If You Cannot Cause Harm, You Are Forever Subject to Those Who Can

Lex Fridman opens with a question built to fail: who is the greatest warrior in history? Ryan Hall, a jiu-jitsu black belt then undefeated in the UFC, laughs it off the way a music fan laughs off “best band ever” and names Metallica. He is no historian, he says, and outcomes still matter in an outcome-driven world. What he wants judged first is the starting point.

Cuba is his exhibit. A small island with little money and few people has turned out Olympic-level wrestlers, boxers, and judoka at a rate Hall finds staggering. American, Russian, or Chinese medals are unsurprising; the populations and resources are there. India, he adds, should probably do better than it does. The same logic, he and Fridman agree, is why some soccer fans still rank Maradona above Messi: Maradona dragged a limited Argentina side to a World Cup, while Messi at Barcelona was surrounded by other stars.

Pressed for names, Hall offers three: Hannibal, Alexander the Great, and Miyamoto Musashi. Two were commanders inventing tactics against superior opposition; one won duels against serious swordsmen. The common thread is skin in the game. Lose in a video game and you feel a sting. Musashi, Hannibal, or Alexander loses and he dies, and the people around him die with him. Hall puts Muhammad Ali in the same company, because Ali had skin in the game inside the ring against elite opposition and outside it against the institutions of his era. Conviction of that kind, under-resourced and uphill, is rare.

Fridman turns the conversation toward the ugly half of greatness. Alexander and Genghis Khan are remembered as towering figures, yet their campaigns ran on murder, rape, and pillage. Some histories recast Khan as a kind of liberator for his time: join us, or die horribly. Fridman jokes that this is the Bernie Sanders of the era. Hall does not defend the body count. He says the human impulse is to cast every character, including ourselves, as entirely good or entirely bad, and that the habit makes those people impossible to understand.

He points to *The Wire*, where even the characters you dislike have motives you can follow. We want history’s demons to be inhuman, he says, and its heroes to be unstained, and we are living through the political cost of that binary now. Put every person on Earth in a cage and crime drops; that is the law of the jungle, and modern life is fortunate to have superseded some of it. Lions are not called villains. Pull back the controls on behavior and you are left with how things often are, including the fact that modern life was itself built by people like Genghis Khan.

Hall reaches for the veil of ignorance. Stealing in *Skyrim* feels fine because you expect to win; you would not want the same done to you. Fridman cites the Instagram account Nature Is Metal, a reminder that violence is nature’s default. Hall answers with *Ender’s Game*: “If you can’t cause pain, you will be forever subject to those who can.” The six-foot-six stranger who walks past your Rolex is stopped by a shared contract, not by nature. If you cannot resist and no one stands between you, the only brake left is his disinterest. Trying to rewrite human nature, Hall thinks, is both fruitless and a little egotistical. Power of that kind is the One Ring: Gandalf refused it because the desire to do good would still wield something terrible.

Asked about cancel culture and internet discourse, Hall reaches for a word Fridman rarely hears: grace. If human beings are one species, fallible and corruptible by power, then some subspace has to be left for it. The internet records everything in tiny bites, which makes it easy to wave a person’s worst sentence in their face. Hall calls that poisonous on its face, because it does not incentivize better behavior. Even a monster like Hitler did some positive things, he says; embroidering the crimes is unnecessary. Imagine Hitler’s ghost appearing to apologize. Hall would still dislike him, but he would be glad to hear an attempt to push in a better direction. Otherwise you tell everyone that change is pointless, and they double down where they still have support.

Fridman, who has been reading *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* and whose family carries the echo of the Holocaust, asks whether forgiveness has a boundary. Survivors he has heard often describe forgiveness as the way out. Hall says he is nowhere near big enough a person for that, and that the privilege belongs to the people who were there. Holding on, he asks, is it doing something for you or to you? On *The Ultimate Fighter*, with music and books banned, he bought a Bible and a Quran and read them side by side. The Quran, he found, was the more interesting writing. Both kept returning to the most merciful. Then he says the line that organizes the hour: he does not think any of us want justice. Justice is a dangerous game, because someone has to decide what it is, and the veil of ignorance says you will one day have to live inside the world you designed.

People love being a judge for your crimes and a lawyer for theirs, a phrase Hall had just heard and liked. Fridman adds Stalin as the scarier case: not insane, sincerely building a utopia of fairness and flourishing. That belief is a drug. It lets you forget you are a recently evolved ape who does not know what he is doing, until you are killing witches and using whichever water test is convenient. Hall’s caution is consistent. Wield justice as a drug and you will eventually be on the wrong end of the scale.

The mood lightens when Fridman admits he has barely read the science-fiction canon. His path ran through Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka; now he is filling in Foundation, *Dune*, *Snow Crash*, and *Ender’s Game*, after Elon Musk and John Carmack piled onto a tweet with reading lists. Hall is equally embarrassed: beyond Orson Scott Card and Tolkien, he is mostly a prolific reader of Wikipedia. Reddit, Fridman notes, is full of *Dune* questions for him anyway.

Hall cites Card: fiction is not about anybody who actually lived, so it always has the possibility of being about oneself. He has no patience for people who sneer at fiction as uninstructive. We cannot even establish what happened at a 7-Eleven three hours ago, he says; do not lecture him on 600 B.C. as if it were not also a story. *Dune*, in his view, is science fiction only in the loosest sense. It is a novel about religion, group dynamics, human potential, belief, politics, governance, and ecology, and it has made him better at martial arts and at life.

He is skeptical of the film, not as a cinephile but as a reader. Most of a life is internal. You walk down the street, someone asks what you see, and the picture in front of you is not what you were paying attention to; the rest of the world dimmed. That is hard to put on a screen. Frank Herbert, he thinks, was a brilliant curator of other people’s good ideas, which is how most good ideas actually arrive. Asked for an entry point into science fiction, he becomes an obnoxious evangelist for *Dune* and leaves it there.

Fridman asks Hall to explain jiu-jitsu to people who have only watched it capture a culture. Hall goes slowly. It is a philosophy expressed physically: mental and physical capacity working together to move efficiently, almost flowing, unresisting, against a person who is trying to stop you. You learn to generate force, steal it from the floor, steal it from the opponent, and travel with it instead of clashing. Two untrained people fight as runaway-and-clash. Jiu-jitsu done well looks like water moving around a solid structure.

Is wrestling the opposite, Fridman asks, a hunt for leverage and maximum force? Hall wants to marry the two ideas. You flow until you *are* the greater force, then you apply. The best people in boxing, wrestling, and judo disappear and reappear: incorporeal when you want them, inevitable when you do not. He names Floyd Mayweather, Willie Pep, and Pernell Whitaker. Fridman adds the Saitiev brothers, who look like skinny Starbucks baristas and then throw everyone without apparent effort, including Yoel Romero in the 2000 Olympic final. Bruce Lee’s line about water that flows or crashes is trite, Hall says, and still brilliant. Great physical expression is science performed as art.

The analogy that organizes the rest of his teaching is language. Techniques are vocabulary; positions and mechanics are grammar. You do not memorize five billion adjectives; you learn what an adjective is and then you can make sentences. Hall speaks some Spanish, but like a child with a head injury, because he lacks the vocabulary to become an artist in it. Most students get stuck collecting moves and become sequence players. He no longer believes in teaching that way. He tries to hand over structure, send people to class to fill the gaps, and let a style grow that is unique to their body. Nobody can cheat the part where you get submitted a thousand times and finally notice where your own center of gravity lives.

Most listeners have never been on a mat. Hall’s first advice is not a technique. Ask why you want this. He walked into a Manhattan gym as a student at Manhattan College, a baseball player from suburban Northern Virginia who had always been interested in martial arts and had never known it was accessible. He did not know if he would get beaten up or whether the people would be kind. What he brought in was expectation management.

His mother used to say there are two kinds of people: why, and why not. The young version climbs the rock. The thinker reasons himself out of the river. Hall calls that the thinker’s disease, and quotes Bruce Lee: no amount of thinking on the bank will teach you to swim. Decide whether you want a challenge, a way to fight, or a way to protect the people within arm’s reach. Then getting roughed up, bent, and choked is what you signed up for. Joining the army in peacetime for the college money, then objecting when a war starts, is the same mistake.

You also walk into a room where the coach does not know you. Hall estimates that ninety-five percent of his students do not really know him, and he would not trust him either if the roles were reversed. Someone still has to take the leap. Adults in their twenties and thirties, now managers, are the hard cases, which is why many instructors prefer children. “I don’t care if you are Elon Musk, it’s OK to shut up and do push ups.” That abdication, he thinks, is part of what makes the practice valuable.

Fridman insists that choosing the coach is as consequential as choosing a graduate adviser or a spouse. Hall draws a distinction he likes: an instructor sells information; a coach invests emotion, time, and attention after you leave. A hundred and fifty dollars a month buys the first. The second has to grow. His first coach, Christian, was a blue belt teaching six people up a two-person elevator, while Renzo Gracie’s famous academy sat down the street. Hall needed personal guidance more than a brand. Months later Christian told him to train with a tough amateur boxer named Jeff Ruth, then later said he had taken Hall as far as he could. Hall still prizes a coach who can hand off a student without possessiveness, and he tells his own: this is a service industry, but he is not at their service. It is not McDonald’s.

Fridman brings up *Whiplash*, a teacher-student relationship that looks toxic from outside and still produces a musician who could not have gotten there alone. He had both versions as a blue belt: a coach who made him anxious every time he stepped on the mat, which he now thinks he needed, and another who sat him down before a competition and said that win or lose, they would always love him, which he also needed. A good coach, he says, knows when to push the boundary out an inch and when the person is already past what they can carry.

Hall cites John Wooden: some lives are a pile of shit that need whipped cream, some are a bowl of whipped cream that need a little shit. Coaching everyone the same way fails. People often think they want a coach when they want an instructor, or the reverse. He admits he has misfiled students who said they wanted to take it seriously, then vanished, and he treated the absence as a broken promise instead of a crossed wire. He and his wife Jane, both black belts, run a gym together as spouses, peers, and teachers; the wrong hat goes on constantly. He has snapped at a friend he has known since age four, walked away, and only then seen the look that said the friend thought he was being spoken to as a friend, not as an athlete.

Two days before the taping, Hall says, he was as cranky as he has ever been and wanted to tell everyone how unbearable they were. He decided not to speak to anyone. He rehearses the next move in his head: the sentence creates conflict, conflict escalates, the feeling gets worse. Street fights he got into when he was younger taught the same lesson. You manufacture a small enemy, and it distorts how you see the world. Fridman admits he reads the people calling him a fraud. Joe Rogan, he says, genuinely does not read comments; he would give back a hundred-million-dollar Spotify deal rather than compromise who he is. Hall’s admiration is that Rogan’s “fuck you money” was zero dollars from the start. Georges St-Pierre, their teammate at Tristar, is the same type: if you did not already know he was famous, you would not find out in the gym.

Fridman puts Hall in the host’s chair. Would he give a platform to someone like Alex Jones? Listening to *Infowars*, Fridman says, felt like drinking too much tequila in college: you do not know where you will wake up, and everyone in power is a pedophile. Jones on Rogan, by contrast, can play as four-hour theater. Rogan’s defense of not censoring him is that audiences are smart enough not to believe the Earth is flat. The cost, Fridman adds, is watching Bill Gates — a man whose malaria and vaccine work has saved an enormous number of lives — get buried under the same accusation online.

Hall’s answer is immediate: yes, and he feels strongly about it. He understands why amplifying Jones looks like a demonstrable negative. Stepping further back, “the cure is more damaging than the disease, and significantly so.” Conspiracy theories that stick have a quasi-credible anchor. Words like pedophile, racist, and rapist are used because they are kill shots; nobody wants to stand up for the accused, and the fashionable kill shot used to be communist or Marxist. If he starts punishing thoughtcrime, he has to keep punishing it, and the standard always slides. Who put him in charge as arbiter of good taste?

Fridman grants that Jones has a face and a name, then raises 4chan: nameless guerrilla fighters who do not want truth, only to cut at the ankles of the powerful and turn “Bill Gates is a pedophile” into a game. Hall agrees that people with no skin in the game will do anything, and he would not mind seeing that kind of sprawl go away. The pause is who does the swatting. Today’s faction and tomorrow’s faction do not agree on what “toxic” means. Education and critical thinking are the real antidote, he thinks, the same way jiu-jitsu techniques are the beginning of the art rather than the end. Refusing to sit across from the most ridiculous person, and argue point by point, strikes him as a crisis of courage.

Fridman’s hope for Donald Trump, he says, was that someone in jeans would shake the suit-and-tie system. What he wanted was closer to an Andrew Yang: new ideas injected into a stale game. What arrived was a gifted troll who revealed that you do not have to play by the rules. Hall is careful not to analogize the president to Hitler, then notes that a great deal of history’s good and a great deal of its harm begins when a charismatic leader realizes the board can be flipped. *House of Cards* is the image. One wonders, he says, whether that has always been happening in private. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, almost another Clinton — a republic that still keeps producing dynasties.

Fridman, who is Russian, thinks humans still like kings and queens. Something in us longs for the authoritarian control we also put on coaches. America’s counterweight, for him, is the Second Amendment and a Texas-flavored revolt against power. Hall worries that the older American formula — do your thing, within reason, as long as you are not hurting me — is under attack in the culture, if not yet in policy. The internet made California feel next door to Virginia, and Paris feel around the corner from Washington. Collectivist consciousness grows in that closeness, for good and not.

What unnerves him is the redefinition of words. If speech itself is violence, or a precursor to it, then a great deal of retaliation becomes justifiable. Even if the knife points in a good direction at first, it is only a matter of time. He quotes Frank Herbert: when religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way, they put aside obstacles, and they forget that the precipice does not show itself to a man in a blind rush until it is too late. Fight fans love people who run out to murder each other, he adds; that is a coin flip dressed up as a strategy. Floyd Mayweather looked boring until the wins piled too high to deny.

What does it take to become a jiu-jitsu black belt? Hall reaches for a line he attributes to Calvin Coolidge: persistence is the only thing that wins in the end, not brilliance, toughness, or education. The genetic lottery helps until a knee goes. After that, only the person who keeps putting one foot in front of the other is still in the room. He may slow down. He will not stop. Everyone he has watched reach the top of a mountain had different skills and different luck. The common trait was that they continued. He has thought about quitting. He has never quit.

Jane Hall, his wife and fellow black belt, joins for a stretch and puts a body to that claim. She tore her ACL twice and her shoulders four times; a much larger training partner dropped a knee on the back of her head, and she spent seven months looping memories without knowing it, nearly two years waking up with a headache. They lost a baby at fifteen weeks. In 2012, after another injury cost her worlds again, she told Ryan she was done. He said if she wanted to be done, she should be done, then helped her visit a women’s camp. She remembered she loved the thing. The turning point was realizing she was doing it for herself, not as Ryan’s girlfriend with a full-time job who had never aimed to be a world champion.

Among the handful of people they have promoted, about half had kids and other careers; some competed constantly and some almost never. High-level competitors, Jane notes, are often likelier to drop off when brown and black get hard, because they cannot picture themselves as non-competitors. The white belt who trains twice a week for years quietly becomes a brown belt. Their gym outside Washington, in Falls Church, Virginia, is full of those long-term people. For women intimidated by a room of large men, Jane’s report is almost embarrassingly kind: she has never walked into a gym, including as a white belt in Prague where only two people spoke English, and been treated as anything but welcome. The art, Hall says, should be scored the same way he scores warriors: by what someone made of what they had.

Fridman asks about Hall’s reputation as an innovator in leg locks and the 50/50 position, and about John Danaher and the Renzo Gracie team that later systematized the same territory. Hall praises Danaher’s competitive results and the methodology. Then he asks people to catch up on the history. He first learned the 50/50 entanglement from Brandon Vera at a 2005 seminar; Vera had it from Dean Lister, who used it to submit Alexandre Cacareco on the way to ADCC absolute gold, the first American to do that. Hall has also seen Marcos Ruas break a foot with a 50/50 heel hook on old grainy tape. 1990s Japanese combat submission wrestling is full of things that would be called brand new if someone did them tomorrow. Humanity has had two arms and two legs for a while.

BJ Penn winning the jiu-jitsu world championship in 2001, as the first non-Brazilian to do it, impresses Hall for the same reason as later pioneers: there was still a psychological wall. Americans winning worlds is no longer shocking. The inventor of electricity, in his analogy, is more impressive than the later clever uses of it, even though both are cool. He says he believes in alchemy, not because lead becomes gold, but because a belief that something is possible changes the investigation. Walk up to a group of strangers thinking they are jerks, or wondering what they are up to, and you get two different conversations with the same players. Obsessing over the cult of our current knowledge, he says, is the biggest cause of stagnation anywhere, and it starts with refusing to believe the impossible.

Fridman admires people who hold apparently crazy worldviews and then engineer them into reality, which is why he keeps returning to Musk and Mars. Hall has met Musk once and found the temperament contagious, a kind of hater shield grounded in first-principles physics. The line that summarizes Hall’s own competitive psychology follows. You can have ten thousand things going right and stare at the one that is not; that helps long-term development and wrecks you if you have to perform in five minutes. You can have twenty-five things going wrong and still say you are lucky to be alive and glad to have problems to solve. Both descriptions can be factually true. The lens is the difference.

After beating Gray Maynard in 2016, Hall did not know if he would fight again. He had been about to join the army in 2013 when the UFC sent him to *The Ultimate Fighter*; Jane talked him into going. He fought four times in five or six months, then waited a year for Maynard and two more years for BJ Penn. Athletes, he says, die twice: once at the athletic peak, then for the rest of their lives. The years around thirty-one to thirty-three are the physical prime. Randoms wanted to fight him; ranked names often would not, calculating that the threat exceeded the reward. He moved up from featherweight, walking around 158 pounds, so Penn would not have to come down. In the clinch on the fence he felt the small adjustments and the calm. Penn was exactly the jiu-jitsu player Hall had imagined, and post-fight criticism of Penn struck him as a luxury available only after the fact.

Fridman does not understand why Conor McGregor is denied credit for the thirteen-second knockout of José Aldo. Hall first met McGregor in 2010 at a Dublin seminar, before he was Conor, already focused, smart, and hard-working alongside John Kavanagh, Owen Roddy, and Gunnar Nelson. People want to believe he got there with his mouth. The Aldo fight, Hall thinks, was Musashi-style psychological work: show up late to the duel until the other man is no longer in his own rhythm. Aldo leaping in with lefts and rights at the opening bell was not how Aldo usually started. On Khabib Nurmagomedov, Hall’s frame is that fighting is a trade of energy and damage. Khabib avoids damage on the feet, then uses chain wrestling Hall calls among the best in UFC history to suffocate people. Getting taken down fifteen times is not the problem if you stand up unhurt and unexhausted. Spending four rounds on the bottom is. The goal of jiu-jitsu, Hall smiles, is to stay relaxed in the fire. Every American fighter, he adds, wins all hypothetical matchups.

Fedor Emelianenko is Hall’s number one, a fighter whose prime arrived before UFC heavyweight was what it later became, in an era of ten-minute first rounds that almost made a different sport. Cross-era comparisons are like Spartans versus a modern army. His criteria are quality of opposition, lasting success, lasting innovation, and courage; being a big fish in a small pond takes none. He puts Kazushi Sakuraba, Lyoto Machida, and the Gracie family on the list, and notes he would not be in the room without them. Fridman values singular moments of genius over title defenses, the way he values Messi. Hall agrees that numbers are often a way not to say “I don’t know.” Trent Dilfer has a Super Bowl ring; nobody puts him with Dan Marino. Ronda Rousey may not make anyone’s top twenty, and she still changed more than almost anyone by making it permissible for women to be fighters. A mixed late record does not unwrite what BJ Penn, or anyone else, already did. We keep stuffing people, and ourselves, into one box, which is how you get the depression of “I am good today, I am bad today,” instead of a work in progress.

Mike Tyson describing locker-room terror that becomes godlike confidence as he walks to the ring does resonate, Hall says, because people are more like computers than we admit: a feeling has a reason. He treats pre-fight unease as a signal to go watch more tape at four in the morning until the source is gone. Pain and injury are nothing next to the pain of running away. He feels like a winner every time he fights with everything he has; the better fighter still does not always win the night, the man who fights better that night does. Tyson’s admission that hurting certain opponents felt orgasmic is, for Hall, rare honesty from a profession that lies for a living, and it was still a man hitting someone who had signed up to be there. We are all descended from people who killed with teeth and fingernails. Society is thin layers of rules over Nature Is Metal. If speech is violence, retaliation is already justified, and ten friends make might into right. Hall is more aware of mortality than most, as athletes are. He did not earn being born in the United States or currently lacking a disease he knows about. He would rather control how he lives than the helicopter that might fall on him leaving the building. Fridman reads a widely attributed “death song” about dying like a hero going home. Hall says there is no better way to end. Years earlier, a chance meeting Hall barely registered had already changed Fridman’s path; the process Hall spent the night defending had, in one life at least, already compounded.