St-Pierre, Georges

former UFC welterweight/middleweight champion

Georges St-Pierre, John Danaher & Gordon Ryan: The Greatest of All Time

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 30, 2022

• Georges St-Pierre
• John Danaher
• Gordon Ryan
• MMA and grappling technique
• confidence and competitive psychology
• shoot boxing innovation
• leg locks and rear naked choke
• diet and athletic performance debate
• strength training vs. skill development
• GOAT debate (St-Pierre/Khabib/Jon Jones)

Core ideas

Danaher frames the key to excellence in any developed field — sport, business, or otherwise — as identifying skills or approaches that are currently undervalued by the mainstream and building genuine mastery around them before the trend catches up; he cites his own championing of leg locks in grappling, once dismissed by the sport's establishment and now widely adopted, as a direct example. St-Pierre attributes much of his success to a willingness to try unconventional approaches when everyone else pursued the same strategy (e.g., taking down opponents with superior wrestling pedigrees by developing what Danaher calls "shoot boxing" — the deliberate integration of striking and takedowns pioneered largely by St-Pierre himself, born of necessity training in an era and country where MMA was banned on television). Ryan traces his own breakthrough to abandoning brute-force effort in favor of genuinely improving technique (crediting Danaher's insistence he learn leg locks and guillotines despite initial reluctance), and identifies a specific inflection point — submitting a former ADCC champion multiple times in a single training session — as the moment his self-belief shifted from aspiration to confidence grounded in demonstrated success against elite competition.

All three discuss confidence as something built primarily through repeated demonstrated success rather than willed self-belief: Danaher argues his job as a coach is to set athletes up for repeated success with specific techniques against quality opposition, since confidence naturally follows from results and cannot be talked into existence, while failure with a technique cannot be papered over with encouraging words. St-Pierre describes learning to balance confidence and fear after two formative losses — one from underconfidence (against Matt Hughes) and one from overconfidence after early UFC success (against Matt Serra) — using the analogy that confidence is like money in a bank account: skill provides access to it, but overconfidence leads to complacency. All three discuss trash talk and public persona as a distinct, separable skill from actual competitive performance: Ryan describes adopting a confrontational public persona partly in reaction to seeing St-Pierre (whom he considers "the nicest person of all time") attacked online regardless of his humility, concluding that since criticism is inevitable, one might as well be authentically oneself; St-Pierre similarly frames authenticity and emotional engagement — not just technical skill — as central to what makes an athlete commercially successful, since the vast majority of spectators lack the technical knowledge to appreciate the sport and instead form emotional attachments to rivalries and personalities (citing Conor McGregor as the "all-time master" of this).

Discussing sports science and preparation, St-Pierre describes extensive experimentation with fasting (up to five-day water fasts, several times a year) for perceived benefits to inflammation and mental clarity, and an eventual shift toward an animal-based diet, drawing loosely on comparisons to hunter-gatherer practices; Ryan describes having to abandon an earlier "bodybuilder-style" off-season diet after developing serious gastrointestinal issues (H. pylori and small-intestine fungal/bacterial overgrowth) following antibiotic treatment for recurring staph infections, now eating a restricted, easily-digestible diet. Danaher, notably, states he has never observed a measurable correlation between diet and athletic performance in grappling across many elite athletes with wildly different eating habits (citing an Olympic medalist who trained largely on McDonald's), though he believes diet matters more for long-term longevity, particularly past age 40 — while noting elite athletes often develop strong personal narratives about their diets that function more as psychological belief than demonstrated performance effect. On strength training, the three offer differing but reconcilable views: Danaher argues skill development yields far greater returns on training-time investment than further strength gains once an athlete passes a certain baseline (illustrating with the marginal difference between a 300- and 400-pound bench press being imperceptible on the mat, while a new submission variation can be decisive), while acknowledging market/image pressures push many athletes toward visible muscularity regardless of its marginal competitive value; Ryan integrates moderate-intensity, high-rep weightlifting as a supplement to (not substitute for) daily jiu-jitsu training, partly for the mental conditioning of tolerating exhaustion ("redlining").

Danaher provides a detailed technical contrast between grappling and MMA: grappling technique is comparatively "forgiving" (a bad position can often still be escaped) but requires long chains of setup and control to apply, while striking can end a fight in a fraction of a second, making MMA far less forgiving of momentary lapses — a distinction he says explains why lesser athletes have a meaningfully higher chance of upsetting a superior opponent in MMA ("puncher's chance") than in pure grappling. He identifies dominance over a match's pace, direction, and setups as the three attributes that determine the outcome of the large majority of MMA fights, and names St-Pierre, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and Jon Jones as, in his view, the three greatest mixed martial artists ever, offering a detailed technical comparison of a hypothetical St-Pierre–Khabib matchup (concluding St-Pierre likely held an edge in open-space striking and distance management, Khabib in fence-assisted control, with the outcome genuinely uncertain). St-Pierre argues that because MMA's knowledge and technology continue to compound generationally, "the goat is not even born yet" — and separately speculates that history's greatest fighters may be lost to time entirely, citing the enormous but poorly historically documented ancient Greek sport of pankration (whose practitioners reportedly included Plato in his youth) as a likely example of a highly developed, forgotten martial tradition.

On technique specifics, Danaher argues the rear naked choke is the single highest-percentage submission across all rule sets, body types, and skill levels because — unlike joint locks, which some opponents can simply endure rather than tap to — a properly applied strangle is inescapable regardless of an opponent's pain tolerance; he traces the body triangle's rise from a rarely-taught specialist technique (originating from a banned judo position) to a now near-universal preference among elite competitors once its biomechanical control advantages became widely recognized. He similarly argues, from first-principles biomechanics rather than tradition, that takedowns initiated from directly behind an opponent (or from front-headlock control) are inherently higher-percentage than takedowns attempted from the open front position, since the human body is poorly adapted to defend attacks from the rear. The conversation closes with reflections on risk, exploration, and legacy — including brief discussion of extraterrestrial life (Danaher and Ryan express openness to the near-certainty of life elsewhere in the universe while remaining skeptical of UFO-visitation claims absent stronger evidence) and Mars colonization — and closes with career advice emphasizing finding work one is both talented at and genuinely enjoys, building a trustworthy and competent team, continually reinvesting in one's own development rather than lifestyle spending, and identifying one or two genuinely undervalued or innovative skills to build a career-defining advantage around.

Excerpts