Sevan Matossian (00:02):
Bam, we’re live. Oh, it looks like it’s a good connection. What’s up everyone? Good morning. Oh, it’s not a good connection. How do I look guys? How’s it look? Choppy. Good, Augustus. Good morning, Ernie. Good morning. Not a taxidermy dear. Good morning, Greg. I kind of see you trying to get in, but it says not connected. That’s weird. Maybe you have an ASK connection too. Good morning, everyone can hear me? Looks good. Awesome. Thank you. Ernie. No burpees for you today. Rambler. What’s up? Hey, no taxi derby. You were not first. You were second. Greg, you’re in.
Greg Glassman (00:53):
That’s it.
Sevan Matossian (00:54):
Hey, is it easy to get in
Greg Glassman (00:58):
So far?
Sevan Matossian (00:59):
The links I send you don’t work.
Greg Glassman (01:02):
It could have been my computer.
Sevan Matossian (01:03):
How are we?
Greg Glassman (01:05):
Good. Good.
Sevan Matossian (01:06):
Do I look good? Can you hear me? Good. I, I’m at hotel. Hotel wifi
Greg Glassman (01:12):
Sounds pretty good so far.
Sevan Matossian (01:15):
Guys, those of you who are in the Phoenix area this weekend, there’s a legends event and Travis from Ate will be there. Please go over there and support his booth. Also, Paulina will be there from coffee, paper Street Coffee, also served coffee, I believe at one of the BSI events. They’re a sponsor of this show. Everyone knows Gabe is great, big Greg Glassman fan. So they are all in Phoenix this weekend for the Masters. I think it’s called The Legends event, and I think it starts tomorrow. And maybe if I’m capable, I want to go by there and swing by and say hi too.
Greg Glassman (01:58):
I can probably get you tickets. You’re home if someone else doesn’t have an in for you. Yeah, yeah.
Sevan Matossian (02:04):
Oh, cool. You know a guy.
Greg Glassman (02:07):
Yeah, I do.
Sevan Matossian (02:09):
You know, are you friends with the people who throw that event? ’em,
Greg Glassman (02:13):
I’m friends with the people that organized the big golf event in town. Their neighbors.
Sevan Matossian (02:22):
Oh, okay. Oh no. This is a CrossFit event.
Greg Glassman (02:25):
Oh. Oh.
Sevan Matossian (02:26):
When I say masters,
Greg Glassman (02:28):
But I thought you about it. Think some kind of threw this bullshit.
Sevan Matossian (02:35):
Oh no, no, no. Some CrossFit bullshit. But I do think if I recall that the guy who puts on this event asked me if I could get you to come there anyway,
Greg Glassman (02:52):
Rick.
Sevan Matossian (02:54):
Yeah, that’d be cool, right? Yeah. Are you missing your truck?
Greg Glassman (02:58):
Yeah. Fucking missing it. I got conned on that one.
Sevan Matossian (03:03):
Yeah,
Greg Glassman (03:03):
Mom was going to drive back. She was going to fly out with me to go get it and then didn’t I get it? I mean, it’s a pain in the ass, but I wish it were here.
Sevan Matossian (03:13):
It’s a long drive, right? 15 hours from between Santa Cruz.
Greg Glassman (03:17):
12 a dozen. Yeah. Okay. And it’s stopping to eat some shit and gas up every 300 miles or whatever. It’s
Sevan Matossian (03:25):
Because the truck gets a fabulous 6.3 miles per gallon.
Greg Glassman (03:31):
I’m not advertising it’s mileage.
Sevan Matossian (03:35):
No, Jamie Latir. I will be there. Okay, cool. Awesome. Okay. I’ll really make an effort to come by and hang out with you guys. Have a cup of coffee, cheer on some old people. Oh look. Look it starts tomorrow and it’ll be going for three days. This guy ca Gastro, very similar to our friend Dave Castro. He will deliver it for you, Greg. Very kind of. It
Greg Glassman (04:04):
Might come to that. It might come to that. I enjoy the drive is the thing, which is ridiculous.
Sevan Matossian (04:14):
But there
Greg Glassman (04:15):
It’s
Sevan Matossian (04:16):
Thad’s Bell. Greg, will you share? It’s one G by the way. Will you share some of your Fran times? Good dude.
Greg Glassman (04:22):
Good dude. I’ve done in the three minute space, but you got to understand this. I mean, I think I had the world record for Fran for 25 years.
Sevan Matossian (04:31):
Fair enough. Were you the only guy who did it for 25 years?
Greg Glassman (04:35):
Yeah, the unsuspecting client. But it wasn’t until we got into the Greg Almonds space that people took this thing more serious than Airborne was accustomed to.
Sevan Matossian (04:52):
And you,
Greg Glassman (04:54):
And that’s not fair, Mike Bender too. Mike Bender, when he was doing the toughest cop alive competitions.
Sevan Matossian (04:59):
Yeah,
Greg Glassman (05:00):
Yeah. That was a crazy machine. It was a guy at 215 pounds could do 50 dead hang pull-ups, dead hang the judge. No, no cop, no. Mike did freed Craig Coley.
Sevan Matossian (05:18):
Oh, oh,
Greg Glassman (05:20):
He was my bender. Yeah, he won’t. The toughest cup alive several years in a row, maybe five years in a row.
Sevan Matossian (05:26):
Wow.
Greg Glassman (05:28):
Wow. You didn’t know that.
Sevan Matossian (05:31):
I probably did know that. I just never put it together. Whenever I would see him, I just didn’t make the connection.
Greg Glassman (05:39):
I had a dozen years of winning the toughest cop alive in the gym on days that I would have. And it happened. Mike Bender, Greg sson, Phil Mancini, and Chasing Hare. The four of them had been, I mean those were the stars. Stars. And it was first the toughest cop. I’ve been toughest competitor alive to open up the environment and it didn’t matter. The same guys were like Jason Hare, Phil Mancini, Greg Ahmanson and Mike Bender legends in that space.
Sevan Matossian (06:18):
Dave,
Greg Glassman (06:19):
Is that a deflection from the question What my friend time is?
Sevan Matossian (06:22):
No, not at all. Everything.
Greg Glassman (06:25):
It was as good as theirs.
Sevan Matossian (06:27):
Greg, what’s your fitness like these days? Before you answer that, I do think that I may have been there in Hawaii with you when you hung some, did you hang rings from a tree in Hawaii and do a muscle up and your shoulder went honky wonky.
Greg Glassman (06:46):
Back lever.
Sevan Matossian (06:48):
Back lever
Greg Glassman (06:49):
And suffered an enormous shoulder mishap. And the thing was sub my maximum strength and nothing moved for me forever, but the crazy noise and the abrupt pain and I dropped from the rings and I did a muscle up after that just to prove to myself that whatever was wrong, it wasn’t too wrong. I dunno what the test showed, but that’s what that was.
Sevan Matossian (07:23):
And I’ve known you I think for almost more than 15 years, and the only time that I’ve ever heard of you going to a doctor was at one point your shoulder was hurting you so bad. We went to la Sorry about breaking your HIPAA and you visited an orthopedic surgeon and that was just because it was interfering with your sleep so bad, right? Am I remembering that right?
Greg Glassman (07:47):
Yeah. And these guys were like where the Tommy John surgery came from and we had connections and there was a doctor there, there was a CrossFit nut,
Sevan Matossian (07:59):
But you never got the surgery, right? You started going down the pipeline and then you’re like, ah, no thank you.
Greg Glassman (08:04):
Right, right. And it wasn’t that I needed the Tommy John surgery, it’s just that this job curl and orthopedic Sports medicine clinic is world renowned and thought I’d have ’em take a look
Sevan Matossian (08:21):
And I don’t know why this is so interesting to people, but fuck it, if it is, it is. And when you go, you have swimming pools at your residences. You’re almost a daily swimmer, but when you go out on these sailboats, you’re in the water every day with the fish.
Greg Glassman (08:41):
It’s getting the water dry off, pull up the anchor, go to another spot, jump in the water, dry off eat, pull up the anchor, go to another spot set all day long. There’s really nothing else. Do
Sevan Matossian (08:56):
You snorkel?
Greg Glassman (08:57):
Yeah, but I’m kind of gone from the scuba dude and actually had qualifications for scuba instructor and went from scuba guy as a young man to avid snorkeler and now it’s like give me the goggles and I’m pretty good even in terms of what I want to get out of the water experience.
Sevan Matossian (09:27):
How
Greg Glassman (09:27):
Old are you guys? 67 fins and snorkel take up a shit ton of space in a bag. It almost pushes you into this. I don’t know, it’s maybe not for everyone, but it could easily be a quarter of everything I would bring
Sevan Matossian (09:50):
Guys. Also one more thing since you want to take a peek into Greg Glassman’s, how much he moves. This guy has three fucking little four, sorry, four little kids. It is nonstop action. He’s a hands-on dad. It is
Greg Glassman (10:07):
Fucking nuts. They’re under us right now. I mean this is
(10:13):
An in-service day for them in school, otherwise I’d be haranguing ’em right now. And by the way, I got a parenting offering for everyone, especially you homeschoolers, diagramming sentences. I knew grammar and came about it the hard way it seems to me, and I guess that’s resistant to it, but eventually learned it and learned it well. And so I picked up diagramming literally overnight like, oh fuck, this is easy. This is fun and I’m driving the kids nuts with it. But it did this, it transformed to a more accessible and relatable form. Everything I knew about grammar, it was kind of like being a musician and not having known how to read music and then coming across that skill, a blind guy learning the alphabet. I don’t know what the fuck, I don’t have analogies for you, but it’s really interesting
Sevan Matossian (11:16):
For you personally. You’re saying
Greg Glassman (11:18):
For me personally, even for a guy who knew the grammar, I recognize now that I went at it the hard way in part because diagramming is a method of teaching grammar and an absolutely brilliant one and to have lost that in the school system is fucking nuts. And you can go to YouTube and pick up just a bonehead version, one four kids, five minute video and diagramming and anyone can walk anyone or group of people through it and then look at what comes next. It’s just, it really is that simple. It’s crazy elegant. It’s powerful and it has kids thinking about things that seem and feel obvious and yet here it is. They’re trying to make a decision as to what that word’s modifying this one or that one. It’s cool. It’s important.
Sevan Matossian (12:11):
Caved astro Greg. What’s more important Fran? Time or hog size?
Greg Glassman (12:16):
Yeah, geez. Got to have some above.
Sevan Matossian (12:24):
Ro gata Rogat 24. Hey, Greg passed my L one last week. Congrats dude. Shadowing my box owner, but he can only have me coach as and when he can only have me coach as And when is this how most coaches start any other ways into coaching? I think basically he’s asking, Hey, I’m shadowing. I took my L one and I’m shadowing now. Is this the only way to start? Dude, you could just open. I took my L one and I had been doing CrossFit at the park every single day and people just started jumping in and those are the people I started coaching and I did that every day for a couple years. Lugged all my shit in the back of my truck to the park in Berkeley. But do you have any issues with shadowing coaches? Greg, you like that as a method? No. Do you like that?
Greg Glassman (13:14):
Yeah. I mean what’s the standard thing? You hang with someone and get a job, build some clients and then split eviscerate a good chunk of the business and go down the road a mile. I think that’s the complaint of the model, right? I mean isn’t that kind of both sides of the story? A guy claiming he’d raised someone up from nothing, then he left.
Sevan Matossian (13:41):
Yeah,
Greg Glassman (13:42):
We investigated a lot of those because just forced to here’s the facts, look, talk to this guy, talk to a guy. And you’d found out that someone was trying to sell $60 an hour training by paying the trainer $20 an hour and keeping 40 and the customer was paying 60 and the worst of the ripoff was when the guy was actually good enough to be worth the 60 and you’re paying him 20. So of course he goes down the fucking street. But I knew we had birthday with Greg Amundson at the Silver Spur one morning, and Linda, who’s since passed away, the owner there asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he laughed and said he’d just like to do law enforcement someday own a gym. And I’m like, own a gym motherfucker. We’ll go back to right now and I’ll write, I’ll sign a thing over to you. You can own it. It’s like that ain’t shit. Owning the gym, the business taking care of people.
Sevan Matossian (14:54):
If you listen very carefully, you’ll hear construction trucks driving backwards.
Greg Glassman (15:01):
Should I shut the door?
Sevan Matossian (15:02):
No, not at all. It’s so faint. It’s nice. I like it even. Okay, Anthony, more Mark to Tony. Hey Tony. Good morning, coach. My question is with the rampant spread of bad science, where would be a best place to find the stats to support a post covid rendition of your five buckets of death lecture?
Greg Glassman (15:31):
Yeah, I would root out the story and sources that are in Hold the book up, Seth. Oh, you don’t
Sevan Matossian (15:38):
Have it there. I don’t have it with me, but also Greg Jay Kuey and RFK have just come out with a new book called The Wuhan. I’m going to have Jay back on go to Jay Cooley’s Rumble page and you can get all sorts of stats on that. And you’re talking about the book by Dowd Greg?
Greg Glassman (15:57):
Yeah,
Sevan Matossian (15:58):
Sorry, I’ll have two monitors tomorrow. Dowd,
Greg Glassman (16:03):
I’ve got the book downstairs. I just don’t want go off camera and go fetch it.
Sevan Matossian (16:06):
No, it’s called Is it Sudden Death?
Greg Glassman (16:09):
It is.
Sevan Matossian (16:12):
It’s called Cause Unknown The Epidemic of Sudden Death Cause Unknown The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths.
Greg Glassman (16:20):
And that thing is QR quoted back to newspaper accounts that can take you to studies. I mean there’s as much there as you can want to see, but the basic idea is this, is that the actuaries working for the large insurance companies have seen an increase in death that with the covid deaths filtered out. There’s still a problem of enormous magnitude and that is sudden bets and they’re vaccine related, but it’s worth looking at. The insurance companies know the truth is the bottom line. And that’s pretty cool I think is a numbers guy.
Sevan Matossian (17:08):
Will you go into that? Why do the insurance companies know the truth? I know it’s obvious to you, but will you tell us why do the insurance companies know the truth more than anybody else? Why is the truth so important to them as opposed to Pfizer or Moderna or anyone else
Greg Glassman (17:29):
For life or death for profit and I mean life or death of the company for their profit. They depend on a science where the predictive strength of the model governs the day is the determinant of validation. And man, they’ve got their dicks on the line, their money on the line. They’re just straight up numbers guys and hey, look at this.
Sevan Matossian (18:02):
Oh dang, someone listens to the show just like that
Greg Glassman (18:07):
Causing no where was I?
Sevan Matossian (18:11):
Hey, does she just live in that closet? And anytime you say something, she opens up, she comes out of the closet and hands you something, anything you need.
Greg Glassman (18:17):
I had that door put in there.
Sevan Matossian (18:20):
That’s awesome.
Greg Glassman (18:22):
It’s
Sevan Matossian (18:22):
Cool. It’s some hot chick hands you a book, but you’re basically saying it’s a gambling game and they want to make sure that they’re always winning. They’re the fucking house. Right? It’s like you go eventually if you play enough hands of blackjack that the house is going to take your money. It’s a gambling game. I don’t mean that with any implication or insinuation, that’s bad, but they’re going to take your people’s money and offer them health insurance based on the fact that they make money. Yeah,
Greg Glassman (18:48):
They need a clean and sober view as to the risk. And that’s called actuarial science.
Sevan Matossian (18:56):
Okay. Is that true? Did you make that? Is it called actuarial science? That’s a,
Greg Glassman (19:00):
Yeah, that’s what it is. That’s what it is. You can go to get a bachelor’s of science and apply mathematics and take the actuarial exam and you’re off to the races and CrossFit has employed ’em before. We have friends in the game we looked at to support the case that CrossFit was safe sport and safe fitness and it had to be divided up fitness and sport. We needed an actuary to look and investigate that, to report back and work with the insurance company, which was part of setting up the RRG. In fact, we went to them armed with that. Whether you saw it as a sport or as a fitness activity, it was exceedingly safe in comparison with other things and the actuaries had that.
(19:50):
But in that game, what you have to do is you want to find understanding of the risk without any kind of romanticism or bullshit or being swindled because what you want to do is rate against it enough to be profitable and yet still competitive in the industry because the industry’s so competitive. And so a keener understanding of a risk manifests as you being able to raise or lower a premium to effectively find profit in that risk and be competitive against others in the industry. You’re looking over both shoulders and it’s a fantastic thing. And knowing what we knew about the health space had found people in the insurance industry keenly interested in what we were doing when they manifested on the scene in terms of the actuarial science, for instance, that was the story with the life insurer in South Africa, the health insurance people. Someone said that there’s that. It might have been Car, the book or something put up I not car Emily. Or maybe it was card someone put up the Whistler talk.
Sevan Matossian (21:11):
Yep, yep. It just went up this morning on the BSI event, we had an event, a gathering in Whistler, Canada for affiliates that had crossed the 10 year mark. This was, I don’t know, five years ago, four years ago. And Greg gave a talk there and that talk, I don’t think it’s ever been made public and now it’s available on the broken science. That was an amazing talk.
Greg Glassman (21:39):
It was probably related to where you were going to take this anyways, but it was good. I felt good about it. It was a time when the games were exceedingly popular and every time I went to any event, I had affiliates standing in line. When I saw a face that I’d known to have been around for a long time in the line, I could brace myself for them to tell me that this has no bearing on what goes on in their box that fun as these games may be, it’s unrelated to what they’re about. And I know you were there and bore some of my frustration that they didn’t know that I knew that there was a bigger picture to the story than the gladiators. And I got that across. But at the time here, I’m rambling,
Sevan Matossian (22:43):
I’m not rambling,
Greg Glassman (22:45):
I was struggling for all of us that drew a salary and were tasked with had the responsibility of leadership of the entire thing. I was always very concerned for our relevancy. That is the value proposition, that is affiliation. Just what the fuck are they getting? And the concern I had for that prevented me from doing things like CrossFit, fish oil and CrossFit, jump ropes and the rest we left that space and opportunity open for people to apply their trade and claim the best and have us look and consider it. And the rest was staying true to some kind of mission.
Sevan Matossian (23:49):
That event where you brought together the affiliates. Well, before I go there, I want to circle back to that. Give me one second. Let me say a couple funny, lemme close a couple things we have open here. Get with the programming Chase Ingram Classic dude, move shoulder explodes. Let’s try another one just in case. Yeah, he is a boy. Oh, I’ll come back to that Taxidermy. Okay. When you gathered these tenure, so basically the reason why this is apropos now is because the affiliate fees went up to $4,500 and the barrier of entry for the first time in any real measure went up by now requiring a level two of all gyms within a year. And I think basically you can still open a gym just with the level one, but then you have to get your level two within a year if I’m correct.
(24:42):
And then some of the prices around, I got some notifications yesterday that affiliates around the world, many affiliates around the world had their prices actually lowered based on where they were. So if you were in Africa or something where the economy’s different than it is in North America, your rates were lowered. Those were all things that you had to deal with when you were there raising affiliate fees. What should the barrier of entry should be and should prices be different for different countries? Before we get to that, why did you have a gathering of 10 year affiliates? Why was that important you to gather that particular group? Why not just do an affiliate gathering? What message did you have for them
Greg Glassman (25:21):
At the point you’ve kept your doors open 10 years, you’ve seen some amazing things. It’s not possible to have been there so frequently at 5:00 AM unlocked the doors and applied that trade and not seeing things that were fundamentally miraculous. And so I could listen to the details of a type two diabetes reversal, a hundred pound loss, blah, blah, blah. I’m not here to promote CrossFit, but the tails we’re reason for living. We were giving life to people and to be able to make a good living in doing that, a decent living, doing that was an absolutely incredible thing. And you can’t keep the doors open for 10 years and not all the people with excuses, all the bullshit. It’s kind of hard to stay above water for 10 years without tapping into what really makes this thing miraculous. And that is the clean expression of the stimulus and maintaining healthy relationships with people to monitor and encourage support. You’re docent to their path to a better lifestyle. Do you think, and people that do that found it rewarding in every sense of the work.
Sevan Matossian (26:48):
Do you think those 10 year affiliates are more valuable to the ecosystem than let’s say a one year affiliate? And if so, why?
Greg Glassman (26:55):
So I had 800 people there and I was just thinking they kicked ’em off the $500 a month a year.
Sevan Matossian (27:02):
Yeah. From what I know, everyone’s been kicked off the $500 a year.
Greg Glassman (27:07):
Is that 400 a year in fees in terms of what they were paying
Sevan Matossian (27:14):
3,500 times if there were 800? No,
Greg Glassman (27:17):
There were 800 people there. Yeah.
Sevan Matossian (27:21):
An increase of let’s say $3,000 a pop for each loss. No,
Greg Glassman (27:24):
They were paying 500.
Sevan Matossian (27:26):
Oh, what they were paying then. Yeah, 500 times 800. Yeah. Is that 400,000?
Greg Glassman (27:33):
Yeah, 400,000. I would’ve rather paid them 400,000 with a net difference of 800,000 then raise them.
Sevan Matossian (27:46):
That’s how important you think they are, that it’s if you cross the 10 year mark, all of a sudden we’re going to start paying you to keep your doors open.
Greg Glassman (27:56):
I’ve seen
Sevan Matossian (27:58):
Why is that? Why is that Greg? Because they the kind of hold the code. They’ve cracked the code on how to be successful for 10 years. What you said, keep the message clean and be able to maintain relationships. Those two qualities are like
Greg Glassman (28:14):
The people that were in that room that day. I talked to ’em about a clean bathroom and they roll their eyes. The fuck They know that. They know that.
Sevan Matossian (28:22):
Shut up Greg. We already know that.
Greg Glassman (28:24):
They already know that. They know that. In watching you see things in the experienced affiliate that, and that you watch as an experienced trainer and you’re encouraged and heartened to see that. They know.
Sevan Matossian (28:49):
So you lose a 10 year affiliate and that’s worse than losing ten three year affiliates.
Greg Glassman (28:56):
Yeah. I mean a year or two is like that. You just ran out of someone’s money.
(29:07):
We’ve seen that happen. Hey, there was a lot of tragedy in people doing these deals. Like one guy’s going to weld the gear and the other guy’s got credit for the lease, and then the third guy’s going to do all the training and they’re equal partners, some of the principals involved in that. So the guy welds the gear and he’s done like, wow, I got a lifetime membership now these motherfuckers work for me and I’m taking a third off the top. The guy that had the credit to get the lease on the building, he’s just executed some kind of financial genius. Then you’ve got a guy who’s working from 5:00 AM to 10:00 PM at night lugging these fucks around, and you can do that for two years. Brendan Gilio,
Sevan Matossian (29:56):
And then you’re done.
Greg Glassman (29:58):
Oh man.
The above transcript is generated using AI technology and therefore may contain errors.
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