All I see is silver

Lex Fridman sits down in Austin with Craig Jones, Nicky Rod, and Nicky Ryan, who together with Ethan Crelinsten run B-Team Jiu-Jitsu. The gym exists because John Danaher's Danaher Death Squad split into New Wave and B-Team, both now in the same Texas city, with months of trash talk, greasing charges, and steroid accusations still in the air. Lex trains with both sides and likes the people on both, so he casts himself as Switzerland in World War II. Jones's reply is instant: a very rich country.

The introductions are a joke with a spine. Nicky Rod is a brown belt and a two-time ADCC silver medalist, the so-called black belt slayer from New Jersey, land of pizza and biceps, who keeps a loaded gun close enough that Jones tells him leaving it in the car was his first mistake. Nicky Ryan, after a pause, is introduced as "that's it," then as Gordon Ryan's brother. Jones is also a two-time ADCC silver medalist. Lex supplies the translation: silver medalist means number-one loser.

Asked what they are most proud of, Jones says he is proud not to need a full-time job "just to get by on the bullshit I've done so far." His first paycheck from the sport was a thousand dollars at a tournament in Abu Dhabi; he thought he was rich and probably blew it on something bad. Nicky Rod is proud of the two silvers even though they hurt, because gold was close and he is still building the reactions of a pound-for-pound champion. The last ADCC final stung, he says, because he came in off injury and still thought he was going to win.

Lex has to ask twice before he believes it: Nicky Rod is actually a brown belt, with no stripes. Jones says he wants to give him a black belt. Nicky Ryan says Rod is not ready, and they are not kidding. Rod has been in jiu-jitsu about four and a half years, closing in on five, with two ADCC silvers and a habit, from the start, of beating most local black belts.

Rod's own test is knowledge, not the scoreboard. Wrestling and athleticism let him pin black belts early; that is a gift from another sport, not a jiu-jitsu curriculum. Jones and Nicky Ryan grade the same way. A black belt is based on how much you know, not only on what you do on a competition mat, and teaching is how they measure it: can you show the move, and can you make someone else understand what you are doing?

Rod is in no rush. He takes each day as it is and tries to improve it. By the time the black belt arrives, he hopes to already be number one pound-for-pound as a brown belt, then toss the rank on top, maybe even get promoted on a podium. Lex thought the belt talk was a bit. For a team this deep into no-gi competition, the rank is still a step in the martial art, larger than being a world-class winner.

Jones does not hate losing if it pays the bills. A win, for him, is relief rather than excitement: "Oh, thank God that's over." He tries to block compliments the same way he blocks losses. The thing happened, move to the next one, and sometimes make a joke out of it so nobody, including him, has to dwell.

Nicky Rod hates losing and still treats it as tuition you pay to get where you want to go. Winning after a long camp is the closest thing he can compare to heroin, a high that lasts for days. Coming from wrestling, he likes the picture of the loser running off the mat angry, then adds that some of that explosion is a performance of caring after a camp that was not enough. Cry in the mirror, he says, not in front of everybody. He does not think he has ever cried, period.

Nicky Ryan is competitive enough that hating the post-loss feeling has kept him from competing as much as he should. His income, his stability, and his brand all sit on whether he can go out and win, so the possibility of losing sits on him for weeks before a match. Lex, closer to a hobbyist, admits his own fear is not losing so much as embarrassing himself, especially winning ugly by stalling when he is up two points. That, he says, is the version of himself he hates in the mirror.

Lex's confession names a feeling elite athletes often skip past. A loss has a half-life; weeks later it fades. The memory of winning by refusing to take a risk lasts much longer, because you grade yourself on whether you did the thing you were supposed to do, not only on the scoreboard. Nicky Ryan's answer is to take emotion out of the match itself. At the highest level, any emotion is already affecting your decisions.

Emotion before the match is allowed. When ADCC is coming, Ryan will go out to practice, visualize, and put himself in that competition so that game time feels like a place he has already been a thousand times. Nicky Rod runs the same warmup for weeks, walking the path to the mat until the real day is just another Tuesday. Jones does the opposite. He pushes the tournament out of his mind, skips visualization and ritual, trains to have fun and learn a bit, and tries to approach the match the same way.

He barely warms up in the gym and does very little for competition. The philosophy is "there's no warmups on the street." He is 31 and concedes he probably should start; in the room he takes the first round easy if he sees Nicky Ryan across the way. The cost of the method is a slow open. The benefit is that surprise cannot ambush a routine he never built.

Asked about the Instagram theater around a match, Jones says it is all pretty silly: they are just wrestling each other and putting the meaning in. Lex zooms out until none of it matters, a loop of sex, hunger, money, dictators, and a sun that burns out because colonizing other planets is hard. Jones likes the scale. That is why he does not understand people who take martial arts so seriously. Gi or no-gi, he says, it is a bunch of apes rolling around.

Jones's commercial rule sits one breath after the philosophy. Win or lose, the right joke lets you make money off the event that just transpired, and that is what is most important. He owns a shirt that rips off wrestler Jordan Burroughs: "All I see is silver." Lex already has a bunch of the merch. Losing a final, in this version of the sport, is not only a result. It is inventory.

The joke has a governor. Jones throws lines at people and reads the reaction; sometimes he will say something to Nicky and decide it is crossing the line, then tone it down for the public. He tries to get as close as possible, then a little over. That is also how a team this messy, this newly split, this publicly accused, became one of the sport's most watchable products. The match is the pretext. The narrative around it is the business.

Jones's path into the Death Squad started in 2017, when he faced Gordon Ryan at ADCC and EBI and then showed up at Kasai in New York. He used to compete every week, skip the camp, teach seminars for money, and jump in. The promoters had four locker rooms and put him with all of DDS a weekend after they had competed. He expected it to be super awkward. It was chill, and they asked him to train that week.

The larger plan was already to leave Australia. The flight is death, and the tournaments live in America, so basing himself at home was not realistic. In Australia he trained with Lachlan Giles in a shallow room of people with serious jobs; it was basically Jones, Giles, and a couple of others. In New York a class billed for 7am started at 8 on Brazilian time, with maybe a hundred people and a pile of elite athletes who trained twice a day. You need partners who can train as much as you do. Effort does not invent that room.

He got humbled because his game was a ripoff of theirs. He had watched Eddie Cummings nonstop, seen him rip people's legs off, and decided that looked like an easier path than beating specialists at what they already did. His rule at the time: if it bothers old Brazilians, it bothers them for a reason, so it is probably effective. Then he walked into the original room and tried the copies on the authors.

How they ended up in Austin, he will not fully tell. Puerto Rico was *Apocalypse Now*, John Danaher was Colonel Kurtz, and things got weird in the jungle. Jones got along with Danaher, maybe because the coach missed home and the familiar Australian-New Zealand accent, but he followed Nicky Ryan with the core group that left. He misses the private Danaher who jokes behind closed doors, prefers the freedom of a less strict regime, and says Gordon was a good training partner. The negatives they cannot talk about outweighed those goods, and they had to leave.

Nicky Rod dropped out of college to chase fitness modeling, signed with Wilhelmina in New York, and worked as a bouncer while he tried to get in better shape. Locker-room talk about who was tougher, wrestlers or the bouncers who trained jiu-jitsu, got him to a first class. He controlled people, stayed on top, and avoided sloppy submissions because he already watched fights. The second week he was competing, submitting a few black belts and winning on points.

About three months in he got connected to Gordon Ryan and John Danaher. He lived in Clayton, Gloucester County, South Jersey, 130 miles from New York: two and a half hours without traffic, three-plus on the way home in rush hour. It was 2018. He drove as many days as he could until an ADCC trials win and a silver medal paid for a move to the New York and North Jersey area, and he stayed with the team through the turbulence into Austin.

What he learned from that room was a method. You will not get singled out as the star among studs, so you have to become the person who asks. Once he got verbal about his curiosities, the technique jumped. He already had an innate path to the back, so he perfected back control and the rear-naked choke, then leg-lock defense, then the body-lock pass he calls the Rody lock. Find the position you are naturally good at, make it absolute, then fill the holes opponents will use.

The split still cost him a single person who ran practice every day. He now has Nicky Ryan, Jones, Ethan Crelinsten, and Damien Anderson as a bench of people to question, and adjusting from one coach to a team took time. Lex notes for listeners that Nicky Ryan looks terrified on the couch while Jones enjoys it. The jungle, they agree, is still not a story they will tell on a podcast.

Nicky Ryan started around thirteen, after Gordon, mostly to exercise and lose weight; he says he was pretty fat as a kid. The first class at Gary's gym in Brunswick hooked him, and he trained every day. Summers they took him to New York to train under Danaher. After freshman year of high school, at fifteen, he dropped out and went full-time in the blue basement.

The draw was problem-solving that is both mental and physical. He knew young what he wanted to do with his life. Off the mat he calls himself a lazy sack of shit; Gordon was the confident one who went first so a living in jiu-jitsu looked possible. Their parents' generation saw no money in the sport unless you moved to MMA. Gordon, Gary Tonon, and that wave were among the first to make a real living on grappling alone, which is why the parents eventually let him leave school.

Danaher is considered one of the best coaches in the world, charismatic in person, and for Ryan a father figure. He was raised in DDS, with deep ties to John, Gordon, Gary, even Eddie Cummings, and he misses the daily whip-cracking. He arrived just as the room exploded: Gary had won ADCC trials and a wild match with Kron Gracie, Eddie was breaking out, Gordon was winning EBI. For Jones the split cost a coach and a system. For Ryan it cost the house he grew up in.

Lex asks whether Ryan has animosity toward his brother, and whether they can forgive each other. At the split the brothers hated each other, then it cooled, and just before the current social-media mess Gordon reached out: the first real talk in almost two years. Neither was aggressive. They cracked jokes, and Ryan hopes the hostility is finally dropping.

Lex quotes Vito Corleone: "The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other." Ryan's parents raised them that family is everything and you never betray it, so he misses Gordon from time to time. Forty years from now, would the split look like a bullshit reason? He thinks it was justifiable. The way things were going, it was not going to work in the same room. It was affecting training, and people did not feel comfortable.

The public feud is another sport. Gordon posted Valentine's flowers for Nicky Rod, writing that he had been beating him in every round since 2018, so flowers were the least he could do. The bouquet went to the wrong address. Rod had been looking forward to chocolates. Lex, who has been talking to Gordon, says the kind comments are for Nicky Ryan and the rest is worse than the posts.

The recent EBI match on UFC Fight Pass was twenty minutes. Rod pulled guard, stood, Gordon pulled, and they fought underhooks until a body-lock pass attempt became a leg entanglement, then 50/50. From there Rod separated the feet, got pops with a toe hold, and Gordon later said the exchange broke his foot. Jones, who has actually broken bones in competition, including a spiral fracture of a fibula with a heel hook, is picky about the word: you break bones and tear ligaments. Time ran out into overtime.

Overtime starts from a bad position. Rod escaped in about seventeen seconds, took the back, and Gordon matched the escape, then rode Rod for most of a round. Rod's self-critique is that he chased the finish instead of collecting time; a rear-naked choke over the face had no seconds left to finish. Lex asks if steroids would have closed it, and Rod says for sure, then claims he is a natural athlete. They disagree on the rule set itself. Rod likes a definitive winner, Jones shops rules for the opponent, and Nicky Ryan thinks EBI is great television and a way for a worse grappler to stall through regulation and start on the back.

Lex asks whether most top grapplers use steroids. Jones says you cannot tell by looks, but if a sport does not test you should assume people will, especially as the money grows; over thirty, he calls his version TRT. Rod says it is cheating either way, a roulette on dose, and that a cabinet of gold for wrestling other men will not land well on an early deathbed. They agree gear helps recovery and volume, and Jones warns it can make a technician start muscling and gas. The Instagram war, Rod says, began when Gordon accused him of greasing after EBI; he says he was checked, answered on Mark Bell's podcast, and watched Gordon post dozens of stories about him.

B-Team, Jones says, is for aiming low and achieving; Nicky Rod says B is for best. They started as a purple-and-up room of professionals and are opening a white-belt program at 6pm, with a split they want at about a third top, a third bottom, a third wrestling. Jones's teaching bet is constraint-based learning: show the problem before the solution, often as a kids' game, so the student discovers why a crossface or a bent-over posture works. Hold side control with no cues, watch how the person escapes, then add the crossface. Memorizing details without the problem, he argues, is how people stall.

Jones spent five or six weeks in Alexander Volkanovski's camp for Islam Makhachev, with wrestler Frank Hickman. They trusted Volk's cage work as an equalizer against sambo and freestyle, drilled getting up through turtle, and treated Islam as a finisher of tired, broken people rather than an unbeatable grappler. Jones's instructional *Just Stand Up* argues that the old technical get-up is dead and that MMA stand-ups come from wrestling, even if that means exposing the back. Coaching MMA, he says, carries a different weight than grappling: Volk's wife and kids are trusting you with a man's health, not a tap.

A week before the last ADCC, Nicky Ryan went for a rear body lock, felt a pop with a partner named Kenta, and still competed without an MRI. It was a full ACL tear. He skipped surgery and rehab and now trains without an ACL; the other knee, minus a meniscus, bothers him more. Nicky Rod tore a bicep the morning after a brutal arm day, first shot of wrestling, no warmup. Jones's counter-science is that the people who warm up the longest are often the most injured, and that he has been hurt when he got emotional and refused to lose a round.

Rod is filming a pre-match ritual instructional that starts four weeks out: sleep, food, when to arrive, what to do at thirty minutes, twenty, ten, five, and how to limit sensory intake so the day's best decisions happen on the mat. He visualizes the crowd and his own best positions. Jones has no routine and no visualization; his last thought before walking out is whether he will embarrass himself and hurt instructional sales. Ryan sometimes warms up and sometimes does not, but in the room he recreates walkouts, hand slaps, and corner time with a similar body type. Lex notes that Olympic gold medalists sound like Rod, and that the other two are outliers. Chaos, in this gym, is also a way not to break.

Advice for hobbyists is unglamorous. Rod says pick a schedule you can keep for years; people want fast and the sport is slow. Nicky Ryan's habit since B-Team formed is to film every round and watch it the next day, then build positional rounds around the problems. Jones's warning is that not every round has to be a fight to the death, or you get hurt, burnt out, and learn less. For the famous, he has a seminar trick: getting submitted once is believable, five times robs them of the story, so he turns the roll into a joke and will not go hard with strangers.

Trends they like in no-gi are foot sweeps, arm drags, and body locks; the rear-naked choke is still the finish that hits most at the top, and Rod is also building yoko sankaku, the side triangle, because it gives a choke, a kimura, or a path to the back. Ego, they agree, is a switch. You need it in competition mode and you have to shut it off to learn, which means starting in bad positions against people who might catch you. Jones hides a damaged ego on purpose. Ryan calls humility an act and a motivator you must still turn off in the room.

Positional rounds are how they build that switch. Mount and turtle, Rod says, made him tough because you spend everything to escape, then fail to hold the top, then go right back down. Jones argues that if you are the big fish in a small pond and you skip those rounds, competition will expose you. You have to give a worse partner a chance to catch you, which means putting the ego aside. Ryan wants the confidence that even the worst position on the match mat is a place he has already worked.

Running a gym with friends puts money on the table. Jones's rule is to be clear and honest at the start; trouble lives in fine print, and a lot of jiu-jitsu guys cannot read. Staff sometimes think the pie is bigger than it is. A falling-out with a coach Lex likes, Isaac, came down to clashing expectations about a role that could not be fixed, made worse because the relationship had been brotherly. Will DDS ever re-form? Jones says no, absolutely not. They left to back Nicky Ryan and they are staying. The three methods in the room still contradict each other, which is the point of listening to all three.