YouSaid · the spoken record

John Danaher

lines on the record: 326
first: 2022-10-10
most recent: 2022-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is a stacking position now. Normally, we always insist on the idea of getting advantageous angle first, controlling the feet and getting angle. But there's a height advantage that Victor Hugo has here and the length of his legs means that he can play very, ideally with his legs. So getting an advantageous angle might be difficult. In these circumstances, it often makes sense to go right up the middle. Gordon could just go back for legs because the legs Victor Hugo's legs are so far apart at this point that you could easily isolate a leg and attack that but Gordon wanted to show off his passing prowess. Very often he'll go into a match and just say, okay, I'm going to show the skill and he'll often use it as a demonstration of techniques he teaches in instructional videos. So he wanted to show that he could pass them out readily on a world champion.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why don't you run through the sequence where he gets mounted? I believe he gets mounted twice. Just back just a little bit further.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But unfortunately, Gordon has very good guard passing. So he's an excellent guard player, very talented, but Gordon is renowned as.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, this was a situation where Gordon was considerably outweighed by his opponent. So the main thing here was efficiency. His opponent elected to avoid the standing position by jumping into guard. So Nalgard, yeah. Gordon would be in top position this time.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest danger in athlete faces is tunnel vision. Sometimes they will Hit upon a certain move or strategy and just say, I'm going to go with this when there's much easier alternatives. But because they're so focused on the alternative they've chosen, they get this tunnel vision and just focus only on that. The most constructive thing the corner man can do is alert them to the presence of time, which is very important in ADCC match because all the scoring is structured by time. to alleviate problems associated with tunnel vision. that, okay, you're doing this, but if you just did this, it'll be so much easier. So that's the main goal.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always believe it 99.5% of the job of the trainer is done, the coach is done, when the athlete steps their foot on the mat. At that point, You shouldn't need me at all. Everything I needed to tell you should have been not just told you but imprinted into you. Remember there's 15,000 people in that crowd for half of the match. You're not going to hear a word that I can say. There's too much noise. But you'll hear my voice inside your head. Because you've heard it so many times over the last 14 weeks, you're sick of hearing it at that point. Their program knows what to do. So I'm usually pretty confident. I'm also very confident that even in worst case scenarios they can have effective solutions because they train those worst case scenarios every single day in the gym.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's just about okay, what's the most efficient path to victory against this particular opponent? It's just, okay, I've done my job. I've taken them through an extensive fight camp that prepared them for every conceivable situation that they're in. I've run an efficient warm-up. Their body temperature is perfect. Elasticity and the muscles is perfect. My main role when I corner I avoid what most people do when they corner, which is to be a cheerleader. Most cornermen, they're not cornen, they're cheerleaders, they're there to express some kind of emotional support to their training partners or their student. Sometimes they're even worse than cheerleaders. They express their own emotional fears. The match goes on”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you go to judge confidence, don't look at the face. Look at the extremities of the body That's where the truth comes out. You see it in body language, and the further from the face and chest, the more honest the body becomes. Look at the feet and the hands.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very little. So the tournament got off to a very smooth start. Very little energy expenditure, no injuries. And a submission win.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now he's only got one defensive arm and he's just taken that away with his left hand and he gets a one handed strangle for the finish.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The trapping of the arm Notice that no advanced grips were required, it was just a spontaneous trap. There's the penetration of the neck.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to return his opponent to the match. And as you can see, he's successful in doing so. And now it's clear what demand strategy is. So I'm calling to Gordon to break him down to a hip. You put a man on a hip, he can't stand up. Gordon successfully does it, traps the shoulder using that one-on-one grip with his right hand, puts him down to his shoulder and a hip. That means standing up is no longer an option for his opponent. Now Gordon goes in. He's already scoring because of the turtle position that he's in. His opponent stays down on his shoulder. Now Gordon's responsibility is to start looking for the stranglehold. His opponent has basic defensive structure. He's disciplined with his chin, keeps the chin down. Gordon is a master of tying up defensive arms and penetrating under the chin to get to a strangle. And you'll see that shortly.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, now the guy's trying to go up in vertical freeze it there. Now, do you see how he's taking his elbows off the mat and turtle position? In jiu-jitsu, there's only one reason you take your elbows off the mat from turtle position. That's to stand up. So now it's clear at this point what his actual strategy is. It's to get up, force a standing confrontation, win a takedown battle and beat Gordon by points. So he did have a strategy. Now, our counter strategy is always based around the power half Nelson. This is a common move in the sport of wrestling, and it's a great way to break people down as they try to stand up. So heavy. Yeah. I mean, Gordon is a master of it”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At this point, it just started to dawn on me at this point. This guy actually had a strategy, which was to maintain a prone position that he's in now and then shake Gordon off after the five-minute mark. So once that became obvious, then now I'm starting to look at the clock and how close we are. If you can take it up to five minutes. Now, this guy's only intention to stop Gordon from strangling him and finish.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I personally think against Gordon Ryan, I mean, I admire the fellow's courage. It's not easy. But there was a logic to what he was doing. People think, oh, he just got his back taken so easily. But he did have a strategy. Now, did he pick the right person to use that strategy against? Probably not.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total position is the second bottom position of you. Many people only associate guard position with bottom position and jiu-jitsu. That's naive. There's two. There's guard position and turtle position. Now as a general rule, guard position offers a much, much greater variety of attacking options than turtle position does. But that's not to say turtle position absolutely can be an effective bottom position. You can work effectively from there.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hooks are not particularly important here. He'll use it just to get stability on his opponent, but interestingly, his opponent here had an interesting strategy too, which was to occupy bottom turtle position and look to get to the critical five-point demarcation point where points begin to get scored. His idea, I believe, I'm speculating here based on his actions, was to keep Gordon at bay in a defensive turtle position until a five-minute mark occurred, in which case he would shake Gordon off, walk away, and force a takedown battle.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just give an initial comment here. First, you'll see that Gordon elected to sit to the bottom position. The hardest work in submission grappling is when two athletes take the standing position and joust for takedowns. That's where most of the energy gets burned up. So working on the idea of energy efficiency, let's go out and we chose to sit into guard position and then start looking to access our opponents back because if our opponent's head position, a farside arm drag makes a lot of sense. Gordon's able to beat the arm and quickly get behind his opponent. Now the question is going to be getting into a scoring position. It's too early to score at this point, but we're just concerned at this stage of just energy expenditure and make the other guy work harder than us.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No injuries, very little energy expenditure. Now it sounds easy to say that, you know, oh, okay, the strategy worked. But in order to get that strategy to work, you have to have one hell of a set of skills. And we can see those now. Would you like to? Yeah.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. You can get to the finals and just be absolutely spent. So our whole thing is okay, Gordon's got to not only get to the finals, then he's got to fight the toughest ADCC rapper of all time after that. So we were looking for quick and energy efficient matches. And that meant going to the back or going to the legs. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, that's exactly what he did. He was able to get some very, very quick matches courtesy of leglock finishes. And in the few cases where he didn't finish on legs, then he would simply take his opponent's back. And that's a very low stress position to occupy. In one case, his opponent deliberately kept his back on the ground. He just chose mounted position instead. And so he was able to go through his weight division with an extremely low energy expenditure, which set him up well to go into the finals.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So these can be very, very long matches. I mean, to put this in a perspective, modern Judo matches five minutes, a modern wrestling match, I believe is six minutes in international freestyle. So these matches can be 40 minutes long. Now, that's a long, long grappling match.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone looks like the incredible Hulk. Yeah, yeah. So our big thing is when we fight bigger, stronger opponents, we always go in two directions. You either go for the legs or you go for the back. And so we constructed strategies based around those two methods.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there was a genuine concern that Gordon may burn himself out before he even got to fight the guy who most people believe is the greatest ADCC champion of all time. So, our concern was how do we manage this? So what we looked for is extremely efficient methods of reducing the time of the madgers, making the madges as short as possible. Our favorite way to fight bigger, stronger athletes, and I think Gordon was the lightest athlete in his weight division. Everyone goes, oh, Gordon's so big and strong. He's actually quite light. I think he was outweighed by almost all of his opponents.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Toughest people, including the possibility of fighting his nemesis, Felipe Penna, in the weight division prior to getting to the super fight. So there was genuine concern here that he may have completely overstepped himself. The biggest concern I had as a coach, and I'm sure the organizers Mojasm must have had the same concern, so he would get injured or exhausted fighting in his weight division. There were two athletes in particular. Felipe Penna, who had given Gordon a very tough 40-minute match in a no-rules setting shortly before ADCC, and his former training partner, Nick Rodriguez, who were expected to give Gordon very, very tough matches if they came up against each other.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of his extraordinary stature in the sport, the ADCC organization granted his request. That was the first time ever. In addition, Gordon Ryan would be fighting to be the first person to win three gold medals in three different way categories. This has never been done before. So it was a huge event on Gordon's part. And bear in mind also that prior to this event, he had fought just a month and a half earlier against a former ADCC openweight champion, Felipe Penna, who had defeated him in the past and a completely different rule set. And then previous to that against the current world champion. So there had been a build-up to this. So he had been very active coming up to the event. And then he went in to fight arguably the greatest ADC champion of all time, Andre Galvant, which would occur late on Sunday and would have to fight.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a second category called a superfight where established champions who have won previous open weight Tournaments fight each other in one off battles, one athlete against another. So in most of the matches, you will fight repetitively over time towards a gold medal. But in one category, you fight one fight, the so-called super fight, which is usually the headline fight of the event. Traditionally, if you were in the super fight, you could not compete in the weight categories. It was seen as too risky because you might get injured during the weight category or you might have to fight four very tough fights in a row and get exhausted so that you're ineffective during the main event of the show, the super fight. So throughout its history, ADCC has always resisted the idea of an athlete being allowed to do both weight category and super fight. It's never happened before. Gordon Ryan requested to be able to do this.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's correct. This was, in fact, the first time in history that this was allowed for listeners who don't follow grappling. We may have been very rude and just. ADCC is like the Olympics of grappling. It occurs every two years. You can either qualify for the event through winning matches in a qualification process, or you can be invited. The only people who get invited are either former winners or people in the sport who are just widely recognized superstars who bring some kind of brand value, who have proven in the past that they have what it takes to compete at that level. In this format, There are two kinds of matches. Division matches in which you compete against people your own roughly your own size and weight. There is an open wait where anyone of any size can enter. So you can have very small people fighting very large people.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes there's personality differences, like, for example, like Gordon Ryan and Felipe Penna, they admire each other a lot, they respect each other's skills, but they certainly don't love each other, that's for sure. So there can be certain matchup where there's more intensity. But then there's other matchups where the two athletes come out and it's no more intense than a hard sparring session.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“15 minutes might be like 100% full power. That way that's more than enough to get psychologically ready for the intensity of conflict, but won't break your body over time.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that would be foolish. Every athlete in the gym would be injured. You can do it for short periods of time. But the training has to be carefully monitored in terms of intensity levels. We're training seven days a week, a minimum of twice a day. You've got to keep things under wraps. Every other workout, you can have one of the five rounds can be full power, but not seven days a week, three times a day. That's just going to break bodies.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's the same in every competition. It's not like they're twice as strong at ADCC as there and the IBGF World Championships. The physical intensity is always pretty much the same. They experience it every day in the gym If you go out and you grab all Gordon Ryan, it's not like the next guy who grapples is going to be twice as strong sam or twice as fast. be a little stronger, a little faster, but not so much so that it completely changes your approach of the game. There's not that much difference between the human bodies out there on stage. So if you've felt intensity before, you're not going to be shocked by ADCC.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you're aware of it, I always have them to, it's like when you see a magician and you have his tricks explained to you. Never see the magic again. The first time you see a good card track from a good magician is, oh my God. Then when they explain it to you, I did this, this, and that, step one, step two, then you look at it like, it's not that special. And when you explain to people this idea of the pageantry is an illusion. In just as when you watch the magician and you learn the trick. All the magic flies out the window, so too with the nervous response.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's put there intentionally to make you feel a certain kind of way. And your whole goal is to see this as illusion and walk out and see only the reality, which is that this is the same damn thing you do every day in the gym. Differences, you go in with a guy you've never grappled with before.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see what they're trying to do. They're trying to create theater and pageantry when, in fact, it's just a grappling match. It's just two athletes, a referee and a rule set. That's the reality. Now what they try to sell you is something which is not reality, which is this is somehow bigger and different. They reinforce this with pageantry and theater so that it becomes not the grappling match but a grappling performance the same way you have a theater performance. And my goal as a coach is to dispel that and say when you go out there. Only one reality you, him, and the referee reinforcing our rules there. That's it. Everything else you see, the smoke, the fire, the music is an illusion.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asked the question about mental training for me, the central focus of whatever small amount of mental training I give my students comes down to a very, very simple concept to understand. This is the idea of Identifying competition in terms of its normalcy. Most people see training and competition as two different things. Training is normal activity that you do every day. And competition is the exception. It's different. You're going out, there's people watching you. There's a big crowd. They're making lots of noise In fact, the promoters of shows go out of their way to reinforce this. Look at, for example, ADCC, when Gordon Ryan went to fight Andre Galvant. Do they just come out on the mat and fight each other? Absolutely not. There's music. There's pageantry. There's fireballs. They're literally shooting fireballs.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're big believers in the idea of depth of defense, the idea that you should be able to mount defense all the way through from early stages based mostly around anticipation of identifying danger visually before it emerges and all the way through to the deepest levels of defense where you are 100% defensive in terrible positions and you have to claw your way out and over time and get back to a neutral position or even back to an attacking position.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By this method, confidence starts to grow. And so the mental preparation came out of those physical underpinnings, the idea of progressive resistance increasing over time for both offense and defense, building up to a peak where they're going against the best athlete in the world so they can get an accurate assessment of where they stand. Once you're given a competitive match to the best guy in the world, you know damn well that when you go out in ADCC, you're ready to fight anybody.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, better than those he'll be facing in competition. For the other guys, it's getting a clear assessment of what their current skill level is by going against the best there is. Then we add to this a competitive schedule where the athletes have to go out into competition so they get used to the idea of performing in front of strangers on stage, getting used to the strange elements of going out being observed and judged by people you don't know in a performance atmosphere. And so they were all given matches and WNO competition leading up to the event ADCC trials, local grappling events here in Austin, and given a competitive schedule to fight and prepare them for ADCC. Obviously, as ADCC got closer and closer, this was pulled back because of the danger of injury. So within about three weeks out was the last time we had a competition.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time we were able to switch off and have them go against very, very tough athletes, each other. So Luke Griffiths will do a full power match with Gordon Ryan. Now, they're fully aware that there's no one better in the world than Gordon Ryan. So if you have a competitive match with Gordon Ryan, that's a very, very healthy sign. So they went from the start where they were being programmed going against relatively mild resistance and building up over time and then building up to the greatest resistance possible in the sport of jiu-jitsu. And their goal is not to win, obviously, but their goal is to provide a competitive match. Now, Gordon doesn't have any confidence issues, so for him, it's just good, hard competitive training against people that are...”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Defense, on the other hand, you've got to start them in the deep end of the pool so that they start to see what are their vulnerabilities. Okay, so I put them with highly competitive athletes at their start so they can see, okay, there is a problem here. And then even in defense, they start off with lower belts and build up their confidence over time. So just as a weightlifter builds up his ability to build weight, sorry, to lift weight over time. So too jitsu player does it by gradually increasing resistance. Now in jiu-jitsu resistance is not done by weight. It's done by skill level. And so over time, they started to accumulate this experience.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start to gain confidence over time. Just as you would never send a beginner into a weightlifting German and put 500 pounds on the bar and tell him to lift it, rather you would start with a wooden bar, then the metal bar and then gradually accumulate weight over time so you get a progression in weightlifting. So two in jihitsu, you don't take a brand new move and say, okay, do it on Gordon Ryan. Never going to succeed. I have the athletes practice their offense on blue belts and work their way up.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once they get this down, that's where true confidence comes from. Confidence doesn't come from words, it comes from accumulated skills, which experience shows you have been responsible for successful performances in the past. And if you accumulate enough of these, your confidence rises. So when it comes to the mental aspects of competition, I created a program where everyone had was given a set of skills that they had to work on skills directly related to what I believe is the most important elements of success in ADCC competition. In the gym, they accumulated those skills over time. I do it in two different ways, depending on whether these are offensive skills or defensive skills. For the accumulation of offensive skills, I like to have my athletes work with athletes who are lesser than themselves in ability so that they”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never been impressed by this, nor have I any kind of positive effect on athlete performance. What I do see build confidence is the sense that athletes are developing skills and using them successfully under conditions that closely mirror the event they're preparing for.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really think that people, when they talk about mental preparation, need to take a step back and realize that almost every element of what people describe as mental preparation has physical underpinnings. Literally 95% of what I teach the athletes is physical skills. And it's my belief that every mental aspect of competition, the most important of which will be confidence on stage, is a direct result of the accumulation of physical skills. People tend to see things like confidence as a mental state. It comes out of. Performance of physical skills. My life, I've seen sports psychologists try to. Create confidence in athletes through non physical means. And it always ends up being the same kind of cheesy motivational speeches, highlight video reels where they try to pump artificial confidence into people.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, in the future there'll be other students who leave me. That's just the nature of the beast. It's sad when it happens, but life goes on.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gonna have to fight this guy one day. And they're training next to each other. Of course, there's going to be tension. There's always going to be disagreements about what's the right way to act around certain people, certain issues, and people are going to come into conflict. Everyone's been programmed to be an alpha competitor. And you get a room full of people like that. There's going to be conflict. Now, your question was, well, is there a way to resolve this? Yeah, there was. To nine years, I was very successful with this. But there's also a tipping point where things can flare out of control and there will be periodic breakups. They're not the first students I had that left. I've been coaching a lot longer. I've been coaching the squad.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you don't want to suppress egos. I always laugh when people say leave your ego at the door. What do you think drives competition? If you want to be good at anything in life, you got to have an ego. No, I don't believe it's good or even a healthy thing to suppress egos. I'm a realist and I understand that this is a sport where they meet one gold medal per weight division. As guys get better, they're going to be looking at their training partners and thinking”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's definitely a chance of that right now. I think they have an excellent team themselves and they're doing very well. They had an excellent performance at ADCC. So there's not a need for them to come to us. It's not like they lack anything. They still remember everything I taught them. They still coach and teach with the same methodology that I taught them. So I don't think they have any need to do so. If they did, it would be because they wanted to. I still think many of the same personality conflicts that originated the conflict would reemerge currently if they started training together.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A route where you just get to enjoy life a little more, you do other things, you know, like there's more to life than just the inside of a gym and learning how to do a better hillhawk or a better double leg. So of course, you know, years go by, you want to try other things and you have to make this choice in life between extreme excellence versus being incredibly good, but maybe just enjoying my life a little more.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tough. I get why, you know, they laugh when I was 20 years old. I didn't get along with authority figures at all. And to have someone telling you you've always got to work that little bit harder, no, your skill set's not complete. You still need this, this, and this. When you're already doing very, very well and far better than all but a tiny, tiny percentage of people. You've got this guy just constantly telling you, no, more has to be done. You're not there yet. Of course, I understand. Let me just enjoy this more. It's always a choice. You can be the best you possibly can, or you can.”
2022-10-10 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source