If you look at some of the big and mostly troubling economic trends in the overall US economy from the last three or four decades, the business of the sport of Mixed Martial Arts captures a stunning number of them: rising income and wealth inequality; increased firm concentration in some economic sectors, sometimes because they bought out their competition; the declining share of the money that companies make that goes to workers; the decline of unions; the gig economy; the lack of bargaining power that workers have when they negotiate wages with their companies.

John S Nash, a journalist for Bloody Elbow, joins Cardiff to discuss the economic history of MMA and the sport’s dominant company, the UFC — and to reveal the many ways that the sport captures the extreme version of so many broader economic trends within the US economy.

And after the credits, they also give their predictions for UFC 269.