Mark Bell's Power Project - The Future of Crossfit, And The Broken Science of Health & Nutrition - Greg Glassman || MBPP Ep. 1002

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

In episode 1002, Greg Glassman, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how and why Greg created Crossfit, what it was like having to sell Crossfit after a controversial Tweet, and why he believes science is broken.     Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!   ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   ➢ https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off Mind Bullet!   ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box   ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢ https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢ https://vuori.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

So you invented CrossFit? I did. When did you recognize that it could be a potential business that people would really love? None of that was projected or expected. I don't think it would have been rational to. What was that like, essentially, I guess, almost like getting canceled? It was painful, but, I mean, you don't censor falsehoods. There's no one trying to stop someone from talking about the flat earth and get entertainment out of those people.

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Let us know how you dig it and help the podcast grow so we can keep growing with y'all and bring you amazing information. Enjoy the show. We're like working out over here. Why we're, you know, podcasting. We're always doing a little something.

Do you ever talk to Strossen? No, I haven't. He's an interesting character. Good guy. Where's he from? Grass Valley. Oh, okay.

He's not far. He's the Iron Minds dude. Yeah, that company's been around for a long ass time. For a long time. He made a lot of great pieces of equipment. Yeah, he was showing up to CrossFit events in the early days, and we stayed close to him. I mean, we used to have to buy stuff from Bigger, Faster, Stronger. Yeah.

Remember that? Mm-hmm. It had the old VHS tapes and a lot of stuff about plyometrics and jumping over hurdles and shit like that. Yep, yep. Olympic lifts and all that kind of thing. I think some of them were close to the West Side Barbell when it was in Clover City, California. I think that kind of thing. I think some of them were close to the West Side Barbell when I was in Culver City, California. I think that's the story. So you invented CrossFit.

I did. What does that mean? Because I think people are like, how can you invent exercise? concept and what it occurred to me you know over a period of uh maybe 10 or 15 years is it constantly varied high intensity functional movement would increase work capacity significantly across broad time and modal domains and and just that first part constantly varied high intensity functional movement you can call anything you want. I was calling it CrossFit. And the adaptation, the increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains, why not call it fitness?

And definitions don't come right or wrong. You're consistent or not, and they're useful or not. And my belief was that the amount of work capacity across broad time and modal domains, meaning from short duration to long duration, doing a whole bunch of different shit, that if you could graph that, you could get a geometric interpretation of fitness that was actually turned out to be amenable to accurate and precise estimation. And bizarrely, in the academic sphere, there wasn't a definition of fitness that was measurable. And so we took ACSM's definition of fitness, and there was 35 elements separated by commas.

You took the definition and you politely shoved it up their ass. Well, we looked at it and like, you know, we've only got two things on this list, and it was energy and power, but the rest were like well-being, vitality, you know, just unmeasurable things. And in energy and power, they didn't mean what we meant by energy and power either. So it was damn near a definition that couldn't be quantified. You couldn't turn it into something numerical. The discovery of CrossFit, I have to say to say is a disaster and here's why because when you're in your own lane and you're doing your fitness you can feel really good about being great at a triathlon yeah or you could feel really good

about being a power lifter yeah but what you started showing by doing multiple disciplines was how poor some of these individuals would be when they went a triathlete trying a squat, a power lifter trying a triathlon and so forth. Early days at Venice, I got stuck, you might say. I think some people saw it that way with the firemen and cops and then later soldiers. And people weren't standing in line to train then.

But what I liked about them was that physiologically it was significant that they had to train, needed to train for the unknown and the unknowable. And the cool thing about athletic training is that I know exactly what you're going to do, what day, who the opponent's going to be, how long it's going to last, what the rules are, when it stops, when it starts. But in law enforcement and in a first responder kind of world, if you have a deficiency in, say, your cardiovascular fitness, to look at some segmented capacity, that's where you're likely to get into trouble. And if you're not strong, then that could

be the problem. And if you can't be strong at high heart rate, that too could be a problem. be the problem and if you can't be strong at high heart rate that too could be a problem and so this concept of the unknown and unknowable seemed to me to to uh would benefit from a unknown and unknowable pattern and that any blueprint like if if monday is back and bys and legs is you know tuesday thursday's legs or whatever. That becomes your blueprint for your workout, your schedule. When we look at the inverse of it, what we'd recognize is where you're likely to be weak. So you can show me what you're doing, same thing every week. I can come up with a test for you that you wouldn't enjoy. And we found earlier there were guys that could have a five-minute mile and a 400-pound bench press, 450-pound bench press.

But if you had them run 400 meters at a time and then give you 21 reps at 135 pounds, pretty soon it seemed as though they had no strength nor endurance when you blended. And the lesson was that training in a segmented manner delivers a segmented capacity. And the number of people just on that very workout, big bench press, fast guy, proud of both, never mix them, mix it up for them. Give them a distance that isn't impressive and a weight that isn't impressive and keep them going at it. And it's an eye opener. And I think one of the magic things of CrossFit is the naming of the workouts. And where did some of that come from?

I remember the first time I saw CrossFit, probably like a lot of other people, because I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what I was looking at. I was like, this is kind of dumb. This guy is just making people throw up. And then I saw the puking clown logo and stuff like that. And I'm like, after a little while of getting more exposure to it, I'm like, no, this is kind of cool. The guy is putting people through stuff that obviously it's like a hole in their game.

And they're getting worked out really hard. And people are coming back more and more for it. Where did some of the concepts of like naming the workouts come from? naming the workouts come from. You know, I just didn't want to keep saying 21-15-9 of thrusters and pull-ups, so let's give it some abbreviation. And the joke at the time was that something that left you flat on your back feeling that shit, you ought to pick up a woman's name. I don't even know if you can even say that anymore.

But it just became an easy thing. They did the same thing with hurricanes and stuff, right? Yeah, it just became an easy – They did the same thing with hurricanes and stuff, right? Natural disasters. It just became an easy designator. Yeah. Just that simple. Well, let me ask you this too. When you're – or when athletes are looking for places where they suck, I know it obviously depends on the sport that they're doing. Do you think that athletes in different sports would benefit from doing something specifically at crossfit or just figuring out where they suck when it comes to exercise i'd say that the ladder is

more important but i also believe that um and i think we demonstrated that there's more opportunity where the margins of victory are tightest to improve your uh performance well you know where that difference between gold and silver is a tenth of a second, there's a greater opportunity in general physical preparedness than there is in additional time within your sport specifically. And some of the stuff that I think was the biggest waste of time was trying to replicate sporting movements like rowing under a load with a cable. And, you know, that seemed to me to be detraining of what you're looking for

in those fine motor recruitment patterns. But we went into communities like jujitsu and watched what they were doing. And these warm-ups took so long that they were fairly sapped, and you could see it when they finally came time to roll and what we did was uh warmed up more quickly uh then while still fresh worked on on specialized you know techniques and movement and then as that became a little faded then you could roll and on the way out the door you'll get some actual mat time sparring and then on the way out the door if you just got actual mat time sparring and then on the way

out the door if you just got five or ten minutes we can put a hurt on you that you'll remember the next time you see us and it i think it made it it transformed the jujitsu world i mean there was a part or point where uh you know our our harshest critics were looked like they were doing the same shit right they got the rowers and the rings and you know and the kettlebells and the wall ball and targets and all that and right so tell me what are you doing with that stuff where did some of the ideas come from from obviously you're mixing these domains because you mentioned you were trying to have a varied movement um but like mixing in like a rower a bike along with body weight exercises,

sometimes maybe like a farmer's carry or a pull-up or how did some of that come to be? You know, when you looked at circuit training in the early days, it was, there were ridiculous movements, calf raises, lateral raises, curls, that kind of stuff. And the people that were fond of the cleans and the deadlifts were saying, you don't want to do those things at high rep. And I just called bullshit on that. They'd say never do that. Never. Never do 25 reps of a power clean.

Yep, yep. And that didn't seem real world to me at all. And clean, I know the weightlifters think that they own that, but if you were to deliver a schematic of a human being and deliver it to something, some super sentient intelligent creature with a completely different body style that had seen nothing, in looking at the anatomy and physiology,

you'd realize that your best chance to get under something heavy would be to accelerate it with the hip, drop, catch, and come up. You could figure that out with a computer and AI, actually. You just don't have a lot of choices. With a deadlift, I mean, what's the most efficient and effective? And what's interesting, if you talk about efficiency, it's going to be some amount of work per unit time, right? And effective would be maximum amount of work. And so you're actually describing power when you look for efficiency and efficacy. And what is that for getting something off the ground? It's a deadlift. That's how you do that, you know, and explore other options. What would be roll it up your shin? I mean, what are the options? And so these movements are baked into our

structure. They were somewhat unavoidable. And someone invented the lateral raise, I promise you. But nobody invented the deadlift. Can I ask you something about the clean and weightlifting movements? I think one of the reasons why people criticize those is you have the really, I guess, the athletes in CrossFit who train and they train their form so they're able to do that really well with high skill. But then you have the newer person that comes in. They're kind of learning how to clean, and it's a little bit wonky. So when people see, I guess, someone with a 9 to 5 or somebody that has a normal job doing that at high intensities, that's where things get a little bit murky.

So how do boxes fix that issue over time yeah the entirety of it is threshold training anything where you have where time and skill are both important and like anything from motorcycle racing to cardiovascular surgery you could be this is the prettiest stitch ever done. Yeah, but he bled out 10 minutes ago. And you go, look at this. I just set a world fucking record. Yeah, but he's leaking like a sieve and he's going to die. And this is true of typing.

It's true of just about anything where you have both concerns for time and for performance. And what you have to do is bring the technique into efficient and effective range. And, you know, bad technique, you're either just cheating, so a pull-up that comes to here wasn't a pull-up, or you're doing something that is extraneous and inefficient and ineffective. And so challenged with it. I told you about when we met with Devin and friends up in Canada.

The physical therapy team there was saying that these movements are dangerous at this high speed. And I go, well, look at the crews here. I've got your guys competing against my trainers. And my trainers are crushing them on time and in technique. And that's not an accident. Shitty technique doesn't make you lift more. Right? So we can work them simultaneously

and we saw this with the seals in the shooting whereas if you shot at a target and your your shots were all over the place forget how long it took you you're moving too fast and with a perfect grouping whatever the timing timing is, you're going too fast. If the grouping is too, too tight, then you're shooting too slow. You could go faster. And so there's some point where, and what does that look like to you? I mean, look, if we just make it something subjective, I want A minus movement with A plus times. Okay.

And we see that in the champions. I mean, it's just the thing about Rich and Matt and the other champions is the movement's very good, and especially under duress. And we're looking for that in everything, again, from heart surgery, typing, to motorcycle racing. What surprised you about some of that? Were you surprised to see the percentages of the weights that people could utilize and still improve? Or the percentages of what? Because these things do get intense, especially when you're competing. But it does seem like the training ends up falling in like a 70%-ish range, kind of depending on the athlete. And I find that to be really interesting.

Yeah, that seems about right to me as well, too. It was interesting that the games in the later heats, the times improved and the technique improved. And so they've clearly come to terms with that. Yeah, it's just you would think, you know, I don't know, you just always think everything's got to be so intense. Everything's got to be done to like this maximum. But you're seeing some of the top people utilizing those lower percentages. The games athletes, when they're done, when the games are over, they're wrecked. Right.

And they've been in a detraining mode. They're hurt. They need time off. And this is with it, what do you do, three, four heats a day in, what, two or three minutes? So it's 12, 15 minutes of work, but an output level that is clearly not sustainable. And so, of course, you can't train at that level. But we knew this of like the Kenyan 5 and 10K champs, and they were training at what was 140 or 150 percent of race intensity.

But for the last time, we saw – Really? Yeah. Yeah, they're sprinting. David Salo did the same thing with Cal Aquatics in the swim world. Yeah. Yeah, they're sprinting. David Salo did the same thing with Cal Aquatics in the swim world.

And he made some sprinters into some world record long distance champions. Wow. And what he had said as an exercise physiologist is, to my recollection, was that people are spending too much time in the pool at too low an intensity. And he said, why don't you prove that? You're an exercise scientist. And he left and formed Nova Aquatics and, sure enough, started producing some gold medals. It'd probably be, I'm just guessing, but it'd probably be 140% of their race time. That's correct.

But they're not doing some sort of overspeed training. No, not in volume, just at pace. Right, right. At pace. They're training it much faster than they run. We saw that in cycling. So they're training it much faster than they run. We saw that in cycling.

We had a handful of favored 1,500, 2,000-foot, nine-mile climbs. And it'd take you, you know, whatever it was, 30 minutes to get to the summit. And then you'd go out on the all-day ride, the 100-mile ride, and you'd basically hold your own. And at the end, the line was, here comes the quad people. We could stomp them at the end, treat it like the hill climb. Who are the most adaptable athletes that you've seen? When you saw some of these people come into CrossFit, was there any common link? Was it like that guy was a football player, that guy was a wrestler, that guy was a gymnastics athlete? We had less ego in the MMA crowd than you might have ever thought or anticipated.

And a lot of what we see in the bravado and the posturing and all that is encouraged on by management and Dana White and crew. But BJ used to have to talk a load of shit, and he just had none of that in him. But most of the MMA people that we worked with were confrontation averse and came hat in hand. And when I told the world that I think you guys are training dumb, they're like, well, what do you think we should do? I said the same thing to the triathletes. I actually got death threats.

I said, well, if I'm going to have someone coming after me, I want it with a little guy with a number painted on his arm and his Speedo, right? What was the theme of some of the MMA training you saw at the time? What type of stuff were they doing? They had separated the cardio from the strength and the wrestling community knew better and the MMA community didn't seem to. Okay.

Old school wrestling workouts, huh? Amazing. Amazing. I've been accused of ripping that off. I'm going to tell you, you look at the Greek statuary and you can tell they knew about food and they knew about exercise. You know, you can't just make that shit up. Let me ask you something.

I'm curious. When it comes to something like MMA training, why would you say it's incorrect to separate cardio from strength training workouts? At least even if, like, you're in the gym and you're going from movement to movement as far as strength training, why can't cardio be separate? Or why shouldn't it be? You know, as a gymnast, what you'd do in the preseason is you'd work tricks. You're trying to get these movements, and you might have an idea for a routine

with 10 elements in it, and you want to do them with tremendous precision and accuracy. You want them to look really good. And then the first time you string them together, you find you can't because it takes two, two and a half minutes to do them. And it's more like Fran. And so you have this horrible out of breathness that complicates your ability to perform these high skilled movements.

And the other thing is you're not allowed to stand there with your mouth wide open and pant. And so you have to be cool as a cucumber like that at max heart rate, then turn your back and go off and die in the corner. Points deducted, right? That's right. For breathing hard and looking funny. Really? Oh, yeah.

Okay. Makes sense now. I got deductions for hair too long for being out of uniform. Yes. Redneck coach. Boy, you're out of uniform. But you knew that. So Fran was one of the first ones we did,

and I was trying to chase that feeling without doing a gymnastics routine. You know, what can take two or three minutes and leaves you completely wiped out? And front squats from a full squat or press over, you know, a push press or shoulder press, whatever you want to call it, pressing overhead from that full squatted position mixed with pull-ups, at that 21, 15, and 9 had that feeling.

You come in about three minutes, and it was just a horrible feeling where you're staggering. You've been hit. And it turned out that was a good mimic of it, including the not feeling well 21 15 9 it seems like if you do that with just about any grouping of exercises that you feel like you're going to die either takes a simple exercise even if you do some bodybuilding movements and you apply that and you have a short rest interval. It's tough. It's a very natural decay rate. And if you find a weight that you can just get 21 reps at,

if I intersperse it with a second activity, when you come back, it might be that 15 is all you have. And it could be that 9 is all you have on that third round. And what I really like about it is that it's nice to see routines that on the board you don't have to keep looking back at it, right? So you go, Cameron, 21 thrusters at 95 pounds, 21 pull-ups, then 15, then 9, got it. You don't have to keep checking back to see what to do.

So there's the plus. The other thing is you'd like someone to say, that doesn't look bad. You want them to go in a little bit overconfident. And the thing about that fucker is that you don't realize what the problem is until you've done the 21, and it doesn't take much thinking to realize I'm almost halfway through this fucker. And when you turn that around, you do 9, 15, and 21, the sandbagging starts. You feel the 9, the 15, no way, this is fucked, the 21.

It's really interesting to just look at large communities' times when you reverse that. And so there's some optimism. You know, you're 21 45ths through at the first round. Wish you hadn't started, but you don't want to turn around from halfway. There's so many psychological things like that that were really fun to play with.

Another one we did, and I don't know if this is even on subject, but we would take a group of runners and send them out on a mile and start them all at the same time and then bring them in and record their times. And they'll look at the differentials. And on the next go-around, start them in that reverse order. So if some guy came in dead last by a minute from second to last on the start, he goes and the next person doesn't start for a minute. second to last on the start he goes and the next person doesn't start for a minute so now what happens is you got people that are being chased that have never been chased before because they've always been last and i got a guy that's in the turtle position he's been held back and you know

he's got to run and chase down and it was really interesting is on the next time you do that the rank ordering reflects the improvement for each individual damn so what exactly does that mean well i've got a guy i've got a guy chasing people who's only been chased and i got a guy who's who's being chased that never had a chance of being chased and everyone just seemed more motivated than they were before especially that last place finisher okay because he's now got a full minute ahead of the second worst yeah i had a client once that ran the wharf dwarf and his goal was to only be passed by 300 women and so he's running and counting chicks that run by him and i thought it was like whatever motivated him it doesn't

that's not that's not my my business so much right to run that race someone told me 300 women yeah what race is this race my uncle who does marathons he calls because he's he's now like in his 60s he calls it getting babied when a woman in his with a stroller passes him he's like i used to be fast and now this is happening pat project family we love beef on this podcast we talk about it a lot all right we love our meat but sometimes eating the same meat all the time can get a little bit boring. That's why we partner with Good Life Proteins, which also has certified Piedmontese on their website. But sometimes you might just want to eat some chicken or fish or duck. Duck. Who eats duck? But you can eat duck. That's why if you go to

goodlifeproteins.com, you can select their Build-A-Box options and input all the proteins you want. Then you'll select subscribe and save to save money on all of your meat. If you enter code POWERPROJECT at checkout, you can save up to 25% on your subscription. That means you're going to be saving 25% on all of that different meat that's going to be heading to your door. Once again, head to goodlifeproteins.com. You can enter code POWERPROJECT and save up to 25%. Links are in the description box below as well as the podcast show notes. When did gymnastics become a part of CrossFit,

or has that been there since the beginning? From the beginning. There wouldn't have been a CrossFit without my gymnastics background. You can't teach gymnastics to adults, Coach. You really can't. You can try. You can try. You can try. The basics are there.

Let me ask this. So when it comes to teaching gymnastics to adults, why do you think that is? Because I feel like adults can, but there seems to maybe be just like such a large mental barrier and physical barrier that maybe there's just not time or people don't put the time towards it. Imagine if you come into the weight room and the only thing that's there is dumbbells that are half your body weight and barbells loaded at your body weight. And so what are you going to do? And quickly you come to realize the value or the process by which strength occurs. And in gymnastics, it looks like this. It's relatively high velocity cent eccentric movement that you slow down until it becomes static and then you slow it down so much that the hope of concentric so what's your

first iron cross look like that you fly right through it and then you want to go slower and then more slowly there's a point where you go i did it and you go no you didn't it's you know half a second and then hold it as long as you can. And at the point that you can lower down, hold for five seconds, there's a chance you may lower down, hold for one, and pull it out. But it's always eccentric fast to eccentric slow to static long to concentric slow to concentric fast. And that's just the nature of you and your body weight. And so that makes a lot of things hard.

That's a hard place to learn. It's a hard place to start. Even just try that, I'm just thinking in my head, just trying that with a push-up. Like working on the eccentric, working on the isometric, and reversing out of that, and doing so without any shaking or shimmying or making faces. In the off-season, I'd learned

if I was going to lower from a handstand to an inverted cross and pull out, truth of the matter was I was going to have to be able to huck up a pair of dumbbells equal to my body weight, about 140 pounds. So I need 70 pounds in each hand and I'd be able to controllably lower it down, lock out and bring it back up. And the course of about eight, nine months, in fact, I got that. But I didn't even want to try on the rings until I could do it with a dumbbell, right? It doesn't help to head because there's a lot of instability. But when I got where I could lower 70 pounds in dumbbells and bring them back up,

first day of school on the rings there, I got it, man. Lowered down to inverted cross and pull out. You know, one of the crazy things when it comes to something like that is the tendon and ligament strength that happens. Like you're not, you know, when most people do a lateral raise, it's a bent arm and you come up to this position. But when the lever is this long and there's all this strain on, you need to develop strength here. And that takes more time than just building muscle there. There's a co-contraction of the lat and the pecs

that you don't see in much functional movement. Or any maybe. It's an odd movement and a lot of that stuff is probably unsound. Sounds like a world record lateral raise. Yeah, I can send you down dumbbells all the way. I'm no fan of lateral raises, you know. And I have problems with my shoulders that I don't know if it was from ego throwing competitions in the yard because I know I've hurt myself throwing.

And when my right shoulder was bad, I used to think it was from the throwing. But then my left shoulder followed the same path, and so I had to take that out of the equation. But I, as a kid, like I swam a mile a day for a couple of years, 132 lengths of a 40-foot pool. And I think some of this, I think you can wear joints out. Why were you so active as a kid? You just played a lot of sports?

I just, you know, mental illness. I were you so active as a kid? You just played a lot of sports? Nah, just, you know, mental illness. I don't know. Yeah, I liked moving. And then how did you come to figure out the dumbbells? Did someone kind of lead you towards that, or did you just think, I need to be stronger? I didn't have access to equipment through the season, and there was being a ring man, a big part of that was strength. And so if you want to hold a planche, I mean, you should be able to take a dumbbell down lower than about here, standing or on your back, and freeze it for a while. It feels like that movement.

And sure enough, it clearly works. Can I ask you about that statement where you said you think you can wear joints out? Yeah. I get what you're saying there. And one thing I wonder is, like, would the—I'm 31, right? So I'm not there yet, but wouldn't the biggest factor be the intensity at which you maybe load the joint over time? Like, cause I feel like it's probably good to get into these end ranges of these joints, but not do it to a point where it's, it's too

intense and too often. You know, we know there's a difference like with, with the games athletes, there's a difference between training hard and working someone to death. And where exactly that line sits, I don't think anyone has an easy answer for it yet. But I'm watching my friends that were, I've got a buddy, an interventional radiologist, my buddy Will Wright, he loved hearing the story, but he was as good on swimming, running, and biking as anyone i knew and i knew some really talented people yeah and he just had a hip replaced and so i talked to my friends that are you know doing a lot of hours on the on the on the road how are the hips and there's a point where

they're like yeah it's a little bit of a problem i I've got to warm up longer and more. But that happens to people that don't do anything as well. But I think I'm seeing overuse injury. You know, I don't have – it's a theory, you know, a conjecture. But that doesn't – wouldn't surprise me. Do you think some of it was maybe just from certain risks that you took? Like because when you're young and you feel good, you kind of go for it on certain moves and certain things that you do. Even at a later age. I mean, at 45, I went out and bought a pommel horse, and I used to be able to do double leg circles on a pommel horse like Rich Froning could do jump rope. And the first leg circle, I felt so – my shoulder, my shoulder. I saw stars.

So yeah, your ego can do that to you just about at any time. What do you do for exercise these days? Chase my kids around. I'll get on my bike every once in a while. I like to swim. Spend a lot of time in the water on this recent trip in Croatia and Italy. Do pull-ups. I love to walk under the pull-up bar and do a few.

It's hard to get to all the different things that you have landed on with what you've done with the fitness industry. The expansion of CrossFit and CrossFit coming in, just – to me, it's changed fitness forever. It really has in a lot of ways and a lot of the thoughts that people had on strength I think were way off. All the way to the point where occasionally you would see a CrossFit athlete being so proficient at something to the point where it was like near world record times or near world record numbers, some of the women at lower body weights deadlifting over 500 pounds, the guys being proficient in deadlifting as well, deadlifting 600 pounds, some of the people on the rower just having these amazing workouts. amazing workouts. And I think before CrossFit, people just didn't think that mixing up workouts like that would make any sense. And I think even still to this day, there's a lot of confusion on it. People are like, I don't understand how you would utilize that to get good at one thing. But we've seen it happen time and time again, haven't we? Yeah. And you know, if you tell me you got a four minute mile, I've got a problem with your

fitness. If you got a thousand pound squat, I might also have some concerns about your fitness. I got concerns too. Yeah. It's, uh, I, you know, that seems, that seems overly specialized to me. But I remember when I said in an interview with Tyler Haas of ring training that, uh, a good athlete with regular CrossFit training could someday hope to get a 500 pound deadlift. And I took a lot of heat from that at Iron Garm and Dragon Door. And that was held up as an example of the absurdity of my position on things.

And you roll the clock forward seven years, and every one of the male games athletes could do a 500-pound deadlift. Indeed, it can happen. Yeah, and there was people doing it after running a 5K trail run. Yep. As part of a deadlift ladder. Yep. It's like, wait a second.

Now I totally don't understand what's going on because now they're still lifting those weights that would be maximum weights for most people. They're doing so after they're already fatigued quite a bit. It was neat to see the number of people, especially the women you mentioned, that have gone into weightlifting with successful careers after CrossFit. It's also interesting to me and very telling that a super significant number of the female Games athletes were gymnasts. Hmm. But that makes sense to you. I mean...

It does, and part of it is the esteem with which I hold gymnasts. Hmm. But until you come up against something that, you know, like basketball, the gymnasts are always gonna shine. Let me that you know like basketball the gymnasts are always going to shine let me ask you this when it does come to like a kid let's say that there's someone who has a kid and they want to put them through some type of athletic development a lot of people typically sometimes just have their kids specialize in a sport right what what do you think

would be the ideal training setup for a kid growing up things that they should learn how to do? I want them to have fun, of course, first and foremost. And then I'd like to fix their motor recruitment patterns so that we had some semblance of good technique. I know the first time I put my son, Blake, on a rower, the first 10 strokes, no two were the same. First time he shot out, folded at the hip. The next one pulls back in the legs. I mean, each one was a unique attempt at the movement. And until there's some enthusiasm, interest, and the movement patterns look good,

I'm just kind of waiting for puberty to come in and contribute to the mix. But I remember when boys would say, hey, what makes you stronger here? And it was right about the age they were also noticing the girls. And now it's time to turn up the heat a little bit. But the trick in training is you always want to make sure that you only want a little bit more for the client than they want for themselves or the athlete in the coaching position and i've damaged some relationships by seeing someone's potential and demanding that they fulfill it and when they when they didn't have the interest in it we were both uh disappointed in each other me for the push for their lack of push and them because of me pushing them. And off air, I'll give you some clear examples of that,

of people I just thought had amazing potential and weren't living up to it. In the early days of CrossFit, when you started coming up with these workouts and you started having people doing these workouts and stuff, when did you realize that it was like a thing? When did you realize that it could be maybe like a business, maybe it could be, I guess the games are a separate thing. Yeah. When did you recognize that it could be a potential business that people would really love? Like, why would people love to do these punishing workouts? Yeah. You know, I had a Rob Wolf and Dave Werner call me up and said

they were going to open up a CrossFit gym and wanted to. And I said, we'll do it. And they said, well, it's your intellectual property. You'd have to license it I wanted to. And I said, well, do it. And they said, well, it's your intellectual property. You have to license it and pay you something. I said, all right, it's $500 a year, and I'll waive your fees. And these fuckers opened this thing up in a SureGuard storage unit. They couldn't even have customers. But they just wanted to be doing CrossFit in a little space that they controlled. I don't even know if it had lighting.

And I thought that was odd. Then there was a kid at Microsoft, Michael Street, and T.J. Cooper at Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. They just started getting contacted by people that wanted to fly the flag. And that should, you know, look, there was a point. The first one in Seattle was CrossFit North. Then in Jacksonville, Florida, was CrossFit East. And I remember thinking there's going to be a North, East, South was CrossFit East. And I remember thinking there's going to be a North, East, South, and West someday.

We'll have four or five of them. East Coast, West Coast battle. Yeah. And it went beyond that. But none of that was projected or expected. And I don't think it would have been rational to. But what I always did was try to get out of the way of impeding the process. And so what we wanted, I called it the least rents idea. I wanted to leave the bulk of the opportunity with the person that was getting involved and use them as a forward

guard to deliver a message of physiology and metabolism and kind of let the chips fall where they may. And the affiliate fees start to become impressive at 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 affiliates. Then we're at Harvard Business School, and I find out we're the fastest-growing chain in world history that we'd done in seven or eight years what Subway did in 26. But I'm not an endpoint guy. I'm a process guy. And so there's things that you undertake because it's the right thing to do because this is important. And let's see where it goes. Can you go back to what you said?

I missed what you said. You said something along the lines of like allowing – it sounded like you were allowing the CrossFit boxes to be autonomous. Is that what you were kind of referring to? Oh, for sure. I really wanted to avoid anything that might look like a franchise or a franchise model. And why did you feel that was important? Well, first of all, I built something that I'd participate in. And you're not going to tell me what music to put on, what time to unlock the door, what my shirt should look like.

I'm out. You'd have to have something more exciting than that. And I've done that with everything. I wrote the early journals that were things that if someone had put this in my hand 20 years ago, I'd be 20 years further down the road. And I ran a gym that I belonged to, and I gave a seminar that I would pay for, and then an affiliation program that I would participate in. And I wouldn't know how to do anything else. But in looking and listening and reading on businesses and successful

startups that's a pretty common thing it's i mean steve jobs brought us the the watch that he wished he had had when he was reading dick tracy as a kid you know so you have a hot date coming up and you look in your closet and all you see are the old ugly clothes that you usually wear and you're gonna wear tonight it's time to end that guys that's why we've partnered with Viore Clothing, because they have some amazing athleisure clothes that you can wear in the gym when working out, but also clothes that you can wear on a date or during Hanukkah or whatever.

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We're trying to help you out. Andrew, where can they get it? Absolutely. You guys got to head over to Viori.com slash Power Project. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash Power Project. And you'll automatically receive 20 off your order links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes in terms of uh like your your upbringing like your your background like uh i went to one of your um

one of your broken science uh collaborations that you had and you were mentioning your father and how he had you reading like some pretty heavy textbooks back in the day did those things kind of impact and influence some of your thought process and how you question things without a doubt mark i uh my father was director of internal research and development at the hughes aircraft company and i also lectured in uh engineering and mathematical modeling, solid state physics at UCLA and at UC Irvine. And he was very strongly opinionated as to what science was and what science wasn't. And I tried to ignore all those lessons. But when I was in my 30s and then in my 40s and realized I was in the gym because that's the only

thing I really liked doing every day was training and being in that space he's like great my son's a gym rat yeah I think my dad thought I handed out towels at the gym behind the chain-link fence you know that old that old scene from from yesteryear but uh I applied the things that he taught me about science to the exercise space and it made me a fortune and developed a successful program, starting with like defining terms. Let's give some definitions that lead us in the direction of things we can measure. Think about how hard it is to improve fitness when you don't have a way to measure it or you don't have a definition of it. It was impossible, in fact. You don't have a definition of it.

It was impossible, in fact. What was interesting to me is that we put out there that, you know, this is the final formulation, but that constantly varied high-intensity functional movement would increase work capacity across broad time and modal domains. And the collective organizational academic response to that was to conduct a study that, without using those words, admitted as much as that but then invented some injuries that didn't occur. And the effrontery there, the insult, the lack of integrity and honesty, that's unmistakable. But how is it that that passes as university science? That became more interesting to me. And so in my later years where the emphasis was with CrossFit health, we had seen in diabetes and obesity and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

and just about every facet of chronic disease, the medical response was organized. Scientific approach was dead wrong. They weren't telling the truth, and how do you get that wrong became kind of the focus of study. But we had those people like Zoe Harcombe and David Diamond and Gary Fetke and just Tim Noakes, wonderful people out talking, and each of them was smart in a way that they knew something profoundly essential, essential in the biological sense of necessary for the optimal performing of the organism. They knew something that was important and essential that wasn't the mainstream view.

But amongst those that did know, they were unique in that they were speaking out about it. So these were some very intelligent people that were also very, very brave. and that they were speaking out about it. So these were some very intelligent people that were also very, very brave. And we watched all of them from Fetke to Noakes to Dahlquist in Sweden, that would speak out about what was wrong

and then take criticism for it. That was a really massive, nasty response out of academia, out of pharmaceuticals. We're seeing this with the COVID bit too. Just a sad, sad response instead of an open-mindedness. And so that became the focus for nearly a decade for me. What is wrong with academic science and how did it get here? And when I be critical of academic science,

I'm going to leave out the natural sciences for the moment. Biology, chemistry, physics, that kind of stuff, and talk about the social sciences and medicine. But the science that is being practiced there is a perversion of the science that's developed things like man on the moon and your iPhone. And I can articulate in probably more detail than anyone's to hear how that happened, where it happened, why it happened. And the, where we're at now is that, you know, there's a replication crisis where large amounts of medical research, in fact, John Iannotti said more than half of it can't be replicated because it's just wrong. And how we got there is a fascinating story, and I don't think it can be fixed. But I do think that we can educate people

to leave themselves immune or exempt from the bullshit that is so much of academic science. Mm. So, let me ask this. When it does come to something like nutrition sciences, right? I think paleo was something that you've talked about over the years a lot. Is there anything that has changed with the way that you look at nutrition and food, or is it still the same message of like lower sugar, eat whole foods? Yeah. Sugar's a toxin, especially fructose. And the biochemistry of that I think is fairly well established

and the clinical realities are there. And I don't know what's going to fix it, but the costs of excessive consumption of refined carbohydrate, fructose in particular, are pronounced. And you don't have to spend much time in the gym to see that, to realize what's going on. It's so readily available too, and it's convenient. It tastes good. Young children, people that are just really small framed, five, six, seven, eight-year-old kid consuming 60 or 70 grams of fructose in just like a sitting. You start to think about,

I think years ago, I would have just thought, oh, well, just normal kid, like having some Rice Krispie treats, like not a big deal. But now when I see that stuff, I can't help but be like a fitness freak and want to like dive at that person and knock it out of their hand and like, you know, come to the rescue or something like that. But the food is everywhere. It's around us. It's super convenient. Now we've got DoorDash and everything. But there are companies that are taking steps to make kind of these frankenfoods

that are healthy-ish for us that are at least some diversion, like a Quest Nutrition, a Quest Bar, a Legendary Foods Bar. I find that those things are interesting because it's – you were saying like maybe we can't fix some of these things, but maybe we can mitigate them. Maybe we can start to steer people in different directions and educate, and people can start to decide for themselves what kind of products they're going to buy. I had a woman once after an event ask me what I thought of the Health rider remember that thing uh oh he sat on it the humper yeah yeah yeah and uh i didn't know that's what it was i told her i i thought it was stupid and then she kind

of tears up and i was like oh i fucked up i just see it coming and she says i've been doing it every night for 20 minutes and I've lost like 60 pounds. And I go, first off, I'm a dick. Let's just pack up here. I said the wrong thing. Good on you. I'm proud of you. Congratulations.

I've just seen too many more people who hung their laundry up on me. Right, right, right. Yeah, if it gets you to sweat. Anything that gets you moving is good. And in terms of diet, I had a stepbrother who says, no, it's just don't eat white foods. And I go, well, what are the white foods? And he's like, sugar, rice, pasta. And I was like, I see how it's working for you. You know, anything that will reduce your carbohydrate intake is, if it's excessive, is likely to be

beneficial. And so it's funny to hear, you know, I thought it was neat when Jason Fung says, carb restriction doesn't work, but fasting does. And I'm like, fasting is carb restriction. For a fact. Right. For a fact. But anything that'll get you off the carbs and off the couch,

I'm in favor of. And, you know, it's ironic that, you know, if you're, we know that sitting on the couch and only getting up to go get another Coke out of the refrigerator, we know that's wholly destructive. What's interesting is that to get them out of the house and doing something else, their short-term risk has gone up. You know, when you have done nothing for years, but sit on the couch and drink Coca-Cola,

the first time I have you walk around the block, your risk is immediately in the short term been increased. And it's not going to feel good. It's not going to feel good. So it's not going to be fun. And there is some admitted risk to it compared to what you were doing. But the only way out is through to use the Robert Frost line. You've got to. This is true of the congenital heart defects and the athletes that drop dead. Fitness is the answer and also provides some risk. When you were talking earlier about building out the CrossFit boxes, the affiliates and stuff, When did the idea start to come for the CrossFit games? Anything you can measure, you can compete, right? And so the first games, we took a peanut roaster

and turned it into a hopper and put sets and reps and exercises on a ping pong ball and turned it and pulled them out and made games of it. But that was done for fun and then and there's something arbitrary and whoever attended we invited the fittest people we knew the winner was the fittest man on on earth and fittest woman on earth and it's a preposterous claim until you get more people showing up next year to claim it for themselves and at some point where you got 350 400 000 people involved year to claim it for themselves. And at some point where you got 350, 400,000 people involved,

it's likely the case. Is there any other contest that has that many people in it? No, at the time, I haven't kept track, but at the time it was the most participated road to a single crown of any sport. What I also find fascinating about CrossFit is that, excuse me for saying this, but you're not a young man. And CrossFit was the boom of CrossFit was because of technology. Yes. A huge boon of it was because of the technology piece of you guys having the, the CrossFit games and having the, the workouts online and all these different things that got people excited,

and then people could compete against each other. That's what I thought was the most fascinating thing. I don't even know if people still – there's people that probably are unaware of some of the CrossFit stuff just because they think it's dumb, they block it out, they don't ever check it out. But you can compete against somebody that's in your state or in your region. You can compete, and you can see. You can go, oh, my God, I'm 20th in my area. Like that's really cool. Or I'm 10th in my state or I'm 151st in the United States, but I'm a thousandth in the world.

That's pretty amazing to be able to do that. I thought we should develop an engine where a guy could at the end of the games play with filters and goes okay here's the deal i'm the fittest engineer named mark in california over 50 you know in the world right and get a shirt that spells out what filters put you in that position but uh the the camaraderie and the and the enthusiasm for which the last one in the door was received by the others told me a lot that we're off to something really good here. And you see that in Iron Man, too, the crowd that sticks around for that last place finisher and the heroes welcome they get. That's an important thing. And people are doing that in Tough Mudders and other things.

They like to compete and be involved. Tough Mudders and other things. They like to compete and be involved. But for us, the website, seminars, journal, all happened in about an 18-month period. And it exploded right in our faces. But the idea was always to minimize the – I mean, the work is so hard that it shouldn't also be super expensive. And so we reduced the cost for the affiliate. And again, the idea was that they would be the forward guard of this thing. And then, you know, you have something when you find that it builds in these communities, just like it did in yours around your gym. And so pretty soon the stories

are all familiar about, I got my, my kid's orthodontist is coming in, and he brought his wife, and they're telling you like they're surprised it happened. But it was happening that way everywhere. When you were criticized by some of these people that were trying to take you down, I guess, basically, by talking about all the injuries of CrossFit, did you kind of roll up your sleeves and get maybe a little excited because of your science background or you're like okay you want to come at me with this i got some uh really good evidence for you yeah i was never intimidated by that and you know we led with the barfing clown i'm not going to try and hide it you know that part's there um you you know we knew that a workout that produced seals could be, could be, uh, scaled for grandma. But if I start with grandma, I'm never going to get the seals.

And so we kind of started with the pointy end of the spear and we were putting out workouts that frankly would exceed the capacity of just about anyone that went after them and that brought us some really interesting clients there were a number of people in in uh in a professional community that thought something was wrong with them on their first exposure that like i shouldn't have done this i'm sick today and then the second one goes, oh, shit, I got sick again. And then people were just coming around, talking about the feeling was very much like a UFC fight or like 800 meters.

The 800-meter athletes were quick to come around and talk about that horrible feeling twice around the track. It's not like four times around, and it's not like once around. And, yeah yeah go ahead no my guess is it's o2 saturation i'm curious about because like people love it when they have a good workout and they finish not maybe not during but when they finish the workout and they feel like oh shit okay that after feeling is great when you feel like you've killed yourself. But I wonder, you know, doing that too often, do you think there's just an amount of like time weekly that maybe you could have a workout like that? Because like what I've found and threshold. Actually, if a lot of your workouts are there, you'll make long, consistent progress. You probably won't get injured as often. But if a lot of your workouts are redline or above redline, you increase your risk for error when doing something because you're so fatigued.

Yeah, there's something else that shows up too, and there's a preclinical manifestation of overtraining, and it's a mood degradation. clinical manifestation of overtraining and it's a mood degradation and so when you walk in the morning as a trainer 5 a.m instead of hey coach greg what's up everyone's looking down and you're like hi and there's oh think back what we've been doing we've been kicking the shit out of them you go hey i just want to share an article with you today and we're going to stretch and people look up with moist thighs you know so you got to be able to you got to be able to read the room and you can't you can't hand someone their ass constantly i went on vacation once in some sort it was probably work but i left i left one of my studs a whole class to work on and um there was some of the some of the uh writing was up on the board they'd done and he'd had some pretty good artists so

he had a if they puked that was signified by some sketch you know but he'd taken a class in a week's time or two weeks time from 32 people to seven right and just just kicking the shit out of him and you can't do that so you got to be sensitive but there's there's very few, there's very little feedback that would mean as much as enthusiasm for the workout. And the same thing with how hard you go. If, you know, if Monday's workout leaves me where I'm having trouble performing on Tuesday and Wednesday, I don't like life, you know, it's clearly too much. And so the perfect dose is that amount that allows you to keep your next workout and with a significant amount of enthusiasm for it, where you're chomping at the bit and want to go for it again. And what does that look like? I'd say somewhere 50 to 70%, somewhere in that space. So then my curiosity is like, there's a difference between

the person that's going to be very moderate and then the elite level athlete, like the Rich Froning, the Frazier, right? When you watch those guys train, how often were they, or maybe if you know, like how often were they pushing that battery? How often were they redlining each week? Or were they just so good at pacing themselves? Yeah, I'd let someone else answer that. Okay. Yeah, I'd let someone else answer that. But I noticed little things.

Like I watched Dan Bailey versus Froning, and Dan was putting too much into his workouts, into his warm-ups. And it was a nervousness that just had him. He's already leaning on his knees and breathing hard, and Rich is just watching him over there. And it's like you're coming out. I mean, one of our favorite athletes shows up at the games with like a 12-pack. Yeah.

And I'm like, that's not going to work for you. It's not that kind of thing. You need something in the tank that being that ripped isn't going to provide. Yeah. You learn a lot just by looking. There was a guy in Scotts Valley. I'm embarrassed I don't remember his name. guy in Scotts Valley, it's embarrassing I don't remember his name, but he was a high school coach that had seven or eight gals at NC2A D1 schools that were looking at being potential All-Americans from one small school.

And he was doing things like having kids figure out what a scholarship pace would be, and then he'd time them how many laps, how long can you run at scholarship pace, and then they'd try and change the distance up. And always playing games with, you know, like that, mathematical games, trying different approaches. And that just comes out of caring and wanting to keep it interesting and do something different.

And it was that that was the inspiration for my varied strategies for a 2000 meter uh seven minute row or whatever the hell it was at the time just absolutely torturous workouts that you've come up they're hard they're hard what you got over there andrew uh yeah i'm curious um what are some of the like more successful and more i guess i'll say prosperous boxes that you've seen what are they doing What are some of the more successful and more, I guess I'll say, prosperous boxes that you've seen? What are they doing that maybe some of the other boxes that had to close up shop that they didn't do? One of my favorite trainers in my box was Brendan Gilliam,

and Brendan had a wonderful clientele, and everyone was always having a lot of fun and the people were very close. And he told me that he realized early that whenever he's talking about himself, if he wasn't asked, he was making a mistake. And then we've had elite athletes, Olympians, that every time I come by the client, she's hearing again about the Olympic games and the performance and, you know, no one's there for that. But I think getting outside of yourself and committing to the client is everything. I had another trainer ask me once about my relationship with clients. And I said, well, I see you with Rebecca every

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon. What does she do for a living? And he's like, oh, I forget. Does she have kids? I think so. What's her husband's name? I'm not sure. And I said, well, it's weird because I would know what she did for a living, what her husband did for a living, the kids' names,

and what their prospects were because I want her talking about herself. And I said that everything's normal. I mean, you don't care is the problem. And no one's going to fix that about you. You know, you're not, I've never, I've only had, you know, we used to say that. It's part of the training. If your bathroom's fucked up, you got a problem. You know, the people that you want to come in, that you'd need for a large, healthy clientele aren't going to come in if your bathroom looks like a pigsty.

And I only had one affiliate come back, dude, you were right. I started cleaning the bathroom and it made everything better. Usually when there's kind of character defects, that person's just kind of stuck with it. You care or you don't. But what isn't that way? I would have the same approach to an orthodontic practice or a restaurant. have the same approach to an orthodontic practice or a restaurant. Put the customer ahead of yourself and all kinds of wonderful things can happen. I hate to sound like a broken record, but your sleep quality most likely sucks. It's one of the biggest things that we talked about

on the podcast. So many guests have come on and talked about how sleep can help you stick to your diet, stick to your workout plan, lose body fat, gain muscle, all the good things that you're trying to do, but it's hard to do because you might be snoring. And if you're snoring, that's why we've partnered with Hostage Tape, which is mouth tape that you can put over your nose, your mouth, when you're asleep to help you stop snoring and breathe through your nose. But if you have been breathing through your nose this whole time while you've been sleeping, it's going to be a little bit difficult to get air through there. That's also why hostage tape has nose strips

to help open up your nasal airways and make it easier to breathe through your nose when you're asleep. Now your partner won't be having a fuck with you when you're asleep because you'll be actually breathing through your nose. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at hostage tape dot com slash power project where you guys will receive an entire year supply of nasal strips and mouth

tape all for less than a dollar a night again that's at hostage tape.com slash power project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes what's this uh new mission that you're on what's this uh broken science stuff all about you explained a little bit of it already. Yeah, I mean, intrigued by the academic sports medicines response to CrossFit and the failings, utter failings in the health sphere on so many fronts, especially concerning chronic disease, I became fascinated, compelled to look into what's going on, what's wrong. And for the science that's broken, to talk about it, I have to just take a quick moment to talk about science that works, science that isn't broken.

But it looks like this. You start with observations, and that's just a registration of the outside, the real world on your senses or sensing equipment. And if we take one of those observations and we can tie it to a standard scale with a well-characterized error. We have a measurement. And you can also call that a fact now that you have a measurement. But you take that measurement and you project it to a future measurement as a forecast of a measurement or a prediction.

That's a scientific model. And they're graded by their predictive strength which is where validation comes from and so the predictive strength of these models these forecasts of measurement are where a model has its validation and the validation and method are largely independent

of one another so that whether a model comes out of a vision And the validation and method are largely independent of one another. So that whether a model comes out of a vision or perspiration or inspiration, its legitimacy is tied entirely to its predictive value. And that is a prediction of a physical event. That's what the physicist E.T. Jane said or like our guy Matt Briggs calls it, prediction of an observable. My father called it a forecast of a measurement. But in any case, the legitimacy of that, the validation of it, comes from its predictive strength. And what's happened in academic science with this natural science is excluded, but what's happening in you know it's probably not a shock to find out that experiments in psychology and sociology and economics don't work won't replicate but it's a tragedy to find

that this is also the case in the medical sciences and what they've done is they've replaced the prediction predictive strength of a forecast of a measurement, of the prediction of a physical or of an observable, that's been replaced with null hypothesis significant testing and peer review. And the method of inference with the null hypothesis significant testing, that the inferential statistics denies there even being the meaning of the predictive strength of a proposition. They say that propositions are true or false. And this deductivist approach relies on these p-values that never examine or get to logically to the predictive strength of the hypotheses.

And it's an utter disaster. It would be lucky when these things do work. And no one should expect science conducted in this manner to work. Now, the advantages are that it's cheap and easy. We've got lots of scientists, lots of science, lots of papers. But when you go back and look at it or rely on it for a clinical setting, in the real world, it doesn't work. And there's nobody in successful science. These are things that Elon Musk knows about academic science.

Do you think maybe some of the broken science is used on purpose? For a fact, it is. Now, there's a corruption. There's a corruption that we talk about all the time. And that's, you know, you're doing something illicit for personal gain, right? You know, the lying, cheating, stealing kind of corruption. But there's another kind of corruption. And that's where, you know, like in the computer world where a file is altered so that it doesn't work anymore, right? It loses function

because of its being tweaked, like something broken in a transmission or a piece of code that won't work. It's a bug. The epistemic debasement of modern science that is academic science, the shift from validation coming from the predictive strength of models to the validation coming from mildly inductive p-values and peer review is one of the greatest intellectual failings of the species. What do you think the consequences of some of this broken science? Trillions of dollars of wasted money in medicine in particular and delayed cures, the inability to address things head on, like chronic disease. Like showing how a particular drug might work for diabetes

rather than just maybe studying alternatives, which could be exercise, nutrition, things of that nature. It's fun to just look in the space of Alzheimer's research alone and the amount of fraud that's gone into that with things like educanumab and the rate of retractions. And it's a mess. What are some of the things you've seen there? Because I'm unfamiliar. There's a great ongoing saga about fraud in Alzheimer's research, and the overwhelming

majority of the approaches have been to trying to do something about these tau bodies or amyloid plaques. And it turns out that the baseline work there was faked years ago. And it was done so with Photoshop. It led someone to say there's no disease that Photoshop can't cure. But someone online 10, 15 years ago found some of these technical photographs of what identified this particular plaque and could find these photos from other studies. They'd just been changed color, but even some of the artifacts of the photograph were there in the repeated, you know,

so they were just stolen off the net. Hmm. Let me ask, is there anything that you think can fix the way these things are done? Or maybe how people should maybe interpret it as they're paying attention to some of these studies, et cetera? Yeah, well, we're trying to do that with the Broken Science Initiative.

And my hope would be that at a point when someone says, you know, if you don't believe me, you don't believe in science, that we all giggle. You know, that should make you laugh. And we need to question some authority. I had thought that the CDC would get infection disease right, but they just didn't understand metabolism. And it turns out they're not going to get anything right.

They're not going to get anything right. Do you think that they could have protected us further when it came to the situation of COVID? They could have protected us further when it came to the situation of COVID? Yeah, but we needed to start much sooner. You know, I did in that five buckets of death. If you looked at who it was that was falling to COVID, these were people that were in grave condition anyways. And the life expectancy for someone in a U.S. nursing home is six months and so it's swept through that community just devastatingly so and so we have millions of people alive today with chronic obstructive pulmonary

disease that are alive because they're on drugs that weren't available 10 or 15 years ago and when something comes wrong like a virus like this it can be it can be deadly but the lockdown the crippling of the economy, the closing of our schools, none of that was healthy. None of that was necessary. None of it was useful. And it seems like we do have some science that has already demonstrated that those things aren't great, right?

The fix is in. It's pretty obvious what's going on. And the censorship would tell you a lot we don't censor truths i mean you don't censor falsehoods you know there's no one trying to stop someone from talking about uh the flat earth we get entertainment out of those people but uh the people like uh jay badachari and sc Atlas from Stanford and John Iannotti's and the abuse they took from the mainstream media delivered to Fauci and his stand on the virus and its origins and all of that was all scandalous. Do you think like there was a misinterpretation of what you meant when you had that statement in 2020, the 19 thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How were you, what was the intention, and how was it interpreted? The IHME announced after their models on COVID failed miserably, and they were believed before they predicted anything. And the validation for any theory, any model, can only come through as predictive strength. So until your model has predicted something successfully, non-trivially predicted something, not the sun coming up, but something that isn't trivial, there's no reason to trust it. And we were told to trust turn their modeling into uh police racism and and of black people and police brutality and racism with the black community and i had already seen in a in a paper i found from uh the cdc pre-COVID that said in every age, in every culture, quarantine ends and through a disproportionate

impact on minorities and other disenfranchised folks, it hits them disproportionately. And at the lift, what you have is race riots. And that has always been the case. And so I asked, what is this like Floyd 19? I mean, look, what are you going to do? And I actually quoted that piece from the CDC deal, put quotation marks on it and thought someone would drop that into Google and see that this was the language of the Center for Disease Control. control but nobody did nobody did and george floyd at that point had been it become a hero and but it really had nothing to do with him and it had nothing to do with with anything other than the ihmes we we don't need scientists modeling um police relationships with the black community no good's going to come of that. What was that like? Essentially, I guess, almost like getting canceled.

Yeah, it was, it was, it was painful, but you know, because you end up removing yourself from CrossFit, right? I was going to,

I would have stood there flat footed and fought the world with the community support, but the games athletes and vendors came at me, and I was like, okay, my time here is finished. And then when I, the numbers that were being thrown around, I was like, oh, shit, I mean, you know, I can deal with this. $200 million is a lot of sting, you know,

and I was never going to, I was going to die on my feet doing this thing, you know. And I'm 60-something, and I got little kids under seven, and the opportunity was just too compelling to walk away with some multigenerational wealth, take care of my kids, and pursue other things. And frankly, by that time, the failings on the health front and the reasons for so many things being wrong in healthcare.

You know, we got to the point where we said, I had told Jeff Kane that everything that's wrong is wrong on purpose. And he came back with, we don't have a healthcare system. We have a disease economy and an outbreak of wellness could collapse the whole thing. And I thought that was just utter genius and worthy of exploration. And you've been on this for a long time. I've been fat, yeah. You've been talking about this stuff for decades. Yeah.

When we first started taking on Gatorade and hydration, I got a call from old friend Adam Walensky, who's a D.C. lobbyist. And he was there the night that RFK was killed in the Ambassador Hotel. He's the one kneeling down beside him, cradling his head. But he was a friend of John F. Kennedy's and a friend of RFK's. And he told me that he said, he calls me out to Santa Fe. He's in his 70s at the time, late 70s. He said he calls me out to Santa Fe.

He's in his 70s at the time, late 70s. And he said that the worst of corporate law and dirty tricks out of business, most of it can be the best of it and the worst of it can be traced back to Pepsi's chief counsel, a fellow named Richard Nixon. And he was 15 or 20 years their chief counsel. And the things they did to people, he says, you will be made to pay for this. And I thought it was funny to get on my plane and go out to San Fe, New Mexico, and hear this from this guy. And since that time, I've made acquaintances with RFK Jr. And it was an interesting thing because he remembers Adam Walensky as being really good to him after his father was killed. But you can't speak truth to

what's going on in medicine and health without picking up enemies along the way. And I know from our lobbyists that there was a Coca-Cola plan, an Operation Sparkle that was supposed to be targeted at me. Wait, what do you mean? Yeah, Operation Sparkle. Two lobbyists talking at a bar talked to our Podesta guy and said that there's an active program to stop Greg Glassman. Stop some of the meetings and some of the conversations you were having? Because you were having, I guess, gatherings and seminars, having different guests talk about Big Sugar and stuff like that. We went on a soda tour, and I said that the American College of Sports Medicine,

the NSCA, were soda whores, and so they sued me. Your mouth is getting you in trouble again. Yeah, so they sued me and rust green and crossfit and so we said well all right um what we want in discovery is we want to see all your correspondence with soda and they told the judge there really was none and so we produced some and the judge says you're lying just like you did in the federal case the federal case was going on san diego and the state case was going on in San Diego, and the federal judge and state judge had clearly spoken. And so they ordered a – for the second time now at the state level,

it already happened at the federal case, they ordered a forensic examination of the NSCA's servers and cell phones and iPads. And they basically refused to give up hardware until it was damn near too late. And then we got a trove of hundreds of thousands of emails that they had said didn't exist and we didn't have the time to examine them. And so we paid a group of attorneys internationally that do this kind of thing emergency looking through hundreds of thousands emails and it was unbelievable what was what was in these emails and so we had another another round of forensic examination

and we found out all of a sudden the case had been dropped and these people had had more interaction with, literally hundreds of thousands of interactions with soda. In fact, there were guys at the NSCA asking Pepsi, they said, can't your lawyers do something about these CrossFit assholes? And they were actually saying that it's too bad that someone, some terrorists didn't do the CrossFit HQ, what happened at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Belgium. So they were, I mean, and this is science, right? The NSCA had more emails on CrossFit than CrossFit had on CrossFit. They denied that we were a competitor in their eyes, and then we had a file that was a competitive examination of CrossFit by the

guy that in deposition said he didn't see us as a CrossFit, you know? And he'd said that he came to our seminar in his own time and with his own interest, and we got the emails where he's requesting to be sent. And so the federal judge just proclaimed all of these people to be perjurers. And again, what makes this important is not that they're coming after CrossFit, but this is the scientific response to constantly varied high-intensity functional movement,

increases work capacity across broad-type and modal domains. It was a conspiracy of felonious lies and cozying up with your soda partners. But the role of Coke and Pepsi and the American Beverage Association in academic fitness is perfect, just like it is in medicine. It's unfixable. Is it helpful at all that Pepsi and Coke and even Gatorade, like there's Gatorade zero, there's zero sugar. Do you think any of that will have positive outcomes? No.

Really? No, I don't. It's not strong enough to... We talked to countless professionals on the podcast about the importance of having strong feet, and chances are that wearing narrow toe box shoes has weakened your feet and your toes don't function the way they should. Sucks, bro. Yeah. That's why we've partnered with Paloova, and they're the first casual, wide toe box, five-finger shoe shoe that you can wear running in the gym, literally anywhere.

But the benefit of these shoes is that as you stick your feet in and your little toesy woes, you start to get a little bit of spacey wasys. Your feet will start to function the way they should because your toes will slowly start to widen out and your feet will no longer be this blubby little cast that they probably are right now. Andrew, how can we get them? Yeah, time to spread them cheeks. I mean, toes. Head over to paluva.com slash power project. That's P-E-L-U-V-A dot com slash power project. Now check out enter promo code power project 15 to save 15% off.

Again, that's at paluva.com slash power project. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. They got tons of them. Check them out. What do you think should be done? Like you have any, like I know in other countries, like maybe in Europe, I think they might tax foods that they deem unhealthy, which is kind of hard to put into a category like what's unhealthy and what's healthy.

But what do you think are some things that could be done that would be helpful? I like the soda tax only because the American Beverage Association fought it so strongly. And so you scream at me what you don't want. We might start with that. You know, that was always interesting to me. But I don't have a, you know, I didn't start CrossFit thinking we were going to make everyone in the world fit.

But what I could do is bring health and fitness to anyone that would show up and try, right? And I think we can do the same thing on the science front. You know, I know it's a small thing when it comes to the broader conversation, but it's interesting how the – when you mentioned like the zero sugar stuff, right? How would it have any effect? Because some people love their soda, right? So when they have the zero equivalent, they're not getting any calories. Many people like lost weight, et cetera, because they just got rid of full sugar soda, right?

Sure. So I'm curious, do you think that there is even a negative health outcome with zero sugar sodas too? I think there could be. Okay. Yeah, I don't have compelling evidence for that, but it wouldn't surprise me. I got you. But it would surprise me if it were anywhere near the scale of what the the uh leaded version the sugared version does you know i mean you can see the you can see the

effects of excessive carbohydrate impact walking through the airport and i don't see people dropping dead from the diet coke but the studies that and the rumors of problems wouldn't surprise me. I wouldn't be shocked by it. But if you can ask me right now, is Diet Coke an improvement over the regular Coke? Of course it is. Of course it is. It's like heading in the right direction in some way. For sure. But these companies, they own so many other companies,

and the store is just like flooded with – there's tons of sugary products kind of everywhere. It just makes it very difficult for people to be able to kind of rein in their – I guess their ability to not overeat. Yeah, we sent the two Russells to Russ Green and Russ Berger to Exercises Medicine, which is founded by Coca-Cola and baked into the Affordable Care Act. But we sent them to an Exercises Medicine fitness seminar and certification. And after a couple of days, while they're wrapping it up, they say, hey, you haven't said anything about nutrition.

And they said, very good point, and here's the deal. It's not within your field. And all you can do is pass on the advice that comes out of the USDA and the CDC and the FDA. But we don't take a stance counter to that. And right there, you see the whole purpose of exercise as medicine was to silence the trainers. I know at some point you were like eating one meal a day. And I think at some point you might have been even eating every other day. I played with that too.

Do you still mess around with some different things like that? Yeah. You know what? I've been on a little bit of an anti-sugar kick right here recently. I don't like the way it makes my kids behave so much, so we've kind of gone that direction. But I've always liked playing with things like that. And I remember the first time I took seriously, you know, 40 years ago, the potential carbohydrate restriction,

I just started fucking around with the Atkins diet. Three days in, I'm seeing trails, right? I mean, it was really weird. And I'm watching kids eat candy, and I want it. And it's an eye-opener. Maggie and I have some great friends in Arizona. They're interesting. They're more religious than I am,

but you don't have to be very religious at all to be more religious than I am. But they're a neat kind of farm family and they never got ice cream sandwiches from Costco, but they did. They bought a little flat of ice cream sandwiches. And within days, they're gone. But the kids are showing up in the corners with ice cream sandwiches.

And so they dig, and there was within the freezer buried were these stashes of ice cream sandwiches. And then the fistfights started and the lies. And they're going through there. And the ice cream sandwiches can be directly tied to breaking six of the ten commandments right and so the family's the family's summation was that this must be satan in these fucking ice cream sandwiches it's causing fights lying to parents you know we're not honoring mom and dad and like right stealing it's all there yeah it's like yeah i get that i get that it's kind of like don't eat white foods i mean it'saling, it's all there. And I was like, yeah, I get that. I get that. It's kind of like don't eat white foods.

I mean, it's not a perfect model, but it wasn't lost on this family. The good kids were doing things that were uncharacteristic of themselves in pursuit of this shit. And Karin Thompson from South Africa who worked with me on CrossFit Health, of this shit and karen thompson from south africa who worked with me on crossfit health um she knows everyone in the metabolism world and her angle is that uh sugar is addictive and whether you're jason fung or tim noakes you hear that and go yeah there is some there is some odd behavior associated with it i mean my maggie and iett, who's now eight years old, he came in when we were living in Hawaii. He came in the room one night at like three in the morning, just stood over the

bed and says, I want sugar. And it was like the men in black scene, you know? I mean, that was his brain talking and having a metabolic crash, right? Let me ask you this, Greg, because when you say something like sugar is addictive, I get what you're saying. Like highly palatable sugar, like things like Rice Krispies, people are going to want to overeat this, especially kids and adults too. But then there are going to be some people within the health and fitness space that fight back and say, oh, it's not addictive. Things in moderation, et cetera. What is your viewpoint of individuals who put forward that type of idea? Because I can understand how when somebody can gain control,

when they have a Rice Krispie treat, they're not going to be fiending for three. But a lot of people don't necessarily have that habit. I used to not be able to have that habit. I was looking at it you know obsessive compulsive relationships with food and uh i'm an egg lover i'm a steak lover i maintain no one's ever had a porterhouse and then ordered another one than another one or had three eggs six the dozens gone where you going i'm going back to the store get some fucking eggs has 10

eggs every morning yeah i do I do. We run through a lot of eggs. But there's an off switch. And with the carbs, you ever sat at the bar and like, why am I even eating this shit? I've done that. I don't like it. I need some more. I've done that. And so when I was riding my bike

to the gym every morning, there was this donut shop, the Donut Station in Capitola.itol is right down the street and they had a they had a uh cherry filled glazed bear claw oh man and it was fucking amazing but if i'd have one on monday on tuesday i'm stopping by and getting another one then wednesday and then you try to not go by and the fucking bear claw is calling your name out and you go in there you're dutifully inclined getting it and then i have to make this willful decision to not go there but as i'm pedaling by the next day i'm thinking about it and i pedal back home i'm thinking about it

two weeks later i'm not interested and i go in to just look at the bear claw and it's fucking things talking to me gets you back and it doesn't have the same appeal but you know there's i need distance from this thing. And that ought to speak loudly to you. And it's true. I mean it's the hardest thing about quitting anything is that first day or two, right? That's where it's really rough. And then after a while, you recognize that the attraction was irrational.

Irrational. I think it's fairly simple. You know, I've been saying it for a long time. Like I have like a war on carbs, you know, and it's mainly processed carbohydrates because again, I'm going to want to overdo it on those. I'm going to want to overeat those. But it's such a simple message to tell somebody and then people get all bent out of shape

and they're like, it's not carbs, not sugar. It's overeating. But most people are having a problem controlling their overeating because they're like, it's not carbs, not sugar, it's overeating. But most people are having a problem controlling their overeating because they're eating sugar. They're getting constant influence of sugar over and over again. They might not even realize, they might not even realize how much sugar they're having or how much it calls their name. I think it's important to do little experiments here and there and see how addicted you are to caffeine, how addicted are you to your coffee, your monster energy drink, your sugar, whatever it is. Just run little experiments here and there.

I'm not saying you've got to get off all these things, but it would be wise to at least explore it a little bit. For a fact. For a fact. You know, it's interesting. My first exposure with carbohydrate restrictions, a trainer at Gold's Gym in Venice told me to get Atkins' book. It works. I'm like, okay. And I read it and it made a lot of sense. I experimented with it and I knew the control was dynamic. I felt very, very different not eating carbs. I didn't have a weight problem, but I'm like, wow, this is

ringing my bell. There's something important here, interesting here. But when you restrict the carbohydrates on someone to that Atkins induction phase where you get more than 19 grams a day and none of it, you can't even have tomatoes. So it's strict. But what's interesting is day one, personally, a pound of bacon, six eggs, full chicken, and then a stick of butter, right? And then day two, just a little less. And day three, you're like, fuck it. I don't really want to eat today. And then the next thing you hear, the only reason it works is it cuts your calories. And you're like, we're never going to win this thing.

But it's true. The obsessive compulsive nature of your eating will significantly change when we get the sugar out of the diet. I think there's something different going on too other than just the calories. And I think it would be hard to study, but I think over like a long period of time, I think one of the differences we're talking about in someone that's unhealthy, their metabolism is kind of broken. For a fact.

And in order for that person to lose weight, they have to figure out a way to unbreak their their metabolism has to be like healed and it doesn't always just get healed by significantly lowering calories maybe it will at first maybe they'll lose a little bit of weight but they tend to kind of get stuck their metabolism is not very efficient meanwhile someone that has a clean kind of healthy body their metabolism works, can drop 10 or 12 pounds pretty rapidly. Yep. Because everything just is already working the way that it needs to work. I agree.

It's not easy for everyone to flip from fat storage to fat burning. It won't be comfortable physically or mentally. Right. Yeah. I know Bob Kaplan, who was Emily Kaplan, my partner in the Broken Science effort. Her husband is a very, very talented thinker in the metabolic space and friends with Seyfried and has worked for some other big names. But he's very much of that view that your metabolism is broken. He says it took three to five years for himself to fix it.

It could be broken because of your sleep too. Like there's so many factors, lifestyle factors and a lot of things like that. In broken science, are you trying to mainly just draw attention to kind of how much broken science there is so that it can help raise awareness and people will start to look at other portions of science? CrossFit Health had a tagline of, let's start with the truth. And for broken science, we switched that. Let us start with the truth. Six words becomes incipiamus veritatis. Let's start with the truth. And whereas I don't think anything is going to be fixed, it's not even going to be possible until you come to terms with what the nature of the problem is. And people have to admit that it's a problem.

Yeah. And what I'm really after, again, is protecting an individual that's willing to listen and think. But blindly accepting what your physician says or what's come out of the CDC has been has been more problem than help for a long time. And that's what freaks me out about the zero sugars and everything. I mentioned this recently. So I had a zero sugar soda this morning for breakfast when I was crushing my 10 eggs. So on one side, the science or whoever would say, oh, your 10 eggs is going to give you cholesterol. And then the other side of my plate or table would be the zero sugar soda.

That's totally fine. And so that's what freaks me out. But what you mentioned earlier, you said something about fructose. What do you mean by fructose being bad? Or I'm not sure if you use those terms, but you mentioned something like that. Or I'm not sure if you use those terms, but you mentioned something like that. produced unregulated production of AMP and leads through the production of uric acid and is related to gout and obesity. And it was pretty nice work. And Lustig at UC San Francisco has worked with kids where they don't give them health foods,

but they take the fructose out of the diet. So you're still getting shit like Pringles, but we stop on the sugar, and it's amazing how the metabolic and cardiac metrics that improve favorably. The problem with fructose and glycation happens everywhere in the body and it's going to be a factor undoubtedly in uh undoubtedly in alzheimer's but even in cardiovascular disease the uh

decrease in cell membrane motility that comes when you uh glycate uh proteins um and glycation is that permanent covalent bonding of a sugar to a protein and when the hemoglobin bonds with with sugar on the cell it loses its motility and becomes somewhat rigid and insulin has a hard time conform conforming to the receptor site. And so your body produces more and more. But that decreased motility shows again in places like the vasovasorum, those micro vessels that feed the arteries at the heart on the backside from high pressure nodes. We're seeing it there too. And there's some brilliant work that we'd pointed out in CrossFit and had that guy, his name is Slobodin, I think the Russian, that on the tip from a Chinese cardiovascular surgeon, a guy that was doing venous graft bypass, had observed that the arteries that were taken out were dead on the outside. They had plaque on the inside, but they were dying on the outside. And I believe that we have enough evidence to conclude that plaque causes heart disease

in the same manner that a plaster cast causes a broken arm. It doesn't. It's a body's attempted repair job where we have a vessel that's failing from the outside, dying from the outside. And the plaque is put there because it's a better alternative than the thing blowing out. And in fact, you have both occurring. When you mention this, are you also talking about,

I know how people mention how fruit isn't the same as it used to be, but is it also like fructose and glucose from fruit or fructose from fruit? Yeah, but you'll never eat enough oranges to give yourself a glass of orange juice or to get to the 43 grams of sugar or fructose that sit in a soda pop. Exactly. So when you're referring to fructose, you're referring to like soda, juice, Capri Sun, that type of – For sure. Okay. In fact, a high fructose corn syrup, if you had to point to a public enemy number one, there it is.

Okay, good. And where that is is everywhere. So fruit has also cofactors and fiber that help slow down the sugar going into the body, and it's got potassium and other things like that. You know, we were, while in Croatia, we found ourselves frequently in front of figs or apricots. And you and I could sit in a bowl of tried apricots and eat a number of apricots in no time that no human being could eat in the solid form right right you know like look right here i've got 12 apricots sit down and try and eat 12 apricots see what that feels like yeah it's uh it's uh it's just interesting how we've gotten to this point of like over

correction because you have to almost like teach people not to eat carbs and at some point I'm sure it was probably fine to eat some bread and Eat some potatoes and eat some rice and things like that the cross prescription of some fruit little starch and no sugar we in later years change that to Some starch little fruit no sugar switch the starch and the sugar. And Lustig in particular was able to show me that glucose in the starch form wasn't having the same impact that fructose was.

And these sugars and stuff, they might still have a negative impact even with somebody with a high energy output because we're starting to see diabetes kind of show up in some folks that exercise a lot. It's a bad fuel and burning more of it through so that I don't get the adipose tissue isn't going to be a solution. And so we have guys like Sami Inkanen, who's a wonderful man, interesting cat. He was a PhD in astrophysics. He was, I think, from Norway. And his parents told him that if you learn, if you become fluent in Russian, you get a PhD in astrophysics, you'll always have a job. And he did that.

Not bad. Yep. And it worked. He also became a, I think he was number one finisher in men's professional Ironman. And that same year got diagnosed as a type 2 diabetic. And he says, that's impossible. How could I, I couldn't eat better and I couldn't possibly exercise more. Well, he put his big PhD physics brain to work on it. And it only took him about 30 days

to realize he was being poisoned by carbohydrate and that his diet wasn't good. And he fixed that, set a world record rowing from San Francisco to Hawaii with the Misses and ate paleo all the way and started the Virta Corporation. He was also the founder of Trulia. But they're doing daily blood sugar testing, continuous glucose monitoring, and phone consultation, and are clearly reversing diabetes that are removed with people. The goal was to help over 100 million people or something like that. Yeah, yeah. A blessed man. And that program works. And you look at it, and it makes sense that it does.

Can I ask you a question about that guy? Because I don't know if you know the details of how much he's having per day, but a lot of runners, they'll have the gel packs, they'll intake a lot of excess. Was it that type of situation? Yes. Okay. notes you know that wrote the law of running he uh he himself became diagnosed as a diabetic and his father had been a diabetic and uh he said i gave him all the wrong advice and stuff i was telling him to do there's another physician and biochemist that was uh wrote the economic laws of of uh of uh economic uh investment or he's down on federally funded science and where that is but keely was a phd md and he got diagnosed with diabetes and what his physician told him to do was in your perfect match for what he'd been doing and so he's like hey something's wrong here you know this is

this is this is what i'm already trying and so he cut breakfast, hey, something's wrong here. This is what I'm already trying. And so he cut breakfast out, and his diabetes went away. He went from a horrible A1C to a good one, just eliminating breakfast. What's next for Broken Science? Just talking to people. It's really a good time for that. The stories that are coming out every week of some scandal are really eye opening. And we're getting a lot out of that. And there's a lot of people coming around, I think, just more of the same.

Do you think there will ever be like a time or do you think there'll be like a price to pay for kind of what happened with COVID? Do you think that will ever get like aimed or directed at anybody? Like it seems like there's a lot of cover-up of like the lab leak and so forth and just do you think there will ever be – will anything ever happen from any of that? Yeah, you know, I see the truth as like, you know, it's like holding a beach ball underwater. You can do it for a while, but eventually, boom, there it is again. And I hope that's what's going on but uh i see some encouraging signs very cool yeah awesome having you here uh last question anything

why did you decide to do this show you haven't uh spoke uh in years yeah i Did I just bug you just enough to get on here? I liked you and the family. Your brother came around, and you came to my house and listened, and we're a great guest, and a friendship ensued out of it, and it's kind of the way I roll. You picked me because I ate the most amount of lobster probably at your house. Hey, that was a lot of fun. Oh, my God. That food was so good.

Yeah. I'll do it again. I'll have you out. I'd love to have all of you come. Thank you, sir. Thank you. I have a lot of respect for what you're doing. And, you know, Bob Kaplan's a big fan of yours.

Oh, cool. And have you talked to Bob before? I have not, no. You know Emily. Yeah. Yeah. Bob might be the smartest guy I know in the sciences. Oh, cool.

And he's a real fan of your show. He's got the world record for weighted pull-ups damn yeah any idea how many he did i think it was a 400 pound load what get a look into that i'm oh he did like that up he did like a one rep yeah holy shit oh that's insane yeah he's a. I've never heard of anything like that before. 400 pounds. He sent, he went to a- Who would even attempt something like that? Bob. Yeah, Bob. Jesus.

For sure. Damn. Well, thanks, guys. Yeah, thank you. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.

Thank you.