Devon Larratt’s Only Priority Is Winning. Everything Else Is a Tool

Fridman opens with a confession he knows will annoy people inside the sport: he actually likes *Over the Top*, the Sylvester Stallone trucker movie that a lot of arm wrestlers treat as a circus. Larratt’s answer is that the ridiculous part is, to a certain degree, real life. There was a tournament literally named Over the Top. There was a trucker division. A guy really did win a truck. His name is John Brzenk, and Larratt assumes Fridman already knows who that is.

Brzenk, Larratt says, is every arm wrestler’s father. The entire sport looks up to him. He won that tournament at 18. At 57 he had just competed with Larratt a couple of months earlier, still at world level, still beating monsters, forty years at the top. Before video and the internet, Brzenk was the one who answered the questions everyone had about technique. The lesson that now sounds obvious was his: if you want to get better at arm wrestling, you arm wrestle. He has been everybody’s target for four decades.

Larratt came into the sport in a serious way in the mid-1990s. Before that, getting good was very hard. Everybody was doing it wrong. Technically sound pullers were rare; the scene was underground. His entry was a flyer in the mail. You had to know somebody who knew somebody, then you went to a club and could not do anything with the people there. The internet collapsed the transfer of knowledge. By the turn of the millennium professional leagues were slowly picking up. By 2010 there was another jump, a little more money. By 2015 millionaires and billionaires were organizing events. The past five years, he says, the sport has just blown up. Things that took him ten or fifteen years to learn, new guys now have down in a year.

Fridman presses the structure underneath the boom. It is one versus one, and that can turn into a battle of nations: Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, Russia, Georgia. The great Olympic sports work that way. The two humans on the table stand in for two flags. North American titles remain highly sought after because the North American athlete is still typically the most famous, even when Eastern Europe has produced someone monstrous. Recognition and strength are not the same thing.

The pancake meme started as food and became a plot. Larratt traces it to a big match with Michael Todd, another champion who, he says, is never getting off the horse. Todd’s elbow is a complete disaster. He is probably one of the most loved and hated men in the sport right now, and a lot of the hate is the King’s Move. Larratt does not share the outrage. What is wrong with being a little controversial? He gets passionate, even angry, at the purity tests. There is a saying: can you beat him in a hook, can you beat him like a man? His answer is win. That is all that matters. If you can win with style, win with style. Do not talk to him about anything but winning.

The rematch was recent, a year and a bit before this taping, for something they invented called the Legacy Hammer. Todd had taken it from him around 2018. Covid shut the circuit down. Todd, then the North American champion, went to Dubai to set up a huge match with Levan; organizers and leagues would not let it happen. There was still room for a match of significance, and Todd asked who he wanted. Give Devon a rematch. Larratt said yes while he was in a terrible place: deep-vein thrombosis, a pulmonary embolism, mentally wrecked. He turned his life around and committed hard.

What happened in the match? He destroyed him. He beat the piss out of him, in his words, then they talked afterward, friends who fight like brothers and let each other go hard. Strength and mass go hand in hand, so he committed to getting as big and as strong as he could. Pancakes every day. Bacon. Every sloppy bit of garbage food he could eat, while also trying to eat healthy, and eating the garbage whenever it was there. Fridman jokes that he should write *The Pancake Diet*. Larratt says he probably will.

Asked to rank strength, power, endurance, skill, strategy, and mental toughness, Larratt says they are all important. You use everything and adjust strategy to the tools you have. If he could pick just one thing to have more of, it would be strength gained while actually arm wrestling, not from an off day. Fridman compares it to jiu-jitsu, where drilling on much weaker partners is useful for working things out but does not build the intensity you need against peers. Larratt wants a blended strategy. A kind of rule: whatever you do, you get better at. Be as precise as possible. Do not get hurt. The answer is not always the same.

His current belief is what he calls tower building. A great tower takes a ton of volume. The way to build volume is workouts that are not particularly challenging, that make you feel good, done so that when you add them all together you get the biggest number. Many easy sessions a day, as specific as possible, is in his opinion the best way to lay the foundation for an extreme peak. There is no more precise way to get strong at arm wrestling than to arm wrestle.

For a man almost thirty years in, that means harvesting energy from clubs. In Austin he went to a packed place they call the Water Tank, talked to Dmitri, an engineer and one of the toughest people there, and pulled against a bar full of people, hundreds of matches. He describes himself as a lightning rod. Absorb everything people can give. It is perfect only because he is strong enough to take it without damage. If he were losing, the same night would be worthless. Preparing for a serious match he tries to do that three or four times a week; the days in between are blood-flow rehab. He will never hit a personal record anymore. The only peak he cares about in this cycle is June 25.

June 25 is Dubai, against Levan Saginashvili, the Georgian Hulk, widely acknowledged as the most powerful person in arm wrestling today. Is he beatable? Everybody is beatable, Larratt says twice. Levan is incredible. He is what the modern peak of the sport represents: curling 300 pounds with one arm, specialized strength so far ahead of the field that Larratt does not hedge. He is also, under the aggression, something of a teddy bear. The two things Larratt is confident about are experience, which counts for a lot, and his ability to breathe and recover. If the tide ever turns, he thinks Levan will never get it back. The plan is to hold off the first assault of power, find a hole, and go in.

He likes to make the sport bigger than most arm wrestlers believe it is. There is a mental side when you face something you have never seen. Experience means what is a surprise for Levan is routine for him, so his adjustments will be more precise. He plays a dirty game. Fridman asks about the faces: the head shake, the look that says the match is finished, quit. Commitment, Larratt says, is uncommon in him on purpose. By the time he shows up he sometimes wishes they would kill him, because that is how far he wants to go. If you are committed and you lose, you should be hurt. He is often unhappy when he loses without an injury. He cites Dan Gable, who dreamed of being unable to walk off the mat and was disappointed that he always could.

The climb is simplicity: remove distractions until life is just the target. He has seen everything on Levan, read everything, taken other people’s opinions. Far from an event he always builds the opponent up, respects him to the point of fear, believes he might lose. That forces him to be responsible. Then, later, he starts to degrade them, and by fight night he tries to dominate every interaction from start to finish. In the moment itself he is free. He does not think about the past or the future. He thinks about killing the dude in front of him.

Strength, in his vocabulary, is not a curl number. It is chains: an upward drive that closes an angle, a cupping chain that anchors to the heart, a pronation chain that turns the thumb over and attacks the other person’s cup. Huge numbers of muscles in each chain, trained as movements. Levan’s movements for arm wrestling are incredibly impressive, and the genetics are special; not everybody can be Levan. People discount the other side of him because he so rarely has to show it. He came up through hard technical wars in Georgia, including years against Genadi Kvikvinia, until the tide turned and the gap became a different level. Some argue the technique is flawed. Larratt thinks he sometimes just plays with people, as in a Top 8 against Kurdgali Angerbaiev, a 220-pound Kazakh technician some call the Bruce Lee of the sport, who lost 6–0 while Levan grabbed him low and did not seem to care. Larratt’s summary: Levan is Everest. He will be the pointy end of the spear for North America.

Fridman turns to the left-hand match with Denis Cyplenkov, the Russian Larratt used to call Dennis Chernobyl, one of the men who led a new era in which super-heavyweight strength went through the roof. Larratt wanted the match for years, 2008 to 2012, and could not get it made. He was more of a one-on-one puller; Denis did the tournament format. Larratt was ranked number one, then had surgery, abandoned super heavyweight, spent years at 225. When WAL failed and that division was scrapped, he went back after the big crown. The 2018 season was right hand. They had been chasing the match for a decade. They wanted left; he wanted right. He just wanted to meet Denis.

Denis completely destroyed him. Larratt is careful not to hide behind the 2016 surgery. Denis was better that day even on Larratt’s best day; there is no version of his career, left or right, that beats Cyplenkov in 2018. He might like to think he could do it now. At the standoff he looked at an arm whose bicep looked like a glute, the whole structure sinewy and strong. In the match Denis let him set a great position, locks in, a hold you can really do something with, and ripped through it. It was the first time Larratt thought he had torn something. Afterward he wondered if Denis had ripped his chest in half. Nothing went purple. The strength gap was just that significant.

He used to do a job where the price could be death, and he arm-wrestled through that entire period, treating a lethal cost as something limited to soldiering. After Denis he changed his mind. Anything you are in love with, once you get far enough down the road, is going to kill you in some way. He cites Bukowski: do what you love and let it kill you. Denis’s professionalism far exceeded his. He realized he was no longer employed; he was in professional arm wrestling. How serious was he, actually?

The loss does not haunt him. Some losses upset him because he made a mistake. He did not make a mistake with Denis. There was nothing he could have done that day, and he is at peace with it. Pulling left-handed against him was a chance to touch one of the strongest human beings ever to sit at the table. Knowing that level is possible planted seeds. His career looks like a stock market, trending up, and wrapping his mind around Russian training philosophies is what later changed the system.

North American fitness culture, as he was raised in it, is no pain, no gain: push, sweat, grit, fight through. Talk to the Russians and they say never fail, never go to failure, always feel good. The two philosophies express themselves very differently. If you want to get strong, do not fail. They are also believers in volume, and volume is very hard to achieve if you believe in no pain, no gain. That slogan produces more injuries. Fridman hears Dan Gable’s wrestling idea of play, lighter work that lets you pile up years. Larratt sees the parallel at a hundred percent. His number-one training is hours on the table, playing.

New clubs are high energy because the first time you walk in, everybody is trying to kill you. If you are strong enough to absorb it without injury, they are giving you everything, which is as specific as training gets. He makes an assumption that he is the best guy there and pulls in a way that protects them, because the more he keeps them in a good position, the more they can give him. When he sees someone like Dmitri, number one in Texas, he pulls that in a little, withholds pieces until he gauges where the man is. In training he does not want to fail. Failure in arm wrestling is bad technique under effort, and bad technique gets you hurt.

Endurance is what the arm-wrestling world knows him for, but that is not why he does the long nights. He does them to get strong. At the Water Tank the first run was a little over an hour, then a break, then another 45 minutes. Far from an event, as much volume as the body can handle. Inside eight weeks, even six, he would already be shrinking volume. After the hour mark he can feel blood sugar dropping, blood going through the muscle without pushing good stuff in, the start of breakdown. He does not want that.

Asked for a match that still stands out, Larratt does not pick the famous losses. In 2005, on his first combat tour overseas, a long rough deployment in which he was shot and blown up, he trained the whole time knowing a big match waited at the end. The opponent was Ron Bath, the man who would be the American giant if there were no John Brzenk. Larratt was the best in Canada and not yet expanded internationally. The supermatch went 3–1, every round close, Bath winning the first. He had to dig out of the trenches. It was probably one of his closest matches ever.

The meaning is what happened afterward. He sat down, relaxed, calm, satisfied, because it was a match that takes everything from you and you win it. Then the center of his backbone exploded. A fire ripped through his whole body, out the top, through the feet, an instant, and then it was gone. He is not particularly spiritual or religious. It was the weirdest thing he has ever felt, and he has never had it since. He was sore for three or four months, as if it had smoked out his entire body. Two or three years later he won the world championships. People have an invisible crown, he says. Bath had one. He thinks he took it from him.

Fridman calls him one of the great trash talkers in any sport, because the shit-talking has love and respect behind it and still gets into people’s heads. Larratt treats the voice as a powerful weapon most athletes underuse because they think it is unsportsmanlike. A weak person with a voice can still change things. In a fight, a never-ending flow of negative suggestion can do work. You are not just fighting the opponent. You are fighting everyone watching, the crowd, the referees. He will pick someone out of the crowd, go after a fan, talk to someone’s wife, smile the whole time, as he did with Mike Solaris cheering from a corner. He has believed since he was young that our inevitable death might come from a super-aggressive alien species, which is a way of saying you have to fight for every single thing. If they match his aggression he uses endurance; if they do not, he has the tactical edge. He ramps the gamesmanship at the grip and at the referee because everybody is trying to get an edge within the rules. His genetic makeup is persistence hunter. He needs to extend things. An explosive athlete would not use the same strategies.

Jody Larratt, his wife and high-school classmate, is often in the corner and sometimes talks more trash than he does. The quality he admires most in people is bravery. If she believes something is true she does not back down. She can change her mind; while she is convicted she will not stop fighting. She has pulled him out of the fire repeatedly. Without Jody, he says, he is on the street, in a tent, eating dog food. Love is difficult to accept. You often do not feel worthy of it, and someone who really loves you will love you even when you do not. Loyalty, patience, perseverance: that is when love shows itself, sticking through the shitty years. Love and faith are powerful forces. Without them, people and worlds descend into darkness. The love she has given him is what has allowed him to keep building.

Larratt served in Canadian Special Forces, a job in which death was a real possibility. He loved the life. He never wanted to leave; he thought he would be there his whole life. The favorite part was the people. He felt totally comfortable putting his life in the other guy’s hands, happy to be in a place where he could follow, knowing the people ahead and beside him were incredible. Faith in a team that is not there for money, there for a higher purpose, is very special. For an adrenaline junkie, nothing matches going out at night to fight.

He used to say fighting was the highest level at which a human could express those drives. He now calls that a personal failure of belief. He thinks you can do the same thing in any field, any discipline, if you go hard enough; it all starts to feel the same. At the time, the expression was close-quarter battle, the whole reason he was there. Ground troops on a mission, orchestrated movement done quickly and accurately, communication that shrinks as the team gets better. As good as humans are at fighting as individuals, what makes the species strong is the ability to fight as a team: collective intelligence, the social animal under the highest stakes. War brings that out. It is also tragic in the loss of life and well-being. He does not skip that sentence.

Zoomed out, the sport is two people who must keep an elbow on a pad and win when the back of a hand hits the table or crosses a line. Lockup rules vary by organization. Without straps you agree, with a referee’s help, on a fair clasp, and you can slip out. With straps it is like marriage: somebody has to lose. Inside that box Larratt sees specialists and blenders. A lot of athletes win world championships on one singular move, a hook or a top roll taken to a crisp extreme. Jerry Cadorette’s system is a flop-wrist press: he gives the hand away on purpose so the shoulder can get behind it and he can press from what looks like a losing position. Matt Mask is a top-roller whose other weapons are not nearly as powerful.

Larratt puts himself with the blenders, people with a lot of good options. Then there are speed guys who try to do very little attrition. Some athletes will trade energy any time because they trust the gas tank. Travis Bagent was famous as extremely explosive; if the match stops, he typically loses. Larratt calls himself the 22-second guy. Power people want the first five seconds, the first press, right to the pad. If he beats you in a second, he says, you are not in the same world. With his peer group he typically wins at 20 seconds and beyond. That is how he is built and how he trains.

At the high level it gets harder to be a specialist. Every move has a theoretical counter, so a single-move guy will eventually meet someone he cannot beat. In a tournament, specialists usually do better, because the singular move carries them through quickly. In supermatch format, blenders typically do better. Levan, in Larratt’s mapping, is not a specialist. Top roll is his strongest move.

Freedom arm wrestling, sometimes called arm sumo, removes the requirement that the elbow stay on a seven-by-seven or seven-by-nine pad. Every table becomes a possible arena. You win when the knuckles touch the tabletop or you hold the hand off the edge for a three-count. Lifting the elbow is still a foul. You can move the elbow all over the surface, move the body around the table, even get most of a body onto a big table. Standard arm wrestling, he says, is fighting in a phone booth. Freedom is fighting in a field. He thinks it is the future of the sport because it is more accessible: a bar, a school desk, a guy on the street. You do not need to bring a table with you. He has always tried to push what people think the sport is.

For someone who wants to beat their buddies, the first step is find people, find good people, get with a club that can mentor you. There is an app called Armbet. The scene is all over social networks. Then do the lifts. If he had to keep it simple, three movements should be about ninety percent of the investment. First, cupping the wrist on a cable, thicker handle so the work sits out on the fingers, because any good opponent attacks the fingers, pulling to your center, to your chest. One of the big misconceptions in the sport is that you are aiming for the pin pad. Pinning happens once the hand is close to you. The vector is always toward yourself. The most dangerous thing someone can do to him is pull him away from his body.

Second, pronation through the thumb, the roll that fights the cup. Cupping plus rolling bends the other person’s hand back; once that happens their whole game is cut to pieces and the remaining options are nasty. Third, rise: always be climbing. He does not lead with bicep curls. It is a chain. Sharpen the blade of the axe; a great bicep you cannot quite use is not worth much. Cables let you measure output. Bands travel well but are imprecise, and they are dangerous because their acceleration is faster than gravity, so a screw-up gets much worse. The same wrist strength shows up in gi jiu-jitsu chokes: weak in a flop wrist, strong in a cup. The thing that wins on the table is also the thing that finishes a grip. Fridman believes in drilling thousands of times; Larratt believes in volume, which can look like a lot of play.

He has tried every diet: vegan, raw, only meat, balanced, bodybuilder. He does not believe food is as important in arm wrestling as in other sports. The conversation starts with whether you are eating enough. Super heavyweight is different from a weight class. A weight-class guy needs to be more responsible. A super heavyweight has to eat stupid amounts and test the digestive system. He has landed mostly on meat because, for his particular body and the sports he does, his mind is clearer. He would not recommend it to anyone else. A study he heard about, aimed at heart attacks, found that what mattered most was how people felt about the food they were eating. If you believe it will do good things and you allocate it right, it has a positive impact.

Overseas, facing imminent death, he would go out for ice cream. If he ate a bag of chips or a bunch of chocolate bars and then trained, the workout was incredible. Easily processed carbohydrate gets into the blood as fast as you can burn it and produces remarkable blood flow, plus the mind enjoying it, plus the belief that it works. Fridman rhymes that with sleep: an insane schedule can still be the right one if it is in service of something you love and is not costing you in stress, the Mike Tyson trick of training while you have convinced yourself everyone else is asleep. Larratt’s competition staple is all-you-can-eat sushi, convenience as much as preference.

He has arm-wrestled Hafþór Björnsson, the Mountain. If you went back a thousand years and gave that man armor and a two-handed sword, Larratt says, he would rip across the landscape and no one would stop him: 419 pounds, tall, strong, fit, disciplined, a warrior. Björnsson and Eddie Hall, two legendary strongmen, turned a World’s Strongest Man grudge into a real boxing match. Hall blew a bicep. Larratt had been preparing to pull Levan in December; Levan had a movie, the date slipped, and Larratt saw a chance to broaden his base. He sent Core Sports a funny video offering himself. Five weeks out, on a Friday, they asked if he was serious. He said yes and thought *oh shit*. Sunday they confirmed. He started skipping rope.

By the fifth message telling him to train with Firas Zahabi he called TriStar in Montreal on a Monday at two, packed by seven, and spent four weeks in the fighter dorms getting punched in the face, running with Olympians and pros. He knew it was a losing battle. The chance to fight Thor was too cool not to take. What he brought back was running, a reminder of how far full-body endurance had slipped under specialization, and a leaner body. Far from competition, he thinks you should spread out. He talks about a wave: if you want to go above the line you have to spend time beneath it. Some men in that gym who do not look like anything would murder him worse than Thor. Georges St-Pierre, another TriStar product, does not look terrifying and is super humble, then dominates people under the lights.

He has thought about death from a young age. He is afraid of it. He hates it. He does not want to die. There are times he can rid himself of the thought, but he is not happy that death is inevitable, and not happy that it may be inevitable for all of us. He likes to fight against it. Offered immortality, he would choose no. That is his only wish, and he would still refuse. Fridman would take yes, and then worries that endless time is a snooze button: ambitious goals delayed because there is always tomorrow. The richness of a moment, in his view, comes from the chance you could die tonight. Sushi is more delicious because there is a limit. The Stoics preach contemplating mortality for that reason. Larratt grants that every near-death experience has made him live better afterward. His counter-image of immortality is getting all the things done. Fridman hopes he is right and fears the drive to create would dissipate into YouTube and Doritos.

On robots, Fridman argues that a machine with a human-like experience would also have to be mortal: fear, love, suffering, the ability to miss someone, the real risk of losing a self. Otherwise it is an intelligent toaster. Larratt hears that as a negative view of immortality. A doorbell during the taping produced a box with a new legged robot, which Fridman takes as comedy and as a thesis: legs let a machine notice you the way a dog does. He thinks superintelligent robots will have to grow up inside human society, not as a separate runaway, and that Neuralink-style bandwidth is both nervous-making and probably unstoppable. Larratt loved *Terminator*. China and the United States, Fridman notes, have declined to limit autonomous weapons, unlike the global ban on biological weapons. Drones already automate pieces of targeting. The teamwork and ethical lines Larratt valued in a human unit are easy for a machine to plow through. Larratt calls AI war terrifying, especially as the future warrior looks like someone behind a keyboard. He thinks it is probably inevitable.

Why we may not have seen aliens yet, Fridman says, could be a filter: once a species gets clever enough, it destroys itself, and humans are close. Larratt decided long ago that aliens must exist; this is good real estate, and we ourselves are probably to some degree alien. Civilizations that reach us may be orders of magnitude more intelligent, so they might have to dumb themselves down, or they might miss us because we are not that special. His practical hope is smaller. He hopes nations get their aggression out through arm wrestling. The best thing about the sport, he says, is that it brings people together: the Austin club, the kindness, the excitement. His YouTube is sleepy, unwashed, unvarnished on purpose. Fridman closes with Miyamoto Musashi: the only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win.