 From the SAP Center at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HGST, Sports Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by HGST. Now your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live at SAP Center at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks, the Shark Tank as it's affectionately known. We're here for Sports Data 2015. We had a great time a year ago. We wanted to repeat the performance. Great to shout out to HGST for sponsoring us and the Sharks for hosting us here at this great venue. It's a terrific view out over the ice. And we're excited now. We're shifting gears from the pro sports into CrossFit and CrossFit Games. CrossFit has taken the world by storm. People are super passionate about it. If you know anyone that's involved with it. So there's the workout aspects. You probably see one going up in your local neighborhood. HGST's really kind of adopted CrossFit for internal bonding and competitive nature and having better health. But also there's the CrossFit Games, which is competitive. It was on last summer, if you didn't see it. It's kind of crazy. It's a lot of running around and people throwing weights and jumping. So we're excited to have the CrossFit guys. So welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. Let's get a big shout out. So we have Justin Berg. You're the GM of the CrossFit Games. Joe Novello, the producer of the CrossFit Games. And down at our far right, Kyle Machado. He's the tech guy. Excellent. So the CrossFit Games. So I have to admit, I talked to Chris. You know, we were setting this up and I hadn't really seen anything about CrossFit. So I turned on the CrossFit Games and it's pretty crazy. There's a lot of stuff going on. I think it was down to Carson, right? It does. We've got our world championships down in Carson, California. But that's really kind of the tip of the pyramid. The broad base is we've got over 13,000 affiliated CrossFit gyms who are all supporting this from the bottom in the beginning of the season. And we crown the fittest man in one month on earth every year. So let's back up a couple of steps for the people that aren't familiar with CrossFit. When did it get started? How did it get started? How do we get to here? Well, CrossFit started with a guy named Greg Glassman who is actually from this area. He founded the program, started getting kicked out of a lot of local gyms. Founded the program and the program was so effective that other people started calling and saying, hey, you need to teach us how to train our trainers in the CrossFit method. Started the seminar business that we've developed to the point where now we run between 15 and 20 seminars per weekend, every week of the year, all over the country, all over the world. And then also people said, hey, I want to be involved with that program. So I'd like to have a CrossFit gym myself and train people locally in my town. And so that started the affiliation program which now has over 13,000 affiliates, almost half of those outside the U.S. Wow. And what year of prize money did it get? About 15 years ago. About 15 years ago. The games nine years ago this year. Nine years ago. Awesome. And Joe, what is it about CrossFit that people get so passionate about? I mean, you talk to people about CrossFit, they have an opinion, right? They either love it and know about it, maybe don't know anything. And then some people are like, ah, you know, that CrossFit, that's a little crazy. But it really touches people in a very particular way, a very special way. Well, yeah, I think the first thing is that, you know, we have an enormous fan base that are fully engaged in participating and watching CrossFit. The interesting thing about the games is it doesn't just start with the 40 top athletes that competed Carson in July. It starts with 230,000 people around the world. As a matter of fact, I think Justin knows this better than I, but I believe we're the biggest participatory sporting event in the world. All of these people have been working out at their gyms. They get the opportunity to do the workouts, the same workouts that the top athletes do, and they get a chance to qualify. Well, once you've done it, once you've participated in this, it's just swells up people's enthusiasm for the sport. So if you start with the 230,000, only a mere fraction of them make it to Carson for the final, but all of them are, you know, big fans, big cheerleaders for the sport. And of course, it's infectious to the people that are in their local gyms or the local boxes and their families and so forth. And you really get just a tremendous wave of enthusiasm for the sport. So out of a typical gym, 230,000 people, out of a typical gym and suburban wherever, how many people that work out of that gym actually start that journey? A lot of people, because I think the communal aspect across it makes it very approachable. So even though you might not win the CrossFit Games, it doesn't mean that you can't participate in the Open, which is really a community event. It's a celebration of people who are competing for the first time. Maybe they're able to compete for the first time. They walked in and they were a world-class couch potato and that was about it, but they got themselves to the point where they could actually do the workouts as they were written and prescribed and then they want to celebrate and also go through the experience of that workout with the fittest athletes in the world. It hurts for the good ones just as much as, as it's the same, it's just as tough for a new athlete going through that. It is interesting. I mean, the community aspects in so many things that we do now are so important. And at the end of the day, we are social animals. We like to do things with other people. We like to have a shared experience. And as the Marines and the Army taught us long ago, nothing builds a bond like going through hell together. So Kyle, talk about some of the actual events and what is kind of the boot campishness of it that does create this bond between people? That's a great question. He's been to boot camp, Kyle, right, so. He's been to real boot camp. I did almost 12 years in the Marines, so it's very similar to that aspect. I think that there's a certain bond in the pain and the group atmosphere and the shared suffering that goes into your first workout or your millionth workout in CrossFit. And that's a big point. Most of us aren't going to play in the NFL. Most of us aren't going to be professional athletes, but every day when you go to a CrossFit gym, you get to have your World Series Game 7. Every day you get to have your Olympic moment, whether it's pre-season playoffs or the championship, you get to go in there and compete, whether that's with yourself or the clock or the 10 other people in the class with you. It's a big bonding experience. And then now there's the corporate aspect. Obviously HGST is a big sponsor. They brought you in. I've seen the videos of everybody working out out of the parking lot at the headquarters. Explain kind of how that dynamic works and how that's kind of helping CrossFit evolve but also as a different way for really CrossFit to get involved in the community with kind of a different binding, if you will. Well, it's kind of a love story that started with there was a core group of Crossfitters inside that company and it started from their top. So their executive suite was all into CrossFit. They had had a CrossFit experience before. They understood how that transformed communities, how it broke down some social barriers, got things much more kind of even keel and built some really strong relationships. They approached us and said, hey, we're doing this and we want to kind of hang out and see if there might be a potential for a partnership. We obviously use a lot of their products. We're in the business to store in a whole lot of video and we have a leaderboard which is popularly attended by a lot of different people who really care about their score and their results in the games. So it became kind of a natural fit for us. They were Crossfitters themselves. They believed in it. They saw what it was doing for their own relationships and for their company and they happened to have a very complimentary product for what we're doing in our day-to-day business. So Kyle, talk about the feedback. I think so much of this stuff today that gets popular wearables and Fitbits and everyone's getting a Fitbit, it has to really do with feedback loops, right? Just simple feedback loops that give people the feedback they need to try to improve, to try to get better. From a technology perspective, how do you see these types of feedback loops and data driving people to stay motivated, to try to achieve more, to get deeper in their engagement? I think that we're a society of instant gratification at this point and I think that the wearables are very good for motivating people to get up and see results and get the badges and the achievements and to share with their friends what they've done. And I think that that's a struggle that we don't particularly have in Crossfit because you're coming to that gym every day. Your wearable is the whiteboard and the whiteboard marker and the coach telling you how you're doing and the clock telling you how fast or slow you're going. That's Crossfit's wearable. And I don't know, if you're looking for instant feedback, Crossfit's not gonna give you instant feedback. It takes a good, long dedication to get really good at it and to see results, but it's guaranteed to be there. Yeah. And then Joe, you've been a producer, we're talking about Off-Light and you've got lots of Emmys, you've produced events. How's the Crossfit games different? How's the evolution of showing kind of modern day sporting events different than it used to be? And what's kind of the engagement that you really are trying to achieve? Because it's a very intimate thing watching on TV. You're down there, they're throwing the weights around. It's not from the cat bird seat, from the high view. I think the unique thing about the Crossfit games is the ability of the athletes and what they're able to accomplish on the field of play. The thing that I tell most people is what you're watching is so difficult and they make it look so easy that when you really start to break it down, it's extraordinary what they're doing. And it happens on all levels. We had teenagers competing this year, we have masters division and I'm in the masters category, if you will. And one of the most amazing things I witnessed was one day I sat in the stands and watched the 60 plus year olds picking up barbells and throwing them up over their heads and it actually blew me away. Cause I do that in the gym and I know how hard it is to do what they're doing. And when you scale that up to the top athletes, watching them compete, watching them do what they do and accomplish it in such an amazing manner, but at the same time it's such a community atmosphere. Anytime you watch a CrossFit competition, the person who gets the most cheers is generally the person who finishes last. And that sense of community that extends throughout the CrossFit world happens every time we have an event on the field of play. And I think that's one of the things that blows most people away is that you can beat the trash out of the guy next to you but when the competition is over, everybody's trying to help everybody else get better and that's really what a lot of CrossFit is all about is making people better. Yeah, cause it's really just self improvement. That's what people are celebrating. Cause there's a lot of great athletes doing really hard things that you can watch on Sundays. You can watch them trying to hit a baseball. You can watch world's strongest men but they're not normal people. Most of those people, we couldn't as hard as we ever wanted to train. Most of us could never achieve what some of those really high level elite athletes do and say football or whatever. But this is an opportunity for anybody who puts in the time and effort to potentially achieve great returns on their investment as well as be part of something, as well as maybe they win, maybe they don't win but it's really, it's the community thing that seems to be really the driver. Everybody improves, everybody improves. And I think that relativity really is unique to CrossFit cause you don't know what it's like to sprint with Usain Bolt or what it's like to catch a pass from Tom Brady but you do know exactly how heavy that barbell is and you know how hard that pull up is. You know how out of breath they are. And so when you see that it adds an extra layer and dynamic to the characters that are participating in the CrossFit games. And that's what makes us different and a little bit unique is that this isn't just sports for entertainment. You don't just sit in your chair and go boy that guy was great, who wins this year. You actually are hopefully motivated to do something yourself. You're motivated to take an extra step in your own fitness journey to be able to challenge yourself, get outdoors, do something with your body that you might not have thought you could do before. And I think that that's what's unique for us is this is hopefully adopting, or it's enabling people to have a change of behavior not just to be entertained for a couple hours on a Sunday. Well you know there's lots of exercise trends that kind of come and go. There's the kettle balls and the jazzer size. You know I think back to my mom when I was a little kid she was always doing some jazzer size or something, this or that. How does CrossFit stay relevant? How do you stay fresh? How do you stay growing and not subject to whatever the next, I'll just pick on kettle balls at the top of my mind. I saw some kettle balls the other day. And keep relevant because you do have that other thing where you kind of the entertainment piece as well. You've got the workout as well as kind of the show and the contest. But how do you guys stay relevant? How do you keep the excitement up? Where do you go next? I think from a workout standpoint, this is designed to be an open source model. So we know we're in possession of the most effective fitness program on the face of the planet. The results are there. We have quantified fitness and that started with Greg, our founder and the guy that wrote this whole system from scratch is he defined fitness. It is your work capacity across broad time and modal domains, which means you can put a number to your fitness. Okay so one more time, say that one more time a little slower. This is the definition of fitness. There's a lot of smart people in the audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not so smart, that's why I gotta say that. Your fitness is, your fitness is your work capacity. Work capacity. Measured across broad time and modal domains. Okay. And what that means is if you take a variety of different, not just one thing, not just one, I'm not just great at things that take 10 seconds. I'm not just great at things that take an hour. I'm good at things that take from one second to five hours. I'm not just good with a barbell. I can also swim and I can run and I can jump and I can throw. And you take all these things and if they're quantifiable they can be tested and then you can take a statistical reading of who's doing well across all those different challenges and the winner of the CrossFit Games does statistically best across a broad range of physical challenges. And that's what you see in CrossFit gyms is people take a little kernel of that and they say hey it's not gonna be as broad and diverse as the CrossFit Games but they're gonna move their body with a lot of variety. They're gonna constantly be working at high intensity and doing that over time in a communal environment gives a lot of results. So for us it's not what's new and what's different. It's staying true to our original mission which is defining fitness and staying true to a very simple approach which is you gotta work hard. You gotta do functional movements at high intensity but if you do that well in a communal environment the results come and they always come. Awesome. Well guys thanks for stopping by. It's a really great trend. You guys are onto something pretty magical. And again if you haven't checked it out check out CrossFit. I'd never checked it out until we got involved and I was blown away. I was like wow these guys are onto something. So thanks again for stopping by theCUBE. Thanks Jeff. All right Justin, Joe, Kyle from CrossFit. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE.