MANAGE LOAD

“We don't test. What we do is we race, and the race is our test. We use that as a performance metric. If I want to run a test on somebody, especially one where I want to get really good data, usually you want to like take a day or two off in front of it, make sure the test is their best ability, and then they're going to have to recover from it, and it could be up to like five, six day process, and then you just lost a week of training.”

“One of the things we document that's new here is as a condition of the exit of the board members who had moved against Sam that he wanted out. They insisted on an outside investigation. What happened there is, in my view, quite extraordinary, which is, yes, at private companies, sometimes reports of this type, when a law firm is brought in to restore legitimacy can be kept out of writing. Often, it's to limit liability, And often, legal experts say it's a bit of a red flag. And what we report in this piece for the first time is there wasn't a report. For years, people were like, where's the report? Where's the report? There wasn't a report because it was kept out of writing.”

“You should know how a workout is going to affect them mentally and emotionally. Has anybody, and I'm going to speak from experience here, has anybody ever gone through a very hard, long workout and just afterwards you're emotionally drained and you just maybe cry a little bit? Like, your athletes will do that too. And if that happens, how do you get them from there into the next workout?”

“One more piece on on the regulatory front. It is crazy to me that model development of this scale and seriousness remains essentially unregulated in this country. Right? Here you have a private company saying, well, we have now created software that can create so many different kinds of novel exploits that all software might have to be rewritten, and they are not really under any kind of regulatory regime. And the regulatory regime that previous administration tried to put into place was thrown out by the current one because it might harm American competitiveness.”

“Anthropic has been running this model internally for several weeks now, and they claim that this thing has found vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. They gave some examples, that have already been patched. One of them was that this model apparently found a twenty seven year old security flaw in OpenBSD. OpenBSD is an open source operating system that runs on firewalls and routers. It is sort of like a critical security layer on the Internet, and it was designed specifically to be hard to hack.”

“We started out kind of as training partners, and it didn't go into coach and athlete until I had back surgery. And then after that, it was more like I was just watching her more, but she doesn't like me watching her work out. So we go from there, but then she started to hand it over and she would trust me with it. And that is a heavy load for me that like, look, I don't want to break her trust. She will ask me every single workout, why am I doing this? And I have to have a reason because if there's not a reason for something that I write in her program, it doesn't get done.”

“Sam Briggs mentioned this about when younger athletes were coming in to CrossFit. And I have the utmost respect for all the young athletes, but I remember her saying this is that they just don't know how bad it's supposed to hurt yet. They don't know. They haven't experienced it. They haven't hit it. And so when they do, they just think that's right. Whereas as we age and we get older, and we know how bad that hurts, sometimes we're like, okay, I'm gonna go almost up to that.”

“Understand the difference and how they relate to correlation and causation. What is actually causing something to happen versus what just is happening at the same time as something else? If I program something or a week and the quality day of the next week, the athlete has a great fantastic day. Is it something that I did with the week before? Or is it something, did they get better sleep? Did they get better recovery?”

“Because of how heavy and important the running is in this sport, we don't stop. Yes, if you stop running, you would get stronger faster, but just because you're running doesn't mean you can't keep getting stronger. When I go into a strength block, it usually involves more specific sets and more touches to any type of resistance than it does mean eliminating my running completely. That volume of it goes from maybe 60 miles, 55 miles a week, down to 45.”

“No. In my mind, it is obvious why. Like, if you're a corporation and you release a tool and people with no real technical expertise are able to use it and within a few hours discover a novel exploit in the Linux kernel and then take over other people's machines to cause crimes, you might be held liable as a corporation. You will get in trouble at like, there will be congressional hearings. So companies just in their rational self interest do not want to sell cyber weapons on the open market.”

“Availability is the best ability. If you're available constantly, always able to work, and that includes, you know, your quality days, your easy days. If you're available constantly, then you can stack good day on top of good day on top of good week, good months, good years, and over time, that's when you see the consistency really start to pay off.”

“Be an expert in the rule book. You should know the rule book as better or as well as or better than the athletes themselves. You need to be able to tell them what they are and are not allowed to use. They're going to come to you and say, hey, can I bring this with me? Can I take this gel? Whatever it is, you need to be an expert in how the rule book is set up.”

“Number two, and this is just in time for pride. They will tell you when there is a rainbow in your neighborhood. This is such a good idea for a weather app. Yes. Who does not wanna be sitting at your wage slave job? You haven't been outside in, like, seven and a half hours, and then ACME weather tells you, hey. Guess what? There's a rainbow in your neighborhood. You're gonna book it outdoors, and you are gonna behold the majesty of creation.”

“But I asked my friend, do you have a password manager, and do you reuse passwords for the same thing? And she said, you know, I've never really been able to to get one of those, password managers to work for me, and I do sometimes reuse my passwords. So I said, like, look. If if you're looking for something that you can do, just make sure that you have done your basic online cybersecurity hygiene. You should use a password manager. I use one password. There are many others out there that are just as good. Don't use the same password for anything. Your passwords should be randomly generated and not, you know, the name of your pet or whatever. And then use multifactor authentication where you can.”

“Relatedly, by the way, a a lot of announcements over there right concentrated around when they knew we were gonna be running and right developed in the period where we were in these intensive conversations with them. And many of them sort of pointed at the topics in the piece. You know, they announced this new safety fellowship that's very airy. They announced this new governance plan that's very sort of airy and ethereal, but are meant to, I think, you know, occupy space in the conversation on the same topics.”

“One of the things that I always have to do is actually pull them back. Hey, let's pull back for a minute. You're running too fast right now, you're getting burned out, you're not able to hit a good day after a good day. So before we get hurt, be the brakes, not their breaking point.”

“I program for their group, I always also follow, it is program for the best, scale for the rest. So I tell everybody on it that like, listen, this is a lot. When they are following it, I tell them, start out doing about 70% of each piece. That means that if I have in there a 60-minute run, go do 45 minutes, 42 minutes, whatever it is, the first week that you are on it. 70% of everything. If there is a four-round workout, do three rounds.”

“So they are at least claiming that they are trying to get ahead of what they envision will be a reckoning, was what was the word they used, to force cybersecurity. And it seems plausible to me that in the next kind of six ish months, every major piece of software in the world is going to need to be patched, rewritten, and rereleased.”

“And then there is the white hot center of the rivalry, the stuff you mentioned that I think is in a very different category, which is, you know, Elon Musk and other direct competitors really amplifying everything they can come up with. And in some cases, we document things that are inflated or trumped up or just seem to not be true. So Elon Musk, in particular, has intermediaries circulating some pretty spicy and pretty unsubstantiated material in Silicon Valley, and we talk about that.”