The Sevan Podcast - The TRUE Strength Of Field w/ Friend & Halpin #907

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

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At Air Miles, we help you collect more moments. So instead of scrolling through photos of friends on social media, you can spend more time dinnering with them. How's that spicy enchilada? Very flavorful. Yodeling with them. Ooh, must be mating season. And hiking with them.

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Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Oh no. Yeah, I'm stressed for it. Hey, bam, we're live. Mike Halpin, Caleb Beaver. We are taking name recommendations for Caleb's child.

And Mr. Brian Friend in the house today. Today we are going to explore, discuss. Need to explore. Oh, I heard that. That was me. Explore, discuss the future, the present, the past, not in that order of what it takes to get to the CrossFit Games in regards to worldwide rankings and strength of field numbers. And more specifically, I think, what can be done to fix the current situation so that

Africans can attend? No, not that. I'm off a little bit. We'll see what we can do. Okay. So, hi. Hi, everyone. Everyone knows who these guys are.

While you were late, I put it to the audience to try to guess why you were late. Oh, okay. Fantastic. Any good guesses? One person paid $5 to guess. Oh, Sevan is late because he had to put his shopping cart away. Oh, you know what's crazy about the whole shopping cart thing? God, I have to just always – I've just been eating my words now for day after day after day. So today I went to the supermarket, and as I'm coming out, you know that little sidewalk that runs in front of supermarkets? You know what I mean where all the carts are, and they have wood for sale and tomato plants if they're in season and a huge thing of watermelons?

Do you know what i'm talking about that area and and i'm and there's a narrow spot there between like the card centers of the world that is the supermarket right right good very good point uh as i'm as i'm walking down there with my boys in between the shopping carts and like a pillar that holds the roof up of the shopping cart and some lady who's who's probably 52 my age but moves like she's 112 puts her cart horizontally and blocks the sidewalk and walks away my son of a bitch that serves me right i'm the guy who's like professing not to put your carts away and some lady i mean just clear as day blocks my kids and i from walking down a sidewalk. This is an unplanned Salmon, but who was the

person who donated that five bucks? Nick, Wad Zombie. Nick, Nicholas. The guy who made this card right here. Ben Smith. It's for sale. This is my sixth podcast with you this week.

Wow. And the only way I've gotten through it is the Wad Zombie cards. I'm drawing power from them. Oh, that's incredible. Because I drain you or because the subjects are so taxing or both? It's a combination of things. I've tried CBD balm on my neck.

I've done the mobility practices from WAD proof prior to the show. And now I'm resorting to drawing power from the wad zombie playing cards well i like that uh i i will say this um i i'm thoroughly enjoying this week it's much easier than i um than i thought it was going to be i thought this morning show was like one of the best shows i've ever done i i it was crazy i was scared because with caleb and suza i'm gone but i've adapted. I know you hate to hear that. I actually listened to it for about 10 minutes this morning.

Did you laugh at all? No, that means you didn't. I don't know about that. Have you been following the – we have a gentleman, a caller, who's dating a woke girl, and he's not woke, and she doesn't know he's not woke. Have you been following that? No. Oh, my God. it's amazing right caleb it's incredible honestly it's like we're five shows in of getting uh reports and it's it is it is truly amazing i can't believe he's pulling

it off yeah it's crazy what's she gonna do when she finds out it's like she's dating a frog and she's gonna like but it's almost at this point yeah well he's too deep sure uh so um are you guys excited about this do you think you have a real solution is this just like a fuck you to hq is this like we're just hating on hq or hating on the games or we're here than a positive way to be like offer some uh on unrequested unsolicited yet um helpful constructive uh well i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily say unsolicited okay maybe it's not solicited by crossfit headquarters um although and yeah obviously people know what our opinions are about the current methods for these things but i think in large part because of what we've said about it the question is well what would you And in particular, I've been making this claim since before anything was announced anyway,

that I really don't think that it's right to use prior data in a forward-seeking endeavor, because the athletes wouldn't know what they're doing and the decisions that they make would not be reflective of the decisions they could make now with what they know and that's important to establish because the same thing is true for the system that we're applying our method to the athletes would not have known about the system that we're going to talk about tonight in their pursuits and attempts to open the quarterfinals this year. But this system is only reflective of performance during the two stages of the CrossFit Games season so far. The one that you're proposing.

Yeah. And Mike Albin's proposing. Did you guys come up with this together? What are its origins? So, you know, I have had many thoughts about a way to potentially do this, but on the back of many people kind of pressing me or asking me, well, what would you do? I just tried to come up with an idea, and I asked Mike to run a study, and I was pretty happy with how the initial study went. So I asked to continue it through the quarterfinals, and we did, and we never ran another study.

and we never ran another study. I think we were both pretty happy with where this landed, especially in light of what the current system is because we're really not trying to change too much. We want to keep some, especially what we're doing here. We're trying to keep and did keep some elements of what CrossFit HQ has included this year because I think there are components of it that are and can be helpful even in future iterations.

I just posted on the CrossFit Games site. This is, by the way, for whatever it's worth, this is how I know that whoever runs that account is a douche nozzle. Semifinals tests drop next week. What are you, fucking 15? I mean, this has been announced for a long time that the semifinal workouts would be available one week before the semifinals.

When's the merch dropping? When's the merch dropping? What the hell? Give me one second. Oh, shit. We have a break-in at the Brian Friend compound. One time we were doing a show with uh brian and uh the fire alarm went off which is different than when you had you have again he heard the air sirens hey um brian uh

did you someone breach uh the compound no my tv just turned on oh i don't know why it turned on we just started playing something hey alexa ch Chris Beesterfield, we got a hog shot. Fair enough. Olivia, anyone else seeing a black screen? Nope, wrong show. We don't do black face or black screen on our show. Thank you. Okay, well, I'm excited to hear about it.

Is it a complete revamp, or is it just some tweaks and twacks? There are a couple key i would say key things to understand in the onset one is that we wanted you know crossfit has communicated that the intent of this in the long run is to have a more accurate representation of the competitive landscape year to year so that if in the case that there is a year where there's a particularly strong group of athletes concentrated in one region, that they can benefit from that in terms of game spots allocated. And we want to see that too. I've been advocating for that for a long time,

as many people have. But what we see right now is that, and we've gone over this a lot, is that that's not really happening there because of how the system is set up. It's pretty difficult to have an impact on the scoring system within the year that's actually being tested. So our system eliminates everything from the past and only looks at competitive performance in the Open and the quarterfinals of this season. Okay. I can't wait to hear about it. You know this could be – remember when Tyler Watkins came on here and tried to talk to me about scoring that, and then I don't think he ever was allowed on the show ever again.

I am a little concerned for helping, but we'll see what happens. Do you want to talk about Sapphire Godard before we – Oh, just briefly. Everyone loves, wow. Her hair is God damn. Who doesn't love a redhead? This is incredible.

Go on. Well, just, you know, obviously condolences out to her. She's got, like she says, a ruptured ACL out for the season and it's going to have an impact on her

team. Her team was the third ranking team in Europe coming out of the quarter finals. And I think three, if not all four of them are good enough to make, or did even make the individual quarter finals on the, on their own merit or in at least did last year too. So anyway,

they weren't on my rankings the other day because I had kind of heard about this. It wasn't announced at that time. So we didn't bring it up on the show, but it was a tough day because two, you two teams, two of the top teams from the UK, both took big blows. Zach seemed obviously

not competing at all, and Sapphire, they do have an alternate listed. I think they're going to continue to compete with her, but it'll be a big blow losing someone as good as she is. I would like to leave Sorry, Caleb. I had to big dick you. I'd like to leave with this picture of our dear friend Sapphire.

Great picture. Yeah, what an amazing photo. Okay, fantastic. Okay, good luck, Sapphire. It was a great event, too. A lot of handstand push-ups and then a lot of sandbag cleans. What about a replacement for her? What about Christine Holta?

Well, it has to be the athlete that's listed as your alternate. And like I said, they do have an athlete listed as alternate, so they can continue, but that athlete does not have the same experience and credentials as Sapphire, which is okay. I mean, she can get an opportunity to compete. I think they're still going to compete. So, but it's just, um, we have a comment from Jeremy world. She's sneaky hot, uh, from Marco. We have a question. Is World. She's sneaky hot. From Marco, we have a question. Is she single, Brian? Is she single?

I think her boyfriend's actually on the team. We have some comment of just observation, scientific observation. Super tight body like me. Super tight body me likey. Oh, okay. Shorthand. And then Allison NYC also. I love when tight body. Me likey. Oh, okay. Shorthand. Um, and then, and then Alison NYC also,

uh, I love when the quads look like that. I'm not sure what she's talking about, but I like it when they look like that too. So, all right. Uh, back to,

uh, going back to the other, the, the developments on the other side that Brian mentioned of the other team that will not be going well, that lost a player. We had this post. Um, and I post, and I read it twice now. Maybe I should have read it three times.

But what I think it's Will Kane talking about not going to the semifinals because he's a little ambiguous, but I think he's sending out some love to Zach George in this, right? He's basically saying, hey i i know i'm reading into it wrong i mean you have to read into it isn't he saying hey buddy i'm sorry that um this happened but no hard feelings i think he's a little bit more even keel than his teammate was the other day but i think will kane says go ahead go ahead uh help him i was just gonna say i think he was a little bit more nice than Janie was.

Aren't the photos saying that I'm your friend, I got your back? Like he's hugging him here like, hey, you do you, buddy. I got you. Yeah. I think he speaks up well for his teammates here and says how disappointing it is, but still is as nice as he can be. And he doesn't link to mr george either anyway i i thought i thought it was i thought it was i think uh do you know that um molly the meatball the mma fighter yeah yeah she was she was in his comments saying something about it

so oh no shit well thank you holy you. Holy cow, Halpin. Oh, Meatball Molly, I can't imagine what y'all are going through. Nicely out there, lad. There are most definitely ways to go about things. Sending love. Wow. I mean, this is a real... I think that there's definitely

an understanding of the decision that Zach made from a personal perspective. It makes a lot of sense, as you've talked about, but there's, you know, there are ways that are more well-received to go about it than not. And it seems to be that, that at the end of the day, most people are not that impressed with the way he handled it in terms of communicating with his team. Not necessarily. I can't believe you took such a cool opportunity to make so much money for

your fan. Fair enough. Zach, I got you back oh go ahead helping i was just gonna say uh comparing the two situations there you can see there there is a concern on teams that don't set up set up actual alternates so like brian and i have been digging through a lot of these teams over the last few weeks, you can see teams where they have no alternate. And if something happens, good or bad for the athlete, in the two cases here, you can see in some cases they had an alternate. They can still keep moving.

It's a blow to the team, but they still can compete. If they don't have any alternates or there's no one else at that affiliate listed, then they're just dead in the water, unfortunately. So I think that that may be something that factors in in the future is making sure that you have somebody there that's maybe going to try for individual, but still is listed as an alternate for the team. Fair enough. Wise advice.

One final time back to Sapphire. Olivia comments, she ain't sneaky hot. She's in your face hot i agree and i would also like to propose there's this a desire to make superheroes all these different um ethnicities nationalities races skin colors i would like to propose a more redheaded superheroes maybe sapphire could play a wonder woman um you know she could and then And then Olivia closing the shallow and superficial talk about people's looks

say, I say Brian is sneaky hot. And that will be our final comment in this shallow field of judging people by their aesthetic. Anthony TPA, $5. If a team with an elite indie as the alternate and the person fails to make the games as an indie competitor,

can the team use that person if they want? Yep. I mean, why would the person do that if they're an indie competitor, right? They can only do one or the other. Yeah, that's just saying if you and I were the competitors and they were on the team at semifinals and Halpins are alternate and he's competing as an individual and misses the games.

Oh, okay. And then you're like, I don't want to go to the games. Or Halpin's better than me anyway. He could fill in. Okay. Because he was listed as the alternate. Barry McOchner, no. I am not going to read this.

Go to your room. Okay. Just on that, Tia is an alternate for Proven as well as Saxon Pantschuk for Proven. Or at least they were during the Open. Okay. It's possible. Did you see the picture of Dave and Adrian together in Nashville yesterday? I did.

Muy interesante. Okay. We would expect that they'd be doing something together after what's happened this week so i do i do uh it's just interesting i wonder if dave i wonder if dave went out there specifically to see him it seems oh shit yes yes yes yes oh my god ladies and gentlemen this is what the world is about the bad things you know why bad things happen so that good things can happen

listen this is those of you who are married are going to understand this conversation very clearly my wife lost her phone earlier today. That's why I was four minutes late to the show. I was on the phone with Brian doing a little prep. Hello, you've been... Oh, fuck that.

Anyway, she found her phone. Guess where it was? In her pocket? In the fucking car. But it's good news. It's good news. I'm cool. I'm cool.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen uh i present you brian friend michael halpin with what we call the solution a solution not the final solution okay i'm just chilling good drink coffee the rest of this episode i'm so happy all right um so if you if you do want to follow along, the full articles on Be Friendly Fitness and we're just going to kind of walk through it. I'll kind of. When was the article published, Brian? I think last night. Did you tell me it was published? No. God damn it. How the fuck am I supposed to prepare for these shows if you don't tell me? You're trying to sabotage my show because you work with the other guys now.

I'm even wearing their shirt tonight. I know you're a to sabotage my show because you work with the other guys now i'm even wearing their shirt tonight i know you're a good dude i love you okay uh this actually is a great shirt this is their tour short shirt from the season that that never was oh really talking only fitness made like a tour short the year on the back there's like 25 uh 28 however many sanctionals there were and only like 12 of them happened And then there's just 16 listed that never happened, which is, it's actually kind of sad, but it's a cool shirt. Okay. Have him send me one. Have him send me one.

There's some stuff that we're going to do on the show tonight, Sevan, that I didn't want you to get distracted by. So yes, you're coming in a little blind on purpose. Okay, great. Should be fun for some people. Okay. So anyway, my idea was basically to,

that each stage of the season should be a vetting or a screening for the next stage of the season. So that there should be things that are tested in the open that are specifically meant to eliminate people who can't do things that are showing up in the quarterfinals. Same thing with the quarterfinals into the semifinals, the semifinals to the game. So there should be a progression to the season. So if we just looked at this year's open and we see that there are a decent density of ring muscle-ups at the end of a workout, and we're talking about for an open

field, a decent density of muscle-ups, you would expect that a ring muscle-up is going to be a prerequisite for something that's coming down the road and that if you can't do any of those you probably shouldn't be advancing to the next stage of the competition same thing with the strict handstand push-up same thing with the um that the thruster okay why are we testing a one rep max thruster are we doing it just to do it or is it a precursor for something that's coming next, like 15 clean and jerks at 275 pounds or a workout that opens with nine front squats from the floor at 225? And I know, especially in the women's field, that there are people, and we've talked about this,

that had no main ring muscle-ups, no strict handstand push-ups, and a thruster weight that was pretty low that were still able to make it through. So I felt like, you know, given the difficulty of some of the quarterfinals tests, the filtering process wasn't necessarily up to par. So I just ran the study. I said, Mike, what if we evaluated the people who participated in the Open, not the ones that signed up, but the ones who participated? And we said in order to advance from the open to the quarterfinals, you have to be in the top 15% of all of the scored tests independently.

And only that group of athletes would be able to advance. And then I let him do his thing. Let me contextualize that for a second. What is the situation now? It's the top what percent? 10 percent. It's the top 10 percent now. Of registrants, not participants, and we are choosing to only look at participants because we're trying to evaluate the competitive performance against the competitive field. So theirs is a top 10% of all the registrants and not based on individual performances but based on their final placement.

Right, yes. And theirs is by region. Ours is by world. Okay. And why – what made you think that this was a valuable distinction? distinction. I understand the participant and registration piece, but, but why individual events so that someone wouldn't someone maybe who did great in four of the workouts, but couldn't do ring muscle ups and the other don't doesn't move ahead. Like you were explaining in the beginning, potentially. I mean, it's, we've seen this basically play out at further stages in the competition, right? The 2014 is probably the best example of this. Sam Briggs was the defending champion. She was amazing at just about everything.

There was one thing she couldn't do, and she was not able to advance in the season. And I think that this model is basically accounting for that because it also puts some responsibility on the programmer. What are you testing in each of these tests? And it could be something as simple as capacity, core stamina, a grip test. There's many different things that a test can break down to. But whatever you're testing, there should be a reason for it. And you should have kind of an expectation that the athletes have a minimum threshold.

The athletes that will be advancing have a minimum threshold within that context, knowing that there's going to be an elevated challenge coming in the next stage of the competition. And you would do every year that way? Every year would be that way? Potentially. So, you know, the thing that I acknowledged when I was being critical of this is I think that for this year, you should have started from ground zero. And I've already said why. But I don't think that you necessarily could not implement a structure that does capture a little bit more data over time i just think that i would want to be involved with some other people to have a conversation about that um this is a simple study that i can do that's just for this year

yeah and brian says it well on the article is that you you give the athletes an ability to say here's the line in the sand. Everything after this matters. And you're going to actually try during the Open. You're going to try during quarterfinals where we see athletes today, they'll do the quarterfinals workout and then they'll just go back to what they were doing for the day. They'll do all five workouts in 24 hours and they won't really try too hard at any of them. In this case, it's raising the level to say you have to be within this 15% across all five tests to qualify to the next stage. So the only thing, sorry, I should think of a gentler way to word this, but the only thing that it solves, well, it creates one thing. It creates a more competitive atmosphere. But the only thing that it solves is it makes it so people who have major holes don't move forward. It actually doesn't address the issue.

That's not the only thing that it solves, but it is an issue that becomes true in this system, yes. Yes. It doesn't solve this issue. When I think of the worldwide rankings, the big thing that I think about in the strength of field number is the fact that you can't get the points that matter unless you go to the games. Hold on to that thought until you see how this plays out. Okay.

This is not actually addressing worldwide ranking. It is addressing strength of field and the game spot allocation. Oh, okay. Actually, in some some ways it does away with worldwide ranking which is better somewhat in the system that's currently there it's kind of irrelevant anyway you know you you could say oh this is the number one ranked player in the world the person in the world based on the whatever random point system that we have but it doesn't actually matter in the in the in the way the of the season, there's nothing that you get for being first.

You get the exact same thing for being a hundred, but you get nothing if you're a hundred and first. Right. And so what you'll see here, how performance ends up dictating some of that stuff down the line and worldwide ranking kind of falls to the wayside. Uh, one quick comment, uh, Manny Spiegel, I find myself yearning to hear about calvin heimberg and eagle mcmahon tonight wait till i send you the you you know i got one of those dudes on the hook he says he's game he's coming on i know you didn't laugh at my response i oh i meant to i

meant to it was good i i just can't tell you how proud a lot going on tonight i mean you've been you've been trying hard. I did see that text, and I kind of got really excited. I mean, it's just one of those things. Like, if you just break through with one person, you never know what can happen. Yeah, he'll tell someone else, right? And he's a pretty forward-facing person. You know, like 30,000 to 50,000 people watch his YouTube every week.

So if he's like, oh, this week I was on this podcast, whatever, whatever. Bam. Okay, Manny manny sorry not tonight i appreciate the the yearning in your loins okay i'm ready for the uh i'm ready for more tell me more about this this program what what are the implications what is it we're just going to get straight to it so if you open up that article and you go to the open the subset of the open. I don't know if Cornholio is joking or not. I hope Brian has himself covered when this gets plagiarized. And I would guess that Brian hopes it gets plagiarized. That is the last thing he's concerned about, right? Brian, you hope they take this right and run with it

yeah okay yeah that'd be great so we did um we ran the study and then we'll just go to the women and i'll and we'll just show you what um what happened here so this is the minimum work that ended up being required to get into the 15 percent threshold for women and it turns out you actually even in this study you did not have to have a ring muscle-up you just had to get into the 15% threshold for women. And it turns out you actually, even in this study, you did not have to have a ring muscle-up. You just had to get to the ring muscle-ups by a certain time distinction, which is fine. I thought about making, I just wanted to run the study out. So we'll just show you what it is. And then I'll tell you why I just kind of allowed that, allowed that to be for now. Does everyone understand this who's watching it? I just want to make sure you understand it those are the workouts from this year's 2023 open and so for 23.1 to to actually qualify for the quarterfinals you would have needed 30 cleans

by the 11 minute 34 mark so what brian did is he and brian and mike halpin did is they figured out what the top 15% was and then made that demarcation. Everyone else got basically by the 30 cleans, they got 85% of people got worse than 1134. I'm understanding this correctly, right? Yes. The only thing you're misrepresenting is that I did any of the work on the back end. I did. Okay. Sorry. Uh, any time I say Brian's name, just insert how, how basically I would say, help, and can you do this? And he would say, yeah, I can do that. And then he would do it.

But they wouldn't just need the 30 cleans by 11.34. They also needed a minimum of five rounds plus two burpee pull-ups. They also needed a minimum thruster of 147, and they needed a minimum of eight strict handstand push-ups. And then from there, they make it to the quarterfinals. If they didn't meet any of those, then they would not be eligible to advance. Okay. I love it. And if you scroll down, you can see exactly how many people advanced from each part of the world. And, um, uh, was this total number, how many people actually went to the quarterfinals, um, with their current system?

It's more like 10, 10,000 or so. In this system, it's 105,000? Well, you can look. That's the total number that started, and 10% of that went. So that would be 10,591. Oh, okay, okay. In our system, you can see the starting number of participants, not registrants.

In fact, there were more registrants, so that number was actually higher than 10,000 in their model. But either way, you see the number of starting athletes, the number in each region who qualified, the percentage of athletes that qualified from that region. And that in total on the women's side, 4,108 women were in the top 15% on all four of the open tests. And therefore would be the, those would be the athletes eligible to participate in quarterfinals, nobody else. And if i were to judge the continents i would think that um south america would have the most steroids and asia would have the least therefore they're the outliers just saying i'm just saying it's like if i were to be a judgmental asshole i mean it's like you

know it's pretty it basically settles on four percent everywhere there's some high and some low but that's the mean, right. Which was, which was kind of cool. I thought that was kind of a neat thing because, and we'll get to this towards the end, but obviously there's a perception that there's certain parts of the world that are predominantly stronger than others. And this is obviously, there's a huge number of people difference between 1260, but relative to the number of taking the test, it was pretty similar. Meaning that there are still, you know, the same number of athletes around the world in each region are, we're good enough at this point to advance on a percentage scale. Hey, uh, Halpin, this is already amazing.

This is, I love this. And you're catching, you're, you're keeping up. So it's, yeah, thank you. This is, what are the implications that we only get half as many? I I'm dying to ask the big question, right? Did any names get cut off? But I'll hold off. We're going to get to that at the end.

I didn't want to show you early because I knew the whole time they're obsessing. Yeah. OK, so so what are the implications? Implications are the most superficial sense. It's 5000 less registered 6000, which is $50 per person. So CrossFit HQ makes $300,000 less money. They have the opportunity to make that much less money, but you know, there's a big percentage of quarterfinal qualifiers that don't sign up anyway. Okay. Oh, it would be, you know, it would be a,

there's certain aspects of this that we wouldn't know until it played itself out. But if 50% of the people who make quarterfinals are signing up for it, but 90% of the people that qualify in this method are signing up for it, that's a notable difference. Now, if it's 50-50 either way, then it's, you know, there's, I would say, then we go back to the drawing board because that's not really what we're looking for. I want to try to establish a model where the people that are making it to the next round want to be in the next round. And half the people that are making it right now don't because they're not signing up let me ask you this um how many people did register for the quarterfinals do we know that number we have it somewhere is it more than 4 000

it is yeah it is okay all right uh i'm loving this this. This is great. So what I'm looking at here is 105,000. Why do I – 105,000 women signed up for the open individual. Participated in it. Participated. Did all four tests. Okay. I like this. Wow, this is some crazy shit. Good stuff, dudes.

Okay, let's check the men. We'll just show you so we can see some. Let me do one more let me let me do one more thing let me do one more thing off subject go back to the women again sorry go back to uh any any surprises here in these numbers in terms of um uh participants anything that like knocked your sock off or isn't related necessarily to the scoring but you're like i'm gonna make a note of that i mean it's it's an it's again it's one of these things and we're gonna get to this later on anyway but to me it was notable the distribution of registrants, or participants in this case, from NA East to NA West to Europe, because those three are being treated relatively similar.

And we've talked about this a couple of times recently with regards to the age groups, but there's basically 30% less people signing up in NA West compared to the other two. So that was something that kind of jumped off the page to me. The same number of percentages or percentage-wise, the same number is advancing, but the people starting the season were a little bit different. And it's just, I thought it was just something to make note of. Right. Okay. I like it. Okay. Thank you. Are you liking this, Caleb? This is cool, right?

And in terms of the minor continents, that numbers actually look nice because Oceania is the only one that currently has three spots and they have the most people participating. Asia and South America get the same number of spots and they're relatively close and Africa gets the least spots and they have the least. So like it makes sense from that. But that's to be expected because those spots were previously distributed based on open registration. OK. Hey, what about how much does it cost to register for the open for the quarterfinals? because those spots were previously distributed based on open registration. Okay. Hey, what about how much does it cost to register for the quarterfinals? $50. Let's raise it to $100.

There we go, Jeremy, taken care of. Raise it to $100. Well, other conversations to be had about that. Let's take a look at the men so these would be the minimum requirements for the men in the same model instead of having not to do any ring muscle-ups you have to be able to do at least eight you have to do 16 more burpee pull-ups in the sixth round wait a second are you suggesting that someone went to the quarterfinals with zero ring muscle-ups yes that. And zero strict handstand push-ups and a laughable thruster weight

relative to what's expected from a weightlifting perspective in the next round. Wow. So again, for the men, you would need to meet this number or more in each workout, eight ring muscle-ups, five rounds plus 18 burpee pull-ups, thruster 228 pounds,

and then in the last workout, complete 20 strict handstand push-ups plus the double unders. We are at the 33-minute mark. I have to take a one-minute commercial break in honor of Dave Castro taking over the training department at CrossFitting. Congratulations, Dave. You don't even have to want to do CrossFit. You don't have to want to be a coach. You don't have to want to be a coach you don't have to want to be a trainer if you just want the operating manual to your body

it's not just forging elite fitness it's the operating manual to the human genome you'll take this CrossFit level one seminar and you will walk away inspired from the second you leave your entire life will change you will make significant changes to your life because you are excited. You will start tweaking with your diet. You'll start tweaking with your movement. You'll start tweaking with who you hang out with. Everything will take a shift. For some people, it'll be massive. For some people, it'll be a little bit. No matter what, you'll move towards a better life. Everyone is going to sense in you that you are more accountable, more personally responsible, happier, more helpful,

more thoughtful human beings. And you'll be nicer to look at. You might talk too much shit about CrossFit, but... I hear a lawnmower in the background okay did you wash your hair before that one no i've never washed my hair i haven't washed my hair since this looks so nice 94 you got it blown out yeah i was gonna say that i had the i had the gardener put the blower on it okay i'm I'm digging this. Okay, are we going to get into this about who shit the bed, like who had zero and who had the worst? Oh, good.

This is going to be great. That's towards the end. Okay, awesome. So those are the minimums required. If you scroll down, you can see the number of athletes by region that were able to advance. There were more men that participated, nearly 161,000. Almost 7,000 of them would have qualified.

And again, if you look on the percentage side of things, it was more like 4.5% average with South America being the highest outlier again. And this time, I guess Africa by a small margin would be the lowest outlier. Anything weird, discrepancy between the men and the women? Well, yes and no. Again, I want you to see the number of North America West compared to North America East, but especially compared to Europe. Europe had 57,000 men participate. North America

East had about 41,000. North America West had about 30,000. But Europe's with, you know, it's still not on par when you add those together. But that region is showing to be a lot of people signing up, similar number of people advancing. And we're going to talk more about them later on. Hey, what about the fact that you carried two digits past the decimal for the men and not the women, is that just more care? You like men more and deserve? Got to look out for my own. Okay. I don't know.

Okay. I understand. You don't want to be accused of too much attention for the women. That could get weird. Quality. I like that. Bias towards men too for protection in this Me Too era. That's very smart of you.

Okay. So that gets us through the open. Now we have 4,100 women, 6,900 men that are eligible to advance to the next round. Obviously, we have to see who signs up and then who participates of those people that sign up. And I was, I was okay with this, these numbers. I had, I thought, so the one reason that I didn't go back and say, well, let's just bump the ring muscle ups for women to at least one, because, uh, we're already only at 4,100 advancing. And I think that that's fine. This model will eliminate a lot of people who don't have a ring muscle-up anyway because they will be below standard on either the handstand push-up

or the thruster weight, which also both require a press-out at the top. I love it. It's good. Sean M. weighs in. women are lucky to even get one digit fair enough fair enough so we're gonna so then at this point i said okay mike i'm pretty happy with this yeah let's wait for the quarterfinals to finish and let's just try the same thing and see what happens so i so he goes okay we'll apply 15 as a threshold for each scored event in the quarterfinals and there were five of those let me ask you this sorry let me go before we do that is there a movement that's um biased towards men or towards women like when i think of muscle ups

i think is that unfair to the towards the women because more women would have zero than men because of just the the whatever the whatever the, well, yeah, the nature of what men are capable of and what women are capable of, or like maybe women are better at handstand walks or, or is that irrelevant? Mostly irrelevant because they're not competing against each other, but in, but in a programmer's mind, it should be relevant because when you're programming a workout, you, you have a certain idea in mind and you might say, I'm going to put eight legless rope climbs here and that's going to get the stimulus that I want. But if eight legless rope climbs is not going to get the stimulus you want for the women, even though it might for the men,

then it might be prudent to lower the number. So you can still achieve the same desirable outcome. Okay. And like you said, you're, they're not competing against each other. So if, if women are worse at, uh, ring muscle ups or men are worse at handstand walk, um, it wouldn't matter. Yeah. And I mean, Dave is a master of this principle. Think back to, I think it was 2010 or 11 when they did the ring handstand pushups for the men and the ring pushups for the women. Okay. Because he didn't just want to see people standing there trying to kick up and whatever and wasting 10 minutes doing nothing. It's not very entertaining. And there have been programmers who've made this mistake, who've programmed too high of a density of something that just stops

like a majority of the individuals or a team in its tracks. And then you don't get to see kind of the spectacle and everything that you came to watch. And that might be a good segue here, because in the next section, based on how they did it, just how they did it this year, the next section based on how they did it just how they did it this year there are thousands of athletes on both the men and the women that are left just standing there at a 275 bar or they're left standing there doing zero handstand push-ups okay it's crazy to me that someone can't do any handstand push-ups who can make who can do so well and everything else it's crazy to me that someone can't do any handstand pushups who can make, who can do so well and everything else. It's bizarre to me. Yeah. And so keep in mind that the, the concept here is that every stage should screen for the next round and that

if you're testing something, there should be a reason. And if you're not good enough at it, that should be a reason to preclude you from advancing to the next round. Right. So quarterfinals, we applied the same study, 15%. I had no idea how this would turn out. I just said, run the test. Let's see what happens. If we don't like it, we might maybe we'll try something else. But we did like it. And so we stuck with it. And so this is also just a 15 percent threshold in every quarterfinal test as a prerequisite to be eligible, not to qualify for, to be eligible for the semifinal stage of the season. Oh, you put on several views since we started the show.

So let's go. I would guess this is not the most optimal time of the week for a show Friday night Cinco de Mayo, but whatever, we're doing it. Is that what today is? Yeah. I had a few drinks earlier so oh awesome police navidad michael i didn't realize you were mexican so let's go down and take a look at the women you're going to see the same thing here there's going to be a minimum work for each

of the workouts and remember you'd have you would have had to hit the minimum on all five of these things so for the first mike just in case you asked what the tests are, you may want to pull them up in case you don't have them in front of you. But minimum work on the first one would be 85 reps and an 11-minute tie break. I'm just going to read through them, and then if you want to ask, you can. In the second one, you would have had to have done five rounds plus eight dumbbell snatches. Workout three, you would have had to finish in 9.18 or faster. Workout four, you would have had to do two

full rounds plus 160 meters on the row. And in workout five, you would have had to finish in nine minutes, one second, or faster. If you didn't meet any one of those, you would not be eligible for the semifinal stage of competition. I love it. Cornholio, the Nopin had

four women in the top 11. That's good. That's a testament to his programming, I think, right? Yeah, he was a very, I did speak with him a few times about the workouts prior to the release of them. And he was very intent on making sure that the test was appealing to hopefully a big variety of people taking it. And in particular, you know, he tried to make sure that stimulus like we just talked about would be the same for the men as the women. Yeah, that's awesome. Are the results out for that?

Seems like it. Oh, all right. I think it's done. 85 reps on the first workout would be having five handstand pushups left at the tie break time. I can't even remember what the workouts are, but thank you. handstand pushups left at the tiebreak time. I can't even remember what the workouts are, but thank you. It ended with the wall-facing

21 handstand pushups. Yeah, 21 wall-facing handstand pushups. And I'm lying when I say I can't remember them because that would imply that I actually knew them at some point. So anyway, you can look at what the workouts are. Those are the minimums required. And if we go further down from here, again,

we can see the number of athletes in each competitive region that were able to do that. So in this case, and then the percentage we'll talk about in a second. But in this case, North America West, 58 women were able to meet the minimums. Europe, 75. North America East, 79. South America, 12. Asia, 4. Africa, 1. And Oceania 25.

Nick Schroeder, friend seems a little aggressive tonight. Not at all. He's also like a kitten tonight. You're misreading him. But thank you for the assessment from the stands. Brian, what about the don't we need in Mike, don't we need 300? Oh, yeah. So this is the idea. You only need that number because it's a number that you've been told that you need.

But as a kind of a metric that we have been familiar with, 254 is not that far off, considering that we had no idea where this would end up when we start. So it was kind of cool how close this was. Okay, I got a good one. You're telling me, just so you know, I am going to Africa for their semifinal. And I got my first class ticket on Qatar Airlines. And I'm headed over there with Taylor. By the way, Taylor, I'll be in first class if you want to come up and get like a cloth napkin

or real silverware. And you're telling me that when I get there, there's only going to be one athlete competing? We'll get to that. We'll get to that. We account for that. In my final, it's just going to be one. I can't wait to see who that is.

You're going to tell me who that is by the end of the show? It's not the one. It's not the one that you'd think. Taylor may not be going if it was this case. Oh, my goodness. Halpin, you're breaking my heart. But we are going to see who that is, that one. Yeah, we'll show you.

In Oceana where I'm going to see if Maddie Sturt and Ellie and the gang are in there. Mm-hmm. You'll get to see. Oh, this is good. Holy shit. This is scary. Yeah.

So once again, we see also with the percentages. Does Sidney Wells go? Does Sidney Wells go? Does Sydney Wells go? We'll get to that. Oh, no. Anyway, just 254 women would be eligible to advance. And we'll just kind of pause right there. We'll look at the men, and then we'll explain kind of our thought from there.

No one from the eastern portion of Canada makes it, huh? Just to be clear, because there might be confusion, because in other cases there's minimums. In that case, that one athlete from Africa qualified. That is not like giving a minimum. And the same for Asia. We didn't give any minimums on this. They could have gotten zero, but they got one.

And there were some people, you know, we posted on Instagram this morning, and there were some people that have read through the article that have given some thoughtful questions and responses. And that and that's kind of what I, what I landed on and trying to communicate with them is this is purely performance-based. So this is objective. We ran the tests. We know that the athletes didn't know that this test study would be applied to them and we're acknowledging that, but based on, I just wanted to see what would happen. Is it possible to do a, to do a, to do it to do us to apply a system like this to only online competitions that we know are not run perfectly and end up in a place

where we have this field of semi-finalists that is actually capable of taking the test and is competitive against each other to compete for spots at the games crazy and so we're almost watching u watching UFC do you watch UFC right Halp from time to time not every one of them sorry Brian I got distracted by a thought in between my in here if you thought I

was watching it on TV right now no I was wondering if you're gonna watch tomorrow night but tomorrow night that's how much I know okay this is exciting Brian I can't wait I'm so curious how you're gonna solve this problem and now I got all, Brian. I can't wait. I'm so curious how you're going to solve this problem. And now I got all sorts of questions. I can't wait to the next slide. Let's move on. Okay. So I got some questions. Men, same metrics applied. They would have needed to do the first workout in 11 minutes,

53 seconds or faster. And the second workout, five rounds plus seven dumbbell snatches or more workout three finishing 919 or less, which was kind of cool because it was within one second of the minimum work requirement for women. Number four, two rounds plus 540 meters on the rower and workout five, seven minutes, 10 seconds or faster, which was dramatically different relative to the women because like we talked about earlier the workout ended with nine legless rope climbs and that that a minute and um 50 seconds difference is basically all because of the legless rope climbs a couple a couple things here um brian i hope i interrupted at the right

time when you're taking a pause daniel garrity what if the people stop competing after each workout once they find out they're outside the top 15%, it will narrow the field. So you're saying that if you realize in workout one, you were outside of the top 15% that you wouldn't even bother doing workout two. Is that what he's saying? I mean, yeah, I think that's the scenario that he's potentially presenting. And I would just say that I don't, I think that with the group, like the hope would be here that with the group of athletes that it is advancing, that they're taking this test for more reasons than just one. And there are some other ideas that I have about the way that these particular tests in this model, open quarterfinals, would then have show relevance for competitions outside the season

that would encourage them to want to place as well as they could anyway. But that's a much bigger picture topic. And this is, you know, this is not a perfect solution. This is a solution that's just, that is just demonstrating a way that it could be done only using data from this season. And I was like, like I always say, there are things I don't know about what happens in the conversations of the CrossFit games team at headquarters, et cetera.

But I do think that there are elements of this that could contribute to some solutions that would meet their objective more closely, which is to actually assess the competitive landscape of the field this year. Can we go back up and look at the women one more time? This is off subject, but are you shocked by the fact that north america east has more than europe by itself no we'll get to that in that we'll get to that later on we're specifically going to talk about europe and this perception with you're not you're not shocked you're not shocked by that past no okay okay no one should be shocked by anything right now this isn't a you know just we're learning as we go and we're learning some things that we didn't know because the models that are in place previously don't allow us to to come to the same conclusions okay hey just so you know my my thoughts about the crossfit games uh staff is that they don't even have the bandwidth to

absorb this information. And that basically that by three days from now, there'll be 10,000 people who see this video who know more about CrossFit Games performances in the mathematical sense than 99% of the staff at CrossFit HQ. That's my assessment, and that's

not a dig. I'm just telling you, that's how good I think this is, what you and Halpin have done. And the limited bandwidth they have to digest this. I think it's very limited, unless they're watching it right now. Well, they could also watch it anytime they want after the fact. Right, right, right. They could be right. That's fair enough.

I hope they do. This is great. This is fucking amazing. Okay, here we go. Let's go. So here are the number of men by competitive region that would have met those minimum thresholds. North America West, 45. Europe, 109.

So the men, isn't that ass backwards than our conventional wisdom? That the fucking women are better in Europe and the men are better in the Americas, and your thing is fucking it all up. Well, this is exactly why it's important to do a study like this. You're jumping the gun. Do you want me to just jump to the end already? No, no, no, no, no. I don't know.

Sorry, sorry. But I wish my wife – tell my wife that. Can you do math? I wish my wife would say that to me. Just take it to the – do you want me just to jump to the end? Yes, please. Simon, what's 45 plus 77? 45 plus 77 is 110 plus – 119, I think.

Did anyone else get a different number? 112, 112. There we go. 112. So in totality, between North America, West, and East, which have 45 and 77, there's 112 men, and Europe has 109. Right. There's basically a wash.

Yeah. We're going to keep in mind, in the current model and all of the previous models, Europe gets half the qualifiers to the games as North America in total, but they have the same number more or less within three that are advancing to this stage of the competition. Meaning they have the same number who've been good enough at the tests that were given by the programmer that should serve as prerequisites to the next

round. Continuing down, South America 21, Asia 6, Africa 4, Oceania 24. 286 total. I apologize. It's not 112. Okay.

122. Sorry. 122. Sorry. 122. Thank you. Oh, there you go. Oh, shit. Look at all you guys fucking piling Sorry. Oh, 122. Sorry. 122. Thank you. Oh, there you go. Oh, shit. Look at all you guys fucking piling in. Okay, fine. Barclay.

286 total athletes in the male side would be eligible for the next round. 254 in the women. And again, we ran these without knowing where we would end up. And both of us were like, damn, that's pretty close to 300. where we would end up. And I, both of us were like, damn, that's pretty close to 300, but those 300 are selected in a way that doesn't reward performance. It just is a number of spots that was arbitrarily selected. Who decided 30 was the number or 60 was a number.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay. Okay. Okay. I see what you're saying. Certainly wasn't, isn't based on performance because so the 30 it's not that the people weren't picked based on performance it's that the number and the test wasn't okay we got to the number 300 based on an arbitrary distribution we're getting to 286 based on the performance of the athletes against themselves and the best rising to the top okay and by the way i'm i canceled my trip to the top. Okay. And by the way, I'm,

I canceled my trip to Africa, but now I'm going, cause I see that the men are going to compete. I'll go just for the men. Originally I was going just for the women, but I guess I'll go for the men. Just keep saying, hold with the travel agent for a minute.

Okay. You might want to redirect. Sorry. Uh, standby. Standby. So, and in this Asia where they have a 50% more 50 more athletes oh no it's they're coming together

so so one other thing to call out is is with that today 60 men from europe and 30 men from asia and 30 men from africa all go to a semi-final but in this, this shows that 105 more men in Europe than Africa did as well as those four in Africa. So with that, it's showing that there's a substantially tilted scale here for getting the right people to the next stage. What do you mean by that, substantially tilted? the next stage what do you mean by that substantially tilted well in this case if you only took 60 people from europe which we'll get to there's there's what 49 basically saying there's there's 50 more athletes from europe competing in the semi-finals currently than africa okay in this model out of 113 between africa and europe it's like 96% of them are European. Right.

And 4%. So instead of getting a 66-33 distribution, this would be dramatically different. And we'll see that. Any other questions about where we're at right now? No, this is good. So 254 and 268 are eligible. And those numbers are going to continue to be important.

There's two things we wanted to sing this year. One is it's not logistically feasible to run a semifinal with 109 European men. Now, you could potentially talk about, well, then they should earn two, which is fine to say. And that's potentially something we just chose kind of not to do that. We decided that because we were trying to change as little as possible. We're going to cap any semifinal at 60, which is a number that they have previously selected, meaning that it seems like it's logistically possible to run a semifinal with that number of athletes. I do think that there are, in the way that we're going to make some modifications for

Asia and Africa, that there are some minimums that you could impose. You could say if a competitive region has at least 100, they'll be split in half and we'll have two are some minimums that you could impose. You could say if a competitive region has at least 100, they'll be split in half and we'll have two. You could possibly make a caveat for that. What about going the other way, just take 60? That's what we did here. Does that piss you off? Would that piss you off?

No. Because it's using a system and then kind of neglecting the results. Yes and no. Because of this next part. OK, so as you see that we're trying to change as little from the current system as possible. So we still want to, like, have some representation from that system because there's not it's not entirely flawed. OK, game spots distribution is where those numbers will become relevant. So basically, you know, we have heard Dave Eubanks talk about the fact that they tested it with 50 athletes. They tested with 100, 200, 300. They ran these different tests and they kind of thought 100 was the sweet spot. But what we decided to do was we'll run it with the number that proved

that they were good enough to be there, even if they're not all going to be there. So we're going to use 286 and 254, and we're going to do the DeHaan distribution method for game spots based on that. And can you remind me what the DeHaan was, or is it simple? What was the DeHaan again? remind me what the de haunt was or is it is it simple what was the de haunt again it's a method of allocating spots by the the number they have for each well in the crossfit version of it the number they have in total in whatever grouping that we have so in this case it's two of 56 crossfits is out of the top 100 and it says f na east has 30 they at the is out of the top 100, and it says if NA East has 30, at the first round of the DeHaan method, they get 30 votes,

and then if they win, it splits it in half. There's a whole bunch of math involved. I don't want to bore you. But it's a method of voting. Some countries actually use it for their parliament, things like that. So. things like that so so oh wad zombie um this is uh i feel like i'm no you're not too dumb for this conversation it's actually uh really easy um but uh give it a second we'll at the we'll start at the top and

run through the whole thing like in 90 seconds when we're done once we get through all this it's it's it's super cool it's tight so africa and asia obviously jumped out wait wait stand by uh rosie i'm currently taking a shower gotta shave these cactus this cactus wow yeah okay i love it like it people someone's listening to us in the shower okay who. Who made that sound? Who made that? Who did that? I did. I was trying to find something, but I found it now. Okay. So African Asia, obviously there were not a lot of qualifiers and it seems like you said, it's silly to have a competition with one person competing in it. So we just said that you need to have a minimum, like a minimum number to warrant having your own semifinal.

And in this case, because Asia and Africa did not, but we still want to have some element of global representation. And all of these athletes have proven to be good enough to take the next test. We're going to combine them. take the next test. We're going to combine them. So in this case, there'll be 10 total men from Africa and Asia and five total women from Africa and Asia competing for a minimum of one game spot. We're going to show you what the games distribution ends up looking like for men and women now. So you can actually see how many in each region would be going to the games in this model. the games in this model oh based on that the haunt distribution using the 286 and the 254 okay we didn't strip it down to 100 we've already vetted the field through two rounds of testing we know the 286 and the 254 that were good enough at the test that the programmer gave

to be prepared for the next round of tests so we're going to use those numbers to distribute the game spots because that is the competitive distribution of athletes in the field this year. On the far right, there's a semi-final spot. If I went to North America, if I went to Pasadena, I would see 58 competitors.

We're capping it at 60. They only had 58 that make it, so they don't get an extra two. Those two weren't good enough, so they just get all 58. In Europe, they had 58 it make it so they don't get an extra two those two weren't good enough so they just get all 58 in europe they had more than 60 so some that were good enough still don't get to compete and what about northeast okay if you combine south america and asia into a semi-final that means an african won't be going right or south america might not go or south america might not go is that a? Are we trying to get some national? We still want to be like somewhat respectful of travel. Like if you're sending everyone from Asia and Africa to South America, that's a massive ask.

If you're sending everyone from South America to the Middle East, that's a massive ask. Well, I mean, Asia and Africa are massive anyway. We ask, you know, most of the South American or the African athletes are South American, but basically we just have a central location. We are suggesting the UAE. There's plenty of other options. Egypt has really has plenty of good competitions that they host and is a fairly central location. But the idea is, and I'm sorry, but I don't have any interest in watching the 30 women in Africa that are going to be taking the semifinal test this year. Twenty five of them at least have no business taking the test because their performances in the previous stages did not show the capacity that's going to be required.

If we if we look at what the quarterfinals was and project to what the semifinals could be based on that, there's going to be tons of athletes in that field that are just going to be standing around doing nothing at some points. They won't have the skill. They won't have the strength or they won't have the capacity to take those tests. At least they shouldn't because the tests should be progressing. But what about like the whole communal part of it or letting each country get at least some representation to encourage growth or participation? How about all that stuff? All that fancy stuff? We see that here. We see that here. You have to have a minimum number to even host a semifinal. And then from the, based on the minimum number, if you, you know,

once you meet that with South, South America did and Africa, Asia combined. There's a good chance. No one would ever go from Africa again. All the, all that has to happen is the one person from Africa has to beat the four people from Asia who proved to be good to be also good enough at this test. That's a 20% chance. Okay. Then someone from Asia might not ever go again.

This year's competitive landscape has no bearing on next year's in this hypothetical model. So they just need to get better. Okay. That's another reason why you would take the quarterfinal test so that you can look back and you can say okay where are the things that kept me up you have a really tangible answer to that question yeah our version of this de haunt method does not align with like what brian spin has talked about with africa or um with some of the things where it looks back two years and you sort of have to like thread the needle to ever get somebody out of, out of some of these continents. In this case, the 286 or whatever the number is, they all go into that same bucket and then their votes come out to say where some of these go. So

if, if all of a sudden 20 people from Africa or 20 people from Asia can land in the top 15% of the world, they would get more spots at the games through this method. Oh, that's awesome. So that Africa and Asia, that five is five men and five women. No, this is the women. Just women. Okay. And so if we look here, it's not that far off of what's actually happening. In our model, nine women from North America West would qualify. In CrossFit, they get 10.

In Europe, our model shows 12. Their model shows 11. Our model shows 12 for North America East, and theirs shows 11. So the two strongest regions, North America East and Europe, would each get one extra spot. North America West would get one less. And then you would see as you go down to the other continents, Africa. Which is probably the way it should be. We all know that.

Africa and Asia have three in the current model. In this model, they only get one. And their other two spots are basically going to Europe and North America. And then Oceania gets an extra one. They go from three to four in this model. And their strength of the field of their women is rewarded there. That's the spot that comes from North America West, and South America remains at two.

Unchanged. I like it. I would be more interested in watching the five women from Africa and Asia that were good enough to get there. Now I'm going to learn who those athletes are. I'm going to know who to be watching because there's only five of them. It should be competitive. They all will feel like they have a chance there. And the same thing in South America, 12 women competing for two spots.

I'm interested in that. 30 women competing for two spots. I'm only interested in the last seed anyway. Jeremy Garcia, if you don't want to lose 13-0 to us in women's soccer, then get better. So I Googled that, and I guess in 2019 the USA women to lose 13-0 to us in women's soccer, then get better. So I Googled that, and I guess in 2019, the USA women beat Thailand 13-0. A little bit of sports. I've lost a game or two like that.

Do you have? Yeah, I remember one year we thought we had a really good team. We went somewhere else, traveled for a tournament, and we lost games like 5-0, 7-0, 9-0. You were the coach? No, I was on the team playing. I was a kid. You weren't the goalie, were you?

No, thank God. That'd be rough. Should we look at the men? Is this the men? No. That's women. There you go. There it is.

We're getting there. Yeah, this is what you want. Did you see something? Yeah. What do you see? I see Africa and Asia. I see Oceania. A little higher.

North America West, six. So the major. Europe. Oh, 15. There you go. The men again. European men kicking ass. I thought they shit the bed i thought bjorkman carl goodmanson was their only only quality athlete well there's a difference between having athletes that are competitive very top of the sport and there's

an athletes that are that are a region that shows a lot of depth to its competitive field and so we one thing that we've been deprived of over the years is understanding truly how deep the competitive field is in Europe, because for a long time they were only getting five spots, and all five of those athletes were placing in the top half of the field on a regular basis. But we never knew how 6, 7, and 8 would do in any given year because they weren't going there. And in the meantime, we had a bunch of, this is specifically in the women's field, a bunch of women from North America that were finishing pretty low. And I was contending that we got 20 women or more from North America and only five from Europe. And the five from Europe are beating 20 of those women from North America, whatever it is.

Why don't we have a few more in Europe? But that was back then. And the landscape is constantly changing, which is why I think that it's dangerous to have a model that builds on the past. So in this current model of this current season, North America West has only 45 people at semifinals and only gets six spots to the games. That's three less than they have in the system right now with nine. North America East gets 10 spots instead of 12. Most of those spots are going to Europe.

North America lost one and two. That's three of them. And they're going to Europe, which had 11 and now gets 15. So three of those four are coming from North America. That's huge. Yeah. South America goes from two to three which is a a bump up of one asia and africa did have three in this model they get two combined and oceania once again

gains a spot and goes from three to four showing that the men the men even without uh the likes of well ricky probably did factor into this set because he was good enough to make it. Jamie Latimer, did Jocko go woke? Yes, he pushes sugar, water, and protein drinks in a can probably. But he's butt buddies with Andy Stumpf. Okay. Him and Stumpf are butt buddies. So, of course, hereg for because he doesn't

know shit and he'll believe anything i don't actually know if jocko hates greg but um and i listen to the podcast and dave i thought dave fucking killed it uh he called jocko and david goggins pop seals i like that part yeah if that if that doesn't get you excited uh go listen to it it makes you there's a difference uh i can't't wait to have Dave on and ask him about the difference between the seals. And there is a difference. Well, I think there is from the integrity and – they're just the people. But anyway, I enjoyed that podcast. I thought Dave murdered it.

And he was very respectful of Jocko, and I actually came away liking Jocko more than normal, but yeah. Jocko, it's inappropriate to fucking mention Glassman's name without first saying how many people's lives did he change, how many people's lives did he save, how many millions of days did he add to people's lives here on planet Earth. You know that for a fact so before you start speculating dumb shit at least fucking say that now do jaco i don't i didn't get the impression that jaco didn't um it doesn't like greg from listening to that um the worst thing he said about greg is that you know he he speaks the truth to a fault maybe i think that's what he said. But it's crazy not to recognize. Dude, someone on every single continent by the thousands, except for Antarctica, has had days added to their life or knows someone that saved their life.

Matt Fraser himself said that it's probably saved his dad's life, the diet component. And one of his friends lost 100 pounds. Matt was a full-blown hater when he went on rogan these people are fucking don't fucking think straight they need i hope their karma does not catch up with them okay sorry i i bring it back i'll reel it in jamie that's your fault i blame you i'll play the victim there got it for your own for your own learning i actually want you to read the next section okay great here we. Here we go. I have the – the European misperception. Well, if I do have a misperception, it's Brian's fault.

For those who have been following my work for years, you may recall that on multiple occasions I've suggested that there is no group in the world being slighted more than the women in Europe. Yep, that's my takeaway from being your student for years. in Europe. That's my takeaway from being your student for years. And that was in fact true at the time, which was every moment prior to right now, 7.16 p.m. on May 5th, 2023, Cinco de Mayo. However, unlike the current worldwide rankings and strength of field system that CrossFit is using, our system does not account for what used to be. Rather, it accounts for what actually is now. And in the current competitive landscape, we see that it is, in fact, the European men, not the European women, who are not being adequately represented this season. Based on their performance this season, they've earned 15 game spots, one less than North American men. Wow. Let me read that again. Based on their performance this season,

the European men have earned 15 game spots using this brilliant method that Mike Halpin and Brian friend are presenting today. That's cool. Yeah, I'm digging it, dude. And the last part is your 90 second synopsis. Oh,

okay. We believe this model is the true representation of the strength of field for this year's group of competitive athletes competing in the CrossFit Games. Season. Season. They were vetted through the Open and performed in the top 15% of all tests against all worldwide participants. Okay, so that's the first thing, the distinction. Remember, the current method uses registrants. This method that Halpin and Brian have devised uses participants, meaning

you have to do all the workouts. You can't just pay the money. So that makes sense. There's no question there. And then you have to finish in the top 15% of every workout to even be considered to move on to the next stage from open to quarterfinals. So that makes sense. So you may be first place in three of the workouts, but you shit the bed in another one and you don't move on. And we've already talked about what the implications of that and the reasoning of that and that makes sense you don't want someone going to the quarterfinals who's just taking a spot who doesn't have muscle-ups right um and then maybe you might get someone from the adaptive class who's in a wheelchair who can't do the running sneaking in and taking a space from an able-bodied

person god forbid we let that happen uh they were vetted through the quarterfinals and performed in the top 15% of all tests against all worldwide participants who previously had proven themselves in the Open and chose to participate in the quarterfinals. So the quarterfinals just worked the exact same way as the Open, right? Taking that top 15% of every workout.

That's the distinction. Once we established the group who, based on performance, are qualified to tackle the next stage of the test semifinals we use them to distribute games qualifying spots that was what we just talked about there where uh after you do that you see using the de haunt method still using the games method you are actually using the most up-to-date data to allocate spots most up-to-date and precise um uh with the caveat that you can't have a massive hole somewhere and uh and and you end up with what we saw right away

is is that european men are better than we thought um luca luca welcome to the 2023 crossfit games luca jukic i want to read these last two. Hey, that fucks Colton, right? It doesn't. No, it doesn't. That's not the way to think about anything. Okay. Okay, good. All right.

Sorry. All right. I'm so negative. This is a performance-based model. Well, we will. It's getting almost to the time we're going to show you who made it and who didn't. All right. Look at Caleb's all excited.

We believe this will yield semifinal fields that are composed of athletes who are actually capable of taking the test and ultimately get a games field that will be both a global representation of athletes. Well, I'm not buying that yet. And an accurate, this part's true, an accurate depiction of where the best athletes this season are coming from. I think that that's some woke shit right there, boys. You can't prove that and ultimately a game field that will be both a global. Everyone could come from Rhode Island the way you're doing your shit.

No. Okay. They can't. All right. Look at Halvin's like, well, let me see what that would require. It would be the population of Rhode Island, I think, would be the problem. All right. This is good. Okay, are you ready for the fun?

Yeah, this is cool. Is it in your article? I'm scrolling down not to see. We didn't, we didn't, because that's what everyone... Oh, shit, you're afraid you're going to hurt someone's feelings? Don't, don't hurt them. No, I'm afraid that people will get caught up in the names and miss the system okay are you

gonna publish the names next week somewhere you should they're gonna we're gonna show them right here so if you want to know them you got to come to the real stuff on friendly fitness yeah seven on podcast only place to find it a clip at 114 we're gonna rip this clip right off of there and put it on the website as you told me i could though this is good yeah rip away and do you want me to crop caleb out right now men or women no he has to show you this he's he's been sitting on this information all day there he goes okay come back come back men or women seven oh here we go women oh the. I know who she is. Okay, these are the qualifiers. These are the ones who were good enough to participate in semifinals. There are your four athletes from Asia and your one athlete from Africa

that in this model would be competing against each other for one spot to the CrossFit Games. Sahar Kaya is – I thought she's Turkish. How did she get African? She lives in Norway. She's from Turkey, which is is in Asia and therefore she can compete in Asian who's the African one

Emma Rader or Gemma Rader oh wow okay and we will get to and most people are probably expecting either Christina Levalitakis or Michelle Bazinet we'll get to at least one of those in a minute. I was hoping Michelle Bazinette.

And just for the numbers folks here, what you're seeing there to the right is their percentages on every one of the workouts. So in Gamma's case, Emma's case, on workout two, that was her highest. She was at the 11th percentile, you could call it. But well within the range, whereas you see the one Russian woman, Alina Alexandrova, had two data points that were 13.7 and 13.96%. So she was flirting with the cut line on two of the four, five tests. Oh, I see what those are. Okay. Okay.

Any one of those numbers is over 15%, you're out. So everyone on this list will all be under. The only question is how much under. Which the article doesn't touch on this, but this tries to represent then a live competition. You only get one shot, or even in an online competition, you get 24 hours. But if you shit the bed on the first workout, yeah, you're pretty much done.

Like we're going to see it at semifinals. There's 60 people in a field. If you don't do well on the first day and you're placing 40th or 50th, you're going to have a hard time climbing back out of it. But in this case, it's just online. They have to get all the all of it in there. You only get one shot. If you do worse than 15%, you're not going to make it now the thing is you don't know what 15 is until they go through all of the process and show it on the other side

so you got to just put your best foot forward sahar kai killed workout number two huh yeah what place is she taking oh yeah really top 100 yeah crazy okay Really? Top 100? Yeah. Crazy. Okay. South America would get 12 women. We'll see who they are here. This is to go to the games. No, this is to go to semifinals. This is to go to semifinals. Okay, okay.

Zoom out a little. Kind of no surprise there, right? Those are the girls, right? Yeah, these are, I mean. Campos, Cato. There was one other girl I recognized at the top there. Nevis. Nevis, yeah. And then the women that are on my radar as kind of sleep

depicts us here. Actually, we picked them. I think we picked her last year. Luisa Marquez, Amanda Fusomo, Andrea Pinheiro. They're all here. Connie Cabrera. Yeah. Oh, and you got their worldwide rankings. It lines up perfectly. That worldwide ranking is CrossFit's worldwide ranking? No, that's their ranking using this model. Oh, and you got their worldwide rankings. It lines up perfectly. That worldwide ranking is CrossFit's worldwide ranking? No, that's their ranking using this model across all 200 and whatever it is.

254. Yeah, and then the region one is just ranking those athletes for that region. So Sasha's number one and so on. Yeah. But Sasha is 51st across all of the 200. Yeah, and if you go back to the left, you can see that in the case of Asia and Africa, there's also a couple of women that are in the top 100, right?

Dawan and Sahar. You see where Emma Rader came in 225 out of 254, obviously. And then the woman from Russia was the second to last person in. Sorry. Take 120 seconds. Jocko thinks CrossFit is awesome now because I think he's doing business with them via his energy drink, 100%. The entire podcast was actually really good until you got to the end, and basically Jocko betrays himself

because you walk away asking one question. What took him so long to get a dev group guy on who's probably one of the most famous SEALs in the world who didn't fucking use his SEALdom become famous he did something fucking else and uh his contribution to fucking humanity health fitness is remarkable but for some reason he has all these other fucking ding-dongs on his show and now all of a sudden he has dave on like i said who is a dev group guy it's fucking asinine he betrayed himself he should have there's a cut he should i just think he should have shown's a cut he should i just think

he should have shown a little humility he should have been honest and like you know i thought you were a dick before or something he should have came clean because it is fucking weird that we're 16 years into this fucking thing of dave working there and he finally makes it on that podcast like why because doc jocko's pushing his um a can that's lined with plastics that are fucking horrible for you and that shit to CrossFitters, which, by the way, I haven't tasted and I'm sure I'd enjoy. And Jocko, you're always welcome to come on my podcast. Thank you. No hard feelings. What about this? Let's go. Let's go. Let's touch on Semper Fidel's emotions because I got a little

bit of this woke tart in me too. Why do regions have to be – oh, no, no. He's the opposite of me. He's saying why do regions have to be represented? There's potentially fitter people in the American bottom 45 than Africa top two. I feel like I can answer that. I want to hear you guys answer. I think regions should be represented.

There's – I think a majority of people do think that. I think that there's also people like me that don't think that they need to be unnecessarily overrepresented. And like I said, this is a performance-based model. We see that there are still women and men in the world that were good enough to advance to this stage of the competition, meaning that they're good enough to take the semifinal test. They have the prerequisite skills. And of course, this is assuming that the programming is building on itself, which seems like I can't really understand why I wouldn't. And these are the athletes that I want to take the test, the ones that are good enough to take it. You're going to see at every semifinal that there's going to be, you know, this, this group of athletes that's, that's struggling or unable to do something.

Okay. We're getting close. This is getting good. Oh, Shiana. There's my girl. God, I think we're going to get her on the show soon. Holy shit. She's that good, huh? She's the number one seed. Caitlin Van Zeel. Did I pronounce it right? I don't think so, but close. 16th in the world. But number one in Oceania. Yeah, it's awesome.

Wow. Oh, no. Oh, no. What? Sturt's 10? Did you check your math, Halpin? Well, look at her numbers. Look at her numbers.

Look at number two. 1%, 3%, 2%, 0.2%, 4%, 14%. look look at her numbers look at her numbers look at number two what one percent three percent two percent point two percent four percent fourteen percent so there was one thing that she was clearly bad at do you know what that test was is a crossovers single under oh so that's not a fitness thing that's a skill thing okay on the fitness tests if you could do the crosshairs singles it's just a capacity test basically for these athletes but outside of that her numbers would probably be compared you know that would be up there in the top five at least okay she's the same woman that

you showed a video of with jay crouch shirtless in the background hey hey double unders how dare you help and i know exactly who fucking maddie sturt is you fucking uh i'm just saying she did crossover double unders just watch your mouth maddie sturt's my girl people are gonna think she's not i'm looking for it right now i'm on her instagram here it is trying to fucking one-up me helping i was trying to call for the video it's a good video get distracted by jake roush in the background just start with of course you and i love how you highlight herself on right here we go. Sorry, Kayla. Okay, so she's basically saying fuck you to workout number two.

She's been practicing. Okay. You see Abraham Lincoln just sitting there in the background. Just a statue. Yeah. Okay. Hey, and she looks a little crowded in the pecs too. Like we saw, what's his name was doing

um taylor right there's another word for that but yeah for what is it oh okay breasts breasts whatever breast pecs crowded in the chest is that just is that the exact something looks different about the way she's doing oh oh, this isn't that show. Okay. Anyway, awesome. This is great. Okay. Maddie Sturt. I like that.

You gave me hope. Thank you for letting me – I would love it if her and Jay went. Wouldn't that be dope? We can keep going across if you want. Here we go again, you son of a bitch. This guy just doesn't want everyone to go. He wants the best he just wants the best again why should jemma who's ranked 225 but gets to go to the games but americans with rank 150 does not it's not fair okay it's a valid question and there is as we mentioned there is potential potentially another solution which would

be to create an additional semi-final so you could say that if you're over 60, then we split them in half. So in the case of Europe, since they had 75 women, we would say, okay, well, 40 or 37 are going to go here. 38 are going to go there and they're going to have two semifinals, but that's changing a little. We were trying to keep things relatively tight to the current system that's in place in terms of number of semifinals, because another, you know, there are tons of other elements that we can't necessarily address here,

but the viability or financially of sustaining a semifinal is something that has to be considered. And, you know, for CrossFit, it's something that would have to be considered. So he's not wrong. I totally get where he's coming from. But again, I would, I would just like think, think this is just an experiment this is just a way to see is it possible to only use the data from this year to land at a competitive semi-final field and have a better perspective on what the competitive landscape actually is before saying uh these are the spots that are going to be allocated to the games and and uh so danny spiegel from North America West is number one. The great Lauren Fisher, who I have no doubt.

Not number one. She's number eight. Oh, good. Making me feel better. Okay, let's go back. Ah, here we go. Wow. Ariel Lowen, no surprise. At the top. Maybe a surprise that she's third in the world, though. Wow. Alex Gazan

coming in hot this year. Rebecca Fuselier. Incredibly impressive, yep. Kelly Baker. You don't believe her. Yeah, I mean, I want to believe in her. God, I hope I can get on the bandwagon. Emily Rolfe.

Christine Kolenbrander. Do I know who Emily Rolfe is? Who is that? Remember she got the blood clot in her hands when she biked to work about one of the games last year oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah of course i know who that is okay great okay yeah yeah i apologize uh emily rolf yeah she's going to the games for there's tons of things i could have said about her but i had a feeling that would be the one to trigger your memory thank you there are two things about her that uh stand out and that's definitely one of them uh christine colin brander uh from uh uh jared

graybiel's event um zealous games actually christine's uh she's looking really good in a lot of the videos i've seen she means she looks i'm excited to see her at semifinals uh miss kerstetter uh the child that is uh good enough to compete at the game is bizarre uh uh super impressive danny spiegel number eight number nine lauren fisher uh former crossfit games athlete uh hanging on the level how many did we say would go from this region nine or ten ten for the women um quarterfinals that's still the games all all 58 of these would go to semifinals but i'm just saying like i'm just guessing if yeah okay oh no that means freya moose bruger might not Well, this is a good idea.

We'll get to shows where we're going to have to make predictions about who's going to get in and out. But in this model here, coming into the semifinals, outside the KEL line are Bailey Rail, two-times games athlete the last two years, Freya Moosebrugger, games athlete from last year, Sydney McElishan, games athlete from last year. Obviously, the semifinal things can change, but it does give a decent idea that that

West semifinal is not quite as easy as you may have thought. Bruce Wayne, why did they put Danny on the West Flyer and not Lowen? Come on. Come on, Brucie. Come on, Brucie. You know why. 1.8 million reasons of ass shots.

Sidney McEllishan, Allison Scuds. Katrin David's daughter. Trista Smith, another kid. Kelly Clark. What the fuck? Did you check your math on that, buddy? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Okay, let's look at that. What's up with her nine-point... Oh, wait, what workout was that, number four? This has devolved into an athlete show instead of a ranking show. This is why we showed this last. That was the rowing and GHD workout. V-ups.

V-ups. Oh, okay, okay. That's another call-out for people watching at home. This also includes all penalties. So if an athlete got a penalty, they took a 15% bump on their score here. Anyway, we can go to look at the last two regions if you want to. This is Europe in yellow. And all the way at the top, you're going to have Laura,

Gabby, Manon, Emma, etc. Annie Thor is at her sixth there. Sarah Sigma is at her ninth. They get 12 spots in this model. Keep scrolling down. There was someone down there that I was surprised that I saw down there. I thought Dahlstrom. That's

Emma McQuaid. Emma Mccquade did the semifinals i think she was quite sick when she did it but even even so you see that big big number on workout two most likely a result of a penalty okay and then we and at 26 we have our red-headed Wonder Woman, who's actually going team. There are some team athletes in here as well. This is just all the athletes that made it. They were the ones that chose to participate in the quarterfinals this year, whether they were going to do team or not. They did the individual quarterfinals.

What is Jamie referencing here? Who are the two who did not make the cut in West on your model? What did she catch there that I didn't catch? There's 58. That's not exactly how it works. Oh, but I see what she's saying. Okay, clever.

The 58 that made it in this model are not necessarily also all in the model that are competing at quarterfinals. Is there anyone that you're like, holy shit, they didn't make it? Yeah, we can skip to that in a little bit. If you want to show the last one. I it yeah we'll show you that in a little bit okay if you want to show the last one i think it has the number one athlete i know yeah okay wow isn't it isn't it amazing i bet you um uh what's his name what's the i bet you madaris is number one too mal o'brien number one emma carrie number two no surprise brookwell is number three

annika greer number four wow that's, that's a shocker, right? Slipping in there. Emma Lawson. Danielle Brandon. No surprise here. The women look pretty solid. Keep scrolling down. There's your girl, Sydney Wells.

There she is. All right. That a girl. Tori Dyson. Carolyn Prevo. Miss Spencer. And so just so you can see seven. Rory and Scott, there she is, the viral miracle.

Go ahead, Brian. Sorry. If we go down to 60, you can see what this guy has been referring to, is that we just put a line there, and we acknowledge there are other ways it could have been handled. But in this model, if you keep scrolling down, you'll see that 61 through whatever it ended up being, 79, would not get invited, and for Europe, 61 through 75 would not get invited.

Well, they might via a backfill or something like that, but there would be a cut for those regions that had a density of athletes, but they would still contribute to the overall distribution of game spots. What about Stephanie Chung? Being that she's a Noble athlete, doesn't she automatically move up 30 spots for DEI reasons or something, like all the Noble athletes get a special score? Didn't see that memo.

Okay. How can I work that in? Okay. Let's look at the men real quick. Yeah. Or real slowly, whatever you want. Yeah, this is good. Those are the six men from Asia that would have qualified.

Say that top guy's name, please. Sung Jong Kim. Sung Jong Kim. Andrei Fedotov, Artur Semenov, Kang Kyung-sun, Ruslan Miftakov, and Mevlut Aguirre. Kang Kyung-sun? Kang Kyung-sun. That is amazing. Yakov and Mevlut Aguirre. Kong Kingson? Kingson? Kong Kingson. That is amazing.

Might be Kang. Kang Beaver. Kang Beaver. Kang Beaver. Kang Beaver. Strong. Strong. And then for Africa, Keelan Henry, Darren Zunimer, Michael Van Tonder, and Kalem Diebel.

And so these four from Africa, those six from Asia, would compete against each other for two spots at the Games. There are two Games athletes from last year in this group, Arthur Seminoff and Keelan Henry. But obviously there's a chance that two from Africa make it or that two from Asia make it and none from Africa make it. In this model, all of these athletes have earned the right to be there based on their performance, proven they're good enough at every test

that Adrian Bosman has given them to line up and take the techs to the next stage. And I think it would be fun to watch these 10 guys go against each other. Me too. I do too. Caleb, definitely not Shelly Beaver. No Shelly? Okay. No. Harry.

Too close to Smelly. No Shelly. Yeah, thank you. No Shelly. Too close to Smelly Beaver. Thank you. We'll check on Oceania. Or no, South America is green. No surprise? Basically, all the guys that you would expect here,

they get 21, and they would be or what did we say? The men would be competing for three spots. Do you have a chart that shows the overall world rankings? Your new world rankings? Look at this. This shows it.

What I mean is like you have a top. Oh, because that's interesting. Guy doesn't even make the I mean, he doesn't even make the game. Look again, look at the percentages there. And that 5.8 is probably a crossover single under skill omission thing. And you have the core V-up work at the capacity test, which you probably would expect to be his worst, and it was.

But he's in the top tenth of a percentile on two of the five tests. What's wrong with Halpin? He got a new tattoo, and it's too much red. He had too much red ink. Too much red ink. What did I do? Okay. Beautiful. I'm digging this.

Ready for it. Oh, she in, yeah? Obviously, Ricky would not be there, but this is how he did on that performance. Jay Crouch, Will Kearney, Jake Douglas, a lot of the guys you'd expect. They end up getting 24 total athletes. They would would all be invited and they would be competing for four spots instead of three spots crazy i'd also another interesting thing happen would be like to see the region's average of their rankings you know what i mean so to add up all those rankings

divided by the number of guys and see which, like, give them a… Has the lowest average. A strength quotient. Yeah, yeah. Okay, this is good. North America. There he is. There's my boy.

45. Wow, the champ is a savage. Look at his percentages. Holy shit. I mean, Vellners are not that much worse. I agree. They got one and two in North America West. This is nuts.

Look at Cole Griesheber, eight. Wow. I might go to, wow, look at Tetlo, 29. Good job, dude. You'd make me so happy if you came to Pasadena. Yeah? Yeah, I'll be there. I haven't seen you in years.

Seymour Beaver. That was my suggestion. I think it's S-E-Y. Yeah, you can't spell it like that. But I ain't hating. I just want you to know. Oh, Saver Beaver. Wow. Jay Hartle. Not bad.

This is great, man. Pasadena is, wow, look at that. You're telling me Luis Oscar is going to be in Pasadena? In this model, they only get six spots. No, nine spots. Nine spots. In this model, they only get six.

In the actual model, they get nine. So look at the – No, no, no, no. In the actual model, they get ten. And in yours, when you went – Oh, you're talking – The women got nine. Oh, the men really get fucked.

Wow. Wow. No, They don't. There's no one getting fucked. This is a reflection of their competitive performance this year. Oh, that's what I mean. This is so fair. Unfortunately. This is incredibly fair.

Wow. And, hey, you know what's crazy about that too? This is how they do get fucked. They got the fucking – they got fewer spots because they got ass people, but then they got the two best guys in the fucking world in there who are just going to take the spots wow this is great and and i think again that's an excellent that's an excellent thing to understand and i'm not confusing anything no and this thing that you're talking about about doing the the average the lowest like the average

of each semifinals ranking whatever isn't is something that I would entertain introducing at this point. Because as we know, the strength of the field is not only limited to size. That's what we're rewarding here. But in essence, that's what CrossFit's model is rewarding. Also only in a more limiting way, I would say, or a less accurate way. I think whatever division the champ is in should just get a free extra spot. That's what they used to do because they got

a free ticket. Anyway, I do think there is a way to adjust for strength, like the strength of the field counting for the top portion. We didn't explore that here, but I do think that it would be a relevant conversation if we were ever able to be a part of that conversation

going forward. How are ticket sales for North Met? I haven't seen that data released. I think, at least in the East, all of the reserve seats are bought, but they still have

admission. I'm really, really hoping that it's just these amazing environments. I want to see full stands. I want to see fans on their feet. I want to see the environments that we used to see at regionals everywhere. The regionals I used to go to were fucking madhouses.

I'm really, really hopeful that that comes back this year. If you're considering going, do it. They're going to be competitive. They're going to be fun. There's a lot of, there's talented athletes everywhere. Um, uh, a huge compliment for the podcast here. I'm more confused than a nine-year-old boy transitioning. So I'll just, I'll tell you what we're looking at here.

So basically, and that's fair. Cause I was confused too. Um, basically what you're looking at is that worldwide ranking. There's the worldwide wide ranking based on this new system, the help and friend system. The numbers here is where basically Justin finished relative to all the people who did the quarterfinals. So in this workout here, Justin was in the top two tenths of 1% of workout number three in the

quarterfinals. And what you have to be is you have to be in the top 15 so scroll down a little bit i'll show you someone um scroll down until you see like a 14 in one of the columns god north america west is tough see sam there 14th in the region i'm just looking at the numbers okay so just look here really quick at us go ahead and stop there was i saw it on the left. Look at Daniel Cook. Okay, number 28. Perfect. He got a 10.65%.

If Daniel would have gotten a 15% there, he wouldn't be invited to the semifinals. You have to finish in the top 15% in the quarterfinals. And this shows that he was – so you could also subtract that and figure out he was actually in the 90 percentile but if you fall below the 85 percentile you're fucked same with Maximilian Krieg oh yeah here Taylor Sturgis very close to not making it Greg Gross

Greg Gross holy shit Gross Beaver don't use that one either write that one write that one down as a no go oh gross and uh yeah and gross yeah okay we want to read through the rest i think i think the next the next section is the one that you want to see is who didn't make it so yeah we'll give some

accolades to the top qualifiers. I'm going to take a quick little... I'll be back in 30 seconds. You guys take a look at these guys. Look at Lazar Djokic. I don't know shit about Victor Hoffer except you guys talk about him a lot. These are great numbers too. Look at Fabian Benito.

He's killing it. He's continuing his trend from this year of basically dominating online qualifiers. He was top qualifier for Dubai, top qualifier for Waterpalooza, and top qualifier in this model out of all the men in Europe. This is the basically like the biggest revelation from this study is that the European men have a tremendous depth of field. And so we can kind of look at the top here, knowing that they would have earned 15 spots. We see a lot of familiar names, but obviously also some new names here. Victor Hoffer the young man from france harry lightfoot

incredible season so far in the first two stages uh niela kai who made a big name for him in the offseason reggie fossa who generally does well online and we're waiting to see that breakthrough in a live competition and then a bunch of games athletes from last year. Moritz, Jona, Enrico, Uldis, Hapalainen coming in at 14th. Luka Djukic in 18th from two years ago. So, Jorgos Karevis, two-times games athlete, 20th. Guillaume Briand, games from last year, 22nd. So, lots and lots of talent in Europe, 15 spots to compete for. Lastly, we have the North America East.

You may be surprised here with the guy who ended up on top for North America East. Third in the world, Dallin Pepper, Sam Cornway, who everyone's excited to see back this year. Jeff Adler, Noah Olsen, Spencer Panczyk,

et cetera. Listen, I, I, I worked out right before and I, then I had two pints of water and I'm drinking a pint of coffee. I mean, what do you expect?

I mean, I'm a pint of coffee. Yeah. I mean, I put a shot of espresso into a road cup. Dear Bill and Katie. Yeah, this is good. This is great stuff. Hey, what about using this in any other –

Oh, Dallin, look at you. North America East. Are there any other systems events? Is this something Waterpalooza could pick up? a worldwide ranking conversation. Again, this is kind of a narrow study. We know that there are limitations to it, but we wanted to run it to see if it was possible. And basically, I think that it worked out really well as a starting point for a system

that could be a more accurate representation of who is actually competing and competing well in the year that we're testing for. Look at Jack Farlow up in the mix. Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. There's going to be some names. Does any part of you think that maybe it's flawed when you see that? Or is it like, wow, no, no, no.

And it happens. What does Tyler Watkins think about this? Has he seen this? What's he think? Don't know. I don't think he has. All right. I'd be curious to hear his opinion on it.

Can we scroll down a little bit? I want to see this. Man, North America East looks tough. Will Mora, James Sprague, Tyler Christofal. Holy crap. Marquand Jones. Roman being nearly 20 is interesting. Pete Mason, Nate Ackerman.

Look at Griffin Raleigh. Hey, is he competing? Luke Parker. He's going individual? Mm-hmm. Benito. Benoit. Benoit Boulanger.

Oh. There used to be a... Very excited to see him. He's a member number two pupil of Carolyn Lambry. Oh, what's this guy's name? Selvon. Oh. Selvon.

Juice Beaver. I don't know about Juice. Hunter Beaver is good. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Chrissy. Holy shit.

That and her spellings on point. Wow. Wow. Wild Beaver. Okay. You want to see the not qualifiers? Oh, yeah. This is going to be good.

There you go. These aren't all of them. These are just examples. Kaiki Cervini, a friend of Daniel Cook's. Willie Georges. Wow. And so what you're seeing there in the red is they had to be in the top 85%. Top 15%. Yeah, top 15%. And so what you're seeing there in the red is they had to be in the top 85% and –

Top 15%. Yeah, top 15%. They had to be 85% or better. It's just weird to see it this way. But, wow, Alex Vigneault really shit the bed on workout one. It's interesting that it's all workout one, right? Well, it's broken out into each. You're going to see them all.

Yeah, you'll see them all. But those are the athletes that failed because of workout one. Oh okay but again what what is the limiter there we know this from the programming show last night it's a strict handstand push-up and those guys didn't have that skill so in my opinion this is no different than sandberg's not making the game because of a handstand walk or catch and davidson are not making it because of a rope climb is that it's just at a different stage this is at the the quarterfinals. Adrian has increased the, that's a pretty good one actually. Adrian has increased the standard in terms of skills required. And I think that that should be reflective in the vetting, their screening process to the next round, because we can assume

that there's going to be something. If you can't do a wall-facing strict handstand push-up, you're going to be faced with something more challenging in terms of upper body pressing test at the next stage. Hey, this is – Caleb, this is what I'm talking about, all kidding aside. That dude's fucking parents, Riley Good, they knew. Like they didn't waste the name. They knew their last name was good so they're like all right we're gonna put really we're gonna name our kid really but without really putting in really

i mean that shit is tight that's brilliant okay oh long hair long hair that's like if you're native american uh you could get away with that long hair beaver i knew a guy his name was benjamin e fishel and so. His name is Benny Fishel. Wow. That's solid. Yeah, that's solid. Oh, wow. Wow.

Bruce Wayne taking it to the next little Robin Beaver. That's a great name if you have a son. It's got layers to it. Yeah. Wow. Holy shit. Okay. Let's see.

Workout 3. Alexander. That's your guy, Mr. Weak. Who? The guy from Spain. Alexander Onagasaki? No, I didn't have that guy. You know him.

I do? I thought it was... No, I know Anuel. This is Buddy. You know this guy. You definitely know this guy. Okay. This guy runs Training Culture. Oh, okay. Wow. He was on their team last year. And he's just on the edge.

Look at that. Spencer Ray. William Leahy. Well, that's that. He took that big penalty for all the mishaps that he had on his rowing GHGV up workout. And, again, that's what happens here. And that will, we think, encourage athletes to not toe the line. So, because in this current model with, you know,

a pre-adjourned number of people, it's not based exclusively on performance and you get these, sometimes you get these penalties that are whatever relative to, I mean, they're arbitrary penalties basically. And here he's punished for it. He doesn't get to advance in the season because he failed to move well and follow the rules that were written. Which semifinal is he going to in real life? West. Hancock is an English surname.

It is derived from a given name a variant of johan combined with the hypochoristic suffix cock which came into fashion in the 13th century from coxio k to coxio ck applied to a young lad oh okay it is that wow it is a it was a suffix applied to a man a young man who strutted proudly like a cock. So that is it. Hancock. That is the origins of the name. Darcy Hancock. This is, yeah, interesting. Okay. So be it.

Hancock Beaver. Want to see the women? Yeah. Let's do it. This is good. These are women who are going to semifinals but would not under this system. For the most part, yeah.

Okay. I don't know who any of these people are. Margie Bleeker is one of the best in the Netherlands. Mars, the best in Mars, from Mars. Now, in the test two there, you see Christina live at Itakis. She was the top qualifier from Africa to the semifinals. Oh, okay. Didn't make it in this model.

Crossover again? Crossover again. So she doesn't have the skills. And we know that Adrian values the skills. And so I think that's valid. He's put a test for it. If you don't have that skill, then go back to the drawing board because you're going to need a better skill at the next stage.

That's a very good guess. Robin Friend and Robin Beaver. Is Mike Halpin Trish? Trish does have a weird sense of humor like Halpin. That's very possible. It's also clever. They're both clever. I do see the correlations. That's clever it's also clever they're both clever i'm i do see the correlations that's what i meant clever the first time i was on was the time trish said a doocy for the first time so

that's not even how you say that word did you hear that how he said it did you hear how he just i'm not allowed to say the word but my mom won won't let me, but you said it wrong, but I appreciate it. You can say it like that. But do see. Nirvana. That damn Nirvana. On the wrong syllable. Any stones unturned, Savan? Any questions for the data wizard behind this process?

Congratulations. This is fantastic. I think I will have more as I process it more. great wizard behind this process congratulations this is uh this is fantastic i'm sure i think i will have more as i process it more um but but i really like this it's it's uh it's good so you know like we said it's not perfect it was a one we took one stab at it we were pretty happy with it so we ran with it and i think it's it's an idea and it's a demonstration that it's possible to assess the season within the season that's being tested. I think that it elevates the performance of the athletes.

I think that it elevates the responsibility of the programmer. I think that there's in each stage of the competition at one, it feels like there's something that you're actually like trying to meet a benchmark for instead of just kind of doing it to check a box. And if you don't make it, you can look back very tangibly and see why not, you know, and it's like, okay, well, what was the thing that prevented me? Cause on every other test I was well within the range and you have a more

focused study. It might be not be, it could be a specific skill like a single crossover, single under a ring muscle up, but it could also be, you could could see maybe if you do make it that it's like okay i was in the top two percent on these three things but on these two things 12 and 13 it was still good enough but clearly these are the areas that i should be working in because relative to my peers i'm falling behind mike albin as we went through this did you see anything that concerned you you're like oh i missed that the first time going through. This needs to be tweaked.

I don't mean in terms of actual data errors or anything. I mean in terms of like, oh, this doesn't actually work as well as I thought now that I've seen it presented, or shit, this is better than I thought. Anything that stood out to you as you went over it? As you said, this is your first crack at it. Brian and I have tossed this around a little bit. You start to see that it could potentially help other things. Like for example, we did this before a lot of the penalty stuff really kicked off where they were talking about how many people that do they review

and what does the review process look like? How many videos do they have to watch in this model? If somebody does 30% on a workout, you don't have to watch the rest of their workouts. They're just out. So it immediately cuts out athletes where you just don't even have to concern yourself with them anymore. They could win a workout. And if they did 30% or something on another workout, you don't even have to worry about it. So it starts to resolve some other things. It's not perfect.

There's places that have been called out either in Instagram or here tonight that start to say, well, how exactly would this or that work or what would it look like here? But it at least asks the question or opens up the conversation to say, why wouldn't you want to push for the best execution all the way through? Because the thing I hear about the most is we should go back to more live competitions. Well, I don't see that exactly happening as I think about this more or look at the season more. But in this case, it really nails like you have to be perfect. You have to have

stats that look like Mal and Justin and say they never went above like half a percent. And if you have athletes that are all looking at that and going, I'm going to nail all of this from top to bottom, you can then look at programming that says, well, what if all of these athletes are monsters and they can go to semif says what if all of these athletes are monsters and they can go to semi-finals and then all of those athletes can then qualify through that model to the games what does it do to raise the level even higher when you get to the games and it's the best of the best of the best across the world uh brian uh same question you did you see anything just now when you're looking at

that one question that someone did come up with how been they said um uh and brian they said hey what if someone falls below 15 percent um and they don't move on i guess the answer is who cares we already got their money right i mean who cares like that it's a sam briggs example it doesn't matter if it's the open or the quarterfinals or the semifinals that, you know, if you don't have the skills or the strength or the capacity for the for any phase of the test as you're qualifying through the season. And I mean, we looked at the athletes who didn't make it. And, yeah, there's, you know, Alex Vigneault will have a chance to make the games. But that's I mean, but, you know, he clearly has a hole in his game.

But that's, I mean, but he, you know, he clearly has a hole in his game. And if this comp and if the season is truly progressive, then we can expect to see some version of a handstand pushup, either at the semifinals or the games, that's going to continue to expose the flaw in his game. Hey, with that, with this method, I think does come some responsibility on the programmers. That's significant. And I think that they've done it well already but you can't you don't want to introduce something that's just completely off

the wall new and not give people time to prepare for it right and that's that's actually the problem with the worldwide ranking that's out there now they're looking two years back when brent fukowski didn't give a flip about the open and would just sort of say all workouts and saying that open now matters or that semifinal or quarterfinals from 2021 matters all of a sudden in our case, we're just looking at, you just did these workouts, but Brian calls it out in the article. We do say the same thing. We say, Hey, the programmers weren't aware of this 15%. The athletes weren't aware of this 15%. The athletes weren't

aware of this 15%. But if you told them today, in nine to 12 months, you're going to have to do this again. And you're going to need to nail all these workouts. And the programming needs to be tight. And the written documentation needs to be tight. And all of the pieces need to align to say that we actually found the best athletes in the world and they're going to go on to the next stage then you have that but if you just if you just throw something together at the last minute then you get what you get uh and um nate uh sure seven is that a bald spot on the top of your head? Dude, I wish. I have more hair than I know what to fucking do with.

I don't know what the fuck you're looking at, but no. I'm like a fucking bear. Caleb's just stewing about your... I think I'm a couple years away from ear hair I'm going to have ear hair soon Brian are you happy huh turned out good

I would say relative to when we started yeah I was pretty pleased with the way that it turned out like the numbers make sense to me in terms of the athletes that are qualifying for each stage the numbers when I look at what you needed to achieve in the of the athletes that are qualifying for each stage the numbers when i look at what you needed to achieve in the workouts themselves for the most part makes sense

and yeah i think that you would end up with a field of athletes that are actually capable of taking the next stage now you're i mean just like there were people eliminated in the open and just like there are people eliminate quarterfinals you're still going to have some that are going to be eliminated in semifinals but at least we know that they have met the minimum thresholds across the board to meet, you know, to advance to this run. The last one,

Sean M uh, you guys are nerds. Um, uh, did Caleb's in the military. Straight up retarded. So, uh,

uh, uh, any chance, chance this makes any uh do you have any hopes or aspirations for this guys do you have any do you think there's what do you think about my negative or or less than optimistic perspective that they just don't have the resources to implement anything new or to hear anything else um it's a matter of wants, not capacity. It depends if they want to or not. I think that there are better models to pursue. I don't think this is a perfect model. I think that it's a good starting point for a conversation. But I thought the same thing in the fall. When I first heard they were doing this, there were certain concerns that I had. I expressed them. It doesn't seem like they were considered. That's okay. You know, Hubix has said, oh, this is our first attempt at it. We're going to see how it goes. We're

going to refine it. I'm putting out another model there. And if there is an opportunity to have a conversation and say, hey, you know, some of those things that you suggested are things that we've thought about in the past or that we maybe didn't think about, but are curious to us, obviously I would be open to having a conversation about that. It'd be beneficial for me too, because I could learn from them some of the things that they know that may be limitations that I don't understand. Do you think the athletes give a shit? Yeah,

definitely. Okay. Yeah. There will be, look, uh, in, in some of these,

uh, continents that get 30, like 29 out of 30 or 30 out of 30 are signing up. Like they'll be pissed about this. They'll be like, no, dude, like what the hell you're taking away at like the pinnacle of our season. But like I said, I'm trying to put this model out there absent of thinking about the people I'm thinking about the competition. And I'm specifically thinking about the fact that CrossFit chose to introduce worldwide ranking and strength of field this year, saying that it's, it's a, it's going to give us a representation of the competitive landscape. We know that it's not. I'm not going to spend time

talking about all the reasons why it's not, but we know that it's not. This is a model that does that more specifically. All right. I like it. I believe it was interesting. What's an A-10? It's a plane. It fucking destroys everything in its path. Wow.

It's a good plane? Great plane. It's like taking a Gatling gun and putting it on something that flies really fast. Yeah. Ooh. And it sounds awesome. All right. Yes,

then that is correct. Air Force says A-10. Thanks, guys. Fantastic show. I'm impressed. Thank you. Thanks for doing it here. Thanks for coming on the show. Caleb, thanks for talking to me about the A-10. Helping your charts, your graphics, your Excel sheets, everything was great.

I appreciate it. You guys have something else up your sleeve that you want to talk about? Anything else? Not tonight, but we got some other stuff coming up in the next couple weeks. All right, guys. I don't know what's happening tomorrow morning. I don't know. I'm tripping.

You guys know who watched the show this morning. I'm just tripping. It's going to be a tough next 10 days for me. Not for any serious reasons. What are you doing, Halpin? A little arm wrestling? Scratching my elbow. I thought maybe you were arm wrestling.

See you guys later. Ryan, thank you. Caleb, Halpin. Bye- maybe you were arm wrestling. Okay. See you guys later. Ryan, thank you. Caleb, Halpern. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye-bye.