Craig Jones Drove a Bag of Cash to Rogan — Then Put $2 Million on a Jiu-Jitsu Mat

Craig Jones is an Australian submission grappler, a co-founder of B-Team, and one of the sport's most reliable sources of chaos. Lex Fridman opens with the image that made Jones a crossover character: a million dollars in cash on Joe Rogan's podcast. Jones had no security until Rogan asked whether he was actually bringing it. He said no. Rogan sent his own team.

The money came from Shuffle.com, a sponsor. A friend of the company — a stranger to Jones — handed over the bag. Jones had been told not to tell anyone. He sent pictures of the cash to everyone he knew. "That was probably a security risk," he admits, then adds that Rogan claimed he had never seen a million dollars in person. Jones is not sure he believes him.

Fridman asks about his relationship with the risk of death. Jones says he is risk-averse, which Fridman immediately calls a lie. The clarification Jones prefers is that he is after adventure, not danger. Risk is just the tax. "Sometimes the best adventures involve the most risk, unfortunately." He had just come back from Ukraine for the second time, and the story of how he got there starts in Central Asia, on a horse he had never ridden.

Jones and a camera crew were in Kazakhstan shooting a travel documentary when they ran into Kokpar, an old horseback game. Riders cut the head and legs off a goat or sheep and use the carcass as a ball. Up to a thousand men on horses fight to drop it into the other side's goal. The goals used to be concrete; now they are markers. Local businessmen put up huge prizes. The horses and the riders have been trained since childhood. Jones had never been on a horse.

The crew only wanted a shot that *looked* like he was entering the pit. The drunk stuntman holding the reins took him straight in and did not bring him out. Jones was wearing a loud Coogi sweater, Biggie Smalls bright, in a scrum of angry riders. Someone recognized a foreigner and started yelling "Borat." Sacha Baron Cohen's 2006 film is still a raw memory in Kazakhstan. Jones says he was not making Borat jokes, but he admits it is the same family of humor: an idiot enjoying the local culture a little too much.

When a rider picked up the carcass, a wave of horses came at him. Animals slammed into each other. The prize money was serious for the locals, and a tourist in a gecko sweater was not welcome in a game they had trained their whole lives for. After that, filming sensitive subjects in Kazakhstan got harder. Jones looked at a map. Ukraine was next door. Before the full-scale war he had been invited to teach a jiu-jitsu seminar there. He told the crew they should go, throw a charity event, train with people, and see it themselves.

They pulled off what Jones calls the biggest jiu-jitsu seminar in Ukrainian history, which still surprises him given that the country is at war. Afterward a soldier who is now a close friend said the profits were meant for people on the front, and those people were already there. The line Jones remembers: "I can't promise you'll survive, but I'll promise you'll have a good time." Jones answered that that was all he needed to hear. With his friend Roman, they got as close as 0.7 kilometers from the line.

Daily life, he says, starts with an air-defense app. Sirens can mean drones, aircraft, or missiles, and the missiles can change direction, so you never know if the alert is actually for you. You live under constant fear and still have to keep going. The heaviest moment of the first trip was almost banal: Jones went downstairs in a Kyiv hotel to lift weights, a rare healthy impulse. A hypersonic missile was shot down by a Patriot battery about five minutes from the hotel. The building and the attached gym shook. Some people panicked. Most went outside to look, which he notes is not the recommended move.

Local troops later took him to a crater where debris had landed. Most of the shrapnel was already gone. Jones pocketed a fragment anyway, unsure whether that was legal, and then lost track of where he put it. He figured it might set off airport scanners and took it regardless. The timing mattered: the U.S. had not yet voted to keep funding weapons, and everyone was doing the same mental arithmetic — when do the interceptors run out? Standing at the impact site, he thought about what the Patriot had knocked out of the sky, and what would have happened without it.

When he posted video from Kyiv he was accused of being paid by the Ukrainian government. His reply is that people do not understand that life has to continue. Kyiv is far from the front, and cities have to try to function or life in those towns simply stops. Fridman adds that this is not unique to Kyiv: Kharkiv, Donbas, Kherson — people adjust because prolonged suffering is unsustainable, and then they start valuing what they still have. Some locals do not even go to the shelter. Jones calls that a bolder move: refusing to let the war rewrite daily life.

The other thing Jones probably should not have been allowed to do on that first trip was Chernobyl. Early in the war, troops came through Belarus and there was fighting around the plant; the world worried about a radiation leak. The soldiers pulled back. The area, he says, is now covered in mines. A tourist — "an idiot like myself" — has no business there. They tried twice. The first attempt, with a special-forces friend, cleared two checkpoints. At the third they were stopped and threatened with arrest, which Jones thinks was fair. A second connection, whom he will not name, had heard about the charity seminar and opened doors. They got a private tour of a place that is completely empty, the abandoned fantasy he had from *Call of Duty*, the HBO series, and documentaries. Fridman notes that demining will take decades. Jones's darker addendum: a zone where a mine might trigger a radiation leak will sit very low on any postwar list. Chernobyl tourism, he thinks, is gone for a long time.

The second trip, four or five weeks before the taping, went further. They filmed in Odessa, a city hit constantly. Jones still talks about a middle-aged man in underwear with a beer belly doing a strange dusk dance on the beach — "abrasive to the eyes," he says, "but I appreciated it." Then the national police chief, a contact from the first visit, offered to escort him personally to Kherson if he wanted to see real action. Jones took the invitation and lied to his cameraman, calling it a safe trip so the man could tell his fiancée not to worry.

They switched to armored vehicles outside the city. The driver joked that Jones should leave a phone number for someone to recover the bodies, and Jones thought he was only half kidding. Kherson's population, he was told, had fallen from about 250,000 to about 50,000, mostly military. The police station's upper floors were destroyed; they worked from a bunker. Filming recently ruined buildings was restricted, because that footage helps the other side recalibrate the next shot. Before the city tour the driver mounted a drone jammer on the roof, then pulled out a helmet, tossed it in the pickup bed, and said Jones would not need it. He would be dead anyway.

They drove along the Dnipro to within a kilometer of the line. Artillery started. Inside armor it sounded farther than it was. Smoke looked distant; the driver tucked them behind a building. Then two more rounds landed very close and very loud. Only when the driver sped up and started taking evasive lines did Jones feel the danger as real. A later translation of the radio traffic: one person dead, several injured, less than half a kilometer away. The order was to end the tour and return to the station. On a previous village stay, shelling began the day they left; a soldier sent a selfie video of the fun starting after the guests were gone.

The soldiers laughed at Jones trying to fire weapons, and they helped him with tournament marketing. They secured a Soviet Lada, painted it with ADCC logos, towed it to a range, and hit it with RPGs. Fridman calls it creative; Jones calls it dangerous. Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Fridman notes, are unlikely to copy it. One round lodged under the car unexploded. They needed the enemy logos on fire, so they poured gasoline, shot the tank — a movie trick that did not work — then lit a gas-soaked rag and threw it through a blown-out rear window. They ran. The special-forces friend yelled that it had not gone off. They walked back to light more. The car ignited. He yelled run.

They had asked the range for about ten minutes to photograph the burning logos. Either the shooters did not wait or Jones's crew took too long. Live fire resumed. Ricochets passed overhead; one landed by his leg. Afterward the soldiers told him that if he had been hit they would have dumped the body at a hospital, because there was no good way to explain why an Australian athlete was on the front blowing up cars. Through the jokes, he says, the point was still to show how bad it actually is.

Morale, as he heard it, is mixed with battle fatigue. "All the heroes die early" — the people willing to sacrifice themselves are taken first. Front lines might take six months to move 100 or 200 meters, so the war feels endless. Ukrainian intercepts, soldiers told him, pick up Russian troops marching toward positions they know are fatal. They go anyway. The footage soldiers shoot themselves, first-person trench video that often never hits the internet because of operational detail, reminded him of descriptions of World War II: bodies thrown at a problem until something gives.

Asked how seeing war changed him, Jones drops the routine. He used to file soldiers as a separate species. Talking to Ukrainians broke that. Roman had not lived in Ukraine for eight years; he had a wife and daughter in France and volunteered to come back for a mother and brother still there. Australia and the United States do not have that kind of conscription now. Many Ukrainian soldiers were drafted; they are ordinary people in an insane situation. A sense of obligation to land and family is, from an Australian vantage, hard to imagine until you sit with it. Another friend, Dimitri, a gym owner, brought out papers about a grandfather executed by the USSR, put on a bicycle helmet and an AK-47, and said he would rather be dead than live under Russian rule again.

America supplies weapons, from old Soviet RPGs to U.S. kit. Individual kit is another matter. If a soldier wants gear that might decide whether he survives a winter or a summer, he often pays himself. Foreign trainers joke that most armies issue the good stuff; Ukrainian funding is stretched, so battalions raise money online. Social-media fame becomes a logistics tool, and Telegram groups on both sides mix propaganda, morale, and psychological war — showing what you did to the enemy, and what was done to you.

Fridman turns to FPV drones. Jones describes a $300 to $500 carbon-fiber, partly 3D-printed aircraft that can drop a frag, drop a mine, or, he was told, carry a liquid that burns through vehicles so the people inside melt. The economic shock is the point: a $3 million Russian tank destroyed by a $300 drone. He thinks Ukraine leads the world in budget drone warfare because it never had money for the big, elaborate platforms. Most of the fighting he saw ran through FPV. Cameras ride along. A kamikaze drone can chase a person, and that chase is recorded. The police chief who gifted him a used drone said artillery is scary, but a drone will follow you into a building.

In Kherson, Jones was told the sky is full of drones that can loiter until you step outside, or fly through an open window. Indoors is not safety. Range is stretching too: short-range FPVs strapped to larger drones with signal boosters, he heard, can reach 30 or 40 kilometers, so the operator may be far from the impact. After the Trump assassination attempt, Jones found himself thinking the next attack on a public figure might arrive as a drone — and Fridman answers that a gunman fits an existing story, while a drone would detonate conspiracy theories about who flew it and from where.

Fridman is more haunted by autonomy: swarms of $500 drones flown by AI, first as defense against human FPV, then as both sides' default. Light-show drones already fly themselves at a low level; adding detection, pursuit, and self-defense is the technology both militaries want. Once both have it, he says, you get machines that do not care about humans. Jones's human-scale picture sits next to that: he was with Roman in Marseille on a permitted break — Roman volunteered, so he can leave; most Ukrainian men cannot — when tourists flew a drone at the beach. Roman's body reacted before his mind did. The war had moved into his nervous system.

Jiu-jitsu, Jones says, is a strange passport. It has put him in rooms with oligarchs, royalty, and tech people — "strange access just for being good at wrestling dudes." Fridman calls it a code: even if you know nothing else about someone, shared time on the mat creates respect. Jones wants his travel series, *Craig Jones: Gone Walkabout*, to follow that community rather than the competition circuit. Most people in gyms do not compete. Plenty of brown and black belts cannot name the stars. You will never grow the sport through tournaments alone, he argues. You grow it by talking to the majority who train for health and sanity.

Anthony Bourdain is the model: food was the door; the show was about the people who cooked it. Jones also reaches for Scientology. "Scientology isn't starting with Planet Z. No, it's starting with John Travolta and Tom Cruise." Get faces first, doctrine later. The Bali episode donates part of its proceeds to an academy an Australian built in a slum, starting on a mat under a tree and teaching kids skills like photo editing so they can take internet work. Jones, joking and not, says Australians have done cultural damage around the world and he would like to put a little back.

What he loved in Bourdain was the nerve to show a place honestly. A travel show that only praises is easy; Bourdain found a tasteful way to hold good and bad at once, and locals still respected him. Kazakhstan taught Jones how hard that is — a foreigner criticizing the culture gets written off as an idiot. Fridman says Jones already has a version of that skill: the trolling has love under it. Jones hopes so. Then Fridman mentions Gabi Garcia, and Jones says there is a deep passionate love under that trolling too. That is the hinge into the other half of the conversation: a $3 million tournament on ADCC weekend.

The Craig Jones Invitational is August 16 and 17, 2024, at Las Vegas's Thomas & Mack Center, the same weekend as ADCC. Budget: $3 million. Two weight divisions, two superfights. Each division winner gets $1 million. Every competitor gets $10,001 just to walk in. The stream is free on YouTube, X, and Meta. Ticket profits go to charity, mostly cancer research. Jones's stated mission is athlete pay. He gives Sheikh Tahnoon credit for funding no-gi grappling for years, but says the live and streaming audience has grown since 2017 — Metamoris, EBI, Polaris, Gordon Ryan — while ADCC's payout has not.

Fans asked if he was doing ADCC. His answer was a ledger. Preparing means time, energy, and "expenses on steroids" for a tournament he will probably lose. Lose day one and you make zero. Lose in the final, which he has done, and you get $6,000; third is $3,000, fourth $1,000. At ADCC 2022 he looked at a sold-out crowd of about 10,000, knew FloGrappling had paid for the rights, and went home with $6,000. The official argument is exposure. Jones's reply: there are many ways to expose yourself. Then ADCC moved from Thomas & Mack to T-Mobile — 11,000 seats to 15 or 16,000 — and still did not raise prize money. He can track the sport's growth in instructional sales to white and blue belts, the same people who watch these events.

He posted a video saying he was out, and listed sports that pay more, including village Kokpar in Kazakhstan. The aggressive reply, he says, did not come from Tahnoon's people but from whoever runs ADCC day to day. Amid death threats, that person told him T-Mobile costs $2 million and that Jones does not understand business. Jones thinks $2 million is a UFC-scale venue wasted on jiu-jitsu's current size. They argued online. The other man said that if Jones did not like it, he should go get $2 million and put on his own show. Jones said he might. An anonymous friend then handed him a $3 million budget, with two requests: stay unnamed, enjoy the trolling, and help the sport. Thomas & Mack, ADCC's old building, happened to be free that weekend.

The troll was structural. ADCC pays $10,000 to win; CJI pays $10,001 to appear, plus a million to win, and broadcasts for free. Jones says he did not chase many athletes — a million dollars does that for you. The Tackett brothers jumped first and, in his view, legitimized a roster that might otherwise have looked like a B-Team vanity project. The under-80-kilo division, minus two or three names, is the best in the world. Then, he says *allegedly* for legal reasons, ADCC matched women's prize money to the men's after Ffion Davies, the reigning champion, signed for a CJI superfight. Women had been getting about $6,000 for first. Jones, calling himself a longtime feminist activist, says he equalized women's pay in a night, after the promoter had claimed only the sheikh's side could raise it.

He also claims, again allegedly, that ADCC started paying appearance money it had never historically paid, to keep names. A Brazilian manager who looks like the Thing from *Fantastic Four* takes a 20 percent cut: Jones would invite a fighter, the manager would walk the offer to ADCC, negotiate show money, and skim. CJI has no room to negotiate — $10,001 across the board, a million to the winner — so the manager's incentive is to park clients at ADCC. Jones still thinks the raid helped the sport. Borrowing ADCC's stars forced that event to fill brackets with people who would not have made it otherwise. The calendars barely conflict: CJI is Friday-Saturday, ADCC Saturday-Sunday, and CJI's Saturday card starts at 5 p.m. The "fans must choose" story, he says, is the marketing. You can watch both, skip the ADCC Hall of Fame lion monologues on Friday, and still see Jones wrestle "a giant woman" on Saturday night.

That woman is Gabi Garcia, among the most decorated athletes in women's grappling. Between them, Jones figures, they have 15 to 20 world titles, almost all hers. He puts her around 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4 and 220 to 275 pounds depending on the hour; he is 179 and 5-foot-11. The wager, which he hopes is a first in combat sports: if she wins, he personally pays her a million dollars; if he foot-locks her, they collaborate on an OnlyFans tape. Fridman asks if she agreed. "She shook on it." He calls it three years of seduction and a motivational story for men who have been DMing someone on Instagram: persistence, regardless of height and weight, might work.

The competition surface is The Alley, a rectangular pit with angled walls inspired by Karate Combat's square. Resets, Jones says, are one of grappling's worst features — 90 seconds of a ten-minute ADCC match can be a referee dragging people back to center or reconstructing a position that went out. Sneaky athletes hunt the edge. An angled wall makes being driven there a takedown liability, unlike a vertical cage where split-squat stalling can freeze a fight. He also wants grappling to look different from MMA. The usual objection to a pit is sightlines: expensive seats sit below the lip. A cage you can see into; a raised flat stage you can see, but people fall off onto concrete. The Alley, plus raised stands, is meant to be a small coliseum. It was expensive. "When you are spending someone else's money, you will spare no expense in production."

He has fought Karate Combat twice and never stepped in the pit, so he does not claim to know how to do jiu-jitsu on a slant. Some CJI athletes have already built practice walls, which he thinks is wise with a million on the line. Qualifying matches are three five-minute rounds; finals are five. The point is to kill the rational strategy of taking the back early and riding out the clock. Scoring copies MMA's 10-point must, which grappling purists call confusing and which casual fans already understand from the UFC. Stalling will be penalized hard. There is no second-place money. "If you ain't first you're last." Fridman asks if the purse will make people careful. Jones's answer is a threat to his own event: a generous friend provided the money, and unless people go out there trying to kill each other, he will not do it again.

Jones says they turned down streaming platforms that wanted to buy the rights because the marketing was already working. The ADCC promoter claimed to be growing the sport by putting it behind a paywall and spending that money on a bigger arena. Jones thinks that is how you harvest an audience, not how you grow one. His references are comedians: Andrew Schulz and Mark Normand releasing specials for free, then watching the room get huge. Jiu-jitsu, still niche, needs an exciting un-paywalled show first. Paywalls can come later. If this weekend is wild, he thinks funding the next one gets easy.

He is not taking a profit. Ticket money after production and staff goes to charity. Rich Byrne, a New York black belt who ran Kasai Grappling, survived aggressive cancer, founded Tap Cancer Out, and offered to match CJI's donation dollar for dollar. Another anonymous donor promised the same. More tickets therefore multiply. The hard parts of actually running the event, Jones says, were getting people to believe it was real, and talking athletes into committing. From idea to show night is less than three and a half months. Appearance fees do not include flights and hotels, because coordinating travel for this roster would, he says, make him jump off a building. ADCC had been selling tickets for two years and was largely sold out before CJI existed.

Kaynan, semi-in and semi-out, wanted second- and third-place prizes instead of a single million. Jones said no: all or nothing is a better spectacle. Mica Galvao is "the one that got away," chasing a double grand slam and, Jones believes, a chance to avenge Kade Ruotolo — plus teammates flying in for ADCC kids' divisions, which made splitting weekends ugly for a coach. The Ruotolos, Kade the reigning champion, allegedly turned down significant show money, asked only to be on opposite sides of the bracket, and promised to fight to the death in the final. Jones thinks Mica could have made a more memorable legacy by choosing athlete pay over a title that will be asterisked anyway. Gordon Ryan was never likely. They do not text. Jones tags him on Instagram. Gordon does not answer.

On FloGrappling or Fight Pass, unless it is PPV, nobody sees the view count. That is leverage the platform keeps. A free multi-platform stream lets every athlete watch the spike when they walk out and take that chart to a sponsor. Jones wants that power moved from promoter to competitor. Fridman compares it to the IOC: a spectacular Games, opaque finances, athletes paid almost nothing, footage locked private so even a judo clip in a podcast gets a copyright strike. The Olympic idea, Fridman says, is that everyone can watch; a paywall fights that spirit, and major grappling should be on every platform. Jones's shorter version: if you want a huge sport, and competition is a niche inside a niche, give the content away.

Nicholas Meregali crushed Jones in the gi at Abu Dhabi World Pro in the absolute semis; Jones still shares the one reversal from side control. Years later Jones left the Danaher room and Meregali took his place — "more credentialed, handsome, doesn't speak as well." At ADCC Jones moved up to 99 kilos to leave 88 for two teammates, who both lost in the first round. He attacked Meregali's legs for three minutes, swept, got on top before points, and gassed against a man who naturally sits around 225 or 230. Jones took the decision, then lost the final. A booked rematch died when Meregali chose vacation. Flo later wanted to announce a February date Jones could not do because he was helping Volkanovski, then pull him and keep the ticket money. Jones told them to do whatever they wanted. His number now is half a million, otherwise he cannot be bothered. "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."

Will he and Gordon Ryan get along again? He thinks so. MDMA, he says, started as 1970s Houston couples therapy; something like that might clear the air. Reddit suggested ketamine. Jones pictures a therapist asking Gordon to clear the next few weeks. He claims his own therapist is a Russian website that prescribed Vyvanse. Fridman says that is not a therapist, just something spelled the same. A Harris-versus-Trump debate, Jones representing Kamala and Gordon Trump, sounds to him like the right kind of fight: not to prove who is tougher, but to force the interesting parts of both men into public.

On trolling, Jones says the target has to be worthy. You do not pick someone with better banter, because you will lose, and you do not pick someone small, because then you look like a bully. Chael Sonnen, in MMA, is the better shit-talker over a career because the consequences are actual violence. A Reddit comment called Jones a coral-belt troll who happens to be good at jiu-jitsu. He traces the rank to Australia, where daily conversation is trying to ruin each other's day, and the victory condition is the other person finally getting upset. An Australian walking into American banter, he says, is Neo seeing the Matrix. He does not look in the mirror and regret going too hard. He thinks he is providing balance, a kind of justice, and that it will probably come back on him in spades. Fridman, as a fan of both Jones and Gordon, says he can see the love. Jones's punchline: he wishes Gordon would buy it back. He does not anymore.

Mo, who runs ADCC, is a love-hate story. They were close; Mo helped move the Danaher squad to Puerto Rico. The break, as Jones tells it, was public talk about athlete pay, taken personally. Mo is both a competitor and, in effect, the boss, which complicates friendship. Jones invited him on a podcast: if the pay argument is stupid, say so on the record, to Jones and to the grappling world at once. Mo declined. Jones says he has never thought Mo was stealing. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The math he wants in public is venue cost: about $200,000 for Thomas & Mack versus $2 million for T-Mobile, a $1.8 million jump and zero raise for athletes. Mo keeps asking to talk face to face. Jones says the feud is public, and if one of them is an idiot the audience is entitled to know which.

Preparing for a real event, Jones says, is brutal mostly in the head: am I training enough, am I overtraining, is that tightness an injury. Sleep falls apart. Nicky Rod might handle eight hours a day; Nicky Ryan, eight minutes — Fridman mentions a video of Nicky Ryan vomiting into a trash can, top comment: that is the warmup. Some of Jones's best performances came when he was called up last minute, sick, or undertrained, because he accepted the result in advance. Gunnar Nelson once drank the night before an ADCC absolute, sat in the stands eating ice cream, got called, and took bronze. Jones would rather wing it than stew for three months on a tournament that comes every two years. He booked Phil Rowe and Rafael Lovato Jr. on consecutive weekends, partied after a flying triangle in Mexico City, and woke up remembering Lovato. Honesty about that, he thinks, is itself a mind game: opponents cannot tell if he is lying, baiting, or actually unconcerned.

Seminars create a structural conflict. Participants want a once-in-a-lifetime round with a world-class guy. Jones wants to land in a city, eat, have a drink, and meet people. "Snipers" circle. His current protocol is thirty minutes straight: ten people, three minutes, no rest. He tries not to meet pressure with pressure, which tires him; removing expected resistance confuses the other person and slows the round. If someone comes in hot and he feels he might get hurt, he will fully finish the submission. He cites Ryan Hall: warn, then go. He will not break a limb for its own sake, but a tired heel hook on a fresh partner who refuses to tap is, in his view, on them. Fridman wants to keep rolling around the world for culture and cannot find a setting that calms people down. Jones is blunt: you cannot. Any notoriety, in the sport or outside it, and the old "drop in anywhere" era is over. Training is trust. Strangers are scary. His radar: Pitbull Sports rash guards, or anyone from Poland. He has never had a flow roll with a Polish person. Reddit asked how many legs he broke in Eastern Europe. "Three or four." He does not enjoy it. It is funny afterward. People think tapping him is a CJI invite.

For a hobbyist with one year, his word is longevity. Pick safe partners. Learn positions instead of panicking: panic might escape you, or lock you in a tear. Find a pace, an intensity, and a room, and you might train five years without injury. Explosive movement from a position you cannot move is how tissue goes. He lets people put him in bad spots and stays relaxed. Calm in a bad position, he says, is not confidence in yourself. It is confidence that the other person cannot finish you — the highest kind, because you can give them anything. Fridman sees beginners go tight and start breathing hard; under that is panic. Jones agrees. Make someone panic and you make them tired, even at a high level when the fear is a guard pass. Flexibility plus calm is cardio because it is the absence of panic.

His own game looks inventive because of money and boredom. Hits nobody else knows become instructionals; they also keep the art from turning into the one trick you learned as a blue belt. Unexpected positions make people panic. The method is tape, reverse engineering, and the training moment when you have no idea what just happened. He does not claim to have invented much. He popularized styles of leg entry, octopus guard, more work from turtle, a pinning game. Online jokes gave him a microphone, so a post can move a technique — as long as the product actually works. Meta ads did not love titles like "power bottom," so the names got softer. Mark Zuckerberg, whom he met briefly around Volkanovski versus Ilia, loves jiu-jitsu and MMA and seems serious about competing; CJI would take him, but he is coming off ACL surgery and only returning to sport in August.

What Jones loves about Alexander Volkanovski is the origin story. People picture a UFC champion in a super-gym. Volkanovski trains in a small beach-town room on puzzle mats, not American Top Team, a late start out of rugby, and is still, in Jones's view, the best featherweight ever. The work rate is the opposite of Jones's: insane cardio, ugly weight cuts with eyes rolling back while the fighter says it is easy, a man fully relaxed until five minutes before the cage, then talking about never letting anyone take the belt from his family. They tried to book Volkanovski against Mikey Musumeci at CJI; Jones will not say why it died. He thinks the first Islam Makhachev fight proved Volkanovski can win, and that Volk is one of the best cage wrestlers in the world. Dagestani training, as he sees it, is a refusal to concede an inch — perfect for MMA pressure and fence work, leaky in pure jiu-jitsu where leg locks and guard pull the grind into a different geometry. Asked about Khabib in his prime, Jones says buggy choke, half-joking, then tells a story of a Tatar fighter he could not buggy and had to put to sleep twice with a triangle. Eastern Europeans, he says, treat the match like a real fight. At an Odessa seminar, another school brought about ten Dagestani guys. All of them went insanely hard. "They all wanted to be broken."

Ten or twenty years out, the version of the sport that excites him is wrestling fused with standing submissions: always fight to get on top, whether by sweep or by a submission that becomes a sweep, and avoid being pinned. When both people engage on the feet, it looks like fighting. He admits that if the other man is a better wrestler, he will pull guard anyway. Fridman says the crowd should mock that, and Jones half-agrees that the million should go to the person who took the most risk. In an open stream, stalling becomes a meme; medals matter less than the clip. They walked the venue the day before and decided one ambulance was not enough. He expects people to refuse to tap. "Everyone will be Dagestani for a day." Refs will hit stalling hard.

What percentage of athletes are on steroids — 100 percent? "Anyone that's ever beaten me." He has thought about testing people in the name of science, just to see what they run, but the culture is secret even among training partners. He tells the world what he takes and people say he is not on anything. Accusing without data, Fridman argues, is a way to call someone a cheater while skipping evidence; some people are not on steroids and are simply better. Jones calls the accusation a self-defense mechanism: you would rather invent a syringe than admit the other person's genetics are that far above yours.

Fridman asks, after all the places and all the damage people do to each other, what still gives him hope. Jones does not reach for a peace plan. "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." Coming from someone who has stood in Kherson artillery and watched a friend flinch at a tourist drone, the line is less of a bit than it sounds. Fridman closes with Anthony Bourdain: travel changes you; you leave marks, and the world leaves marks on you. Jones has spent the episode arguing that a small sport's fate might be in the hands of someone willing to be disliked, and to be actually funny while doing it. He told the athletes the money is a friend's, and unless they try to kill each other he will not run it twice. That is not an institution. It is a personality. Plenty of sports, he would note, started that way.