#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling

The following is a conversation with Craig Jones, martial artist, world traveler, and one of the funniest people in the sport of submission grappling. While he does make fun of himself a lot, he is legitimately one of the greatest submission grapplers in the world.
And underneath the veil of nonstop sexualized Aussie humor and incessant online trolling, he is truly a kind-hearted human being who's trying to do good in the world. Sometimes he does so through a bit of controversy and chaos, like with the new CGI tournament that has over $2 million in prize money, and it's coming up this Friday and Saturday.
Yes, the same weekend as the prestigious ADCC tournament. The goal of CGI tournament is to grow the sport.
So you'll be able to watch it for free online, live on YouTube and other places. All ticket profits go to charity, mainly to cancer research.
So I encourage you to support the mission of this tournament by buying tickets and going to see the event in person. Craig gave me a special link that gives you a 50% discount on the tickets.
Go to lexfreedman.com slash CJI, and it should forward you to the right place. They're trying to sell the last few tickets now.
It's a good cause. Go buy some.
And also, let me say, as a fan of the sport, I highly encourage you to watch both CGI and ADCC and to celebrate athletes competing in both. From CGI with Nicky Ryan, Nicky Rod, Rotola Brothers, Fionn Davis, Mackenzie Dern, and more, to ADCC with Gordon Ryan, Nicholas Margali, Giancarlo Budoni, Rafael Lovato Jr., Mika Galvao, and more.
I have a lot of respect for everyone involved. I train with many of them regularly and consider many of them friends, including Craig, Gordon, and of course, John Donaher, who I will talk to many, many more times on this podcast.
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It is one of the most delicious things I consume in a day on days like this. So yesterday I had a really hard training session in jiu-jitsu.
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I think in this episode, Craig brings up doing couples therapy with Gordon. You know, I'm a big fan of those guys.
Training with them and just the way they approach this really complicated art and their ability to achieve sort of world-class level and consistently innovate. I'll innovate everybody else.
It's so fascinating to watch. So part of me hates that there's shit talking going on online.
I understand it's part of the sport, but I do hope that there is, at least amongst the fans, more celebration of the athletes involved. And I'm now still working through the footage of the Olympics for judo and wrestling.
It's just, I love all the sort of one-on-one combat sports and all of the Olympics in general and all sports, man. I love football and basketball.
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And now, dear friends, I invite you all to come to the pool

with Craig Jones and me. When you brought the $1 million in cash on Rogan's podcast, did you have security with you? We had security, but only by Joe Rogan's request.
Because he said, you're really going to bring it? Yeah. Do you have security? I said, no.
He's like, don't worry about it. I'll send my security.
So you were going to do it without security? Yeah, we're going to win. I thought, I mean, I was told not to tell anyone.
Yeah. But I sent pictures of it to everyone I know.
everyone i know yeah so that was probably a security risk yeah so it's just you in a car with a bag of cash yeah it was a company that sponsors me shuffle.com it was their friend a friend of theirs so a guy that's never met me before yeah just took the risk to show up to a stranger's house with a million dollars in cash to bring to joe rogan It was a big risk of him. And you just put it in the car and drove it.

Drove it over there, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, no security except Joe.

Except Joe.

That's common sense.

And then Joe said he'd never seen a million dollars before.

Yeah.

But I don't know if I believe him.

That's what everyone says.

That's what Pablo Escobar probably says also.

What's your relationship with risk?

Especially with the risk of death.

I would say I'm very risk averse. You are.
No, you're not. That's a lie.
My relationship with risk, I like a bit of excitement. I like a bit of adventure.
I'm more about the adventure, but I will not let the risk get in the way of it. And also, obviously, just got back from Ukraine.
I'm happy to take a few risks if it's part of what the locals want me to do you know what i mean like in kazakhstan we did some things that were dangerous like if the locals are like come along join in on this activity i feel personally obligated to go with them so it's not about the risk like you're not attracted to risk you're attracted to adventure and the risk is a thing you don't't give a damn about if it comes along with it. Sometimes the best adventures involve the most risk, unfortunately.
Speaking of which, you went to Ukraine, like you said, twice recently. Twice.
Really pushed the limit there. Including to the front.
To the front. Tell me the full story of that from the beginning.
How did you end up in Ukraine? So we're in Kazakhstan. We're doing some filming in Kazakhstan.
And obviously, Borat's still a very traumatic memory for them. And some of my jokes felt like they don't go as well in that neck of the woods.
So we had some difficulty filming out there. So we filmed this horse game.
Have you ever heard of Kokhba? Thanks to you, yes. It's a game, a very, very old game.
They cut a goat or a sheep. I didn't get too close to look at it.
But they cut its head and legs off, and they use it as some form of bull. And then they'll have up to 1,000 guys on horses violently trying to pick this up and drop it in the other end's goals, basically.
The goals used to be concrete. Now it's just a tarp, but local business owners will throw down huge amounts of money for the winners.
And these horses have been trained from a very young age. The riders have been trained.
I've never ridden a horse before. We wanted to film something that made it look like I was going to go into the horse pit, into the cock bar pit.
However, the drunk stuntman that we used just decided that when he took my horse reins, he would take me straight into the pit instead of ending the shot there. So I was in there amongst, I guess, the horse riders, the cock bar riders, and we weren't leaving.
We just were in there for quite a while. And he was just, he could talk a little, he could talk English pretty well, actually.
And he's like, oh, I thought you'd want to check it out from the inside. And then while we were in there, someone picked up the sort of carcass and a wave of horse riders came at me.
I was quite concerned at that point because they're bashing into each other. And obviously they're angry.
They're seeing a foreigner in there. I was wearing like basically Biggie Smalls, Kooji, Geku lookingku looking sweater so i stood out they definitely didn't like that i was participating in a game that they probably trained their whole life for and that amount of money they could win is very very significant and there's me in there they're also pointing out borat borat thinking i was making borat jokes which again very traumatic memory for the people at kazakhs were you making Boratat jokes? No, but I guess it's the same type of humor.
Sure. Just, I guess, I'm not pretending to be Kazakh.
I'm just there being an idiot and enjoying the local culture. But we were over there in Kazakhstan.
We did that. That was obviously a bit risky.
Did they learn to love you? I think they learned to love me and then to hate me again. So it was like a bit of an all-encompassing relationship for the Kazakh people.
But we basically abandoned ship. It was proven too difficult to film some things, some sensitive subjects over there.
And I said, where should we go next? And I just looked at the map and I was like, we're near Ukraine. Ukraine was a place that I'd been offered to teach a jiu-jitsu seminar prior to, I guess, the war commencing, the full-scale war commencing.
And we're looking for a bit of adventure, something interesting to film, something following the news, obviously very controversial in the news. People have very strong opinions.
And I was like, let's go over there. Let's do a charity event.
Let's do something. Let's train with the people and really experience it for ourselves.
So we set up the seminar. Turned out to be the biggest seminar for jiu-jitsu in Ukraine history, which is wild considering obviously they are at war, but everyone came together to support it.
And one of the soldiers there, one of my friends there, good friend now, who's on the frontline, he made a comment on there and he said, hey, like this is a seminar to donate profits to the soldiers, but we're on the front line. And I was like, you know what? I'll come to you.
And he's like, listen, I can't promise you'll survive, but I'll promise you'll have a good time. And I said, that's all I needed to hear.
So we connected. And my friend Roman, we went really, really close.
I think we were at the closest point, seven kilometers from the front line. Obviously very surreal experience to be over there, seeing basically how the battles fought with all drones.
How long ago was this? I think it would have been March or April. So we went there.
We went and basically spent two nights up on the front line, went back to Kiev, and that was it for that trip in terms of crazy stuff that happened obviously just the people living like you download the uh air defense tracker so at any time there could be an air siren going off an air alert on your phone could be like drones heading your way planes are in the air missiles flying and then those missiles will change direction and stuff so the air alert you don't know if it's heading a different direction but they just sort of warn everyone so you live under a constant state of of fear basically and then on that first trip the heaviest moment was i was going downstairs in the hotel to work out which is honestly a rare thing these days doing something healthy with myself you're working out getting the pumping some iron and this was divine intervention that a hypersonic missile was shot down by the patriot defense system just like five minutes from the hotel so the whole hotel and the uh attached gym just shook like crazy and people started some people started freaking out most people went to leave to go outside which i don't think is recommended but you want to see what's going on out there. This was in Kiev.
This was in Kiev. So it got shot down.
And then some of the local troops actually took me to the site of where just part of the missile had landed in the ground and left this huge sort of indentation that already cleared up most of the, I guess, shrapnel from the missile. I don't know if I should or if I was legally allowed to do this, but I took some of that missile back home with me.
I don't know where I left it, actually. But I thought maybe that would raise some alarm bells and airport scans, but I took it regardless.
And that was basically the craziest thing that happened on that first trip. The Patriot defense system is incredible.
It's an incredible piece of technology.'s from the united states it's expensive but it's incredible and then so that's protecting kiev that's protecting kiev yeah that was at the time where u.s hadn't uh voted to i guess keep funding the weapons over there so it was kind of a tense moment because i think i don't know everyone was thinking like when do those air defense missiles run out so that was a heavy moment for me thinking look at what it shot out the sky like imagine if that didn't they didn't have that but we yeah that was probably the most surreal moment but kiev largely life goes on most of the time as per normal i was faced with crazy messages and comments even just posting that video like i'm uh getting paid by ukraine and stuff and it's just like people just don't understand that like life has to go on like kiev's here the front line's far away like the cities have to largely try to operate as normal or just life life will not go on in those villages and cities well it's human nature as nature as well. It's not just Kiev.
It's Kharkiv. It's even Donbass, Kherson.
People get accustomed to war quickly because it's impossible to suffer for prolonged periods of time. So you adjust and you appreciate the things you still have.
Yeah, it's some bull of moves out there. I love seeing people that just crazy stuff's going on from the war and they don't even react to it they don't go to the bomb shelter it's like a baller move like i'm not going to change my lifestyle actually on that first trip as well something else that i probably shouldn't have been allowed to do was go to chenobyl yeah so chenobyl i believe troops came through belarus and there was some fighting going on in chenobyl i think the whole world got concerned at that point if any sort of radiation leaked but chernobyl as it stands the troops back down and it's completely covered in mines very very difficult to go to chernobyl basically as a tourist or as like a i guess a idiot like myself should really probably not be allowed in a place like that.
But we were able to get there. We passed like four security checkpoints.
It took two attempts. First time we tried to go in there was with a special forces guy.
We cleared two security gates. Then they stopped us and basically threatened us with arrest.
Rightfully so. Really have no business going to Chernobyl.
We made a connection. I won't say this connection was, but he had heard about what I had done sort of with a charity event and opened some doors for us to be able to go to Chernobyl.
So we got to see Chernobyl. We had some filming restrictions there just because it was a crazy military sort of conflict at one point.
And we got to actually see Chernobyl. Chernobyl has always been a dream of mine to see because it's just such an interesting place.
And to see it under these conditions, very, very strange. Yeah.
What was that like? So there's no civilians there now. It's just completely empty.
I guess it's kind of like the fantasy you have. I imagine people going tours of Chernobyl back in the tourist days when it was a tourist spot and and it would be busy full of tourists.
We got basically a private tour, so we got to really feel that abandoned sort of vibes. I guess I was interested in it from playing Call of Duty and then Chernobyl series, all the documentaries and stuff, but very, very strange place to go visit.
And it is now a minefield, like a lot of parts of ukraine that's one of the dark terrifying aspects of wars how many mines are left even when the war ends for decades after there's mines everywhere because demining is extremely difficult and that that could continually kill people i don't think it'll be a tourist spot for a very long time because if you were thinking about areas to demine when the conflict ends, an area where if you accidentally trigger a mine could cause a radiation leak, it's probably going to be very low on the list. So tourism for Chernobyl, who knows how long until that returns.
Why do you think you were able to get to Chern chernobyl is there's why why don't you think uh the ukrainian people the ukrainian soldiers don't see you as a threat maybe they were hoping i did step on a mind maybe my jokes didn't go too well there so your connection was actually putin he was trying to get rid of you yeah now i don't know i mean we felt pretty safe when we're there there was air alert went off. They were kind of more concerned with me dying just for the PR side of things.
It's like Australian tourists. In one of your videos, I actually heard Ukrainian language.
They were talking about, we don't want to lose an athlete. That's what they're saying.
As you're loading the rocket launcher. Oh, yeah, the rocket launcher.
I shot a rocket launcher with the troops on the first trip but the second trip i went back to which was only maybe four to five weeks ago yeah this time we went to some crazier spots so we went to odessa which has been hit a ton i really enjoyed the video of uh old man stretching and like exercising on the yeah what is that Yeah, what is that? Is that a local custom?

Well, Odessa people are known historically to be wild.

That was wild.

It was abrasive to the eyes, but I appreciated it.

Especially a middle-aged man in underwear with a beer belly doing a sun dance at dusk.

That would frighten many people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The battleship would turn around.

Yeah, so where else? Yeah, so we went odessa we briefly went back to keith we so i made a connection with the police chief of basically the entire country last time and he had said to me that if i wanted to go somewhere sort of really heavy in terms of action we could go to curse on he's like, I'll personally escort you to curse on. And I was just like, well, here we have an invitation for adventure.
I think it's a great idea to go. And I thought, you know what? I'll completely lie to my cameraman and tell him it's a safe trip to go on so that he can pass that information on to his fiancee and she won't have any concerns.
Yes. So we basically take this huge journey all the way down to Curzon.
We switch at a city outside. I can't remember the name, but we had to switch to sort of armored vehicles.
And I remember the guy that picked this up there said, hey, give me a phone number for someone to call to recover your bodies. Yeah.
And he said that in a joking way, but I think it was serious. But I said, just leave it.
I don't think they need it. I don't think we much left probably if we get hit over there.
But we go basically into Kurson. I think Kurson's population used to be like 250,000.
Now it's like basically all military down to 50,000. So we went into the police basically stationed in the bunker underneath.
The top of the building was destroyed. And then one of the local guys just took us on a city tour, which again, we had some filming restrictions because obviously anytime something's hit, I guess the other side wants to be able to see what damage has been done.
So if you take any footage of recently destroyed buildings, that's going to help them recalibrate and target the next shot. So Kurson being so heavily hit, it's basically within range of every single thing Russia has, every form of weapon, drones.
Before we took the tour, he put some drone blocking things on top of the car, which didn't look reassuring. He also took a helmet out the back of the car, which I thought he was going to give give to me but he just threw it in the back of the pickup truck and said oh you won't need this you'll be dead anyway and i was like oh i've made a great life decision with this little curse on tour but then we took a tour of the city and curse on used to be kind of like a beautiful beach city by the dnipro river but basically it's it's just the river that separates Russia from, I guess, the Russian land they've taken from Kurson.
So Kurson split across that river, and there's just Russians on the other side of the river and Ukrainians on this side. So very, very dangerous spot.
Kharkiv makes a lot of press because of the long-range missiles that hit, but Kon's just being hit all the time so we took this tour we went along the river we went to within one kilometer of the front line so that was the closest we got after this point we heard artillery strike and because you're in an armored vehicle it sounds further away than it Obviously, the sound doesn't get in. So I thought it sounded far away.
We could see some smoke that actually appeared closer in the distance. The guy driving us took us to a point where a large building was blocking us from, I guess, the angle at which the missile would have came from.
And I thought everything was cool. I thought it must have been off off in the distance and then we heard two more strikes hit very very close they sounded really loud and then i think um he's radioing in to see if everything's safe if we can leave this point and then we basically race back but we kind of i started to realize we're in danger at any point where he really sped the car up or sort of took sort of evasive movements in the car but we got out of there and i think i had someone translate it later and basically yeah he was checking to see if the roads were clear for us to leave ultimately it ended up being someone died and a few people were injured from that blast which was less than half a kilometer from us and basically they were rating radioing saying end the tour come come back to the police station.
Artillery is terrifying because they're just shelling and the destructive power of artillery is insane. Yeah, and it's constant all the time.
Yeah, and you hear that noise and you're like, is that coming or going? Very concerning. Right.
You don't know. Yeah.
You don't know. And just like that, it could be you.
You're gone. Last time the village we went to, basically, it was the day we left.
So we stayed there overnight. The day we left, it just started getting extremely shelled.
And the soldier we were with just took a selfie video of us. And basically, the location we were in, just strike after artillery strike just being like oh you guys left and the the fun began so they they take it in good spirit i was trying to use their energy to reassure myself but i guess when they see it every day it's they're kind of more adjusted to it they're not like they're not freaking out every time something crazy like that goes on well they have to right yeah they have to be in good spirit you have to be joking and laughing and yeah the guys are always laughing and joking they were laughing and joking at me quite a bit holding weapons trying to shoot weapons and stuff they got a lot of enjoyment out of me shooting the rpg yeah they're probably still telling stories of that crazy australian American that rolled in.
They helped me out though in my marketing campaign for the tournament. We were able to secure a Lada classic Soviet Union car.
We towed it, we painted it with the logos of the other event, the ADCC. Yeah.
And we got to shoot some RPGs at it. Yeah.
Great experience. great experience great fun yeah it's a very creative marketing campaign very dangerous one i don't think like coke or peps are going to do that one so it's very very innovative it was a bold move luckily they let me get away with posting it but when we were there it was at a basically at a shooting range and we cleared them out for a while so we'd blown up the car we'd set it on fire we'd done all this sort of stuff.
I remember we were trying to blow it up. It wasn't quite hitting.
One of the missiles was lodged in under the car. So it was kind of risky.
That could have gone off at any moment. But we needed to get it to ignite.
We needed to get a shot where it was on fire. The logo of the enemy tournament was basically on fire.
So we poured gasoline on it. We shot the gasoline tank.
That didn didn't work that must be a movie trick or something and then we decided we had light on fire a rag and just throw it into the blown out back window so i'm with this guy special forces guy and we throw the rag in the back like soaked in gasoline rag yeah and we start running yeah and he's like stop stop he's like it didn't go off so we're sitting there quite close to the car lighting it trying to light more as we walk back to the car and then we just hear the car ignite and he's like run run run so we came quite close to death already at that point but we wanted to get this shot with some photos in front of the burning logos but we told the guys at the shooting range to basically give us 10 minutes or so, so we could take the photos. I don't know if they didn't wait the full 10 minutes or if we took too long, but they started firing at the targets anyway.
And then the ricochets were flying very, very close to us over our head. One landed right by my leg.
We're like, shit, we better get out of here. obviously not much safety concerns at that point but we survived basically artillery strikes we survived a bit of friendly fire with bullets coming our way but again i was strangely calm because the other guys were calm but then afterwards they were they said to me they were like oh bro if you got shot we'd just have to dump your body at a hospital we wouldn't be able to explain why you're here blowing up cars.
Right, right.

And you're American and athlete, international celebrity.

They'd be like, what is he doing on the front line?

There's no real good explanation for it.

But I mean, even through the jokes and stuff, it's good to highlight what's actually kind

of happening over there.

It's obviously very, very bad.

What's the morale of the soldiers like? Is there still an optimism? Is there still a hope? I mean, there's sort of the battle fatigue, you know, and as they say, like, all the heroes die early, you know, the guys, the real heroes that are willing to sacrifice themselves, they're the ones that are going to get taken out quick. Unfortunately, that's the reality from over there, but their thoughts are mostly that it's going to be a prolonged war like when i ask them about how fast the front line moves they're like oh it could take six months to move one 200 meters yeah so it just feels like it's going to go on forever and from the ukrainian side's perspective those guys talk to me about how when they hear radio intercepts of Russian soldiers marching to the same frontline spot is that basically they're marching into certain death at certain locations.
And based on the radio transmissions, they know they're going to die, but they head forth anyway, straight forward into a Ukrainian position, which is just wild to me.

I guess like World War II, they just keep throwing troops at it.

And you see a ton of footage they take themselves, which is just mind-blowing.

Obviously, some of this footage doesn't make it to the internet because it's got important sort of details in those conflicts.

But they're showing first-person perspectives of trench warfare.

It's just crazy to see what some of these guys have have gone through so i went to a lot of the same places as well including her son what was your sense of the place curse almost like it was just so destroyed i think at this point most of the civilians are gone i saw a lot of just elderly people left behind, especially a lot of old men. And I just think they're just like, hey, I've lived here my whole life.
I'm just never leaving. So no matter the level of danger, those guys just remain.
And then it's largely just, I guess, military and Kurson. But that place felt very, very dangerous.
I didn't realize until we got there just quite how destroyed it is. How did that experience change you? Just seeing war head on? How did it change me? I guess just realizing a lot of these soldiers are just like, you kind of distance yourself from them thinking that they're something separate.
But really speaking to a lot of the Ukrainian soldiers Ukrainian soldiers like my friend Roman he hadn't lived in Ukraine for eight years he lived in France he had a life he's got a wife over there he's got a daughter he basically volunteered to come back to protect his uh mom and brother who still lived there so it's like you sort of I used of you the military guys because in australia and i guess in the us they don't have this conscription ongoing right now you know what i mean like whereas obviously there's guys like roman who volunteered but then there's a lot of ukrainian soldiers that were conscripted into the war so it's like you just realize how a lot of these guys are everyday people just in this crazy situation like where roman felt obligated to return to ukraine like from my perspective anyone

in it from australia or us just it's just a different perspective on like those they feel

different to the regular people fighting in ukraine from my perspective yeah it's defending

the land that is your home yeah like japan was coming for australia i guess in world war ii

Thank you. fighting in Ukraine, from my perspective.
Yeah, it's defending the land that is your home. Yeah, like Japan was coming for Australia, I guess in World War II, they attacked the North, but really there was no foot battle and there was no soldiers on the ground within Australia.
I guess the U.S. too during World War II, so it's like a completely different perspective from our recent histories compared to, like if you were ukrainian and there's russians within the defined border their responsibility to protect their homeland and their family is just something you can't imagine but also after having spent time with them you can see why they feel such a strong sense of obligation to protect uh to protect ukraine protect their family and friends.
And in a lot of cases, the soldiers are using their own funds to buy equipment, whether it's bullets, whether it's guns, whether it's armor. Is that still what you saw? Yeah.
I mean, in terms of the weapons, America provides weapons. So we saw a wide selection of weapons.
Some of those would be old Soviet weapons, like obviously the RPG we shot and what we shot out of it is all Soviet. It's very old weaponry.
And then you've got US weapons that have been given as well. But in terms of the basic soldiers' equipment, like if they want good quality stuff that might be the difference between them surviving the winter or the summer, just in the extreme temperature range, they have to pay for that all themselves.
So they always joke about when foreign soldiers come over to train them or a lot of foreign soldiers come to learn about the drone technology they've developed on a budget is they always joke with them about how like everything from most countries is basically supplied all the good quality standard equipment they'd need is just supplied by the government but in ukraine obviously funding is very stretched so these guys to have the best equipment they have to basically find money to pay for themselves and they'll do that by seeking donations best way to get donations would be to grow social media profiles so that's when you see a lot of sort of social media warfare from a perspective of gaining fame to secure donations for their battalion to be able to fight better or protect themselves and also some of the social media warfare i guess is psychological warfare against the enemy yeah you'll see like private telegram groups where they're showing what they've done to the enemy what the enemy's done to them it's just crazy it's crazy yeah there's telegram groups on both sides and it's basically some of it is propaganda some of it is psychological warfare some of it is just nature of being like, of increasing your own morale and the morale of the people around you by showing off successfully killing other human beings, which are made other in war. And the nature of this war has evolved.
So drones have become more and more prevalent. They're consumer-level cheap drones.
Can you speak to that? Have you seen the use of FBE drones? Yeah, so I mean, basically like a $300 to $500 drone. I think it's like carbon fiber, 3D printed, and they can attach different forms of weaponry to it, whether it's just dropping a frag, they could drop a mine out of it.
I know they were talking about how they had a liquid that could basically burn through sort of a lot of cars and tanks. So the person inside would basically melt alive, which sounds horrible.
But what's mind blowing to me is you could have like a $3 million Russian tank that could be destroyed by a $300 drone, which is just crazy how fast the war changes. I think they're kind of the world leaders in budget drone technology they didn't obviously don't have the budget for these crazy elaborate uh massive drones i did see some higher budget bigger drones over there but for the most part those fpv drones is really how most of the battles are fought and you're seeing the um you're seeing the cameras on So you can see like basically a kamikaze drone will chase someone down and they have that footage.
And that's what the police chief said to me when he gifted me one of the drones they used. And he basically said, he's like, artillery is scary, but a drone will follow you into a building.
It's like kind of a haunting thing to think about. Like they'll see the drone, they'll hear the drone.
They might try to shoot it down or they might try to run. But if it's a kamikaze one, those guys are pretty good at flying them.
It's going to chase the soldiers down. A lot of soldiers like pretending to be dead.
It's really crazy. Some of the footage out there of those FPV drones.
So it's a terrifying tool of war and tool of psychological war and used by both sides increasingly. Yeah, both sides use it.
I remember I was with Roman in Marseille, and he had his break period. He was allowed to leave the country because he basically volunteered to join the army.
Ukrainian men can't really leave Ukraine right now. But Roman, I was in Marseille, and this was a surreal experience for him.
We went to the beach, and there were some tourists there flying a drone, and you just saw his instinctual reaction to that drone sound in the sky. Flashback to that.
Currently, they're all, as far as I know, all human-controlled, so FPV. But to me, increasingly terrifying notion is of them becoming autonomous.
It's the best way to defend against a drone that's FPV-controlled is for AI to be controlling that drone. Just have swarms of drones that are $500 controlled by AI systems.
And that's a terrifying possibility that the future of warfare is essentially swarms of drones on both sides. And then maybe swarms of drones, say, between US and China over Taiwan.
That would be wild. Because, I mean, they do those crazy drone light shows where they do those performances with the lights and stuff.
So they're already pretty sophisticated with sort of pre-programming. Those are pre-programmed.
So the low-level flight control of those is done autonomously, but there's an interface for doing the choreography that's hard-coded in. But adding increasing levels of intelligence to a drone, where you can detect another drone, follow it, and defend yourself.
In terms of the military on both sides of the Ukraine war, that's a technology, that's like the most wanted technology is drone defense. Like how are you defending us drones on both sides? And anybody that comes up with an autonomous drone technology is going to help whichever side uses that technology to gain a military advantage.
And so there's a huge incentive to build that technology. But then, of course,

once both sides start using that technology,

then there's swarms

of autonomous drones

who don't give a shit

about humans

just killing everything in sight

on both sides.

And that's terrifying.

There's civilian deaths

that are possible

that are terrifying,

especially when you look

10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now. Yes, I mean, it's surreal.
When we went to Kurson, he was like, the entire sky is just full of drones at any given time. They could decide to come and attack.
So they could just sit there forever waiting, waiting for you to come out of that building. They'll wait a long time when someone goes and hides inside or potentially if it's open window fly straight through the open window to get it to get people yes you're not even safe indoors yeah there's nowhere to hide and they can wait for a very very long time and as far as i know even politicians like you're in danger everywhere in ukraine so if you want to do a public speaking thing and doing outside you're in danger because it's very difficult to detect those drones it could be anywhere so it's a terrifying life where you don't know if you're safe at any moment anywhere in ukraine well sure i mean it's crazy what happened to trump i thought maybe at the next attack on a public figure might come in the form of drawing technology some sort of of something along those lines.
I wonder how they protect against that here. If that happens, just imagine the insanity that would ensue.
Because we understand the idea of a gunman with a rifle shooting somebody. But just like a drone, just imagine the conspiracy theories.
Who controlled that drone?

Where did it come from?

Yeah.

And now everybody, I mean, that will just cause chaos.

And the range is ever increasing. One of the battalions in Ukraine, because those FPV drones have short range, pretty short range,

but they were able to attach it to one of the larger drones with a signal booster.

So they could potentially go up to 30, 40 kilometers into the distance.

So the drone that hits you could be flown by someone so far away from you.

And if you want to to the soldiers there, did they have a hope or a vision how the war will end? Not really. I guess it just seems to everyone that there's going to be no middle ground.
When I was there, there's a kind of optimism that they would be victorious, definitively. So is there still that optimism? And also, are they ready for a prolonged war? I mean, I think it would be a soldier-by-soldier basis.
I know each of them had a different perspective. I remember I would ask them about in terms of U.S.
politics and their fears, because the first trip I went there, U.S. hadn't agreed to resupply weapons.
So it was a very different feeling in the air there of concern over what was going to happen. But they still remained quite optimistic that no matter who got in, they felt would do the right thing.
But in terms of prolonged war, most people think it's going to go for a very long time, like the children's hospital that just was bombed in kiev anytime there's a moment like that that reignites everything and i think it happens on both sides so i know that there was an attack in uh crimea it was an attack on a beach i guess um and i don't know if that attack on the hospital was retribution for that but that's sort of the energy that is felt. Like they might have battle fatigue, but when something happens to civilians, especially kids on your side, kind of reinvigorates the energy to fight for as long as necessary.
And in terms of a case-by-case basis, one of my friends, Dimitri over there who trains jiu-jitsu owns a gym he was very

passionate about it just because of the history like he brought out documents of his grandfather being executed by the ussr so i know that when the war started he basically he took a bicycle helmet his ak-47 and went out into the streets and he's like i'd rather be dead than live under russian rule. So, I mean, very case-by-case basis sort of personal history for them, I think.
Did they comment on U.S. politics, whether they hoped for Trump or for, in that situation, Biden, now Harris, to win the presidential election? I think most of the guys tried to keep it pretty positive.
You know what I mean? Some people did think that maybe if Trump was elected, he wouldn't continue to fund it, but they really try to stay optimistic. Most of the people I spoke to really tried to remain optimistic that they would be protected if it comes down to it.
But obviously there was a nine-month period where they weren't refunded. So as that stretched, obviously they're refunded now, but it takes a lot of time to get that equipment back to the points at which they need it.
So I mean, if ammunition had ran out, Patriot Defense System had ran out, really, really sort of scary prospect there. I don't know what's all, I guess no one knows what's going to happen there,

but.

Did you lie to people and say you were close to the president so they can be

nice to you?

Like,

so they can convince you to continue the funding?

I'm an Australian diplomat.

Diplomat.

That could be a nice way in.

Yeah.

That would have been a nice way to the top.

Luckily for me,

most of the places I travel to,

jujitsu gives me access to so many different individuals.'s super bizarre like oligarchs royalty I guess tech wizards it's just this it's a strange group of people like a code around the world of just I get strange access just for being good at wrestling wrestling dudes yeah martial arts there's a there's like a code and there's a respect the mutual respect even if you don't know anything about the other person if you both have done martial arts i mean there's similar things with judo with jiu-jitsu with grappling all that i don't know what that is it's like an inner circle that's kind of like because this film project we're working on it's kind of focused on that is uh because of the history of having jiu-jitsu and traveling and doing seminars and just getting access to strange experiences from the local strange in a positive way and participating in those experiences that's what i sort of wanted to focus this travel show on was the community of jiu-jitsu people around the world kind of really has no sort of ethnic background religious background even level of level of wealth. As cheesy as it sounds, kind of a good equalizer on the mats.
And that community camaraderie sort of knows no limits there. Including like mats, the shittiest mats in some small town in the middle of nowhere.
100%. Even like Sheikh Tarnoon, who started ADCC, I know when went to the u.s and he studied there he would train at a very simple gym he wouldn't declare who he was like i watched a documentary produced about sort of the story of shake tanu and how he studied in america basically in anonymity the people at his gym didn't know who he was in his country and he trained there he trained with them for years clean their mounts like anyone else and then they didn't realize who he was until he said hey i want to invite you to my country but he actually meant basically his royalty come and then they realized who this guy was and the significance of him that's gangster that's great one of the things i love about nogi jiu-jitsu is like you don't see rank.
So on a small scale, there's no hierarchy that emerges when you have the different color belts. Everybody's kind of the same.
It's nice. You get to like.
See the skill. The skill speaks, but there's just like a mutual respect and whatever.
I mean, you can quickly find out who. I actually wonder if I would be able to figure out the rank of a person you think you can can usually figure out how long a person's been doing jiu-jitsu i like to think with some of the aggressive clothing choices i've made and sold in the sport that that should be a beacon that that person is a blue belt has hopefully some talent because they're fearlessly provoking the other party there oh it, it's like in the jungle whenever there's an insect that's red that is really flamboyant looking.

That means they're dangerous.

It's a target, yeah, being flamboyant.

If you come on the mats with something pink, a pink gi or something, people are circling in fast.

Especially in Eastern Europe.

Okay.

So, yeah, you mentioned the project. Can you talk talk about that i saw there's a preview that you showed craig jones gone walkabout going walkabout yeah and uh so you showed a preview in indonesia where you're both kind of celebrating and maybe poking a bit of fun at hicks and gracie he's and grac Gracie.
Yeah. So I like to, to, uh, match looks from time to time in an homage.
You look sexy. It's comfortable actually.
I enjoy it. Yeah.
You should keep it. Oh, only wear this now.
I'll wear this for the Gabby match. Um, I mean, yeah, we're trying to do a documentary series because the way I see it is I want to grow the sport of jiu-jitsu.
And this sounds funny to say now because I'm doing a tournament, but everyone tries to do it through competition. But as we know, most jiu-jitsu gyms you visit, a very small percentage of people compete, let alone compete regularly.
You go to gyms that could be brown or black belts that don't know many of the big name competitors. So my thoughts were, we're never going to grow this sport by competition.
We're going to grow it by appealing to the large majority of people that do it, which are just people that enjoy it for the benefits it provides to them, whether health or psychological. And obviously, many people inspired by Anthony Bourdain, basically he was looking at what he did with food by showing the very interesting characters in the food culture, the food industries, especially with street food, and building around that.
So I'm trying to look at Jiu-Jitsu like a giant cult. Scientology isn't starting with Planet Xena.
It's starting with John Travolta and Tom Cruise. So we can create a documentary travel series highlighting the diverse, interesting people that participate in the sport.
In that sense, I hope we can grow up. But also doing some charity work along the way.
We'll release the Indonesia-Bali episode pretty soon. But as an Australian, I do do a lot of damage culturally around the world, so I'd like to do some good as well.

We've done a lot of damage to Bali, so we'll give back to local communities.

We have an Australian there that runs an academy, Academy Christos.

He's one of the guys we're donating a portion of the ticket sales to from our event.

But he basically went straight into a Balinese slum,

started teaching jiu-jitsu on a mat under a tree, and then slowly through donations has built a gym. And his real focus is not just taking money from people and gifting it to them to help the community, but to teach them skills.
So he'll take a lot of the disadvantaged kids and he'll teach them things like photo editing so they can get that work from the internet, incredible guy it's good to know that you see yourself as the John Travolta of jiu-jitsu many masseuses have accused me of the same thing unfortunately all lies yeah there's there's a lot of similarities between the two of you so you mentioned Anthony Bourdain what do you like about the guy what do? What do you find inspiring and instructive about the way he was able to, as you said, scratch beneath the surface of a place? I just felt like he was very authentic. Wasn't afraid.
Like this is something I had trouble with when we first started doing the travel show. It's easy to do a travel show if you only say positive things about a place.
Yeah. You know? But he would find a very creative way to show what's good and bad,

a very honest reflection of the place.

So that's something I would strive to do.

However, in some places, it's very difficult.

You know what I mean?

Like, for example, Kazakhstan.

If I were to say something negative about Kazakhstan,

they'd be like, who's this foreign idiot talking about our culture?

And I think that was what was incredible about Bourdain is he could talk about

both the good and bad of places and he would do it in such a way that it was

tasteful and was respected by the locals.

Yeah.

That's actually a skill that you're incredibly good at.

You make fun of a lot of people, but there's something,

maybe there's an underlying respect.

Maybe it's the accent.

Maybe, I don't know what it is.

There's, there's a love underneath your trolling i like to think so hopefully yeah gabby garcia there's a deep a deep passionate love underneath the trolling yeah speaking of which let's talk about cgi you're putting on the cgi tournament it's in about a week same weekend as adcc three million dollar budget two divisions two super fights winner of each division gets one million dollars everyone gets ten thousand dollars how do you even say that plus one ten thousand plus one. Plus one.
Just to compete. So it's August 16th and 17th.

Everybody should get tickets.

Same weekend as ADCC, which is August 17th.

Okay, so what's the mission of what you're doing there?

The mission has always been, first and foremost, increase athlete pay.

So ADCC has invested a ton into the sport.

Obviously, I mentioned Sheikh Tanu. Sheikh Tanu has done so much for the sport of grappling, particularly no-gi grappling.
So he's grown it. He has funded this for a very, very long time.
But we've kind of hit a point since 2017 where the audience, the crowd watching live and at home behind a paywall has grown considerably. We had things like Meta Morris, we had the Eddie Bravo Invitational, Polaris, all these sort of professional events that have also contributed to growing the sport.
And obviously people like Gordon Ryan have definitely increased the popularity of the sport, but the payment for adcc has never gone up despite again the growth of it so what i did a lot of fans were asking me earlier in the year they said okay you're gonna do adcc and i said that is a big commitment of time energy expenses on steroids to get my body ready for a tournament that i'll probably lose. And if I lose on day one, I make $0.
If I lose on, if I lose in the final, which I have done a couple of times, I only get $6,000. I think third place is 3,000, fourth place is 1,000.
So if you make day two, you get paid. But for me personally, seeing ADCC 2022, you're looking out to a sold out crowd of like 10,000 people.
It's on flow grappling, which you know, pay quite a bit of money for the streaming rights. I can't comment on what that number would be.
And then you go home, despite having put in all that effort with only 6,000, and they're basically, the argument is you're paid in exposure. But again, there's many ways to expose yourself.
You know what I mean? That's just one of the platforms to do so. Yeah.
My problem was that they announced that they were going to go from Thomas and Mac to T-Mobile, which is a jump in quality of stadium, but not a significant jump in sort of seating. so we've gone from like 11,000 seat arena to I think a 15,000, 16,000 seat arena.
And I knew that flow grappling would have had to pay more money because now the sport's growing so much. And I can personally kind of track the growth of the sport through selling instructional DVDs, instructional online products, because that keeps growing.
And we're targeting those white and blue belts vulnerable to internet marketing yeah and that audience continues to grow and those will be the people that largely watch adcc events like this so i simply said in response to a lot of fans asking me why are you going to do adcc and i just simply made a video saying no probably not probably not be nice to make some more money and then i listed a bunch of sports such as cockbar that you get paid more to win cockbar in the villages of kazakhstan the payment structure is higher and i received a very aggressive response not from any of shake tanu's people but from basically who the event today. One of those guys amongst giving me death threats said, hey, T-Mobile costs $2 million.
You don't know what you're talking about in terms of business and production. And he's probably right.
But to me, $2 million is a waste of money for a jujitsu event. I don't think we're at that level yet.
Like that's where the UFC hosts events. You know, $2 million two million dollars that's an expensive expensive venue so we argued a bit on the internet and he said hey if you don't like it why don't you go get two million dollars and put on your own tournament and i said i might just do that and one of my uh anonymous friends kindly donated a three million dollar budget and i actually messaged him before the show to say, hey, we won't reveal your identity.
Because obviously anyone that has money is going to get asked for more money or asked for money from others. So he wants to remain anonymous.
But he basically just said to enjoy the trolling aspect of it and also contribute to the sport of jiu-jitsu. Well, it's good to know that the anonymous funder appreciates you for who you are, Craig Jones.
He sees my true identity and he wants to provoke. It's trolling for a good course.
Yeah. But basically, we were able to find Thomas & Mac Event Center, which was their original venue, and it just so happened to be available that same weekend, which we're happy about so we booked that out we decided to adcc pays 10 000 to the winner we were like you know what we'll pay ten thousand dollars plus one to show up so to show up in our event you're going to get paid more than to win adcc and not only that we're going to broadcast it for free so on meta x and YouTube, you'll be able to watch this event for free.
That's amazing. It's very considerate to the Flow Grappling streaming platform, I believe, to have also a free alternative on the same weekend.
And the brilliance of this whole thing is I was largely criticized for not knowing anything about business, but the people criticizing me decided to host a tournament, a 15,000 seat arena. They decided to take sponsors.
They decided to use a stream platform which sells subscriptions based on the athletes that would enter it, but not give any of the talent, the athletes a contract, which gave me this beautiful position to basically say, hey what do you prefer the prestige of an ADCC gold medal or money? And that's the fuse so far. And we put that out into the world.
I didn't chase too many athletes down. Obviously, a lot of these guys really need money.
So you throw a million dollars out there, people are jumping on board. So initially, we started getting, we got two local guys here in austin the tacker brothers they jumped in first and they're great kids they really legitimized the whole thing because if if we pick certain athletes like just b team guys straight away it's already looking a bit dodgy but we got some legitimate athletes especially the under 80 kilo divisions full of minus two or three guys that's the best people in the world in that weight division and as we started to grow our roster here what happened i'm going to say this allegedly for legal reasons is that the first move adcc did was they matched the female pay to the men's pay so the women always traditionally got paid paid less, I think $6,000 for first place.
As soon as we had Fionn Davies, the reigning champion, come across to do a super fight with us, bang, ADCC raised the prize money of the women's division to equal the men's. So me being a feminist activist throughout many of my years on this earth, immediately got women's pay raised in the sport of jiu-jitsu equalized basically which went counter to everything the promoter had said because he said it was out of his control to raise money he said only the only the adcc i guess coming directly from the sheik or the shakes sort of guys could raise the prize money he got it raised and then what happened was once we started getting some of these big names here, so some of the best guys from ADCC would be in this division.
We've got a bunch of champions or medalists or really the top betting favorites for their divisions there. They started, again, I can't emphasize this enough, allegedly paying show money, which has never historically been done before, to keep athletes in their show.

So you're saying allegedly there were some under the table payments by ADCC. Do you have secret

documents proving this? I do have the documents. Now, some of the guys obviously told me, you know

how it is, you slap a million dollars on the table, it looks great. That was me proving I had

the money, which wasn't even my money to begin with. But it was basically me saying, hey, the

money's real. I don't know why, but strangely, a lot of people don't believe me when I'm telling

the it looks great that was me proving i had the money which wasn't even my money to begin with but it was basically me saying hey the money's real no i don't know why but strangely a lot of people don't believe me when i'm telling the truth i don't know why they wouldn't but what logically happens is they're like oh look how much money he has we're going to give like give us more so they negotiated with me there was one particular brazilian businessman manager i won't say his name, but he looks like the thing from Fantastic Four. And he was a manager for some of these athletes and he would take a massive 20% cup.
So what he, and I got to, I got to pay respect to this, uh, respect to this cause it actually caused trauma to the other team as well. But he would, uh, I would invite an athlete to CJI.
He would go to the other organization and he would say to them, hey, what sort of deal could you give me to keep this guy? You want to keep him in your event? And he would use CJI to leverage more show money for his guys, of which he gets to grease the wheels with 20% for himself. However, at CJI, everyone gets $10,001 across the board and a million dollars prize money.
So there's no room for really negotiation for the tournament aspect of us. So he has a vested interest in putting his guys in ADCC because he can negotiate show money and he can basically take 20% of that for himself.
But really, for the sport of grappling, this is incredible across the board because by us stealing or at least borrowing a bunch of athletes from ADCC, ADCC had to fill their divisions. So they filled their divisions with many other competitors that wouldn't have ordinarily had the chance to do ADCC.
And really, although we've scheduled it the same weekend, ours is actually Friday, Saturday, ADCC being Saturday, Sunday. Our day starts pretty late.
So we start 5 p.m. Saturday.
So really, ultimately, it was a big marketing ploy to go head to head, pretending like we're making the fans choose, but the fans will be able to watch both events. You'll be able to go all day Friday for us.
You'll sadly miss the ADCC Hall of Fame ceremony, where you'll see many of great speakers, public speakers, philosophers tell their stories about hardship. Just like at the end of any jujitsu seminar or beginning, if you're blessed like that, you might have a 45-minute monologue about how they're more knowledgeable than doctors, lawyers, classic black belt technique.
But you will miss that. With great metaphors about lions.
About lions, yes. About being a humble lion, most importantly.
Humility is important. You can watch all that Friday.
You can watch most of ADCC Saturday. And then Saturday night in Las Vegas, I'll be doing what many men have done before.
And that is wrestling a giant woman. Can you speak to that? How are you preparing for this moment of violence on a Saturday night with Gabby Garcia? So Gabby Garcia is the legend of sort of women's grappling.
I think she's won more than anyone else. So between me and her, we would at least have 15 to 20 world championships, I'd imagine.
She's huge. I say that in an endearing way.
She might be 6'4", 6'3". And her weight varies depending on what time of the day it is,

between 220 and 275 pounds. But she's going to be coming in quite big and strong.

Me, I am about 179 pounds right now and a five foot 11.

So I've got a significant size disadvantage.

She has the credentials, but we're going to scrap it out,

scrap it out and see who's best, the greatest woman's competitor of all time or a guy that's never won anything has it added some complexity to the picture that you know there's some sexual tension in the room whenever you the two of you are together yeah maybe i'm being romantic but it seems like there's you've slowly started to fall in love with

each other it's been three years of seduction it's been a long time it's inspiring for for many young men that follow you and look up to you just the the the romantic journey that you've been on it's truly inspiring yeah i would say it's a motivational message to the guy that keeps sending dms to a girl on Instagram for years. That maybe after three years, it could also happen for you to, no matter her height and weight, I think persistence is the key here.
Yeah. And we do have a wager on the line.
What's the wager? This might be the first wager of its kind, I would hope, in combat sports history. If she wins, I'll personally give her a million dollars.
If I can footlock her, we're going to collaborate together in an OnlyFans sex tape. Did she agree to this? She shook on it.
Great. You fans channel is that still up it's after august 7th it's gonna be firing it's gonna be on fire yeah wow i think that and honestly when we talk about secret investor i think that could fund the entire tournament it'd be that that'll be the only paywalled thing about this tournament is your only fan yeah only family yeah it's gonna be a spiritual experience for me yeah wow uh okay i'm fully distracted now can you talk about the rule set so we're using the angled walls inspired by karate combat karate combat did those angled walls those are awesome you're calling it the alley that's really really interesting so the it's like in a pit i guess and the angled walls are yeah so karate combat have a square pit we have a rectangular alley we like the visual of just you're in the alley with someone you know you come we both know what goes on alley there's only a couple things that could go on back there what's the second thing never mind i got it but why this is brilliant why the angled wolves are brilliant for grappling is because any grappling tournament this goes without question goes ibgf adcc the reset is one of the most annoying aspects of the sport and one of of the aspects of the sport that some of these

sneakier guys take advantage of, there's guys out there that are brilliant at playing the edge, open the ref will reset them, or they'll shoot a takedown near the edge. And you might watch, and again, I'm picking on ADCC here, but you might watch an ADCC match where 90 seconds of a 10-minute match is the referee grabbing them, bringing them back to the center, or trying to recreate something of a position that landed outside.

Not only is that sort of boring to me, and it sort of could be biased. You know, like, again, it's happened to me in events where, like, the ref's gone, stop, I've stopped, he's moved a little bit more, and then there's an adjustment in the reset.
I mean, it to a certain extent it's just more of an annoyance they bring it back they reset it to the best of their ability in the center the angled wall mitigates that and it mitigates it in such a way that is a disadvantage to be pushed up against the angled wall you're very easily taken down against the angled wall you could use a cage like the ufc does or any sort of mma organization however cage wrestling can be slow you're obviously at the vertical and it can stagnate there guys are very good at using split squats to really defend that position so we and for me personally i don't love the cage for grappling i'd like to differentiate it for grappling what holds people back from using the alley or a pit like structure is the viewing the viewing angle because if obviously if you're one of the vips or you pay for expensive seat that angled walls above you a cage you can see into an elevated platform sort of stage you can see clearly into because yeah because it's basically flat but the athletes could fall off and injure themselves so something happens ufc fire passes the elevated flat stage it's kind of scary to be near the edge you you go you go off you're going to land on concrete you might want to do that to the other guy if you that way inclined but the the alley the angled wall solves all those problems, very minimal referee interference. Again, the only thing that holds back is the expense of building it.
But again, when you're spending someone else's money, you will spare no expense in production. So we've spent a lot of money on the alley and we've really gone out of our way to create an experience that around the alley, we've elevated everything so that the people watching will be able to see down into it.
Because your instinctual thought is, oh, it sounds great, but how am I going to see in it unless I'm far up? You'd need a Coliseum-like structure, which is basically what we've attempted to create so that you get both a perfect place to wrestle, to grapple in, as well as a perfect viewing angle for the fans. Well, I think it's an amazing idea.
What about the jiu-jitsu on a slant? You've triangled somebody on a slant. Is there some interesting aspects about the actual detailed techniques of how to be effective using a slant? I'll be honest, I for Karate Combat twice.
Never once did I ever step foot into the pit. Just, again, like you said before the podcast, if there's a right way of doing things, I'm probably doing the opposite.
The wrong way. I actually have no idea why people take advice from you, but they do.
I'm mostly an inspirational speaker at this point. Yeah, you and robbins are like this same size at least but in terms of the training for obviously the athlete's very difficult some of these guys have gone out there and built their own angled walls yeah i saw that there's a cool video that they're getting into that that's a smart thing to do there's a million dollars on the line you should probably invest in that but i also like a new surface that no one's competed on no one's gamed it yet no one's like we're gonna see it unfold like like when ufc when people started figuring out how to use the cage we're gonna see this unfold in front of our very eyes how the strategies work for this the other thing we've done too is we're doing rounds so qualifying rounds would be three five minute rounds the

final would be five fives why i want to do that is to incentivize action we're going to incentivize

action through penalizing people but we really want i love a short burst a break and the guys

can go hard again i don't like a jiu-jitsu match where the guy takes the back early and he's like

oh if i keep this position i've won and that's something that people that don't compete don't realize is if you take some if you get a good position early get up on the points you just sit there go oh let's ride this to the end that's why i want rounds so that you might take guys back you're really incentivized to get that finish and the way we're trying to grow the sport is to steal the MMA scoring structure, which a lot of people are criticized because they think it's overly complicated to understand it. But to the mass audience, they understand a 10 point must understand a decision in that sense, understand it being scored round by round.
So we're trying to appeal to a broader audience here. But we think based on the structure, based on how hard we'll call stalling penalties, based on you wanting to finish your opponent quick to have a better chance at a million dollars, because it's 10,001 to show up and a million to win.
If you ain't first, you're last. There's no reward for second place.
So I'm punishing the one position I've only ever been able to achieve in tournaments. Are you worried that because of how much money is on the line, people will play careful? A very generous friend of mine has provided this money.
I'm like, unless you guys go out there and try to kill each other and put it all on the line, I just won't do it again. Like, I'm giving you guys a massive platform.
We've turned down offers from streaming platforms that wanted to buy the rights to this event because the marketing's going very well. We're turning down money to grow the sport.
The ADCC promoter said he wanted to grow the sport. so what he did is he put it behind a paywall and he used the money from the paywall to buy a more expensive arena.
I don't think that's how you grow the sport. I think you grow the sport like comedians do these days.
Guys like Mark Norman will release a special for free. Andrew Schultz did it first, released a special for free, and it grew his audience massively.
I think that's what jiu-jitsu needs we need an exciting show that's not behind a paywall that'll grow the sport grow the audience and really then ultimately we can get to a level where it could be behind a paywall but i just don't think where they're yet yeah i think million dollars is a lot of money but the the opportunity here because it's open and freely accessible by everyone, is to put on a show. And then you get a million every year.
If this is a crazy, exciting event, the funding is going to be so easy year after year. And the other aspect we're doing to it is, unfortunately, I'm not going to make any money off this thing.
It's a non-profit, and the money from charity. Except the OnlyFans, but whatever yeah that's the real cash cow but that's the real work too yeah and that's not for charity that's for your personal bank account the the only fans are you also that'll be for the follow-up therapy but that'll be expensive gig for whoever takes that on board love hurts that physically will yeah ticket proceeds to charity so like obviously we've got the three million dollar budget we've got production expenses um we've got the team of staff to hire um but if we could sell this thing out we could potentially donate a ton of money to charity one of those charities is tap cancer out and what's great about this is rich burn is a black belt from New York who's in the banking world.
He used to run an event called Kasai Grappling. He went through cancer.
He basically had a very aggressive cancer. He had it treated.
And now he basically has said to us that whatever we donate from the profits of the event, he's going to match dollar for dollar. And we've also had another guy who wants to remain anonymous agree to match dollar for dollar as well.
So the more ticket sales revenue we can create here, the more we can actually give back to charity. So it's really all around, it's going to be a great event.
Yeah, Tap Cancer All is great, and all the charities that the athletes have been selecting are great.

What's been the hardest?

You are wearing a suit, so you figured out how to do that.

The tie was difficult, for sure.

The tie was difficult, but you figured it out, and congratulations on that.

But you've never run a tournament.

I've never wrestled a big woman either.

Well, I have, but not in this form. Not in a competitive environment for OnlyFans.
What's been the hardest aspects of actually bringing this to life? The first one was people believing it was real. That was quite difficult.
And then communicating with the athletes. That's basically my responsibility is securing these guys, getting these guys to commit to things.
It's very difficult. There's a reason a few athletes in every sport really stand out.
And it's kind of professionalism, kind of the way they market themselves. And I think those two things do go hand in hand.
So we're in a sport where there's not enough money where a lot of these guys do have managers i think in mma things would be a lot easier for the promoter because you're not talking directly to the athlete you're talking to a guy who might who's obviously taking a cut but like he's there's a middleman so in a situation where you're talking directly to the athlete can be very difficult can be very annoying can be very hard to reach these guys they can be very non-committal that for me has been one of the biggest challenges the guys that i speak to that are like i'm in and they're like i'm out i'm in like navigating this area one other aspect is because we did this basically from idea to event will be less than three months three and a half months so it's like we're having to do so much in such a short period of time little things like of the show money we've given them they're expected to basically secure their own flight and hotel to the event we're cutting down on staff because that would be one of the if i had to coordinate getting these guys flights i would just jump off a building like it's it's hard enough to get them to agree to the event let alone coordinate hey what date do you want to come in it's like herding cats so really just the interpersonal stuff's been difficult obviously going up against adcc the legacy event has been pretty damn difficult as well well established huge history they've been selling tickets for two years everyone's known it's coming for two years. That thing was largely sold out before we even announced the event.
So we're going head to head with this event. So from a ticket sales perspective, very difficult.
What's been a Reddit question. What's been the most surprising people who turned down on your invite? Oh, I mean, we can, we can name names.
I mean, obviously Kynanan he was a semi in semi out his suggestion was actually to do a second and third place prize rather than a million and i'm like no we want all or nothing it's all or nothing here well it's a better spectacle better entertainment yeah probably more injuries but it's all or nothing. Miki Galvao, the one that got away.
Yeah. That's sad.
But we got the Rotolos. The Rotolos, props to these kids, because Cade's the reigning champion.
Yeah. These are two of the best guys in the sport.
Allegedly were offered pretty significant show money to stay. But they hit me up and they said, hey, promise us one thing.
We're on opposite sides of the brackets and we'll fight to the death in the final for the million. And we know, everyone knows that we've seen them compete against each other multiple times.
So that was not a surprise because I know they're good kids. But to basically turn down, allegedly allegedly show money to do this event, to support the event, to me is incredible.
Mika Galvao, things would be more complicated there. Obviously, Mika officially joined ADCC before he secured the Rotolos.
Cade beat him in the final. Mika's personally motivated to face off against Cade.
He didn't know Cade was in our event before he agreed to ADCC. there's more to that story too in terms of Mika's personally motivated to face off against Cade.
So he didn't know Cade was in our event before he agreed to ADCC.

There's more to that story too in terms of Mika doing ADCC

because a bunch of the kids in his team,

I think they're being flown out to do the ADCC kids events.

So there's like his two teammates,

well, at least one of his teammates will be doing the ADCC 66 kilo division.

So his dad, his coach doesn't really want to split time between two events. That's a difficulty for athletes there.
But obviously disappointing. We couldn't secure Mika.
Mika said he was about the legacy. So he wanted to be the youngest guy ever to double Grand Slam, which is basically win all the Gi events and win the ADCC that same year.
My thoughts were, if I was in his position, and I never was obviously a prodigy, a talent like that, is I thought he had a position to make a statement in the sport to kind of, as cheesy as it sounds, be on the right side of history, to have turned down a double grand slam to be in an event

that supports athlete pay.

Again, I don't overly criticize him,

but I think in terms of your legacy and reputation,

to be at a point and choose to do that is much more memorable

than him getting that double grand slam,

which I'm sure he will win the ADCC 77 kilo division this year but it'll be somewhat tarnished anyway so i do feel bad for some of the athletes that win this year and potentially people will be like oh yeah but that was half the people weren't in the division i feel bad for those guys but at the end of the day most of these guys had an opportunity to be a part of an event that really there's no

downside to.

You have a chance to be paid more money than you've ever been paid in your life.

You're selling tickets that are going to go to charity and it's not behind a paywall.

So anyone, anywhere in the world can stream this event, watch it.

And there's no barrier to entry in terms of finances.

Was there ever any chance that Gordon Ryan would enter? I don't think so. I don't think so.
Is that something you tried? Me and Gordon don't text each other too often. I tag him on Instagram and things, but he doesn't respond.
Tell me about your history with Nicholas Marigali. My history with Nicholas Marigali? Actually, it dates back to a time where probably he does not even remember back when i used to wear a kimono so i went to abu dhabi world pro i was chasing my gi dreams yeah i lost in i can't even remember again probably the final not me i probably lost in the final against tommy langlacker in the weight division this was the last year they did the absolute i went into the absolute i made it all the way to the semis nicholas merigali destroyed me in the gi i did hit a nice little reversal on him though he passed my guard and i somehow reversed him from side control that's the only part of the match i share after which he swept me submitted me you reversed him from side control yeah okay Okay.
So that could be like an instructional. That could, yeah, exactly.
Exactly. But right place, right time though.
But then years later, I left the team. Marigali replaced me.
So they brought in a more credentialed, handsome, doesn't speak as well, but they brought him in. He's my replacement.
He's coming to the team. We face off at ADCC.
I do a heavier division thinking, I looked at the names and I was like, that looks like an easier division. And I had two teammates at the time that were in my 88.
And I was like, those guys will have to face off first round. I'll have to face one of them second round, the way they do the seating and the structure of the bracket so i was like i'll do 99 i'll leave 88 for the boys they both lost my division first round unfortunately so i faced off against marigali beginning of day two a lot of pressure because dana has used to corner me used to be my coach now he's cornering the brazilians who we used to complain about enemy.
And I'm like, what's going on over here? It's like karate kid stuff. I face off against Marigali.
I go hard early because I think he can't defend leg locks. For the first three minutes, I'm just attacking legs, legs, legs.
I ended up sweeping him, getting on top. No points before the points period.
But I'm very tired. I'm very tired at this point.
Marigali's big. Like there's some guys that get juiced up to hit a certain weight.
That's what I did to enter this division. You can't keep your gas tank.
Marigali's just a big dude. Who knows if he's on the juice or not, but he's just naturally sits around 230 pounds or even 225.
When you're naturally that big, your gas tank's a bit better. better again if you balloon yourself up on every substance possible gas tank's surprisingly not too good so we have a bit of a close one decision goes my way ultimately finals next i lose that but that is sort of our competitive history we were meant to have a match that had been pre-booked immediately after ADCC.
So we agreed to this before ADCC.

I was like, the price is right. I'm in.
So I sign up for it. And I'm thinking ADCC that we're going to face off soon after.
Marigali chose instead to have some vacation time. He wanted to go on vacation.
He wanted to relax. A bit of relaxation down in Brazil.
So the match is scrapped. Flo hit me up and they say, can you do February? And this was about the time that Volksford Islam in Perth.
I was like, no, I can't do February because I'll be helping Volkanovsky. That's going to take precedence over this match.
Flo goes, you know what we'll do? We'll announce it anyway. We'll sell those tickets anyway.
We'll get the people hyped and then we'll just have you pull out and i'm like all right do it uh do it i'm like do whatever you want that's fucking probably not a good idea but they do that and then people keep trying to rebook this match but now i barely even train anymore i'm busy being a promoter traveling So now, instead of facing me in competition again,

which I would do if the price was right,

they'd have to pay me very well.

Two of the shows have offered me the match,

but the money, terrible.

What do you think is the number that would convince you?

It would have to be, I would think, half a million dollars.

Otherwise, I just can't be bothered.

You know what I mean?

It has to be worth it. Because to put a price on a guy that takes himself as serious as merrick garley my guy is a very serious man he's talking about authenticity he's talking about words he doesn't understand for me to give him the opportunity to live in a world where he had won the last match against me it's hard to put a price on that it's you know when people say it's not about the money it's not about the money it's about me waking up every day knowing that he knows he lost to me so you think you've gotten it in his head yes how do you think you would do if you were to face him for the for the said 500 000 for the 500 yeah i think over five minutes i beat anyone in the world you still think you you got it? I still think I got it.
Gabby about to find out, too. All right, so you're going to make a statement with Gabby, that it'll be a match she remembers.
Yeah, she for sure will remember. I think the fans will remember it as well.
I'm open to it. If we do this match, I'm taking it very serious, but we'd be open to rematches.
I've always said I would have a MMA fight with her. I wouldn't be afraid to hit a big woman.
So unlike with Marigali, if you win, you're not going to ride off to the sunset with Gabby. I'm a bit of a romantic.
I think she deserves a few finishes, you know? Not one and hit the bed that night. So you think you can actually beat Nicholas McGaugh? I think so, yeah.
I mean, you could throw a riddle at him before the match. That'd fucking complicate things for him for the next hour.
Will you and Gordon ever get along again? I think so. I think we need...
The origins of MDMA was couples therapy in the 70s in Houston, I believe.

I believe something like that for us could resolve these underlying issues.

You're a man of Reddit because they suggested that you should consider ketamine therapy sessions.

Just imagine a therapist sitting down with him.

They'd be like, clear the schedule for the next couple of weeks.

With all due respect, Greg, I can't imagine a therapist sitting down with you.

That would be a terrifying...

I do have a therapist, actually.

They prescribed me Vyvanse.

Thank you. That would be a terrifying...
I do have a therapist, actually. They prescribed me Vyvanse.
He's quite confident in my... Is this the Metamon Bali, or what did you...
It's a Russian website. It's the old Sean Connery thing.
It's not a therapist. It's just something that's spelled the same.
I think me and Gordon, a debate of some type would be awesome. Like a political debate? Yeah, me representing Kamala Harris and him representing Donald Trump.
So intellectual sparring. An intellectual battle, a battle of wits.
Can you just speak to your trolling? Is there, like underneath it all, is there just a respect, the human beings you go after for sure they have to be worthy of being attacked you know what i mean like um if someone that's the thing it's like you want a worthy adversary not in a sense of i don't want to battle someone that has better banter than me because i'm gonna lose But I want to battle someone with a profile large enough that it doesn't look like you're just...

Who do you think is the biggest troll or shit talker in martial arts?

Hanada Laranja.

Yeah, well, you can't even put him in the...

He's another other class of human being.

He's overqualified.

Chael Sonnen comes to mind.

Chael's good. You versus Chael.
Who's a better shit talker if you look the entirety of the career chael is better i mean i think if you can shit talk in mma because there's this far worse consequences for you if you're still willing to do it when really violent things can happen to you i mean i'm getting death threats but like he he has a certainty of violence against his opponents in MMA.

So on Reddit, somebody said, you are a Coral Belt level troll and just happen to be good at jiu-jitsu.

So what did it take for you to rise to the ranks of trolling from white belt to black belt to Coral Belt?

What's your journey?

We're talking shit.

That's a good question. I think it would have happened after I moved to America.
Because in Australia, like we just on a daily basis say some of the worst things you could ever imagine. Like in private life.
Yeah. We're just trying to ruin each other's day.
In a way that's so blasé, you're going back and forth. And the guy that actually gets upset and says some real shit, that's your victory.
You know what I mean? You're like, oh, we got you. That actually bothers you.
All right. We'll take that as a victory.
So when you come to America and everybody takes themselves a little too seriously, those are just a bunch of victims that you can take advantage of. An Australian entering American banter is like Neo neo getting his matrix skills you're just like whoa i see everything coming do you ever look in the mirror and like regret how hard you went in the paint at somebody i don't think so i don't think you see you're proud of yourself i think what i some balance.
It's like I'm bringing some justice. Ultimately, it'll probably come back in spades to me.
Yeah. I don't know.
As a fan of yours, as a fan of Gordon's also, but as a fan of yours, I see the love behind it. I don't know.
It seems always just fun. The shit talking seems fun.
I wish he'd buy it back. It doesn't buy it back anymore, though.

What's your relationship like with Mo, the organizer of ADCC?

I mean, it's been a love-hate relationship.

Like with Gabby?

Like any good relationship, if you don't get blocked at the end of it,

were you really in love to begin with?

Right.

That's my thoughts anyway. So in terms of my friendship with Mo, me and mo were really close friends for a long time we'd talk a lot he was instrumental in us moving down her death squad to puerto rico he lives in puerto rico spends most of his time in puerto rico uh i've spent time with him in florida california but in terms of our relationship i'm trying to think of an exact time where it went south but i guess in my him being the adcc organizer in my attack of athlete compensation was taken personally which is obviously gonna ruin whatever friendship you had.
And that started around the time you weren't thinking about CGI. I mean, to be honest, CGI was a result of the response of my discussion of athlete compensation.
So me and Mo had been close friends

even after the Danaher team broke up.

We were still close friends for quite a while after that.

But it does complicate things when someone is,

for all intents and purposes,

he, as an ADCC competitor,

and he runs ADCC, the event,

he's in control of it now.

He is your boss.

So that does complicate our friendship. Have you had a conversation since you announced CGI? Have we had a conversation? When did you get blocked? I honestly didn't get blocked.
I was just joking. Nah.
Honestly, we had a disagreement about athlete compensation. I said, let's do a podcast and talk about it because I'm a big fan

of transparency. If you think I'm an idiot for thinking athletes should get paid more,

tell me it, show it to me. And I've made public statements.
Other people have asked

why we don't get paid more money. You can both tell me and the world at the same time, the grappling

world at the same time, but was not interested in doing a podcast. Again, maybe he thought I was

going to hit him with some gotcha questions or something, but really at the end of the day,

I personally believe you've got nothing to hide. If you are confident in the business decisions

you've made, then there's no gotcha moment that I could actually do. I could easily, I would have done the podcast if I look like a complete idiot, would have released it anyway, because it would be a good message to where we are in the sport.
But again, considering what I know about Thomas and Mac's price, which I believe we're paying $200,000 for, and T-Mobile's $2 million, how do you justify no increase in athlete pay while we have a 1.8 million increase in venue cost so you're saying that there could potentially be poor business decisions poor allocation of money that could be reallocated better to support the athletes i've never once thought this was some organization where most like stealing money for himself i'm that, and again, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so he might fully think that what he's doing is going to grow the sport. I'm going about it in a completely different way.
I don't think we need T-Mobile. I don't think we need a behind a paywall.
I think we need cheap venue, still maintain good quality production, release it for free. If you want something to grow, present it for free.
Is there a future where the two of you talk? Yeah, for sure. He keeps insisting on talking face to face.
I don't have a problem with that, but my argument is this is a public feud. We're having a disagreement.
Let's settle the disagreement in a way that answers the question to the fans. Because if one of us is a complete idiot, then I believe the world of people following this story are entitled to know which one of us is an idiot.
If you talk to them, would good faith like would you uh turn off the or turn the troll down from 11 to like a three yeah i don't even think i need to troll him i just say hey why like like show us the books you know what i mean like honestly when our event's done we're going to be pretty transparent obviously we are ran as a non-profit we're going to be pretty transparent about

everything and i mean obviously ultimately all the views we get when flow grapp when an event

on flow grappling or fight pass or any other streaming provider unless it's a pay-per-view

you're not going to know how many people watched so that's one aspect of what we're doing is

we're going to have a visual sort of guide to how many people are fans of grappling yeah transparency in all of its forms that's what bothers me about the ILC with the Olympics is that there's this organization that puts on an incredible event but there is it's completely opaque it's not transparent and the athletes don't get paid almost at all, so it's usually from sponsorships. And they sell distribution, broadcast distribution, and so it's mostly paywalled after the fact.
It's very, unless you're a super famous athlete or a famous event, it's hard to watch, I don't know, the early rounds of the weightlifting or the judo or all of the competitions where most of those athletes get paid almost nothing and they've dedicated their whole life. Like they've sacrificed everything to be there.
And we don't get to watch them openly. In many cases, you can't even pay for it.
With IOC, I've got to experience this because I'll have like podcast conversations with like Judoka for example and I put like a little clip in a podcast and uh the Olympics channel takes it down immediately so they have all the videos uploaded private they're private oh they flag the copyright they just flag the copyright copyright automatically. From the private videos, they could release.

They could release somewhere, even if it's paywall, which I'm against.

But paywall it, but make it super easy accessible.

So the flow grappling model is still okay.

I'm against it.

But if you do a really good job of it, okay, I can kind of understand a membership fee.

But it should be super easy to use.

But in the case of the Olympics, first of all, in the case of the Olympics, the whole point of the Olympics is for it to be accessible to everybody. So paywalling goes against the spirit of the Olympic Games.
And I will say the same is probably true for many sports like grappling, especially for major events like ADCC that I feel like they should be openly accessible to everybody, like on every platform. But what was the decision like for you to make it accessible on YouTube and X? Well, I mean, just because basically it's going to grow the sport.
You know what I mean? Like if you have to subscribe to a platform to watch something you have a mild interest in, a mild curiosity in, a financial barrier there so i want to open it up because again we have an investor who's contributing and is happy for it to be spent this way happy for us not to be held hostage by these sort of streaming providers and really like again i'm not making accusations it's flow grappling or ufc firepast they are making the right business decision by not providing streamer numbers because that's leverage that those people can use against the streaming provider but for me as an individual athlete that really wants to understand the metrics of how many people actually watch this sport to leverage that in my own sponsorship negotiations, then if I'm in a

position... that really wants to understand the metrics of how many people actually watch this sport

to leverage that in my own sponsorship negotiations,

then if I'm in a position to have this out free

and also give every athlete involved the same metrics and information,

you will literally be able to see the spikes when you compete.

And you'll be able to take that and present it for opportunities for sponsorships for businesses to say look look how many views this got i was one of the most viewed moments of this event so i want to put the power back in the athlete and take it away from the host and it creates a lot of incentive for the athlete to make it exciting yeah this is your time it might never happen again i fully intend to run this every

year that's the goal but again it might never happen again is there a possible future where the 2026 adcc is run by craig jones could i take over adcc i think from an adcc perspective make a lot of sense. I think it would make a lot of sense to wait to see if this event turns into Fyre Festival first before you commit to something like that.
But I think a more modern approach to the promotion of the event, again, I keep going back to the comedians. You know what I mean? If you want to grow your brand, whatever that may be, provide content for free and you can pay waller eventually you can grow the audience create the audience free you know i think the again if your goal is to create a huge sport here then it's like if we're already a niche sport and competition aspect of that is it even smaller niche then we grow that, providing this content for free.
Well, having just chatted with Elon Musk, who fundamentally believes that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, that to me, if the universe has a sense of humor, you would certainly, Craig Jones would certainly be running ADCC, which would be, I mean, it would just be like beautifully hilarious. It would be a poetic ending.
It would be an underdog story from a man that could never win the event to running the event on behalf of the Shake Ta Noon. So I saw B-team videos of the CGI camp, people training super hard.
So you aside who don't seem to do things in a standard way, what does it take to sort of put yourself in a peak shape, peak performance for a huge event like the CJI or the ADCC? I mean, psychologically, it's really, really brutal. For me, anytime I'm leading up to

any event of any meaningful significance, it's horrible on a psychological level because you're

always thinking about, are you training enough? Are you doing enough? If you feel any signs of

sickness, injury, the stress levels increase, your sleep quality decreases. It's all those

little subtle things that are so hard to mitigate. So whether you feel like you're training

Thank you. injury, the stress levels increase, your sleep quality decreases.
It's all those little subtle things that are so hard to mitigate. So whether you feel like you're training hard enough, you're overtraining, those to me are the most difficult aspects.
And I think really those are an individual thing. And that's really something where a coach can provide what he thinks to you is the right amount of work,

you know?

And I think that's different for different people.

I think Nicky Rod could do eight hours a day. You know what I mean?

I think Nicky Ryan,

eight minutes.

I saw a video of Nicky Ryan,

like with a trash can throwing up.

Yes.

And the top comment is like,

that's him doing the warmup.

That is satisfying to watch.

Yeah.

But yeah,

so you're supposed to train hard enough to where you have this confidence

And so, that is satisfying to watch honestly yeah but yeah so you're supposed to train hard enough to where you have this confidence that you're prepared yeah i mean and it's an impossible thing to grasp it's like um some of the best performances i've had i've been called up last minute or i've been sick or my camp's been horrible and for me personally i've gone in there and thought, oh, relaxed, almost like, oh, well, you know, like you got called up a week ago, you were injured, you missed four weeks of your camp. And I went in there super relaxed and accepting of the result and performed much better.
Sometimes when I know three months out, I've got an event coming up and that event only happens every two years. It just, the stress of that alone, like I personally on an individual level, more of a, I'd rather wing it.
I'd rather be in the stands and just roll down like Gunnar Nelson. I remember he had a brilliant performance in an ADCC absolute and he was out drinking the night before.
He had no idea he was competing the next day day he was in the stands eating ice cream and they called his name out for the absolute and he went out there and i believe he got bronze i believe he beat jeff munson so it's like it's different for different people obviously you don't want that to be the standard you've got to be putting in the work at all times but even now in my crazy travel schedule where i don't train anywhere near like I used to, as long as your game is technical and as long as your body's in good condition, I believe you can still train well against world-class guys. You might not be able to do an hour straight, but if you're technique-orientated, you're just losing fitness.
So is it possible to out-cardio Craig Jones? Is your game fundamentally a technique-based game? For sure, for sure, yeah. I've never wanted to win anything bad enough to train properly for it.
Right. But isn't that the secret to your success, being lazy? I think so.
I think that's the only logical explanation. And I also use it also use it as mind games too.
Like, again, no one knows whether what I'm saying is true or not. Right.
And I'm not saying this story to say anything bad about my opponent at the time, but I booked two matches and two consecutive weekends. And I've been traveling.
I think I just got back from one of my trips.

I've been over international.

So I don't even know where the fuck I was.

You're in Texas right now, by the way, just in case you forgot.

Texas, just for you.

Just came back. Thank you, man.

This is an honor.

But I hadn't really even trained.

I couldn't train.

Like I was traveling, just had no ability to train.

I trained for like a week, had the Phil Roe match.

And I said to myself, I was down in Mexico City. And I said, you know what? If you win this match, you got to face Lovato next week.
Don't go out and party. Don't celebrate the victory.
But as a 32-year-old man at the time, hitting a flying triangle submission, I thought that deemed a worthy after party. Yeah.
And we got out of control that night. And it wasn't until the next day I woke up, I was like, oh, I have Lovato next weekend.
But I'm also, people don't know whether I'm telling the truth or not, but it's also, I'm almost too honest because I'll be like doing interviews saying, yeah, I was out partying and I barely trained. The opponent looks into that and they question it.
Is he telling the truth? Is he baiting me? Is he really that unconcerned? You know what I mean? It's almost a psychological battle in and of itself, but for the most part, it's true. So to you, being psychologically relaxed is extremely important, just not giving a damn.
I wonder what that is. Not too much pressure.
I don't want to. Pressure.
I don't like the pressure. But you like the pressure when it comes to internet shit talking.

I mean, you get to silently sit back and think about a good response, you know?

Yeah.

How important is it to just go crazy hard rounds leading up to competitions like that?

You said sort of Nicky Rod, but on average for athletes at a world-class level, do you have to put in the hard rounds?

Yeah, I think you have to put in the hard rounds.

It depends at what point in your career you are. You know, like I think like someone like Nicky Ryan might almost train too technically too often.
And when he comes to competition, it's a confronting experience when someone hits him hard and he feels that pressure. So I think different people require different things.
When Nicky Rod is breaking the spine of a 37-year-old father of three bus driver, it might be time for him to train in a more technical manner. So it's like you've got to cater it to what they need.
And again, depending on the opponent, it's a game of strategy. For me, when I was more active, I look at an opponent that I want, that I could steal some clout from, of which the clout you can make money, and I think to myself, what's the best ruleset I can beat him in? That's the strategy.
And then how would I beat him in that ruleset? So there's so many strategic layers to go above and beyond just the training for me. But nowadays, if I train, short duration high intensity that's the best of me i don't like this six little like 10 six minute rounds whatever like i don't like this long training i don't like it's it's for me it's too much toll on the body i think um i go to the gym we bang maybe the first round slightly light

and then just

bang it out two hard rounds tops little bit of problem solving get out of there because you want to feel the a little bit of the competition intensity that feels the best on my body when you're traveling you're doing seminars and you're just doing jiu-jitsu with folks are you training with them i'm sure there's like from everything i see people would love to train with you yeah they want to they want to i mean i don't know what it is obviously you yeah i guess you let's say it's like people want to play basketball with like a basketball star or something you know what i mean but But I guess if you played one-on-one with a basketball,

there's no great risk of injury.

You know?

Yeah.

That's the real problem is like if you don't roll at your seminar,

the seminar participants don't feel like they got the full experience.

Yeah.

But there's snipers at these seminars.

There's these sharks that are circling wanting to attack you. And you have to look at it from both perspectives.
I think you should provide excellent technique, excellent question and answer time. And I think you should roll a little bit.
For the most part of these days, I'll just roll 30 minutes straight. I'll just do 10 guys, three minutes, no break, 30 minutes straight.
I might even get the guy to pick. again if you some of these guys come in hot yeah it's terrifying man because the thing is like with anthony bourdain sort of analogy here like you're exploring all parts of the world you just want to be there in the culture teach good techniques and just socialize you don't want to, there's just a bunch of killers that are trying to like murder you.
Yeah. To them, they're like, I get to test myself against a world-class athlete today.
And to you, you're like, oh, I'm in Odessa. I'd like to get to know the people.
Yeah, exactly. Try some food, have a couple of drinks, and enjoy the place.
But to them, it's time to go. You got to rope it open a bit.
You know, like if I meet pressure with pressure, I get tired. But if I don't provide resistance where they think there should be resistance, now it slows their pace down.
They get shocked a bit. But 100%, if I'm at a seminar and someone's rolling too hard with me, if I feel like I might get hurt,

I will 100% rip a submission on them.

You know what I mean?

It's like you're confronted with a threat.

Yeah.

You have to meet it with a threat.

It's like I've spoken about this with Ryan Hall.

Ryan Hall, give him a warning and then gone.

And I think it's perfectly acceptable.

I won't endanger them for no reason. But you're coming hot you better tap fast if i feel a threat you better tap i'm not going to break break it for the sake of breaking it but if you're if you do some crazy shit and that might potentially hurt me and i get a submission and i'm tired if you're fresh you can catch a heel hook hold it tight the guy tries to wiggle out you got it yeah if you're tired and you've been nice with the heel hook and then they slip out and club you in the head then next time it's going to be the last time well last time see you're another level you and ryan hall are just world class but like for me i'm trying to find navigate through this because i'd like to be able to roll you know like 10 rounds for fun for cultural like they're coming for you too and uh unfortunately ripping submissions or like you know neon belly some kind of dominant position people don't like hear the message at all or if I let them submit me a bunch of times, they don't calm down either.
So I've been trying to figure out how to solve that puzzle because I like to keep rolling with people across the world for many more years to come. But it's tough.
You can't do it. If you've reached any level of notoriety, whether it's in the sport or just as a celebrity, you're better off to just have three, four trusted training partners and train privately.
That's the sad situation. People used to say, oh, you could be such and such a good anti-gym.
No, those days are over now. Now, if you show up and you have any sort of name, they're coming kill you better honestly you're better off it's so much safer training is about trusting trust is built from safe routes yeah strangers us scary i don't know i'm trying to develop a radar when i look at a person trying to like figure out are they are they I'll tell you what, the most damp.
Yeah. That's a good one.
You know what? Anyone that wears a pitbull sports rash guard or anyone from the country of Poland, be ready. Oh, Polish people go hard.
People go hard. I've never had a flow roll with a Polish person.
Somebody on Redditdit asked how many legs did you break in eastern

europe three or four to send a message or just for your own personal enjoyment i don't enjoy it you know they don't enjoy the violence it is humorous after the fact though but i mean it's just like hey like bro i'm jet lagged i'm tired i'm here for you guys why are you trying to hurt me you know like if i get a submission tap don't hesitate at all don't hesitate you know like it's like it's i mean jujitsu's dangerous it's a dangerous thing and when strangers going crazy it's their show they think they're getting invites to cji if they tap me it's just wild uh so speaking of, just for the hobbyist, for a person just starting out, what wisdom can you provide? Like say you were tasked with coaching a beginner, a hobbyist beginner. How would you help them become good in a year? What would be the training regimen? What would be their approach, mental, physical, in terms of practice, to jiu-jitsu? I mean, honestly, picking safe training partners and trying to understand the positions and not just freaking out.
Like, you might escape if you freak out, but you also might be stuck in something and you injure yourself. So it's like, I think if you can, it's just about longevity.

You know, like if you can train, find a pace to train at and like sort of intensity and

the right people, you could potentially train five years without injury.

It's really about how you move.

If you are always moving in an explosive way, eventually you're

going to do that from a position in which you can't move and then someone's going to tear. And you also want to be able to trust training partners to not go too crazy and inflict too much pain.
You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, I think I've managed to avoid a lot of injuries because I just never roll too athletically, explosively.

I think I'm managed to avoid a lot of injuries because I just never roll too athletically, explosively. I think I'm probably incapable of moving at that rate of speed.
So that's part of it is you, the way you move, but I guess you also don't allow anybody to put you in a really bad position in terms of hurting you? I let them put me in bad position, but I try to stay relaxed at all times. you know that's the that's the key here is like uh i mean yeah obviously you got the cheesy keep it playful but it's like you if you really keep if you can remain calm in bad positions that is a skill that's your confidence not in yourself but that the other guy's incapable of submitting you that's the ultimate confidence you can give them whatever you want so the thing you want as a beginner is to focus on minimizing injury by relaxing, by not going, by not freaking out.
Yes, keeping it at a pace so you can understand what just happened. The thing is, how do you know if you're freaking out or not as a beginner? It feels like a...
If you're panicking. Yeah, that's a good...
If you're... I mean, I see a lot of beginners kind of breathing, starting to breathe hard, they tense up.
That's probably, underneath that is panic. Yeah, if you can make someone panic, you will fatigue them.
It's the same, it's like if you're, even if you're a higher level and you're worried about getting your guard passed, it's the panic that leads to fatigue in your guard retention. But if you're you're so flexible you remain calm i think it's

because you're not panicked fear is the mind killer but also you have one of the more innovative games in jiu-jitsu history how do you develop that how do you continue throughout your career how are you innovating what was your approach to learning and figuring positions out figuring submissions out?

I mean, financial motivation.

If you can hit moves and no one else knows how to do, you can sell those instructional. But also it keeps it interesting because it's like, I mean, it can get stagnant and boring, you know, like a lot of people get to blue belt.
They're good at one thing. They only do that one one thing i think it's finding creative ways to beat people and sometimes creativity is in how they respond to it so if you can find a humiliating move to do to someone we're not even necessarily humiliating but a move that is unexpected when you get with something you don't expect i think that is sort of really one of the most fun aspects of it you know what i mean Like you train to stay better than the people you're better than.
That's what keeps you in the game. And finding creative ways to beat those people is some of the most entertainment.
So that's just something that brings you joy is by doing the unexpected. Yeah, if you get swept with something that you don't think should work, I think that's fulfillment.
So your game is even a bit trolly. Interesting.
But what's the actual process of, like with the Z-Guard, all the innovative stuff you've done there? How do you come up with ideas there? I mean, just studying tape. Just study tape and try to reverse engineer.
Like if I see something or I train with someone and it feels, you know when you have those moments where you're like, oh, I don't even know what they're doing here. And if you can put someone in a position they don't understand, that's also where they panic.
So it's like creating different ways to make people panic. But also, I mean, just innovation, like having fun with it.
You know, like I guess the artistic aspect of it is fun.

You can be creative in how you can beat people.

Did you say artistic or autistic?

Both.

Okay.

Both.

Just checking.

What's like the most innovative thing you've come up with?

What's like some of the cooler ideas you've come up with on the mat?

I don't think I've come up with anything, but I've popularized things know like certain styles of leg entry i definitely didn't invent them but i popularized them octopus guard playing more from turtle sort of the pinning style of game like you like as a because of my jokes online put me in a position of power in the sport so that when i post content it can popularize a move or at least an instructional popularize a game but it's still i'm not trying to sell inauthentic products i'm still what i want the technique to work be yeah but put some humor on top of it like power bottom your instructional names are pretty good and but you changed that one i saw the name of that i mean unfortunately meta the ads were not appreciating some of that humor so we had to soften soften the titles a bit you got a you got a phone call from the man said change this i didn't allegedly right the company hosting it right right uh what do you think about zuck in general like Like the fact that he trains jiu-jitsu.

Have you got a chance to train with him?

Because you've trained with Volk.

I haven't trained with him.

I met him when Volk fought Ilya.

We've spoken briefly.

Interesting guy for sure.

Loves jiu-jitsu.

Loves MMA.

He's really intending to compete in something.

I think.

Competed in jiu-jitsu.

Intends to compete in MMA. Has a beginner's mind, is humble about it.
It's interesting. Was he ever in consideration for CJI? Oh, I mean, we would love to have him.
We'd love to have him. But he's coming off of ACL surgery.
I think he's returned to sport, it's August. So I think he'll be back training again soon.
Yeah. What's your been like with with volkanovsky like what have you learned about martial arts about grappling and different domains just training with him i mean for me personally what's so interesting about volkanovsky is his i guess where he came from you know like it's like uh you have pre-existing ideas of what a ufc champion is again i would say it's similar to when i've started training jiu-jitsu and i first It's like you have pre-existing ideas of what a UFC champion is.
Again, I would say it's similar to when I started training jiu-jitsu and I first traveled to America and got to train with some really famous people. You realize how relatable they are in some aspects.
Volkanovski trains a freestyle, and it is humble beginnings, humble origins. It's a small gym in a small beachside beachside city they're running puzzle mats you know what i mean you think ufc champion you don't think puzzle mat gym you know what i mean like he's not training at a american top team he's not at one of these big gyms so to me it just shows what you're capable of through hard work and sort of self-educating in such an isolated place.
It's insane to me that he's still considered probably the pound for pound best featherweight ever, in my opinion. And he's basically come across and started late from a rugby background.
But also in terms of what I've learned on a technical level, I picked up a lot of stuff from him in sort of grappling exchanges, how to get back up, obviously wall wrestling. In terms of how hard he trains, how hard he works, the cardio aspect is insane.
His cardio workouts are absolutely insane. So he's the opposite of you.
Complete opposite of me, probably publicly and privately as an athlete yeah the amount of work he puts in and just his uh sheer sort of mental willpower i remember there's been a couple of times where i've watched him do weight cuts where like that's horrible you're watching your your friend you know obviously we started as like basically i would help him in certain jujitsu aspects and then becomes a close friend of yours but the whole process of the mma fight is horrible especially when you care about the person fighting because some of those weight cuts you see are awful like you're basically seeing guys eyes roll back in their head like him just powering through a five kilo 10 pound cut and just constantly talking about how easy it is but while clearly i mean these guys look like they're dying you know like to push through that and then to push through some of the moments in his in his fight to watch him be completely relaxed until like five minutes before the fight and then he starts talking about you're never going to take this belt away from my family like he's singing about his family before he fights his kids you know you see the character change it's just absolutely insane to watch on the other side of that is obviously watching the ups and downs there's been so many ups the last two have downs. So you see in the full spectrum of the highest highs

and the lowest lows.

How is he able to deal psychologically with loss?

I don't know.

Obviously, he's still hungry, still motivated.

Obviously, I thrive in a losing environment.

But him, on the other hand, I'm not sure.

We don't talk too much on that level.

Obviously, we check in his friends, see what he's up to, what he's planning yeah uh we were trying to get him a grappling match at cjr i won't say the reasons it fell through but we were setting one up with mikey musumichi but we couldn't get it done and you can't say the reasons why i'll say the reason but it would have been would have been awesome you think you could have set that up if you had more time like set something like like part of the challenge here is for some of these gigantic matchups i feel like it takes time yeah that being the promoter tournament not as bad the super fights really really difficult i don't think we could have set it up with more time that particular match but that was the dream that's what we're hoping to do but there's a lot of other interesting matchups you could have possibly gotten through if there's more time yeah i'd love to see i mean personally i really want to see volks and ortega have an actual grappling match because we saw him get out of those deep submissions and apply a ton of ground and pad i'd love to see him just have a grappling match i'd love to see more of the ufc stars have grappling matches especially if they've had any head trauma in a fight it's like hey let's keep them busy because as you see some of those guys go crazy if they can't train uh what about the fights against makachev you think vol can beat him i think the first fight showed he could beat him, for sure. Showed it's possible.
Even in the second fight, when he reversed the grappling exchange, I wish he'd tried to take Makachev down. I really think he has a huge strength advantage against Makachev.
And I personally believe he has a fence wrestling advantage. You might not see it in a sense of the technical hip tosses and things like that, like really.
But I do believe Vox, one of the best, if not the best cage wrestler in the world. Who do you think wins in a grappling match? That would be interesting.
Right. It'd be interesting.
The problem is almost to, while you are a champion like Islam is, you could just never book them. You could never get it.
What do you think makes the Dagestani wrestlers and fighters so good? I mean, I think, personally, those guys are just like, they just love it. It's just about like, it's how they train.
Like, it's a fight to the death. You know what I mean? Like, it's just just built in them they don't want to concede an inch ever i think for mma and wrestling that can be very very good i think sometimes when those guys come over to jiu-jitsu specific events they get leg locked they fall into traps overly aggressive or overly evasive but i think the way they train just is perfect for a fight a fight they that can just forward pressure, eat some shots, grind a guy against the wall.
Fence wrestling is technical. Jiu-Jitsu is far more technical.
There's way more things you can do in a grappling scenario from top and bottom than I think against the wall. So a grinding nature of how they train works really good to walk a guy down and take him down against the wall and then obviously with ground and pound very good to hold a guy down so i think just never considering an inch in training it's just they've done that since they were born basically so you learn how to grind somebody down yeah like they're just trying to break each other at all times trying to have some dominance over other over their friends and they train with but you think in the grappling context that's that that will not always translate no not when you can pull guard and submit from your back i think that sort of negates some of that grinding pressure i think that has to be met with more slow technical lateral movement i think that's think that's the way you, like, that would be the dream for me, is a guy just comes straight forward into my guard.
So that grinding approach works well if he's taken me down and got already close to me. But if I'm laying flat on my back and he's standing and he has to engage, he has all that danger at range.

Yeah.

But if he can connect to my body before we go down,

now we're in his world again, I think.

I wonder if it's like, you know,

at his prime could be versus you, for example.

Who do you think wins there?

Buggy choke for sure.

Buggy choke?

No way.

I know you're joking.

Are we getting with the buggy, I reckon?

Really?

So you can get the buggy choke at the highest level? who is the one who is the one who is the one who is the one who is the one who is the one who is the one who is the one who Okay. You're not a buggy believer.
I'm not a buggy hater either. I'm just...
I'm agnostic on the buggy choke.

Khabib would go to sleep for sure.

Yeah?

Yeah.

There's no way he would tap to a buggy choke.

Who was it I faced recently?

I faced a Russian guy from Tatar.

I couldn't buggy him.

I was trying to close guard one, though.

Sort of like it is harder to pull off.

But he... I had to put him to sleep twice at the end of the match with a triangle, but he was just willing.
Like, I don't know, Eastern European guys, it's like, they're treating it like a real fight, you know? Have you ever, like, gone hard with a Dagestani person? Like, grappling, wrestling? Any of the fighters, any of the MMA guys? Have I, have I, have I? I do train hard when i did the seminar in odessa it was at a school but another school in the city brought like 10 dagestani guys all of them went insanely hard okay i was like guys okay it's a small sample size but they all wanted to be broken what do you think you as the wise sage of jiu-jitsu if you look 10 20 years out how do you think the game is going to evolve the art of it the art of it I mean I think obviously people are going to keep innovating perfecting certain things throwing out information bad sort of techniques bad sort of but I mean it's so to predict. It's like that's the game of making money off the instructionals is predicting where we go next.
It's so, so difficult. What do you think is going to be the most popular submissions, CGI and ADCC this year? Is it going to be foot locks or rear naked? I think – actually, CGI, I think there's going to be a lot of guys that don't tap, that take injuries.
A small concern is that a guy wins the match, but is so injured, he can barely go on to the next match. Win the battle, lose the war.
We are going to see that, aren't we? People refusing to tap. Actually, we did the walkthrough yesterday, and we were like, one ambulance is not enough.
Get a second one here. Yeah.
Because if they take one guy injured to hospital, we can't continue until an ambulance comes back. So these guys are going to go.
Everyone will be Dagger standing for a day. That's what I think this tournament will achieve.
But progression, it'll just be the integration of wrestling into jiu-jitsu. I think that would be the most exciting way the sport could progress.
It's basically folk-style wrestling, but an integration of submissions from the standing position too. If you just follow the rules of you should always be fighting to get on top, whether that's a submission that leads to a sweep or a sweep, and you should trying to avoid being pinned and as long as the game revolves around that and guys engage each other offensively on the feet that would be the most exciting best way to um watch the sport yeah when i show the sport of jiu-jitsu the most exciting stuff is whenever both people want to be wrestling scrambling wrestling they want to both want to get on top yeah that looks like fighting versus guard stuff i'm a guy that totally agrees with you but if i think the guys are better wrestler i will concede you know like it's like that's the gas the the hard part but then the whole the whole crowd will then mock you ceaselessly, as they should, for conceding.

That's what the million should be.

We should have a tournament or a round-robin thing

where it's like the million goes to the most exciting man

who took the most risks.

I mean, in a way, that's what's going to happen

because this is quite open.

So the benefit of being exciting

is you're going to be glorified on social media.

And if you're going to be boring and stall, you're going to be endlessly sort of willified. And forget about medals.
Social media glory is all that matters. Well, in a certain sense, on a basic human level, yeah.
I mean, not all that matters, but if you're going to stall, you're going to become a meme, I feel like, especially with CGI. And so are the refs going to try to stop stalling? Yeah, we're going to penalize them hard, hit them hard, get that boring shit out of here.
So what percentage of athletes would you say are on steroids? Is it 100%? Anyone that's ever beaten me. Okay.
They're taking more steroids than me. I don't know.
I wanted to test them, them but not to do anything bad but just in the name of science to see what people are running you know it's so hard to say because you like you train with people and they don't even tell you what they're on i tell the world what i'm on and they go look at you you're not taking any steroids so it's like it's like uh such a secret thing. I personally think it's almost impossible to say.
But occasionally you look at a guy and you're pretty certain, you know. Yeah, the looks of it.
But it could also go the other way. Certain people are just genetically built it and they look like they are and then there's probably others like yourself.
It's a self-defense mechanism because you'd rather assume that that guy was on steroids than his genetics is so far superior to yours. You're like, nah, it must be steroids.
Yeah, that's the part of accusations of people being on steroids that I hate. It's like without data, people are just like, it's a way they can say that somebody's cheating without because i like celebrating people and sometimes people aren't on steroids and they aren't cheating and they're just fucking good what about gabby garcia um i think she's beautiful strong uh and you're a lucky man to share the mat with her i should be honored and i have i'm betting a huge amount of

money on her so me too either way you're gonna get paid she's paying 11 to 1 i bet on love as well so we are aligned in that way love will prevail okay you put alex jones to sleep uh just to reflect back on that What was...

He was too woke, he needed it.

So that's you fighting the woke mind virus. Just to reflect back on that.

He was too woke.

He needed it.

So that's you fighting the woke mind virus or whatever?

I think it was on the pulse too much.

What was that like?

I didn't see the full video.

I just saw a little clip.

I thought he was dead for a second, but for some strange reason,

couldn't stop laughing.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I was like, please wake up.

There's something funny about it. I was like, his blood pressure is higher than mine i hope that didn't cook him yeah that would be quite sad it's so crazy he's murder somebody yeah he's probably the most just entertaining human being ever off like just just he just says the crate like off air he's always on it like that's just, he's always ready to say some wild shit.
The craziest shit possible. What's it like going to sleep? I somehow have never gone to sleep.
I went to sleep one time. Lachlan Giles was demonstrating a technique on me, but I woke up straight away.
But for 10 seconds, I didn't know who I was, where I was, what I was doing. But that's it.
That's the only time I went out. Disorienting.

Didn't feel good, though.

Some people say it feels good.

Did not feel good.

Because you were, like, what?

Panicked?

Lost?

Yeah, I just didn't know what was going on.

Yeah.

And then you loaded it.

That must be a cool feeling to load it all back in, like, realize where am I.

I feel like that sometimes in a hotel when I'm, like, traveling.

It's like, where the fuck am I again?

When you wake up.

Maybe that's what it's like. Some people push it too far david carradine you know what what i'm i'm too i'm too dumb to get that joke what a erotic asphyxiation oh good thank you thank you now i know uh so given all the places you've gone all the people you seen recently, what gives you hope about this whole thing we've got going on, about humanity, about this world? We start war sometimes.
We do horrible things to each other sometimes. Wow.
I missed all that. What gives you hope? That you can still make fun of anything as long as it's funny.
That's what I'm fighting for.

People talk about cancel culture.

I just think the joke wasn't funny enough.

Had poor delivery.

Well, thank you for being at the forefront of making fun of everything and anything.

And thank you for talking today, brother.

Thank you, bro.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Craig Jones. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Anthony Bourdain. Travel changes you.
As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly. You leave marks behind, however small.
And in return, life and travel leaves marks on you.

Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.