Blake Masters

Unpacking Hero WODs

Today, I am going to participate in ritual. Along with thousands of CrossFitters around the world, I am going to do “Murph.” This means that, starting at about 10 a.m., I will do the following as quickly as possible:

• Run one mile
• Do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 air squats (in any order)
• Run one mile

Murph is probably the most famous of CrossFit’s 80 or so “Hero WODs.” (WOD = workout of the day, in CrossFit parlance.) Hero WODs are named in honor of soldiers (and, occasionally, first responders) who are killed in action. Murph is named after Lt. Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan in 2005.

In some sense, this is unproblematic. Honoring fallen soldiers is good. But there’s also a sense in which Hero WODs serve as veiled support for substantive military policies or nationalism generally. Most people who know CrossFit would have to admit that there’s a certain degree of militarism to it. (There’s a good post about this here.) Before its association with Reebok, CrossFit HQ sold clothing labeled “Infidel,” ostensibly to be worn as a badge of pride.

So Hero WODs are rituals, and rituals are worth being skeptical about. One should understand what he or she is doing before participating. Provided that you’re not going to get punished for being public with your freethinking, it is always better to think through your actions than to just go along with the crowd.

The question, then, is whether Hero WODs necessarily imply support for the conflicts in which these people were killed. If so, I would not participate, since I do not support those conflicts.

It’s hard to be critical of Hero WODs once you know the stories behind them. Last year I read Lone Survivor, which was written by Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor from Michael Murphy’s SEAL team. It is epic and intense. After reading it, it seems completely right to say that Michael Murphy is worth honoring and remembering. But what that means and how one should do that are interesting questions.

I’ve done Murph several times before. It’s never easy. Physically, of course, it’s brutal. It’s enough to floor anybody. But the real wallop is mental and emotional. It’s a long, methodical workout. There is plenty of time to think. Plenty of time to go through your narrative.

So what is that narrative? It’s different for different people, which is probably good. But I think the traditional narrative—the standard, uncontroversial version—goes something like this:

Michael Murphy was a badass soldier. He made unquantifiable sacrifices. He fought bravely to protect his brothers and his country. He believed in America. He fought for justice. Michael Murphy’s life and death show that we, as a people, are strong enough to overcome our losses and still win.

That’s not necessarily a political narrative, but there’s some nationalism and perhaps even militarism to it.

My narrative is different. I try and strip away the military piece. Honoring Michael Murphy is different from honoring his, or any politics. Perhaps Michael would disagree. But my take is more like this:

Michael Murphy was a badass human being. He challenged himself mentally and physically. This workout is an extended metaphor for challenge and improvement. I am angry that Michael died. Death is a horrible thing. War is a horrible thing. Life isn’t always easy. It isn’t always fair. We have to fight death, disease, nature, and, sometimes, maybe even other people. There is honor in physical and mental perseverance. There is honor in humanity. We have to keep moving.

Perhaps some people see no difference between those two narratives. If so, fair enough. But I do. It’s important to me to draw that distinction, because Hero WODs are ambiguous phenomena. If we don’t clarify our thinking—if we don’t earnestly try to understand what we’re doing when we do them—then I’m not sure we are really honoring anybody or anything. We’d just be going through the motions. And when that happens, ritual devolves to mere process, absent meaning.

My dad and me, 39 minutes into Murph on Memorial Day 2011.

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 14 Notes Essay

Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 14 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s.

Class 14 Notes Essay—Seeing Green

I. Thinking About Energy

Alternative energy and cleantech have attracted an enormous amount of investment capital and attention over the last decade. Almost nothing has worked as well as people expected. The cleantech experience can thus be quite instructive. Asking important questions about what went wrong and what can be done better is a very good way to review and apply many of the things we’ve talked about in class.

A. The Right Framework

How should one think about energy as a sector? What’s an appropriate theoretical framework?

Revisiting the 2x2 matrix of determinate/indeterminate and optimistic/pessimistic futures may be useful. To recap, here are examples of those respective quadrants:

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Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 13 Notes Essay

Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 13 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely.

Class 13 Notes Essay— You Are Not A Lottery Ticket

I. The Question of Luck

A. Nature of the Problem

The biggest philosophical question underlying startups is how much luck is involved when they succeed. As important as the luck vs. skill question is, however, it’s very hard to get a good handle on. Statistical tools are meaningless if you have a sample size of one. It would be great if you could run experiments. Start Facebook 1,000 times under identical conditions. If it works 1,000 out of 1,000 times, you’d conclude it was skill. If it worked just 1 time, you’d conclude it was just luck. But obviously these experiments are impossible.

The first cut at the luck vs. skill question is thus almost just a bias that one can have. Some people gravitate toward explaining things as lucky. Others are inclined to find a greater degree of skill. It depends on which narrative you buy. The internal narrative is that talented people got together, worked hard, and made things work. The external narrative chalks things up to right place, right time. You can change your mind about all this, but it’s tough to have a really principled, well-reasoned view on way or the other.

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Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 12 Notes Essay

Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 10 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock Partners, joined this class as a guest speaker. Credit for good stuff goes to him and Peter. I have tried to be accurate. But note that this is not a transcript of the conversation.

Class 12 Notes Essay—War and Peace

I.  War Without

For better or for worse, we are all very well acquainted with war. The U.S. has been fighting the War on Terror for over a decade. We’ve had less literal wars on cancer, poverty and drugs.

But most of us don’t spend much time thinking about why war happens. When is it justified? When is it not? It’s important to get a handle on these questions in various contexts because the answers often map over to the startup context as well. The underlying question is a constant: how can we tilt away from destructive activity and towards things that are beneficial and productive?

A. Theater 

It often starts as theater. People threaten each other. Governments point missiles at each other. Nations become obsessed with copying one another. We end up with things like the space race. There was underlying geopolitical tension when Fischer faced off with Spassky in the Match of the Century in 1972. Then there was the Miracle on Ice where the U.S. hockey team defeated the Soviets in 1980. These were thrilling and intense events. But they were theater. Theater never seems all that dangerous at first. It seems cool. In a sense, the entire Cold War was essentially theater—instead of fighting and battles, there was just an incredible state of tension, rivalry, and competition.

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Read! Share! Please don’t transform or sell.

Several people have asked if they can make ebook versions of the notes essays. 

You can, of course, always do this for your own use. But for now at least, please do not distribute to the public. (One guy even tried to sell a version that he made!)

All of these notes are wrapped in a creative commons license. 

If we do end up publishing a pdf/ePub/Kindle version, we will likely want to work with a single designer and get things to our liking. 

I’m not trying to stifle innovation with IP. Obviously I want Peter’s ideas and the notes to spread far and wide. And to be clear, I’m not interested in making money from them.

But neither do I want dozens of versions of a book alleging to have been written by myself or Peter Thiel floating around when, in fact, neither of us has seen or approved the particular formatting, editing, etc.

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 11 Notes Essay

Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 11 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s.

Class 11 Notes Essay—Secrets

I.  Secrets

Back in class one, we identified a very key question that you should continually ask yourself: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? To a first approximation, the correct answer is going to be a secret. Secrets are unpopular or unconventional truths. So if you come up with a good answer, that’s your secret.

How many secrets are there in the world? Recall that, reframed in a business context, the key question is: what great company is no one starting? If there are many possible answers, it means that there are many great companies that could be created. If there are no good answers, it’s probably a very bad idea to start a company. From this perspective, the question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.

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CS183 Notes - Traffic So Far

I’ve put 10 class notes essays online so far. That material represents roughly half of the course (there are 19 classes in total).

Several people have asked me what the traffic to the site has been. I always enjoy when people post this kind of data that gives their projects more transparency (e.g. this). So here is some of that for anyone who might be interested.

The date range is April 2nd (when the class started) through this morning, May 10th.

At first glance an average visit duration of 2 minutes seems very low. Many people are not reading material that, at least for a moment, is literally right in front of them. But maybe 2 minutes is actually quite high. While many people may tl;dr click away, many others seem to be reading the full posts.

The image below shows the spike from David Brooks’ Creative Monopoly piece in the NYT. Daily visitors shot up to 25k and have since settled down to about 5k/day since. 

(I edited this graphic a bit to get the visits axis labeled on this scale.)

Update: here is the visit duration view:

Some possibly relevant things that people have told me today:

• Readers using things like Instapaper or Pocket might not be fully represented.
• Google Analytics can’t detect single page time, so visits from people who read in full off a link and then bounce go unrecorded or are logged in the first bucket.

The traffic stuff is interesting. I won’t pretend I know exactly what the stats mean. In some sense it doesn’t matter; it’s the same undertaking whether 2, 200, or 200k people follow along. But truly interesting ideas should spread far and wide, and it’s been fun to see that happening.