Icarus is a documentary that takes a deep dive into the doping scandal surrounding disgraced former professional cyclist Lance Armstrong. In this episode, we talk to the director of the documentary, Alex Blumberg, about how he came up with the idea for the film, why he wanted to make it, and how he and his co-workers conspired to cover up the extent of doping in the sport of cycling. We also talk about what it was like to be a member of the infamous USPS doping ring, and what it means to be part of a team that helped cover up doping in order to win the Tour de France. And, of course, there's a little bit about doping and doping in general, and why we should all be mad at the system for failing to catch and punish Armstrong for doping. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve listened to the entire thing. If you haven't checked out the full episode, you might not want to listen to the full thing. It's not for the faint hearted. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you re listening to this podcast. It'll help us reach all the listeners out there who need it. Thank you so much and we'll see you again next week! Thanks again for listening. -Jon Sorrentino and Jonny DeKorte Jonny's bio: Jonny is a writer, producer, editor, and producer, and he's a good friend of mine. He's also writes for the New York Times Square. Jon is a lot of people who writes for me. He's a lot, too. . Jon's bio is here: Jon s bio: John s bio is also here: Jon s new book is here is here Jonathan s bio here: my bio is his bio is on my bio here is my bio Tom s bio and my bio also is here on my website: my bio: my website is here s My bio is linked here: bit. link is here. , my profile is here : linktr. linktr=Jon s: , my bio s , his bio s: my profile , and my podcast is here? v=
00:00:37.000We'd gone back and forth a little bit on Twitter, and then I finally sat down and watched it the other day, and I was like, holy shit.
00:00:44.000The extent of the cover-up, first of all, for folks who don't know what it's about, the documentary started off just kind of about doping, right?
00:00:55.000And then it became about the state-sponsored Russian doping program.
00:01:00.000And then it all imploded while you were doing the documentary.
00:01:21.000And the initial idea had come to me essentially when Armstrong confessed.
00:01:26.000And I'd been a lifelong cycling fan and I had followed him for my whole journey with him.
00:01:33.000And what struck me the most about his confession was that if you talk to anybody outside of the sport, they all thought that he got caught.
00:01:42.000But the reality is, is he actually never got caught.
00:01:46.000I mean, to this day, this guy has passed 500 anti-doping controls clean.
00:01:52.000So I'm going, wait, not what's wrong with Armstrong.
00:01:56.000What's wrong with this global anti-doping system that they can't catch the most tested athlete on planet Earth?
00:02:13.000Upset at this system that is essentially making an athlete not have a choice as to what they do or not do if they actually want to have a possibility of winning if the system itself is not able to catch them.
00:02:28.000I mean, that is really an important thing to talk about.
00:02:30.000In the high-level world of cycling, when they took away Armstrong's victories in the Tour de France, Think this the person who got who did not test positive in any tests before that I think was like 18th place.
00:03:32.000Well, there's a little more to it, too, right?
00:03:33.000Like, he was actually suing people that were saying that he was doping, and he was going after them and threatening them with lawsuits, and which, you know...
00:03:43.000And that's, you know, why, before I ever picked up a camera, I had named the film Icarus.
00:03:51.000And I had named it Icarus because of what I deemed the Armstrong story.
00:03:58.000Which was a story of a guy who just kept pushing the boundaries and pushing the boundaries and pushing the boundaries until he flew too close to the sun and his, you know, wings burned and he plummeted to the earth.
00:04:14.000You know, ambition that wouldn't stop and having no filter on how far you went to win and what you were willing to do and who you were willing to destroy in that process to win.
00:04:28.000And to me, When you take the doping out of it, that's the problem that I would have on a personal level with the lance of it.
00:04:43.000It's one thing if you're doing something that everybody else is doing, but it's another thing when you're literally going out and destroying other people's lives to try to protect your own lives.
00:04:55.000Yeah, I mean, I kind of see his position.
00:04:58.000I see how he got caught up in it and the momentum of it all just sort of brought him to this place where it was almost no, there's no way to do it.
00:05:04.000Either, you know, you go after these people and try to silence them, or you come clean.
00:05:08.000And eventually he was forced to come clean.
00:05:10.000You knew though, and most people did, that he was doing something.
00:05:15.000Yeah, I mean, I had always felt that he was doing something.
00:05:19.000But I also, having been kind of deeply involved in the sport, believed that everybody else was doing something also.
00:05:26.000So his confession to me wasn't really the shocker.
00:05:31.000What was the shocker and what set me out on this journey was...
00:05:36.000Like, in the public court of opinion and what you saw going on in the news was it was essentially like, you know, we've got Gotti, we've got Al Capone, we've got the ringleader, we've got the, you know, the biggest criminal in the history of sport,
00:06:08.000I was looking at what does this mean in all sports?
00:06:12.000What does this mean in terms of the Olympics?
00:06:15.000What does this mean in terms of basketball and football and baseball and all these other sports if the most tested athlete on planet Earth can't be caught?
00:06:25.000And that's what set me out to make the film initially was to explore using kind of just the Armstrong story as the framework but to explore what was wrong with the anti-doping system in sport and essentially use myself as a human guinea pig to explore that and then along that way kind of show whether or not this system worked And then essentially present
00:06:55.000hypotheticals about what could be done or what couldn't be done and whether or not we as a society care about, you know, drug use and sport.
00:07:07.000And that was the original concept and construct of the film.
00:07:13.000Well, drug use in sport is very complicated because it's so prevalent and it's almost impossible to separate the two when you think about it, particularly in the Tour de France, right?
00:07:24.000In professional cycling, I mean, it is just a dirty sport.
00:07:28.000Well, I think that, from what I know, is over the last several years, it's really cleaned up quite a bit, quite a lot.
00:07:36.000And if you start looking at the times also, they've started to come down and slow down.
00:07:43.000But I think that we're probably in a What I would call it, I don't know, a glory period between the science kind of catching up to the cheaters in some way and then the cheaters basically figuring out how to out-science the science again.
00:08:18.000I've read that they're now figuring out how to replicate EPO erythropoietin at the genetic level, basically, how to make your cells naturally create more erythropoietin.
00:09:20.000And what had happened is, so I decided that I was going to go on this super-size-me-esque journey into the world of performance-enhancing drugs.
00:09:34.000Doing all this research shortly after Armstrong confesses, which is 2013, early 2013. And I actually picked up a camera in May of 2014. And over this year, I start talking to all these scientists, and I'm contacting people on a global level in Switzerland,
00:09:51.000in Germany, in the UK, and all over the US. And essentially, each one of these scientists, I'm asking essentially the same questions.
00:10:00.000I'm saying, hey, Do you believe the anti-doping system in sport works?
00:10:53.000And they said, the biggest variable is that you've got to get your samples into a WADA lab, a World Anti-Doping Agency lab.
00:11:03.000And that becomes very difficult because if you can just get your samples into a WADA lab, amateur, professional, anybody, right?
00:11:10.000Well, you can start figuring out All the, you know, loopholes and what you can do and what you can't do if you can essentially know how to be tested.
00:11:19.000So the variable was how I was going to get my samples into a water lab.
00:11:23.000And I start talking to a scientist here by the name of Don Catlin in Los Angeles, and he's considered the grandfather of anti-doping.
00:11:34.000He created all the tests for the first test for steroid detection in sport.
00:11:40.000He actually is the first guy who did the testing for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, which was the first time they ever did anti-doping testing in sport.
00:11:51.000So Catlin has developed all these tests, and I get in touch with Catlin, and he's retired.
00:11:59.000I think he's about 80 years old, and he retired, I don't know, five, six years ago.
00:12:06.000And I quickly realized in talking to Catlin that he's very frustrated.
00:12:11.000He basically has felt that he spent his entire life and career In a system that he was never going to win at.
00:12:19.000And that no matter what he did, and he would develop one methodology to catch somebody, the very next day there'd be another way around it.
00:12:28.000And then he would develop another methodology, and then the very next day there'd be someone around it.
00:12:32.000Or he would propose that the league, or the NFL, or baseball, or whoever you want to say, should use this test to catch You know, this sort of substance abuse and the leagues would not use that test intentionally.
00:12:50.000Or he would find positives and report the positives and then be told basically to, you know, pretend that there wasn't a positive because his job was simply to report, not to police.
00:13:03.000And he had spent an entire career with this.
00:13:08.000And so he has, you know, I think a lot of frustrations with the anti-doping system and he said that he wouldn't help me do it because A, he would have had to prescribe me drugs and he didn't want to be liable for that.
00:13:23.000B, he didn't know how he was going to get my samples into a water lab because he doesn't have access to that anymore.
00:13:32.000He didn't want to, as much as he felt all the fallacies in the system, he didn't want to be out there, you know, basically, almost in a way, making a mockery of all of his work.
00:13:44.000And he says, hey, I know this scientist in Russia, Gregory Rychenkov.
00:13:49.000He runs the WADA Lab, the World Anti-Doping Agency Lab for all of Russia, and I think he might help you.
00:13:56.000And, you know, essentially he said that because he knew that the Russians had, you know, always been kind of trying to figure out ways to game the system.
00:14:10.000And he had met Gregory in like 1983. And that's a whole other story.
00:14:16.000Because Gregory had basically come to the United States as a spy to figure out what the Americans were going to beat him against in the 1984 Olympics, which I can talk about later.
00:14:28.000But I get in touch with Gregory, connects us through email, and I start emailing Gregory.
00:14:34.000And we spend about eight months back and forth on emails, calls, at the time he had just done the Sochi Olympics.
00:14:43.000So he was doing all the testing for the Sochi Olympics.
00:14:45.000And he invites me out to Oregon, and this is July of 2014, to go meet him.
00:15:05.000And I make a decision that I'm not going to bring my camera crews, I'm not going to, you know, do anything other than to just meet him.
00:15:14.000And we start talking, and I say to Gregory, and he had just finished the Sochi Games, I said, do you believe that a medal in the Olympics can be won without performance-enhancing drugs?
00:15:54.000And that, you know, was this moment where I went, okay, clearly there is a deeper story here that the head of the anti-doping laboratory in Russia is telling me that A, he doesn't think you can win an Olympic medal cleanly,
00:16:11.000and B, he doesn't know whether or not he's a bad man.
00:17:40.000And so he viewed it as kind of like, hey, this is a cool project to get involved in.
00:17:46.000And in his mind, I think he also looked at it as, hey, what's the big deal if I expose the fallacies in the anti-doping system?
00:17:54.000Because maybe they'll actually do something about it if I show, you know, essentially how it doesn't work.
00:18:02.000So he agrees that he's going to be my doping advisor, and this is now July 2014, but I had to do the race clean first.
00:18:11.000I then had to go and, you know, through this whole thing, and I wasn't going to actually start doping until essentially the beginning of the next year and beginning of 2015. So you had to do the race clean to get a base?
00:18:24.000Yeah, because my whole premise was, hey, I'm going to do this race twice.
00:18:28.000I'm going to go in it and do it clean, see how good I do, and then the next year I'm going to go in just dope to the gills with the hope that I'm going to win it.
00:18:37.000Now how much cycling had you done before this?
00:18:40.000I grew up racing when I was 13. I'd raced seriously until I was 19. But then I moved out to LA. I was in a huge, like a horrific bike crash when I was 19 in a race.
00:18:53.000And that essentially, I guess, I didn't have the balls after that.
00:19:13.000When I was 19, my freshman year in college, so I went through college basically with plastic teeth in my mouth as I was going through essentially like reconstructive dental work.
00:19:25.000And it made me really think twice about being a professional athlete or pursuing cycling.
00:19:31.000I came back to it the following year, and as you know, you know, in any sort of competitive realm in sport, you can't be thinking about whether or not you're going to get injured.
00:19:42.000You can't be thinking about what those risks are.
00:19:44.000You have to, you know, be fully committed or you're going to lose or you're going to get dropped.
00:19:48.000And I found myself, you know, not following the wheel close enough.
00:19:53.000I found myself holding back on descents.
00:19:55.000I found myself like in my mind of, oh my God, what if this crash happens again?
00:19:59.000And so I decided to stop racing and moved out to LA. I got into the entertainment business.
00:20:05.000I was doing stand-up comedy originally.
00:20:09.000But cycling remained like my passion in life.
00:20:18.000And so I've always rode, but I stopped racing.
00:20:22.000But to go back and do this, it was like, okay, there's a part of me where I'm going to kind of go relive my youth or the idea of how good I could possibly be.
00:20:34.000And the bigger element was I thought it was going to be a compelling film and something that would be very interesting, not for cycling, you know, people that were into cycling, but into sports.
00:20:47.000And curious about, you know, drug use and sport and performance enhancing drugs and what they do and what they don't do.
00:20:54.000So, the first run at it, you had been off cycling for how long?
00:20:59.000I'd still been training and riding and riding, but the first run at it, I mean, I like radically amped up my training program for like six months ahead of time because I was going to do this thousand-mile race through the French Alps in Europe.
00:21:26.000Not creatine, but I was always doing protein shakes.
00:21:29.000I was doing, you know, all sorts of recovery drinks and, you know, essentially training, you know, getting my blood monitored and eating super, super healthy and...
00:21:43.000I'm essentially training as scientifically as I could without using any sort of illegal substances.
00:21:55.000And so what kind of results did you get the first race?
00:23:09.000So I get back to Gregory, and in the film you see this Skype call.
00:23:15.000And so, you know, in a creative filmmaking process, editorially, you're always faced with decisions of, okay, do I spend 10 minutes of this film on all these emails back and forth to Gregory before we see him on Skype?
00:23:31.000Well, that's not as dynamic as, boom, you see him on Skype.
00:23:35.000So that very first call, which was the very first time I had had him on Skype, and it was the first time that I had seen him since Oregon in July 2014, and now I'm beginning my protocol, and there he is, shirtless and willing to help me.
00:23:53.000Almost that very moment, this German television show comes out like a 60 Minutes piece called ARD is the station.
00:24:03.000And this German investigative reporter, Hayo Sepit, who unbeknownst to me at the time had been following the story of essentially the possibility of Russia having a state-sponsored doping program.
00:24:17.000Had already interviewed Gregory, and he puts together this, like, 30-minute, explosive, like, 60-minute show, alleging that Russia has a state-sponsored doping program, and that he's working with these two whistleblowers that have basically fled Russia to go work with him in Germany and tell their story.
00:24:35.000And these two whistleblowers are now, like, enemies of the state.
00:24:40.000And they're worried about their lives and there's threats to their lives.
00:24:44.000And they essentially start bringing forward information about a state-sponsored program.
00:24:50.000And the information is so compelling that WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, launches an investigation into the claims behind this German television show.
00:25:03.000And there's a backstory to that, which is that WADA... Had had this information for four years and they sat on it because they're essentially in bed with the IOC and the Olympics.
00:25:17.000So the only reason why they finally acted on this information out of Russia was they were forced to because it was now in public and this German show had done kind of the equivalent of putting it on a front page of a New York Times and so they had to take action.
00:25:52.000There he is being alleged as essentially the guy who is doping all the Russian athletes, that he knows everything.
00:25:59.000There's athletes on camera saying that Dr. Rechenkov is the guy you go to.
00:26:07.000And it was a major pivot point in the story.
00:26:12.000But for me at the time, I made a very, very succinct decision, which was, I'm going to continue behind the scenes to follow this story, this investigation, because I didn't know where it was going to go.
00:26:26.000But in the meantime, I have Gregory, this Moscow scientist.
00:26:34.000And that's the movie that I set out to make.
00:26:37.000And so I'm going to stick on that journey while doubling down on the other side of the story, should this side of the story end up truly being something.
00:26:53.000And so he's doping me this entire year while he's under investigation, while I'm literally going to guys like Dick Pound, who founded WADA. And Richard McLaren, who's investigating him, and the guys within WADA and different guys in global anti-doping.
00:27:13.000And I'm saying, hey, what do you know about this Russia investigation?
00:27:18.000What do you think if this proves true?
00:27:21.000Do you think Gregory Rechenkov is involved?
00:27:24.000And none of these people that I'm interviewing know that I'm working with Gregory.
00:27:31.000They have no idea that I know Gregory.
00:27:32.000And so I'm getting these very, very candid, honest responses.
00:27:37.000And we cut to November 2015 and this 335 page report breaks and it's alleging that he's the mastermind of a state-sponsored doping program in Russia.
00:27:53.000But again, it's all smoke and mirrors and it's mandated to track and field.
00:27:59.000And that's when things got incredibly serious.
00:28:03.000Putin gets on state television, it's a huge worldwide story, denies that any of this is true, but he makes a statement stating that if any of this is true, that it will be the individuals that are held accountable and that punishment will be absolute.
00:28:23.000And that was essentially Gregory's death sentence.
00:28:27.000And we were Skyping and we were talking during this entire period as this crisis is unfolding in Russia.
00:28:34.000And he's forced to resign from the lab.
00:28:40.000Russia is suspended from world track and field.
00:28:43.000Gregory tells me that the KGB, the FSB, have plotted a suicide plan to make it look like he's killed himself and that he needs to get out of Russia.
00:28:57.000How did he know that they had planned that?
00:28:59.000So Gregory had FSB clearance because he was essentially FSB. He was part of a secret...
00:29:10.000Operation by Russia to essentially dope all of its athletes, have them avoid detection, swap urine, etc.
00:29:18.000And so Gregory was, you know, had high clearance.
00:29:21.000And other people within the FSB that liked him basically said, hey, you got to get out.
00:29:32.000I put it on my credit card and he arrives in Los Angeles.
00:29:36.000This is November 2015. How do they just let him fly?
00:29:40.000So this, I am sure, to Putin and the other Russian ministry officials, this has probably been the behind closed doors, screaming, shouting matches, I'm going to cut your head off, how did you allow this to happen,
00:30:50.000And I'm sure that, I mean, there's probably been endless, you know, people getting their jobs lost in Russia because this guy was able to get out.
00:31:39.000And this system, when I began to truly understand what this was, I mean, this upends all of world sport.
00:31:50.000This changes, whether the Olympics want to acknowledge it or not, this changes all of Olympic history.
00:31:57.000It changes the last 40 years of the Olympics because it basically shows that Pretty much every medal ever won by Russia in Olympic competition was won through illicit means that Gregory was behind a state-sponsored doping program where essentially pretty much every athlete On the Russian national team was,
00:32:25.000you know, an employee of the Russian state and that Russia had, you know, went into each one of these Olympic Games and world competition, cheating, to use sport as a way to assert itself geopolitically and as a way to show itself as a strong country.
00:32:46.000And we forget I think in the US, I mean, A, I mean, sport is what people care about on this planet.
00:32:53.000But, you know, Orwell said it best, that sport is war without the weapons.
00:33:00.000And if you look at what these Olympic Games are every two years, it's every country on planet Earth coming together under the illusion of peace and goodwill and harmony.
00:33:13.000While the governments are looking at this as a way to assert geopolitical power and strength.
00:33:20.000So if you're China coming into the Olympics, like they did in those Beijing Olympics, and they swept those Beijing Olympics, and from the information that I have, they essentially did the same thing that Russia did in the Sochi Olympics.
00:33:33.000But if you're looking, let's say, at China and those 2008 Beijing Games, they spend billions of dollars.
00:33:40.000The world has never seen an Olympic Games like those Beijing Games, the opening ceremonies, the closing ceremonies.
00:33:46.000What that was, was that was China showing the world we're a first world power.
00:34:22.000And that is what countries have been doing for the last 40 years in the Olympic Games, just like Hitler did in the 1936 Games.
00:34:30.000It helped unify his power and help, you know, bring Germany together.
00:34:34.000And so this is what the history of the Olympic Games have been, shrouding under this mask of peace and goodwill and unity and handshakes.
00:34:44.000This is countries around the world going in and showing the rest of the world their strength and power.
00:34:50.000And Russia certainly has viewed that every two years as a platform for Russia to assert itself geopolitically.
00:35:00.000And in so doing, they put together a state-sponsored doping program to help, you know, advance Russia's geopolitical goals and show itself as a world power.
00:35:13.000Is there any evidence that China's done the same thing, or is it just speculation that they've got a state-sponsored program as well?
00:35:20.000Well, I personally don't have the evidence.
00:35:24.000According to Gregory, and I have no reason to doubt Gregory, especially in light of everything that he has said has proven to be true, he was at the 2008 Beijing Games.
00:35:35.000And according to him, What would happen, different than what Russia did in Sochi, but according to him, what would happen is that the Chinese athletes, and if you look at the medal count out of Beijing, China swept those Olympics, just like Russia swept their own Olympics.
00:35:53.000And according to Gregory, what the Chinese athletes would do is they would show up for their, you know, their doping tests, And certain collectors, meaning when the athlete shows up, they have to be chaperoned,
00:36:09.000and they're basically chaperoned, and that chaperone watches them pee into, you know, a container, and then they put the pee in these two different bottles, and this is the whole safeguard system.
00:36:22.000According to Gregory, what was happening in China is that the collectors We're actually Chinese government agents, essentially, like, you know, Secret Service for China, and that the athlete would go in to have his, you know, urine collected, and this agent would give the athlete a bag of his clean urine,
00:36:41.000and the athlete would put that urine under his armpit, and then collect the urine.
00:36:48.000And that's apparently what China did in the Beijing Olympics, according to Gregory.
00:36:55.000And he had knowledge of that, and that is where the ideas started to come for how to put into place what they ultimately did in Sochi, where they swapped out clean urine for dirty urine, but they did it in a much more complicated manner because of the camera systems,
00:37:14.000because of all the technology that was in place.
00:37:17.000Russia took it to a whole other step further Those lids that they had used, those supposedly unbreakable lids or unremovable lids?
00:38:34.000It's only to be opened if the A sample turns positive.
00:38:38.000And that B sample is put into long-term storage for 10 years.
00:38:42.000Basically, should testing evolve or whatever or something come up, they have this B sample to go back and test that athlete's urine up to 10 years in the Olympic vault, in the Olympic, you know, labs where they're holding these samples.
00:38:59.000So basically what Russia figured out is that they needed to swap out both the A urine and the B urine.
00:39:07.000But in order to get into those B samples, they had to break into these bottles.
00:39:13.000So through a couple years of testing, the FSB got involved in a program where they figured out, using these tools, how to essentially break into these bottles undetected Dump out the dirty piss,
00:39:29.000put in clean piss, and reseal these bottles.
00:39:32.000So both the A sample would be negative, because that was swapped, and the B sample had been swapped, and it was in long-term storage.
00:39:41.000So if they removed the top of the B sample and they swapped that out, what did they do with the A sample?
00:39:45.000Well, the A sample, they were legally able to open it for testing.
00:39:51.000But it was supposed to be tested under, you know, a bunch of other people watching.
00:39:57.000So what they would do, and this gets into detail into the film, is that they would take basically the A sample that was already in this room, they'd smuggle in the B sample.
00:40:08.000The B sample shouldn't even been there.
00:40:10.000And they would crack open the A sample like they were allowed to crack open for testing, but they would do this at like two o'clock in the morning.
00:40:18.000And they would bring this A sample and the B sample through a secret hole in the wall of the room where they were aliquoting the urine.
00:40:30.000And they would pass these bottles through the hole in the wall.
00:40:33.000And once they got through the hole in the wall, On the other side, in this makeshift room, which looked like a storage closet, but there were no cameras in there, and they had designed the whole lab for this.
00:40:44.000I mean, there was a lot of thinking that went into this.
00:41:17.000They went secretly to a KGB building, an FSB building that was about 100 yards across the street from where the lab was, a secret building.
00:41:25.000And there they would open up this bee sample, they would dump out the urine, bring it back to Gregory, sitting in this room, and Gregory would then put that same clean urine.
00:41:35.000Into that bee bottle, reseal the bee bottle, put the two bottles through the hole in the lab.
00:41:40.000They then take the bee sample, smuggle it into where it was supposed to be, the long-term storage container, and all the athletes test it negative.
00:41:55.000If they did that in Sochi, what did they do in Beijing?
00:41:57.000What did they do in all the previous Olympics?
00:41:59.000Well, so that's where it's interesting because, and this is kind of the Lance Armstrong of it, or you want to call it the anti-doping system evasion of it.
00:42:12.000Where in the past, it was always about the science, right?
00:43:48.000So he's able to develop a test that's the long-term metabolites to basically see that you took these drugs, you know, even if you hadn't taken them for six months.
00:43:58.000Well, at the same time that he develops this test, and this has now been adopted on a global level, and specifically at the London Olympics of 2012. And I think, don't quote me on this, I think this test really got approved in like 2011,
00:44:17.000And so he puts out this long-term metabolite test that's catching all these athletes from all over the world because now they can catch them up to six, seven months.
00:44:26.000He figures out the anti-venom to his own tests.
00:44:30.000And what he develops is a three-drug cocktail Where he is able to dissolve the steroids in a solution of either vermouth, martini for the women, chivas for the men, whiskey for the men, and he would give the athletes basically the steroids in like a shot,
00:44:50.000And what he figured out through the science is that if the steroids were taken with alcohol, they wouldn't actually go into the blood system.
00:44:57.000So you would get all the benefits of the steroid, but your body would pass it out in a very, very quick time, and so you were undetectable.
00:45:15.000So, this guy is, you know, essentially, you know, at one time, you know, so he's figuring out, so all the Russian athletes are basically knowing, you know, they're on his system, and so they're taking steroids while the other athletes,
00:45:32.000if they were doing the same thing on a global level, are getting caught, and the world system is using the methodology that Gregory developed.
00:45:43.000And so this was the cat-and-mouse game going on for a very long time.
00:45:50.000And, you know, before that it's, you know, it's the microdosing, it's the lance of it, it's all the how do you get away with it.
00:46:00.000But what they did for Sochi is they just said, well, hey, screw that.
00:46:06.000You know, we don't want to take any chances.
00:46:09.000We're going to have our athletes dope full tilt so they can be at their very, very best.
00:46:16.000They're going to be dirty as hell, but we're going to swap out their urine.
00:46:20.000So there's no—and because in Sochi, Russia controlled the lab.
00:46:25.000They basically owned the keys to the vault.
00:46:36.000They won 13 golds in Sochi, 33 overall medals, which was the highest of any country.
00:46:42.000And for Putin and Russia, I think when you go into, you know, what's going on in the U.S. and Russia, the Cold War has never really ended.
00:46:53.000It's the illusion of a Cold War ending.
00:46:56.000And what you're seeing is, you know, a country where economically it's always been, you know, you have a lot of wealth and a very, very small number of hands, but the rest of the country is pretty much living in second world conditions,
00:47:12.000you know, once you get out of Moscow and St. Petersburg and where the main money is.
00:47:17.000But Russia on a global level is always wanting to assert itself as a world geopolitical power.
00:47:25.000They have a lot of resources, natural resources.
00:47:30.000And in the case of Sochi, this was a way for essentially Putin to show, like China did on a global level, Look what we're able to pull off in these Olympics.
00:47:43.000They spent 50 billion dollars on those Olympics.
00:47:47.000His approval rating had been on the decline.
00:47:50.000But if he could win the Olympics, he could unify Russia, just like Germany winning the World Cup or any, you know, this is because this is what sports is on a global level.
00:48:01.000Or, you know, the Denver Broncos winning the Super Bowl, the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, and every single person in New England shows up for a parade.
00:48:09.000And so the Olympics were Putin's way to basically show the world that Russia was an economic power, a superpower, geopolitical power.
00:48:18.000And if those Russian athletes could win, that's the same thing of going to war, that's showing that they are, you know, that Russia is strong.
00:48:26.000And so the mandate was win at all costs.
00:48:29.000Gregory was the mastermind behind that program.
00:48:32.000And right after they win those Sochi Olympics, Putin's approval rating soars to 95% and he uses that approval rating to go into the Ukraine and to go into war with Ukraine.
00:48:46.000I'd never connected those together until your documentary when you were talking about them invading Crimea.
00:48:55.000Instantaneously made me reconsider the the impact of sports like geopolitically like I really didn't think about it that way before that movie and After the movie what stuck with me the most and one of the most disturbing things is I remember the news where they were talking about Kicking them out of Brazil,
00:49:13.000where they were saying that the International Olympic Committee was going to remove all the Russian athletes from competing in Brazil.
00:49:21.000And I saw the story, and I think we probably even talked about it on the podcast.
00:49:31.000And what you see in the film and what's going on right now, which is so...
00:49:38.000What's upsetting in the state of the world that we're in right now is first is in the film from this investigation that gets launched from Gregory going to the New York Times and us presenting all this evidence.
00:49:55.000They launched this three months investigation and I'm essentially behind the scenes kind of as a puppet master because Gregory can't talk.
00:50:06.000And so I'm the guy with his lawyers helping facilitate all the evidence, helping to decipher all the documents.
00:50:13.000And we had hired on a whole team of people to do this.
00:50:16.000And that's that scene in the movie where you see where I'm sitting at the table with the leaders of WADA basically You know, telling them that the Easter bunnies and Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don't exist all at the same time.
00:50:31.000And so this investigation goes on for two and a half months.
00:50:37.000And during this investigation, Richard McLaren gets the samples, the Sochi samples, out of the long-term storage from the Olympics, the IOC in Luzon.
00:50:48.000They do forensics on these bottles and they see the scratches on the bottles.
00:50:55.000They bring in Interpol and other agencies and they figure out the tools, how Russia gets into the bottles, and they see all the evidence on the bottles.
00:51:05.000And then they also find an extraordinary amount of salt content in the urine, because what Gregory was doing, which we don't get into the film, In order to make the clean urine match, he also had to adjust the gravity of the urine,
00:51:20.000and he would use human table salt to do that.
00:51:26.000When you pee, depending on how hydrated you are, dehydrated you are, what you ate that day, The gravity, essentially the weight of your urine, changes.
00:51:35.000Basically the content of what your body is...
00:51:40.000Is that why dehydrated people have dark urine?
00:51:47.000So every athlete, when they would give their sample, part of the doping control form is they mark the specific gravity, essentially the weight of the urine.
00:52:03.000So they're just measuring the weight of the urine?
00:52:05.000Well, they're measuring part of when they do the intake form on the urine, they weigh aliquot so that it's also another thing against fraud.
00:52:17.000Because, okay, so your specific gravity is, I'm making this up, 0.020, and that's in that sample.
00:52:24.000Well, so if they were to go back and retest that sample, And the specific gravity was wrong, well they'd know that something was up.
00:52:32.000So part of swapping the urine is he would also adjust the specific gravity with table salt.
00:52:39.000He figured out that salt would change the gravity of urine.
00:52:43.000So because he's trying to match on the doping control forms exactly, you know, what's in these bottles, he puts in table salt.
00:52:52.000And when they go back and test these samples, sure enough, In 100% of the samples they test, they find evidence of the scratches, they find evidence of tampering, and they find the table salt in the urine.
00:53:05.000So this is like, I mean, this is beyond a reasonable doubt that this system happened.
00:53:17.000And it's now the Rio Olympic Games, and we're sitting there and going, well, every country in the world is calling for Russia to be banned.
00:53:25.000Every anti-doping agency around the world is calling for Russia to be banned.
00:53:30.000Every op-ed in New York Times and paper from around the world is saying you have to ban Russia from Rio.
00:53:36.000And Thomas Bach, the president of the Olympics, essentially has the audacity to call these findings and all this evidence allegations and does not ban Russia from the Rio Olympics,
00:53:56.000So 281, I think, over 390 athletes Go to Rio and the only athletes that are banned are the world track and field team because he kicked the buck down to the sports federations to decide what to do and because this investigation had started in track and field track and field and Sebastian Coe upheld the ban for the Rio games and Here we are now a year and a couple months later And
00:54:27.000now the Olympics are trying to decide whether or not to allow Russia into the next Winter Olympic Games.
00:54:34.000And not only have they essentially removed Richard McLaren from this investigation, and he was able to continue the work through December.
00:54:47.000And in December of last year, 2016, he is able to release his full findings.
00:54:54.000And these full findings have 1,200 documents of evidence of emails between Gregory and the ministry, emails between, you know, on and on that have been forensically proven using metadata where these emails were coming from,
00:55:10.000the spreadsheets of what every single athlete was taking, when they were taking it, the bottle collection numbers.
00:55:16.000I mean, You're talking because I've seen the evidence.
00:55:23.000And Richard McLaren concludes that over 1,000 athletes across all sports were involved in this state-sponsored doping operation.
00:55:35.000And the Olympics, until a couple weeks ago, had done essentially nothing with this information.
00:55:46.000They have only tried to figure out essentially how to Push it under the carpet and pretend that this didn't happen.
00:55:55.000How to allow Russia into the next Winter Olympics by finding loopholes, by saying that you can't, you know, that it should be the individual athlete's right, etc., etc.
00:56:06.000And they have an investigation going on right now Which is the investigation to investigate Richard McLaren's investigation, which was already forensically proven, everything was already shown beyond a reasonable doubt, but to essentially figure out whether or not they are going to allow Russia into the Winter Olympics.
00:56:30.000And they are finally reaching out to Gregory, even though he has been available for a year and three months to speak to them.
00:56:40.000They are finally reaching out to him to have him provide the same evidence that he provided to Richard McLaren and the investigators on that team.
00:56:50.000So they're very reluctantly pursuing this, or very reluctantly even contemplating banning Russia.
00:57:00.000I think what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, I set out making a movie exploring the anti-doping system in sport, and I uncovered essentially the biggest scandal in sport history.
00:57:16.000But behind that scandal is I'm seeing essentially the geopolitics and the business interests of all these organizations that basically stand for one thing.
00:57:28.000They say that they're for something and that they're doing everything to protect their own business interests and do the exact opposite of what they say that they stand for.
00:57:37.000And it calls into question that If the Olympics are up there going, play clean, be true, be fair, don't do this, play by the rules, come into these competitions and respect fellow athletes,
00:57:53.000and then they're presented with a scandal on epic proportions, a scandal that changes its entire history.
00:58:01.000That has been forensically proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and then they don't uphold their own rules, and they don't act or have a punishment for this?
00:58:11.000I mean, you have to ask, what's the point of the Olympics?
00:58:16.000Why should any athlete on planet Earth who is competing cleanly, who's training their whole lives to go into these games with the belief that they are on at least a level playing field, theoretically, And then you have the organization itself not protecting the rights of clean athletes.
00:58:38.000You have to call into question, why have the Olympics?
00:58:43.000What's the point of it if this kind of behavior is allowed and it's unpunishable?
00:58:52.000I think that you have billions and billions and billions of dollars at stake.
00:58:58.000You know, look, I mean, Russia is hosting the World Cup this summer.
00:59:04.000Vitaly Mutko, who was the sports minister, who was elevated to essentially the vice president of Russia, the deputy prime minister after this doping scandal to basically because Putin took him out of harm's way.
00:59:19.000You know, he was sitting on the board of FIFA. He helped Russia get the World Cup bid, you know, so that they're hosting the World Cup next year.
00:59:43.000There is no interest in essentially knocking over the apple cart.
00:59:50.000In the protection of fair sport or athletes' rights or fair play.
00:59:57.000And the athletes are essentially the victim of a country's geopolitical interests and business interests.
01:00:06.000I mean, we see this across all sports, but this is a case where it's night and day, and you're literally sitting at evidence that is so staggering in its scope and scale, and an organization that is basically Like,
01:00:25.000unable to act in any sort of ethical or moral capacity to implement any sort of justice against what has been thousands and thousands and thousands of medals stolen.
01:00:46.000From clean athletes all over the world, not just American athletes, but I mean, any athlete who went into those games clean and a Russian beat them, they basically got their medals stolen from them.
01:01:00.000Are they hoping that this is just going to be swept under the rug and that there's going to be more news that sort of drowns this out?
01:01:09.000In my personal opinion, that's how I see it.
01:01:13.000You know, Gregory Ratchenkov, he wrote a op-ed to the New York Times.
01:01:32.000And in the op-ed, if you read it, he goes into detail about the evidence that he's provided, the IOC's lack of interest in doing anything, and essentially his opinion on Russia's cover-up.
01:02:42.000And this is all a man who was working for the Russian ministry who had the backbone to become a whistleblower and we're still in this cycle of fake news and denial and I'm witnessing this on a daily basis and it's unbelievable because when you look at this story and then you draw a line which is so easy to draw into the current US political climate and what
01:03:12.000is going on with Russian meddling into our election you go well If Russia was willing to do this for the last 40 years, and we have all the evidence now that they actually did this, and they have denied it and continue to deny it and don't take any responsibility,
01:03:28.000and not only that, anybody who has spoke out against them ends up dead.
01:03:33.000Or, you know, or they end up in jail, or they end up, you know, in a fake news cycle.
01:03:38.000I think it's pretty, you know, I think there can be a straight analogy into, you know, if there's any question as to whether or not our election was meddled with, or whether or not Russia is able to To assert its power geopolitically,
01:03:57.000I think this film answers that question and that I'm hoping that our country is going to wake up and go, hey, we're not going to tolerate this.
01:04:08.000We're not going to allow a foreign power to meddle into our election process or into the potential leadership of this country.
01:04:19.000I mean, it's It's pretty scary when you think of the bigger implications of what this scandal is and was on a global level and then looking at what that means, you know, even for America.
01:04:33.000Well, it's essentially highlighting the intentions and what the Russians are willing to do.
01:04:40.000The evidence, though, of doping is so far and beyond the evidence that we have so far about election tampering, right?
01:04:48.000We have evidence of election tampering, but what you're telling me is just so ridiculously undeniable and what your documentary shows is so ridiculously undeniable.
01:05:00.000It's just stunning that they're allowing the Russians to compete.
01:05:34.000Yeah, they're finding a lot of positives from 2012. 2008 has been a little bit harder because of the statute of limitations on the retesting of the samples.
01:05:45.000And for a lot of reasons, the IOC doesn't really want to go in there and get all those samples to retest them.
01:05:53.000Then it proves that the Olympics are a fraud.
01:05:56.000But there's been so much in the past, there's been so many allegations of deception and fraud when it came to the Olympics in the first place.
01:06:04.000There's always been some brewing behind the scenes.
01:06:08.000But you must have been stunned in the process of making this documentary about one thing, and then while this is happening, you know, just completely...
01:06:59.000So, you know, so we're caught back up in these Cold War politics where essentially all of us individuals, you know, on an individual level go, hey, I... I love Russia.
01:07:13.000And yet we're caught up into the geopolitics like we were in the Cold War between our leaders and the government workings and the ministry that we have nothing to do with it.
01:07:28.000You know, I think over the last 20 years, we've viewed Russia as our friend, that they're, you know, that they're our friend.
01:07:37.000And what we're learning now is that it's been a, it's been a pretend pat on the back while we're seeing the government.
01:07:52.000Do things and we're learning things of Russian tampering and involvement that I think that Americans a year or two ago couldn't have imagined.
01:08:05.000And the fact that this story that I uncovered then collides with The election meddling and hacking and Russian involvement into Syria, etc.,
01:08:21.000etc., and that those things were all coming together at the same time.
01:08:25.000I mean, I couldn't have imagined, because even as I uncovered this scandal and worked to expose this and bring it forward, I had no idea at the time that there would be claims that our election was hacked.
01:08:43.000Yeah, that was never even a discussion before this cycle.
01:08:51.000Now, when this all came out and you put this all together, I mean, you had to think to yourself, like, what I've just made is going to change sports.
01:09:03.000I think your documentary is the most powerful anti-doping documentary ever made.
01:09:11.000And I think what you've done, fortuitously, for you to be involved in this and be involved with Gregory as this was all going down, I mean, it's really crazy how the two coincided together and produced this staggering result.
01:09:28.000When you're sitting there at the table with all these water guys and you're discussing everything, it's almost like they didn't want to hear it.
01:09:35.000It's almost like what you were doing was exposing incompetence and corruption in an indefensible way.
01:10:19.000They don't want to do anything that's going to hurt the other.
01:10:24.000You also realize that there are many board members of WADA or part of the IOC. So like Craig Reedy, who is the president of WADA, is also the vice president of the IOC. Dick Pound,
01:10:40.000who founded WADA, was running for the presidency of the IOC and was a vice president of the IOC. So the Olympics and WADA are totally interconnected to each other.
01:10:51.000And in my opinion, or at least what Gregory has told me, is that WADA was essentially established as an arm of the IOC to help protect its sponsorship dollar and to make the Olympics appear as clean,
01:11:12.000as, you know, as up to their Olympic ideals.
01:11:15.000So, you know, what you're seeing within these organizations is WADA has no power to actually do anything.
01:11:23.000So all that they can do is observe and report.
01:11:25.000So in the case of this, the scandal gets uncovered, they then do an investigation, they corroborate everything as truth, and then they advise the Olympics.
01:11:37.000WADA Bless their heart, advise the Olympics that they should ban Russia from the Summer Games in Rio, and that they should ban Russia from the Winter Games coming up in Pyeongchang.
01:11:49.000WADA, that was WADA's recommendation, to which the Olympics did not take that recommendation.
01:11:55.000And WADA doesn't have any power to actually enforce punishment.
01:12:00.000So in the case of Russia, And talking to people inside of WADA that were dealing with this over those four years is they're getting all this information from Russia.
01:12:11.000But ultimately, WADA is going, we don't have the budget.
01:12:14.000We don't really have the money to do this.
01:12:16.000They have like a $25 million a year global budget for the entire world.
01:12:21.000So we don't have the budget to do this.
01:12:23.000We don't have the manpower to do this.
01:12:25.000And ultimately, we don't have the power to do anything anyway.
01:12:30.000And how are we going to go take on Russia?
01:12:32.000So they sat on the information, realizing that they were ultimately going to be powerless to do anything.
01:12:40.000So it's a very complicated system because, at least from what I've seen, is there's so much politics and geopolitics around it that keeps these Operation's essentially,
01:12:56.000you know, ineffective in actually really doing something, and the anti-doping sport almost becomes an ethical and moral decision if the organizations and leaders themselves are not really trying to do anything about it.
01:13:14.000Now, do you think the banning of the track and field team was just a slap on the wrist, or was it a compromise that was reached, where they decided, look, we have to do something, what should we do?
01:13:24.000Well, what had happened is, so the first report was all track and field mandated, and there was so much evidence in regards to track and field.
01:14:03.000And so there was so much in the track and field investigation, the athletics investigation, that the IAAF, the International Athletics Federation, dealing with their own scandal, if you remember this a few years ago, Yeah.
01:14:39.000Gregory upholds the ban, and they uphold the ban because of Gregory's evidence.
01:14:44.000So they were trying to figure out whether or not to uphold the ban, and it was on the eve of the Rio Olympics, and Gregory, through the authorities that he had been working with, Was able to get that evidence and information to the IAAF. The IAAF was able to see that and they upheld the ban for Russia's track and field team,
01:15:07.000which, you know, is a pretty big punishment.
01:15:12.000At least it's taking a stance of, you know, this kind of behavior is not going to be tolerated.
01:15:26.000Courageous and bold move on his part and what a sacrifice to Come forth with all this evidence to risk his life and to I Mean essentially blow the lid off all this.
01:15:37.000I mean if it wasn't for him, what do you have?
01:15:41.000Nothing, you know It's been a You know, I worry about him every day.
01:15:47.000I'm sure I don't I'm not able to talk to him.
01:15:50.000I'm not in contact with him Can you get any messages from anyone else to him or him to you?
01:15:58.000I've been told by his attorneys that he's healthy, that he's in good spirits.
01:16:04.000I know he's continued to work and provide information to WADA, apparently the IOC. He will be providing information to the Olympics as part of their investigation.
01:16:18.000I've been told that he's worked with global authorities and global police agencies to help provide information because he has so much information, not just about Russia, but of all sorts of other things that were going on, of bribes and Payments being made and,
01:16:35.000you know, I don't know what evidence in that regard that he has, but he at least has the, you know, he knows so much.
01:16:44.000And I know that he has been working effortlessly through his legal counsel to provide this information and to work with With global authorities to work with WADA now hopefully the IOC the Olympics US authorities But you know,
01:17:05.000I I don't know what his life's gonna be like.
01:17:08.000Yeah, that's what I was gonna say and I don't know if and when he'll ever be able to see his his family we launched A month or so ago, if anybody's interested on my Twitter page, we launched a GoFundMe for Gregory through an organization called Fair Sport.
01:17:31.000Fair Sport was launched by one of the producers on my film and a guy by the name of Johan Koss, who's been a huge advocate in anti-doping.
01:17:43.000And Fair Sport was basically launched to help other whistleblowers in sport come forward with information, but also to help Gregory in this ongoing battle.
01:17:57.000We're being told that he needs to get money to his wife for an attorney, for legal help.
01:18:12.000So he has incredible legal bills and other help that he needs.
01:18:21.000And so we've launched this GoFundMe to try to To try to provide him a lifeline over the next years, years, because his future is so uncertain.
01:18:43.000And he wants to continue to, you know, be, you know, kind of Frank Abergnell, you know, a guy who had, you know, committed wrongdoings, but he was under the orders of the ministry,
01:18:58.000but he has a lot of information that he has risked his life to bring forward to the world because he felt a huge Burden to do this and he wanted to do this.
01:19:12.000This was his this was his doing and ultimately he entrusted me as his Conduit to bring this story forward and also Gregory has attempted suicide in the past I mean,
01:19:27.000so you're you're and under much less dire circumstances.
01:19:30.000I mean He's essentially a wanted man right now with no freedom.
01:19:45.000You know, you see in this response to...
01:19:49.000His New York Times op-ed that they would, there had been a lot of, if you followed the news in Russia, they had already taken lots and lots of action against him to, you know, kind of silence him to make him irrelevant.
01:20:04.000In the film, I think one of the most shocking moments was at the end of every year, Putin gives a huge press conference with hundreds of journalists and And the doping scandal gets brought up,
01:20:20.000And he goes, and this is just, you know, six months ago, goes, oh, the guy who defected, the citizen who defected, the scientist, I don't even remember his name.
01:21:12.000That's pretending that by not acknowledging, you know, him is not to acknowledge the truth.
01:21:19.000And that is what is going on in this world.
01:21:23.000And so here you see Putin looks straight to the camera and say, I don't even remember Gregory's name.
01:21:29.000I mean, that would be the equivalent of asking an American, who's our president right now?
01:21:36.000And somebody saying, I don't remember his name.
01:21:41.000I mean, that is the level of lies and deception.
01:21:44.000And then you see their reaction to the New York Times op-ed by issuing an arrest warrant for Gregory to again paint him as a criminal, to again pretend that this didn't happen, to again try to obstruct the truth and shift the focus away from the truth and the punishment and what all this evidence is and his bravery of coming forward,
01:22:06.000and instead try to turn him into a criminal.
01:22:10.000So it's startling, and it's incredibly upsetting.
01:22:16.000It was one of the reasons why we latched on to 1984 and Orwell in the film, because everything that is Gregory's life was doublethink, but everything that's going on in our lives, In our geopolitical cycle and with Russia and Putin,
01:22:34.000The truth is no longer the truth, and you don't know what news to believe or what not to believe.
01:22:41.000This is obviously very unexpected for you.
01:22:43.000I mean, you set out to do one documentary and another thing reveals itself in the middle of it, and something incredibly serious.
01:22:49.000What is the impact of this been like for you?
01:22:52.000I mean the weight of this all carrying this around with you It's been a lot From the from November of last year when Gregory came to Los Angeles to us ultimately going to the New York Times and In May of last year May 2016 There was about a seven-month period where myself and my producing partner
01:23:22.000Dan Kogan with Impact Partners and my other producers Jim Swartz and David Fialco, we had this information and this evidence and we knew what this was.
01:24:06.000It was, you know, we'd see, like, a car.
01:24:10.000Gregory, who was not in protective custody at the time, was getting information from his people out of Russia that they were, you know, that they were looking for him, that they were, you know, concerned.
01:24:24.000And we knew the gravity of what this was.
01:24:28.000Like, I understood once I dove into this evidence with Gregory How big this was, like what this truly meant, and that I felt that, you know, Russia and the Olympics, but Russia would probably do anything at all costs to try to,
01:24:47.000you know, not have this come forward, because what this meant, and it meant that their Olympic Games were a fraud, and that they had We've been cheating global sport for the entire modern history, and that it showed the extent to which Russia and the ministry was willing to tamper in international affairs,
01:25:19.000Where we couldn't even get him a lawyer, because every law firm that we would go to would have some sort of conflict of interest with Russia.
01:25:34.000And during that time, two of his friends died within two weeks of each other of heart attacks at age 52 and 59. And Nikita Kamayev, who's 52 years old, and he's running, he had resigned from running the Russian Anti-Doping Agency.
01:25:50.000So technically, the Russian Anti-Doping Agency shouldn't be working with Gregory's lab, the WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency lab, those should be two independent things.
01:26:00.000But these two were working together because there was never any anti-doping in Russia.
01:26:06.000It was the anti-anti-doping system posing as anti-doping.
01:27:38.000There's been so many stories, like in BuzzFeed last year, of the 14 deaths in London all tied to various adversaries of Russia.
01:27:46.000There's been multiple books written on it.
01:27:50.000Even, you know, which was not widely reported, the Russian agent that co-offered apparently the Trump dossier with the MI6, the former MI6 agent, he was found dead in the back of Alexis about five months ago outside of Moscow.
01:28:08.000So, you know, clearly they play by a different set of rules.
01:28:14.000And so this is all going on as we're figuring out how to bring this story to the world.
01:28:20.000And our government, the U.S. government gets involved, the Department of Justice and FBI. They started investigating and we realized that we have to bring this story public and that it's the best way for Gregory to hopefully be protected.
01:28:40.000And that once it's public, it'll be in the world.
01:28:45.000And so we brought it to the New York Times with Gregory and sat with them for three days.
01:28:51.000And then they broke the story and then as a film we then followed that story as it unraveled.
01:28:59.000But yeah, it's been very heavy and very worried about Gregory and also incredibly frustrating to see that What you kind of read about in conspiracy novels and you read about and,
01:29:21.000you know, all these guys who believe that, you know, everybody, you know, of how the system works and then getting to witness this firsthand.
01:29:32.000And also, I think, as an athlete, having kind of my Olympic ideal of what the Olympics is being shattered and seeing that this organization really has no regard for anything other than their own business interests.
01:29:46.000Now, how much time does Gregory have in protective custody?
01:29:52.000Do they have a determined time period where they're willing to protect him?
01:29:58.000I mean, it's the U.S. government that's protecting him, I assume?
01:30:01.000To my understanding, you know, that is the case.
01:30:22.000You know, I'm very optimistic that he'll continue to be okay and that also if something were to go wrong, we'll be able to help him with that,
01:30:37.000you know, through his counsel and team.
01:31:04.000In the film you fall in love with him.
01:31:06.000You just fall in love with this guy and you see him for who he is, which was incredibly important for me.
01:31:13.000As the filmmaker and as his friend, I knew that it would be very easy to paint him into an illusion of somebody that he wasn't.
01:31:22.000Some despicable guy who doped all the Russians.
01:31:25.000And then what you see in the film is truly this loving...
01:31:29.000Kind character who essentially is caught up in a system that he helped perpetuate but he certainly didn't create and that he is ultimately an employee of the Russian government and he was doing his job and that was his job.
01:31:55.000And when you put all the pieces out on a table and you take into account all the different variables with doping and trying to catch these people and what the future holds.
01:32:05.000And then what you were talking about with EPO, with some sort of a biological way to get your body, a genetic way to get your body to reproduce the same sort of chemicals.
01:32:14.000It seems like there's no real solution.
01:32:17.000You lay it all out and you look at what happened in Sochi.
01:32:21.000You look at what's going on right now with the Olympics allowing the Russians to still compete in the Brazilian Games even after all this.
01:32:28.000It doesn't seem like, oh, this has to happen.
01:32:34.000You just look at this big mess and you go, where does this go?
01:32:38.000You know, I think that that is a valid question, because when you start to look at where it goes, first of all, I really believe in, you know, the concept behind clean sport.
01:32:54.000Like, I really believe in that, and I believe that That athletes should go and compete clean because those are the rules.
01:34:04.000And he gets into how And he makes this whole scientific argument about how human beings are not done evolving, that we're just not done evolving.
01:34:13.000We believe that we've done evolving, but he shows through history how we're not done evolving, just like we went from, you know, from Neanderthals and humans and, you know, and he goes through the whole history of it and he shows how basically humans are not done evolving.
01:34:29.000And part of that not being done evolving is we're constantly figuring out how to live longer.
01:34:35.000I sat with a guy yesterday who said the problem isn't whether or not human beings are going to start living to 110 or 120 years old.
01:34:42.000The problem is that we're figuring out how to keep our body healthy, but we haven't figured out how to keep our minds healthy, and that all these people that are going to be living longer lives, there's the problem with Alzheimer's now and dementia, that even though you live a longer life,
01:35:00.000The point being is that we're in an age of medical and scientific technology that every single day is another invention, another advance.
01:35:10.000And, you know, for $200,000 or whatever it is, right now, in the embryo, you can change your kid's eye color.
01:35:18.000You can go in and decide that your kid's going to be six foot and I'm 5'8".
01:35:22.000You know, I mean, wow, I would have loved my parents to have To have seen to it that I was six feet tall.
01:35:30.000You know, and all these kind of things that are going on right now in the medical science and technological advancement world are also things that the world is going to have to start figuring out what they do on the fields of play and athletic because the humans of the future Are going to be better versions of what we have right now,
01:35:55.000just through science, just through technology.
01:35:57.000And then the question again goes into the world of what's clean, what's not clean, what's anti-doping, how do you police sport?
01:36:06.000And those are very hard questions to answer.
01:36:12.000On one hand, you don't want to stop medical, technological progress.
01:36:17.000You don't want to stop people from being able to cure diseases.
01:36:22.000It's almost like some of the technology that they use for aerospace makes its way into everyday use.
01:36:30.000Some of the technology that they're going to use for All these different medical innovations, all these different ways to cure diseases and increase human performance, they're going to make their way into athletics.
01:36:41.000And it's going to be a very blurry line between what is natural and what's not natural.
01:36:45.000I mean, if your parents decide to genetically alter you in the womb and change you to a super athlete, is that your fault?
01:36:52.000And if it's not your choice or your fault, should you be allowed to compete?
01:36:56.000That was always the argument about Corellin.
01:37:03.000They were these tiny people and he was a fucking giant and a gorilla.
01:37:08.000And they used to call him in Russia, they used to call him the experiment.
01:37:13.000And if you look at Corellin, you look at him physically, I mean, there's very few athletes you're ever going to see that look like that guy.
01:37:19.000I mean, he was close to 300 pounds, moved like a cat, and would literally launch grown men through the air.
01:37:26.000They were so terrified of his physical prowess that grown men used to flatten out on their stomach and literally try to cling to the earth to avoid being thrown by him.
01:39:59.000And on top of that, juice to the tits.
01:40:01.000So there was like so many factors that came into play.
01:40:04.000And when you're talking about this state-sponsored Russian, you know, doping program, I mean, you have to really think and include Karelin in that because he was just a massive, massive part of it.
01:40:19.000You know, and people have always speculated for many years, like Fedor, who is arguably the greatest heavyweight of all time, was competing in Pride, which was an openly dirty league.
01:40:29.000When Pride was opposite the UFC, the UFC had very rudimentary testing at the time.
01:40:34.000What they would essentially do is do urine testing at the weigh-ins, which Victor Conte famously said is just an intelligence test.
01:40:44.000I got to know him pretty well through this.
01:40:46.000Yeah, Victor did the podcast a few years back and was talking about it, and this was pre-USADA. Now the UFC has hired USADA and Nowitzki, and Jeff Nowitzki has done a fantastic job and unfortunately just caught Jon Jones, who re-won the title, knocking out Daniel Cormier.
01:41:03.000They stripped him of his title, and now Cormier is going to be the champion again.
01:41:06.000It's so fucking confusing and distorted.
01:41:09.000Because in mixed martial arts, as opposed to even any other sport, even wrestling, wrestling your health is on the line, but nowhere near as much as it is in mixed martial arts.
01:41:17.000So the cheating, it's not a matter of a guy getting across the finish line faster than you.
01:41:21.000It's a matter of a guy landing blows, or a woman landing blows, that they would not have been able to land had they not been cheating.
01:41:29.000It gets very, very tricky because you're talking essentially about not just illegal activity, not just cheating, but potentially assault.
01:42:22.000And that is why this problem is so, I think, Hard and difficult to combat because when you look at what is at stake, the economics at stake, the box of Wheaties, essentially, that going in and nobody remembers second place.
01:42:51.000And if you're not the winner, you might as well have almost never been there.
01:42:54.000Well, and different than any other athletic endeavor because essentially it is their life, but is not professional, which is a really weird thing because you have so much money involved in the Olympics.
01:43:06.000Billions and billions of dollars are going into the hands of people who don't even fucking compete.
01:43:12.000It's unlike any other athletic pursuit.
01:43:13.000If you look at professional sports, I mean, whether it's the NBA or boxing or what have you, the vast majority of the money goes to the athletes themselves.
01:43:53.000And sport is privatized, and the athletes get paid, and that even when you go to the Olympics as an American athlete, you might be competing for America, but America is not paying your way to the Olympics.
01:44:14.000But in China, in Russia, in any essentially, you know, post-communist, communist, any sort of country like that, the athletes are employees of the government.
01:44:29.000And they're essentially state employees, and their job is to go and compete for their country, and they're being paid to do so.
01:44:36.000And the spoils are so incredibly large for the athletes, even in America, that people are still going to be willing to put it on the line and compete because you could be that Michael Phelps guy that winds up getting incredibly rich and famous from winning the Olympics.
01:44:50.000So people are willing to compete and essentially risk their physical body, risk all of their time, their effort, their dedication to trying to accomplish something that All the world's going to be watching massive profits being made,
01:45:06.000and they don't see a fucking penny of it unless they win.
01:45:16.000If you're Simone Biles, if you're Phelps, if you're any one of these athletes in basically sport that people don't really watch and there's money behind any other time of the year other than the Olympics, every four years people care about gymnastics.
01:45:33.000They don't care about gymnastics any other time, but once every four years everybody cares about gymnastics.
01:45:57.000He's a basketball player for the Australia team.
01:46:00.000He's actually an NBA player putting together a shower curtain for where he was staying.
01:46:04.000And on the side here describes the 196-cabin-9-deck supership that the men and women's U.S. basketball teams were staying on and had 250 police officers watching them.
01:46:25.000But the point being that the Olympics are essentially a professional endeavor where the athletes, the ones who people are watching, are not getting any of that money.
01:46:36.000And it's a dirty organization in that regard, because it's not amateur.
01:46:40.000If it was amateur, the world would see it for free.
01:46:49.000It's staggering what NBC paid for the Olympic rights for the next however many games it is.
01:46:55.000Yeah, and what they get paid from the advertisers.
01:46:57.000And that's just the U.S. That's just the U.S. So on a global level, this is the most watched This is the most watched event on planet Earth.
01:47:30.000I mean, it just didn't make any sense that everyone is getting paid but the athletes.
01:47:34.000It's essentially they've managed to keep it this way.
01:47:38.000They had this situation in place a long, long time ago, and then it became this massive global business, this huge empire, and they managed to keep the athletes out of the pay loop.
01:47:54.000And not only that, there were so many people that have profited to the tunes of millions and millions of dollars through the essentially bribery of other countries into all the politics behind that to protect their athletes so that the athletes can continue to win medals.
01:48:15.000Gregory told me a story, which I wonder when this will come true, because I certainly can't verify it, but he told me a story of the former Olympic medical director, and the guy apparently was the head medical director of the Olympics for like 15 years or something.
01:48:33.000And according to Gregory, this guy lives in an incredible chateau somewhere in Switzerland.
01:48:49.000But he's the head medical director of the Olympics.
01:48:51.000And according to Gregory, he's accepted millions and millions and millions of dollars in bribes.
01:48:59.000Through different countries to conceal positives over all these various Olympic Games.
01:49:05.000Whatever it was, you know, Slovakia or whatever, there'd be a positive and this guy would get, you know, half a million dollars to conceal it.
01:49:13.000There's a positive here and he'd take the money and conceal it.
01:49:16.000And I wouldn't be surprised if that's, I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg, because this is huge money and these countries are willing to pay this big money because for a country...
01:49:32.000Like Russia or China or, you know, even Jamaica, right, to win medals, what that does for its country on a world level.
01:49:43.000All of a sudden, when Jamaica's winning medals, everybody's going, wait, we want to go to Jamaica.
01:49:48.000I mean, just what that Jamaican team did probably did for tourism dollars to Jamaica.
01:49:58.000It made Jamaica, and Victor Conti will talk about this, you know, in detail, how the five fastest runners on planet Earth are Jamaican, and Conti will go, yeah, right.
01:50:29.000You know, when Fedor was the king of the world, as far as the heavyweights in mixed martial arts, Putin was regularly at his fights.
01:50:36.000And it was always like this big deal that, you know, Putin was there and Fedor would smash these people, especially when Fedor fought in Russia.
01:50:45.000And, you know, I mean, it's a massive, massive deal to have a top fighter or top athlete representing your country.
01:50:53.000I mean, it's just a huge deal for you to have the number one guy.
01:50:59.000I mean, you look at, you know, like Sharapova, you know, and, you know, Gregory would tell me stories of, you know, I mean, he knew for years what she was taking, what she was up to.
01:51:35.000Wasn't there a situation with Serena Williams where the testers came to her house and she locked herself in a safe room and called the police?
01:53:05.000I mean, but I couldn't imagine if you're thinking about the amount of money that a certain person who is a world-renowned athlete in whatever sport is, I mean, the amount of money that's involved is fucking staggering.
01:53:16.000And if you have stringent drug testing, you know, that's why the John Jones thing was so disheartening.
01:53:21.000Because, you know, Jon Jones, who's arguably, if not the greatest mixed martial arts fighter of all time, he's number two.
01:53:28.000You know, maybe Mighty Mouse is number one, but you would say that Mighty Mouse has not faced this kind of competition that Jon has.
01:53:34.000So that would put Jon into number one in a lot of people's eyes.
01:53:37.000But to have him test positive like that was so disheartening for people and just such a heartbreaker.
01:53:43.000Because people had just hoped and prayed that, you know, him coming back and winning that way, like, maybe he'll get his shit together.
01:53:49.000You know, when you see a guy with massive potential and he's been involved in all these fuck-ups in the past, maybe finally he's got his shit together.
01:53:56.000Or maybe what happened is he came back and he realized that he was never gonna be what he was gonna be.
01:54:10.000And I think, you know, you see that in so many guys.
01:54:15.000I think that once you've been on that program or you understand that program, I think it's probably very, very hard psychologically to go off of it.
01:54:24.000And also, you know, you're always going to be pushing those limits.
01:54:30.000There's, you know, in Armstrong in 2009 when he staged that comeback, You know, I believe that he was trying to do it clean, and then all of a sudden realized he was going to get his ass kicked doing it clean.
01:54:46.000And you look at that comeback year, which is so interesting, that Contador, who beat him, set the all-time fastest times in that year, and that was supposed to be the clean tour.
01:55:06.000Contador set the all-time fastest times and, funny enough, that year where Armstrong got third, had he been doing the tour any other year, the watts per kilo that he had put up, the power that he had put up,
01:55:42.000And now with CRISPR, you know, now with this new technology that allows people to essentially, I mean, it's on the table how the potential is going to completely play out.
01:55:53.000But other countries are using it right now in embryos.
01:55:55.000You know, whether or not humans in the United States, whether they're going to use it and you're going to see these...
01:56:06.000As this technology progresses and it gets better and better, if you find out that your children have the genetic markers that could essentially lead to Alzheimer's down the road, why would you want your children to have Alzheimer's?
01:58:01.000I don't know what it is, because I don't think...
01:58:02.000We were talking about this with some friends.
01:58:05.000We were saying, like, if everybody decides to stay clean, but yet the technology becomes viable for the average person, you're going to have a mailman that looks like the Incredible Hulk, and you're going to be watching these scrawny guys fighting the UFC. No one's going to tolerate that.
01:58:20.000We're just going to have to assume at some point in time that all these people are enhanced.
01:58:24.000We're just going to assume that it's more than just dedication and hard work.
01:58:29.000And honestly, it's going to be a sad day when that happens, because when that does happen, and we just accept the fact that we've created these genetic freaks, they're not going to be special.
01:59:05.000You didn't get it from somebody literally taking the embryo and altering the genetics in the embryo and making him a destruction machine, making him a violent force of nature like Mike Tyson was in his prime.
01:59:18.000The idea that you could take a regular person like young Jamie over there and turn him into Some sort of crazy freak athlete.
01:59:26.000It's weird because when a freak athlete comes along, you see them and you go, wow, that guy's a freak.
01:59:44.000That in the U.S. or whatever, we're looking at it on the...
01:59:48.000You know, the $40 million a year contract level of it and whether or not that's ethical and what do we do about that all of a sudden we have athletes as genetic mutants and what is that future?
01:59:59.000But then when you look at it on the geopolitical level and what a country is willing to do to win and what it means for their athletes to win and assert power.
02:00:09.000I mean, like, I remember when, you know, a couple years ago when Germany won the World Cup.
02:00:59.000I mean, it's such a huge part of the recreation of the people and, you know, giving people something to be excited about.
02:01:04.000Now, when you do take into consideration this new technology that's on the horizon, CRISPR, and who knows what's after CRISPR, right?
02:01:12.000And then you look at what Russia's been willing to do with their state-sponsored doping program, you've got to think they're already involved in that.
02:01:21.000Well, you know, Gregory said something to me interesting.
02:01:24.000He says, well, you know, whatever they put on that WADA list, meaning whatever banned substances they put on the list, we've already got in Russia, we've already got another 10 or 20 that we're messing with.
02:01:40.000If you remember last year, the whole Meldonium scandal with Sharapova and all these athletes.
02:01:46.000A couple guys in the U.S. On Meldonium.
02:01:49.000Well, that was a substance that Russia had been, you know, messing with for years, knowing that it wasn't on the ban list.
02:01:57.000And then they essentially put it on the ban list like that, and then they started testing for it, and they did it as a, you know, it was very intentional to go catch everybody on Meldonium.
02:02:08.000But, you know, according to Gregory, they're already figuring out the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.
02:02:17.000Especially when you have a state-sponsored program, and there are no state-sponsored programs that we know of like that in America.
02:02:23.000I mean, that would give them a massive advantage.
02:02:26.000No, we don't know of any program where, I mean, when you think about what that is, it would be like the equivalent of Obama or Trump, you know, going, hey, American athlete, you need to be on this program if you're going to be on the national team and represent America.
02:02:46.000You go on this program, and if you don't want to be on this program, well, you're not on the team.
02:02:50.000And what Gregory was doing, which was part of the whole ethical and moral conundrum, which is an interesting thing which we never get into in the film, is he was constantly being forced to sacrifice athletes.
02:03:04.000So part of this system, the only way that it would work is you had to have lambs.
02:03:09.000If nobody ever tested positive, right, well, it would look like there's something wrong with the system.
02:03:18.000And they would consistently have positive tests.
02:03:21.000And the guys who would test positive, what they would do...
02:03:26.000They were the guys who either were past champions that the ministry looked at and said, hey, you're not going to go and win another gold medal.
02:04:45.000So they figure out how they can break into these bottles and swap the urine.
02:04:51.000But he personally was never doing that.
02:04:53.000What he would do is the FSB, these guys, would come in, they had this device, and like once a week, whenever they needed to do it, they'd come in and swap out all these B samples that they would keep in storage, you know, just for safekeeping, and the A sample was always swapped.
02:05:09.000But the B sample, they would like, you know, there wasn't going to be a need to retest it right that moment.
02:05:15.000So they'd keep it for a week or whatever, and then the guys would come in and they would swap out all the samples.
02:05:20.000So part of this system was that he kept a urine database.
02:05:26.000So he had 16,000 matching urine samples.
02:05:33.000That he was holding in the laboratory that they should have all been disposed of after three months according to the code.
02:05:38.000So any international athlete that would come into Russia to compete in the games, kids, gymnasts, anybody competing in Russia, and if they tested clean, Russia would hold their urine, put it down for the specific gravity, the steroid profile,
02:05:54.000keep it in a database, You know, the urine's being kept frozen.
02:05:58.000So they would always have samples to swap for any of the Russian athletes at any time, even if they didn't have a clean sample for that athlete.
02:06:07.000So because most of the Russian athletes, they were on the program, in Sochi they took extraordinary precaution.
02:06:13.000They collected clean urine of each of the athletes on the program.
02:06:18.000But outside of that, what they were doing was just going, hey, We have 16,000 samples to choose from, so whatever is going to best match the Russian athlete to swap with, we can take the urine of another athlete, a clean athlete,
02:06:34.000and make it look pretty much identical to that Russian athlete because they could choose from 16,000 samples.
02:06:48.000I got to see a spreadsheet and then on the eve of this investigation breaking...
02:06:55.000And WADA is going to go raid this laboratory, and there's thousands of missing samples.
02:07:01.000And in the report, this report, this 335-page report, I'm trying to remember, it was something like 1,400 samples are missing, or 1,400 samples were destroyed.
02:07:24.000And they had to bring in these containers, industrial trash containers.
02:07:28.000And in a dark of night operation, emptying out the lab and bringing all these bottles to like some industrial trash where they dumped them and crushed them and incinerated them.
02:09:02.000They can launch fake news against you.
02:09:04.000They can put you in jail, just like they did to Gregory, just like they're doing.
02:09:07.000And so everybody, no matter how powerful, they all have that fear of the government in their mind.
02:09:13.000And what you see, because I saw this firsthand in Russia, where I have some very wealthy, very powerful Russian friends, and they will never talk bad about the government.
02:09:47.000Or you're going to cross the paths of a wrong person.
02:09:50.000And that's what we've seen in all these stories year after year after year out of Russia and certainly, you know, other countries or, you know, the mysterious death of Kim Jong Il's brother, etc.
02:10:20.000They did a, this was interesting, about two weeks ago, Russia's trying to get reinstated for the Winter Olympics.
02:10:26.000Well, not reinstated, they're trying to make sure that they can go to the Winter Olympics.
02:10:30.000So they release a story through Sputnik News and RT, the Russian, you know, Times, Russia Today, and they release this story that McLaren, the investigator in the film behind all the Gregory's evidence, That McLaren is willing to forgive Russia,
02:10:46.000that he believes that there's errors in his report, and that WADA believes that Russia should be reinstated and allowed to go to the Winter Olympics.
02:11:07.000And then, you know, next day McLaren's out there, you know, going, that's not true.
02:11:11.000But his press release was picked up by a handful of outlets where the Russia release, because of how they're able to disseminate news, went global.
02:11:23.000I always watch a guide like that, and I wonder, like, you look at the Russian administration that's in right now, and you want, how long can they keep that going?
02:11:30.000And you would look at it in terms of America, like Americans would revolt.
02:11:33.000But like you were saying, in Russia, I mean, I remember the story about some Russian oligarch who...
02:11:40.000Spoke ill of Putin, and I don't remember what the deal was that he was discussing, but they stripped him of all his money, took his company away, and put him in jail.
02:11:48.000Oh, wasn't that, um, not Medevev, uh, I know who you're talking, what's his name?
02:11:56.000Well, he was the richest man in Russia at the time.
02:11:58.000They just took his entire fortune, locked him in a cell, kept him there for years, then eventually released him, which is an even bolder move.
02:12:06.000They're like, look, we just dismantled you, and now we'll just let you go.
02:12:35.000For the other $14.8 billion, it's only money.
02:12:40.000Just freed after 10 years in jail, told journalists at a press conference in Berlin two days ago that he didn't know how much money he had left.
02:12:47.000Leonid Bershidsky, a columnist for the Russian edition of Forbes, thinks he has an idea.
02:14:00.000Well, I didn't put the two of them together because when I was watching the film, essentially, I was just thinking about the anti-doping ramifications.
02:14:07.000But, I mean, it's pretty obvious that if they're doing this, and there seems to be a lot of evidence that they've at least attempted.
02:14:18.000I mean, there was some new thing recently about Facebook ads.
02:14:41.000And the only thing that I can think is that with the information age that we're currently experiencing, I feel like we're in the adolescence of this, and that what seems to highlight This age is that the distance between people and information just keeps getting shorter and shorter and The ability to hide things hide devious acts and hide money and hide influence and hide manipulation seems to be it seems
02:15:12.000to be able to People seem to be able to find out things quicker and quicker now.
02:15:17.000Yeah, I was having a conversation about this the other day, where if it's, you know, I mean, look at the Instagram age and Facebook and everything.
02:15:25.000Everybody seems to know everything about everyone, and that anything eventually comes out.
02:15:31.000And I think, again, we're experiencing the adolescence of this.
02:15:35.000I think there's going to come a point in time with, and I believe it's going to be through technological innovation, that we're going to be able to read each other's minds.
02:15:43.000I think the idea of the internet, if you went to someone in the 1800s and told them one day you're going to be able to talk to your phone and ask your phone, you know, a bunch of different questions that will literally give you the answer, they would go, what the fuck is a phone?
02:15:55.000Like, what are you talking about, man?
02:16:22.000This is just a couple hundred years ago.
02:16:24.000I mean, what are we going to experience a couple hundred years from now?
02:16:27.000I think we're going to be able to read each other's minds.
02:16:29.000I think the idea that the way we operate now, our operating system of language, the way we communicate with each other through mouth noises, And that we have a dictionary.
02:16:53.000And as you're talking, all the people that are listening are doing the exact same thing.
02:16:56.000I think it is entirely possible that in the future we will swap that out for some sort of universal system, some sort of universal system that is neurologically connected, that we're going to have something that is either embedded into our minds, embedded into our brain itself,
02:17:12.000embedded into our neurological system.
02:17:18.000If technology keeps going, and we keep progressing, and there's no reason to think other than some sort of a natural disaster or some sort of a human-created disaster that it doesn't keep going the way it's going, we're going to get to some place where we can see each other's minds.
02:17:31.000We're going to be able to read each other's thoughts, for good or bad.
02:17:59.000I mean, even in the, which you wouldn't know about the film, but the way that that evidence was truly corroborated was the electronic trail.
02:18:10.000And here's the amazing thing, which people probably don't realize, is so, like Gregory, when he comes to the U.S., he had erased all of his phones, because he was under the ministry order to erase everything.
02:18:21.000And what was happening is the athletes were snapping a photo of their doping control forms.
02:18:27.000So that's how Gregory would know what number corresponded to what athlete.
02:18:31.000I mean, this was very intricate how this was going down because nobody in the lab, you know, which, you know, if you're the scientist and you're getting Armstrong's sample, you don't know what's Armstrong's sample.
02:19:19.000They told him to erase it all from his phone, all from his computers, everything.
02:19:23.000And when he comes here, he brings his old computer and he brings his old phones because this guy, he just knows.
02:19:29.000And when he turns over all the evidence to WADA and the US authorities and Interpol, what they're able to do is they're able to get all this erased information,
02:19:45.000All this erase stuff that was on his phone and computer and retrieve it.
02:19:54.000Like a massive portion of this evidence.
02:19:58.000What they were also able to do is what we probably don't realize, and this goes into what you're saying, is like when you send an email, if you've got the metadata behind it, so like he was getting emails sent through the Russian ministry, so you're sitting there going, well, how do you know where this came from?
02:20:16.000They can go back in the actual through the metadata that is being sent in a computer and show exactly from what computer where date time that email was sent and that's how they were able to corroborate all his evidence through Through basically forensics of,
02:20:35.000you know, whatever that study is of electronic forensics.
02:20:39.000When you talk about reading minds and that kind of stuff, I mean, half of that technology is already there.
02:20:45.000I mean, any photo you take on your phone, even if you delete it, they can get it back and they can figure out exactly where you were, where it was sent, how it was sent, the spot that you sent it from, where it's nuts.
02:20:58.000I mean, for sure, there's going to be some new technologies a couple years from now that's going to make it even easier to do than that.
02:21:05.000And when you read about, you know, there's all these apps with encryption software and stuff, and I mean, I've given up the idea that you can be essentially invisible, or that if somebody wants to get your information,
02:21:20.000they're going to get your information.
02:21:24.000And, you know, another thing that's really interesting is that we're looking at photos and we're looking at video and email, and we're assuming that it's going to be in the future more access to photo, more access to email, more access to video.
02:22:41.000A complete dissolving of reality as we know it.
02:22:44.000Which I think even goes into, like, the whole anti-doping world of it in sports where, you know, you actually just made me think about, like, Terminator.
02:22:54.000Where you're sitting there going, well, wait, you think it's a real person and it's a Terminator, but you think of all the technologies that are going on right now and why...
02:23:05.000Won't there be a chip in your brain that basically takes away pain so that you can, you know, persevere in an MMA fight that takes away your, you know, all these different technologies that are essentially controlling your synapses,
02:23:23.000controlling your reflexes, it's all there.
02:23:29.000And then obviously enhancing the human body itself.
02:23:32.000I mean, there was a technology that we've been talking about recently where they were trying to combine spider silk with human skin tissue to make an artificial skin, a replacement skin that's bulletproof.
02:23:50.000Yeah, they're going to genetically engineer human skin, so it'll look like human skin, it'll have much of the same properties of human skin, but it'll be bulletproof.
02:24:06.000I mean, the power of that bullet would still, like, really mess you up.
02:24:09.000Well, sure, you could do some tissue trauma underneath the surface, but the actual skin itself won't break.
02:24:17.000It'd be like having a bulletproof vest all over your body.
02:24:19.000I mean, that's what Kevlar essentially is.
02:24:21.000What Kevlar is, is a material that is so dense and so thick It's so impenetrable that when you shoot a regular bullet into it, the regular bullet hits it, does not go through it, and just spreads out and expands.
02:24:35.000It's still very painful for the person who gets shot, but it protects your life.
02:24:39.000And we could easily see that happen with entire bodies made out of that stuff.
02:24:43.000I mean you got to believe it's probably already out there like in some secret lab they've already like developed the skin and sitting in like a Petri dish that's bulletproof skin.
02:24:54.000Yeah, if I'm reading it on a science website for sure I'm not the first one to get the information.
02:24:58.000I mean this is getting to the highest level.
02:25:00.000I mean where is the real money, right?
02:25:02.000It's the real question is and I don't know this answer is The top scientists in the world, the top innovators in the world, I mean, when do they scoop those people up?
02:25:11.000When does the government come in with some black ops money and say, hey, we would like to hire you and give you X amount of money to create this, and this is what we know so far about that, and here we're going to take you to Groom Lake out in the middle of Nevada and show you some lab that you didn't even know existed.
02:25:28.000Yeah, but you've got to believe that that's already way into going on, because there's nothing that we spend more money on Sure.
02:25:58.000We sell the world our weapons and that is what is employing like millions and millions of people in this country is basically our military and our defense and ultimately, you know, developing spider skin.
02:26:12.000Yeah, I mean this and this is what we're seeing, right?
02:26:15.000This is what we get to see and look at.
02:26:16.000Who knows how many different programs are going on right now as we're speaking that we have no knowledge of whatsoever.
02:26:22.000I mean when they released Stealth Bomber and a couple other of these like sort of experimental vehicles where they were putting together these things once they they actually released them when they actually put you know had press conferences and showed people they had been working on these things forever.
02:26:40.000Who's under wraps for like 20 years and all of a sudden you see this thing you're like whoa.
02:26:47.000I was in Palmdale and that's near Edwards Air Force Base and we were filming Fear Factor out there and this is right after September 11th and so they were doing all these exercises and these things were flying over the desert.
02:27:00.000I mean, once you see them in real life, you're like, holy shit, that's a fucking UFO. This black thing, not shaped like any plane you've ever seen before, flying across the sky.
02:27:11.000And you just look at it and go, what the fuck is that thing?
02:27:15.000Yeah, and that's like 20 years old now.
02:27:21.000I mean, they probably have some ridiculous stuff.
02:27:23.000And then there's some theoretical ideas.
02:27:25.000You know, there's some magnetic drives they're trying to put together.
02:27:28.000I mean, there's a bunch of speculation about different types of weapons that they're trying to...
02:27:34.000To anti-matter weapons, some things that are just going to be able to just completely annihilate anything they touch and whether or not they're going to go completely through the earth if you hit things.
02:27:46.000I mean, they're just going to keep getting better and better at blowing shit up.
02:27:49.000You know, I mean, the amount of power that we have in the nuclear arsenal today and the amount of power in the weapons in comparison to the weapons that we used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's insane.
02:28:04.000I mean, they're hundreds and hundreds of times more powerful now.
02:28:07.000No, it's staggering to kind of understand what kind of destruction is possible.
02:28:12.000Like, nothing, I don't think, on the level of what we're seeing in natural destruction of what nature can do alone, but...
02:28:18.000Yeah, but it's also fascinating when you think about the implications that your film has sort of brought to light, is that a lot of this destruction, like when you were talking about the Ukraine, a lot of this destruction and a lot of this, the confidence that they have to go into these places and use these weapons is kind of dependent upon public opinion that's dependent upon sport.
02:28:40.000Right, and dependent on basically kicking somebody else's ass without the weapons.
02:28:45.000And then that allows you to almost like weaponize because you have the power of the country behind you.
02:28:51.000You know, what was interesting is after Sochi and Putin's rating goes up to, you know, 95% or something like that, that everybody in Russia supported him going into Ukraine too.
02:29:59.000And I remember a few years ago when the Broncos won the Super Bowl, and you're looking at the statistic was something like 85% of the city of Denver showed up for a parade on a Monday.
02:30:19.000So if you don't believe that the governor of Colorado that day could have been like, hey, we're going to go seize Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, and Utah.
02:30:32.000Everybody in the state of Colorado would have been like...
02:31:13.000I mean, I think if you looked at human beings as a whole...
02:31:17.000And you look at what we used to be versus what we are now.
02:31:21.000If you were some sort of an objective life form from another planet that didn't have any vested interest in, you know, understanding our culture and just tried to examine us as a super organism...
02:31:39.000As long as we stay alive, as long as we don't get hit by an asteroid, killed by a hurricane, swamped in an earthquake or tsunami, we're gonna continue to make better shit.
02:31:47.000We're gonna continue to become better humans, technically.
02:31:52.000I think even from a moral standpoint, I think we're better now than we were before, which is why things like Putin are so disturbing, which is what, you know, if you go back to like the Genghis Khan era, it was the norm, right?
02:32:02.000That was how dictators ran, that's how kings ran and emperors ran their dynasties.
02:32:08.000It's more uncommon now and more disturbing because the main superpower doesn't do it that way, the United States of America.
02:32:14.000That's one of the reasons why people are so patriotic about America, because when you look back at human history, we are as fucked up as we are and undeniably fucked up as it is.
02:32:25.000We are the shining example of what's possible in the future.
02:32:29.000That you can keep going and eventually create some sort of a system that's different, some sort of a experiment in self-government that's different than has ever existed before.
02:32:40.000Where you can get to a point where a fucking reality show president, or a reality show Host becomes the president of the United States of America for good or for bad It opens people's eyes to the possibility like wow like this This is a new thing like this in terms of human history.
02:32:56.000This is a new thing this whole Experiment this whole thing called the United States.
02:33:00.000It's only a few hundred years old is a very new thing If you looked at us objectively, if you were something from another planet, you would say, well, what's the endgame with these fuckers?
02:33:11.000Well, what they're trying to do is make better and better stuff.
02:33:13.000And I think the real issue with that is artificial intelligence.
02:33:17.000Because we look at artificial intelligence, we say the word artificial intelligence, and we think of it as like a thing that we can turn on or turn off.
02:33:26.000We think of it as a device, a VCR or a fucking television.
02:33:31.000We think of it as a piece of equipment that a human has created that may be able to think for itself.
02:33:38.000I think it's just a life form that exists from parts and pieces that we're designed to put together.
02:33:46.000I think our entire thing about being attached to materialism, our constant thirst for innovation, we always want the iPhone 8 is out, but iPhone iPhone X's around the corner.
02:33:56.000Do you hold out or do you get the new one now?
02:35:00.000We're limited by the scope of our evolution.
02:35:03.000You look and you're talking about human beings having been...
02:35:06.000No, that's what I was getting into with Juan Enriquez, which is, you know, where his argument, and I actually interviewed him for the film and ended up not using it because of where the story went, but his argument was not the moral, ethical argument around anti-doping in sport.
02:35:24.000It was just purely the argument of, hey, look at evolution, look at reality, look at where we're going, look at where...
02:35:33.000Human beings are essentially transcending to, and then how do you ever have the basis of what is the concept behind clean sport, or even transcending sport,
02:35:49.000whatever you want to call it, is being a pure ethos, because there are so many Technological and really evolutionary variables that seem to make that fundamentally difficult.
02:36:56.000And the story behind that is that the USOC came to Don Catlin because Catlin had found the positives and basically those nine samples just vanished.
02:37:10.000And you remember when Ben Johnson tried to compete clean after that?
02:38:11.000I wonder if Dick Pound adopted the name prior to penises being a dick, or when he started calling himself Dick Pound, he knew that it was a dick, or if he adopted it post-dick hair,
02:38:26.000or at what point he basically said, yeah, I'm going to be Dick Pound.
02:38:30.000Well, Richard to Dick is always a weird one, too.
02:39:05.000When you said that, I thought I still had it on.
02:39:07.000So this guy, Dick Pound, Richard Pound, who actually...
02:39:14.000Founded WADA. At the time, he's basically within the IOC. And you talk about a crazy conflict of interest here.
02:39:21.000So Richard Pound was an athlete, a swimmer, an Olympic swimmer, actually.
02:39:25.000And then he got into being in the IOC, and he's a lawyer.
02:39:30.000And his law firm has been representing the Olympics for the last, I don't even know how many years, 30 years in all of their sale of the Olympics to the entire world is Richard Pound's law firm,
02:39:47.000And Richard Pound's also the vice president of the IOC. And Richard Pound establishes WADA. He's the first head of WADA in 1999. Now, an interesting story is he's Canadian and he is essentially like the ambassador to Canada during the time that Ben Johnson tests positive.
02:40:12.000And so Ben Johnson tests positive and And Canada sends Richard Pound in there to basically see if they can do something to make this go away.
02:40:24.000Is there some way that basically Ben Johnson cannot be positive?
02:40:30.000And Dick Pound, as he will tell you, was there essentially trying to negotiate, find a loophole on behalf of Canada that Ben Johnson would not be positive, but that apparently he was just so radically positive and there was just nothing that anybody could do about it.
02:40:51.000It was just like, you know, hey, we'd really like to help you, but this is really, really bad.
02:40:59.000I remember an article that described the whites of his eyes being yellow because his liver was overwhelmed trying to process the amount of steroids over his body.
02:41:10.000I mean, he argues that the coaches, you know, that he had no idea.
02:41:21.000I mean, I wonder what they really did think was going to happen, or how they thought they would pull it off.
02:41:25.000Well, I mean, it was these kind of scandals that forced the IOC to create WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, because they looked at a brand in crisis, and how were they going to regain...
02:43:03.000I mean, we have this idea that you'd be able to tell looking at someone whether or not they're on steroids.
02:43:07.000That was always the idea, like, the sniff test.
02:43:09.000Well, Gregory, the funny thing is, I was working with him over his time, he'd run into guys and he'd be like, He's on HGH. He's on HGH. He took too much HGH. Oh, definitely.
02:43:21.000I mean, he could, Gregory could just look at somebody and know whether or not they were, like, toping.
02:43:27.000And there were a time, you know, because I was on this program for a year and he looks at me, he's like, Brian, you're taking too much HGH. Really?
02:43:46.000I mean, he would, it was just, you know, he could just look at somebody and know.
02:43:52.000Like he just, he just, anybody he knew and we would meet people over that year, um, There's a funny story when I was in Moscow, when I go to meet him after this Haute Root race, and I bring with me,
02:44:08.000which again, we don't get into in the film, it's pretty crazy, I'd figured out, essentially because I wasn't going to be tested every day, that I was going to simulate the protocol, so during this second race...
02:44:19.000I'm peeing every single night into Ziploc bags and basically sealing the Ziploc bag and storing this frozen urine in like a little thermos.
02:44:29.000And the idea is I'm going to bring all my frozen urine with me to Moscow.
02:44:33.000And I had all these blood tests done too before or after to build the biological passport and the steroid profile.
02:44:42.000So I bring him all my frozen urine to Moscow, and he had went into the process of literally testing this urine that I had brought him in Ziploc bags that I had smuggled with me into Russia.
02:45:00.000And the second part of the investigation comes out before he's able to covertly test all of my urine within his lab, which he shouldn't have been doing.
02:45:10.000But I go to this birthday party, and in the film, I shot it on my iPhone, that scene of chaos with the birthday party.
02:45:20.000And he's there, and he's singing, and he's introducing me, and he's doing karaoke, and he's dancing.
02:45:26.000So that party was for a Russian gold medal shot putter.
02:45:32.000And everybody at that party were like former gold medal shot putters, wrestling, decathlon.
02:46:05.000It was like, it was every single, and we were at this party, and there was like 30 of them, and I have these pictures of me with, like, giants.
02:46:13.000I mean, literally, like, just the biggest human beings you've ever seen in your life.
02:46:17.000And Gregory's like, yes, yes, I helped him, I helped him, I helped him, I helped him.
02:46:56.000I'd say to your listeners, anybody that wants to throw a bone to Gregory, he's got a GoFundMe page, and he could really, really use that help.
02:47:05.000And that GoFundMe page is on your Twitter page?
02:47:10.000I posted a tweet today with a link to his GoFundMe, and if you go on GoFundMe and search for Gregory Rodchenkov, you'll find it too, but it's right there on my Twitter, at Brian Fogle, and...