Latest / The Ageless Warrior Lab / Ben Kovacs on FloGrappling, Guardian Gym, & free training for kids in need EP | 56

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Ben Kovacs on FloGrappling, Guardian Gym, & free training for kids in need EP | 56 · The Ageless Warrior Lab

0:00
SPEAKER_02: We figured out that we couldn't actually really run the program until we treated the kids.
0:06
SPEAKER_02: Opening the jiu-jitsu school sort of unearthed a bigger problem, which was these kids have skin infection issues.
0:12
SPEAKER_02: So I think we invested a couple thousand dollars.
0:15
SPEAKER_02: We figured out how to buy the medicine, and so now we're actually getting these kids treatment so they can train.
0:20
SPEAKER_02: Even if they don't become great at jiu-jitsu, we may have solved an even bigger problem in their life.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Ageless Warrior Lab.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: I'm BJJ Coral Belt and Dirty Dozen member Dave Meyer, here to draw wisdom from Brazilian jiu-jitsu and the martial arts and explore how it applies to success in business, relationships, your long-term health, and making the most out of your life.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: My guest today is Ben Kovacs.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: Ben has spent about 20 years on the mat in BJJ.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: He's a black belt, a former Twitter employee, the co-founder of the nonprofit Guardian Gym, and now the general manager of Flow Grappling.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Guardian began with a simple idea that kids who can't afford jiu-jitsu should still have a place to train.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: It started in Oakland, California, and has grown into a network supporting free training at academies around the world with a thousand young people training free throughout 36 academies in 12 countries.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: Then continues to help run Guardian and now works on a different side of the sport at Flow Grappling, the place where you can see live streams and recordings of many major grappling competitions, including IBJJF, ADCC, Who's Number One, WNO, Polaris, Fight to Win, and others.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: Ben's thinking about how to serve the people who practice jiu-jitsu and create opportunities for athletes.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: What drew me to Ben's story is the way he used what he learned in business to give something back to a sport he loves.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: We talk about how Guardian avoids the pitfalls of some nonprofits and stays totally mission focused.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: We also talk about flow grappling and the value it provides to competitors and also the landscape of professional grappling leagues.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: I think you'll enjoy our talk.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: So please sit back and enjoy my conversation with Ben Kovacs.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: Ben, thank you so much for taking the time this morning to talk to me.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate it.
2:22
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: So I have a lot of things I think would be interesting to talk about that I know our audience would want to hear about.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you, of course, about Guardian and the nonprofit that you've created.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: And I want to talk to you about flow grappling, a tool that many of us in the jiu-jitsu community use.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: But I have a few other things I want to cover too, if you don't mind.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: And I had looked online, looked at your bio, and I noticed some interesting things.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: First of all, that we've had a maybe a similar path where we both do jujitsu, of course, but have gone through tech space and went into nonprofit.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: So we certainly could nerd out on a lot of deep stuff about the functioning of nonprofits, about tech user journeys and things like that.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: And we'll see where the discussion takes us.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: But I noticed that you played poker.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: And I want to ask about that real quick.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: I have a good friend who you might know, David Mitchell, he's a black belt.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: He is a training partner of mine now down at Black Sheep in Fairfax, California.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: Super good competitor.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: And he also used to play semi-professional or maybe even professional poker.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: I'm interested to know, did the skills or talents that made you a good poker player, did you bring those to bear in any of your professional life, or was that just a one-off thing that you were good at and it was fun?
3:39
SPEAKER_02: I don't think so.
3:39
SPEAKER_02: I mean, of course, maybe there's some small amount of crossover, but what I was doing is I was playing poker during the poker boom when everything was just this mad rush to play online poker at the beginning.
3:51
SPEAKER_02: And I believe what happened for me is I got very lucky that there just happened to be a lot of bad players in that pool at that time for a certain amount of years.
4:00
SPEAKER_02: And so I think what I'm pretty good at is managing risk.
4:04
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I was good at managing a bank role and sort of understanding just like the math behind a lot of that stuff and the psychology of that, where I think that's where a lot of people fail.
4:13
SPEAKER_02: So I don't really consider myself like an exceptional poker player or this incredible reader of people at the table or anything like that.
4:20
SPEAKER_02: I just think I was like, you know, very similar to jujitsu, right?
4:23
SPEAKER_02: I was just like a purple belt playing with a bunch of white belts.
4:26
SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of how I made money during the poker boom.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: And as I've played poker later in life more sparingly, I'm kind of like a I realize I'm a pretty average player, so I think I just right place, right time.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, there may be skills.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: We talked about jiu-jitsu as the chess game as well, and not having a tell about what you're about to do.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: I've mostly talked to martial artists like yourself, who also, some of whom are just 100% martial artist fighters and some of whom are doing other things.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: But my one of my last interviews I put out was with a good friend of mine who's a really exceptionally good magician, and he's not a martial artist, but the things he talks about in terms of misdirection misdirection and the ways in which magicians play off our extremely fallible brains and perceptions seemed really relevant to me to martial arts.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: So I just wondered, is there a little bit of bleed over also from a good poker player there, too?
5:22
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I thought I'd ask.
5:23
SPEAKER_02: I wish it was an easier answer to be like, heck yeah, like great at poker, great at martial arts.
5:28
SPEAKER_02: It all works together, but couldn't be farther than the truth.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk for a minute about Guardian.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: So you left a career path that you were on to build Guardian, and that's similar to something I did.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: I was a musician and I had been playing music, and music through technology of being a keyboard player drew me into computers, and I ended up having a day job as a computer specialist at a law firm while I was playing my rock and roll at night.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: And but something happened in my life that made me want to switch over to the cause that I jumped into, which was animal welfare and helping animals.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: Um, just curious, what was it that caused you to want to move from Twitter or wherever you were working at the time to start a nonprofit?
6:08
SPEAKER_00: And then we'll talk about the nonprofit.
6:09
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I don't think I've been the most career-focused person, you know, ever.
6:13
SPEAKER_02: I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, you know, my dad did a lot of maintenance work at a nuclear power plant and then at a landfill.
6:21
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I thought sort of the definition of success coming out of high school was like owning a Tacoma and having a house someday.
6:28
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, if I could like get a get a truck and get a house, I basically have like made it.
6:32
SPEAKER_02: You know, I didn't realize there was this whole big world out there of tech and all the fancy stuff and government and things that people may get into at the highest levels.
6:41
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I kind of stumbled my way into working at Twitter, not really with a great sort of career, even moving to California, right?
6:48
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't this grand plan.
6:49
SPEAKER_02: It was like I moved out here because my best friend from college moved out here.
6:51
SPEAKER_02: I thought I would do it for a year, ended up getting a job at Twitter, meeting my now wife, and never going home.
6:57
SPEAKER_02: But the the impetus to start Guardian was when I was working at Twitter and my partner Joel, who started Guardian with me, who was kind of a big executive at Twitter at the time.
7:06
SPEAKER_02: I just thought, if I don't stop and do this now, I'm never gonna do it.
7:10
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people say, hey, when I'm 65 years old and I retire, I'm gonna have all this money, I'm gonna start a nonprofit.
7:15
SPEAKER_02: And my answer is always no, you're not, because you're gonna be tired.
7:17
SPEAKER_02: You know, you're not gonna have, you know, you're gonna be busy with your grandkids or traveling or you're gonna get sick or you're not gonna make it until you're 65.
7:24
SPEAKER_02: So I thought, hey, why don't I do this now?
7:27
SPEAKER_02: I can always go back and get another job in tech now that I have this sort of resume with Twitter and these other companies.
7:33
SPEAKER_02: I should be able to get a job at Facebook or I should be able to get a job at, you know, wherever the next hot thing is.
7:38
SPEAKER_02: But I don't know if I'm ever gonna have the burning desire or the energy or whatever, the the time to start to start the nonprofit again.
7:47
SPEAKER_02: So I thought, why don't I just take a few years, start this, not outsource it to somebody else with money, but just make sure I kind of can put my personal stamp, if you will, on it.
7:56
SPEAKER_02: And so that was the impetus to start Twitter, take a few years out of sort of the real corporate world and start the nonprofit.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's funny you say not uh hand your money over to someone else to do it.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: That was a criticism, a pushback that I got a lot too when I decided that I wanted to focus on something that helped the world, and I was sort of thinking, what are the different things I care about?
8:15
SPEAKER_00: And my stuff was all about the more powerful, unfairly exerting that power over the weak.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: And that could be guys abusing women, ch children issues, but the the animal one was the one I really dove into, the way that people treat that some people treat animals.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: And I was working at this law firm and I was the head computer guy, and I was doing good.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: I had a corner office, and there was no money in the animal space.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: It was just gonna be nuts.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't at that time even gonna start my own nonprofit.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: I was just gonna, I didn't even occur to me, I was just gonna go work for some nonprofit.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: But the partners at the attorney at the attorneys were like, that's nuts.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: Like, why don't you just make money and donate?
8:53
SPEAKER_00: Like you could have more of an effect sitting on the board of someone else's nonprofit and donating money.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Why would you want to do this full-time yourself?
9:00
SPEAKER_00: And that didn't resonate with me at all.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: That wasn't gonna like scratch my itch at all.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: I felt like there's something I want to do, I'm just gonna go do it.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: And it sounds like you had a similar reaction.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: Well, the truth is most nonprofits are a lot of bullshit, to be perfectly frank.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: Like there's a lot of, I don't know, legal scamming, whatever you'd want to call it, or what I would consider slightly immoral behavior.
9:22
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, at Guardian, I don't even really consider us a nonprofit the way we operate.
9:26
SPEAKER_02: Of course, we have a 501c3 status.
9:28
SPEAKER_02: People get a tax deduction when they donate to us, but I don't get a salary to do it.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: My wife isn't employed by the nonprofit.
9:35
SPEAKER_02: You know, there's none of this like backdoor dealing.
9:38
SPEAKER_02: It's all about running it like an efficient little business, right?
9:41
SPEAKER_02: We don't have office space, we don't have rent, we're not, you know, it's like very, very efficient the way that we do it.
9:47
SPEAKER_02: So the almost all the money that we we raise can go to the actual cause that people are expecting to support.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: And I think very similar to jujitsu, who gets the headlines in jiu-jitsu, right?
9:58
SPEAKER_02: It's like these 10 people who have big social media accounts that have these crazy lives that may not resonate, but all the guys like you or me or who, you know, Billy or Susie who train, who are just these like normal people who go to train and are actually good people off the mat for the most part, like they don't nobody talks about them, right?
10:16
SPEAKER_02: You go to Master's Worlds and it's this giant event of tens of thousands of people who do jujitsu and are just like, you know, flying under the radar, using it for the right reasons, but the sport is dominated by the wrong stuff.
10:25
SPEAKER_02: And that's the way the nonprofit world is.
10:27
SPEAKER_02: You get these American Cancer Society type things, United Way, and then you look at the books and it's like 15 cents on the dollar, 30 cents on the dollars going to the program because they're just maintaining very similar to the federal government, these massive organizations that need to need to get fed, right?
10:42
SPEAKER_02: And they grow, and somebody's making a million dollars a year to run the nonprofit and grow it, and they have a board that wants to see growth and everybody wants to get paid.
10:51
SPEAKER_02: And so we just really do it very, very different than that.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: And that's one of the reasons I don't take a salary, is because I want to tell people like, I'm not doing this for money, I'm doing this because I actually love to do it, right?
11:01
SPEAKER_02: And I think that that's just different than a lot of the nonprofits out there.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: So I have some thoughts on that, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying, and I have worked since that time I described, I've worked in the nonprofit space where I have well, I certainly wasn't paid for years at the beginning when I was creating my own nonprofit.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I taught jujitsu and created a curriculum with John Will.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: This was pre-internet, and we sold VHS videos at that time and a big oversized manual to basically karate schools that just wanted to incorporate grappling.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: We didn't call it Brazilian jiu-jitsu because there was no ranking involved.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: But we would do that and go to like conventions, century martial arts conventions, sell to the instructors.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: I would go do seminars on the weekend.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: That's where I made my money, and then I would work on my nonprofit during the week.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: But for years now, since the nonprofit has grown, I definitely do take a salary.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: And I do see that, you know, if you want to have really good people working on something, you might actually need to pay that.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: So I'm not in sort of the camp of if you're working for a nonprofit, you should definitely be for sure, all in all cases, be paid very little.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you want to get really good people to focus on something full-time, and they literally they have a mortgage.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: Like they can't come and help you and work unless you give them.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: So I think there are times where it makes sense to pay someone, but I fundamentally agree with what you're talking about.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: There is a flaw in nonprofits, in the nonprofit structure.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: This is the way I look at it, and I think you might resonate with this.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Most businesses are in a business where they sell a product or service, and they can get away for a while without having a good product or service just through good marketing or bullshit or whatever.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: But eventually it's gonna bite them and they're gonna lose revenue if they if their product sucks or if their service sucks.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: In the nonprofit space, you're fundamentally not always, because we can talk about I want to talk about the business model of Guardian, and this was true with Adopt a Pet too.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: We were making money not from donations, from creating actual value in another way.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: But in most nonprofits, you're you are getting paid by donors.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: So the way I look at it is you are selling something, you're selling a feeling to donors.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: And if you're good at selling that feeling, they will pay a lot of money for it.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: And some nonprofits are really good at selling that feeling.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: That does not have necessarily anything to do with whether you're actually good at the thing that you're saying that you're doing and helping the world or whatever your mission is.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: You could be very good at selling the feeling through a great website and great videos and great brochures and suck at your mission or be doing nothing for your mission.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Or the opposite could be true.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: You could be doing an amazing job at your mission and be really terrible at fundraising and be seriously underfunded.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: So to me, my speech is always you want to be both if you're a nonprofit.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: You want to be really good at the thing you're doing and you want to be good at selling the feeling.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is there isn't a often a connection between the two.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: There's no punishment.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: So if you're not good at your mission, you're still really good at selling the feeling.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: You can still make a lot of money.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: With Adopt a Pet, the pet adoption website, and you mentioned you're a dog lover.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we'll talk about that at the end as well.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: Um, we were able to solve that because we were surviving on sponsorship dollars.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: We were creating value for sponsors who wanted to sell pet products to the pet adopters coming to that site.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: And that could have been a for-profit.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: In fact, there is a for-profit website out there.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: So it didn't have to be a nonprofit, but that was how we were funding it.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: And then if our web traffic went down for some reason and we weren't doing a good job at bringing eyeballs to the site and getting pets adopted, our sponsorships would go down because they wouldn't want to sponsor us anymore.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: So we it was an unusual case that we bridged that.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Guardian also, I think, and you could tell me more about it, has an interesting business model.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's the Guardian gym sort of main facility, and then I know that you've and we're going to talk about this, how you sort of scaled out.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: But why don't you tell us a little bit about what is the business model?
14:56
SPEAKER_00: How are things being driven and how are you making money?
14:59
SPEAKER_00: So, how are you able to be as efficient as you are?
15:02
SPEAKER_02: So, a couple things.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: Guardian started as just one single gym in Oakland, and that was kind of the idea was build something in the Bay Area where we lived, and then it expanded to a gym in Baltimore where one of my best friends who I started training with 20 years ago on the East Coast wanted to open a Guardian, so we kind of did that together, and he runs that still to this day.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: But really, where things kind of broke loose was during COVID, we ended up reevaluating our business model.
15:28
SPEAKER_02: I always had this idea I wanted to go international and I wanted to leverage technology.
15:33
SPEAKER_02: Why did I need the best teacher in Africa, for example, or Peru, when you had Roger Gracie and Loughlin Giles and Gordon Ryan and Craig Jones being able to teach through digital means, right?
15:44
SPEAKER_02: And so that was kind of always like my initial idea, but I didn't implement it from the beginning.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: But we use that time during COVID to start expanding internationally.
15:52
SPEAKER_02: And almost the way a venture capitalist looks at investing in a company, very rarely do they just want to invest in Dave's idea.
15:59
SPEAKER_02: More like Dave goes and Dave gets his first customers and builds his website and builds a product or a prototype, and then the investors go, Oh, Dave, you're on to something.
16:08
SPEAKER_02: If I gave you money, I could help you grow this little business that you started.
16:13
SPEAKER_02: And we look at it as very much the same way.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: So we try to find social projects around the world that have started.
16:18
SPEAKER_02: They usually started or they all started with someone that we knew.
16:21
SPEAKER_02: So, for example, in Peru, the guy that had a little social project going down there, Sal, was one of the first people I trained with back in the day at the Yamasaki Academy.
16:30
SPEAKER_02: He moved back to Peru.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: He had a little social project with five or 10 kids, but he needed maths, he needed a bigger space, he needed all these things, ghys to grow his project.
16:38
SPEAKER_02: So we started actually working with him to do all those things.
16:42
SPEAKER_02: And we realized that unlike America, where there's this big transportation problem in most of the areas for kids to actually get to the gym, these smaller international towns, kids could just walk or bike or take a tuck-tuck, whatever, to the gym for you know zero dollars or fifty cents or whatever it costs, and they didn't have anything else to do in these towns.
17:00
SPEAKER_02: So we were getting a massive amount of students at a much less cost to those places.
17:05
SPEAKER_02: So we started in Peru, then we opened a school in Ethiopia, then we started Uganda, now we have India, we have you know Malaysia, we have Vietnam, we have Cuyacon, Mexico, and almost all of these schools originally started with someone that we knew, either a friend of a friend or someone that one of us used to train with.
17:23
SPEAKER_02: And we basically go in and we say, look, how can we invest in your academy?
17:27
SPEAKER_02: Everyone's a little bit different.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: What do you need, and how can we help grow it?
17:30
SPEAKER_02: We like to start with tangible things, meaning the mats, the gis, cleaning supplies, you know, whatever.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: And then we usually move on to like maybe paying the salary of the assisted instructor who needs to be there, things like that.
17:42
SPEAKER_02: And so we have a wide, you know, discrepancy in how we invest in each school, meaning some schools need almost zero funding.
17:48
SPEAKER_02: They just want to be part of Guardian and they need very little.
17:51
SPEAKER_02: They need a portal where they can raise their own money.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: Maybe they have a local benefactor like in India, where they have some people that actually have means.
17:57
SPEAKER_02: And in other schools like Peru, we work with Craig and Seth from CJI, and we probably put$500,000 now into that academy because we built a brand new academy, brand new mats with Fuji, six Airbnbs, a weightlifting facility upstairs.
18:13
SPEAKER_02: And our idea, similar to your adopt a pet, was that we wanted to build something that had sustainability for the long haul, something that could kind of self-support itself, where we didn't have to spend$10,000 a month to keep a gym going.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: We could use those Airbnbs to bring people down there, to have them stay, to do camps, things like that.
18:30
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we're still figuring it out, to be honest.
18:33
SPEAKER_02: It's been 12 or 13 years now, but this international model really works for us.
18:38
SPEAKER_02: And so, to answer your question, in the US, we partner with existing gyms that are already there and they add our program in.
18:44
SPEAKER_02: For most of those gyms, it costs them very little to do that because they're already running a kids' class.
18:48
SPEAKER_02: They say, hey, I'll add five scholarships or two scholarships or 20 scholarships, and we'll add that in.
18:53
SPEAKER_02: We'll have a guardian banner on the wall, we'll have a little guardian program within our gym.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: We let them fundraise locally if they need, you know, extra help to do that, to buy ghys and tournament entries and things for the kids.
19:02
SPEAKER_02: And then internationally, we're usually the ones like funding that more whole because there's just not as many people, let's say in Peru or Cuyacon, Mexico, they can stroke those checks.
19:11
SPEAKER_02: So we actually are doing that.
19:13
SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes we'll go to a partner like Level Black in Mexico, and Level Black is actually the ones that are funding the majority of those Mexico schools, and then they can kind of own a little area and they can kind of feel this connection with the school rather than just donating money to us and not really knowing where it goes.
19:28
SPEAKER_02: They can have a connection with that gym, they can wear their gear, they can see their logo on the mat, whatever it is.
19:34
SPEAKER_02: So that's that's really how we do it, right?
19:36
SPEAKER_02: We think about like almost like a little mini venture capital model for how we expand around the world into these gyms and give them what they need to be successful.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: Love that, Ben.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: I think it's just so creative and it's so good.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: And obviously, the name of the game here is to provide access to training for kids who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford jujitsu.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: Is that basically the plan?
19:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I mean, I don't know.
19:56
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
19:57
SPEAKER_02: It looks like you got a lot more medals on the wall than I've ever ever won.
20:00
SPEAKER_02: All my medals are behind me.
20:02
SPEAKER_02: You can see them.
20:03
SPEAKER_02: Um, but look, I mean, it's a trick, right?
20:05
SPEAKER_02: It's a trick.
20:06
SPEAKER_02: It's like I love jujitsu.
20:07
SPEAKER_02: I'm okay at jujitsu.
20:09
SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm a black belt, but I wouldn't consider myself like, you know, world class or anywhere close, right?
20:15
SPEAKER_02: And so for me, the value of jujitsu has been not how do I win tournaments and win all those fancy medals, but how do I have a positive community?
20:23
SPEAKER_02: How do I stay healthy?
20:25
SPEAKER_02: How am I a better husband?
20:26
SPEAKER_02: How am I a little nicer to my kids?
20:28
SPEAKER_02: How do I, you know, drink less alcohol.
20:31
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, for me, it's just using jujitsu as a vehicle to give those kids all the things that we actually want.
20:37
SPEAKER_02: But I don't really believe that you can just kind of take kids from school and just go sit them in a classroom for another four hours and bring a psychologist in and get them excited to sit there for another four hours and learn that way.
20:48
SPEAKER_02: I believe you got to get them moving, you got to get them in a place where they respect their authority figure, aka their instructor or maybe other mentors in the gym.
20:57
SPEAKER_02: And then all those good things happen over time.
20:59
SPEAKER_02: Not always, right?
21:00
SPEAKER_02: But oftentimes they happen over time.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: And because of the consistency that a jiu-jitsu gym allows for, 365 days a year, rain or shine, hot, cold, rainy, doesn't matter.
21:11
SPEAKER_02: It's different than a lot of the other sports that way.
21:13
SPEAKER_02: That the kids have the consistency to come somewhere every day and stay out of trouble and just naturally get into better habits.
21:19
SPEAKER_02: And that's what we're doing with Guardian.
21:20
SPEAKER_02: If we get a world champion out of it, great, right?
21:23
SPEAKER_02: We get an ADCC champion out of it, great.
21:26
SPEAKER_02: But that's not the goal, right?
21:28
SPEAKER_02: The goal is just to provide the opportunity and you know, make people happier, healthier communities better.
21:33
SPEAKER_02: And by the way, it's not just for the kids.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: Think about the parents.
21:36
SPEAKER_02: Imagine being a single mom that has three kids, your kids are just on their iPads all day.
21:40
SPEAKER_02: You can't deal with working two jobs and you know, also paying for a gym membership for them to go to.
21:46
SPEAKER_02: So you're just trying to survive every day and put food on the table and get to the next day.
21:51
SPEAKER_02: But if your son, who's 16 years old, can go to a gym every day and lift weights.
21:55
SPEAKER_02: I mean, some of these kids in Peru, for example, are lifting and training multiple times a day in the facility.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Spend four hours at the gym.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: So that really changes the home dynamic.
22:04
SPEAKER_02: Now your kid comes home healthy, happy, fed.
22:07
SPEAKER_02: They drink drink water, they're putting muscle on, they have confidence.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: Like, what is that for a parent versus a kid sitting there getting fat playing on their iPad all day?
22:16
SPEAKER_00: Ben, this is fantastic, and I'm totally with you.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: And I feel that I should say, for all my years of competing, I didn't hang medals on the wall.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: It was my podcast producer who said, Do you have any medals?
22:26
SPEAKER_00: And I go, like, I got boxes of medals, but that was not why I was doing it either.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I the concept of free training, I started in jiu-jitsu, not Brazilian jujitsu.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: I didn't hear of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu until like 1990 in Los Angeles.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: But I started training jujitsu, what put people now call Japanese jiu-jitsu, when I was a little kid, like six years old.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: And that was at a community center where I think it was like six dollars for six months or something like that.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: There was some little fee that you had to pay to the community center.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: And my whole getting going through up to black belt in non-Brazilian jiu-jitsu was never paying anybody anything.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: It was just you the instructor would be there teaching at some community center.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: They had a day job.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: And it was very alien to me when I first when I really started encountering it.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: You would get that in karate too.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: You had these professional schools.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: And I always just thought a teacher should teach because they love it.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, my teacher, a guy named Jack Secchi, used to say he would not take any money, that six dollars didn't go to him.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: And he didn't want the feeling that he owed you something.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: Like he came there because he wanted to teach.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: You came there because you wanted to learn.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: If he didn't like something about the way you were on class, he would tell you to leave.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: And he didn't you didn't owe he didn't owe you anything.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: So I love that.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: I did come to understand, yes, but so he was able to do that a couple nights a week.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: But if you want to have a school that's functioning where there's day classes and afternoon classes, someone probably needs to have that be their living.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, you need to pay for that, you need to pay for rent, you're not just at a community center.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: So I certainly understand the importance of having a professional jiu-jitsu school with paid instructors and facilities that are available.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: But being able to offer, especially for kids, jujitsu for free, I think is really great.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: That just is very, very close to my heart.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: And I was gonna ask you, and you just sort of shared some of it, you know, whether the value for the kids, for the participants, is the jujitsu training.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: We all know that it's healthy and it's fun, and it's playing chess and it's all those good things.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: Or is it the stuff surrounding it?
24:28
SPEAKER_00: Like the so the training is not the only intervention you're doing here.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: It's the community, it sounds to me, like that is the real true intervention here for these kids.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
24:39
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think so, but of course, like I'm biased, everybody has their own little tweak on it.
24:43
SPEAKER_02: And I think one of the cool things about Guardian is like it's not a dictatorship.
24:48
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I guess it is in a way.
24:50
SPEAKER_02: I kind of run it very much how I want in a lot of ways, as Calder, who's our executive director, would probably tell you, I have very strong opinions on certain things, but I don't have strong opinions on the local level of how the teachers want to run their academies, right?
25:03
SPEAKER_02: And if they want to be more competition focused, if they want to focus more on a gi versus no gi, or they want to run a CLA style training versus a traditional style training, or they want to use a type of gym software for their memberships.
25:14
SPEAKER_02: Like, we don't dictate any of those things, right?
25:16
SPEAKER_02: We just kind of provide the overarching shell and the infrastructure to get going, which I think is what, I mean, let's face it, this isn't a this isn't a Elon Musk rocket science idea, like, oh, we should have free kids training around the world and have gyms.
25:31
SPEAKER_02: Like, it's not exactly high-level thinking here.
25:34
SPEAKER_02: It's just that we more operationalize it to make it possible, you know, for everybody to do it.
25:39
SPEAKER_02: And I think that that's really what we're doing in a way.
25:43
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a good mix of giving them the creative ability on the floor, on the ground level, while kind of giving them the infrastructure, the brand, the donation portals, the backing.
25:52
SPEAKER_02: Imagine if you're starting a jiu-jitsu gym in Connecticut and you say, Oh, I'm gonna have a free kids program as part of my program, people are gonna be confused, they're probably not gonna believe you.
26:00
SPEAKER_02: I've talked to a few gym owners who have nonprofits within their gyms, which usually just means that they're getting Brazilian people to come coach for free for them somehow, um, and calling it a nonprofit or whatever, whatever that grift is.
26:13
SPEAKER_02: But, you know, for for us, like we try to find that balance of you know, not being too heavy-handed and making sure that they can be successful in their own area, right?
26:22
SPEAKER_02: And we even had this debate about art the other day.
26:23
SPEAKER_02: Like, should we be putting art on the walls that's more like guardian art that's standardized, or should we be contracting with local artists in these gyms to put their own flavor, their own cultural appropriateness, if you will, into that?
26:37
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's kind of where we ended up was like, hey, we should be hiring local artists, and it's can be guardian and we can have certain aesthetics for our own brand, but we want to make sure that we're true to the local area versus coming in and telling people how the world works.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: I think that's important, especially if you're moving into different cultures and different countries.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: You've got to be sensitive to, you know, they may not see things the way we see things, and I think it's great that you can have a lighter hand in that, and that you're not trying to tell people how they how to teach and what curriculum to use and things like that.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: I think that that's good.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: When we think about scaling, uh there's scaling up and scaling out.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: So scaling up would have been you had a gym in Oakland, you had people paying for that, and that allowed you to offer free memberships maybe to kids, you know, in underserved areas.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: You could just make that gym bigger and make it bigger and bigger, bigger, bigger.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, scaling out is exactly what you've done, which is just replicating something again and again and again in different ways.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, any instructor who runs a professional school could allow, I mean, it doesn't cost them any more.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: If they've got a kids' class with 12 kids, it doesn't really cost them any more to have a kids' class with 20 kids, where six of them are allowed in on scholarships and not paying, they could do that.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: I imagine that can get tricky for some instructors because well, why is this kid have to pay and this kid not have to pay?
27:57
SPEAKER_00: Or you don't want to embarrass parents by having to show that they're poor or something like that.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: So do you ever encounter those kinds of things where in a s when you're integrating unpaid students into a school where there are paid students, is there any weirdness that comes, any friction?
28:13
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't know.
28:14
SPEAKER_02: I I don't we we never did that at our original Guardians, right?
28:18
SPEAKER_02: So Guardian Oakland and Guardian Baltimore were just all free for kids.
28:22
SPEAKER_02: So I personally didn't have to deal with it as much, maybe as some of our sort of satellite schools, whatever you'd want to call them now in the US, may deal with.
28:30
SPEAKER_02: I always tell people, first of all, like you're gonna get taken advantage of maybe by 10% of the people.
28:34
SPEAKER_02: Like they could afford to pay, but they're gonna claim that they can't afford to pay.
28:39
SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, you have two options.
28:41
SPEAKER_02: You can police that really hard, or you can just accept that and just say it's a cost of doing business type thing.
28:46
SPEAKER_02: Um, so we've always done that where we didn't like ask for paperwork, we didn't ask people to prove that they were low income, anything like that, because if you do that, then you disproportionately affect the people who have the hardest time, right?
28:59
SPEAKER_02: The people who don't have parents who are legal immigrants and have the right paperwork and the right tax stuff all set up, right?
29:05
SPEAKER_02: They're the ones who aren't gonna be able to comply with those rules.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: And now the kids who actually probably needed this the most are being kind of put out because of all of your requirements.
29:13
SPEAKER_02: And I think you see that in a lot of the government programs, right?
29:16
SPEAKER_02: It's like smart people take advantage of these programs who can do all the paperwork and all the legal and have resources, not the person who ultimately that program was designed for in some cases.
29:25
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I don't think it's a big deal, honestly, for most of our programs, frankly.
29:29
SPEAKER_02: I think most people understand it hasn't been like a big issue to answer your question.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, you also mentioned that some of the satellite schools are sort of arose around, I think what you called social projects.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: How do you define a social project that's just some guys getting together to train for the good of the community?
29:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, it could be in various forms.
29:49
SPEAKER_02: It could be sort of the same thing that we just talked about, where maybe some guy in Costa Rica has a gym and he's just letting kids train for free that are local, but there's not a lot of structure around it.
29:58
SPEAKER_02: And so they come to us wanting to put a more formal program together and figure out how they can go to the five kids training for free in their program to like an actual, you know, kids program that has 50 kids in the community training every day.
30:10
SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, most of the time it's like some guy or girl has a program, maybe they rent out space from some other gym or in Ethiopia, they were bringing puzzle mats into another facility and then deconstructing them every week and taking them out, and they just they don't have the resources to go and put a full space together with full mats and have three classes a day, right?
30:31
SPEAKER_02: Or what we found out now is one of our schools in Africa, one of our new schools in Lyra, all these kids have skin infection issues.
30:39
SPEAKER_02: So they have, I don't even know what what it's called, but they they have like crazy ringworm type stuff and other things.
30:46
SPEAKER_02: But we figured out that we couldn't actually really run the program until we treated the kids, which is kind of cool when you think about it, because it's like the jujitsu opening the jiu-jitsu school sort of unearthed a bigger problem, which was these kids have skin infection issues and they're ruining their bodies, scratching themselves to death and stuff.
31:05
SPEAKER_02: So I think we invested a couple thousand dollars.
31:07
SPEAKER_02: We figured out how to buy the medicine, and so now we're actually getting these kids treatment so they can train.
31:12
SPEAKER_02: And again, back to point one is like even if they don't become great at jujitsu, we may have solved an even bigger problem in their life, which is their skin infection issues that we're gonna just keep being pervasive and ongoing and spreading throughout the community.
31:23
SPEAKER_02: So again, bring them into the gym, find out what their problems are, what are their physical problems, what are their mental problems?
31:30
SPEAKER_02: Are they homeless?
31:31
SPEAKER_02: Are they streeping sleeping on the street at night?
31:33
SPEAKER_02: Are they not showering?
31:34
SPEAKER_02: Do they have lice?
31:35
SPEAKER_02: You know, whatever it is, and then we can figure out how to put money and solve that problem, usually, which frankly isn't a lot in most cases, right?
31:42
SPEAKER_02: To to get those kids treated, especially in a third world country.
31:45
SPEAKER_02: Right.
31:45
SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, move on with the jiu-jitsu, the rest of the jiu-jitsu, and give the kid give the kid uh a new hobby with jujitsu.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh obviously this is not about making world champions.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like you say, kids, you know, they may excel and that's fine, but this is about just changing people's lives.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: And most people who train jujitsu are not going to become world champions.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: Although there are a lot of world champions, that don't get me going onto that where you have all the different age divisions and the belt divisions.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I think it's wonderful that what you're doing has all these sort of side benefits.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: I was, you know, I think, and I think the fact that you have people who you know or who come to you sort of trusted, that helps solve the potential issue of, I don't know, maybe a bad actor who's an instructor, you know.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: Though, like you're saying, those become very high-profile cases.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, most jujitsu schools do not have problems with an instructor behaving inappropriately with anybody.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: But then when one does, it gets very high profile stuff.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: But obviously, if you're creating things around kids, you want to feel extra confident that whoever the instructor is really is doing it for all the right reasons.
32:48
SPEAKER_02: Well, this may sound horrible to say, and I don't mean it in a bad way, but I think that's also another reason I like partnering with an existing program and trying to grow it because I can say, hey, this program's already happening with or without us.
33:00
SPEAKER_02: You know, we're just, you know, adding fuel to the fire, right?
33:03
SPEAKER_02: So someone's truly a bad actor, like they were already doing it.
33:06
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I didn't necessarily like create a program that didn't exist.
33:10
SPEAKER_02: Now you could argue that we brought more kids in and things like that, which of course we don't want to do.
33:15
SPEAKER_02: But by having that touch point where we have some connective tissue to that person, meaning like we train with them 20 years ago, we have 10 mutual friends that also know this person, maybe even better than I do, it does create like a bit of a social pressure on them where you know they can't necessarily just be some random person off doing crazy things.
33:33
SPEAKER_02: And also if they were truly a bad person, sometime over that 20 years, we probably would have gotten multiple signals, you know, that hey, like this isn't the person.
33:41
SPEAKER_02: And and if now, if like anybody's even remotely in that ballpark, right, where we have even the slightest concern, we just obviously won't continue with that person because it's just not worth it to us if we have any bad feelings, or we even ask our other gyms.
33:55
SPEAKER_02: We say, hey, we're gonna onboard a new school.
33:57
SPEAKER_02: It's in, I don't know, Costa Rica.
34:00
SPEAKER_02: Here's the instructor.
34:01
SPEAKER_02: If anyone has any objections with this, maybe you know this person, because now we have almost 40 academies, right, that are that are guardian academies.
34:08
SPEAKER_02: So we say, Hey, does anyone know this person?
34:10
SPEAKER_02: Does anyone have an issue with this?
34:11
SPEAKER_02: Does anyone have any red flags?
34:13
SPEAKER_02: And that just gives us even more touch points to go out there and try to figure out if they maybe there's an issue before before we get started.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's great.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a minor thing.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: I like I say, I think 99.9% of all people doing martial arts are training or teaching it because they love it and they want to help people.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: And I think those bad cases get a lot of publicity because they're shocking and stuff, but it is not the normal situation in martial arts, you know.
34:38
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it's 99.
34:39
SPEAKER_02: I wish it was.
34:40
SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?
34:41
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't know.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: I I think well, I think there's like a gray area, right?
34:44
SPEAKER_02: There's like the really, really bad stuff, which is just like criminal, you go to jail for the rest of your life stuff.
34:50
SPEAKER_02: Like that might be 1%.
34:52
SPEAKER_02: But then I do think there's a gray area of dating your students within the gym, your adult students, and sort of potentially taking advantage.
35:01
SPEAKER_02: And I think maybe that's a larger percentage, maybe that takes it up to five or six percent or something of people who, and I don't know the exact percentage, but from what I've seen going around to gyms, it's it's a lot more pervasive, unfortunately, and I think I'd want to admit.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I I think that that's fair.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: If if we're talking about which is understandable, I know people who run gyms, who've dated students and married them, and it's gone fine.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: I get it.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, you're spending all your day on the mat, it's the only people you ever meet.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: So I could see that, as you're know and pointing out, that can also lead to all kinds of power imbalances and stuff like that.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: But I was thinking more in terms of like child abuse or something like that.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: I that I think that's gotta be quite quite rare.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: I have heard of it, but I think it's gotta be quite rare.
35:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm like very unworried about the child abuse.
35:45
SPEAKER_02: I'm worried about the sexual abuse, right?
35:48
SPEAKER_02: That's that's my worry.
35:50
SPEAKER_02: Not that I don't think most of these instructors are like beating kids.
35:52
SPEAKER_02: And I think again, because our focus for most of our schools is not on competition, right?
35:57
SPEAKER_02: You don't get the crazy coaches who are shooting the kids up with steroids or making them not drink water while they train or things like that.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: All right.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: So switching off of that, I just want to pick up you mentioned a partnership with Craig Jones that you're doing that's with the school in Peru.
36:14
SPEAKER_02: Well, we've partnered on a a lot of schools now, but Peru is Peru is one of them.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: That's really, really cool that Craig is doing that.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't aware that his organization was supporting your charity.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: What brought that about?
36:25
SPEAKER_02: So CJI has always been a nonprofit run endeavor.
36:30
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people don't know this.
36:31
SPEAKER_02: They don't make any money from CJI.
36:33
SPEAKER_02: It's run by something called the Fair Fight Foundation, which is their nonprofit that you've seen throughout the broadcasts and throughout a lot of content.
36:42
SPEAKER_02: And basically the idea with Fair Fight was to you know use jujitsu to give back to charities.
36:48
SPEAKER_02: So year one, when Craig did CJI, it was like going after ADCC saying, you don't pay enough money, I'm gonna pay a million dollars, plus I'm gonna give money to charity.
36:56
SPEAKER_02: And so the first year they gave money to a few different charities.
36:59
SPEAKER_02: We weren't actually involved in CJI one.
37:01
SPEAKER_02: I think they supported a school in Bali that does kind of similar to Guardian things, but it's like one academy.
37:07
SPEAKER_02: And then they also gave money to, I think, Tap Cancer Out and maybe one other nonprofit or two that I'm not aware of.
37:13
SPEAKER_02: And then between CGI one and CGI two, not that long after CGI one actually, Craig and Seth came to Peru and they actually saw what we were doing down there.
37:25
SPEAKER_02: And they decided that they really wanted to do something kind of more tangible that would last for 20 years, meaning they didn't want to give money to like a research project anymore or anything like that, because I think partly with Craig's personality, because he's always joking, people don't really know.
37:41
SPEAKER_02: Like, did you really just give a half million dollars to you know to rain to you know save the rainforce or whatever?
37:48
SPEAKER_02: So they were like, if we build a school, then no one can really deny what we're doing.
37:53
SPEAKER_02: And you know, even if Craig overdoses or something next week, like he'll he'll still have this gym that he'll have this legacy of something that he built and created.
38:03
SPEAKER_02: And so they started, yeah.
38:05
SPEAKER_02: So we started there, they gave about$400,000 of their own money uh from CGI 2 to build that school, which was the majority of the money for the build, the vast majority, maybe call it 80%.
38:18
SPEAKER_02: They've also donated six figures to schools in Africa, so helping build our Guardian Uganda school, for example.
38:25
SPEAKER_02: Craig's also gone to Ethiopia and laid mats down for the Ethiopia school.
38:30
SPEAKER_02: He's been to our school in Cuyacan, Mexico, bought Christmas gifts for the kids and done all sorts of stuff there.
38:36
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, he's traveled to, he's been to Guardian LA, he's been to Guardian Baltimore, he's been to a lot of schools around the world and supported in various ways, and they continue, continue to do so.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: I had no idea, you know, and I I like Craig as a personality.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: I've not met him, but obviously as an amazing fighter, but this just knocks him up a few notches for me.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's just wonderful.
38:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, and you would know this, there are pros and cons to having large donors for a nonprofit.
39:04
SPEAKER_00: One of the downsides is they can exert control or what they want becomes like super duper important because they're like 90% of your funding.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: It sounds to me like this is a really good example of where that's not an issue, where you have a major funder that's doing something, but there's that they're, I assume, very much in support of what you're doing and not trying to get you to do something different.
39:25
SPEAKER_00: You know, mission drift.
39:27
SPEAKER_02: Well, first of all, Craig and Seth are like kind of opposites.
39:30
SPEAKER_02: Seth is Craig's business partner, and Seth is very much like me.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: You know, he's an older jujitsu hobbyist who has he has three kids, I have two kids, and you know, we just have a lot in common, and I think that those two really like balance each other out.
39:45
SPEAKER_02: You know, Craig's a little bit wilder, but underneath he still like really cares, right?
39:49
SPEAKER_02: And I think Seth, though, can kind of keep a lot of things organized and set a lot of the things up, and is part of the reason that obviously CGI one and CGI two could be actually even events and be successful and get sponsors and sign athletes and all the things, like so Craig can go out and do his promotion, which is what he's best at, is marketing, if you will.
40:07
SPEAKER_02: And Seth does kind of the behind-the-scenes business stuff.
40:11
SPEAKER_02: But I think that like there's this thing I think a lot about with Craig when I think about it with Gordon, I even think about it with myself, which is everybody wants to be on this team of like good and bad.
40:21
SPEAKER_02: Are you a wild party guy or are you a jujitsu guy?
40:24
SPEAKER_02: You know, are you a gi guy or a no-gi guy?
40:26
SPEAKER_02: Do you like the IBJGF or do you like ADCC?
40:30
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
40:30
SPEAKER_02: Like, I just like all these things.
40:32
SPEAKER_02: Like, I just take my gi and my no-gi stuff every day to training, and whatever people want to train, I just say okay to.
40:37
SPEAKER_02: I don't have to be on a team of gi versus no-gi.
40:40
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, like Craig's a degenerate in some ways, right?
40:44
SPEAKER_02: Like he tells you that every day on his Instagram and his YouTube, but he's also like a good person underneath, right?
40:51
SPEAKER_02: I actually think the same about Gordon too.
40:53
SPEAKER_02: Like, I think Gordon says crazy things on the internet, but I think like Gordon is a good person in a lot of ways.
40:58
SPEAKER_02: He helps his students a lot at the gym.
41:00
SPEAKER_02: He's nice to me when I talk to him.
41:02
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't need to be on this like team of like one versus the other.
41:07
SPEAKER_02: And I just think that that's one of the big weird things we have in jujitsu, and people are always trying to figure out with Craig and his charity work.
41:13
SPEAKER_02: Like, is he this or is he that?
41:14
SPEAKER_02: And the answer is he's both.
41:16
SPEAKER_02: Like, and that's okay.
41:17
SPEAKER_02: I mean, personally, I think I'm both.
41:19
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't think I'm some perfect person, to be clear.
41:21
SPEAKER_02: I've made all these stupid mistakes and done a bunch of stuff I regret in my life, but you know, I'm also doing good stuff over here, and that's okay.
41:28
SPEAKER_02: I can be like partially degenerate and partially, you know, whatever, but also like do some good stuff, and it doesn't have to be a hundred percent on one team or the other.
41:37
SPEAKER_02: So I don't know.
41:38
SPEAKER_02: I think that's one of the big problems right now we have in jujitsu is like kind of a team thing, and everybody's very against each other, and everyone's searching for drama and searching for a reason to call someone out for being bad.
41:48
SPEAKER_02: And you know, did you you know what what what can I what can I complain about?
41:52
SPEAKER_02: UFC BJJ is taking a lot of that heat now, which is nice for me at Flow, where like, you know, they're kind of the new Goliath coming in, and people like, do you like UFC BJJ, or do you like Flow more, or do you like ADCC?
42:04
SPEAKER_02: And everybody can't just be like, Yeah, I just really like jujitsu.
42:07
SPEAKER_02: I like to watch all of it.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm totally with you on that.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: I actually want to talk about flow in a second, and I want to be respectful of your time.
42:14
SPEAKER_00: But just in terms of Guardian, do you have future plans, future goals?
42:18
SPEAKER_00: Do you stay involved in it?
42:19
SPEAKER_00: Are you trying to make it so that it doesn't need you?
42:22
SPEAKER_00: Is it just more of the same, or what's the future?
42:24
SPEAKER_00: What's the ideal future for Guardian?
42:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so first of all, you know, we have an amazing executive director named Calder Powers who runs the organization day to day.
42:33
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I would argue Calder does five different jobs.
42:36
SPEAKER_02: So he manages all the schools, all the payments to the schools, the onboarding of schools.
42:41
SPEAKER_02: He also runs our social media and all of the coordination with our photography and videography and things like that.
42:48
SPEAKER_02: So he's just doing a tremendous amount of stuff for one person.
42:52
SPEAKER_02: And again, goes back to that point that, you know, he's passionate about it and doesn't feel like it's a job.
42:56
SPEAKER_02: So without him, you know, I don't even know if I would continue to do this because he's been such a great guy that we've had in the organization for over 10 years now.
43:04
SPEAKER_02: He started as a volunteer and worked his way up, and that's like allowed us to do some so much of this stuff.
43:09
SPEAKER_02: You know, for me, I want to continue to kind of do what we're doing, obviously.
43:13
SPEAKER_02: I think we've kind of hit this, I'll call it product market fit in a way, for the tech people to understand where we've figured out this international model.
43:22
SPEAKER_02: We have a good way of doing it now.
43:24
SPEAKER_02: We're able to do it very efficiently and cost-effectively.
43:26
SPEAKER_02: So I don't see any reason why we won't keep adding international programs around the world over the coming years.
43:33
SPEAKER_02: I think we'll probably do like one or two major projects every year, like we did in Peru over the last few years.
43:39
SPEAKER_02: So maybe it's like building a six-figure school in some country, and that'll be sort of our staple project.
43:45
SPEAKER_02: While we maybe add 10 different academies, let's say, around the world each year.
43:49
SPEAKER_02: You know, but but we don't have a growth plan in the sense that we don't have a number to hit, so it has to be the right thing.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: We don't have to bring on 20 new academies to hit the board's growth plan, right?
43:59
SPEAKER_02: We don't have to.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: raise a certain amount of money to stay in business.
44:02
SPEAKER_02: So we want to do everything very intelligently and and just make sure like I never want to become one of those nonprofits that, like you said, is better at marketing than actually making an impact.
44:13
SPEAKER_02: You know, that's when I'm going to take a step back and say, well, we're going to stop raising money because we're going to get back to like actually making the impact, not marketing, if you will, right?
44:21
SPEAKER_02: So I think right now we're actually doing a pretty good job of doing both.
44:24
SPEAKER_02: I think the marketing's pretty good mostly because of Calder.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: People are hearing about us because of our partnerships with Craig and, you know, these other people, but I do want to just make sure that growth is, you know, the right type of growth, right?
44:37
SPEAKER_02: And we're really supporting the schools.
44:38
SPEAKER_02: And also I don't want to go support new schools if our existing schools start floundering, meaning like the people who have been with us for five or six years, when they hit a bumpy road, I want to be able to support them and make sure we can fund what they want to do, not just be onto the next one so we can put another win on the chalkboard and say, oh, we got our 37th school and we have a school like Baltimore or LA or Connecticut or whatever that's actually like needing needing help from us.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I hear you saying you don't want to just grow for growth's sake, grow on paper or grow whatever.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: You have a mission, you care about this mission and you want to protect that mission and you want it to be done well.
45:11
SPEAKER_00: And if that if it can be expanded, it gets expanded but you want it to be done well.
45:15
SPEAKER_00: I'm right with you on that.
45:17
SPEAKER_00: Can we talk about flow grappling?
45:18
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
45:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
45:20
SPEAKER_00: You've been there what general manager for about a year, something like that?
45:23
SPEAKER_00: Like 16 months.
45:25
SPEAKER_00: My my connection with flow grappling is I do still compete, even at my ripe old age, about to turn 64.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: And I really appreciate it was always a frustration for me, first of all, not to be able to see my own matches after the fact, you know, to have to get somebody there to videotape or whatever.
45:42
SPEAKER_00: So the fact that there is, you know, technical things could go wrong, but most of the time all the matches are being recorded.
45:49
SPEAKER_00: So I can go back and see my own match, I really appreciate that.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: And that I can, which I sometimes do, I don't always do it, if I see who my first competitors are going to be to go kind of scout them out.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: Just out of curious how do they start?
46:01
SPEAKER_00: What should I expect?
46:03
SPEAKER_00: I find that really, really valuable.
46:04
SPEAKER_00: And that is basically the entirety of what I do on Flow Grappling.
46:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's a lot of other functionality but to me that's worth it.
46:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm happy with it.
46:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm really glad that it exists.
46:12
SPEAKER_00: So you know thank you for that.
46:15
SPEAKER_00: I wonder do you see it having a role for non-competitors?
46:20
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm a competitor that's really good.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: Well what would you like what is flow grappling right now and what would you like it to be for people who are not necessarily themselves competing?
46:29
SPEAKER_02: I think that I'm going to be like brutally brutally honest here, you know, and maybe get myself in a little bit of trouble, but first of all, flow grappling is part of flow sports, right?
46:42
SPEAKER_02: And Flowsports has 22 or so different sports that it supports about seven of which we would consider priority verticals.
46:50
SPEAKER_02: So that would be like racing and hockey and wrestling and cheer track and field and grappling is is one of them.
46:56
SPEAKER_02: I think I forgot one, but Flow's a really good company and the the fact that it's able to basically combine resources from a lot of these different sports to have a back end that allows a lot of this to happen, right?
47:10
SPEAKER_02: Meaning it doesn't have to build out a separate office space and a separate podcast studio and a separate infrastructure for each of these different sports because it can share some of those things across the different sports, right?
47:22
SPEAKER_02: And the truth is grappling flow grappling is really my real nonprofit.
47:29
SPEAKER_02: And I say that because people think that flow grappling is this big bad company that's charging this annual or monthly membership to watch jujitsu.
47:39
SPEAKER_02: And the truth is the way flow works is it takes your membership money that you pay your subscription your yearly subscription you pay which now is I think down to like$120.
47:50
SPEAKER_02: So it comes out to 10 bucks a month if you pay annually and it turns around and hands ADCC IBJGF fight to win finishers Long Island Jiu Jitsu Network BJJ Stars Polaris it turns around and hands them money and also produces some of their events so when you have 55 match running at Masters Worlds to see your match as you said flow is actually paying for all of that to happen on top of whatever the rights fee is to work with that partner.
48:23
SPEAKER_02: And so it doesn't you know it's a very hard business to run because jujitsu is not like a massively giant sport.
48:34
SPEAKER_02: And so we have a lot of costs that go into running these events or a lot of rights fees that go into buying the bigger stuff like let's say an ADCC worlds.
48:44
SPEAKER_02: And so at the end of the day I honestly believe that if Flow didn't have kind of the backing of this larger company just to support the overall infrastructure I'm not even sure it could really be a standalone business, right?
48:56
SPEAKER_02: And I think that that's how kind of generous the company is with you know make making sure that they're supporting the the grappling ecosystem and make sure that they're not you know charging$500 a month and they're charging a rate that's actually$120 a year or$10 a month that people can afford.
49:14
SPEAKER_02: And I just think that you know we need to do a better job of explaining how flow grappling works to the market.
49:20
SPEAKER_02: And we need to make people realize that hey you're investing$1,000 a month in your jujitsu because you have a gym fee, you have your gis you have your special supplements you take you travel to tournaments you have hotels you take privates you go to seminars and all of a sudden you see this$10 a month thing and you're like oh my God it's so expensive.
49:40
SPEAKER_02: And we need to shift that to people saying like oh this is an investment in the whole community and this is an investment back to your question either in watching jujitsu and getting better and supporting the community that way andor my own jujitsu so I can watch my matches my kids' matches my teammates' matches because if I don't pay this small fee that all this stuff goes away right and or it's you know can incredibly degraded because maybe somebody does it in a much sloppier less cohesive manner.
50:10
SPEAKER_02: So that's my tangent if you will of like what flow is and how we need to do a better job explaining to the world how it works because I don't think most people know.
50:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah I didn't know about that.
50:20
SPEAKER_00: But to be honest with you, it sounds like maybe someone has raised a concern about the fee or whatever.
50:26
SPEAKER_00: That that thought has never crossed my mind.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: Like you say I pay the annual thing.
50:29
SPEAKER_00: I don't even compete that many times a year these days mainly world championships or something local but it's still useful it's useful to me.
50:35
SPEAKER_00: And of course what you said when you look at the cost for me to get to a tournament especially Masters Worlds I was just there.
50:41
SPEAKER_00: And you know hotel or you know just all those costs like to have a$10 a month thing so I could see my damn matches and understand what the hell happened or watch all my friends who were on mats that I couldn't see.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean that's just I don't know that's a no-brainer for me.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: But obviously maybe somebody has an issue with it.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: And in fact as I was asking you the question about what does flow grappling do for people who are not necessarily competitors I was of course thinking jujitsu people are not competitors.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: I have a product idea you can throw throw it away if you want but I do have a product idea.
51:15
SPEAKER_00: The question I get all the time when I say oh I'm going to a jujitsu competition I generally don't say a world championship because that sounds like amazing and there's obviously no there's no anybody can walk into the world championship.
51:27
SPEAKER_00: But so I say I'm going to a competition and lots of people I know are always saying oh is it televised?
51:32
SPEAKER_00: Can I watch it?
51:33
SPEAKER_00: And I say yeah it's on flow grappling but none of them ever go because they're not going to sign up just to do that.
51:38
SPEAKER_00: But if I could buy them a even even for 10 bucks an easy way to hand out to all my friends and family say hey I just paid for this for you here's how you do it go watch it.
51:49
SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of the people would actually watch it they'd certainly feel pressure to so that there's a product idea some way to just sign up just to watch one tournament because you're someone's mom or you're someone's brother or someone's cousin I think that would be useful for me.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it'd be useful for anybody else.
52:03
SPEAKER_00: But I think it's a good idea.
52:04
SPEAKER_02: It's good timing too I mean we haven't really done a lot with grappling tech the last few years because we've been doing a big wrestling revamp within the company and the idea is that some of the wrestling technology will be able to be ported over to grappling.
52:16
SPEAKER_02: And so actually I'm working with the product team a lot coming up in Q4 to sort of outline what our 2027 product strategy is going to be.
52:26
SPEAKER_02: And you know for me I don't think we need to rebuild a lot of the stuff that's out there in the market.
52:31
SPEAKER_02: I think that we need to basically do things like what you're talking about.
52:33
SPEAKER_02: We need to make it easier for people to watch their matches we need to have less invasive ads in some of the matches some of the ways that you know when people click through the site they can still get hit with certain ads at certain times which I don't particularly love the way we do that.
52:46
SPEAKER_02: And there's just like a lot of sort of archiving issues and athlete profiles there's just some things that we need to kind of clean up and do a better job of and you know I don't think we need to build the world's greatest you know technology the the late the thing we just need to make it easier for somebody like Dave to like you said watch your matches maybe figure out a way where your family can watch your matches or your friends that you train with you know even if even if it's not live right even if to your point like you could buy a guest pass and that allows you to send your match for 10 bucks to 10 different people to watch after the fact.
53:15
SPEAKER_02: They don't need to sit around all day and you know watch you be 45 minutes late to your mat to compete right but if you could give it to them the next day even that would be cool.
53:24
SPEAKER_02: So yeah I think that's a really really good idea.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: I'll be the first to sign up for that.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: You know you mentioned ads I don't know that I notice it on my phone.
53:31
SPEAKER_00: So maybe the ads are served differently on my desktop computer.
53:35
SPEAKER_00: But yeah it's a little bit annoying I mean I I'm I totally if you're paying for service and there's ads for me it becomes a little bit of an issue I wasn't even going to bring this up and I'm not complaining.
53:43
SPEAKER_00: But because I'm clicking quickly if I want to watch other people's fights and I just want to see how their fight started I'll be jumping from fight to fight to fight and I know it's like every three things or something I hit an ad.
53:53
SPEAKER_00: So those are the times when I'm just like oh yeah now I have to sit through the ad.
53:56
SPEAKER_00: But you know you got to do what you got to do.
53:58
SPEAKER_00: It's a business whatever.
53:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah I mean it's it's it's something I'm going to fix.
54:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm already working on it so that's good for that and I'm glad that you're I'm glad that you're there and I'm glad that you're sort of looking out for that.
54:11
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's good that you're a jiu person, right?
54:14
SPEAKER_00: So that you kind of know the community you're coming from this too.
54:16
SPEAKER_00: You get us, you are us.
54:18
SPEAKER_00: So it's nice to know that one of us is there sitting in your seat.
54:22
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk a little bit about some of the actual competition formats that are out there now.
54:27
SPEAKER_00: Because you've got who's number one which I think is from your company.
54:31
SPEAKER_00: Yes I think it's really cool.
54:34
SPEAKER_00: Are you do you like that rules format?
54:37
SPEAKER_00: Is there a format that you would a format tweak or rules tweak that you would like I know it doesn't have like the EBI overtime so there it still can go to a judge.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: I actually just had a long interview with Eddie Bravo who's a good friend of mine and it was very interesting talking to him.
54:52
SPEAKER_00: He's quite colorful.
54:54
SPEAKER_02: What are your thoughts on the rules for who's number one and anything you'd like to see different I mean I can go back to my earlier comment first of all I do enjoy all the different formats and sort of settings I watch all of them I like the rounds at certain places to some extent but I do think for for me if I could have my holy grail it would be who's number one rules and kind of timing but in the pit setting pit meaning like what CJI uses is the pit not the UFC bowl and I think that the reason is I believe that a lot more submissions happen when people get tired and a lot more comebacks happen like you saw with Vic Luke Griffith and Kaynan Duarte at ADCC.
55:39
SPEAKER_02: The thing that made that match so good was Luke was getting beat most of the match and then he came back.
55:44
SPEAKER_02: Now if that was a round match that probably wouldn't have happened Kainen would have got to rest in between rounds and recover and you know John Donaher and I talk about this a lot.
55:53
SPEAKER_02: It's like that 15 minute format it does allow kind of the best jujitsu to come out it also allows people to get gas and kind of give up or get tired whatever whatever happens in the match.
56:03
SPEAKER_02: So I do think from sort of like a pure jujitsu standpoint that's probably as good of a rule set as you can have anything past 15 minutes I think is too long.
56:11
SPEAKER_02: But I I put out a post the other day and it got a lot of positive traction which is like I think we need to shorten the events and what I have what happens when I go to an event is like the beginning is really exciting.
56:22
SPEAKER_02: The day before is excited everybody's excited about it.
56:25
SPEAKER_02: Maybe there's like a killer match in the middle that happens and then by the time you get to the main event the one that you spent all the money for everybody wants to go home.
56:34
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know like I go to bed at like 8 30 now like I'm in bed.
56:38
SPEAKER_02: I'm an old guy right and I go to these tournaments and they start at seven o'clock or eight o'clock or whatever six o'clock and at 10 o'clock there's still a match left to go and I have to like get home decompress and I'm going to sleep at like one o'clock that night which means a lot of the kids can't really go there as well.
56:55
SPEAKER_02: So I just think like these things don't need to be four or five hours.
56:58
SPEAKER_02: They need to be like 90 minutes to two hours and we need to put the best matches on people just don't care about 99.99% of jujitsu.
57:08
SPEAKER_02: They only care about certain matchups and high stakes things you know at the highest level obviously the local people care about like the local fight or whatever that's happening in the the local arena and the the fans come out and support that.
57:20
SPEAKER_02: That's different but like for who's number one or UFC BJJ or Aiga or Polaris like nobody cares about the local stuff is just to sell tickets locally and then we create these long drawn out shows that people get get bored about.
57:35
SPEAKER_02: And I think what I'm going to do for the next who's number one is like really compress it and say like here's the people who are fighting here's the stakes of why it matters here's the story of like this is why these four people are the best in the world right now and why they're all fighting.
57:49
SPEAKER_02: And like we're not going to put a bunch of filler on there.
57:51
SPEAKER_02: In fact you're only going to be here 90 minutes.
57:53
SPEAKER_02: So it'll be harder to sell local tickets but we're not in the local ticket selling business right we're in the streaming business of entertaining the world with jujitsu.
58:02
SPEAKER_02: So we're going to change a lot of stuff up that way.
58:03
SPEAKER_00: Sorry I'm kind of all over the place on no no no no no no this is really this is really interesting.
58:09
SPEAKER_00: You could do like UFCs have the like the pre-fight cards or whatever.
58:13
SPEAKER_00: That could be the local thing.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: So that starts at four o'clock you go see your cousin and your daughter or whatever that stuff happens but maybe the coverage doesn't then happen until something changes when the real show starts.
58:26
SPEAKER_00: So I guess if you're trying to sell local tickets you could still have those local fights happening.
58:29
SPEAKER_02: It just doesn't have to be what the part of the yeah but then the problem is the people honestly they they come and they they watch their kid I saw this with the WNO recently we had like four of the best youth in the world fighting as a a kind of a different WNO concept and one of the kids had like 30 people that came another one had a bunch and by the kids match they left and like the main event half the seats were immediately empty for so it does create I think a different problem because you're right you will sell all those tickets locally they will buy 10 tickets for that family or 20 tickets for that family.
59:02
SPEAKER_02: So you check the box that you sold the seats but I want to see like the energy peaking for the main event.
59:07
SPEAKER_02: I want to see every seat full for the main event not peaking peaking early if that makes sense.
59:14
SPEAKER_00: No that's that's a good point.
59:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean life is complicated and you've got different goals that you're dealing with yeah you get you kind of have to find the best path forward.
59:22
SPEAKER_00: I know you talked about the late night stuff fight to win events always are quite heavily localized and when I go to support I mentioned David Mitchell he's usually the the last fight because he's the main guy and yeah it's like 11 o'clock like I want to go I got to get up and go to work the next day.
59:40
SPEAKER_00: So I totally feel for you there.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: And it that's a very hyper local event where these are people that mostly you haven't heard of and and I get why they stack that but that wouldn't be my preference for a big event like what you're talking about.
59:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah I mean fight to win is one of the few events I'd say that actually works in jujitsu and works meaning like is economical and that's because Seth puts like 70 how many fights run a fight to win like 70 a lot and everybody's selling their own tickets and yeah it's a lot.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_02: And that's why it works right he has like very controlled venue costs.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_02: He gets people to sell the tickets for him he doesn't offer this big prize money but when I deal with people with WNO like some of these people want six figures to come out and just do jujitsu for five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes max right and I was talking to the one guy in Austin I don't know maybe six seven months ago and I was like hey I think we might do a WNO in Austin on this date do you want to fight and he was like yeah I want$170,000 and I was like I was like how about this?
1:00:40
SPEAKER_02: You're gonna go to the gym and you're gonna train really hard six rounds today for free or you could just drive over to the stadium or arena whatever it's called venue 15 minutes from your house and you could compete for 15 minutes and we'll give you$40,000 and he was like nah$100,000 minimum and I was just like thinking in my head like this is so it's becoming very out of whack where obviously Gordon got this six figure contract with Flo back in the day to do who's number one but Gordon sold like incredibly well because he was incredibly divisive and he created this love him or hate him thing.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_02: The problem with David Mitchell I like David Mitchell by the way problem with David Mitchell is no one hates David Mitchell.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_02: He's a great guy six people love David Mitchell and the rest of the world doesn't care about David Mitchell right there's a million david mitchells who are really good at jujitsu but they just don't no one cares right you have to be dominant and have a personality for people to care right and that's what Gordon had that magic secret sauce for.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_02: And so I think what has happened is a lot of the other people have come along since Gordon and been like oh well you know Gordon got paid this so I deserve this but what they don't understand is that Gordon wasn't 2x what they were as far as like people caring to tune in or buy subscriptions to watch or buy a pay-per-view whatever you want to call it he was a hundred X or a thousand X different right and you know what was worth a hundred thousand dollars to pay Gordon is literally worth$400 to pay you even though you're a top 10 or 20 jujitsu guy in the world.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_02: And that's the sad reality right and now everything's kind of spreading out onto the fleep free platform.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_02: So you have all these UFC BGJ was free on YouTube.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_02: You know you have PGF free on YouTube you have CJI free on YouTube you have Aiga free on YouTube.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_02: So like you have all these these things that are pulling certain athletes into different sort of free places which I think makes it even harder for the super fights and that's why I'm constantly at flow saying hey like let's do the super fight stuff but let's be smart about how we do it there's six million grapplers in the world like Dave who really care about Dave's jiu jitsu journey and like you said that$120 a year when you get to watch your own matches or watch your teammates compete or your coach or get better in some way or scout your opponents before the tournament there's six million people of which maybe let's call it three million people want to do those kind of things.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_02: So that's a really big market compared to like how many people want to watch other random people do jujitsu.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of like the direction that I'm like pushing a lot of and and look look UFCs already went to the participatory tournaments.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_02: I mean they have more data than anybody in the world so why did they start the UFC BJJ and like a year later say shit we need to start participatory tournaments because they see the same thing which is there's no economics to putting on these big super fights like they they're losing money putting on these big UFC BJJs I guarantee it.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_02: There's just no way I know what people get paid and I know what a production costs to do and there's no way they're making money doing these things right so they're running they're running a nonprofit if if you will right or a charity putting on these big events trying to entertain fans and they're trying to figure it out now doing the UFC BJJ opens now they're moving back to Fight Pass or they move back to Fight Pass for the last event trying to generate revenue but that's like nothing right like imagine it's five bucks a month or something and imagine they sold 10 00 pay-per-views for their last event that's$500 that doesn't even cover like a third of the cost of the main event.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah so where's the rest of the money coming from so that's the trick like everybody in jujitsu thinks all these companies are big and bad and making all this money but the truth is like just look at the math it doesn't really math out.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah you know I'm old and I started Brazilian jujitsu several years before the UFC so I've just watched I mean it's interesting to me something that began as a fighting art that was all about winning one-on-one fights and the first UFC's which was basically just a comparison of styles to promote Gracie Jiu Jitsu and it did a great job of that.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: And then how the sport of the UFC what that went through almost died whatever and the adding rules both to make it safe and palatable for regulators or whatever but also to make it more exciting for fans right and I've certainly talked to other people about how having rounds like you say is good for strikers because even if you get on the ground just hang out and then you'll stand up.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_00: So the rules there's always rules there always was rules and the rules are going to shape what happens on the map.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_00: That's just the way it's always going to be and how the UFC started to become very popular and became like the most popular sport and interesting to me I totally get that because it's bloody it's everything that sports fans might want to see it's interesting to me the popularity of submission grappling which I would think is mostly for people who do grappling but like you say millions of people do a form of grappling now.
1:05:47
SPEAKER_00: And so that's become a really popular spectator sport, but it feeds into all these things you're talking about where there are stars who are stars because they're legitimately outrageously good, of course, but because of the personality And of course, UFC had that too.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_00: Those were the people who sell tickets.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_00: Diaz Brothers, you know, they're fun.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, or you're Chelson or people like that.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: Like they're fun.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: And so you watch them.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: It does create sort of a separate out classes.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_00: Like you've got the superstars who can sell the tickets and they're going to make big paydays.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_00: You've got other people who are legitimately great, maybe even just as great.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_00: We've never heard of them.
1:06:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think ultimately, for me, all of the watching of tournaments, it's interesting to me, but it's only interesting to me because I might learn something new, see something new that's emerging.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: Personally, I'm only interested in my and and my friends, not just me personally, but I'm interested in the growth of jujitsu.
1:06:41
SPEAKER_00: How do I become a better grappler?
1:06:42
SPEAKER_00: How do my friends become a greater grappler?
1:06:44
SPEAKER_00: That is why I'm watching any of these things.
1:06:46
SPEAKER_00: It's not purely for entertainment, but I'm probably weird.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_00: There are probably a lot of people who just want to be entertained, and you've got to show them something that's entertaining.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't think that's I think that's like a big failure, to be honest.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_02: Uh, our misconception is I don't think jujitsu is about entertaining non-ji-jitsu people, meaning like these big super fights.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people have said that, you know, hey, we need to make this for a non-jujitsu.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_02: I can tell you, because I see all the numbers, I talk to every big promoter out there, it's hard enough to get the jujitsu people to watch.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_02: We we have a big event on a Friday night or something, and like I'll have like four of my friends on Friday morning, like, what's that post you just posted?
1:07:23
SPEAKER_02: What event are you at?
1:07:24
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, oh, I'm at the whatever tournament tonight, right?
1:07:26
SPEAKER_02: And they don't know.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_02: They don't know, they just don't care.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_02: So if you can't get the black belts and the people who train four days a week to watch events, how the hell are you gonna get the you know, the wives of those people or the kids of those people who don't do jujitsu to care?
1:07:40
SPEAKER_02: You're just not.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_02: So I think we just need to focus on actually getting a product out that jujitsu people care about.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_02: And you know, there's six million plus people grappling in the world now.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_02: Like, how do you get a small percentage of those people to to tune in?
1:07:55
SPEAKER_02: You know, some of these events, I mean, look at a UFC when they were on YouTube, right?
1:07:59
SPEAKER_02: They were getting like 17,000 streams for their event.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_02: I think CJI peaked at like 150,000 or so, 170,000 at one point.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_02: I think it was the very peak of the live streaming of CJI.
1:08:12
SPEAKER_02: Like you would think that half the grapplers in the world would be watching that tournament.
1:08:16
SPEAKER_00: They're not watching it live, right?
1:08:18
SPEAKER_00: So they're gonna go back and watch it after, I assume.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_02: For most of them, but I'm saying like the biggest ones, like an ADCC or a CJI, right?
1:08:25
SPEAKER_02: That the the big, big stuff.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you'd think it would be, I would think it would be bigger numbers than that, frankly.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I just I don't know.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_02: I would say like 90% of the people I talked to, and I saw a really great video from Kivon Gonzalez about this the other day, who owns Bodega Jiu Jitsu, and he was just saying, talking to people at the gyms, like they didn't even know the biggest tournament in the world was going on a few weeks ago.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_02: They never heard of Gianni Grippo who trains with him.
1:08:50
SPEAKER_02: You know, he's basically talking to them, like, of course, you know, ADCC last week, you know, oh Gianni Grippo and this and that, and they're like literally just eyes glassed over.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_02: They they've never heard of any of the things he just mentioned.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_02: And to me, that's like kind of crazy.
1:09:04
SPEAKER_02: Like you could be doing jujitsu for four years and you don't know what ADCC is, or you don't know if you've never heard Gianni's name or anything like that.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_02: But it just shows you, unlike you and I, there's a lot of people who are like watching Zero Jiu Jitsu.
1:09:16
SPEAKER_00: That's a really good point.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_00: For a lot of people, I'm just thinking about this now as we talk, and I'm not like a super fan either.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm not a super fan of the UFC.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_00: I watch if a friend of mine is fighting or something, but uh I think I'm just thinking this through for most people who walk into their local club to train submission grappling or jujitsu, they're going there for I guess maybe self-defense, they're going there for health, they're going there because it's fun, all the reasons that people go and train jujitsu.
1:09:44
SPEAKER_00: They're probably there's probably a good percentage of them, to your point, that are not viewing themselves as connecting into a sport that's bigger than their group of friends and their teacher on the mat because they're getting what they want from there.
1:09:57
SPEAKER_00: They're not chasing the latest, greatest technique or anything like that.
1:10:01
SPEAKER_00: Jiu Jitsu for them is the community.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
1:10:04
SPEAKER_00: It is that small thing.
1:10:05
SPEAKER_00: So it would be an interesting product challenge to say, okay, so how do you bridge that?
1:10:11
SPEAKER_00: How do you take someone whose little family is why they're going to jujitsu, and how do you provide a value for them to cause them to be interested in doing something digitally outside of their Saturday morning class, which is the whole reason that they're going.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_00: It's an interesting challenge.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for sure.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_00: You've been really generous with your time.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_00: I want to wrap up.
1:10:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm impressed with you that you're a person, you've said a couple times that you're not the top jujitsu person in the world or whatever you're have a lot of humility around that.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_00: And I just have to officially say, and I'll say this to anybody who will listen, you know, I have world championships that are all at my age division.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_00: I never won in the adult.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: So that means, like, you know, I joke like take someone's medication away.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_00: It's not really like that.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_00: I even at the Master Seven, if you're competing in Master Seven, you probably kept yourself in pretty good shape.
1:11:00
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of guys, a lot of testosterone.
1:11:02
SPEAKER_00: So there's still a challenge, but just there to be real for a minute.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_00: We're all sort of just where we're at in jujitsu.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_00: We do it because we like doing it.
1:11:12
SPEAKER_00: That's just what it is.
1:11:13
SPEAKER_00: And it's nothing really more than that.
1:11:15
SPEAKER_00: But I'm impressed that you have taken an interest in jujitsu and you have found these ways, besides your own personal enjoyment of training on Saturday morning, as I mentioned, of doing these things that really are great in the world, like Guardian Gym and all the influence you're having on kids, or now working with flow grappling and wrestling, if I pardon the pun, with these questions of how to turn this digital thing into something that's really useful for people like ourselves.
1:11:41
SPEAKER_00: Just what a cool way to project yourself out into the world of jujitsu beyond simply, you know, winning a local tournament or something like that.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_00: So kudos to you.
1:11:50
SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
1:11:51
unknown: Yeah.
1:11:51
SPEAKER_02: It's by desperation, right?
1:11:53
SPEAKER_02: It's a lot easier to create something new and change the change the rules than get really good at the thing that I'm supposed to get good at.
1:12:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, look, we can all only get as good as we can get, and we measure that goodness against other people.
1:12:07
SPEAKER_00: That is the fundamental thing about competition, right?
1:12:09
SPEAKER_00: You could be amazing.
1:12:10
SPEAKER_00: You could have improved a thousand X from the day you stepped on the mat.
1:12:13
SPEAKER_00: But if the guy next to you is just improved a thousand one X, he might beat you, and it might be because he's got better attributes, it might be because he's working harder, it might be because he's on testosterone, but whatever it is, you can't judge, you can't ultimately judge how successful you are by if you beat somebody else.
1:12:32
SPEAKER_00: I just you can't.
1:12:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's funny you say that because I mean it's kind of the same thing we were talking about with poker earlier.
1:12:37
SPEAKER_02: I train a lot down at CoyoteRas and I go to the comp class at one o'clock when I can, if I don't have a meeting or something at that point and sneak in an hour of training.
1:12:46
SPEAKER_02: And mostly I do it out of like convenience because I can get home for my kids, you know, after school and get get my work done in the morning.
1:12:54
SPEAKER_02: It just kind of works for my schedule versus a 10 a.m.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_02: class or a 7 p.m.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_02: class.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_02: But you know, when you're training there and it's Mason Fowler and Yuri and Kyo and Joao and Mateus, and then now Mika Galval's training there, you know, you kind of leave there every day and you're like, I sort of like I am awful.
1:13:12
SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, I mean, I go like literally like most days I win like zero rounds, like straight up, like zero.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_02: And you know, like my my highlight of the day will be like I almost got something on someone, right?
1:13:23
SPEAKER_02: That's like my my like wow, you did great today.
1:13:26
SPEAKER_02: But I train in other places, and then I go to Poland or something for ADCC, and I'm training with some guys from Europe, and I'm like, wait, like I'm not awful at jujitsu after all, like I'm just awful at the coyote comp class, right?
1:13:41
SPEAKER_02: Of course.
1:13:41
SPEAKER_02: So I'm actually quite average.
1:13:43
SPEAKER_02: I'm obviously not beating everybody, but I'm not not getting beat up by everybody either, right?
1:13:47
SPEAKER_02: It's just something in the middle.
1:13:48
SPEAKER_02: So it is it is funny kind of who you surround yourself with and jujitsu of how you feel about how good you are or not, right?
1:13:56
SPEAKER_02: And at the end of the day, I just don't think it matters, right?
1:13:58
SPEAKER_02: Nobody, just like I said before, nobody cares to watch random people do jujitsu.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_02: Nobody gives a shit about how good you are at jujitsu.
1:14:06
SPEAKER_02: And if you won or lost, or if you tapped, all they remember is like, are you a good person to train with?
1:14:11
SPEAKER_02: And when you walk in the room, do they walk the other way?
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: Do they want to train with you?
1:14:15
SPEAKER_02: Do they enjoy having you around?
1:14:17
SPEAKER_02: And I really probably shouldn't be in that class to be honest.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_02: I think Kaio is like generous and lets me train there, but I think it's because he likes me, right?
1:14:25
SPEAKER_02: That's the that's literally all it is.
1:14:27
SPEAKER_02: If he didn't like me, he would just be like, hey, this isn't the class for you.
1:14:30
SPEAKER_02: But he likes me and he likes having me around and he likes joking with me.
1:14:34
SPEAKER_02: So it kind of works for that reason.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_02: And are you a likable person who makes other people around you happy, or are you someone who makes them want to duck every role with you?
1:14:43
SPEAKER_02: And I want to be the person that everybody goes, yeah, like Ben sucks, but you know what?
1:14:47
SPEAKER_02: Like, he's cool, and I like hanging out with them and we have a good time.
1:14:51
SPEAKER_02: And it's you know, somewhat competitive, right?
1:14:53
SPEAKER_02: It's not, it's not a total waste of my six minutes, but you know, don't hurt them, don't be a jerk, don't crank a submission, tap when you should tap, right?
1:15:03
SPEAKER_02: Just like the basic stuff, and then people, people like you.
1:15:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree totally.
1:15:07
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I like Kayo a lot.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_00: I've known her for a long time, and I'm sure he enjoys having you in that class.
1:15:13
SPEAKER_00: Listen, I get the same stuff.
1:15:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm training at black sheep.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_00: I've got wolf, and a lot of the local San Francisco area, Bay Area black belts come in there on Saturdays and you know, they're nice to me because I'm old, but tons of guys there are better than me.
1:15:26
SPEAKER_00: And to me, I have this saying, I think it comes from like the Talmud or something, better to be the head of better to be the tail of a lion than the head of the sheep.
1:15:33
SPEAKER_00: And that's always what I'm doing.
1:15:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to be the worst guy on a great mat.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_00: I would much rather be that than the best guy on a shitty mat.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_00: And you like you say, you're getting better.
1:15:43
SPEAKER_00: You don't realize you're getting better until you go onto a normal mat somewhere.
1:15:46
SPEAKER_00: And this happens to me all the time too when I travel, and it's like, oh yeah, like I train with really, really good guys.
1:15:51
SPEAKER_00: But at the end, like you say, none of it matters.
1:15:54
SPEAKER_00: It matters is if you're having fun and you're not getting injured and all the stuff that you said about just being a good partner to train with, that that's what it's all about.
1:16:00
SPEAKER_00: And you are always getting better.
1:16:02
SPEAKER_00: Listen, and I can also tell you, as someone who is well over the hill, right, in terms of my training, I am going to get worse.
1:16:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to have to get worse because my body cannot do things.
1:16:13
SPEAKER_00: I already have lots of things that I don't do, or lots of techniques where I will abandon this, and I just have to look at someone and say, dude, the 40-year-old Dave would have spanked you for the thing you just did, but you're getting away with it with the 64-year-old Dave, and that's fine.
1:16:26
SPEAKER_00: So, like you said, I just adjust my victory conditions a little bit.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_00: For me, a victory condition is always I didn't get injured today.
1:16:34
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
1:16:34
SPEAKER_00: That's a great day in jujitsu.
1:16:36
SPEAKER_00: I had fun, right?
1:16:37
SPEAKER_00: But it might be that guy didn't get me this time, or I got off this one sweep on a blue belt or something that I've been working on.
1:16:43
SPEAKER_00: It's been hard to do.
1:16:44
SPEAKER_00: So those are my victories.
1:16:45
SPEAKER_00: It's not who wins or how many taps in the six-minute match because that's just an arbitrary thing.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_00: I know what I'm working on, and those will be my victory conditions.
1:16:54
SPEAKER_00: And the main one is I just didn't get injured and had a good time.
1:16:56
SPEAKER_02: You're the guy that I want to be, right?
1:16:58
SPEAKER_02: I want to be 64 years old, still training and staying in great shape and staying connected to the next younger generation because you've got something in common that you can actually do with them.
1:17:10
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you are, in my opinion, a definition of jujitsu success, right?
1:17:16
SPEAKER_02: And I think that unfortunately for a lot of the really young people, like you saw that kid, I think it was UFC BJJ a couple days ago, got his arm snapped in a Kimura like broken in half.
1:17:24
SPEAKER_02: And I'm just like, I mean, how incredibly dumb, you know, like how how incredibly dumb to not get to train for a year now and pay a bunch of money for surgery and negatively affect your career because you didn't want to tap to a clear submission.
1:17:42
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I assume that's what happened.
1:17:43
SPEAKER_02: I don't, I mean, I don't know, maybe it got put on super fast.
1:17:45
SPEAKER_02: But anyway, my point is like you, if people, I think more people should look at it and say, like, this is the ultimate goal of jujitsu, being 64, 74, whatever it is, and still training and be healthy.
1:17:59
SPEAKER_02: And I'm gonna be a 20-year-old and I'm gonna shoot for that.
1:18:01
SPEAKER_02: And like, most of these kids come up to me and they're like, Ben, how do I make a career out of jujitsu?
1:18:05
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, just don't like make jujitsu your fun thing.
1:18:08
SPEAKER_02: Go open a school.
1:18:09
SPEAKER_02: If you really love jujitsu and you want to be a career, open a gym.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_02: Get 300 members paying you$250 a month.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_02: That's a good living.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_02: Like, and then if you want to take a super fight like David Mitchell likes to do, doesn't David work at Google or you know what?
1:18:23
SPEAKER_00: Up until recently, and he's opening a gym up here in San Rafael.
1:18:26
SPEAKER_02: But the point is, like, you know, that's a good to me, that's a good way to do jujitsu.
1:18:30
SPEAKER_02: You know, work at Google, get a paycheck, work at, you know, whatever, be an electrician.
1:18:35
SPEAKER_02: I don't care, make a living, and then go do these like little fun super fights, you know, do your local fight to win, do whatever.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_02: And that's a great way to kind of get competition, get really good at the sport, but like not be reliant on just flying around the world to make$600 on a super fight.
1:18:53
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's you know, my advice for most of the people is like make jujitsu your hobby, make it fun.
1:18:58
SPEAKER_02: You can still compete, you can still go 100%, you can still win your medals, you can still do all these things, but like there's only a handful, like literally a handful, like five, 10, 15 people that are gonna make like a real living out of just like the competition side of super fight jujitsu.
1:19:14
SPEAKER_02: And I think if more people had the mentality that you were the definition of success, and hopefully in 20 years, because I'm 20 years younger than you, hopefully in 20 years, I'll be sitting in in there, and there'll be some young whippersnapper going, Oh, I want to be be like you because you know you're still training.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_02: And that's my goal.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_02: That's my goal for sure.
1:19:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I listen, I appreciate your saying that.
1:19:33
SPEAKER_00: I did a whole episode, you know, I do different on this show, Aegis Warrior Lab, I do interviews, but I also do what I call my life lessons, where I'm just talking about something I've learned that I think is useful in life.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: And I did one on specifically injury avoidance.
1:19:46
SPEAKER_00: But I think one of the biggest things is what you do already, which is just be cool, pick your partners well, like you don't have to train with the jerks, and you know, all the stuff you know, tap fast.
1:19:57
SPEAKER_00: But part of the just being cool and having good partners is if you put out a good energy, people put back a good energy right back to you.
1:20:03
SPEAKER_00: If you don't, you know, totally globalistic on people, they won't go ballistic on you.
1:20:08
SPEAKER_00: And it is all about fundamentally, longevity is about injury avoidance.
1:20:11
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
1:20:12
SPEAKER_00: Injuries will take you out.
1:20:13
SPEAKER_00: So don't get injured.
1:20:15
SPEAKER_00: For sure.
1:20:15
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's great talking with you, man.
1:20:17
SPEAKER_00: Yes, great talking with you too, Ben.
1:20:19
SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
1:20:20
SPEAKER_00: I will have links to everything in the show notes, and I really look forward to meeting you in person sometime and hopping on the map.
1:20:25
SPEAKER_00: It'll be fun.
1:20:25
SPEAKER_00: Sounds great.
1:20:26
SPEAKER_00: Take it easy on me.
1:20:28
SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Ben Kovacs.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_00: We'll have links to everything we discussed, including where you can make a donation to support the amazing work of Guardian in the show notes.
1:20:39
SPEAKER_00: Thanks to my team, Robbie, Phil, Kyle, Angela, Bill, and to Ryan Peach Turner, my podcast producer and chief editor, for your help.
1:20:48
SPEAKER_00: And thanks also to the show's sponsors and supporters.
1:20:51
SPEAKER_00: And you can see them on our supporters page at agelesswarriorlab.com.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please do take a moment to rate the show.
1:21:00
SPEAKER_00: That helps other people find us.
1:21:02
SPEAKER_00: Ben and I talked about longevity in BJJ, and I have a two-part episode on that, numbers 48 and 49.
1:21:10
SPEAKER_00: I also mentioned an episode I did on avoiding injury, and that was episode 28, and you can see that by clicking here.
1:21:18
SPEAKER_00: I'll be back next week with more lessons from the lab.
1:21:21
SPEAKER_00: And until then, keep developing your strength, your wisdom, and go out and do good in the world.