Run a Profitable Gym
Run a Profitable Gym is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. This is actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms. Broke gym owner Chris Cooper turned a struggling gym into an asset, then built a multi-million-dollar mentoring company to help other fitness entrepreneurs do the same thing. Every week, Chris presents the top tactics for building a profitable gym, as well as real success stories from gym owners who have found incredible success through Two-Brain Business mentorship. Chris’s goal is to create millionaire gym owners. Subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and you could be one of them.
Run a Profitable Gym
Greg Glassman: 1-on-1 With Chris Cooper
CrossFit founder Greg Glassman is back with a new project: MetFix.
In this exclusive interview on “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain Business CEO Chris Cooper gets the inside story on Glassman’s latest venture—a program designed to attack chronic disease through its focus on metabolic health.
Glassman explains why he believes sugar is public enemy No. 1, how broken science has misled the fitness industry and why MetFix is in a position to address problems that CrossFit can’t.
He also shares his thoughts on the failures of modern education and why changing one life at a time is the only way to win the war on metabolic dysfunction.
Greg discusses MetFix’s potential applications in hospitals, schools and CrossFit affiliates, and he clarifies the relationship between MetFix and CrossFit.
This is a conversation you can’t miss. Tune in to hear more about MetFix and get Greg Glassman’s unfiltered take on health and nutrition.
To learn more about MetFix, visit the link below.
Links
MetFix
Gym Owners United
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00:11 - How to teach nutrition to a 6-year-old
21:50 - Getting proactive about health
38:04 - How Greg teaches his kids science
48:11 - Joy from teaching
01:17:45 - Greg’s closing thoughts
Greg Glassman is Chris Cooper's guest on this edition of Run A Profitable Gym. Please hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Now, here's Chris with Greg.
Speaker 2:So, of course, we've already started chatting and I've asked Greg, how do you teach nutrition to a 6-year-old
Speaker 3:Pal ? We, we've talked about the sugar bug and the sugar monster, and we're, we're all about the vilification of sugar here.
Speaker 2:Hmm . Okay. And
Speaker 3:I got my kids thinking that it is causal of obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Yeah. And cancer. You know, I get
Speaker 2:That
Speaker 3:The evidence for that is intriguing and the likelihood of it seems exceedingly high to me. But what I find really fascinating is to, I'm off your question here, but I'm gonna go here anyway . Okay . Because I'm telling you that we, we scare our kids with sugar, you know, want 'em to be, to, to understand. So they've heard it before. But , uh, uh, if you put sugar in cancer into Google, you get a huge in , in return. A lot of it institutional and a lot of it using the same language to talk about the importance of debunking the myth that sugar causes cancer. So I go downstairs immediately as Maggie go, Maggie, have you ever heard that Sugarhouse is cancer? She goes Only from you <laugh> . And I go, yeah, I would , if you think if something were to be a myth, I'd have , there'd be someone other than me that that's, is willing to publicly say it. And I say it with no certainty, I say it without profound conviction. What I say is that I will be surprised if that doesn't turn out the case. What I'm saying is that the evidence, especially once you come to realize as , as I do that cancer is a metabolic disease , um, you start looking for things different as a metabolic disease than you might wear at a genetic disease. Mm-hmm <affirmative> . Less concerned about radon and more about disruptive , uh, uh, forces to the mitochondria. Right? Yeah. And, and once you go there, the next thing you kind of notice is this enormous effort to debunk this myth. And it's the myth that no one stated or believed. And I, I understand what's, what's at play here. And I, and it also helps me understand why it is that there's resistance to cancer being a metabolic disease when I think that the nuclear transferase experiments demonstrate quite convincingly that that's exactly what it is. And I'll invite people to go ahead and look those up on your own. It's a little project, but , uh, the resistance is, is that once cancer's a metabolic disease, we're gonna start paying closer attention to the things that are disruptive to mitochondria. And we do know one significant way to kick the outta your mitochondria, and that is through the oxidative stress of, of sugar. But
Speaker 2:Do you think there's resistance
Speaker 3:In the all body systems, including in the mitochondria?
Speaker 2:Do you think there's larger resistance though, than just like, what's in the literature? Like is there resistance from the story that we're told, obviously through marketing, but also like resistance from what we wanna believe? Like, I don't wanna believe that sugar is the cause of cancer. Sugar's good, tastes good, you know? Is there, is there resistance from a , a bunch of different places or is it just in kind of the official literature?
Speaker 3:The problem is, is multifaceted as you could , as I could possibly imagine. Yeah . I don't really know where to start. There's the, there's the facet of, of corruption in the , in the sense of, of , uh, food and beverage industries influence on, on , uh, on academic research and published literature. There's another issue in that . There's a , an epistemic a , uh, uh, philosophical failing in academic science that it's drifted with its null hypothesis, significance testing and p values away from science where validation comes from the predictive strength of models. So it's gone from physical prediction to an inference scheme that is just as fallacious as anything could ever be. And that break in the, in philosophy of science inspired by Ronald Fisher in the inference world, the whole p value mess in, in large part. And the, the , uh, uh, peer review combination as a replacement for predicted strength is a , is a particularly easy thing to, to hijack. And so there's people sitting around going, wait a minute, alls I need is a big name , uh, uh, uh, uh, a panel of researchers, and we need , uh, uh, p values that show that , uh, that that show that the, the null hypothesis is , uh, is , uh, unlikely, and we can demonstrate that sugar-sweetened beverages have no ill impact. You know? Hmm . Let's get to see at that. And that's exactly what happens. That's exactly what happens. What's, I think, important from the, from the CrossFit perspective, if we can go there for a second. Yeah. I , I saw recently that, and I , I never look at some , someone sent it to me, but CrossFit was publishing that science shows that exercise can offset debilitation, I think it was, or something to that effect. And , uh, uh, like of course it does, and I would hope that some science showed it. But I would, it also wouldn't surprise me in the least if it were, if it weren't baked full of problems as almost all science is in this space. But more importantly, CrossFit, a affiliates, CrossFit trainers aren't sitting around waiting for, for science to demonstrate the CrossFit offsets debilitation. This is a clinical reality, and you don't have to have done this long at all to have countless examples of that. In fact, here's my, my assu assumption was if I can reverse it, if you come in here moving poorly, and now you're doing handstands and jogging two years later, then for sure this same stimulus is gonna be, is gonna be responsible in , in prevention. Mm-hmm <affirmative> . If I can reverse, I'm sure I can prevent. And this becomes a , a matter of, of clinical reality, which is nothing but a variant of an empirical fact. And your obligation is to, is to start with the imp empirical realities. And from there , develop useful science and useful science. Isn't that what you're seeing is Yep . You're seeing it. You know, we asked my dad to demonstrate that , uh, that scientifically that ISR was saving lives. And the challenge there is , is immense. 'cause the only people that go are those that are willing to stand there six days a week for six weeks and watch their kids get water boarded. And so it's people that are terrified of drowning anyways . Yeah . Right . I gotta find the same kind of parental concern and, and , and then have them do a different program. What , unbeknownst to them, I mean, you could , you couldn't even imagine the experiment where he worked it out. And he says that he, he wondered what our sense of what science is, and I, what do you mean? And he goes, well, I think you, I think you want me to demonstrate that floating babies are better than sinking loss . And he, and he goes, I don't, I don't know if that's the kind of thing science does. And I thought, I thought that was rich. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's great. So, for the listeners who aren't familiar, ISRs infant Swim resource, and you can look it up online, but Greg, you know, I said earlier that, you know, your genius is making the complex simple, and it seems like metrics might be the next evolution of this. And would you think of metrics as kind of an evolution that, that kind of comes after the Broken Science Initiative? Or is it on top, or is it the practical component of broken science? Or how does this all fit
Speaker 3:In, in 2000 , uh, 19 January 1st, 2019, there was a coup, and that is the guy that first built the website and his inner circle took back control of.com from games and, and frivolity, I knew it , Danny Bowflex and Constant Games coverage. What I thought was exciting and powerful about CrossFit was turning into something else in rapidly . And so we built a lot e even the workouts. And so from the ground up , we revamped. And that morning, January 1st, 2019, we had the, the family in the living room. And what had happened over the past several years is that I would go to the games or any event and stand there in a long receiving line, and I'd see there's Chris Cooper coming up eventually. And, and the Chris Coopers would always explain to me that it , it wasn't about the games at their box <laugh> as if I didn't know. And it bug , bug the hell outta me. And so I'd see here, you know, I'm gonna have to hear it. And they'd tell me that it's different, my box, man , it's not about the games. And so that's why we had Whistler. I said, I gotta get in front of the tenure affiliates and tell 'em , I also knew that, that the challenge was, first off, the miracle that is CrossFit is the non-protected secret that you, that you left with after the seminar. And I'd tell you at the seminar, there's nothing that happens at the seminar that a reasonably bright 10-year-old couldn't have pulled from the in internet this morning from our website. But here we go. What's not on this website is that your squats aren't below parallel, though . They feel like they are. Right? Mm-hmm . Yeah. Yeah. And that's how you clean. That's not how you clean. So that kind of stuff is, is is the part that, that can't get looked up. But , uh, I knew that, that the miracle of CrossFit was in the hands of the affiliates and that the mothership needed to find relevancy. Yeah. And, and after it didn't take much soul searching at all. And I realized what that was, and it looked like all those things that I can't, I can't do myself. And so I wouldn't have looked to the mothership for insights on bathroom cleaning , um, nor nor training protocol. But there were things like protecting me from, from , uh, uh, deadly legislation and litigation and , uh, continued education and, and validation of the methods to provide material and resource to the affiliate. These are the things that I would've counted on, looked for and, and wanted to receive. And so we did things like stop the licensure, occupational licensure form , the risk retention group. Um, the mothership spent a million dollars to avoid a $10,000 settlement in a case in Texas, a million dollars to avoid 10,000 and a and a year and a half. And we finally got that zero verdict, but we wouldn't settle. And 'cause of , what I didn't wanna do is settle 50,000 times, times 15,000 . Right . 10,000 times, 15,000 did , wasn't willing to do it. And it set , it set a precedent. Um, the Zoe Combs and Malcolm Kendricks and asee , Mount RAs and Tim Nos , and I don't even wanna leave anyone out, they're all just so, so amazing people. Iver Cummins, we're talking to him again. All those people from that 2019 point forward were more likely to be seen on the front end than was , uh, uh, uh, uh, the games games winners. Trying to think of his name . And he hates me because number him , you know, we, we tried to sell the games and everyone in the world was interested. Every kind of vc they had 'em lined up , taking me out to dinner. And what I couldn't do is I couldn't get anyone to buy the games they wanted. They wanted training and certification. Oh . Affiliates, affiliation, and , uh, and a certification. And there was no hiding the fact that the games was an enormous cost with a , with a dubious return. It wasn't, it wasn't the business. It was a tumor on the business. And it , and that's a thing that the people in games, media and the games competitors themselves never fully dropped . And so Joe Rogan says to Frazier, that's his name, that he doesn't know your name even after he's made you rich. Like no , he didn't name your , I'd have to spend 25 million to get 23 back. So that, so that Frazier could make poo . That's right . You know , I mean , yeah . That was , that was , there's no business there. Um, so, so what's happened, the question on Met Fixx as an owner, I was able to, to move CrossFit in that direction. And what I wanted was, I said, we don't presume to know the NSCA, the A CSM, the NIH , nor the CDCs charters. Yeah . But I , we could sit here and come up with something that I'm sure would be close to what they would put on paper, and that would be something with integrity and honesty, objectively give advice and guidance for health . You know? Right . All that just , it'd sound great, right? Yeah, yeah. Whatever we imagine it to be, I think we would all agree that it , and the f fda they did is in wholesale abdication of that charter. Hmm . If you're , at this point, if you're trusting the CDC , I find that actually humorous. Actually humorous. And , you know, maybe things are gonna change rapidly there. I've got, believe it or not, I got friends in the house. It's kind of funny that we would end up at a point like this, but , uh, the management changes include people that we're , I've been very friendly with now. Interesting. Now I could, I could run CrossFit and make it about the things it was about. I don't know what a game plan would look like that could stay true to that and be fiduciarily responsible to investors. I don't think there's a VC portfolio that wants a guy saying sugar is causing heart disease. I don't think there , I don't think there's anything in the rest of your holdings that goes, oh, that helps,
Speaker 2:Or, or, we're not gonna settle with the SCA. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right. Right. And, and so that, I understand that the nutrition program that comes out will have, will be oblig defective. I attended, I sent Russ and Russ to exercise his medicines , uh, nutrition certific , uh, I'm sorry, fitness certification. And at the end, rush shoots his hand up. It's weird. We've sat here for two days and listened to all of this, not one word on nutrition. And they go, aha, great point. And that's because it's outside of your kin , outside of your area of expertise. And we have things for this, like the USDA , the food pyramid, and an ethical trainer, an honest trainer or a good trainer uses that material and that material only. And you find right there exactly why exercise is medicine. They need a cautery of trainers that will refuse to tell the truth about sugar. That's important. Important . And anything , any venture capital holding isn't gonna be, there's no, there's no publicly traded , uh, there's no portfolio in , in a venture capital's holdings that, that wants, wants the, the, the problems that we would bring and are bringing to that, to that game. And no one's gonna fix chronic disease and, and not come clean on sugar. We're not gonna come clean on sugar. They're not gonna fix chronic disease. And so, me individually, mefi , we're not looking for institutional reform. Does it need it ? Sure . But I like to see, yes. I went up and down the halls of Congress with Nina Tch Holtz and, and others gonna change USDA if only we'd get into science, health and technology committee. You know, if only we could talk to the DC legislators. We talked to everybody. We talked to everybody. I finally had someone from the New York delegation that I got into a pretty nasty little confrontation with. He finally stopped, great guy with a , with a southern accent and a funky kind of charm to him, headed to New York delegation. He says, oh, wow, man. He goes, I got a true believer here. And I go, yeah, whatever. He goes, no, seriously. He goes, I'll go 10 years without seeing someone doesn't have some up their sleeve. He goes, I get what you're saying. Now I get it, and I apologize. Tone instantly changes. Couldn't believe that True believer. He goes, do you understand that Pepsi Cola is headquartered in , purchased New York? And he goes, and the name makes you giggle. Well , it's exactly right. And he goes, in every one of us, every state is either beholden red or blue to Coke or Pepsi, and you're coming in here talking anti-sugar. Dude , they ain't, you know, there's, nobody's gonna help you. You will have no friends and elected officials. Wow . Not gonna happen . Not gonna happen. And I'm sitting there with Podesta's people and we're all looking at each other. Like, that was well put . <laugh> . Yeah , <laugh> . The one thing Coke and Pepsi can agree on, and they had control every state. The one thing they can agree on is that these anti-sugar guys, they're lunatics. Wow. And they're not, they're not. So Med Fixx can go there. CrossFit can't. Med Fixx will stay close with RFK Junior and Jay Char profit ain't gonna do that. Got it. No one wants their investment taken where I , I would take it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I can certainly get that. Does that create any kind , it
Speaker 3:Includes pharma too. I mean, you want to start on that? I think the vaccine was so much worse than the disease that it's like, we're we , and that's still, there's still a divide there that is, that is treacherous.
Speaker 2:Does that create any kind of friction? I mean, Emily said the first a hundred Met affiliates are by and large also CrossFit affiliates. Does that create any kind of friction between the CrossFit affiliate and the Met affiliate, then ?
Speaker 3:I sure hope not. In fact, my vote was, but you know, Emily's running this thing, and I'm, someone asked me, one of our friends from France asked me if I wanna be the guy that comes out on the balcony and waves. And I said, yeah, kind of . I mean, truthfully, yes. Do I want to travel? Eh , not so much. But I'll tell you what I really don't wanna do. I don't want to teach the push press , and I don't want to take questions about programming. And I didn't enjoy teaching nutrition. And I don't want , I don't wanna do that now, but I'll, I'll, I've , I'm ready for, for torturer and spear forks on the sugar front , I think seed oils are bad. I, I don't want to put any energy there because we can't do GMO's, seed oil, pesticide vaccine, and sugar <laugh>
Speaker 2:<laugh> . Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:And if it were I sugar, and I know they do, I would fund, I would fund a broad range of concerns. So that compromise keeps me from suffering.
Speaker 2:Right. Okay.
Speaker 3:And it , and it would, I see that all the time. If, when I hear someone talking about chronic disease, then they've gone on for three, four minutes now, and I'm hearing seed oils and pesticides and genetically modified organisms, microplastics, I'm like, oh, that's the enemy. That's the enemy. The, we , I can't assess the significance of seed oil damage. And I know it to be real. It's gotta be real. I'm , I'm confident of that. I cannot access the totality of it in a , in a hyperinsulinemic hyper , uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, glycemic state and a hundred pounds overweight.
Speaker 2:Yeah .
Speaker 3:Such simple mechanisms like with a chronically elevated blood sugar, sodium, retention's a problem too much. When I , at u glycemia, sodium retention's a problem holding onto it.
Speaker 2:<laugh> <laugh> . Right.
Speaker 3:Completely different reaction. And I, and I, everything seems that way to me. The hormonal disruption that chronically elevated blood sugar provides that insulin glucagon disruption is so primal to, to such so much functionality in every mammalian system from the first proto true a billion years ago to today. We share that hormonal axis to jigg it, the way we do the, there, there won't come. Something that surprises me as a consequence of that. Not mental illness, not thermal regulation , not fleas , everything. Yeah. And we can explain it so many different ways too. My personal favorite is glycation. That's that covalently bonding of, of sugar to, to essential structures, typically protein, sometimes fat. And where we see that in disease states, everywhere we look, everywhere we look, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, there's a glycation component.
Speaker 2:So if, if Mefi affiliates can't rely on, obviously government support or help , uh, and, you know, basically they're trying to convince or find the people who are already self-advocates for their own health, where do they start making, you know, penetrating their community and, and getting people in to actually take proactive steps in their health?
Speaker 3:Perhaps this, perhaps my thoughts are in terms of a practitioner without really, you know, like, could a hospital , uh, be a MET fix affiliate? I would sure hope so. Um , a children's hospital especially, I was part of an effort to pull all soda out of some children's hospitals. And it , man , it was a fight. Yeah . You had to , it was tough. It happened at the, from the, from the vending machines in the, in the, in , within the, the , uh, staff areas, commissary patients, everything. No , nobody, nobody liked that. Could a , could a school be a met ability physicians, yes. I think great. But a , a CrossFit affiliate, I think is what a lot of people are picturing. And I, I think for me, it would be this, that I'm selling the ency to your metabolic recovery. Um, that's what you're paying for. And I'm gonna give you some fitness too. But I would turn the conversation in the focus to what we did when we had the experiment in the basement with the underserved people at hq, where I wanted, I wanted people that were particularly challenged metabolically so that I could demonstrate to employees in CrossFit Inc . But they'd have to go through the parking lot and come up through the gym to go into the building. And I wanted them to see what I was gonna do with the last people you would ever imagine in a fitness commercial. And the way we came across that is, I, I just straight out from the start said, I want fat and old farts, and they can't be fat enough or old enough. And , uh, the challenge immediately was how to put that out into space. And I came up with the formulation or put out on Facebook, if you were the last person you would ever imagine doing CrossFit, we want to talk to you . And out of that response was , was considerable. I found a cautery of people that were in having serious troubles. You know, 450 pound charge nurse with a walker. Right. Wow. And her , her dad, he doesn't even have a heart. He's got a medic , uh, uh, ID bracelet says that he's got an arch screw for a heart. There is no pulse. I'm not dead <laugh> . You know? Wow. Yeah. And so that's a , and that's a father daughter team. And , uh, we started with 12 people, and a year later we had 150. And the stories were why I train . That's it. That is , there's purpose in that that has, it transcends anything that can be put on a, on a, on a, on a deis , on a , a podium. There's no, no amount of metal metals around the neck. There's nothing, there's nothing like what we were doing in there . New ownership dismantled that program and immediately, and took down forging elite fitness from the walls before they wanted cameras in there to shoot the new open. They didn't want those people in there. Oh, that's interesting. And I said, you know what? I like, I was, I , I told Dave and Savanna , I'm gonna put a 400 pound woman on the front end of the site. Jeff Kane didn't like it either. Nobody liked it. Nobody liked that. Nobody thought that was good for business. Wow. Who was I speaking to? Was I trying to lure in 400 pm people? Nope . Nope . What I was talking to is the 15,000 people that have the greatest opportunity for advancing the health, preventing chronic disease that exists in the community. Mm-hmm <affirmative> . And you can extend that leadership to the physicians that come to your box. And so many affiliates have, it's amazing how many physicians learn something profound about metabolism and disease prevention and reversal in a box. I know of a case famous one here in Phoenix where , uh, uh, grossly overweight internal medicine doc crosses the street to , goes to the gym. He doesn't know CrossFit from his, but his practice sits where he can see the gym. Mm-hmm <affirmative> . He, he loses an enormous amount of weight, questions, the diet and the exercise, and all of it finally reports to them that he was a type two diabetic, and now he's not. And the whole thing is, is is a revelation to him professionally and otherwise. So what do they do? They put weak cure type two diabetes up on a, and I'm like, any day now, someone's gonna knock on the door and drag those off for that. Yeah . And , uh, we backed them . I told 'em , I'll pay, I'll pay for whatever comes down the pike for that legally, and let it be known to everything in the state of Arizona that you want to have a fight. You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to show that they didn't do it. That they can't, and that they know it. And , uh, I don't think you can do that. And so they, they remained unmolested. But what a beautiful thing. Yes . What a beautiful thing. The current, you can't, I can't play that game in a , on a , on a , with a fiduciary responsibility to a , to a investor that wants to maximize profit. I also can't argue against CrossFit, dumbbells, jump ropes and fish oil. Right. It on assumption of the fiduciary obligation to, to the , the dude that hired me. Right.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:I would do that. I mean, if you, but, but see, I don't know. I don't know how I could run that thing. I mean, I know the things , uh, like those are things we turned down. I didn't want to do jump ropes. I don't wanna do fish oil. We asked the people at Nordic Natural, what would be better about this fish oil? And it would be branded CrossFit. And I'm like, what else? Nothing else. You'd make money <laugh>.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 3:Funny. And that seemed , that seemed dilutional of the brand, you know, on that first to sale from , uh, the guys from , uh, what was that thing called? Whatever. But they , uh, they testified in my divorce as to my mismanagement of the company by evidence of the things I was leaving on the table
Speaker 2:Was this Antos?
Speaker 3:Yes. Yep . Yep . Oh , allowing, allowing the affiliates to make their own t-shirts was me mismanaging the , the marital asset. And you could pick one NBA and after another, to tell you, that was a stupid thing to do, to let them make their own shirts. Yeah. Like, no, you don't get it. They're tribes. They're independently owned and operated. You can open your doors. You can be, you can be John Wellborn and, and, and have a , a CrossFit Newport Beach. And the motto was, go yourself. And you'd see those in the grocery store, beautiful women wearing the go yourself, John Wellborn T-shirt, and then three years later meet a religious G and get tossed outta the gym for saying. That's okay. I mean, that's, it takes all types, right?
Speaker 2:Does , yeah. Yeah. I see that. How, how important is media, do you think, to the new era, I guess , of Mad Fixx ? I mean, that was maybe the first thing I ever learned from you in person, was that just how valuable media was to the whole movement. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I , you know, we, we were having at CrossFit years and years ago meetings with bit delivery experts telling us that you get this rapid growth with the giveaway. But at , uh, I , what it was 15 to 20 terabytes. The, the, the whole thing goes bad on you, goes south on you, and , and you lose, you lose, you can't, you can't maintain scale and everyone goes broke. Hmm . And I don't, I'm , I don't, I should stay away from the numbers, but it was funny that we were already at like 50 to 100 X that in , in bike delivery.
Speaker 2:<laugh>.
Speaker 3:Yeah . Um, Western Digital gave us a drive that actually required , uh, several hundred thousand dollars in, in , uh, in building and air conditioning to keep it cold, because we had many times the Library of Congress is holding in, in , uh, largely , uh, red camera footage of the games . Yep . You know, and so we, of course, it , it , it , it was in many ways a media company. I Google myself and turns out I'm a publisher. Right. Yeah. I mean, we had a , we had the best selling documentaries on it , on , uh, iTunes for several years. And so media is all important, but I don't see a value beyond being sourced and repository for reliable information for people of a like mind . And, and I want, and again, I want that mantle. I want the mantle that the CDC and, and the FDA abandoned , it may be an underwriter's laboratory of, if you will, of , uh, of health information where they may not be Right, but they're not lying. Right. Yeah. <laugh> . And, and, and with that spirit alone, you are gonna be, you're gonna be useful as a resource, I would suspect. And so I want to collect those things in those people when you know something. And here , and here's that thing. We know. Here's what's important. If you take the universally accepted parameterization of health, and what I'm talking about is blood pressure vitals , uh, bone density, muscle mass , uh, triglycerides, cholesterol, you go on and on. A lot of 'em , you look at those things, and if you treat them as though they were independent variables and attempt to, to derive a healthy state by bringing the blood pressure down, we're gonna bring the triglycerides down. I've got a and we're gonna , we're gonna increase your bone density. And I do this by , by , uh, uh, chemo pharmaceutical intervention along those parameters instead of the scientifically and essential, logical, truthful realization that all of those things are dependent variables of lifestyle choices. What you end up doing is you're hammering on the speedometer of a runaway train. I'm not going to suppress your triglycerides with drugs, elevate your bone density with drugs , um, reduce your blood pressure with drugs and have a healthy organism. Got it. But I can do potentially is extend your lifespan in that debilitated state. So that sustainability, right. The big, the big fuzzy word that, that so many love sustainability in this space gets us to that on, on , on , uh, a broad retinue of drugs at 50 years old and living to be 125 on that . Right . Yeah . And , uh, I, I don't think that should be the goal. It's a, it's a horrible thing. The unprecedented amount of death we had during Covid was a tragedy amongst the chronically, chronically ill amongst the, the, the worst sufferers of metabolic syndrome. And it ripped through those, the message from the worst of Italy from the physicians, there was not mask up. It wasn't get vaccine, it was stay fit from the ones working the front line .
Speaker 2:That's interesting. And I heard
Speaker 3:They fit ,
Speaker 2:I heard something really similar in Sweden too. Um, but you really didn't hear that in North America at all. Is it up to the Met affiliates to bridge these gaps with their local positions to create their own media? I mean, you know, one thing that I think you famously said is that if you talk to the smart kids, they'll explain it to everybody else, or something like that. Like, is that what the first a hundred Met Fixx affiliates are really gonna do? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't know what the, I don't know what the , uh, motivation is entirely and limiting to a hundred. And I , I'm not, I don't have clear sense maybe entirely of, of, of what an affiliate does or doesn't do. Okay. But I do know this, that when you, when you understand something as, as important as the fact that this, the health parameterization, it consists of dependent variables controlled by lifestyle choices, chiefly , um, sugar intake and sedentism , the ravages of those two, and that they're both, they're both , uh, uh, one looks certainly the other for sure looks like addictive behaviors at the point that you understand that, and that there's no market for that. There's no marketplace for that. There's no medical organizations like that. What you need to do is hub and network and bring people around. And how, how interesting is it that I, I'll be bringing around the same people again, the Tim nos, the , the Zoe Combs, the Iver Cummings, the, the, the , uh, uh, Malcolm Kendricks, you know, I seen Malhotra and now we got Jay Botta Cherry and RFK Junior . And I think that there needs to be , so I think that what's available on the resource and the greater conversation and networking, I think we're gonna start a book club around stove. I can simultaneously start educating as to what science is and what science isn't. I mean, look how simple this is to teach people that science teach our children that science is , is source and repository of man's objective knowledge, right. Source and repository. It's where we keep it and where it comes from. And it is knowledge silos in models. And these models are a , are a , a forecast of a measurement. They take a, they take a, a measurement and a set of conditions and predict a future, future measurement. And the validation of the, of the model comes from its predictive strength. I mean, these are, these are indeed things you can teach children. And that the, that the predictive strength is the sole determinant of validation. And that, that that's , uh, independent of, of everything else. So that rather, the, the scientific idea with its predictive strength comes through inspiration or perspiration. It's it that doesn't affect its validity. I had a , somewhere between an acquaintance and friend, he called me before him, and I enjoyed his company, and we got together several times, but he got a Nobel Prize chemistry because of a idea he had high on LSD mixing a batter in a commercial bakery. And that was from PCR. And they didn't get to say, you don't get the Nobel Prize for PCR because you were high on LSD and stirring batter in a, in a commercial mixer. It doesn't work that way. Right, right. Yeah. I don't, I wouldn't recommend anyone take LSD and stir batter in a commercial mixer and think you're gonna get a Nobel Prize from it. But the significant point is that the, the validation of of scientific models comes out of their predictive strength. And that has nothing to do with peer review. And it also has nothing to do with the probability of the data on some , I'm assuming, a null to get right at the null hypothesis, significance testing, which is something we could do show on after show. But there are people in that space like Gerd Giger at Max Plunk that I , I would , I couldn't get enough of recommend anyone to read GERD Gigerenzer every 10 to 12 years. You write something brilliant on the failures of, of , uh, of p values and no hypothesis significance testing. And the brilliance. And the extent of the, of the realization and support for that is it should be enough to put an end to it. And it's not, it's not, it's not gonna go away.
Speaker 2:Well, you are homeschooling, I think you said five of your kids right now, and you're using a , a math textbook from the 19th century. What are you, how are you teaching your own kids about science?
Speaker 3:I'm going to make an attempt to bridge qualitative and quantitative reasoning through probability theory. And I have, until they're , uh, old enough to emancipate at 18, they can say, I'm not gonna learn this anymore <laugh>.
Speaker 2:So that
Speaker 3:You can , you can nudge my kids and on the subject of why do we have to learn fractions and we have to learn fractions so that we can learn math, so that we can do probability theory, so that we can learn what science is, so that we won't stand in line to get a vaccination that's dangerous and unneeded . That's what we're trying to do. And , uh, you can, I can nudge my kids on an example and go, what's the lesson here? They go, there's no such thing as free. I go, that's right. Somebody, there's no free. Somebody paid for it. You know, nothing's free. And if you, probability of A given B is not the probability B given a, and we can start with the example of what's the probability that it's gonna rain given that it's cloudy versus what's the probability that it's cloudy, given that it's raining. 10-year-old sees that difference when that 10-year-old becomes an md and they, and they learn that a test has a a 95% sensitivity. They think that it is a 95% chance that you have the disease 'cause you tested positive. And it's the same error. It's the exact same error. And by the way, when physicians were presented with discriminating between the sensitivity and the positive predictive value of a test, it's something like 95% failed and took, took a , uh, a, a what would've been a seven and a half percent chance of recurrence and turned it into 75%. And just think of the, think of the cost for that, the implications for that, just in terms of medicine. The prosecutor's fallacy does the same thing. And what I'm going on and on about here is that there are, there are failings in our reasoning that have produced a state at the University of primary research science and its publication and acceptance, no hypothesis, significance testing, p values and peer review, that often without a , without a hypothesis clearly stated to which there's a , a null. Because the first thing we see is, is, is the null and the probability of the data. But the failing that allows that to pass would find, would find the earliest opportunity correction, the perfect opportunity at about 10 years old, at about the fourth grade. That is that I can get into a fourth grader's head, the difference of between the probability of A given B and the probability of B given a with simple examples like the rain . And you can find derivative examples of that failing, like in the prosecutor's FC , where the, where assuming, assuming innocence, the probability of the evidence would be low. And so therefore, the probability of your innocence must be low since the, the evidence is unusual. And, and people have had and released that of jail after sitting under that kind of faulty assumptions all around, all around the world. And in large numbers. There's famous cases of it that Sally Clark, I think was her name, the gal that was , uh, was accused of, of, of killing her two children. Because the odds of ha to having two kids with , uh, Sid's deaths was astronomical, therefore she must have killed him . That's right. And , and the , the logic is absolutely flawed. The probability of A given B can be low , and the probability of B given a can be high . The probability of your data, given your hypothesis, assuming your hypothesis might be really low, but it might be that the probability of the high , of the, of the hypothesis is actually high on assumption of the data. And, and, and , and that is something that iss kind of hard, like the 95% of physicians who get that twisted. When you sit down and explain to an adult the difference, you'll have to do it again. And you'll have to do it again. You'll have to do it again. There are so many of, of these types of things that I, in my own learning recently have had to reinforce repeatedly. And some of them seem counterintuitive. I have to stare at it until I see it that way. And what is profound to me is that we can remediate fourth grade education and put you on this path right away. One that is really important is the, is the, is the interpretations are underlying reality of probability. Probability isn't a , isn't isn't a physical property. And probability theory isn't an experimental science. It is the rational , uh, uh, measure of of our assumptions. Of our knowledge. And that's a , that's a counterintuitive thing. I mean, Clayton Aubrey the author of it , it's a neat read of a book for newbie's fallacy. Okay. He says he got into the field because a friend of his had left the PhD program in mathematics and went to work for a brewery and had a quality control and probability issue that he couldn't even explain with his just about to have a PhD in mathematics. And the reason was, is that the, the , uh, uh, inference community wasn't willing to recognize the probability of a hypothesis, only probabilities of data. And he started looking into this and he discovered the physics et Janes . And what kept him in a program he thought he was gonna quit was that the probability theory that he was studying was some of the most counterintuitive material he'd ever seen in his life. When I read that, I knew exactly what was going on. 'cause I too was trying to, trying to, was dealing with some of the counterintuitive nature of what I was learning. And I do fervently believe that there's comfortable mods that we can make in, in fourth grade education that are, that are consistent with the ancient efforts and , and expectations at the trivium in the quadrivium. And when I was talking earlier, I think I can bridge qualitative and quantitative reasoning through probability theory and deliver a modern epistemology of philosophy of science and render this to perfection. And by the time the kids are able to escape. So if you can, no , if if I do , if I do my job right , yeah . The issues for for college are gonna be maybe entirely , uh, vocational oriented. It might be you just go to get a skill or to get some kind of necessary credentialing, but it's not gonna be hard to exceed the walkaway in homeschooled kids from anything they get at any university. Now, I wouldn't be able to get into the nuances of organic chemistry. And if that's your thing, then go there and study organic chemistry. But in terms of a general ed kids that can read anything, write forcely about it, and do some with some modicum of, of, of rhetorical flourish, right. With a , with a little bit of style and flare and accuracy and good usage, and also not be terrified at using a partial differential equation to solve, to solve or do a lala transform to, to gr out answer to a physics problem. I don't think it's a, a crazy thing to, to move towards that for someone at 17. And yet, very, very, very few people have those capacities as a , as graduate students. And so whether they decided to do nothing with education, I tell you what, I'm gonna be a landscape architect. This prep would be ideal. And if they decided they wanted to get into analytical jurisprudence and be a law professor at Bolt Hall in Berkeley, you'd also be, or, or study particle physics. You're gonna be ideally prepared for this. And all of this for me is exactly consistent with what were the intents with the trivium and the quad rium. And so I don't really care how old my math book is. It's fun, though, to look at stuff like the ray arithmetic and realize that this is where Stephen Douglas and Oliver Wendell Holmes and Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt learned how to learned how to, how to play with numbers, right? Yeah. Then you look at the eighth year book on it, and it's a , it, it reads like , uh, it reminds me of some of the finance material I had to wade through in order to tutor kids that were struggling in math, in finance. And so I had this huge vocabulary problem. The , the math wasn't hard. The vocabulary was, and to think that this was something that several hundred million kids in 60 countries went through. You know what's cool too about the Ray , uh, arithmetic is that , I wish I had 'em up here, but the Ray's arithmetic Ray was born in 1807, I believe it was maybe 1804, and not 10 miles nor seven years from where McGuffey was , uh, born. McGuff, he's reader. Mm-hmm . And interesting , two of them had a , had was just a lock hold on. Primary education. You learn to read with McGuffy and you learn to do, you do learn to do math with race. But for over a hundred years, people learned arithmetic from those books in an era where we, where we had high, high levels of numeracy compared to today. And McGuffey is gone. And we founded a department of Education in 1978 where something like 80% of eighth graders were reading at eighth grade level. And now that figures like 15% on the same exams .
Speaker 2:Greg, you're so passionate about this. And earlier you said that you can't take on sugar and GMOs and vaccine because that would just kind of dull, you know, your effect in each one. Why aren't you focusing on changing education at the, you know, 8-year-old, 10-year-old level? If, if that's really what it's gonna take to change things.
Speaker 3:And, and maybe I am , maybe I am . One of the things I have to be careful with is , uh, I didn't expect to enjoy teaching the kids the way I do. And it's , uh, it reminds me of the joy I got out of training. But I , I wanna , I wanna leave you with this in the modern era where dad and maybe dad and mom both have jobs and we entrust education to experts, and then you, you've got coaches for sports and then you, you sit down on the floor and what play Monopoly or Barbies with your kids to have quality time. Yeah . Teaching your kid how to add fractions with unlike denominators and to do so without tears or, you know what I mean? Like maybe even find some humor in it to play with it. And to teach a kid that skill is an , is an unprecedented, unparalleled quality time. And and that is, 'cause like my, my father taught me a lot, and I don't, I don't, I hope he didn't have any fun. 'cause I didn't, it wasn't an enjoyable experience. I'm grateful for it now, but enjoyable experience. And so I , I, I think I can overcome that. But I do want to speak to the inordinate, the joy I've, I've gotten out of that. Riley was at the board the other day and she's resisted a lot of the math. It's , uh, funny that she's kicks on , uh, not tying and geometric constructions. And I said, this is just math without, without numbers. But , uh, she was standing at the board and she says, and she let me , she's just 11 years old. She goes, oh my God. I go, what? She goes, I get it. And I go , well , good. She goes, you know, it's weird though. She goes, it's really simple.
Speaker 2:Ah , that's great. And I'm
Speaker 3:Like , finally, it's a victory. It's a victory.
Speaker 2:You've been passionate about kids and brain development and learning from the very first, you know, CrossFit kids and you know, you and I traveled and watched some chess in St . Louis and, you know, at one time the CrossFit brain was what you were really focused on. And do you feel like maybe you should be doing more in that space ? I mean, I shouldn't say that you are doing a lot, but would you be having more effect focusing on that age group instead of , uh, you know, helping people who are already a hundred pounds overweight as an adult?
Speaker 3:I have , uh, social contact and, and warm relationships and friendships with an enormous amount of , uh, of , uh, private school , uh, instruction.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The , the CEO of the cur of the , uh, what's, what's David Kirby's schools forget. He was executive director of , uh, Cato though, and now he's got Acton Academy.
Speaker 2:Acton Academy, yeah.
Speaker 3:Acton Academy. And their , their CEO is a, is a , is a good friend of mine. I remember the , his name, the head of, of his business. But , uh, he's been out to some broken science stuff and, and we're talking and , uh, the CEO of , uh, of , uh, the great hearts chain , uh, CEO and , and co-founder is a neighbor and friend, and he's been to several events. And Larry Arn at Hillsdale is a friend. And I've been to his house for dinner and he, to mine , and I , and this is weird 'cause I wasn't searching for these people, but I do have it at just a , just a , a text away contact with an enormous amount of , uh, of , uh, consumers of curriculum. And they all know that I think that we're in need of some , uh, remedy. And so, yeah, I can, I'll remain excited about this. And I think that something is coalescing seems inevitable. You know, I've got a , I've got my list of things that, that if you taught children, we wouldn't have scientists confused today. You mentioned in, in a discussion that the number of people that don't know what science is, the number of people that call themselves practicing scientists and can't stand there and tell you what science is. My father used to do what almost looked like a parlor trick, but he would take new hires in, in, in , uh, electrical engineering and physics. And these were , these were PhD candidates and and beyond that were brought into these meetings. And he would stand there and ask, ask what, what science is and take all comers, write it down on the board, and then he'd put astronomy and astrology up on the board, and he goes, okay, I'm gonna take your definitions and I'm gonna be an astrologer and tell you how I'm meeting your requirement. That until you, until you realize that, that , um, Aries make better lovers has no teeth in terms of number and quantification, but there's going to be a , a eclipse of the, of the moon in 315 days, nine hours in six minutes. Um, that's what, that's your differentiation. There's the, there's the, the, the, the , uh, uh, critical point. And , uh, and so if I look to, and I'm, I'm captivated by trivium and quadrivium, the ancient attempts at , at , uh, and these, these curriculum, this, this approach to teaching grammar school has been constant for a long, long time. And it's easy to get back to that kind of stuff. But I do think that we could modernize that in that there have been some advances in probability theory and information theory and in , uh, mathematics, just, I'll take the simple example of mathematics. Um, music was, was thought by the ancients to be the way to teach number and change. Well, we've got a whole science of change called calculus. And the truth is, I can teach anybody calculus in la in LA when my grandmother, who's fairly long passed away, but I got her textbooks as a kid, and 11th year mathematics was differential calculus. And 12th year mathematics was , uh, was integral calculus. And that was, I say , who took that? She goes, everyone, I go, everyone. She goes, well, one guy got killed on a motorcycle and another two rules got pregnant, and they were thrown outta school, but everyone else did. Wow. That's what we did. That's what you taught kids. Wow.
Speaker 2:Greg, I would really love here, and I would love to ask you, because you, you've launched 30,000 brand new entrepreneurs. The , the thing that I think is probably holding a lot of gym owners back right now, CrossFit affiliates is I would say lack of hope. You know, what makes you optimistic about pursuing fitness, pursuing health, pursuing education that maybe they could latch onto it just to kind of get,
Speaker 3:If I was system focused , yeah . I would be depressed and my si but friends that think in terms of systems and organizations suffer emotionally from their lack of success. I had a friend that got a sabbatical from the prosecutor's office in Santa Cruz, and his wife was a highly regarded audiologist and , and was aghast that the prevalence with which , uh, hearing aid companies would knock on doors and low talk elderly people. So they had a a RP lists, and they'd knock on the door and you'd answer, and they'd speak in inaudible tones and leave you with hearing aids. Right, <laugh> ? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so he took a year of his life, moved to Sacramento to make this an impossible practice. And at the end of the year, as the , the culmination in this, in this work, this bill made the rotations from committee to committee to committee, the hearing aid companies were there to, to fix this thing. And what it did is it ingrained their practices. And at , at the end, he realized that the whole field had been made worse because of his efforts that
Speaker 2:He Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3:Put them in . And he , and he actually suffered clinical depression from it. If I were trying to fix the USDA , if I were tasked as, as Jay Rio or RFK Junior is, I would brace myself for an enormous amount of frustration and, and possibly depression. But what's cool is that when you are working with people , um, that's a whole different thing. And there's, you know, some wills, some won't. So what? Right. But you quickly, I mean , what we had , we started with 12 people in the basement. I ended up with 150, you know, and, and you never have any doubt for them. And they'll keep you more than busy. And maybe the thing we're trying to do, maybe the important thing is for that contagion, for the desire to be, to be content and excited by the impact you have in your community. One of the Mefi affiliates had a, had a , a gym population that had a , that was sounds from the telling of it, that there was a lot of 30 something year olds, and now everyone's 60, 70 and 80 . They still have games competitors, but they're, but they're super seniors now. And , uh, I understand all of that. I understand all of that. Hey, if you really, you know, as a trainer , um, I didn't want people coming in with perfect bodies and perfect help . But, you know, if you, if you don't see someone 500 pounds, there's a giant chunk of marble out of which you could maybe hammer out a David underneath you , you are really not in the right business. And it was, it was exactly like that for me. And so that girl, the nurse that was with the walker, yeah. Um, later I come in and she's knelt down on one foot. She's down on one knee, and she's, could she coing a dog that's been tied to the, to the, to the bars and then jumps up and, Hey, how you doing this morning? And I remember when the proto behavior for that, a year and a half earlier sh that she would approach the 42 inch , uh, plyo and with two strong and capable l one superstars behind her, move the walker to the side, lean forward and lift her panties in pieces onto the box to lay down. Never really had , not even having enough, so much material, it was hard to even get to, to horizontal. But there you are collapsed on the box. And then work all that back to standing and back to the, back to the walker. And for me, I understand that transformation to be beyond my comprehension. You like, no one, these people tell me they have a different favorite color. They like different kinds of clothes. They like, you don't like bicycling because you can. Right. Yeah. Imagine that . And , uh, to, to be a docent for that journey is a , is a remarkable thing. It's why people get into medicine. I mean, you go to work in an ER for the little girl that comes in that wasn't breathing and leaves four days later with balloons skipping. Right. You look for that, and we have access to that where no one else can help. No one else can help. You're not, you're not gonna do it. And it's, it's hard to do three days a week, frankly, one day a week. Unlikely. Unlikely. Once a month. Not gonna do it. Not gonna do it. And tools, do I need, do I need tongue depressors and a stethoscope and a reflex hammer? And, you know, do I need to look in your ears. No, I need to convince you to, to , uh, get off the carbs and, and then, and, and move with me. I had an interesting thing, Chris. My friend Elliot's dad is an orthopedic surgeon, and he , uh, plays squash three days a week, and he rides his bike into the university every day where he is a professor of orthopedic surgery . And the question is, what should he be doing to further protect his health? And I, I'm not gonna tell him double unders and thrusters, I don't believe that. True. I would hope I could interest him in, in , in improving the strength of his cycling, getting to work faster and being more competitive than squash. Do I think that he's gonna live longer because of that? I do not. I do not. I wish that were true. I wish it were true. I was dismayed at the, at the breadth of adaptation from dietary changes alone where there is no exercise. And I had been training for a long time when I first got exposed to that. The very few trainers get to fix people just nutrition and not make a move. In 1995, I traveled very Sears and I got to talk to people about their nutrition that weren't gonna move and didn't move. And what, frankly, it shocked me. And then it , some no small measure bum me out that people were getting increased lean body mass and , and increased bone density without exercise by, by cutting carbs and eating more protein. Yeah . Wow. I couldn't find an adaptation that was unique to accept getting calluses that you weren't gonna get by control of your phone . <laugh>. Yeah . And if that doesn't send a message loud and clear. So as an affiliate, I think, I think that in this political climate, and I'm talking about the people we have at NIH and CDC and the, and the runaway costs direct and at attendant of Chronic Disease, I think that it , there's time to, to communicate truths about eating that can't be stopped by organizations funded , um, by people that are selling to eat and drink. And we saw some of that directly. I mean, we remember, we, we, we defended some , uh, some affiliates and I believe in North Carolina and Florida over exactly this, right? Yeah . Do you remember what I'm talking ? Do you remember the Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent . Yeah. Definitely the Florida one for sure. Yeah . I'm not , I'd be, I'm, that fight needs to continue to be fought, and it's probably more fightable now than ever before.
Speaker 2:Yeah. From a ground level. I think a lot of the, the storytelling is really what , what's probably most important, right? How, how do you affect that one person in your town instead of how do you change the legislation? But I think it was important also that CrossFit Inc . Was fighting legislation, was willing to go to court for these things. And I'm really glad that you said, here's why, you know, the fiduciary duty of, of private equity firm is gonna stop that from happening.
Speaker 3:I, I fully understand. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, I don't, I don't celebrate it, but I'm not, I couldn't be in denial of it. Right? Yeah . If someone, if someone a , if I, if I were tasked with making CrossFit highly profitable, I couldn't look you in the eye and tell you that that means bring it back to what it was. Yeah . It was profitable, but not VC profitable. Now there is this Greg Glassman profitable was we can keep the lights on, pay the bills , um, enormous amount of discretionary income, and then, and then exercise the discretion to spend it on things like building schools in Africa or, you know, things like that. Yeah . Um , and I, but as soon as it's me promising you that I'm gonna give you Q1, 2, 3, 4 , Q 5, 6, 7, 8 returns , um, that's gonna look like going back to the fish oil pills that I denied. And that would make a , it would make a fortune. It'd make a fortune. Here's something else. If it happened though, I wouldn't be there. You mailed me my shirt and you tell me that we now open at 9:00 AM and here's the approved haircuts, and I'm not gonna be around, I would rather live in a, in a wild west of John Wellborn's both versions of John Wellborn than, than something that formulated and regimented. Hmm . Hey, we, you know, what we did was the professionalization of the training space. Right? And that allows for, for, for both John Wellborn's, you know, I'm not gonna tell you to be an effective math teacher, what length your hair you need to have and what kind of shirt you need to wear. Right. You could look like Jerry Garcia, or you could look like a , you know, horn rim glasses with crew cut . You know, that all of that happens. All of that happens. You see in medicine, you see in medicine, you see people, you , they're brilliant minds in medicine that you could give Brilliant this guy. Okay. You know, that's all good. That's all good. And business doesn't like to work that way.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:There's also the , uh, you know, the, there was a hit on the , uh, in, in deliberate and quick elimination of people closest to me. The company took an intellectual hit that's gonna be a, a long term , long time coming, you know, I don't know that they didn't reduce the standard deviation , uh, reduce the IQ of the employees by full standard deviation. Not that there aren't brilliant people still in its employ , but there were a handful of highly intelligent people that, that they needed to go first.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think there's that, I don't know , I don't wanna call it lack of science at the top now, but something like that. But also lack of inspiration. And that's why I was asking you like , why should affiliates be hopeful? And I think, I think you nailed that. You find the hope in the person that's right in front of you and the change that you're affecting in their life, not what HQ is selling for this month.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's always been that way. Mm-hmm <affirmative> . This , and for me, my introspection is, Hey, we got a relevancy problem. We have a relevancy problem. Why is it it is because Chris unlocks the door in the morning and 99.999% of what can be got . And he is getting, you know, we need to do things for Chris he can't do for himself. Got it . That's what we gotta do. And boy, that made us, that meant we had to be sharper than we were. We had to be more resourceful than we were. We needed to bring the smartest people we could find around the parade of what I called mess experts , expert on the mess is one of the proudest things I've ever done. And guess what I mean, we've got, we've got Karin Thompson, which is where I got the me experts . I don't know if you know the connection to Karin and all of them, but you know, we've got a nephrologist who's worried about , uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, blood pressure and impact on the kidneys. And then I've got the , the cardiologist has different concerns than the, than the , uh, pulmonologist. And, and there were different mechanisms that were under consideration, but when, when Karin said that sugar is a addictive, they all would shift gears and go, yeah, it probably is everybody. And so she was what was so common to so many, from so many different walks of life, they all gave her quarter . And you, I don't think you'd be surprised to know we're in communication with all those people except for the, the two that have died. Sarah Hallberg and Paul Roach. Um, but the rest are, are friends. And it's also fascinating to me that none of us, we were friends before Covid , and we have the exact same take on it. And yet before that, our interests were metabolic. They were, you know, <laugh> . Yeah. And then all of a sudden, in terms of that public health we're all seeing the same thing. The only one of the me that got vaccinated was Malcolm Kendrick. And he couldn't go to his, his , uh, ski chalet in , in Grenoble , France. And he'd rather have covid and die than , so he didn't, he was gonna take any risk possible to , uh, and I hope he, I hope he faked it somehow, but he was self-professed vaccinated because of the traver travel restriction everyone else. No one wanted anything to do with that. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, it
Speaker 2:Is. That
Speaker 3:Really is what would unite us. You learn, you learn the voice of public health on one issue, and you get it on other issues if you , it is , it is actually a skill you can develop. For instance, when I put in Cancer and Sugar into Google and see organization after organization after organization committed to dispelling the dangerous myth that sugar causes cancer and and what would the dangers of that myth be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. There's not much down . Yeah. We all stop eating it, I guess. Yeah .
Speaker 3:We're also seeing this, Chris, not to beat a dead horse, but you can find Yeah. Okay. Maybe extra, extra dietary excess dietary sugar causes obesity and yeah, there's probably some mechanisms in obesity that are causing cancer, but sugar doesn't cause cancer. And man , we , we know this play , and it was that sugar doesn't cause diabetes was the big diabetes myth published by as a diabetes myth by the CDC and on it on closer examination, find that sugar causes inflammation and inflammation causes diabetes in people with a genetic defect.
Speaker 2:Mm .
Speaker 3:Thank you for that. Elucidation <laugh> . Yeah,
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:But yet they don't hesitate if you do have diabetes, you can't eat any of these things.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Um, I read the sa the same axle fluger and I , I told him that the CDC says that it's a myth that you can , that, that , uh, sugar cause diabetes. And he brings me this published piece he got online, and it's, if you don't, if you, if you have diabetes, you can't eat sweets, confection, you know, desserts . It's got the whole, every kind of different way of saying sugar there .
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:He goes, it doesn't say that it's a myth. And you know what? He doesn't see the inset around which this text he's reading is wrapped number one diabetes myth, sugar. Cause he didn't see the inset. He's, he's two , he's gonna get the details right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're giving both messages on one sheet of paper, both methods ,
Speaker 2:As you said, if you can reverse it, you can prevent it. And so it is interesting that people with type two diabetes are told, stay away from sweetss, don't elevate your blood sugar, et cetera . But , uh, also they're told it doesn't, you know, sugar doesn't cause it,
Speaker 3:The eids tell of, of talking to patients and saying, yep , you're gonna , you're gonna cut all the , the sugar outta your diet, reduce your carbohydrate intake dramatically. And by the way, the psoriasis patches on your knees and elbows are gonna go away too. And, and if not, immediately they'll respond to treatment where they didn't before. And they were asked why, and they got , we have no idea. That's just, that's what we're seeing, right? Mm-hmm . That's the clinical reality. You can't logically or safely discount the potency of clinical reality.
Speaker 2:No . You said earlier, that's where it all starts.
Speaker 3:That's where it starts. If you're not empirical, you shouldn't even pretend to be scientific. And you need to look at every theory that doesn't pan out with what you see. You gotta look closer, question what you're seeing. Look, again, look at the theory more closely. And then at some point it's okay to say, I don't think this is right. I don't think it's right. I remember the girl at Gold Gym that told me it's the carbs. It's not the fact . Vicki Sims was her name, and she told me, go get the Atkins book. Um , Atkins, she's A-T-K-I-N-S . So I went to to pick quick bookstore and bought Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution and it made sense. But the reason I had the discussion with her is her clients change faster than mine. Mm-hmm <affirmative> . Then you find you can do it, and then you can chase studies. I did that for 15, 20 years. And what am I chasing? Studies. It looks like this. It's not, it's am I, am I, am I estimating the science? No, I know. There's a guy named Norman Kaplan who writes The Deadly Quartet in July of 89 in the Archives of Internal Medicine. And what he says is that Hyperinsulinism is central and causal to hypertriglyceridemia upper body obesity and glucose intolerance and whatever the fourth one is. And in the body of the article, he says that, that the relationship is confusing if you look at it temporarily, but the mechanisms are clear and that this thing is causal of the others. And how do I know it's good science? Because I cut your blood sugar and all those things happen.
Speaker 2:Right? That's what
Speaker 3:I do for a living. That's what I do for a living. And so as I watch you get stronger and smaller, I know when they test your triglycerides, the number's downs. No , that's, that's how you do that. That's how you drive one of those. And , uh, is more research gonna fix this? Maybe, maybe not, maybe not. But it doesn't affect the, the fun or the, or the satisfaction and purpose out of communicating that and getting someone to try it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And also I think the opportunity of being a coach and being the only one who can probably make that change in somebody's life.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There are, you know, there's a lot of , there's a lot of next door neighbors that just, I mean , uh, you've, you've seen it. There's someone that's dragging people into your gym and a lot of
Speaker 2:'em Yeah.
Speaker 3:Philippe Khan made it an employment requirement to come to CrossFit, and that was, and to be on his sailing team or to work with his startup , you had to CrossFit.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:And he was pretty much a prick about it. And it was some of the people just like, I resent the hell out of this, you know? Yeah. Well, I'm sorry. We'll go easy. Right. And others had, had a , had an explosive , um, Bruce Edwards who's worked as our COO brought me client after client after client. And you can build a , with most practices, I believe I'm of the view that whether it's an accounting practice or, or a legal practice, if you stop to make a family tree of of reference, you, you find that there's someone that maybe brought someone who brought someone that brought a bunch. But there's, you can build family tree outta this. And there are people that are just fantastic about giving the work . How many times have we heard this? Yeah, I'm friends with Bruce and he won't shut up about it. <laugh> or, or my nephew just won't stop talking about CrossFit and his nag me until I've come in here. Right? Yeah . I bank on that. That was my marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah .
Speaker 3:I didn't do any marketing. What I did is I took such good care of you that you wouldn't shut up and became annoying to the point of people were coming in marginally against their will. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No ,
Speaker 3:And what do I have to do? I have one purpose, and that's to get you to come back. And so I want to give you an exposure that doesn't debilitate that you like, leave going. That wasn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. It was hard. And I'm actually impressed with how well I did. And if you can't get that rhythm out of it, you got nothing.
Speaker 2:I think that's really critical , um, for people to understand. So I'm glad that you really said that too, because a lot of us, you know, we, we tried to find the hardest CrossFit workout that we could when we started and, you know Yeah. Threw up to our hands , bragged about it, and then didn't understand that that's not what most people want.
Speaker 3:Yes. So ,
Speaker 2:Chris ,
Speaker 3:I've gotta make an assessment as to how badly you want it , and if you would have any desire at all for what it is that I would desire for you looking at you. But, but I wanna make an assessment and then what I have to do, have expectation just at the moment, slightly beyond yours, and so that I've got you going . Okay, I'll do that. But I , I mean , I'll give you five, but not six. And yeah, I can, I'll do 15 pounds, but not 20. And you have to know when to , when to pull up too . I had a client that for years I was , uh, telling other people that if she gets a, a dewy perspiration going, I'm blowing it <laugh> that it's right after that, that she self-reports of misery. Oh. And it took a while to get to where like, it's okay to have that high heart rate and to be sweaty. Funny thing, you know, I had the problem with Annie Sakamoto . I wanted more for her than she wanted for herself. That created a friction in our relationship.
Speaker 2:That's a, that's a real learning curve, is when you see somebody's potential, but you, it's also quite a ways from where they are right now, because as an experienced coach, you see every step to get there, and they can't see that. You have to sort of rein it in and say, I think you could do this. And I think that the most memorable clients for a lot of us are the ones who eventually just kind of exceeded themselves and, and did something that they never thought that they could.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We all all remember the moment that Sally climbed the rope and , and started crying Yeah . Sliding down the rope . Everyone yelling, don't slide, don't slide. Because just crying so hard . She slides down the rope and just never, the first time she came to us, she looked up there and couldn't imagine that she would ever 65 years old be able to get up the rope. Yeah. You feel no one, no one's so hard is to not be impressed by that. Yeah .
Speaker 2:Well, Greg, thank you so much for , uh, you know, everything that you've shared with us, but also everything that you've given us for the last couple of decades. And , uh, you know, your willingness always to jump on these and, and chat and share and be so transparent.
Speaker 3:Thank you. And let me, and let me finish with you, and thank you for the kind words and the support you've always given me. And you've been a , you've been a general in the field, but when the focus changed from the games to health, I knew that not everyone was gonna make the journey. I knew that people in games media didn't give a flying about hypertension or chronic disease. I understand that. I don't, I didn't expect them to. And being transitioned away from CrossFit with a nice euphemism for that, but transitioning away from that and where it's currently going, I see the Met Fix is just another continuation. And I've told me , Emily, if is CrossFit's doing it, we shouldn't be . Hmm . And if it's at that core competency of teaching movement, I like, that's not no one . We're not gonna improve on that. Right. And so my hope would be that, that anyone who wants to change someone's health would kind of wise up to the underlying realities of metabolic system. And if you're gonna be talking about movement, it would be ridiculous not to, to follow the L one program and to go to those people and find out what's going on there. But I know that this new nutrition program isn't gonna be opening both barrels on sugar.
Speaker 2:What is the new nutrition program that you mean? Through CrossFit?
Speaker 3:Um , I, I keep hearing that they're just about to unroll a new nutrition program.
Speaker 2:Oh, I , I honestly haven't heard that.
Speaker 3:Yeah . It's a , that's, it's a , it's a hard thing to do. You know, that's, that's, that's a tough thing to do. It's a bold thing. You , uh, you can still get your YouTube videos pulled down pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh man. Well , I, I mean, I, I really do hope for the best and I de affiliated when you left, I came back when Dave Castro asked me to and gave it a year. Like he asked and then, you know , de affiliated again. But, you know, I, I'm optimistic. I still think the L one is probably the best course out there in the field, and , um, we'll still send people to it too. So I'm glad that me Mefi is a continuation of that ,
Speaker 3:Uh , any evolution possible. And I could even see it at some point. It's just a , a training certification organization and the affiliate program starts to look like something else. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know . Interesting . But I, I know this as an affiliate, I'm so impressed with the, was with the way so many of them did. So much that it was, it was, frankly, it was terrifying that I was at Whistler in truly in front of a group of peers. Yeah . And that though I may have been their source for it, they got it now and again, that search for relevancy is, is, was profound. I don't feel that I'm on a different course from that. And, and maybe it's not even , it's not tied to even a business, but I think as a functioning member of society, I think I find relevancy in providing tools to, to see where there's. You know, it was , I'm , I know we're done, but I wanted to, okay. It was John Smith at Oxford that said the primary purpose of not the sole purpose of an education was for a man to detect when another man's talking rot. And this was at Oxford, the incoming class in, in , uh, 1912. Amazing. But the primary purpose, if not the sole purpose of an education was to detect when a man's talking rot . And I , I don't think he was trying to be funny. And I , and I , I believe that myself. I do believe that that is, and so that's kind of what you , uh, what I'm doing with the kids in the homeschool is, I mean, it quite literally, we're gonna learn, we're gonna learn fractions so that we can do math, do probability, learn science, and not stand in line for, for unneeded vaccines. Thank you, Chris. I love you, brother. You better . Thanks .
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