Please welcome to the whiteboard founder
and CEO of CrossFit, coach Greg Glassman.
[Greg] How is everybody?
[Audience] Good.
[Greg] Good. Can you hear me? 
[Audience] Yes.
[Greg] Alright.
I've got kind of a hybrid offering here it's a
little bit off the beaten path, but we
kind of developed new material by
inserting it in—
you know, rev it and work it in front of you.
I think what I've got to show you here today, I think it's important.
I came here to share with you
believing it is very important.
So, let's just dive into this.
Any questions?
(laughing)
Nothing? Alright.
If you were to take...
Don't get scared.
An X and Y axis.
Okay?
And if we were to put on here power, and we're to put on
this axis duration of effort.
And if we were to take something of some duration—
I don't care, ten seconds, thirty, make it short.
And you were to find a couple of
tests you could do and mark it for power,
some number of foot-pounds per
minute.
Okay? And that's not a hard thing to do.You're just squatting, with each squat with each rep
your center of mass— and it sits somewhere between your umbilicus and your pubic bone.
It travels some vertical distance up and down.
Okay?
And it's neat because whether—
you know, suppose you said, "Yeah, somewhere between my bellybutton and my pubic bone.
Like, right here. Right?"
Well, in the squat, it travels the same amount of distance.
So it's kind of easy to figure what the displacement is of your center of mass.
Because for a lot of our activities,
the direction of travel is straight up and down.
So I can resolve it into foot-pounds per minute and I can do that at some other distance and some other distance
or duration, and I can find these points and I can graph it .
And I'll get some kind of curve like that.
And this is— this is power graphed against time and what you end up with in here is work capacity.
Interestingly enough. 
And I now have a two-dimensional model.
An area that is representative of your fitness. And in fact, we called this "fitness".
Now, over the next day or so, Austin and others are going to kind of back up here and talk about some of the other
things that got us to this point... the hopper model, the ten general skills, that kind of thing.
But we'll come back to that, that's important.
but, here's where it ends up.
Here was the punch line, "fitness" and what this was— is, is the world's first scientific definition of fitness that is
amenable to accurate and precise estimation worlds hi how are you okay
world's first definition of fitness
amenable to accurate and precise
estimation.
It's really important.
Accuracy and precision. We have accuracy when we're close to the bullseye.
And in fact, this is pretty accurate— kind of goes all around but it averages there.
That's reasonably accurate. This has a precision but no accuracy if that's the target.
Right? So precision is kind of you get the same result over again or it clusters closely
and accuracy is your proximity to the desired target.
We have both something amenable to accurate precise estimation here and that was really really important.
Another thing happened along the way,
and that is there was an observation that you could
make a continuum from values that were
sick to well to fit, and any health metric that you could—
that you can think of sits where there
is some value that is "well" or "normal"
that sits in between a "sick" and a "fit" value.
Let's look at it. If your HDLs— that's your good cholesterol.
If they're lower than 35, you got a problem.
50 would be nice. 75 better yet.
Triglycerides 400, you're sick. 120 is better. 75 is better yet.
Blood pressure. Let's just write down the things that follow this pattern
I won't have to give you examples of all.
Blood pressure, triglycerides I mentioned.
What else? Body fat, muscle mass,
bone-density...
What else?
I'm just pulling some up. I'm gonna pick one.
A1c glycosylated hemoglobin
gives us a measure of what your average blood sugar was over the past 90 days.
It's cool because you don't have to do the fasting blood glucose bit.
It's a cool test.
What do I have here? Seven pieces?
A1c as you become fitter is going to go down. 
That's good.
Bone density is going to go up. That's good. Muscle mass it will go up. That's good.
Body fat's going to go down. That's good. Triglycerides are going to go down. That's good.
Blood pressure is going to go down. That's good.
HDLs is are going to go up. That's good.
Now there's another element to here that's really important, so we've defined this this fitness as:
"Work capacity" kind of jumping back here.
"Measured across broad time and modal domains."
It's kind of a mouthful, but it's really very simple.
"Work capacity"— you saw it here.
How far did it move? What did it weigh? And, how long did it take?
Okay? "Measured across broad time", that means of short duration and long duration.
And "modal", doing a whole bunch of different things.
"Domains", we're doing this on the X-axis.
Work capacity measured across broad time and modal domains.
So let me share something with you. 
You're going to learn in the nutrition lecture that we favor
a diet that's comprised of meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.
Whether it's Zone or Paleo or whatever you're doing, they're all very very similar.
We employed that diet because what?
Because it increases work capacity across broad time and modal domains.
It will also elevate your work capacity.
In fact, I don't know of an adaptation to nutrition that's unique to nutrition.
I don't know of a positive adaptation of exercise that isn't also a feature of eating right.
I can get you to eat right and make 
all these things happen.
You can eat wrong and I can induce exercise into your life and make all these things happen.
Together it's a tremendous force most
of you sitting here already know that.
Alright?
So we have our meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar
overlaid against constantly varied high intensity functional movement— the CrossFit prescription.
You're going to hear all of that in greater detail.
And what happens is that as you move from wherever you start here—
under this stressor, what we find is the direction is always in this direction.
Now I want to talk to you— but I said, I don't know the metric that doesn't sit like this.
Where the values we find for people that are well sit in between those that are sick.
So those that are sick and those that are that are fit, I don't know of an exception.
And what this means— should suggest is that fitness is a hedge against being sick
because if you're fit, you're going to have measures that will have to get well before you can get sick. Right?
You with me on that?
If your blood pressure's 105 over 50 and you stop working out and you start eating shitty,
pretty soon you're going to have normal blood pressure.
And that should scare you because pretty soon it's gonna do this,
and now I got a problem.
Same thing with body fat, if you're 5%... it's pretty cool. Take a vacation start being a sloth and you get the 25%.
Now you're healthy. Right? 
Well, pretty soon we're going to be sick.
You see this? It's easy. It's a hedge against being sick.
Now, the things that follow here— and these are representative, and I can name others lots of others.
But I want to point out there's something really significant about these.
Why is your doctor interested in these things? What makes her want to know what your HDL is?
Your blood pressure, your triglycerides, body fat, bone density, gyc—
[Audience member] They're all things that get worse as you get sicker.
[Greg] Yeah! And what kind of sickness in
particular?
[Audience member] Heart disease— chronic disease.
[Greg] Chronic disease! Yeah, you're right. You're exactly right.
There's the right answer that's— even in the broader sense.
It's called "chronic disease".
Check this out: these are the symptoms of all the chronic diseases and it's very likely that if you have any
chronic disease, that you have "deranged markers"— how I would expect if you had Alzheimer's to
see your HDL suppressed, your blood pressure up, your triglycerides up, your body fat up,
your muscle mass down, your bone density down your A1c high.
Same with diabetes.
Same with most cancers.
We used to say "some cancers". 
We, us, meaning me now.
Most cancers.
It's going to turn out that 95 percent of the PET positive cancers— that means,
positively emission tomography cancers.
That 95 percent of the PET positive cancer is going to end up being chronic disease.
That's what we're headed. That's where we're headed.
And that's 95 percent of cancer so it's— it's 100 percent I'm sorry.
100 percent of the PET positive are going to be chronic disease and that represents 95 percent of cancers.
Now what's interesting about chronic disease is that medicine has no effective treatment.
It's symptomatic only.
So I'll give you a drug to bring your cholesterol down.
I'll give you a Fosamax to get your bone density up.
We might do bariatric surgery if you have persistent weight loss issues,
weight gain issues, morbid obesity.
If you have paved over arteries that— coronary
arteries we can do bypass surgery.
You become glucose intolerant, I'll put you on insulin.
But all of these are not fixes.
Their masking the problem— and sometimes it's necessary to do.
If you have persistent malignant hypertension, you should take I an antihypertensive
if you can't get it down otherwise.
But how would you get it down otherwise?
(inaudible chatted from audience)
Yeah, yeah. It's so cool!
I want you to know something about chronic disease,
medicine has no effective treatment for it.
It is crushing the medical system and the doctors are ripping their hair out.
And they can't figure it out.
We had the director of chronic disease and diabetes care— ex of the Mayo Clinic come approached us
because he said, "You guys have the answer."
And he wanted me to come here and tell you that we have the answer.
That diet and exercise is the only thing that has a positive impact
and is at the root cause of what's going
on with chronic disease.
So what I'm going to tell you is that the CrossFit stimulus, which is meat and vegetables,
nuts and seeds, some fruit little starch, no sugar, or paleo like eating, coupled with our
constantly varied high intensity functional movement,
the workouts you know well, that is
the independent variable.
that stimulus is the independent variable that is
driving the dependent variables that are
all of the symptoms of chronic disease.
So what that means is what you're learning here this weekend is how to get a pass on chronic disease
for yourself, your mates, your kids, your friends, your family, some of you may be even so lucky
is to be able to have some positive
impact on your parents most of you never will.
It's hard to do. Mom won't listen neither will dad. Right?
Anyone here training their parents? Good on you that's really cool when you can do it.
Anyone else tried to?
(Laughing)
Yeah...
My mom sat on the rower and gave it like three pulls, and she goes, "How long do I have to do this?"
And I go, "Well, you've gone 12 seconds."
She goes "It hasn't been 12 seconds!"
She's like arguing me. Right? 13, 14, you're right it's been 16 seconds now.
Chronic disease, what impact does it have on us? What percentage of deaths worldwide?
[Audience member] Hundreds of thousands. Millions.
Wrong. What percentage of deaths are
attributable to chronic disease?
(inaudible chatter)
No.
That's closer than hundreds of thousands. It's 70 percent.
70 percent of the people in United States that died last year of the 2.3 million 1.87 died from chronic disease
And the number's rising— that's rising rapidly. The percent number is.
And when we finally add the positive cancers in here,
I figure the number might look like 80 or 85 percent ultimately.
70 percent of the people that die, die from chronic disease.
Around the world.
Medicine has no solution, you do.
That's really cool, right?
Now let's talk about the other things.
What about the 30 percent? What are they dying of?
[Audience member] Trauma...Old age.
[Greg] In part.
I've got a general category
for it and it's just "accidents".
Unfortunate shit, right?
And, there's four types of accidents and we couldn't come up with another.
The "-ics": genetic, toxic, kinetic, and microbic.
Getting cut in two, meteor hit you, hit
by a car on your bike, all that stuff, right?
Toxic. You've been poisoned.
Radon, lead poisoning, baby eating the
paint chips off the window, right?
You get mercury poisoning from fish...
Genetic. You know, Tay-Sachs, right?
Cystic Fibrosis— genetic disorder, you're born with it. It's mom and dad's fault. Not yours.
Kinetic is that is all the accidents.
Traditional kind of trauma.
Microbic— virus and bacteria.
So I got AIDS here. I got car accidents.
Right?
Environmental toxins and bad genes.
That's largely stuff you can do nothing about. 
But there is one exception.
There is something you can do that will make a difference in the outcome with each of these.
What is it?
This again— be fit.
But other than that, nothing.
If you're fit, there are genes you have that you inherited— damn, mom and dad!
But they won't express because of your behavior.
That's a good thing.
There's genes you have that are turned off
that will express— that you want turned
on— and will express when you exercise.
So we can effect our genetic
expression through exercise.
Toxicity, I think we all would believe that someone
fitter is more likely to survive the
same poisoning than someone that wasn't
fit.
You can imagine that, right?
Kinetic, we hear stories from war of CrossFitters surviving things that people didn't survive prior to.
Which is really been interesting. We've heard a lot of that.
Microbic, come on, whose most vulnerable to viral pneumonia?
[Audience] Elderly.
[Greg] That's right. That's right. So there's
some protection here.
Now this is interesting, in this area— by the way this is where the miracles of medicine are.
Now, look— and you know, Nobel prizes in
medicine... a lot of great stuff happens down here.
And if you've got a genetic
disorder that's making you sick, you need a doctor.
If you've been poisoned, you need a doctor.
Okay?
If your arm's been cut off, 
you need a doctor not burpees.
(Laughing)
You got a nasty virus or
flesh-eating bacteria, you need a doctor.
You need a doctor.
But the interesting thing about accidents, there's no real favorable accidents.
I'd like to tell you there's good luck.
They're like, "Oh wow, he caught a bug and he's gonna live to be 120, you got that fucking weird virus."
It doesn't work that way.
And so good luck is no accidents.
And bad luck is accidents.
Now you think, "What other kind of luck?"
Or maybe, suppose you got something really horrible and you just happen to get the world's best doctor.
And she cured.
I'm gonna share something with you, that doesn't happen.
The luck that— what would happen is you get a bad doctor that misdiagnosed you and kill you.
That's the kind of luck that happens around doctors.
You don't— you go to the world's best doctor doesn't mean you're going to get a necessarily
different outcome than you would going to a good doctor or an average doctor.
It's the myth.
We want so much for this to be in someone else's hands and then you want to imagine them to be perfect.
They're not.
We've been talking with this guy from the Mayo Clinic and he was visiting a patient
in a major hospital in New York, the family had grave concerns about his progression of his disease.
And he's looking through his chart— they had them fed him in 21 days.
Next door to that, is a woman that they did an angiogram and they didn't fill the syringe with contrast media
and so they injected 120 CC bolus of air into her and it did the equivalent of her
having a thousand strokes in just a matter of minutes.
Medical fuck up is the third leading
cause of death in the United States.
The two above that are chronic disease.
So I got the two things doctors can't do anything about is number one and two and then number three
this is like being involved with them— any doctors in here?
Physician? It's okay if you are. Come right up front.
Doctors are like lifeguards. 
What you're doing is like a swim coach.
Now, when you're drowning, you don't need a swim coach.
You needed one and you didn't get one.
What you need is a lifeguard.
And my physicians like that. We're very
comfortable with that.
You know? We'll teach people to swim and when they don't pay attention and they go under
you take care of it.
70 percent of what kills people can be
addressed by what you know.
What you're learning this weekend.
The 30 percent get fit and then don't think about it.
I'm going to tell you if you stand around worried
about germs, worried about the tire
that's going to come through the
windshield and decapitate you,
you're worried about breathing toxic air and
you're worried about your genes,
you're wasting your time and you're mentally ill.
It won't make you happy, it won't make you better, it won't make you safer.  You're not going to live any longer.
It won't be because you're staring for that
tire coming through the windshield that
when it comes it doesn't hit you.
We looked on YouTube and I played the game, you actually get to see a tire come through a windshield.
It's horrible! 
And you know what?
You wouldn't have known to go left, right, up, down, stop or go faster.
It's just like there it is and it's in the front seat with you.
Don't worry about it.
(Laughing)
It won't be that bad. It'll be really quick.
(Laughing)
And it's a whole lot better than this!
It ain't going to happen anyways.
Think of the things we worry about,
and this is a 7 out of 10.
Huge.
Let's talk about Medical Expenditure.
What is it, about 4 trillion a year? Is that what it is right now?
Yeah.
What percent of your health insurance premium do you think goes to the health insurance company for its
overhead and its profits?
Yeah that sounds reasonable, right? Five? It's two-thirds.
Two-thirds of your premium goes to health insurance company for its overhead and profits.
One-third gets spent on this shit. Sick people.
One-third.
Of that one-third that's left, what percent goes to treating chronic disease ineffectively?
It's 86% of the one-third.
So at least 14 percent of the one-third
goes to the stuff that medicine can actually do something about.
And that's 6.4 percent was that the number Brian? 
No. no.
It's 4.6 or seven.
4.6, 4.7 percent of your health insurance premium is not wasted.
Cause the part spent on chronic disease is a waste.
I think the part the insurance company keeps is excessive. But that's okay.
Look, you know, can we change that?
Not without starting a health insurance company.
But I tell you what, you can sure change your participation in the system by getting rid of all of this.
What this sums to is what I'm
calling a "kinetic theory of health."
Kinetic theory of health.
And the idea is this, is that with the singular focus on kinematics increasing work capacity—
force, distance and time.
That is just get me a better Fran time and all those things that would support a better Fran time.
What would that look like?
Meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, right? Our Paleo diet will support it.
Maybe some fish oil? Maybe? Making sure you get plenty of sleep, right?
I'm kind of running out of things.
Maybe some rock tape. Huh? 
Anyone got it? Can't sleep without that shit, right?
We're out of shit matters.
And with that singular focus of work capacity, what we do is we get a pass on chronic disease.
And then you realize, "Jesus there's nothing really here to worry about."
All the worry of lifestyle is gone. You have the lifestyle answer.
Make it to the gym. Eat like they tell you in there. Enjoy yourself and forget all the others. Forget everything else.
And so ultimately, here's the magic formula for you: fitness plus luck— and it can only be bad!
Equal health!
And really what this looks like, it's the part you can do something about plus the part you can do nothing about,
is your outcome!
Now, things you can do: annual checkup, right?
Well, here's the stats on it, it doesn't help.
Long-term—this is taking a long hard look at it.
What happens the people that go to the doctor every year for an annual checkup versus those that don't?
It's a wash.
Early prevention, early diagnosis, I'm not
convinced.
In the case of cancer— anyone watch the latest in cancer? Anyone follow this?
Anything about— you know, about cancer as a metabolic disease?
Not a not a disease of the nucleus.
You follow any of that?
By a guy by the name of Thomas s.e.y.f.r.i.e.d.
Seyfried Seyfried...? PhD not an MD.
Wrote a book called "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease",
John Wiley and Sons is the author, $127. It's a textbook... Yeah.
If you're wonkish at all, and super serious about all that stuff we do?
You have to read it.
No matter who you are in here or why you're here there's another book called, "Tripping Over the Truth".
"Tripping Over the Truth" by Travis Christofferson.
That's a must read. That's a must read.
Seyfried's book came out in 2012, "Tripping Over the Truth" in 2014.
The cancer research world has been set on fire.
Everything they've been doing is wrong.
Because their theory of cancer is dead wrong. Dead wrong.
And this isn't a crackpot, this is world-class frontline researchers coming up going, "Hey you have it wrong."
And I don't want to get too much into the "what's wrong" about it, but it's really interesting that James Watson,
the Nobel laureate that discovered DNA with Crik, he's come forward too and joined in and like,
"We all had cancer wrong. We all had it wrong."
What's cool is that cancer is going to be as amenable to treatment, prevention, and reversal
with what we're doing, as is heart disease.
Which is really really exciting. Really
exciting. And again, what the sums too is
that it's gonna end up in the chronic
disease category.
95 percent of cancers will and ultimately be chronic disease.
You have a question about any of this?
If someone had a really direct question about what I'm talking about I'd go into more detail,
but it's not— you're not going to be tested on it.
Please.
[Audience member] Regarding the cancer, I mean there's so many variations of cancer.
Is he talking more specifically about lymphoma, leukemia...
[Greg] All of them.
Otto Warburg got two Nobel prizes, he went and received one the second one World War two prevented him
and Hitler from getting his prize.
But he got two Nobel prizes in medicine in the 30s and
what he did was he showed that the
onco cell— the cancer cell had lost
differentiation and it could no longer
metabolize in the mitochondria—
could no longer metabolize proteins and 
fats to produce ATP.
It could only metabolize glucose and had a voracious appetite for glucose.
Now, there are a lot of people who had heard that like, "Well, wait a minute. I don't need glucose and I can thrive on
protein and fat and the cancer can't eat protein and fat and eats the glucose.
Wouldn't there be a therapy there?
And I think there's people here that have
heard me ask that question thousand times since
knowing me over 20-25 years. 
Fair enough Brian?
And it turns out, yeah that's exactly the reality of it.
That I you can starve cancer through fasting.
[Audience member] Doesn't the brain require glucose?
[Greg] No. The brain will thrive on ketones.
And in fact, the only cells that we have that don't— that won't use ketones to produce ATP are cancer cells.
They cannot. They don't like ketones at all. 
And the rest of your cells love them.
The mitochondria love the ketones. They're easy to burn, they're clean burning,
it's high energy production and the mitochondria actually bathe in them and repair in that environment.
So...
Here's where cancer is coming from.
It's coming— it's an epigenetic stressor placed on the mitochondria.
The mitochondria has such control over cell regulation that it is able to disorder the nucleus
and do chromosomal damage.
So the chromosomal damage— the
genetic damage and mutations are down
road of the accident that's happening at
the mitochondria.
And what's happening to mitochondria is you destroying it with sugar.
I mean, hello! Isn't that cool?
It's going to be just like heart disease, just
like diabetes and you know?
Alzheimer's is in there too. It's a chronic disease.
It's fundamentally diabetes of the brain. The glycation like glycosylated tissues that we see in the kidneys,
when you see it in the brain it's Alzheimer's.
You see it in the kidneys, and you have a end-stage renal disease.
This is huge for us. This is huge for us. What it means is that in this crushed economy, it's estimated by CDC
that we're gonna have a hundred million diabetics in the United States in 2050.
100 million diabetics 100 million divers.
That will effect everyone's dreams. 
Elon Musk wants to put people on Mars, right?
No one's going to Mars if there's 100
million diabetics in this country.
If there's 100 million diabetics in United
States, and your 10-year-old daughter falls off her
skateboard and breaks her arm, you will not be seen by a physician the day she breaks her arm. You will not.
You won't go into an emergency room for something as simple as a broken arm. You will not.
Because the emergency rooms are going to be hell.
It will be like the— like one of those TV shows with the zombies, right?
I mean it's— you will be seeing heart attacks on every corner.
How many feet were amputated due to
diabetes in California last year?
What's the number Brian? Do you remember?
[Brian] 13 thousand.
[Greg] That's what I remember! Yeah, 13 thousand feet were amputated to diabetes in California last year.
There were probably five more been cut off
since I've been standing here.
You don't want that, by the way.
Sir. 
[Audience member] Greg the CDC says in every 30
seconds and there's an amputation related to
 diabetes in the United States.
[Greg] Yeah, don't worry about the thing coming through the windshield.
Worry about sitting there watching the fucking TV, not going to the gym.
Your favorite snack. You don't want
chronic disease.
You know, as a culture we tend to live in fear of cancer and heart disease,
doctors don't fear cancer and heart disease They fear diabetes.
Look, your dick doesn't work, you go blind, you get heart disease, you have strokes, they start cutting off parts.
I mean, it's horrible. It's horrible.
And really nothing gets worse than dialysis.
We finally got to get into a dialysis unit
at University of Virginia and get walked through and see the people in treatment—
has anyone gotten close to that?
I'll tell you right now man, if I needed dialysis they better be saying,
"Dude trust me, we're gonna have a kidney for you fast!"
Because I'm going to do that for a week or two maybe. It's worse than death.
Worse than that— horrible thing.
It's terminal. You're terminal.
One out of four dialysis patients will have a fatal heart attack in the course of treatment
and within the five years of starting.
Die on the—sir.
[Audience member] So I think the question I'm thinking is: how do you change people's minds?
Like, if the facts are out there, and they can find it—
[Greg] I don't want to change anyone's mind.
I want to change their behavior and when I change their behavior they will change their own minds.
And then they'll come back and try and convince you. It's so fucking weird.
But just get— you just want to get them into the gym.
[Audience member] Well these insurance companies have so much money and they could—
[Greg] Fuck them! They were just given— they were just awarded 15 trillion dollars
over the next— no it's five trillion dollars over the next 15 years .
We'll go to five insurance companies.
They're all good with all of this, believe me. So is Big Pharma. They're all good with all of this.
They have no problem with the ineffective treatment of this thing treating it systematically.
The dream is that one day, every diabetic will have gastric bypass surgery.
I saw a guy from the Cleveland Clinic offer exactly that. One day, surgery for diabetes will be
common is it is for heart disease.
That's the dream!
So Roger I'd like— you want to talk these
guys out of their new boat?
Here, I'll make it really— here's all you have to do. alls you have to do is just get people to come into the gym.
And they're going to be safe from this. They're going to be on the island with you.
They're going to pay you. And then you can bring in another one and you'll make some more money and
all these people are saved!
And the rest, fuck 'em. They're gonna die.
They're gonna die!
[Audience member] My question is, how do you transition somebody that comes into your box and wants to
get, you know, ready— bikini ready or you know, look like Rich Froning?
How you can you transition them to this message?
[Greg] Look, if you come to me and you're 300 pounds you want to look like Froning
I'm gonna pretend like we're
gonna pull it off, alright?
(Laughing)
But I'm thinking, "I'd just like you to see
your kids graduate from high school."
But like, fuck, let's go for it!
I was sitting in a class at UCLA and the gal says that goals have to be achievable.
And I'm like, "the fuck they do." I mean at the time Mary Lou Retton was it was a was a household name
gymnast, right?
Just an amazing athlete, and I knew that she had sold 6
million posters.
So that means there's six million little girls— and some
weirdos— they have her poster over their bed.
And they're all aspiring to be her, they're
motivated by it.
They believe it.
They think— it's a beautiful thing. It's a
wonderful illusion.
Entertain it. for some, it'll be true. They will be that good.
For all but five, they're just high as kites,  but good do
it!
Know that the value of a goal is just strictly— it's motivation.
And so if you want to look like Froning, fine. I'm going to make you look like Froning.
But I'm thinking what I'm going to do is I'm going to
keep you from croaking.
Get people in the gym.
- "What is CrossFit?"
- "Come with me."
- "What's this CrossFit thing?" 
- "What are you doing Monday?"
Just get them started.
The people— if you— I was one of those I'm going to change people's thinking kind of guys, you know?
And the people that want to be convinced
will never be convinced. You'll always be convincing.
So remember, two-thirds of the
money is thrown away.
The one-third that's left 86 percent goes to this shit. The stuff that you can fix.
And then, alls you have to do is stand here and look out the window for that thing that's going to strike you.
Don't do that.
Any other questions I'm going to wrap this up.
This is important right?
Fitness plus luck can only be bad is health.
So, make the most out of this
and you won't be seven out of ten that died prematurely unnecessarily due to a lifestyle thing.
In the end, chronic disease is a deficiency syndrome.
A deficiency of what?
[Audience] Exercise.
That's right. That's right.
I learned a new word, "sedentation". 
It's kind of a hard one to find,
you get it Webster's second and third,
but not to any of the— what would sedentation be?
Yeah, being sedentary.
Sedentation coupled with malnutrition.
And what malnutrition in particular might not be most interested in?
The high-carb, low-fat diet and that was really a smokescreen to cover the harm that sugar was doing.
They thought, "If we get you to quit eating fat, significantly reduce the calories, maybe the harm that
sugar does wouldn't be seen."
Didn't work out.
Okay?
So that's state-sponsored malnutrition.
Do you know that CrossFit— do you know that the National Institute of Health just revised its nutrition
guidelines and they did this in like October— November 2015.
And let me tell you what they did, they brought them to our 1990 standard.
Wasn't that nice?
So if you want to know what the NIH is going to be doing, you know, 25-30 years from now,
it's this shit right here.
That's the lead we have.
Take advantage of it.
You don't have to convince anyone anything.
I tell you what, you know, once you've lost the weight, and you feel better, then when you ask me,
"What happened?"
You'll pay attention and it has meaning and it really sticks. Until then, you're wasting your time.
[Audience member] The thing is, our society in general, they trust doctors so much, so if a doctor said
something then that's like the gold standard. Like, we believe in doctors. Doctors. Doctors. Doctors.
Like, "Doctors said..."
"Oh I hurt my knee, I gotta go to the doctor."
Like, why do you gonna go to the doctor if your knee hurts? It doesn't make any sense.
But, that's what they do, our society tells them to do that.
Our insurance company says, "Go to the doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Doctor."
[Audience member] That was the stated goal of the journalthe American— not the American Medical Association
but its forerunner.
Its stated aims were: 
One, to limit the number of doctors in practice.
—this is in like, the 1880s.
Limit the number of doctors in practice and shut down medical schools to do so,
And the other, to raise the price.
They wanted to establish themselves as an authority—
[Greg] You know, look, two-thirds of your health insurance premium is thrown away,
and then 86 percent of the last third is spent on stuff that doesn't really have a significantly positive impact.
And, you know, there's so much that's broken. But actually it's working just right for those involved.
You know what I mean? Maybe we're getting screwed. But Big Pharma's cool.
The insurance companies are happy.
Doctors aren't happy. But hey, that's alright.
No, this thing that looks broken, was actually designed to work this way.
Yeah. Yeah, no one's too excited about anything changing.
But it's going to have to for us because we're spending more than any country in the world and
we're way down on the list for return now.
So we're way past— you know, where
we need to be.
One last question, I'm out of here.
[Audience member] You pointed out dismissal that people's health and you know, prolonging your life.
Maybe not suffering the misfortune that people are doing to themselves nine out of 10 people—
And I think the the essence of this entire conversation is truly the quality of life on top of not just a duration of life.
And you hit on it on so many different levels, right?
And if we as an entity which is the fitness community and specifically within CrossFit can share
with our clients, one person at a time and leading by example you can say,
"Okay, follow me onto the island. Let me show you a better life and then build it one..."
[Greg] No doubt! 
[Audience member] One person at a time. Right?
Maybe that's how we started to change their mind.
[Greg] Sure. 
[Audience member] Within our little community.
[Greg] This isn't a hypothetical. I have— we have 13,000 gyms and with two to four million people
on the island right now.
[Audience member] Right.
[Greg] And, my gyms— our gyms are thriving not because of people's desire to be Rich Froning.
And neither are they thriving because of our impact on chronic disease,
but they're thriving because the end user— the customers are extremely happy with the transformation.
And it's part physical. It's part emotional. It's part blood lipids. It's part, you know, relationships.
But it's all going on and the end user is proud to the point of being really annoying.
(Laughing)
Right?
We've all seen that.
It's like— it's you know, that— were giggling, we've all seen it.
It's actually part of the popular culture how annoying you guys are.
(Laughing)
You know?
You see the Simpsons episode where
the kids got force CrossFit?
Mandatory CrossFit as a punishment?
(Laughing)
It's like— we're all just like, "Ah!" 
We love it!
You know?
Yeah... It's the results.
We've probably poorly led this thing, but the results are so amazing that it's hard to screw up.
Yeah that's all that's going on.
That's the miracle of CrossFit. It's not the marketing. 
It's not my impeccable charm.
It's the results.
People are getting something that they didn't even know they wanted or needed.
To get that, how amazing that is...
You know, I said long ago that we got one of the only services you'd ever offer where you radically
understate the benefit to keep your credibility.
If I told you all the cool things I was
 going to do for you...
Jolene, you'd walk away. 
You probably wouldn't believe it.
It's hard to say with a straight face, but it's true.
I'm really proud of what you're doing.
Affiliates? Show of hands.
How many of you are there? 
Show me— Put your hand up higher.
Yeah. You're everything. 
You're my game plan. There's nothing else.
You know what I'm talking about, Rick, it's already happening, right?
You're already doing it. You're already doing it.
Yeah, we've made a pretty good effort to put a different face on what's going on in the boxes
I don't know if you've noticed that or not with with the media.
But I had what's-his-name, that big ugly guy from the movies? Tate Fletcher.
You know Tate Fletcher anyone?
[Audience member] Yeah.
[Greg] Yeah. Tate came up to me at the Games, and Tate's the bad guy in every film that comes out
right now cause he looks like such a
perfect bad guy.
But, he comes up to me at the Games and he put his arm around me and this was the first time I met him,
and he pointed out on the field and he asked me— he said, "What defective character would hold in
the balance sending someone to these Games with watching a 65-year-old grandmother get her first pull-up."
And I go, "Yeah, what defect in the character would think it's the same."
So, "Kevin, I appreciate you wanting to look like Rich, I can introduce you to him, we do a lot of things
but let's just get started— so, you got a lot to do. 
I'll see you Monday morning."
Yeah, just whatever gets them in, use it.
They're— hey, the people that have been doing CrossFit six months are there for different reasons
than the ones that started— than when they started.
And six months after they've started year-end they'll have a different reason for being there.
It'll change, it'll grow with them, it'll mature with them. And in the end, it will be only about quality of life.
Yeah. By the way, what I'm talking about here— you know, look I'm saying that 70 percent died from that.
The truth is they're dying prematurely with this, which means that the 30 percent are
living longer and that gives them the
opportunity to die from bad luck.
(Laughing)
Which is the ideal outcome. You get that?
You'd like to live so old, it took a tire through the windshield to knock you out.
Alright?
(Laughing)
Thanks everybody. Thank you.
(Applause)
