Drugged In Colombia, Escaping Jail & Defeating UFC Wrestling - Craig Jones
Chris Williamson (host), Craig Jones (guest), Narrator, Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Chris Williamson and Craig Jones, Drugged In Colombia, Escaping Jail & Defeating UFC Wrestling - Craig Jones explores craig Jones: Wild Global Adventures, Dark Realities, And Saving Jiu-Jitsu Craig Jones recounts a year of extreme travel and experiences, from being drugged in Colombia and nearly collapsing in Medellín to witnessing brutal tribal rituals and poverty in Ethiopia and Peru.
Craig Jones: Wild Global Adventures, Dark Realities, And Saving Jiu-Jitsu
Craig Jones recounts a year of extreme travel and experiences, from being drugged in Colombia and nearly collapsing in Medellín to witnessing brutal tribal rituals and poverty in Ethiopia and Peru.
Alongside the chaos, he details his growing charity work with the Guardian program, building jiu-jitsu schools and safe spaces for at-risk kids in places like Ethiopia, Peru, and Venezuela.
Jones explains his ambitions for CJI 2, a $1M team grappling event designed to rival ADCC, make jiu-jitsu more spectator-friendly, and prevent big organizations from monopolizing the sport.
He also discusses defeating wrestling in MMA strategy, reconciling with coach John Danaher, the business dynamics of Flow Grappling, and his vision for blending WWE-style storytelling with real grappling.
Key Takeaways
Travel to unstable regions carries real, often invisible risks.
Jones’ Medellín scopolamine incident and Venezuela off-grid stint show how quickly things can go wrong—even for experienced travelers—highlighting the need for trusted locals, security awareness, and strict limits on partying in high-risk areas.
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Effective charity work requires strong local partners and realistic expectations.
His work with the Guardian program in Ethiopia and Peru underscores that impact depends on vetted local leaders, anti-corruption navigation, and acknowledging that you can transform specific pockets of a community, not entire countries overnight.
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Storytelling is as critical as technique for growing niche sports.
Jones argues that grappling can match WWE or big MMA events in excitement if promoters invest heavily in narrative, rivalries, and spectacle—CJI’s pits, team formats, and personality-driven promotion are designed exactly for that.
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Monopolies in combat sports reduce athlete leverage and innovation.
He’s openly trying to prevent a single streaming or promotion giant from locking athletes into restrictive contracts, believing competition between platforms (Flow, ONE, UFC Fight Pass, CJI) is what forces better pay, rulesets, and production.
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In MMA, confidence built on real safety nets changes performance.
By giving fighters like Volkanovski and Jack Della robust grappling backstops, Jones helps them strike more freely; fear of the ground game diminishes once athletes trust their ability to survive, scramble, and stand back up.
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Technical evolution in jiu-jitsu follows rule sets and incentives.
From leg locks under EBI and ADCC to new pit-wrestling tactics in CJI, athletes innovate where rule structures create openings—whoever spots and builds around the next ‘hole in the meta’ can dominate for a few years.
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Personal chaos can coexist with deliberate, strategic career moves.
Despite the self-deprecating stories—being drugged, ketamine campfires, MS‑13 tattoo—Jones is clearly strategic: he leverages controversy to sell events, uses charity to reframe his brand, and turned a feud with Flow/ADCC into a lucrative partnership.
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Notable Quotes
“Anything’s exciting if there’s a storyline.”
— Craig Jones
“If you haven’t visited Africa, you don’t understand the scale of that continent.”
— Craig Jones
“I failed as an athlete, so the pivot would be as a promoter.”
— Craig Jones
“More fights have been lost due to under-confidence than overconfidence.”
— Craig Jones
“If fake grappling is one of the most entertaining things in the world, WWE, why can real grappling not be that?”
— Craig Jones
Questions Answered in This Episode
How do you personally reconcile the hedonistic, chaotic side of your travel with the very serious suffering you’ve seen in places like Ethiopia and Peru?
Craig Jones recounts a year of extreme travel and experiences, from being drugged in Colombia and nearly collapsing in Medellín to witnessing brutal tribal rituals and poverty in Ethiopia and Peru.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific guard, submission, or tactical innovations do you expect CJI’s team format and pit environment to create over the next few years?
Alongside the chaos, he details his growing charity work with the Guardian program, building jiu-jitsu schools and safe spaces for at-risk kids in places like Ethiopia, Peru, and Venezuela.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Where is the ethical line for you in using dark or controversial humor and storylines to promote grappling and raise money for charity?
Jones explains his ambitions for CJI 2, a $1M team grappling event designed to rival ADCC, make jiu-jitsu more spectator-friendly, and prevent big organizations from monopolizing the sport.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If one major organization did manage to monopolize professional grappling, what do you think would concretely change for up-and-coming athletes?
He also discusses defeating wrestling in MMA strategy, reconciling with coach John Danaher, the business dynamics of Flow Grappling, and his vision for blending WWE-style storytelling with real grappling.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Having now cornered elite UFC fighters and built CJI, what would you teach a 20-year-old version of yourself about building a sustainable, impactful career in combat sports?
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Transcript Preview
That would be good. You could do like, a Andrew Huberman's morning routine and my morning routine compared.
Well, I think we start pretty similar by messaging five different women we meet.
(laughs)
Are we recording? I hope that's in. Cut that in.
Yeah. That's in. All right, man. Hello.
(laughs)
Um, welcome back. How are you?
Good to see you, mate. I'm still alive, unfortunately.
Yeah. Last time we were together was CGI1.
And I think I left you at a strip club around 7:00 AM.
No, that was... That was someone else that looked like me.
James Smith.
That was James Smith. Uh, how did you celebrate after CGI?
Oh, shit. Well, I mean, we went to Cartagena, Colombia and went on a five-day bender, pretty much. Came out very unhealthy, but survived it.
Direct from Vegas?
Yeah. So we left the afterparty, flew straight in there. The secret investor threw us a party, and it was the hardest five days of my entire life. It was grueling.
In Colombia?
In Colombia, yeah. Heavy times down in Colombia.
Right. So it was like the... Like an endurance sport.
You should have been.
An endurance racing... Like the David Goggins of, of parties.
P- pretty much. It w- I mean, we didn't sleep much. The guy had it set up so we had IVs every morning. That probably kept me alive, quite honestly. And we brought Volkanovski's coach, Joe Lopez, 73 years old, didn't sleep.
(laughs)
Did not sleep for three days. Used his poor Spanish on any woman that would listen to him. But somehow still alive, returned to his family safely. Every time I take him away, Volkanovski calls me and is like, "Please, bro, he's gonna die."
"Bring him back alive."
"He's gonna die." And I'm like, "That's what his family wants. They keep asking me."
Y-... Right. Okay.
(laughs)
Jesus fuck. Uh, how would you... What's your synopsis of how the first one went?
I mean, I think it really couldn't have gone much better, you know? Like, it actually surprised me. Obviously, I have my personal assistant, Seth, take care of a lot of the, uh, more mundane activities in preparing us for the event. But yeah, everything went off without a hitch as, as far as I'm concerned. What did you think of the show?
I enjoyed it, man. It's... I think my lifetime, uh, watching of Brazilian jiu-jitsu was multiplied by about ten over that single weekend. I saw more Brazilian jiu-jitsu in that one weekend than I think I had in my entire life up until that point.
Da- day one was a marathon, that's for sure. Day two hit the sweet spot. I think for this next one, we're gonna try and make both days a little shorter.
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