Georges St-Pierre Never Liked Fighting

Lex Fridman introduces Georges St-Pierre as a man many people call the greatest fighter in UFC history, and then as something rarer: one of the great martial artists, period. The first question is almost a trap. In a career built on title fights, was he motivated more by the love of winning or by the fear and hatred of losing? St-Pierre does not hesitate. He likes to win more than he hates to lose. If it had been the other way around, he says, he would never have fought at all, because he does not like to fight.

That sentence is not a pose. He repeats versions of it throughout the conversation. Martial arts found him young, and fighting is probably the thing he does best, but the cage was the price of a life most people do not get: money, access, a kind of freedom. He lists the ingredients without romance. He may have been predisposed with certain abilities. He met extraordinary mentors. He worked extremely hard. The stars aligned. To keep the freedom, the money, and the glory, he had to keep sacrificing himself in a cage.

The men he corners, he says, often love the job. They enjoy walking into the octagon. St-Pierre loves to train, loves the science of fighting, loves the shape and the confidence that mixed martial arts gave him. What he cannot stand is the uncertainty — not knowing whether he will be badly hurt, humiliated, or handed the win. That stress, he tells Fridman, takes more out of him than brain damage. The return on that suffering is the life the wins bought. The feeling itself never got easier.

Fridman quotes a line St-Pierre has used before: he does not believe there is pleasure in life, only a relief from pain. The example is ordinary. Stay hungry long enough and your favorite dish becomes almost unreal. Sacrifice first, pleasure second, and in fighting the bigger the risk the bigger the reward. Fasting is the cheapest way he has found for a civilian to feel that pairing. In his case, he says it changed his life.

The story starts with his last fight, a move up in weight to face Michael Bisping. St-Pierre usually walked around 185 pounds. He forced himself toward 195, eating six times a day on a strict plan, and never felt right — more like he was carrying a bag on his shoulder. At the weigh-in he made 185 and could not climb back to the walking weight he had spent months building. The morning of the fight he was bleeding and frightened. He thought it might be cancer. A colonoscopy would have emptied him when he was trying to gain weight, so he made a deal with himself: fight first, get checked the moment he got home.

He won. The colonoscopy found ulcerative colitis. The drugs were heavy, and he is not a fan of medication, so he went looking for a more natural path and found Dr. Jason Fung, who treats diabetic patients with fasting. St-Pierre ran the protocol like an engineer. Right after the Bisping fight he got a CAT scan — muscle mass, bone density, fat percentage, water retention, even which arm carried more muscle. Two months later he scanned again. The scale was lighter. Muscle had not dropped; it had risen a little. Bone density was up a little. Water retention was the big decline, along with inflammation and body fat. The ten pounds he had forced on for Bisping were, by that reading, dead weight.

His standing method is now a three-day water fast four times a year — after New Year's, before summer, after summer, before the holidays — plus 16:8 the rest of the time. He still trains: the first two days on the normal schedule, the third a little easier, with Himalayan salt when he sweats. He has tried five days. After day three he cannot sleep. He calls it hunter-gatherer mode: creativity at its peak, rest gone. Sleep matters more, so three is the sweet spot. He also admits that if someone had pitched fasting while he was still in his prime, he would have ignored it. It sounds ridiculous, and nobody makes money from it, because there is nothing to sell. Off days he eats once. He will not give up chocolate or carbs. He has watched the Maasai eat almost only meat and blood, and the Inuit live on fish, and he wants to try a carnivore stretch just to feel it. The wider conclusion is modest. A century of official diet advice, he and Fridman agree, has not answered the basic questions. We know almost nothing about nutrition.

Fridman brings up Mike Tyson walking to the ring terrified and arriving as something close to a god. St-Pierre recognizes the arc. He is not afraid to say he is afraid. Early in his career he wondered whether he was built for this at all: he was excellent at mixed martial arts, and the idea of fighting did not make him happy. Around him, training partners were excited. When he corners other fighters, many of them look happy in the locker room. He does not.

The last fight, against Bisping, is the one he can still see. Mickey Gall, Aiemann Zahabi, and Joseph Duffy — men he trained with — all lost, some of them badly hurt. The room felt cursed, "like a funeral." He asked himself the same question he asks before every fight: what the hell is he doing here, why did he choose to come back. Then he put on a mask. If the fear leaked, it would hit his coaches, and their shaken confidence would hit him. John Danaher and Freddie Roach have been with him long enough to know the lie. He still tells them he feels great.

Fight day, he says, he has never felt one hundred percent. The nights before are rehearsal: scenarios looping, sleep thin, body tired, even his eyes itching. He keeps all of that to himself. The turn starts on the pads. Posture changes the mind. Muscle memory and instinct come back, and he remembers that he is good at this. Confidence, in his account, is not a personality trait. It is a record of the camp — the sacrifice he can see in the people holding the mitts. Fear and confidence, he insists, are different things. They can occupy the same body at the same time.

The last door is a bathroom. He used to do it in a bandana and a gi; the Reebok deal took those props away for Bisping, but the script stayed. He looks in the mirror and compliments himself until the words stick. Better team. More sacrifice. Faster, more powerful, more athletic. A higher fighting IQ. A strategy the other man will not be able to live with. He told himself he was going to show the young kids how the job is done. He does not believe it at first. By the time he walks out, the rock and roll has started and he believes it for real. Still scared. Now on cruise control. In a fight, he says, if you are trying to think, you are already missing the opening. The night of the fight is not when you invent the move. If you have not practiced it, you are screwed.

Once the fight starts he does not change his mind about finishing. He does change gears. The first fight with BJ Penn is the example he keeps returning to. The plan was to keep it standing and stay outside, because he thought he was faster. He was not. Penn's reaction time was better. St-Pierre took a bloody nose in round one and moved to Plan B: wrestle, make Penn tired, put him down. That is how he won. If you cannot become the perfect nemesis for the man in front of you, he says, you may still win a few — until you meet someone who will not let you.

Fridman has spent time with John Danaher, St-Pierre's jiu-jitsu coach, and has not heard him talk about Plan B. Danaher's version of dominance is the escape: be so good at leaving a bad position that the opponent cannot hurt you, a psychological hold rather than a physical one. St-Pierre likes the idea and still wants A, B, and C on paper. Ask him before a fight and he can give you the whole strategy in thirty seconds. A fighter who walks in with one idea, he says, is not prepared. Mixed martial arts sometimes punishes a mistake the way a science experiment does. Sometimes it lets you redeem it.

The rematch with Penn had a secret weapon that was not a supplement. A man in Montreal who measures picture frames — not a scientist, a friend of Firas Zahabi — watches fights frame by frame and times how long each man takes to react. In Penn's prime, that friend ranked Penn first on the UFC roster and Lyoto Machida second. Penn's reaction time was elite; his reset time was poor. The nervous system, in that man's metaphor, was a sprinter's: violent and quick to empty. So St-Pierre stopped trying to go first. He faked kicks and takedowns until Penn flinched and flinched again, loading that fast system with junk information. When the battery died, the man slowed down.

The audience, he says, only sees the physical part. Across from someone he can look down, pump a jab, and make a man believe an attack is coming when he is only buying a breath. He is not a psychic and does not believe in that. He does know, looking through an opponent's eyes, when the man is afraid and when he has given up. Critics spent a career saying he would not take enough risk to finish. He answers with hockey: if you are winning 5–3 at the end of the third, you do not pull the goalie. Five-to-three and five-to-four are the same result, and this is how they make a living. A flinch that is too big is one of the tells. The man is no longer fighting to win. He is surviving five rounds. That is a different sport. Look at any great UFC champion, he says — Jon Jones included. Early in a reign they finish people. Later the whole roster has studied them, and the study is not always a path to victory. Sometimes it is only a path to less damage.

The distinction he wants on the record is simple. A fighter trains for a purpose: he has a fight. St-Pierre calls himself a martial artist. He does not train for a fight. He trains for himself, all the time, toward a perfection he will never reach. The seed was planted by his father a long time ago. He still loves the science and will keep training as long as his body allows, which is why people keep asking about a comeback. He is about to be forty. Some men have fought well at that age. He does not feel like one of them. He got out on top, he is healthy — he knocks on wood — and he is wealthy. In his phrasing, he beat the game.

The advice that follows is colder than a highlight reel. If you do this because you are good at it, because you like the money and the freedom, but you do not like to fight, cash out in your prime and walk away. Stay, and you will hurt the legacy and the health. It is a sad business. Tristar in Montreal is, for him, the happiest and the saddest gym on earth: happy because he can still do the thing he loves, sad because when he tries to leave there is always a cluster of men around thirty-three asking for advice. If they are real friends, he tells them the truth. Three fights into a losing streak at that age, they should think about another life. He has seen that movie. The ending is ugly. They get angry, because he made it and they hear a verdict on their talent. He says the stars aligned for him. That is not a transferrable plan.

Parents arrive with a child billed as the future UFC champion. His line never changes, and it does not make the room happy. Is the kid good at school? Stay in school. Boxing and martial arts are fine sports. Stay in shape. Do not put every egg in one basket. He dropped out himself only when the first world-title fight with Matt Hughes was in front of him. Before that he had another way to go if the nights went wrong. Maybe one in a hundred thousand truly make it, and by "make it" he means retire with enough money for the rest of their life. The only stories that get a microphone are the successes. UFC champions, boxing champions, football and basketball stars still walk away with zero. Fridman adds Jimmy Pedro's rule for American judoka, including two-time Olympic champion Kayla Harrison: keep the other path, because knowing you can leave is what lets you go all out. St-Pierre agrees, then points at Danaher. The best teacher he ever had put an academic mind into jiu-jitsu. Distraction, in that sense, was not a leak. It was the method.

If he could talk to a young Georges, he would say the volume was too high and the work was too hard. Train smarter. People underestimate recuperation, he argues, because you assimilate what you learned when you recover, not while you are in the drill. The cult of harder and heavier is useful for someone lazy. Elite athletes are usually not lazy. When a champion looks "gifted but uninterested," the gym gossip may have the story backward. Perhaps he is doing the right amount, and the rest of us are the ones overworking.

The fighter who forced the thought was Mansour Barnaoui, a Frenchman St-Pierre expects people to hear about. They crossed at Tristar one morning. St-Pierre said he would see him at the next session. Barnaoui said no: he trains once a day. He seemed to be waiting for a verdict. The first thought St-Pierre had was not laziness. It was that the man might be right. Once a day is not a universal law. For Barnaoui it was working, and he was improving in a way that was hard to argue with. St-Pierre now does his first session around eleven, still fasted, and finds the mind clearer and more creative. He wishes he had known that while he was still competing.

Fridman quotes Travis Stevens, the American judoka: a good practice ends with the mind exhausted and the body still standing. If the body fails first, you trained fitness. St-Pierre does not treat that as a slogan. Stevens was a main partner for the Nick Diaz and Carlos Condit camps. Every Friday he drove about six hours from Boston to Montreal, trained an hour and a half, and drove back, because the nearest serious judo room was in another country. He would already be kneeling like a soldier when St-Pierre arrived. Offers of a hotel were refused; there was another session waiting at home. St-Pierre was as happy for Stevens's Olympic medal as he has been for anyone. The road there ran through injuries and a loss on a referee's call, with four years between chances. Talent is common enough. The rare thing is a person who can build the room that talent needs.

Ask people for a flawless performance and they picture a knockout. St-Pierre pictures technique that a stranger could call beautiful — Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Stephen Curry, the kind of move that does not require you to know the sport. He walks the roster that way. Khabib Nurmagomedov's work against the fence is, in that specific craft, the best he has seen. Conor McGregor had the accuracy. Anderson Silva was the most flamboyant, moving like something out of The Matrix. Jon Jones brought creativity, spinning elbows, and a career that ran through real adversity. Demetrious Johnson was complete enough to slam a man into an armbar. BJ Penn's hips did things other bodies cannot. Dominick Cruz's footwork and distance. Fridman, mock-offended as a Russian, notes that he skipped Fedor Emelianenko. St-Pierre laughs and puts Fedor back on the list. There were too many names.

The names only count in their prime. The Silva in that sentence is the man who knocked out Vitor Belfort, not the one who lost to Uriah Hall. Fighters who hang on too long make people forget how good they were. Stipe Miocic, he says, is probably the greatest heavyweight of all time alongside Fedor; a prime-versus-prime fight could have gone either way, though his heart leans Fedor. Lose one night and the public starts the erasure. You zig when you should have zagged. Boom. That is the sport.

A fight with Khabib is one of the last professional regrets. Both men wanted it two or three years earlier. The UFC had other plans for Khabib and, from a business seat, that made sense. St-Pierre was on French commentary the night Khabib beat Justin Gaethje and retired. He had butterflies. If Khabib had called him out, he would have said yes. For a fighter, the most exciting thing is often the scariest thing, and Khabib was the scariest matchup left — worth the risk because nobody had solved him.

The sketch of a solution is specific. Take the center of the octagon immediately. Fake constantly. Keep the fight all the way outside or all the way in, never in the messy middle. Use proactive takedowns — a fake that creates the entry — and reactive ones, baiting a punch and coming under it. Khabib is the better chain wrestler, especially on the fence; that is a different sport. St-Pierre's takedowns come from karate, from timing and explosiveness, and they are cheap when they work. If both hands get around the knees, he says, everybody goes down, Khabib included. He would have been the instigator, forced the fight forward, and broken the clinch rather than live there. Most of Khabib's opponents were afraid of the wrestling because they did not have those tools. Whether it still happens is a different sentence. He has made peace. Hitting pads with Freddie Roach a few days earlier, he heard that the rear hand was still there. If Dana White had walked in with a contract at that exact moment, he would have signed in a blink. At home, belly full, healthy, wealthy, the question is why. Young teammates keep asking if he is preparing a comeback, because the look is still in the gym. At the kitchen table it is gone. That split, he says, is almost impossible to explain unless you have been the animal.

Young men want to proclaim themselves the baddest on the planet. He thinks that is an illusion, and a late one to learn. Daniel Cormier can be argued as one of the greatest ever until the Jon Jones matchup gets in the way. Run the same pairing ten times and the nights will split. Someone gets sick, sleeps badly, loses a sliver of focus, and gets caught. The man who wins that night is not the best fighter. He is the man who fought best that night. Basketball and hockey work the same way. The winning team is not always the best team. If we always knew the result in advance, nobody would watch. The cruelty and the beauty are the same fact: a childhood, a camp, and a life get compressed into one evening that does not settle the argument.

The odds conversation tips into philosophy. St-Pierre believes in causality: everything has a cause. If that is true, he does not think he has free will, only the illusion of it. A car breaks and nobody says the car decided to break. A tree falls and nobody says the tree decided to fall. Humans narrate a decision because the ego needs the credit. He feels the same first-person "I chose" that everyone feels. He also thinks causes are pushing the choice, and that by definition there is then no free will. He has not, in anything he has read, found a rebuttal that holds.

Fridman pushes on the darkness around consciousness. We barely understand what it is like to be something. Consciousness might be a fundamental property of the universe, a force that sits in a table as a dim glow and in a person as a peak, and if that is true then free will might be one of the bonuses of becoming highly conscious. St-Pierre does not try to win the point. He says the mystery stuns him. Until someone shows him the argument, he stays where the causes are.

Fridman's long project is a conscious machine. His working definition is pointed: consciousness is an entity's ability to hurt, to struggle, to suffer in the world. Pleasure, in the same frame St-Pierre used for hunger, grows out of that suffering, and people connect because they believe the other person can feel it. St-Pierre flips the fear. He is less worried about AI harming us than about what humans already do. Look at the historical record on this planet and the destructive force, he thinks, outweighs the beneficial one. If a higher intelligence took that into account in order to protect us from ourselves, it might hurt us in the process.

Fridman's sharper fear is dumb AI. The United States and China are already in a race on autonomous weapons. Drones do not need to be wise to be efficient, and in war efficiency means killing. A bug that decides a target might be in five other places can cover a whole area; that logic scales toward nuclear response. St-Pierre does not believe babies are born bad. People do harm because of what they live through. What scares him is the pattern he has actually seen: men of power want more power. Fridman, who grew up with the Soviet record, notes that Stalin's evils are argued to exceed Hitler's and still get less airtime. Both of them land on the same design rule. Fridman does not trust himself with power. Build the system so that no one person can have it — cryptocurrency in finance, open source in technology, a future that is distributed. Coming from a man whose whole job was to concentrate victory into one body on one night, the caution has a particular weight.

Unidentified flying objects are one of the few topics that make St-Pierre lean forward. Because of the sport he has met a lot of people in the military and in politics, and he asks them the same question every time. In Los Angeles that week the man got there first: you want to ask about UFOs. The answer was not a disclosure. There are things flying that they do not know. The man did not know if they were aliens. He knew they were being detected.

Jacques Vallée, the French-born astronomer, is the theory St-Pierre keeps turning over. Vallée has argued that whatever this is may live in another dimension rather than arriving from another star. One of the exhibits is a corridor effect: several people watch a craft, two of them walk a few steps to the side, and from that angle it vanishes, then returns when they step back. As if the thing were visible only from a slit in the world. Fridman adds the humbling version. We may be living in a thin slice of the universe. Whatever sits in the higher dimensions may be permanently out of reach for the descendants of apes.

The White House lawn scenario — a civilization that wanted contact landing to say hello to the president — strikes them both as absurd. If anything is interacting with us, it is more likely a clumsy probe than an ambassador, the way our own robots will meet whoever is out there long before our bodies do. St-Pierre's image is a fish pulled from the water by a fisherman, thrown back, and left to tell the other fish it saw something it should not have seen. What if that is true? Fridman notes a smaller cultural fact that still matters. A few decades ago the subject was a joke and a career risk. Now it can be discussed in public. What counts as a serious topic, the two of them imply, has always been more about the weather in the room than about the evidence.

His father is the first role model he names, and the most mixed. The household did not have much money. His father was an alcoholic and stopped when St-Pierre was a teenager; the son watched both the struggle and the 180. He also watched a man work brutal hours until work became a habit and the habit became a life. The older of nine children, he had to become the father of the family after his own father died. St-Pierre learned perseverance, hard work, and not giving up in adversity. He also learned that he did not want to become that man. His father lived to work. He wants to work in order to live, and to decide when. Maybe the older man is happy. St-Pierre is not sure he ever saw another option.

The same father, a Kyokushin karate black belt, put him on a mat because schoolyard bullies were winning. The mixed record in the yard, St-Pierre says, is not very good: a seven-year-old against boys two or three years older is a different math than a twenty-five-year-old against a twenty-eight-year-old. There was no time to teach, so he was sent to Jean Couture, a coach so severe that St-Pierre was afraid of him and of his father. That style of teaching would probably put a man in jail today. He is glad it happened, because that version of him needed it. He grew up with a lot of anger. People see a nice guy, and he tries to be one. He is clear that there is a lot of darkness, and that friends who chose the other path are not with him now.

The bullying did not end with a Hollywood beating. He thinks he was a target because he did not love himself and projected it: head down, shoulders shrugged, no eye contact. Bullies, in his image, hunt like lions. They do not take the strongest bull. They take the old and the sick. Martial arts gave him discipline and a different picture. He decided to become someone he could love, and he faked the confidence until it arrived. In class he had been the last to raise a hand. He started being the first. You will never be happy, he says, if you dislike the person in the mirror. Change yourself, then change the environment. The order does not reverse. He is still not perfect. He still does stupid things. He can apologize now, because the man doing the apologizing is not the boy who walked with his head down.

Love, when Fridman asks what makes a life, gets a definition that does not sound like an athlete. St-Pierre looks in the mirror and sometimes loves himself and sometimes hates himself for a stupid day, so love already fluctuates inside one person. Couples say they love each other and then fight over the house, the dog, and the kids. If you truly loved someone — if you were an old man and she left for a younger one — you would help her pack. Society wants to own the thing. For him love includes missing someone, losing someone, being angry at someone. The ups and downs are the feeling. The sad case is when those motions stop. The opposite of love is not hate. It is forgetting. That is also why he never posts his family. In this business, if a rival cannot get to you he will try to get to the person you love, and St-Pierre knows he would go crazy. Joe Rogan, a comedian who could talk about anything, has kept a family off the stage for years. A child who grows up as someone's son has a harder time becoming himself. Celebrity, Fridman says from airport hallways, is a loneliness that scales. The private room is not a luxury. It is the part that stays a person.

The advice for a young person who shares his taste is two-layered. If you have a dream, use everything you have, do not take no, and go through hell. Then he adds the half the culture does not reward: do not only work hard. Work smart. He has watched too many men ruin a career in the gym, sparring so violently that they leave the real fight on the mat. That harder-heavier ethic, he said earlier, is a medicine for lazy people. Most serious athletes are not lazy. They need a different prescription.

Make ordinary training playful. Camp is when you recreate the things that shove you out of the comfort zone. Day to day, if the room becomes a hardcore contest about who won, people get careful. They fear injury and they fear losing, so they stop trying the new thing, and creativity dies. When he was younger, a bad Friday session would haunt him until the next week — replaying the exchange, rewriting the move, waiting to redeem himself against the man who had given him the most trouble. The Canadian group that used to meet once a week, David Loiseau and the others, was competitive and not malicious. The point was to get better together. You need play, he says. You also need to play seriously.

The best way to learn, he thinks, is from other people's mistakes. He makes his own, sometimes the same one more than once, but in this sport a failure can mark another person's health. He studies every opponent and he studies himself. Plenty of fighters are good at the first and bad at the mirror. That is why he refused to be the best at one thing and tried to be very good at all of them — wrestling with the best wrestlers, boxing with the best boxers, karate and jiu-jitsu the same — so that in the mix he could see the room where the other man was least competent and drag him there. There is no certainty. There are odds, and there is always an X factor you do not control. The whole conversation has been a negotiation with that X: scans, frame counts, Plans B and C, a script in a bathroom. You never delete the unknown. You move the odds a little.

Bruce Lee changed his life and, he thinks, was ahead of the time. Would Lee have made it in today's UFC? St-Pierre does not think so. He was a martial artist who could defend himself. Among the current elite, no — maybe in his own era, because the sport has moved. The philosophy is another matter. Lee talked about using your longest weapon against the opponent's nearest point. In boxing that is the jab. In mixed martial arts, once the legs are legal, it becomes the side kick to the thigh, later a signature for Jon Jones. How many hours, St-Pierre wonders, did a man have to sleep on a sentence like "be water" before it was ready to say? He splits the arts into three dimensions that every student will touch and only one of which he will specialize in: the philosopher, Lee's country; the choreographer, the stunt people and the forms athletes whose flips he cannot do; and the competitor, the life he chose. On the set of *The Falcon and the Winter Soldier* the stunt team looked like real-life superheroes. They cannot do what he did either. The comparison is a category error, and the argument about who is "more real" usually is too.

They are both in suits, which gives Fridman a Joe Rogan question: is a tie a serious disadvantage in a fight? St-Pierre says yes, then tells the protocol from his nights as an eighteen-year-old bouncer. He never had to take anyone out while wearing the suit. If he had, he would have removed the tie and the vest, called backup, asked a waitress to clear the table, and used surprise to go first. A cage has a referee who says go. A street does not. Traditional karate and Japanese jiu-jitsu, which is where he started, were built for that mess: eyes, neck, chair, bottle, no weight classes. A UFC title does not make you safe. Francis Ngannou himself goes down if the punch he does not see lands on the back of the head. St-Pierre has had a lot of street fights. He lost the first one.

The useful fact, he argues, is moral before it is technical. If you are not the aggressor, you hold the element of surprise, because the other man has to show his intention before he throws. Hands stay up, the body turns a little, the center line is covered — a stance a trained person will recognize and a civilian may read as conversation. Do not take that posture while someone is still talking. That is a declaration. Fridman flips the tie into a disguise: nobody expects the man in the suit. St-Pierre had not framed it that way, then agrees that what you project is part of the weapon. He once defused a man in a bar by complimenting the shirt. Being a nice person, he says, is the best self-defense he knows. Humor helps. You keep the head start.

He learned it at six, playing king of the mountain on a Montreal snow pile. The rule was wrestle and push, no striking. Another boy asked if he wanted to fight. St-Pierre thought that meant wrestle and said yes. The punch put him at the bottom of the hill. He still sees the blood on the snow. From that day, when he felt the heat rising he struck first. He did not win all of those fights; sometimes there was more than one man. The rule underneath never changed. Do not be the one who started it. That is how you keep surprise.

What makes the whole journey worth it? Satisfaction, he says, is the end. If he is satisfied, he has nothing to live for, in the career and in the life. Mixed martial arts already gave him what he needed, so the same insane drive moved into acting. *The Falcon and the Winter Soldier* on Disney+ felt, to him, like going to the NBA on the first try. He knows he is a white belt there and likes the feeling. Zig the wrong way in a fight and you get knocked out. Zig on a set and the director says cut, do it again. Hollywood now wants actual identities — a real Italian, a real Russian, a real fighter — so the remaining gap is craft. He trains on romance, comedy, and drama so that the badass role is the easy day, the way camp was always harder than the fight. Danny Trejo's note was to stop shouting. Smile when you say you will kill a man, and mean it, so the camera can take the feeling instead of the pose. He also knows the risk. Emotions grow like biceps. Dig for the dark ones every day and you will fall into them faster when life goes wrong. That may be part of why some actors break, beyond the usual story about drugs. If he feels himself sliding that way, he will drop the new goal and find another. Satisfaction is still the enemy. Aim so high you cannot reach it. Be afraid of arriving. Fridman closes with Miyamoto Musashi: think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. After two hours of scans, fakes, and the look in a man's eyes, the picture St-Pierre leaves is still a child on a snow pile, staring at his own blood, trying not to forget how he was dropped.