, they'd be thrilled.

>> But the idea of of the meme ification of the war in Iran, the laughing, the the NFL hits, the edited videos of bombs dropping, people pumping their fists Hegseth sort of elf, the kind of this big alpha presentation.

When I was growing up, we talked a little before the program in the 90s.

The most sort of cartoonishly alpha figures, the Steven Seagal's of the world were just that.

They were kind of cartoons.

They had their fans.

But, you know, the fans were kind of like in on the joke that this was kind of silly.

and that that wasn't like actual masculinity.

And now, now that's not like, that's not viewed as a joke.

Even if they're laughing, that's viewed as that's what masculinity is and it's powerful.

And that's where all the culture is going.

>> Yeah, I think that is a shift that we can actually track.

So it's, it's not the strong, dopey, friendly guy, although we still have that figure.

You know, Travis Kelce is still celebrated.

And Travis.

Kelce and his brother are kind of those guys.

And not surprisingly Travis Kelce ends up being attacked from the right for not being pushed to that same side that we're talking about.

but yeah, we've seen we've seen a rise of people wanting to have that status that they didn't have before.

So I think a lot of the people that we're pointing to, they weren't necessarily the jock in high school.

A lot of the Joe Rogan himself was not someone who came up through traditional sport.

He came up through Tae kwon Do, and then he seeks out masculinity.

>> Remind people, by the way, with Rogan, because a lot of people only know Rogan for his podcast.

What's his connection to fighting?

>> Oh, so Rogan has been the commentator for the UFC since, I think UFC 11.

So he's been there way back, way back.

So he's part he's the voice of the UFC.

He's the voice of, of, in a sense, UFC biggest MMA organization.

Rogan is the voice of MMA.

And so Rogan himself, he didn't come up through traditional sport.

He wasn't the jock.

He came up through taekwondo.

His podcast, especially the early Years in a sense, is bringing together this world of people that in some way are related to masculinity, and it could be someone who is a fisherman, it could be someone who's a hunter, it could be someone who talks about intermittent fasting.

It could be someone who talks about weightlifting.

It could be a Navy Seal, right?

But it's someone seeking out an understanding of what masculinity is, rather than if we think to the 80s or 90s, it was often that jock that we point to in high school, and then 20 years later, his his role in society, he's no longer the dude that we all want to be.

Right?

That's that's a shift.

>> In revenge of the nerds, the nerds.

While cartoonishly nerdy, were the heroes.

And, you know, they they eventually got over on the growling, screaming jocks who weren't smart enough to complete their world domination.

Yeah, that has changed.

>> Now, in revenge of the nerds, the goal would be to become more of a jock than the jock, right?

It would be to learn to fight, to take some sort of supplement, to make yourself stronger, and then to present as more masculine than that person who used to bully you in high school.

It would be a much different story.

You don't win through Bonnie Raines.

You get money and then you pay them to hang out with you and accept.

>> You, or you beat them down or kill them.

>> Or you beat them down and.

>> Kill them.

Okay, when we come back from the other side here, I want to we're going to listen to another sound clip of the president last week with one of the figures in we've used the term the manosphere.

We'll define that term.

But certainly culturally there is a lot of power in, in something that didn't used to be at the center of the culture wars or politics.

Ultimate Fighting Championships from the early 90s, finding out from Kyle Green has been very popular over time, but it took a while to go from the fringes to where apparently Senator John McCain said, this is, you know, modern this is like watching cockfighting.

This is, you know, it's kind of horrifying stuff to being viewed as a multi-billion dollar industry, very legit.

And they're going to the White House lawn for a big event on June 14th.

On President Trump's 80th birthday.

Kyle Green is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Suny Brockport.

We'll come right back on Connections.

>> Coming up in our second hour, the head of the FCC Brendan Carr says that President Trump is not happy with broadcasters who have been covering the Iraq war.

And Brendan Carr says broadcasters could lose their licenses to broadcast if the White House doesn't see improvement in its war coverage.

Can they do that?

Can they really strip broadcast licenses over war coverage?

Probably not, but they might try.

And we're going to talk about what that means next.

Our.

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>> A few of your emails as we come back here and continue this conversation on the story of the UFC going to the White House, the first ever professional sporting event, having an actual event that counts in the standings, that counts in the money, that counts in the belts and the titles and the unification.

It's it's not the NBA and it's not Major League Baseball.

It's it's ultimate fighting championships.

And they're going to be there for UFC Freedom 250 this coming June 14th.

That happens to be President Trump's 80th birthday.

He is very excited about this.

He's calling it the hottest ticket in Washington.

And he's bringing in not only this event to honor that, but they're calling it freedom.

250 because originally, as Kyle Green told us, this was supposed to be around July 4th weekend, marking 250 years of the country.

So it is a big event.

Some feedback from listeners.

David does not share Kyle's appreciation for the UFC.

He says, I was stuck watching these fights one time very briefly, and the violence disgusted me.

I think it's very, very sad and scary that people like to cheer such terrible acts of one person harming another.

It's from David.

What do you make of that?

>> So there's this cool project by a sociologist in the UK who also trains in martial arts, and the title of his project is Love Fighting Hate Violence.

And so he tries to create more positive cultures in combat sports gym throughout MMA.

And his argument is that it's fully consensual and it's celebrating the technique and skills that people have.

Now, I cannot fully disagree with David, especially when I was training in MMA, I would often go to local bars with other people I was training with to watch the fights.

And one of the things that frustrated and horrified me was people would get bored during much of the fight, and then excited when there was a brutal knockout.

So if we reduce it just to those moments of simply cheering the knockout, cheering the damage, I agree there is.

There is something horrifying about that.

I also find that to be something appealing, something skillful, there's something amazing that happens in the gym.

More and more.

We see women training in MMA and this is seen as from people training.

Women talk about how positive it is for them to experience this, to kind of reclaim their ability to use their bodies to be tough, to beat up guys in the gym.

So I do think, again, calling out Alex Shannon, he is doing something really good, focusing on the idea of celebrating martial arts culture, celebrating community, celebrating, fighting, and then hating it when it's reduced simply to violence.

And oftentimes the UFC does that.

>> Steve in Rochester says, I remember when they used to have what was called ultimate fighting and punching an opponent repeatedly in the groin to get them to submit was perfectly fine.

Was that a precursor to the UFC?

>> That was the UFC, so one of the one of the early when the UFC first arrived on on the shores of the United States, it was often referred to as no holds barred fighting.

And so there were very few things that were not allowed.

And basically the rules were figured out each successive event.

So in the beginning, you were not allowed to poke someone in the eyes.

You were not allowed to fishhook them, which is putting your finger in their mouth and pulling on it.

And there was maybe 1 or 2 other rules.

Basically anything else went.

There was a fight where one fighter punched the other, trapped them on the ground and punched the other person repeatedly in the groin until they gave up.

That was then made illegal.

When.

When the.

And again, it was an absurd part of the reason it wasn't as popular and it was fringe was.

It was this absurd thing.

After the Fertitta brothers bought the UFC, they had to figure out how do we get all the athletic commissions to okay this event?

Meaning they had to.

They created weight classes.

So before you could have someone who was 150 pounds fighting someone who was 300 pounds, that changed.

So we have to weight classes, we have to have set rounds and we have to have more rules, including no groin strikes.

>> So no groin strikes, no fish hooks, no eye pokes.

>> No punches to the back of the head.

You can't kick someone in the head when on the ground.

So they had to implement a number of things, often things that were seen as esthetically more violent rather than protecting the person you were fighting.

>> The only moves I would have a chance with have been have been outlawed.

Yeah.

Charles follows up, by the way, to say the UFC was a commercial.

The Gracie family wanted to demonstrate the superiority of Brazilian jiu jitsu over other over every other form of martial art.

Hence why hoists one, one, two, and four.

>> That is true.

So the Gracie family they popularized Brazilian jiu jitsu and they wanted to show this off because many martial arts discounted the value of groundfighting.

So the karate, we celebrated the karate person or the Muay Thai person or the or something like kung fu.

And so they said, we're going to create a tournament where.

And this was already happening in places like Japan, places like Brazil, but they wanted to create a big tournament in the United States where someone could come from any fighting background.

In a sense, they hand-selected people for the first UFC who did not know about Groundfighting to the same degree.

And so you had the lightest person in the tournament hoist, Gracie, which was part of the appeal to me.

Growing up in rural New York as a smaller kid, and I see this guy come out, he didn't know how to punch, he didn't know how to kick, and he beat up all these guys who were much bigger than him, much tougher than him.

And then jiu jitsu exploded in the United States.

When I first started doing my research in 2005 ish, 2006, it was hard to find a Brazilian jiu jitsu, Brazilian jiu jitsu gym in the United States.

In any city in the United States.

Now, every major city has, you know, 20 gyms you could go to.

Rochester has at least ten gyms, you could train up.

>> Okay.

Charles.

Thank you.

commenter on YouTube says, I think this will be a wonderful event.

What an apropos demonstration of the culture and mentality of society in 2026.

Can we have an exhibition match between two congressmen and then the response, could we have an exhibition fight between Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham during this event?

I don't think we're going to see amateur exhibition in this one.

>> I don't think we will.

However we do we do see people in the United States government who are quite eager to challenge others to fight.

So Markwayne Mullin had in the past challenged, I think it was the head of the truckers union to a to a fight.

Right now, he's leading Department of Homeland Security and he has a background as a MMA fighter.

So worth noting.

so I don't think we will see that.

And I think the commenter is making a very perceptive joke.

>> Yes.

When Markwayne Mullin challenges a Teamsters union rep to a fight on the floor of the Senate and Bernie Sanders is jumping in to stop the fight from happening.

>> Yeah.

>> We do feel like we're in a.

>> Strange place.

>> A strange parallel universe that maybe we drunkenly stumbled into.

Yeah.

and let me get Sheila's email here.

Sorry, Sheila.

I got to pull that up again.

Sheila says, Evan, today show is extremely interesting hearing your guests talking about men participating and watching MMA fights seems to portray an intimacy that develops between fighters and opponents.

Who and opponents, as well as those who just like to watch.

What does your guest feel is missing in the average American man's life that draws them to the most violent sport yet, at the same time seems to give meaningful friendships?

>> Yeah, I think I think that's a really good question.

And that's one of the things, again, that's one of the things that surprised me the most when I started the project.

Also, if you if you when I've watched fights with people who had not watched fights before, one of the things that stands out to them because they expect the violence, right?

That's part of what sold is after many fights, the two people get up and this could be an immense fight.

It could be in a women's fight.

And they often hug after.

And there seems to be this intimate moment where they're touching.

They're talking about the fight, and there's a connection that's established.

And this is a big part when I've traveled around.

So when I go to conferences, when I travel, I used to go and train at a gym every single time to get a sense of it from research perspective is what I'm finding in Minnesota, where I was doing my degree.

Is that indicative of something larger in the culture?

And without fail, when I would train at a gym, whether it was in Iceland or Las Vegas or Spain, immediately after, other people at the gym would say, hey, let me take you around town.

Let me show you.

Let me show you the place.

I want to make sure that you have a good time in the city, and we would feel like friends, even though we had just, you know, only been together for 30 minutes.

So I think part of it is when you train with another person, there's a necessary trust and vulnerability.

If the gym is working well, you are going to be putting yourself in positions where you could be hurt.

You are going to be putting yourself in positions where the other person could be hurt, and you have to do enough where you go to that point and then stop.

So there's something there.

There's also something about being exhausted with each other, about sharing and exchanging pain, about sweating on each other.

We don't have that many times in society where two people touch each other, where two people sweat on each other.

So you're breaking a lot of boundaries, and then it creates a space where you can fill that with meaning or connection.

Now, sometimes that meaning connection goes a rather toxic way as we're talking about the shift that's happened in my culture, but it also can be something very positive.

So I wrote an article actually with a sociologist from Australia who looks at surfing, and he talks in a similar way about when people go surfing together and when they go on these big waves, there's a connection that's established.

And we look at those moments as a place of potential positive intervention.

now the question about what's missing in society, we know there's a lot of research on isolation, loneliness, difficulty making friends, especially for men.

Right.

And this is in a sense part of that answer.

People using their body to find a way to connect to other people.

>> Sheila, thanks for the email.

So when did you see the MMA and UFC culture start to shift into something more?

in the culture and in the politics?

When did that change happen?

>> Now, I don't want to romanticize the past completely.

MMA always had some awful things happening in it, right?

So we don't want to present it as some sort of utopian project that then was co-opted and changed.

Yeah.

However, it Covid and again, a little bit of a simple answer.

>> But but not when Dana White was on stage with Trump in 2016.

>> Even at that point, you could start to see you could start to see the shift.

But again, when Dana White was there, it seemed much more like when he was campaigning for Harry Reid, he's saying, this is my friend that I always worked with, and I think he's a good person.

So people could read that and say, okay, we know who Dana White is.

He's this blustery guy who celebrates himself.

He's also someone who has, again, that transactional relationship with people promoting Donald Trump to president is also going to help the UFC.

We could read it as that.

Sure.

When Covid hit, the UFC became the darling of the right.

So every other sports league shut down.

They said, here's, here's this dangerous thing happening.

We have to figure out the safe way to respond.

And we're not going to put our athletes at risk.

For many people, the NBA shutting down was the moment we took Covid seriously.

Right before that, we knew this disease was out there.

We knew this virus was spreading.

But if the NBA can't handle it, these are the top athletes in the world.

They're scared they're shutting down.

We have to take it seriously, too.

And then we start to see the wave of shutdowns, the UFC said, we're going to go.

We're not going to stop.

We're going to circumnavigate.

We're going to circumvent laws.

We're going to try to hold an event.

Maybe we're going to go to a Native American reservation.

That was one of the places they wanted to go, because if you're on tribal land, then you can avoid some of the state laws.

And so that they were going to go in California to tribal lands.

Or maybe we go to Florida, where the laws are more lax, or maybe we go to the United Arab Emirates where we can create what's called Fight Island, which is what they ended up doing.

but we're not going to stop.

And specifically, Dana White said the economy matters more than the risk.

You're, you're dismissing scientists and saying you're acting like this is more dangerous than it is.

And then also during this time, Dana White specifically began attacking journalists and calling them weak and calling them scared.

And in a sense, this is a playbook that you see Donald Donald Trump using also.

And so this is when you started to see that shift.

And for a lot of people at local gyms, and I find this particularly sad, they also said, oh, we're not that scared of Covid.

We're going to keep training and you're trying to take this thing away from us that we love.

You're you're trying to take community away from us.

You're trying to say, our gyms have to shut down.

You're trying to say that we can't have a group of people training together.

Even if we would like to do that.

And so that was a that was a real tipping point for both the UFC and their relationship to Donald Trump, but also for local MMA communities.

>> So in that interim time, the manosphere grows.

What's your definition for the manosphere?

>> Okay, so one of the classic definitions, I was reading a psych paper in preparation for this.

I wanted to see how people define it.

And so the classic definition that we see in journalists often use this definition is simply a virtual space defined by misogynist views and toxic masculinity.

I find that to be too limited.

Definition.

There's elements of truth there, but we can find things outside the manosphere that fit that.

For me, I would say it's for men.

It's a virtual space for men by men and about men.

And so the manosphere would include people who are talking about hunting.

They include people talking about the importance of having these extreme activities like skydiving or hiking a mountain.

It could be people talking about health, but again, it always returns to masculinity.

And that's the key part is saying it's a group of men getting together and saying, there's something, there's something special about masculinity.

There's something lacking in society, and we need to reclaim that.

>> Does it typically involve violence?

Does it celebrate violence?

And is it culturally or politically to the right?

>> It doesn't have to be.

But that has become the most dominant, the most dominant voices are that thing.

And so there was an interesting study.

I wish I remembered the researchers who did this, but they created TikTok accounts and they said they were 16 years old, which they were not.

Right.

So it's a group of researchers creating new accounts and saying that I'm a 16 year old boy.

And what they found was within nine minutes, whether they started with looking for gym tips, nutrition tips any of these other things that we've listed within nine minutes, they would find themselves on videos that were specifically anti-feminist and often anti the LGBTQ population.

So nine minutes was all it took there.

Within 20 minutes, it was getting more extreme and specifically political.

So the manosphere, it doesn't have to be that.

And we could look to examples of, I don't know, there's something called the good the Good Men project, and it's a group of guys who try to think about what positive masculinity could be.

I'd say that's part of the manosphere.

They're specifically saying there's something important about masculinity.

It's only going to be guys talking about this, and we're going to try to set a model for boys to follow.

That's not the dominant voice.

>> Yeah, right.

And that's why I just ask, because writing for wired magazine after the 2024 election here, here's Brian Barrett.

He says the manosphere one Donald Trump owes at least part of his 2024 presidential election victory to the manosphere.

The amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male and increasingly, the drivers of the remaining online monoculture.

Donald Trump becomes president of the United States.

It wasn't especially close, which came as a shock.

Unless you watch or listen to Theo Von or the Nelk boys, or Aiden Ross or Andrew Schulz, or Sean Ryan or Joe Rogan, but he's the one you've definitely heard of.

Maybe not the others.

>> And it's important to point out every other person you listed connected to combat sport culture, either through a first appearing on Joe Rogan, or was it the Nelk boys or brothers?

Dana White actually gives them money and they appear at UFC events.

So all these people are emerging from that same cultural space.

And as I was pointing out, the manosphere is the reason I want to have a broader definition is it's easier to understand the appeal.

And it also takes us it makes us take it more seriously.

The fact that someone can start out just interested in.

Give me some tips on how to work out at the gym or give me some nutrition tips.

Or I'm into hunting.

So tell me the best way to get the deer that I'm looking for.

You can start there, and then you end up in the space that we're talking about.

Suddenly you end up in this space that's specifically about a kind of grievance politics, saying men are oppressed, men aren't getting the things that they need.

And the reason, well, let's focus on women or let's focus on all those guys who are misleading you about what masculinity is.

>> That's the modern algorithms of tech leading you there in an accelerated way.

Right?

When you and I were growing up, that didn't exist.

>> Yeah.

And I, I think you can't understand the place that we are in society without understanding that specifically.

Right?

Everyone's an Instagram, everyone's on TikTok.

This leads us to these places.

It often it also flattens expertise, right?

So you could have the person who's giving advice on gym culture or nutrition or the problems of society, who knows nothing about it other than they have a loud voice in their charismatic right.

And I often think the important thing here is it starts out with something real.

If a kid, if a 13 year old boy is lonely, that's a real thing.

Absolutely.

If a 20 year old guy is looking at the economy and saying, huh, that looks a little bit scary, that's real.

Right?

So it's picking up on real things, but then it's leading.

Then you get sucked into the algorithm.

And the answer that we're getting predominantly is a very hateful and angry one.

And that's, that's the scary part.

>> I mean, you could just say, I want to learn more about gun culture.

I want to learn more about hunting culture.

I want to become a better hunter.

>> What rifle should I buy exactly.

And within five minutes you're there.

>> Within minutes, the algorithms will find you.

Yeah.

And that's so people are getting pulled in that direction.

So let's close with this here.

That's how the modern combination of culture and technology has moved people in a certain cultural direction and has accelerated the move of even sports to politics.

What about the voices that push back?

I was reading a piece recently about a country singer named Hayes Carll, and he's one of the few, you know, decently big country singers on the political left.

He's not the only one, of course.

The Dixie chicks, very famously, but many others.

but I mean, he's got songs about climate change.

He's got he's a country singer in the MMA UFC space.

Does that exist?

>> Yeah, yeah, it's harder and harder to find, but it does exist.

So I was mentioning Off Air that I recently started a podcast specifically asking this question, and what we're doing on the podcast is we're interviewing people who have been attached to the combat sport world in some way.

It could be famous fighters, it could be coaches, it could be broadcasters.

And we're saying, hey, is it just us?

What have you seen in terms of the shift?

And then how do you respond?

Do you just drop out?

Do you find spaces that specifically celebrate an alternative?

And there are those people still out there.

One of the first guests we had was Nathan Quarry.

He was a UFC fighter.

He fought for the title at some point.

He was on The Ultimate Fighter, and he also led the class action lawsuit against the UFC, trying to get just fighter pay.

And he's someone.

And I think this is really key.

He doesn't specifically approach this by saying I am the alternative.

I am the example of good masculinity.

But instead he presents a model by saying, I'm going to care about mental health, but I'm also going to still train at a local gym or another guest.

We have Stefan Kesting.

He's a firefighter.

He's a wilderness explorer.

He teaches grappling, and he doesn't say, again, like, look at me, I'm the version of good masculinity because young people are very good at picking up when someone's trying too hard.

And we immediately dismiss them.

Right.

If you or I started a TikTok series and were like, we're going to save masculinity, no.

>> Would be lampooned.

>> Yeah, no one's going to watch it.

Right?

But there's still those models.

And again, even someone like outside of MMA, someone like Bad Bunny, right?

Bad Bunny is not saying I'm specifically going to be a good model for masculinity, but he's willing to play around with gender roles.

He still has songs about having sex with lots of women, right?

So he's not going to say, look, I'm going to be this perfect character.

But I think that's part of the popularity of someone like that.

And young people, as much as they're drawn into this space.

I teach college students.

A lot of college students are horrified by it, too, and they're and they're looking for something else.

>> But they're looking for something authentic, not prepackaged in a lab, in the same way that after the last election, when people said, well, what the, what the political left needs is a Joe Rogan of the left.

Yeah.

Imagine rolling out someone saying, hey, you know, Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

this will be I'm like Joe Rogan, but I'm on the left.

Like, that would get laughed out of the room.

>> Yeah.

And even something like the country example, now I'm going a little out of my area of expertise, but someone like Zach Bryan, I think he can have a more positive effect.

And I'm saying this without knowing everything about his personal life.

I'm sure there's bad examples, but he can have a more positive effect because he is that ex-military, popular country artist who's not specifically saying, I'm going to be the voice of the left.

Once you start doing that, it's you're not going to attract those younger people to follow you.

>> Maybe the next conversation is the music begins to play.

Is a lot of the people on that list from wired, people like Sean Ryan, he's horrified by the Epstein files, feels betrayed.

Theo Von and Joe Rogan horrified by ice.

They feel betrayed, and Nick Andrew Schultz has come out entirely against the Trump administration, saying that he has felt conned.

So some of the biggest voices in the so-called manosphere, there's cracks in it.

It's a question of it's hard to admit that you've been had like that.

It's hard to hard to say I got got but maybe on a future program, we'll talk about the psychology of the sociology of that.

Happy to.

Will you come back sometime?

>> Anytime.

>> Where do people find more of your work if you want them to do that?

>> it's a good question.

Go to the Brockport Sociology Instagram page.

I post a lot of stuff there.

and then I have a new podcast.

I have questions with Tanisha Singleton where we talk about MMA, culture, politics, all that stuff.

And I'm also on a podcast with Abigail Smithson as an artist.

The podcast is called Dear Adam Silver, where we look at basketball and culture.

So a lot of places.

>> Let's talk basketball sometime.

Oh yes.

All right.

Go Cavs.

Thank you very much for being here.

More Connections coming up.

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