The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #685 - Jeff Novitzky

00:00:00.000 Ah, we're live.

00:00:00.000 Alright Jeff, thank you very much, man.

00:00:02.000 Appreciate you coming on here.

00:00:03.000 It was very cool talking to you in Brazil and even though it was a very short conversation, I learned a lot and I got very fired up about this podcast.

00:00:11.000 Awesome, man.

00:00:11.000 Great to be here.

00:00:12.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:13.000 Well, thank you and thank you for all the stuff you've done.

00:00:17.000 For folks who don't know, you're the guy who essentially took down Lance Armstrong or at least made the case or solidified.

00:00:25.000 I mean, how would you describe it?

00:00:26.000 Yeah, I mean, I was involved in the investigation.

00:00:29.000 You know, it was a case run by Department of Justice out of Los Angeles.

00:00:33.000 I was one of the case agents on it, so I was associated with it.

00:00:36.000 That's one of the things that's creepy about it, is that the government was going after bike riders. 0.96

00:00:41.000 It's like, wouldn't you think that they've got some really important shit to do? 0.90

00:00:43.000 Like, I think that bothered a lot of people about the baseball thing with Barry Bonds and with Mark McGuire and all that Sammy Sosa stuff. 0.99

00:00:51.000 It's like, why is the fucking Congress involved? 0.98

00:00:53.000 And it seems... 0.99

00:00:55.000 Yeah, you know, on one hand, these were laws that, you know, the agencies I was with were tasked to investigate.

00:01:02.000 On the other hand, in terms of importance, you know, always on a personal level, I looked at the message that was being sent to the youth, not only of this country, but of the world, and that it became a fact that in, you know, the mid to late 90s,

00:01:18.000 Steroid use was so pervasive in sports that kids are smart these days.

00:01:25.000 They're on the internet.

00:01:27.000 They know what's going on.

00:01:28.000 You really did see it trickling down to kids in high school.

00:01:33.000 At some point, if you wanted to take that sport far enough, you ultimately had to make that decision.

00:01:38.000 Hey, do I want to keep going?

00:01:39.000 If I do, I'm going to have to make a decision whether or not I'm going to use these things.

00:01:45.000 I think about the number of conversations that probably happened around dinner table between parents and kids because of these cases.

00:01:53.000 Got to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

00:01:57.000 And that alone, right there, I think would justify the resources that were spent.

00:02:03.000 Defendants in those cases, it was always overblown in terms of the resources that the government did spend doing it.

00:02:12.000 You know, you heard often the Barry Bonds case was 50-55 million dollar case.

00:02:17.000 It really wasn't.

00:02:19.000 You know, and that case involved not steroid use but lying in front of a grand jury.

00:02:24.000 So it transcended steroid use.

00:02:27.000 It was about lying and telling the truth and misusing the justice system.

00:02:31.000 I've had agents all across the country on non-steroid related cases come up to me and say, hey, thanks for that case because we can use that as an example.

00:02:40.000 When we go out and interview witnesses or witnesses come before a grand jury that, look, you need to tell the truth.

00:02:46.000 And if you don't, look what can happen.

00:02:48.000 You know, the government went after Barry Bonds or certainly will go after you.

00:02:52.000 And when that truth starts being told like that, our legal and justice system starts working.

00:02:58.000 When it doesn't, it breaks down.

00:03:00.000 So it wasn't $55 million?

00:03:01.000 How much was actually spent around?

00:03:03.000 It was funny.

00:03:04.000 49?

00:03:05.000 Yeah.

00:03:06.000 49.50.

00:03:07.000 No, not even close.

00:03:08.000 Some media outlet did a freedom of information request with the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco who prosecuted the case.

00:03:16.000 So this was after the case was done.

00:03:18.000 So they put the dollar figures together of what the trial costs, not necessarily the entire investigation, but the trial itself.

00:03:26.000 I think it was less than $100,000.

00:03:28.000 And the comment was, geez, this is the most cost-efficient, high-profile trial that's probably ever happened.

00:03:36.000 But that's not a full account of all the money that was spent trying to bring him down.

00:03:40.000 It's not.

00:03:40.000 And again, this wasn't trying to bring anybody down.

00:03:43.000 This was a situation where he went before a grand jury, didn't tell the truth, His grand jury transcript, ironically enough, was leaked by the Balco, one of the Balco attorneys, defense attorneys. 0.65

00:03:59.000 And so the public all of a sudden got to read exactly what he said in there.

00:04:03.000 It was obvious that he at least was obstructing, if not outright not telling the truth.

00:04:09.000 And so I think the Justice Department was faced with, what do we do now?

00:04:13.000 What kind of message are we sending If we don't prosecute this guy, it sends a message that far transcends steroid use in sports.

00:04:24.000 There's thousands of witnesses every day that appear before grand juries, so it was almost a necessity to have to do it.

00:04:29.000 It wasn't about steroids, but it was about steroids, because the only reason why he was there was questioning him about steroids.

00:04:35.000 So it essentially was.

00:04:36.000 And that's how a lot of people feel when it comes to organized crime.

00:04:39.000 Didn't they bust Al Capone on tax evasion?

00:04:42.000 That's how a lot of people get caught.

00:04:43.000 They get caught lying while they're in the middle of committing a crime.

00:04:46.000 But it's really about the original crime, wasn't it?

00:04:48.000 Well, they did.

00:04:49.000 I mean, that's why he was brought in there.

00:04:50.000 But when he was brought in, it was made very clear that, look...

00:04:53.000 He's not prosecuting you for using steroids.

00:04:56.000 He was given immunity, actually, showing that as long as you tell the truth, you're not a target in this thing.

00:05:01.000 You're just a witness.

00:05:02.000 So tell the truth.

00:05:03.000 But he was never convicted for using steroids, right?

00:05:06.000 Correct.

00:05:07.000 And wasn't he off the hook even as far as the investigation goes?

00:05:13.000 He never did any time.

00:05:14.000 Was he even penalized?

00:05:16.000 How was he penalized other than having to go through trials and spend a lot of money?

00:05:20.000 Yeah.

00:05:20.000 I mean, ultimately, after he was convicted in the jury trial, the judge sentenced him to house arrest.

00:05:27.000 I bet he's got a sweetie house.

00:05:28.000 It's not really that bad.

00:05:30.000 Can you even watch TV when you're in the house arrest?

00:05:32.000 I think you can. 0.95

00:05:33.000 That seems a little ridiculous. 0.72

00:05:34.000 I like being at home.

00:05:36.000 But I tell you, even in a situation like that, I tell people all the time, Man, being under investigation to begin with, going through a public trial with potentially embarrassing things about you, that's rough.

00:05:49.000 I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, notwithstanding what the ultimate sentence was.

00:05:54.000 But the most embarrassing thing was that he did what everybody knew he did, which was take steroids to get bigger.

00:05:59.000 I mean, that was the most embarrassing thing about it all, right?

00:06:01.000 It wasn't anything else.

00:06:02.000 It was personal.

00:06:03.000 I mean, there was more things.

00:06:04.000 It was ex-girlfriends that were called, you know, went on the stand.

00:06:08.000 I saw him shoot it. 1.00

00:06:08.000 I saw him shoot it right in his ass. 1.00

00:06:10.000 He got bigger right in front of my eyes. 1.00

00:06:13.000 The thing that people have a problem with is that there's legit problems in the world, and they're chasing people for hitting a ball with a stick better. 0.99

00:06:21.000 Baseball is boring as shit, and the best part about baseball is when they hit home runs. 0.98

00:06:26.000 And people are saying, well, finally these guys are doing something that makes them hit more home runs, and it turns out that this something involves science and chemicals, and we don't like it. 0.99

00:06:35.000 So we're going to come down on these people.

00:06:36.000 We're going to spend a lot of taxpayers money.

00:06:38.000 We're going to bring these people before Congress and Joe Biden's going to get all goofy about it.

00:06:42.000 That's how a lot of people felt about it.

00:06:44.000 Well, I think anytime you could spend resources on something that's going to directly affect the youth of society and sending them a message about what is right and what is wrong.

00:06:56.000 You know, having grown up Yeah.

00:07:21.000 The health aspects of, you know, being healthy and working out.

00:07:24.000 All of a sudden, you introduce into that equation, number one, breaking the rules.

00:07:30.000 And so there's, you know, the ethics to look at surrounding it.

00:07:34.000 And number two, you know, ultimately, there can be risk and health consequences with using these things, especially if you're young doing that.

00:07:42.000 So, you know, again, going back to the message I think that it sent To our kids and to parents with where I think society was going back then with the pervasive use of drugs in sports, I think was a positive one that's going to benefit people positively.

00:07:58.000 And I think it did.

00:07:59.000 It did have an impact.

00:08:01.000 The landscape has changed in the last 10 or 15 years.

00:08:04.000 Yeah, I think you're definitely right about that.

00:08:05.000 And that's the most compelling aspect of it as far as the argument for chasing it down is if kids are growing up and the kid says, hey, I want to be a professional baseball player.

00:08:17.000 How many people are going to tell that kid, look, you've got to take steroids.

00:08:20.000 If you want to get into a good college, if you want to get a bunch of recruiters looking at you, you've got to start making some noise right now.

00:08:27.000 And the way to do it is this stuff right here.

00:08:30.000 Squirt that stuff in there.

00:08:31.000 The amount of conversations I had with young athletes, baseball players, definitely cyclists, Where they talked about that moment that all their life growing up, you know, they aspired to be a professional.

00:08:43.000 And then they got to a certain point in baseball, it was, you know, minor league, maybe triple A. In cycling, it was, hey, about to get signed on to a pro team going over to Europe and realizing, oh shit, to go any further, I'm seeing what's going on around me here.

00:08:57.000 I'm going to have to make that decision.

00:09:01.000 I can't even count the number of athletes I've had sitting across the table from me recounting those days when those decisions were made.

00:09:09.000 That we're balling like little babies talking about that.

00:09:12.000 And I think a lot of it was guilt in terms of the decision that they ultimately did made.

00:09:17.000 But just the pressure of coming to that moment, either giving up your lifelong dream or, hey, kid, if you want to go further, this is what you got to do.

00:09:25.000 And in some instances, you know, kind of rebuffing that and not doing it. 0.91

00:09:29.000 And then after you're realizing, shit, I really do need to do this or I can't go any further. 0.88

00:09:33.000 Have many, many of those stories told to me. 0.98

00:09:35.000 Yeah, it is really crazy that sports like professional cycling especially.

00:09:40.000 We talked about this when I saw you in Brazil that I had a buddy that was a professional cycler for a while and he told me this long before the Lance Armstrong stuff went down before he got caught.

00:09:51.000 He said they're all doing it.

00:09:53.000 He said you can't compete at that high level.

00:09:55.000 He said not only that but the doctor that he talked to said you could make an argument that it's actually more dangerous to compete in that sport without the drugs. 0.99

00:10:04.000 And then I said, well, what kind of a fucking sport is this, man? 0.99

00:10:06.000 Like, this is crazy. 0.99

00:10:08.000 Then, after you and I had this conversation, I started looking into the Tour de France times.

00:10:13.000 We spoke about this briefly in Brazil, that the guy who was winning the Tour de France, I don't even know what his name is, he was breaking records that were set by guys that were on drugs. 0.92

00:10:24.000 And we were trying to figure out how the fuck that's possible. 0.82

00:10:27.000 Yeah, it's a bit suspicious. 0.81

00:10:29.000 A bit?

00:10:30.000 I mean, these are hyperhuman levels of performance.

00:10:34.000 And he's beating guys that we know, or the elite of the elite, we're also on steroids.

00:10:40.000 We're also on EPO. Yeah, the cycling, I think we talked about this, in terms of level of sophistication versus all the sports that I saw where drug use was prevalent was by far at the top, where they were investing in machines to bring along with them as they were competing and traveling to test their blood every night to make sure that their levels were within reason and wouldn't pop on a drug test or a biological test.

00:11:19.000 Yeah, that's pretty much it.

00:11:23.000 It's something we're using in our UFC program.

00:11:25.000 So the more tests you have, the better you're able to read it.

00:11:29.000 But over a longitudinal study of your blood and urine markers, science and studies have shown you're going to have normal variances.

00:11:38.000 You know, each human being will have a normal variance.

00:11:40.000 How does that factor in with overtraining?

00:11:43.000 And a lot of these athletes are overtrained, and it's a consistent Aspect of MMA camps is that guys are just really breaking themselves down doing two and three a days wrestling, strength and conditioning, kickboxing.

00:11:56.000 It's just, you know, sometimes you see these guys' testosterone levels, they come in, they're just wrecked and they're mid-camp.

00:12:02.000 Yeah, that's definitely, you know, I'm not a scientist, but in talking to scientists who read these, they take that into consideration.

00:12:08.000 I think the overtraining, you would tend to see some of those variances on the lower side, and that may be normal.

00:12:14.000 But when they're reading these, you know, these biological passports, and you see some way on the lower side, and then all of a sudden you see way one on the higher side, Then, you know, it begins to raise questions about what's going on.

00:12:28.000 Now, a lot of times a biological passport will just lead to more intelligent testing or targeted testing.

00:12:34.000 It may not necessarily be, hey, this person's definitely using, but based on these variances, something may be suspiciously going on here.

00:12:42.000 Let's test this guy or girl, you know, more.

00:12:46.000 Hone in on suspicions like that.

00:12:48.000 And really, the most accurate tests are blood tests?

00:12:52.000 Is that the case?

00:12:53.000 Blood are the most accurate, correct. 0.99

00:12:55.000 There's the other thing you were telling me about when we were in Brazil that I thought was fascinating, was that there's a new type of testosterone.

00:13:02.000 They're making testosterone from yams, right?

00:13:05.000 Correct.

00:13:06.000 And that now they're doing it through animals?

00:13:08.000 Yeah, they are.

00:13:10.000 So, you know, one of the most accurate tests now to use is called the carbon isotope ratio test.

00:13:16.000 And what that's able to do is differentiate between natural testosterone, which all men and women have in their body, and foreign testosterone because there's a different carbon atom in that testosterone because it's made from a plant instead of an animal.

00:13:30.000 There's now, at least in research supply companies, I don't think it's approved for use, but there's animal-based testosterone floating around, which has the potential to Possibly defeat a carbon isotope ratio test because it has the same carbon atom as natural testosterone does.

00:13:48.000 Is there any hesitation in talking about these things because you worry that you might educate cheaters?

00:13:54.000 No, I don't think so.

00:13:55.000 I think, you know, I've always found that, you know, your credibility rises when you're forthright about what's going on.

00:14:02.000 And because on the other side of things, you know, the science is, you know, looking at these things and always coming up with new tests.

00:14:10.000 I think something that's, in fact, I just read it today, and we do this in our program as well, is there was in cycling, they will freeze samples, both urine and blood, and keep them for years at a time.

00:14:22.000 I think?

00:14:39.000 You know, there's a new drug out there that, you know, scientists, chemists are saying there's no test for.

00:14:46.000 Potentially, a couple years down the line, when there is a test for it, we'd have the ability to go back and test that.

00:14:51.000 Now, maybe that athlete's no longer with the UFC or no longer competing at all anymore, but, you know, there's still reputation and legacy at stake.

00:14:59.000 Wow, that's crazy.

00:15:00.000 So the UFC's going to have like a giant meat locker filled with old blood and pee?

00:15:05.000 Yeah, the laboratories will have that, yeah.

00:15:07.000 Wow, that's fascinating stuff.

00:15:11.000 Well, there's a chain of evidence issue with that, isn't there?

00:15:13.000 Just sitting around in some sort of a lab somewhere?

00:15:17.000 Yeah, there'll be secure freezers where there is a chain of custody that goes along with each sample.

00:15:22.000 So outside that freezer will be the paperwork.

00:15:27.000 A lot of laboratories are very secure laboratories.

00:15:30.000 I've tried to get in them before.

00:15:32.000 They're tough.

00:15:33.000 You're signing off.

00:15:34.000 Your life to get in one of those things.

00:15:37.000 So the chain of custody will be good going on indefinitely on those things.

00:15:42.000 So, so far as you know, this hasn't been approved, people haven't used this animal-based testosterone yet?

00:15:48.000 I believe it's being used now.

00:15:50.000 You believe it is?

00:15:51.000 Yeah.

00:15:52.000 There's also, like, wasn't it Alex Rodriguez, is that who it was, that was using a slow or a quick-release testosterone?

00:15:59.000 It gets out of your system very quickly?

00:16:01.000 Yeah.

00:16:01.000 A short lifespan, a short half-life?

00:16:04.000 Yeah.

00:16:04.000 What was the deal with that stuff?

00:16:05.000 It's just fast-acting, fast-clearing testosterone.

00:16:08.000 And I think, you know, the landscape on how drugs are used has changed over the last several years as tests, you know, got more accurate.

00:16:15.000 And so the idea is you could take this, I think he was taking like gummies or lozenges, you know, take it at night.

00:16:22.000 And by morning time, you know, the testosterone could be clear your system.

00:16:26.000 So you take it while you're sleeping to help you recover.

00:16:29.000 That's the idea behind it?

00:16:31.000 Yeah, I think you see more along the lines of, it's called microdosing, so small amounts where, you know, again, talking more of recovery versus building up massive muscles, which you saw maybe in the mid to late 90s.

00:16:44.000 You saw these cartoonish figures out, at least on a baseball field.

00:16:47.000 I think now it's evolved a little bit more where there's less amounts using, more for recovery benefits.

00:16:54.000 Now, a guy like Jose Cansego, how much damage did he do?

00:16:58.000 Or positive, depending on how you're looking at it.

00:17:00.000 When that guy came out with that book and explained what he did and what everybody he knew did, how illuminating was that to guys like you?

00:17:09.000 Well, I mean, you talked before about congressional hearings.

00:17:12.000 I think his book came out at a time when You know, the Balco case was kind of in the media, and it probably caused those congressional hearings where Congress called baseball to the table and Bud Selig.

00:17:24.000 And you look now, 10 years later, and baseball is completely done, a 180. They lead sports in terms of, you know, anti-doping program, professional sports here, well, before our program came along.

00:17:36.000 But, yeah, I mean, their testing program is pretty good compared to 10 years ago.

00:17:41.000 Do the athletes look different?

00:17:44.000 I don't follow baseball, but are they smaller guys now?

00:17:46.000 I think so.

00:17:47.000 I mean, I don't think you see the Mark McGuire's or the Jose Canseco's as prevalent as you did back then.

00:17:53.000 Definitely look at the statistics.

00:17:55.000 I mean, those don't lie.

00:17:58.000 You're not seeing 50, 60, 70 home runs anymore, you know?

00:18:02.000 See, I'm torn. 0.99

00:18:04.000 I'm torn on that because I think baseball sucks. 0.92

00:18:07.000 And that's the only cool thing about it is when a guy whacks a ball and sends it flying.

00:18:11.000 I totally agree with you on the message it sends to young people.

00:18:14.000 I think there's a difference between that, though, and fighting.

00:18:17.000 And the difference between that and fighting, clearly in my eyes, is that when you are taking something and you're fighting, you can do more damage to an opponent.

00:18:25.000 And you kind of force your opponent to also do something if he wants to be on a level playing field.

00:18:31.000 If we had a sport where it was just anything goes, like the Pride days.

00:18:36.000 Now, obviously, a lot of it is speculation and anecdotal evidence and just people, witness accounts from people that were there, like Ensign Inouye, who's been on my podcast before and talked about the Pride contracts, which openly stated, we will not test you for steroids.

00:18:51.000 That was in the contract.

00:18:53.000 And my own experiences with friends who went over there, they were telling them, like, you should take steroids.

00:18:59.000 Like, I have a buddy that would normally fight at 170 pounds, could even get down to 155. They were telling them to do steroids and get up to 185. And he was like, what?

00:19:07.000 Like, he couldn't believe it.

00:19:09.000 He came back from Japan going, dude, they told me to do steroids.

00:19:13.000 And that was the Wild West of the performance-enhancing era, where it seemed like a giant percentage of the people were on something.

00:19:21.000 The difference being that when you're on something, if you're on EPO and testosterone and human growth hormone and all those things, and you're inside of a ring or a cage, you can do more damage to your opponent.

00:19:31.000 You can possibly land strikes that you would not be able to land, and some of those strikes may or may not have a permanent effect on your opponent.

00:19:38.000 So in a lot of people's eyes, it's a much more dire and serious consequence than baseball, where you're just hitting a ball with a stick.

00:19:47.000 So in a lot of people's eyes and in my eyes, I think it's amazing that the UFC has taken this chance and done what they're doing because...

00:19:55.000 They really didn't have to do this.

00:19:56.000 What they did is, you know, bringing a guy like you aboard, you know, I've talked to a lot of trainers, and they raised their eyebrows and shook their heads like, oh, shit's gonna be different now, because they realized that this is a real big commitment.

00:20:10.000 To try to clean up MMA and a commitment that quite honestly, they really didn't have to do.

00:20:16.000 They could have stuck with the Nevada State Athletic Commission's protocol, the urine tests after fights, the occasional blood test if they wanted to do random tests on people they were suspicious of.

00:20:25.000 But in a lot of people's eyes, those tests were more of an intelligence test than they were of a real honest-to-goodness anti-doping effort.

00:20:35.000 Yeah, I'd agree with everything you just said.

00:20:37.000 I'm often asked, hey, do you think steroid use in MMA or the UFC is way off the chart compared to other sports?

00:20:45.000 And my answer is, I don't know yet.

00:20:48.000 I mean, I've seen very pervasive use in other sports.

00:20:51.000 I don't think it's unique to MMA or UFC. What is unique is what you just talked about, the importance of of it and that this isn't hitting a ball over the fence with a stick this is two human beings getting into an octagon and trying to get the other to submit by inflicting pain and hurting them and when you give someone you know an unfair and an artificially enhanced advantage over that other person man in terms of it just not being right it's

00:21:21.000 at a whole new level and yeah I mean Dana and Lorenzo, from the minute I had conversations with them before coming over here, have jumped fully on board to this.

00:21:33.000 And I think everybody realizes that from a business standpoint, especially short-term, this could hurt the UFC. But in terms of long-term and short-term health and safety of their fighters, which I'm telling you, these guys are on board with.

00:21:49.000 They care about their athletes.

00:21:52.000 I mean, this speaks volumes of what they're doing.

00:21:55.000 It's a big turnaround also from just a few years ago where testosterone replacement therapy was sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.

00:22:03.000 That was a big issue.

00:22:05.000 There's no need to mention names, but I know a guy who was in his 20s who was on TRT. It's like, what the fuck? 0.99

00:22:11.000 If you're on testosterone replacement and you're in your 20s and you're competing in MMA, you shouldn't be competing in MMA. You've got a real problem. 1.00

00:22:19.000 If you're at such a low level of testosterone...

00:22:22.000 One of the things that when I was trying to sort it out and make sense of it all, one of the things that I found most disturbing was my conversations with my friend, Dr. Mark Gordon, who's famous for his work with traumatic brain injury, a lot of soldiers that have come back from getting blown up by IEDs,

00:22:40.000 and the The impact that it has on the pituitary gland and how a lot of these guys have very low testosterone because of the impacts they've taken.

00:22:48.000 And he's pretty adamant about it.

00:22:50.000 He's like, if you have to take testosterone because you've been getting hit in the head too much, the answer is not take testosterone.

00:22:57.000 The answer is don't get hit in the head anymore.

00:22:59.000 You shouldn't be putting a patch on that and then getting right back into the octagon.

00:23:05.000 If you are forced to take testosterone because of the head injuries, you shouldn't be competing anymore.

00:23:11.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:23:12.000 And I really, I can't believe how naive people were just a few years back to allow that to happen.

00:23:18.000 It's just, it's amazing.

00:23:19.000 How did it happen?

00:23:20.000 I think just, you know, not being educated, just not around it enough.

00:23:26.000 They didn't look into, you know, things as hard as they should have.

00:23:29.000 That's my guess.

00:23:29.000 I don't know.

00:23:31.000 Yeah, I don't know either.

00:23:32.000 It was never approved by the Olympics, right?

00:23:34.000 The Olympic Committee never approved it, did they?

00:23:36.000 You know, I think in the history of therapeutic use exemptions on the Olympic level, I think there's maybe one, and I think it was literally, you know, someone involved, I'm not sure, but say sailing, that lost their testicles to testicular cancer.

00:23:51.000 It almost got to that level, versus someone who, you know, urine tests would show Low testosterone on, you know, one or two occasions, which my understanding was what was being required for TRT back in the day.

00:24:03.000 Which, not only that, is easy to manipulate.

00:24:06.000 All they have to do is just be tired.

00:24:09.000 Like, literally, all they have to do is, like, work out really hard, do a crazy workout, stay up all night, piss in a bottle in the morning, and you're like, this poor guy's got the testosterone of a 90-year-old man.

00:24:19.000 But meanwhile, they're manipulating it.

00:24:21.000 And also, it's a sign of steroid abuse.

00:24:25.000 Because if you have taken steroids, you've wrecked your endocrine system, and then you go in there and you take these tests, and it shows that your endocrine system is wrecked.

00:24:32.000 You're like, wow, you need some steroids to fix that.

00:24:34.000 It's crazy that that was the protocol. 0.98

00:24:37.000 Just a few years ago, we were dealing with several athletes that were competing in the highest levels of MMA, and they were juiced to the tits.

00:24:46.000 Yeah, and it's a good thing we're talking about being in the past, because it's not happening going forward.

00:24:51.000 Our program does have a therapeutic use exemption possibility for athletes, so athletes can apply for certain medicines that maybe are banned, that an independent...

00:25:02.000 What group that USADA puts together of physicians and scientists will look at to determine if there really isn't a medical need.

00:25:08.000 Like what would that be?

00:25:09.000 Testosterone replacement therapy will not be one of those.

00:25:13.000 Like with Adderall?

00:25:15.000 I'll give you a perfect example.

00:25:16.000 So someone recently, one of our fighters, has some type of disease where they need medicine administered via an IV every month.

00:25:26.000 An IV, as we'll probably get to talking about here, is a prohibited...

00:25:30.000 Method under our system so they would apply for a TUE saying look I'm using this IV because I need this drug for this disease I have so you know give me approval to use it and This board will look at it and determine whether or not that's needed.

00:25:45.000 This is one athlete?

00:25:47.000 Yeah.

00:25:47.000 And this athlete needs it once a month?

00:25:50.000 Yep.

00:25:50.000 So when you do that would you test them when they're not doing that drug whatever they need and then make sure that they haven't been using an IV bag then?

00:26:00.000 Yeah, I mean, that's a difficult one, how USADA is going to do it.

00:26:03.000 I think they would go along with their normal testing protocol on that individual and whether or not it was, you know, hit that individual when they were using an IV or not.

00:26:12.000 If evidence of an IV usage did come up, then they would go back, and this could apply to any drug that is granted for a therapeutic use exemption.

00:26:20.000 They then go back and look at that file for that athlete and say, hey, Looks like that athlete's used an IV. He was, you know, approved to use one under a therapeutic use exemption.

00:26:29.000 Are you at liberty to say what the drug is that they have to take?

00:26:32.000 I don't remember what it was.

00:26:33.000 Okay.

00:26:34.000 Now, what's the reason why they can't use an IV? Is it to mask possible performance enhancing drugs?

00:26:42.000 That's the primary reason.

00:26:43.000 And I saw this, you know, we talked a little bit ago about the cycling community.

00:26:46.000 I saw it, you know, up front and center in cycling and that they were using IVs of saline solution to manipulate their biological passports, so to manipulate their, you know, blood level readings, which were being used to determine if they were blood doping.

00:27:02.000 It could also be used to flush a system.

00:27:05.000 It dilutes blood and urine so that natural steroid profiles are very hard to read after you've taken an IV bag.

00:27:14.000 So that's the primary reason.

00:27:16.000 I think WADA also prohibits them for some health reasons.

00:27:20.000 Those are many.

00:27:21.000 I'm sure we're going to talk about it here, but those are on many different levels, the health reasons, I think.

00:27:27.000 Primarily, when an IV is administered, and I've talked to many athletes that have had this happen, especially close to a competition, there's a possibility of blowing out a vein or having clotting after the IV is taken out.

00:27:43.000 If the idea is to rehydrate, It's much safer to do it orally.

00:27:49.000 There could be some issues with IV administration and edema, so swelling, so cells will not be able to get rid of fluid because they've got too much too quick.

00:28:00.000 I have heard of that.

00:28:01.000 I have heard of that being an issue with IV replacement.

00:28:04.000 And I think that was an issue with at least one UFC fighter.

00:28:08.000 I'm trying to remember the story but I wish I could put a name to the story but I know someone did have an issue with legal use of it back when it was approved where they got a demo.

00:28:20.000 Yeah, I don't know of any current fighters.

00:28:23.000 I've talked to a few retired fighters who have told me about problems that they had with that.

00:28:29.000 Now, sorry to interrupt, but the concern that a lot of people have is that a lot of these guys are cutting a tremendous amount of weight.

00:28:36.000 Some of them more than 20 pounds.

00:28:38.000 They cut that the day of the weigh-ins, they weigh in looking like a skeleton, and then 24 hours later they're supposed to engage in the most ferocious form of unarmed combat we know of.

00:28:51.000 What these guys normally would do is rehydrate with an IV. They would go, and they would have several bags of liquid put into their body, and then they would just blow up like a balloon, come back in 24 hours later, and you'd see them the next day.

00:29:03.000 They didn't even look like the same person.

00:29:04.000 They looked so much bigger.

00:29:06.000 I mean, some guys, it was just freakish to see.

00:29:08.000 You would see them rehydrated, and you'd be like, whoa, how'd this guy do this?

00:29:14.000 They can't do that anymore.

00:29:15.000 Now they have to drink the water.

00:29:16.000 And what are the issues with drinking the water, and how hard is it going to be for these extreme weight-cutting guys to rehydrate?

00:29:23.000 Yeah, I mean, there's many issues.

00:29:25.000 First off, you know, studies show that orally rehydrating is better for you if you're mildly dehydrated.

00:29:35.000 What studies?

00:29:36.000 Are they done by Gatorade?

00:29:38.000 Who does these studies?

00:29:40.000 Yeah.

00:29:42.000 American...

00:29:42.000 Is it real?

00:29:43.000 No, they're real.

00:29:44.000 American Trainers Association, Sports Medicine Journal, there's many of them out there.

00:29:51.000 There's two things that they show consistently.

00:29:55.000 Well, number one, it's obviously safer to put something through your mouth than, you know, put it in the needle in your vein.

00:30:01.000 Number two I thought was interesting is your perceived rate of exertion, so how hard you feel you're working After rehydrating orally is less than if you rehydrate via IV. So the message we're trying to get out is,

00:30:17.000 look, if you rehydrate orally properly, UFC fighters, that next day you're going to feel a whole lot better when you're exerting yourself.

00:30:26.000 Multiple studies have showed that.

00:30:29.000 Now, that's mild dehydration.

00:30:33.000 Extreme dehydration, the studies do show that IVs...

00:30:38.000 Are necessary.

00:30:39.000 You probably should go to a hospital and get one if you're extremely dehydrated, that oral rehydration is not going to do it for you.

00:30:46.000 And in this, you know, in WADA's prohibited method policy, there is an exception to IVs, where if you are administered to a hospital, Setting.

00:30:56.000 And given an IV, it's okay.

00:30:58.000 You don't need a therapeutic use exemption.

00:31:00.000 Under our policy, you don't need to notify USADA. The problem or the catch-22 there is, I think you need to notify the commission where you're fighting that you were administered to a hospital the day before your fight.

00:31:13.000 And they probably wouldn't let you fight.

00:31:14.000 They're probably not going to let you fight.

00:31:16.000 Wow.

00:31:16.000 So what it all comes down to, Joe, is that our guys and girls need to get smarter about those weight cuts and should not be Excessively dehydrating themselves the day before.

00:31:28.000 Let me tell you one more thing.

00:31:31.000 These studies are in their infancy.

00:31:32.000 I'm talking to a lot of different scientists and physicians about this.

00:31:38.000 But right now, rehydration studies are showing that in 24 hours, if you're dehydrated seriously, you're likely not going to fully rehydrate, whether it be orally or IV, in 24 hours.

00:31:52.000 It's probably going to take more like 48 hours.

00:31:55.000 And the last thing...

00:32:02.000 We're good to go.

00:32:25.000 Dehydrated.

00:32:26.000 Well, let's talk about this, because your job is the VP of, what is it, performance?

00:32:32.000 Health and performance.

00:32:34.000 What about, is there a way to stop weight cutting?

00:32:39.000 I mean, look, ideally...

00:32:41.000 What we should do is match people up that are the same size and have them compete against other elite athletes that are the same size.

00:32:50.000 Forget about all the weight cutting nonsense.

00:32:52.000 Let's just, what do you weigh?

00:32:52.000 You weigh 180?

00:32:53.000 That's what you weigh when you're at your optimum.

00:32:55.000 You should be fighting guys that are also 180. Let's find out who the best 180 pound person is. 0.93

00:33:00.000 There's a real problem in the UFC with weight classes.

00:33:03.000 There's a giant jump in between them.

00:33:05.000 There's 185 and then there's 205. If you stand a 185 pound man next to a 205 pound man, you're dealing with 20 16 ounce T-bones that's pushing that 205 pounder.

00:33:17.000 Just think about the amount of mass and power That you can generate with the amount of weight they have, that extra 20 pounds, that's significant.

00:33:27.000 The amount of more power that they could possibly generate, the amount of, you know, just the ability to pick you up when they maybe couldn't if they were just 20 pounds less, the ability to push out of a lock, to break out of a submission, to break out of a clinch, that's significant.

00:33:43.000 And when you have these big giant gaps It's encouraging people to make these extreme weight cuts because they want to be the big guy in the division.

00:33:51.000 I agree with you.

00:33:52.000 Yeah, I agree with you with all of that.

00:33:54.000 Hopefully, the IV ban and kind of those statistics I was quoting earlier in those studies will have an effect on things and cause our athletes, trainers, support to take a look at that.

00:34:09.000 I can give you examples of...

00:34:11.000 NCAA wrestling in the late 90s had a bad issue with weight cutting and lost three wrestlers in one year, two saunas, plastic suits, things like that.

00:34:22.000 When you say lost, they died.

00:34:23.000 They died.

00:34:25.000 NCAA went to the extreme and banned most weight cutting practices.

00:34:30.000 They banned plastic suits, saunas, things like that.

00:34:37.000 They adapted and became much more safer.

00:34:40.000 The IV ban went into effect after WADA passed, I think 2012, and that affected severely Olympic boxing and Olympic wrestling.

00:34:49.000 We're doing weight cuts, you know, similar to what MMA is experienced now.

00:34:54.000 But those sports have much smaller weight classes.

00:34:58.000 True, I think they do.

00:34:59.000 I think they have every 10 pounds, right?

00:35:01.000 Yeah.

00:35:02.000 Well, I mean, but there was, I think, initially, kind of similar to what we're talking about here, a lot of pushback from the athletes about, you know, this isn't fair, this isn't right, this is going to be unsafe.

00:35:12.000 They adapted pretty quickly, and it's become a thing of the past here.

00:35:15.000 So I think, you know, in terms of what we're going and where we're going, I'm constantly just trying to be a sponge and absorb, you know, Studies, science, medicine, pass it along to our fighters, pass it along internally with UFC, and,

00:35:31.000 you know, let's see where it goes.

00:35:33.000 As I said earlier, you know, my position, and I think the position of the leadership, is always with the health and safety of our fighters, you know, at the forefront.

00:35:42.000 So it'll be an issue that, you know, personally I'll definitely always be looking at.

00:35:48.000 Have you had the conversation with them whether or not there will be additional weight losses?

00:35:52.000 I haven't talked about that specifically, but I have talked about what this issue of the IV ban is going to mean and some of the statistics and stories that we're hearing about weight cutting.

00:36:02.000 I'm definitely sharing that with everybody.

00:36:04.000 I think that's hugely important, but there has to be some sort of an option for these people.

00:36:09.000 And for someone who's like, say, Chris Weidman.

00:36:12.000 Weidman's a big guy.

00:36:13.000 I mean, he's very...

00:36:14.000 The fact that he makes 185 is shocking enough.

00:36:17.000 I saw him when he cut weight on a short notice to make 185 for Damian Maia.

00:36:22.000 And he looked like death.

00:36:24.000 I mean, he was on death's door when he weighed in.

00:36:26.000 And then the next day he went out and won just by sheer toughness and will and skill and just the fact that he's that kind of guy.

00:36:33.000 But that's because he cut a lot of weight.

00:36:37.000 I mean, that's how he made that weight.

00:36:38.000 And then he fought the next day and he was definitely depleted.

00:36:41.000 You could see in his performance.

00:36:43.000 I mean, he won a decision against Maya, but he looked sluggish and he just pushed through just through sheer toughness.

00:36:49.000 A guy like him was the champ at 185. If all of a sudden weight cutting starts getting banned, I mean, he's walking around, I'd have to guess, at least 20 pounds heavier than that, at least.

00:36:59.000 What does a guy like that do?

00:37:01.000 He's the champion.

00:37:02.000 If he can't make the 185 weight class anymore, does he just move up to 205?

00:37:07.000 Yeah, that's an interesting, tough question.

00:37:09.000 And I think, you know, these are the toughest guys and girls on the planet and just able to put themselves through I'm not a big believer in throwing a million rules at people.

00:37:34.000 I think you take things one step at a time.

00:37:37.000 Let's see what this IV ban does. 0.99

00:37:40.000 Let's see Kind of what the education that we're providing our athletes does.

00:37:44.000 And, you know, always reevaluate it month to month, year to year.

00:37:49.000 I just think that there should be some sort of an option for these guys.

00:37:55.000 I mean, the idea that they have a 20-pound weight jump between 185 and 205, and then there's a big one is 205 to 265. I mean, that is fucking crazy. 0.93

00:38:05.000 There's a lot of guys that are small heavyweights Or just dehydrated light heavyweights. 0.98

00:38:11.000 And they have to figure out what to do about something like that.

00:38:14.000 I really think the UFC needs many more weight classes.

00:38:18.000 And they've resisted that.

00:38:19.000 They think it waters the sport down like it does with boxing.

00:38:22.000 But I think it creates more champions.

00:38:24.000 And more champions creates the possibility of more champion versus champion fights.

00:38:29.000 I just think that these gaps, if you're going to institute this no IV thing and you're going to change the whole system of weight cutting, you've got to give these people some options.

00:38:39.000 Yeah, you know, we'll see where it goes.

00:38:40.000 It's not, you know, other than IVs being used to defeat drug tests, which is in my past experience, it's a new issue for me that, you know, I'm learning on a day-to-day basis.

00:38:49.000 Now, what about athletes in camp?

00:38:51.000 Are they allowed to use an IV in camp? 0.94

00:38:53.000 Like, what if they have a particularly brutal day in the hot sun, they go run up hills, and they come back, and their doctor says, listen, man, you're really fucking dehydrated. 0.67

00:39:00.000 We would like to get an IV bag in you. 0.89

00:39:02.000 Can they call you guys up and say, hey, we have an athlete that he just did a two-a-day and, you know, did hill sprints and we would really like to get this kid an IV? Again, in a hospital administration setting, they can do it.

00:39:15.000 Don't even need to notify us.

00:39:18.000 That may be an instance where they would want to do it because then they wouldn't have to tell, you know, the commission if there was, you know, a fight coming up soon.

00:39:27.000 But wouldn't that be something they could potentially manipulate?

00:39:29.000 It could, but, you know, they can manipulate their blood levels, absolutely.

00:39:34.000 But, you know, hey, it's a balancing act.

00:39:36.000 If somebody is really, truly that dehydrated and needs one, you know, even if it can be used to manipulate a blood test, if it's for their health and safety because they're so severely dehydrated, then, you know, the policy's made so as not to stop that.

00:39:51.000 Now, Andy Foster, who's the head of the California State Athletic Commission, has done a fantastic job here in California.

00:39:57.000 I'm a big fan of this guy.

00:39:59.000 He's just aggressively going after drug doping and tested a lot of people on the UFC card here.

00:40:06.000 I believe he tested everyone.

00:40:10.000 Schlamenko, who got popped, I think they gave him a three-year ban.

00:40:14.000 That's extreme.

00:40:15.000 That is sending a big, big message.

00:40:18.000 Do you think that that's...

00:40:19.000 The kind of stuff that has to be done. 0.99

00:40:21.000 Like, it has to be so extreme that you have to have a few sacrificial lambs where the rest of the athletes have to go, look, this is my fucking career. 0.95

00:40:29.000 You know, if you want to really compete, this is the way you're going to have to do it. 0.97

00:40:32.000 You can't take any chances.

00:40:34.000 Because we're not talking about nine months anymore, which is not that bad for a fighter.

00:40:37.000 Because the reality is they're not going to fight more than once every six months anyway.

00:40:40.000 So they get, you know, at an elite level, it's very rare that a guy like, say, a Vitor Belfort fights more than once every six months.

00:40:47.000 At the most you might fight three times a year, right?

00:40:50.000 So a guy takes a few extra months off.

00:40:52.000 Not that big a deal.

00:40:53.000 Three years?

00:40:54.000 It's kind of the end of your career.

00:40:56.000 Yeah, I agree with you 100%.

00:40:57.000 There needs to be the deterrent effect up front.

00:41:00.000 And that's, you know, one of the reasons I think our policy is so strong.

00:41:05.000 It's our policy first time is two, but if there's aggravating circumstances, and that would be quantified as, say, somebody was found to take a steroid and did an IV bag just before the test, and we found out about that, that could be an aggravating circumstance, a possibility of four years.

00:41:21.000 Which, you know, as we get out and educate our fighters, I talk about those terms and I ask, who thinks two, definitely four, is a career-ender?

00:41:30.000 Most of them, heads bobbing up and down.

00:41:33.000 I mean, unless you're on the absolute top of the UFC, you know, food chain, four years.

00:41:37.000 Four years is you're done.

00:41:39.000 Long past it.

00:41:39.000 I mean, if you get popped at 34, then you come back, you're 38. That's crazy.

00:41:45.000 It's not going to happen.

00:41:46.000 I mean, if it does happen, you'll be severely diminished.

00:41:49.000 And the likelihood of you being...

00:41:51.000 I mean, you're going to be off the sauce now, too.

00:41:53.000 Like, you were probably doing something, so your system has to recover.

00:41:57.000 Then there's also the mental aspect for a lot of these guys.

00:42:00.000 There's a lot of these fighters that were fighting...

00:42:03.000 Enhanced for most of their career and they have this mental advantage of fighting enhance where they know they're juiced up and it gives them all this confidence Then all sudden you take that away and they just don't seem to be the same guys Yeah, you know, it's really interesting on the mental side of things and I didn't I learned this kind of throughout my previous career talking to athletes is the mental effort that it takes to use drugs when you're under a good solid anti-doping system and Many

00:42:33.000 athletes say, hey, despite the performance benefits I was getting from these drugs, I definitely felt stronger, could go longer. 0.98

00:42:40.000 What it took to figure out what drugs to take, how long they were going to clear my system, worry after I took a drug, oh shit, are the testers going to come tomorrow morning?

00:42:50.000 That mental burden for a lot of these athletes far outweighed the physical enhancement they were getting. 0.97

00:42:57.000 That's a good point.

00:42:58.000 Tremendous amount of stress.

00:42:59.000 Could you imagine?

00:43:00.000 I mean, our policy, you're going to be tested, the ability to be tested 365 days a year.

00:43:07.000 You know, an athlete who would choose to use something that night, that athlete used something.

00:43:11.000 Can you imagine, like, listening for that doorbell or that door knock all night long, all morning long? 0.98

00:43:16.000 There was some athletes I talked to that had surveillance systems up, but they would literally, at night, after taking a dose, be looking at their television screens and, oh, shit, who's coming down? 0.99

00:43:25.000 It's crazy. 0.98

00:43:27.000 That was a huge mental task.

00:43:29.000 And they can't hide either, right?

00:43:31.000 It's not like you could just go to Palm Beach and take a hotel room and camp out.

00:43:35.000 You have to let the UFC know where you are all the time.

00:43:38.000 Yeah, so we have a whereabouts program.

00:43:40.000 And so that requires our athletes on a quarterly basis to fill out...

00:43:46.000 Whereabouts, where they can be located, where they're staying overnight, regularly scheduled activities that they have during the day, so that if USADA, who's administering our program, wants to go out and find that athlete, they can do that.

00:43:58.000 Now, it doesn't involve 24-7 whereabouts.

00:44:03.000 Our athletes don't Yeah.

00:44:22.000 I was having a conversation with, to keep this as vague as possible, I was having a conversation with an athlete who was telling me that he knew of an athlete that was not clean, and so this athlete decided to go overseas and train.

00:44:39.000 Just decided to go hang out in some other country and train there for a while.

00:44:43.000 What do you do if someone says, you know, hey, I'm gonna go train in Thailand?

00:44:47.000 You guys gonna go fly out to Thailand and test them?

00:44:50.000 It's one of the reasons we hired USADA. USADA has partnerships with international anti-doping agencies all across the world.

00:44:59.000 I mean, that's their job.

00:45:01.000 They're constantly going to conferences.

00:45:02.000 They're going out and training collection officers from other international bodies.

00:45:07.000 So they do.

00:45:08.000 They have the ability to reach out anywhere in the world because our population of athletes is spread across the world.

00:45:14.000 And get a test taken or a sample taken from them at any time.

00:45:17.000 Well, let's just say, like, I mean, I'm not accusing anybody of anything.

00:45:23.000 But let's just say, if you were an unscrupulous athlete, and you had ties to maybe people who also do unscrupulous things, and they had a reasonable amount of power in a certain country, and you could just go there, and they kind of had deals with people.

00:45:39.000 And they said, look, you know...

00:45:42.000 We're gonna give you a blood sample, and we're gonna give you a urine sample, but we'd just like you to wait here for a moment, and we'll just go in the other room, and we come back with this stuff.

00:45:50.000 And they come back, and they give it to these guys.

00:45:52.000 Are you getting, like, videotape of this happening?

00:45:56.000 Are you making sure you're seeing the exact athlete put the exact blood in the exact thing?

00:46:01.000 How are you gonna make sure that there's no fuckery, no shenanigans going on, especially in other countries?

00:46:08.000 Yeah, so there's a certain standard, no matter which country the collection's going on to, of how these collections happen.

00:46:15.000 And the doping collection officer, the DCO, has to physically witness the athlete providing the sample, whether it be urine or blood.

00:46:26.000 They have to.

00:46:27.000 They have to.

00:46:28.000 And how do you prove that they did that?

00:46:30.000 Like, if you're dealing with someone, like I said, in another country, how do you prove that this commissioner guy Actually was there.

00:46:38.000 Well, I mean these you know the DCOs are trained based on worldwide collection standards and You know they're vetted before they're hired.

00:46:47.000 I mean that that could happen anywhere Joe could happen in this country or another country But I like America better than I like other countries. 0.97

00:46:54.000 I like to talk shit about them I think part of it would be okay. 0.87

00:46:57.000 So the laboratory gets these samples, you know, we're I think we're doing 2700 to 3000 tests a year and You start looking at samples from a particular country, whether it be the United States in a certain region or another country, and you start seeing suspicion in that sample. 0.98

00:47:15.000 You start seeing variances in the biological passport in collections done in another country versus when maybe they come here to the United States, things like that.

00:47:25.000 So it's a constant detective game going on, and there's things put in place for every Conceivable situation to try to detect that.

00:47:37.000 It just seems like you're gonna catch them.

00:47:41.000 It just seems like there's only so much wiggle room these guys have these days.

00:47:47.000 But are there any things that are on your radar that could possibly be used to cheat that we're not aware of yet, that most people aren't aware of?

00:47:58.000 Like the testosterone that's being done with animals, I never heard about that before.

00:48:02.000 Is there anything else like that that's going on right now?

00:48:04.000 I can't give you any specific example, but I will give the example of the cyclist that just got caught for the drug that's still in a clinical trial.

00:48:12.000 And what that shows what the anti-doping community has been doing is reaching out to the pharmaceutical industry and saying and querying, hey, any drugs that you have in clinical trial are being developed.

00:48:26.000 Do you see any potential for athletic performance-enhancing benefits?

00:48:30.000 And if the pharmaceutical industry said, yeah, you know, this particular drug was called oxygen and a pill.

00:48:36.000 So you take it and create more red blood cells, similar to EPO, but in oral form.

00:48:42.000 And so the pharmaceutical industry obviously told anti-doping, yeah, this is coming out.

00:48:47.000 Anti-doping community was able to develop a test.

00:48:50.000 Kind of secretly and used the test and caught somebody.

00:48:54.000 Oxygen in a pill?

00:48:55.000 That's what it's called, yep.

00:48:56.000 Wow.

00:48:57.000 So it's essentially the same thing as EPO or works in a different way?

00:49:01.000 My understanding is essentially the same thing.

00:49:03.000 It causes your body to produce more red blood cells which carry more oxygen and can replenish your muscles quicker.

00:49:10.000 Now, here's the rub on that, okay?

00:49:12.000 Obviously, that's an illegal substance and it should be banned, but what about guys who train at altitude?

00:49:18.000 What about guys who sleep in altitude tents? 0.99

00:49:21.000 Like, I remember on one of the countdown shows, BJ Penn was sleeping in this crazy zip-up tent, and one of the things he said in his, you know, BJ Penn's accent, he goes, you know, when I'm sleeping in a plastic tent, someone's getting their ass kicked. 0.96

00:49:35.000 Because he has to zip up this fucking tent to sleep in it to simulate that he's at 10,000 feet or that he's sleeping there. 0.95

00:49:42.000 There's all sorts of other things, like Ascent. 0.98

00:49:44.000 You're aware of those altitude machines that they use that vary the altitude?

00:49:49.000 It's like, I know...

00:49:51.000 Ian McCall is a big fan of those.

00:49:53.000 He said they have tremendous effects.

00:49:55.000 Cryogenic chambers, I'm a huge fan of those.

00:49:57.000 They have massive effects on inflammation, massive effects on neoprenephrine, cold shock proteins, all these different things that help you heal and reduce inflammation and help you train more.

00:50:08.000 If you could do what that could do in a pill form, it might be illegal, right?

00:50:15.000 Yeah, and I hear the argument of, hey, isn't that cheating, getting in an oxygen tent?

00:50:19.000 But I don't buy off that that's the same thing as taking a drug that manipulates the hormones and steroids in your body.

00:50:26.000 But what about EPO? I mean, isn't it exactly the same?

00:50:28.000 I mean, if you take EPO, doesn't it do exactly the same thing as sleeping at altitude?

00:50:33.000 I think it does, but it does it in a quicker form.

00:50:36.000 You don't have to put forth the effort of sleeping in an oxygen tent every night for a period of weeks or months.

00:50:42.000 It's instantaneous.

00:50:44.000 I'm not on the side of EPO. Don't get me wrong.

00:50:47.000 I don't think you should be allowed to take it.

00:50:49.000 I think, as far as I know, the only fighter that's been popped for in the UFC was Ali Bagutinov, which shows you how impressive Demetrius Johnson's cardio is.

00:50:59.000 He outworked that guy who was on EPO at the time.

00:51:02.000 But if he's taken that, and that's illegal, but he gets the exact same benefit as someone who's sleeping in an oxygen tent, why is it more difficult?

00:51:11.000 I just don't...

00:51:12.000 Why is that legal?

00:51:13.000 I don't think you get the same exact benefit.

00:51:16.000 I think it's way more extreme in using the drug.

00:51:20.000 Yeah, that you can get your hematocrit.

00:51:22.000 I mean, I've seen...

00:51:23.000 Some hematocrit levels of some athletes get up in the mid-50s to low-60s.

00:51:28.000 What are the numbers?

00:51:29.000 What's a normal number?

00:51:30.000 So the hematocrit level is the amount of red blood cells per blood volume.

00:51:35.000 Normal numbers are 42%, maybe on the high end, 47% or 48%.

00:51:42.000 I've seen them, again, in the mid-50s to low-60s.

00:51:46.000 And when you start talking about hematocrit levels at those amounts, there's so many red blood cells per blood volume that your blood becomes thick, tar-like.

00:51:55.000 And I think we saw this with cyclists in the mid-90s that just discovered EPO and were using it.

00:52:02.000 We're good to go.

00:52:26.000 In the middle of the night.

00:52:27.000 So you can extremely increase hematocrit levels via using drugs like this versus, you know, training at oxygen and oxygen tents.

00:52:37.000 I think maybe you can get up a little bit higher into that normal range in the 47 or 48%.

00:52:42.000 But I haven't seen extremes of getting into mid 50s and low 60s from that.

00:52:47.000 Yeah, my friend who was on the cycling team said that he would hear, they would be on a tour, sleeping in a bus, and you would hear guys get up in the middle of the night and hear their bike come off the rack and they'd go riding.

00:52:57.000 Because they had to.

00:52:58.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:52:59.000 Because their heart would start beating funky and they'd be like, oh shit. 0.99

00:53:02.000 And they literally were producing so much blood that they had to burn some of it off. 0.98

00:53:06.000 That's terrifying.

00:53:07.000 Yeah, I don't know if it's burning it off.

00:53:09.000 It's just keeping it circulating.

00:53:11.000 Keeping it circulating.

00:53:12.000 But also the fact that these are the same guys taking this stuff, not the cyclists, obviously, but fighters, they would get hit.

00:53:20.000 You're going to get hit and you're going to get a lot of bruising.

00:53:22.000 And bruising is essentially just internal bleeding.

00:53:25.000 I mean, that's what you're getting.

00:53:26.000 I mean, you look at a guy's leg, and he gets leg kicked a bunch, and you see these big welts and black and blue all over his legs.

00:53:33.000 That's blood.

00:53:34.000 He's bleeding.

00:53:35.000 It's clotting up inside of his leg, but he's bleeding and swelling.

00:53:37.000 When a guy's on EPO, is there a more significant danger when something like that's going on, if you are bleeding like that, or if you are bruising?

00:53:45.000 I think so.

00:53:46.000 Again, I'm not a scientist, but common sense would show you if you have a lot more red blood cells floating around that are able to clot, then yeah, you're likely running that risk.

00:53:55.000 It's just amazing what people are willing to risk just to win.

00:53:59.000 It sure is.

00:54:01.000 It certainly is.

00:54:01.000 That's been a lesson that I'm not surprised anymore.

00:54:06.000 You see a lot in formal, you know, questionnaires, interviews of athletes that if you could give up a couple years in your life, you know, and there was a pill that would allow you to win an Olympic gold medal, but you had to give up, you know, four or five years in your life, would you?

00:54:20.000 And typically you see the answers to that overwhelmingly, yes.

00:54:25.000 You know, I think a lot of it is athletes are a little bit younger in their mid-early 20s, feeling invincible at that time.

00:54:32.000 Who's thinking about, you know, five years on the end of your life then?

00:54:34.000 And I think, you know, a lot of the decision-making of taking some of these performance-enhancing drugs occurs then, where you feel young and invincible and who cares what you have to pay 20 or 30 years down the line for making a decision now.

00:54:50.000 Yeah, and there's also a bunch of athletes that are putting money in the bank of medical technology and innovation, and they're like, look, one day they're going to fix this. 0.83

00:55:00.000 Let me just take this shit now, and then five, ten years from now, they'll just build me a new liver. 0.86

00:55:06.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:55:07.000 One thing, people are kind of surprised that this is my opinion, but I understand a lot of times why these decisions are made.

00:55:17.000 There's such temptation financially.

00:55:20.000 There's such incentive out there financially in a lot of these sports.

00:55:24.000 There's such pressure, I don't know what the word is, distrust of They're competitors or teammates that they all feel that they're using something.

00:55:33.000 There's a lot of distrust of sports governing bodies that they really don't feel that they care because their programs aren't solid.

00:55:41.000 And so I've had so many of these athletes really surprised that, you know, I say, hey, I understand why I made that decision.

00:55:47.000 I get it.

00:55:48.000 As opposed to, you know, the hell are you doing?

00:55:51.000 You should never have done that.

00:55:52.000 So you play good cop.

00:55:53.000 You're the good cop.

00:55:54.000 I do.

00:55:54.000 I mean, I really genuinely feel that.

00:55:56.000 I like to think that I wouldn't make that decision, but hell, if I was in my early 20s, mid-20s, I don't know.

00:56:01.000 I couldn't sit here and tell you that.

00:56:03.000 And if you're in the culture of, you know, you're in these camps and everyone in the camp is using, you most likely would have a problem if you weren't, where people wouldn't trust you, or, you know, they'd be more likely to turn on you, or...

00:56:17.000 You'd have a problem training with these people and there's a there's this culture of camaraderie that comes with fight camps especially Where these guys have to trust each other because they're beating the shit out of each other on a daily basis And they have to trust that they're hitting each other at 60 70 percent not a hundred percent and that they are trying to work and help each other Have you had resistance from any camps in particular?

00:56:39.000 No, outwardly, no.

00:56:40.000 It's all been positive.

00:56:41.000 A lot of questioning on the IV issue, so maybe quantify a little bit of resistance there.

00:56:46.000 In terms of the anti-doping, overwhelmingly, hey, good for you guys.

00:56:51.000 This is great.

00:56:51.000 Now, I don't know if some of that's lip service or not, but I'm guessing that even those athletes that have chosen in the past to use, that a lot of them are like, thank God, this decision's now made for me.

00:57:04.000 I don't have to be making...

00:57:06.000 This decision anymore.

00:57:08.000 Now there's something in place where I can trust that my sport really does care about me.

00:57:13.000 I can trust that if my opponent is using, he's risking at least his career going down the tube. 0.99

00:57:19.000 So I can begin to trust that who I'm fighting is clean or just being really stupid. 0.98

00:57:24.000 We had this conversation in Brazil about Vitor Belfort's levels when he was tested during his camp for Chris Weidman. 0.97

00:57:34.000 Vitor Belfort was a guy who was on testosterone replacement because he allegedly had low testosterone and you know he was making it out like he was this martyr and he needed medicine because you know he was sick and he had an issue and he even compared it to someone being a diabetic and needing insulin you have to give them their insulin which I thought was Disingenuous and in a lot of ways,

00:57:55.000 it's kind of a crazy thing to say when everybody knows, I mean, it's not a mystery that he used to be 240 pounds when he was 19 years old. 0.97

00:58:03.000 It's not a mystery that he was on testosterone replacement and looked like a fucking gorilla. 0.86

00:58:08.000 And then during camp, he tests three times higher than Weidman. 0.99

00:58:13.000 Weidman tests at 300, Vitor tests at 1,200. 0.99

00:58:17.000 And everybody was like, well, what the fuck is going on? 0.99

00:58:21.000 You know, wasn't it? 0.99

00:58:22.000 Am I saying the numbers right?

00:58:23.000 Was it four times higher?

00:58:24.000 Four times higher?

00:58:26.000 Or was it 900 or 1,200?

00:58:27.000 1,200, right?

00:58:27.000 I think I was right.

00:58:28.000 Okay, so he's four times higher, right?

00:58:31.000 And he tells...

00:58:34.000 You know, Weidman tells him, you know, I'm going to punish you.

00:58:37.000 I know you were using in camp.

00:58:38.000 I'm going to punish you.

00:58:39.000 But you were saying that it's not necessarily the case, and that when someone tests at 1,200 through a urine test, explain that.

00:58:49.000 Yeah, and I actually relied on, you know, experts to kind of guide me through this, but...

00:58:57.000 Urine results like that depend on, I think it's called your excretion level.

00:59:03.000 Different people excrete out in urine different levels of testosterone.

00:59:08.000 Depends a lot on your metabolism.

00:59:10.000 One person could be a high excreter and one person could be a low excreter.

00:59:14.000 It's not necessarily a representation of your true testosterone levels.

00:59:19.000 We talked about earlier blood tests would be way more accurate.

00:59:23.000 So why test him for urine at all?

00:59:25.000 Well, I think the urine test is done because it's a little bit cheaper.

00:59:29.000 They can initially look at the testosterone to epitestosterone ratio.

00:59:34.000 It's a pretty true marker in urine.

00:59:36.000 The amount of testosterone that you have to epitestosterone, the levels can vary depending on how you're excreting out, but that ratio will be very accurate of what's in your body.

00:59:49.000 A normal human has a one-to-one ratio.

00:59:52.000 There are some variances on the positive and on the plus and negative side, and if you look at what Vitor's ratio was there, it was within normal range.

01:00:03.000 But you allow up to 4-1 in Nevada.

01:00:06.000 Is that still the case with the way the UFC has this new program?

01:00:10.000 Is it still 4-1?

01:00:10.000 Because it was 6-1 at one point in time.

01:00:12.000 That was criticized, and it was dropped down to 4-1.

01:00:15.000 So that's gone out the window a little bit.

01:00:17.000 The ratio is looked at to determine whether or not you go to a more accurate backup test called, we talked about earlier, the carbon isotope ratio test.

01:00:27.000 So in all cases, you know, if a test proves high over whatever the number is, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, 6 to 1, then the determination is usually made, hey, let's go to the definitive test, carbon isotope, to determine whether or not that's foreign-based testosterone.

01:00:44.000 And if it is foreign-based testosterone, how much of a time, like once you get the test results, like say if you test a guy and his urine tests are kind of funky, he's reading really high, and then you decide to go to a blood test, if he's doing something like Alex Rodriguez was doing, where it's like quick release,

01:01:00.000 how would you describe it?

01:01:01.000 Quick half-life, what would you describe it?

01:01:03.000 Yeah, fast acting, fast clearing.

01:01:06.000 How would you mitigate that?

01:01:09.000 So, ask that question again.

01:01:11.000 So you do the...

01:01:11.000 So you do the one test and it shows that he's got a very high level, 1200, and then you want to do a blood test.

01:01:18.000 Not necessarily.

01:01:19.000 You could go right to that same urine sample and do a different test, do the CIR test on that.

01:01:23.000 So it can be...

01:01:24.000 So you don't do that ordinarily?

01:01:26.000 The carbon isotope is not done immediately?

01:01:28.000 No.

01:01:28.000 In our program, it will be.

01:01:30.000 That will be as opposed to, you know, hey, let's do the testosterone, epitestosterone ratio test first.

01:01:37.000 In some cases, USADA will go right to the CIR test and bypass the TE ratio, and that It's because of the microdosing issues.

01:01:46.000 So say like an Alex Rodriguez took a fast-lasting testosterone that didn't really manipulate his TE level too much.

01:01:53.000 If you were just doing that test, it would show a 2 or 3 to 1 maybe.

01:01:57.000 And in the past, anti-doping said, okay, he's good.

01:01:59.000 He's under 4 to 1 or 6 to 1. Where if a CIR test was done on that, they would have known right away that he was using.

01:02:06.000 So under our program, oftentimes a CIR test will be done Right away, regardless of what the TE ratio is.

01:02:14.000 Okay, so if you are doing what Alex Rodriguez was doing, even if he tests okay within his boundaries and normal levels, you can do a CIR test and catch him even though it's out of his system?

01:02:28.000 Well, no, no.

01:02:29.000 If it's out of his system, it's out of his system.

01:02:31.000 But if it's a four-hour thing, is that true?

01:02:33.000 Is that actually the level?

01:02:35.000 I mean, it really is gone in four hours?

01:02:38.000 I mean, that's what they say.

01:02:39.000 I'd be a little bit hesitant if I was an athlete to depend on, you know, if I had a drug test in five hours, if something's going to clear in four hours, they can detect pretty minute amounts.

01:02:49.000 But my understanding is it does clear pretty quickly.

01:02:52.000 Are you going to test guys in the middle of the night?

01:02:55.000 The USADA has the ability to do that.

01:02:57.000 I don't think they're going to, you know, make that routine, but if, again, this is all detective work.

01:03:01.000 If they're looking at biological passports over time and see variances between mornings and evenings, they could get a tip or other information that's, you know, non-science related, just a tip from somebody that, hey, this is what's going on in this camp.

01:03:17.000 They'd have the ability to do that, yes.

01:03:19.000 Hmm.

01:03:21.000 A tip.

01:03:22.000 Has that happened before?

01:03:23.000 Have you guys had tips from people that fighters are using?

01:03:27.000 So actually, USADA has a hotline or a tip line that's given to all our athletes.

01:03:31.000 If you hear something about something going on from somebody or a camp, they can anonymously call in and lead that.

01:03:37.000 And you look back at all of the major performance-enhancing drug cases that have come out over the past years, 15 years.

01:03:45.000 You look at Balco, you look at Biogenesis, you look at Kirk Radomsky, who's a New York Mets bat boy that was distributing to athletes.

01:03:53.000 He was a bat boy? 1.00

01:03:55.000 He was.

01:03:55.000 He was a clubhouse attendant.

01:03:57.000 The bat boy was getting them drugs? 1.00

01:03:59.000 He sure was.

01:04:00.000 Wow.

01:04:01.000 How'd they catch him?

01:04:01.000 Is he in jail now?

01:04:03.000 He's a convicted felon.

01:04:05.000 I think he's done with probation.

01:04:08.000 But all of those cases, all the major cases that have happened over the last decade, decade and a half, all were a result of investigations, not necessarily anti-doping side of things.

01:04:21.000 Thank you.

01:04:36.000 Say another case comes out and a local law enforcement agency goes in and does a search warrant and they find, you know, a list of UFC athletes of what drugs they were getting or being distributed.

01:04:47.000 You saw it would have the ability, hopefully, to go to law enforcement and say, hey, when you're done kind of with the criminal side of things here, can you give us, find a way to give us some of your evidence to use it here and use it that way?

01:05:00.000 So again, Joe, we're just trying to, our program has every resource And is that what happened with Balco?

01:05:30.000 It was.

01:05:31.000 So Balco was a criminal investigation first.

01:05:35.000 And what we did there was interfaced with anti-doping.

01:05:39.000 So we discovered drugs in Balco that were designer drugs that they weren't tests for.

01:05:44.000 And through the back door went to anti-doping and said, hey, here's what we've got.

01:05:49.000 We're trying to figure out who Balco's clients are, what they're using.

01:05:52.000 If when we bring them in, they're telling us the truth about what they've used.

01:05:56.000 So the anti-doping side of things was able to develop tests for these drugs, go out and test some of these athletes, both current samples provided and samples that were frozen and left over from previous provisions, and catch some of those athletes for the drugs they were using. 0.99

01:06:13.000 They then pass that information back along to us so that when we go out and question an athlete and they say, I didn't use anything, we will say, you're full of shit. 0.93

01:06:21.000 Now, when you say it was a criminal investigation first, what was the crime? 0.98

01:06:25.000 So, actually, that was back in my days.

01:06:27.000 I was an IRS special agent, so it involved financial crime.

01:06:31.000 It involved money laundering.

01:06:32.000 So, the taking of profits from drug distribution and putting them back in the financial system.

01:06:38.000 Oh, right, because they have to have some way to account for the money.

01:06:43.000 Correct.

01:06:44.000 Make it look good.

01:06:46.000 How much does a guy like Barry Bonds pay for steroids to a guy like Victor Conte?

01:06:50.000 How much does that work?

01:06:51.000 He was interesting because he didn't pay anything.

01:06:54.000 He paid in the form of giving advertising.

01:06:57.000 It was really an ingenious plan.

01:06:58.000 Instead of, in exchange for what I'm giving you, you give me back money, do advertising for my supplement company.

01:07:06.000 Go in magazines and ads and say, hey, you work with me and my supplements and they're the reason for your success.

01:07:12.000 Like ZMA and stuff like that.

01:07:13.000 Who knows what the value of that was, of that advertising?

01:07:16.000 Millions.

01:07:17.000 Millions.

01:07:18.000 It was an ingenious...

01:07:21.000 Plan, money laundering plan.

01:07:23.000 I've had Conte in here. 0.98

01:07:24.000 Dana White fucking hates that guy, but I found him to be a pleasant individual. 0.98

01:07:27.000 I didn't have a problem with him and he was very forthright. 0.99

01:07:30.000 He was very honest about what he did and how he got away with it and what he thinks is going on right now.

01:07:35.000 A lot of people are suspicious of him, of course, because, I mean, he's now like working as an anti-performance enhancing drugs advocate when he became famous for being a guy who provided performance enhancing drugs to athletes.

01:07:49.000 It's a weird sort of turnaround late in life and people are they're suspicious and you know rightly so but what he has what he has done is at least illuminate what he was able to pull off Yeah,

01:08:07.000 you know, I'm asked about him often, and I always say, hey, I welcome anybody over to the good side.

01:08:13.000 Do you believe him?

01:08:14.000 I'm a firm believer in second chances.

01:08:17.000 I think, you know, you have to take everything he says with a little bit of grain of salt.

01:08:21.000 I read something the other day that he still keeps a hand in kind of the dark world, and that's where he learns about all this stuff.

01:08:27.000 The dark world.

01:08:29.000 If you're truly an anti-doping advocate and you know about things going on in the dark world and you're not exposing who those people are, then you're really not truly an anti-doping advocate.

01:08:40.000 But the guy's a character.

01:08:42.000 I mean, I enjoyed...

01:08:43.000 He's one of those guys in my former career.

01:08:46.000 You run into a lot of characters like that.

01:08:49.000 I enjoy everything about those people.

01:08:51.000 It's just living life and running into characters like that, whether in a good or bad way, makes life fun.

01:08:57.000 So you enjoy it because it's part of the flavor of the gig?

01:09:01.000 Absolutely.

01:09:02.000 And also because you're a pretty straight-edge guy, you know?

01:09:05.000 You like people who are living on the edge like that.

01:09:07.000 It's always fun to see how the other side lives. 1.00

01:09:10.000 I don't trust anybody with a fucking mustache like that. 1.00

01:09:13.000 I'll tell you that. 1.00

01:09:14.000 When you got one of them little skinny mustaches, there's just very few people that I trust.

01:09:18.000 Maybe a couple black guys, maybe some people of Puerto Rican descent that have a little skinny mustache.

01:09:23.000 But I don't know, Conte.

01:09:24.000 Have you seen his mustache?

01:09:28.000 Yeah, there's something about that mustache that makes me go, hmm.

01:09:30.000 You know, I just hope at some point, because he does, he's got a bit of a platform, you know, still a lot of, hell, you had him in here.

01:09:37.000 Look at that mustache. 1.00

01:09:38.000 Get the fuck out of here, dog. 1.00

01:09:40.000 Come on, son. 1.00

01:09:43.000 I'm waiting for, you know, he's been critical of me.

01:09:45.000 Really?

01:09:46.000 I'm waiting for a thank you from him for bringing him over to the good side.

01:09:50.000 What's his criticism been?

01:09:52.000 I don't even know.

01:09:53.000 Don't listen to it?

01:09:54.000 Don't listen to it, really.

01:09:56.000 Good for you.

01:09:57.000 Aldo, Jose Aldo has said that he won't do the IV, or that he won't listen to the ban on IVs.

01:10:03.000 He's going to take it, and he said, they'll still let me fight.

01:10:05.000 You know, what do you think about that?

01:10:08.000 Actually, when we were in Brazil a couple weeks ago, I had a conversation with him about that, and he said it was just one of those days where he was in a certain mood, maybe a little bit joking, maybe a little bit pissed off about something else, and said those things and said he shouldn't have.

01:10:23.000 I don't know.

01:10:41.000 Conor's really good at that, isn't he?

01:10:43.000 He's the best!

01:10:45.000 He's the best.

01:10:46.000 It's like he took Muhammad Ali and Chael Sonnen and he rolled it up in this crazy Celtic warrior character.

01:10:53.000 And he's good.

01:10:56.000 That's the thing. 0.85

01:10:57.000 He's not just a trash talker. 1.00

01:10:58.000 He's fucking dangerous. 1.00

01:11:00.000 It's a once-in-a-lifetime personality. 1.00

01:11:02.000 And he pulls it off consistently.

01:11:04.000 He's always on his game.

01:11:06.000 Well, the fact that he was willing to bet Dana and Lorenzo $3 million that he would knock Mendes out in the second round, and he knocked Mendes out in the second round. 1.00

01:11:13.000 I mean, he's a fucking freak. 0.99

01:11:15.000 He really is. 1.00

01:11:16.000 He's a freak. 0.85

01:11:17.000 I wonder if it comes naturally, or he sits around at night plotting these things out.

01:11:21.000 I don't know.

01:11:22.000 Because he's so damn good at it.

01:11:23.000 Well, he was always a very good fighter.

01:11:24.000 I was a big fan of his when he was competing in Europe.

01:11:27.000 He was fighting in the UK. Actually, I tweeted him way back in the day before he ever came to the UFC, saying that I enjoy his fights and I hope he gets over here.

01:11:38.000 Boy did he get over here.

01:11:39.000 Jesus Christ.

01:11:40.000 I mean that UFC weigh-ins when he fought Mendez was the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life of all the fights that I've ever called all the weigh-ins that I've ever been at I have never seen anything like that in America and it was like we were in Dublin That's amazing.

01:11:56.000 I'm four months into this, so I'm a newbie, so I expect that now.

01:12:00.000 Don't expect that.

01:12:02.000 No, that was a total outlier.

01:12:04.000 I've never seen any...

01:12:05.000 Well, expect it if he fights again, though, in a bigger way.

01:12:07.000 In December, when he fights Aldo, Jesus Christ, that's going to be crazy.

01:12:12.000 If Aldo makes it to it without getting injured and he makes it to it without getting injured, which is a big problem with this sport, you know, if you look at boxing matches, boxing matches that get arranged and how many of them actually come to fruition, it's most of them.

01:12:24.000 Most fights get scheduled, they come and they actually come to pass.

01:12:29.000 With the UFC, it's maybe 70%.

01:12:32.000 I might be wrong, but if I had to guess, like big fights, 75% at the most, 25% of them fall out, it seems like.

01:12:41.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

01:12:43.000 It's lagging behind a little bit, the anti-doping side, because that's taken up so much of my time, but it's another responsibility under my title is to try to provide our athletes to reach out, provide them with other resources in terms of training, rehabilitation.

01:12:57.000 We've...

01:12:58.000 Reached out to a couple companies here, domestically, Exos, which does a lot of training for NFL draft picks.

01:13:05.000 What is that?

01:13:07.000 It's a training facility.

01:13:08.000 E-X-O-S. And what are their training facilities? 1.00

01:13:11.000 Yeah, so they are most widely known from taking...

01:13:15.000 Shoot, if you look at most of the first-round draft picks in the NFL, they've gone and trained at Exos from...

01:13:20.000 You know, their end of their last season in college through the combine, and they've just instituted good nutrition, good training methods.

01:13:30.000 We've contracted with them a couple months ago, sent a couple athletes down there.

01:13:34.000 I think Rashad Evans went down, Forrest went down kind of from an internal perspective to look at things.

01:13:41.000 I think Luke Rockhold went down there, CM Punk.

01:13:44.000 Forrest is retired.

01:13:45.000 He is.

01:13:45.000 And he went down there to look at what?

01:13:48.000 Just experienced, you know, a week of training.

01:13:49.000 So the idea is to get our athletes to train smarter, to listen to their bodies, to, you know, give them techniques and proper nutrition, things like that, so that as our guys are training smarter, listening to their bodies better,

01:14:04.000 there will be less instances of getting injured, you know, coming up to big fights.

01:14:09.000 And the UFC is developing some sort of a performance center, correct?

01:14:14.000 Correct, we are.

01:14:16.000 I think they're breaking ground pretty soon on that, but the idea would be through consulting with these other companies that have been in the business of training high-level athletes to putting all these resources and tools and machines and space available to this state-of-the-art,

01:14:34.000 world-class facility that our athletes would have the ability to come to and train, to come to and rehabilitate.

01:14:42.000 I think we're good to go.

01:15:02.000 In terms of how we teach our athletes to train.

01:15:05.000 Is there a consensus, though, on the correct way to train as far as strength and conditioning goes, as far as how much time to spend doing skill work versus how much time to spend doing endurance work?

01:15:19.000 It seems like there's a lot of debate and then there's a lot of...

01:15:23.000 Athletes vary as far as their needs, their style of fighting.

01:15:27.000 How would you manage something like that?

01:15:29.000 Yeah, that's a tough one for me that I'm I'll be the first to admit, just learning and coming up to speed.

01:15:34.000 I mean, you probably know better in your involvement in MMA and what it feels like to train and what you would need to do in your training to be able to be ready to get into a real fight a month or a couple weeks later.

01:15:46.000 I'll turn that back around on you.

01:15:48.000 What do you think in terms of how close to a fight these guys need to be going full speed so that when they get in that octagon, it's not a shock to the system? 0.97

01:15:55.000 Like, holy shit, what's going on?

01:15:57.000 Well, it depends on who you ask, because there's a lot of people that I respect that vary wildly on how they approach things. 0.97

01:16:04.000 Like, you'll talk to one guy who's a strength and conditioning coach, and he has this very specific idea of how you should train, and then another guy who's also very well respected, but completely different methodology.

01:16:15.000 I'm a big fan of what Marv Marinovich was able to do with BJ Penn and the amount of work that he did with BJ's endurance.

01:16:23.000 I think that BJ during that time was just one of the greatest of all time.

01:16:27.000 During the time we fought Diego Sanchez and Sean Shirk, when BJ was in his prime.

01:16:33.000 And I know during the Diego Sanchez fight in particular, it was an absolutely brutal camp for him. 0.93

01:16:38.000 And he went and worked with him for only a couple fights because it was so goddamn brutal.

01:16:46.000 But a lot of people think, and Nick Kurson, who's a protege of Marinovich, I've had him on the podcast, we discussed it pretty deep.

01:16:54.000 And he thinks, and I like the way he thinks, he believes that strength and conditioning during camp is everything.

01:17:02.000 And that's really what you should primarily focus on.

01:17:04.000 That these guys already know how to fight.

01:17:06.000 And that really they should be putting almost all of their effort into conditioning.

01:17:11.000 Getting their body to the point where their body can perform at an extremely high level for five rounds, five minutes each.

01:17:17.000 And that All the other skill work and everything like that should actually take a backseat to conditioning because what you're dealing with when you're dealing with a championship level fight like that is an athlete that's so finely tuned in skill-wise already that really what you need to do is give them the horsepower and give them the gas tank.

01:17:33.000 And what that also would do is it would prevent the really hard training that is breaking guys down, like the really hard wrestling training that's breaking guys down.

01:17:44.000 Instead of doing that, you would just drill.

01:17:46.000 Instead of doing these hard sparring drills, you would just drill.

01:17:49.000 Matter of fact, Tim Kennedy was just on the Fighter and the Kid podcast with Brian Kellen and Brendan Schaub, and Brendan texted me last night and said that Kennedy said he doesn't spar.

01:17:59.000 He said he just doesn't spar.

01:18:00.000 He said he moves around with guys and he just does strength and conditioning work and everything like that.

01:18:04.000 He said, but the sparring, like, you take enough punishment fighting.

01:18:08.000 So he's of the mindset that you shouldn't be beating yourself up in the gym.

01:18:13.000 So I think there's a lot of variation there.

01:18:16.000 Yeah, I agree.

01:18:17.000 I think that's something that EXOS promotes is that it depends on, you know, an athlete individual to individual.

01:18:23.000 Some are different than others.

01:18:25.000 One thing that they did tell us is that they were just amazed, and getting back to kind of the weight-cutting thing, that an athlete who's going to compete 24 hours later is putting their body through such extreme conditions just 24 hours before.

01:18:39.000 And the effect that that's going to have on your performance when you do an extreme cut and then put that weight back on.

01:18:45.000 And that, you know, during the off-season when you don't have a fight scheduled and you're maybe even 20 pounds heavier than that, You know, the muscle memory of getting used to working out at that 20 pounds heavier than you're actually going to be fighting doesn't seem to make a lot of common sense because you're fighting as a completely different feel and person and muscle mass that,

01:19:07.000 you know, training-wise doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

01:19:10.000 So, I don't know.

01:19:11.000 Again, I'm new to all this and trying to be a sponge and absorb everything.

01:19:17.000 Yeah, I've seen the horror stories. 0.98

01:19:19.000 I've seen guys cut too much weight and just fight like shit, and I've seen guys that really blew their opportunity at being champion. 0.97

01:19:25.000 The best example that I've ever used is Travis Luter. 0.98

01:19:29.000 Travis Luter was one of the best American black belts in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, especially at the time.

01:19:34.000 He was just extremely high-level black belt.

01:19:37.000 Very, very technical, very strong, and fought Anderson Silva.

01:19:42.000 Didn't make weight.

01:19:43.000 Didn't make weight. 0.98

01:19:43.000 And when I tell you that he was on fucking death's door, I've never, in all my years of watching fights, watching weigh-ins, seeing guys look dehydrated, never seen anybody look as bad as him. 0.98

01:19:54.000 His lips were cracked. 0.98

01:19:56.000 You could see cracks in his lips where his lips had shrunken down.

01:20:00.000 He was chapped.

01:20:02.000 His face was completely sunken in.

01:20:05.000 That's scary.

01:20:05.000 And he was shuffling.

01:20:06.000 He couldn't walk to the scale.

01:20:08.000 He was shuffling.

01:20:09.000 And he didn't make the weight.

01:20:10.000 And he tried for like an hour and a half afterwards to try to make the weight.

01:20:13.000 Still the next day took Anderson Silva down mounted him was on top of him and I'll tell you what if Travis was a hundred percent right there He would have submitted Anderson like Travis was submitting everybody who was stopping people at will like Charles McCarthy who's a friend of mine who trained with him in the house He said it was like rolling with Ricardo Laborio.

01:20:32.000 He said his level was like super high level and Blew his chance.

01:20:36.000 And really never sort of reached his full potential after that.

01:20:41.000 But that was like the worst I've ever seen.

01:20:44.000 He's like a guy who just blew his potential.

01:20:46.000 I'll tell you an interesting stat.

01:20:48.000 I think it was the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

01:20:49.000 So they had...

01:20:52.000 Dehydration, rehydration study, and they had certain percentages of dehydration and what that meant to a body.

01:20:57.000 I think it was 7% or more, your cognitive skills decline immensely, and I think it was 15% dehydrated.

01:21:08.000 In the study, it's an imminent death.

01:21:10.000 Organs are shut down.

01:21:11.000 15%.

01:21:11.000 Start doing the numbers, Jill, of some of these cuts that you've heard about and seen.

01:21:16.000 I heard one the other day, someone on the radio talking about an athlete they had that was 170, Four days before a weigh-in and went down, I think, to 145. And do the math on...

01:21:29.000 Now, that's assuming all that weight cut was water.

01:21:32.000 I don't know if that's actually the case, but probably.

01:21:35.000 And when you're talking that short of time, that's almost 15%.

01:21:37.000 Conor McGregor, when he fought Chad Mendes, he looked like a dead man.

01:21:41.000 I mean, you could see...

01:21:41.000 I mean, people were commenting it online.

01:21:43.000 They're like, Jesus Christ, look at him.

01:21:45.000 Can a guy like that, a guy like that who's fighting a guy like Mendes, can a guy like that In 24 hours, orally rehydrate properly?

01:21:55.000 Yeah, I don't know what the question of that.

01:21:57.000 I mean, I think our athletes are outliers.

01:22:00.000 They are The toughest individual, you know, they're genetic freaks to begin with.

01:22:06.000 So, you know, maybe this common science doesn't quite apply to them by the exact number.

01:22:12.000 But, hey, I tell you, it's something we had.

01:22:14.000 We had a meeting the other day with our operations staff, and our fighters come in on Monday or Tuesday, and the first thing they do is weigh them in just to kind of get an idea of, hey, where they're looking at.

01:22:24.000 Do they do a body fight or a water composition?

01:22:26.000 Not that I'm aware of, but I tell you, I'm going to start We're good to go.

01:22:48.000 On the inside, these things don't go away, and you're probably doing, you know, lasting damage.

01:22:53.000 Have you talked to any ex-fighters?

01:22:54.000 I've talked to a few about that have ongoing kidney problems.

01:22:58.000 They're probably going to have the rest of their life thyroid problems, or their thyroid's all messed up from these extreme weight cuts.

01:23:04.000 It's definitely out there.

01:23:05.000 It's devastating.

01:23:06.000 Yeah, it's devastating.

01:23:07.000 Well, Daniel Cormier didn't make the Olympic team, or didn't compete in the Olympics because of his kidneys shutting down.

01:23:14.000 It's a giant, giant problem.

01:23:16.000 It's just awful.

01:23:19.000 Here's the thing.

01:23:20.000 For a guy like Aldo and a guy like McGregor, what really people want to see is they want to see Aldo fight McGregor, right? 0.98

01:23:27.000 They don't give a fuck if they weigh in at 145 and then rehydrate back up to whatever the hell they weighed before that. 0.99

01:23:32.000 That's nonsense. 0.99

01:23:33.000 What they should do is figure out where these guys are healthy.

01:23:37.000 Like, where are you healthy?

01:23:38.000 And then we're going to see the best fight out of these guys.

01:23:40.000 The problem is the title.

01:23:42.000 The title is everything, right?

01:23:44.000 You want to beat Chris Weidman as the UFC middleweight champion of the world.

01:23:48.000 If Chris Weidman releases his title and says, look, I can't make the UFC's 185 pound limit anymore because of this new non-IV using policy, so I'm just going to drop the title.

01:24:00.000 Chris Weidman could still have huge super fights. 0.99

01:24:03.000 Because he's Chris Weidman and everybody knows he's a bad motherfucker. 0.98

01:24:06.000 So if he decided to fight at 205 or whatever, people are going to line up. 0.99

01:24:10.000 It doesn't matter if it's for the title.

01:24:11.000 He's got a name.

01:24:12.000 Ronda Rousey has a name.

01:24:14.000 Conor has a name.

01:24:15.000 But there's a lot of guys that just don't have a name.

01:24:17.000 So for those guys, that title is critical. 0.54

01:24:21.000 The difference between Robbie Lawler fighting Carlos Condit just in a fight and Robbie Lawler fighting Carlos Condit as a champion, it's a big goddamn difference. 0.55

01:24:29.000 It's a big difference.

01:24:30.000 And that's unfortunate.

01:24:32.000 Because I think that...

01:24:34.000 The situation that they're in right now where they have to hit the specific weight class, I think we should match guys up based on their size and not based on weighing in 24 hours beforehand at a very specific weight.

01:24:47.000 I think it's dangerous and I also think it's irrelevant.

01:24:50.000 I don't think it matters.

01:24:51.000 I mean, I think there's advantages that guys would have if they were more than a certain amount over their opponent, or less than a certain amount.

01:24:58.000 There's a way that you could mitigate that, though.

01:25:00.000 There's a way that you could figure out, like, what is the range that these guys could weigh in, but make sure that they are within the range of dehydration, within the range of body composition, and they're not fucking with the numbers any.

01:25:14.000 Let's find out what you actually weigh.

01:25:16.000 What does Johnny Hendricks actually weigh when he fights?

01:25:19.000 When Johnny Hendricks is at his best, that's where Johnny Hendricks should be fighting.

01:25:22.000 What about Tyrone Woodley?

01:25:23.000 All those guys.

01:25:24.000 And figure out where everybody belongs, and then compete at that level.

01:25:27.000 But everybody's competing for titles.

01:25:29.000 And I think that is part of the problem, is the 155 pound title, the 170 pound title.

01:25:36.000 But really, what we want to see is the best fighters fighting against the best fighters.

01:25:40.000 That's where the money's at.

01:25:41.000 Yeah, I hear you.

01:25:42.000 I don't think there's a simple answer to this.

01:25:45.000 I think it's a process and steps.

01:25:47.000 I mean, all I can say is, and I already am being this, but I'm going to be the squeaky wheel here that hopefully at some point squeaks enough that gets some grease into this.

01:25:56.000 And in terms of the fighters, hey...

01:25:59.000 I have just one interest in mind.

01:26:01.000 I have one goal and one interest, and that's looking out for their health, short and long term, with everything we're doing, with this anti-doping program, with the IV ban.

01:26:10.000 Ultimately, I challenge anyone to say that I don't have that at the forefront of what we're trying to do here.

01:26:18.000 I certainly think you do, but I just think that the IV ban without some sort of weight class management is almost like counterintuitive.

01:26:28.000 I think there has to be something that allows these guys who they've, you know, if a guy like Weidman has worked so hard to get to the 185 pound title, all of a sudden he can't make it anymore because he can't use IVs.

01:26:40.000 It just seems ridiculous.

01:26:41.000 Or because you have a policy that he's too dehydrated and you check him and you find out what he's doing to get to 185. Even though he's been doing his whole career, you guys step in and say, hey, this is too dangerous and we're not going to allow you to do it anymore.

01:26:54.000 It's kind of crazy if he's got to move up 20 pounds.

01:26:57.000 He's already talked about fighting Jon Jones.

01:26:59.000 Statement he made recently and it's one things I love about this guy said he wants to fight the best guys in the world and he says if Weidman or if John Jones rather comes back he goes I have to fight this guy because he's the best and I'm not leaving the sport until I fight John Jones and Because he's the best at 205 and so he wants to do that But I just think that making the weight cut and making that weight class is probably reducing his career and probably reducing a lot of these

01:27:29.000 athletes' careers.

01:27:30.000 They can do it.

01:27:31.000 They get through it.

01:27:32.000 But at what price?

01:27:33.000 And that price is, I'm sure, cumulative.

01:27:36.000 It has to be.

01:27:37.000 Yeah, I hear everything you're saying, Joe.

01:27:39.000 You know, the only thing I say is this program's been up and running now for a month, month and a half.

01:27:45.000 They're not going to listen to me, man.

01:27:46.000 They've got to listen to you.

01:27:47.000 They think I'm crazy.

01:27:48.000 You've got to talk to them.

01:27:49.000 Weight classes.

01:27:50.000 More weight classes. 0.99

01:27:51.000 And all the people who, fuck that, you've got to water down the sport. 1.00

01:27:54.000 Shut up, dummies. 1.00

01:27:55.000 Shut up, all of you. 1.00

01:27:57.000 You don't know what you're talking about. 1.00

01:28:01.000 This fucking sport is so filled with crazy people. 1.00

01:28:04.000 They're willing to do anything to win. 1.00

01:28:06.000 I mean, that's one of the things about the weight cut is that the amount of effort, the titanic effort that it takes to get down to some of these weight classes and rehydrate and compete against world-class athletes in the toughest sport in the world 24 hours later is just nuts.

01:28:23.000 They're superhuman on so many levels.

01:28:25.000 So many levels.

01:28:27.000 Their fighting skills, their ability to withstand pain is just incredible.

01:28:33.000 The mental toughness, too.

01:28:34.000 The mental toughness that it takes to go through those weight cuts and then compete 24 hours later is just insane.

01:28:41.000 So we were talking earlier about the designer drugs that you're catching people on or these drugs that they're testing, like we were talking about the cyclist.

01:28:52.000 Is there anything else that's like that that you may see coming up?

01:28:57.000 Possibly.

01:28:57.000 I mean, I don't have anything, you know, for you here today, but there's constantly drugs in clinical trial phase that could have an application to, you know, performance enhancement.

01:29:08.000 And how do you guys stay on top of that stuff?

01:29:11.000 Like, what's the method of making sure that you're aware of every new thing that these guys are doing to try to get some sort of an advantage and when these things should be legal and illegal?

01:29:22.000 Yeah, I mean, that's the role of the anti-doping authorities and USADA who we use, and they constantly interact and interface with the pharmaceutical industry so that when you know these things are in the pipeline, they can get a look at, hey, what's potentially performance-enhancing or not.

01:29:37.000 I think the pharmaceutical company's been...

01:29:39.000 Pretty cooperative about it.

01:29:41.000 I mean, you know, financially they could probably care less, but, you know, it doesn't look good, I think, when they have a product like an EPO, which is a great drug for, you know, someone who has cancer or is anemic and helps your body create red blood cells that you need to live.

01:29:58.000 Great drug.

01:29:59.000 But then most of the press about it is athletes that are using it to cheat.

01:30:04.000 So I think it's good from a reputation standpoint for the pharmaceutical industry to get on top of these things and seeing what the application could be and helping anti-doping with that.

01:30:15.000 Is there a window where these guys are going to be able to use certain things that you guys haven't caught on to yet that are actually legal for them at a certain point?

01:30:24.000 Like some natural supplements, perhaps, that turn out to be a little bit too effective?

01:30:29.000 How do you make that distinction?

01:30:30.000 Potentially, and that really lies with WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency.

01:30:35.000 And they are constantly monitoring things.

01:30:38.000 There are certain things, I forget what it was, we were talking last week, but they have things on their watch list.

01:30:43.000 So that something like you just talked about could be some type of legal supplement, and they're taking a look at it and studying it.

01:30:50.000 What are the performance-enhancing benefits?

01:30:52.000 Does it have side effects where that, you know, if you had athlete A, say, hey, I don't want to risk myself to those side effects, so I don't want to use that even if it is legal.

01:31:00.000 Is somebody gaining an unfair advantage because they're willing to risk those side effects?

01:31:04.000 So it's a constant monitoring process being done by, you know, the top-level anti-doping authority, which is WADA. Now, what about unintentional contamination?

01:31:15.000 Anderson Silva just got through this big crazy trial in Vegas, which I'm sure you watched that.

01:31:20.000 I was in the front row.

01:31:21.000 I was right behind him.

01:31:21.000 What the hell was that about?

01:31:23.000 The songs that kept playing?

01:31:26.000 That hearing was disturbing on so many levels.

01:31:29.000 So many levels.

01:31:29.000 Explain to people what I'm talking about, because if they hear it from me, they're going to think I'm kidding.

01:31:34.000 Like, explain what was going on.

01:31:36.000 So they had a little conference call device, which they had actually a couple scientists on the line for that were testifying about some of his tests.

01:31:45.000 And somebody out there was able to get the number, and in the middle of the hearing was playing these songs.

01:31:51.000 Let's talk about sex.

01:31:53.000 Yeah, he was testifying about the Cialis that he thought was Cialis that he was using, and a Shaggy song came on, a Salt-N-Pepa song came on. 0.59

01:32:02.000 Yeah, songs about sex kept coming on during the... 0.69

01:32:06.000 It was such a zoo. 0.99

01:32:07.000 The whole thing was just so ridiculous. 0.96

01:32:09.000 Yeah, it wasn't good. 0.95

01:32:10.000 It wasn't good.

01:32:11.000 It was great for people that were paying attention.

01:32:14.000 I mean, the courtroom burst out in laughter.

01:32:16.000 Yeah, but it's sad.

01:32:17.000 Somebody's career reputation at stake, you know?

01:32:20.000 Right.

01:32:21.000 I mean, to me, I'm all about having a little humor injected into things, but...

01:32:26.000 I hated to see that.

01:32:28.000 Well, I can't say I hated it.

01:32:31.000 It was just too funny to me.

01:32:33.000 I think the whole thing was odd in the first place.

01:32:36.000 The argument is, for folks who hadn't heard it, that he was taking, or the excuse is, that he was taking liquid Cialis that was apparently made in a laboratory that also made steroids, and that this liquid Cialis was tainted Unintentionally,

01:32:54.000 like you get a vat of stuff and you mix it all together and then you throw the new stuff in the next vat and you haven't cleaned it?

01:33:00.000 His story was, it was liquid Cialis from a friend that he recently got to know that came from Thailand in a blue unmarked vial.

01:33:09.000 Yeah, it's crazy, but if you're going to make something up, would you really make that up?

01:33:13.000 I would lend more credibility to that story because of the personal nature of taking it and maybe the embarrassment around taking that.

01:33:22.000 He could have come in and said, hey, I used a protein powder and found something in it.

01:33:27.000 I would lend some more credibility to that.

01:33:29.000 Well, you know, I'd alluded to that on this show.

01:33:32.000 I didn't express the exact nature of the issue, but I'd known about this for a long time.

01:33:38.000 I'd heard about the liquid Cialis excuse for a long time.

01:33:42.000 But if I'm correct, hadn't he said that he had taken that same steroid While he was healing from his broken leg?

01:33:52.000 I'm pretty sure that he had said that he had taken it before to heal his broken leg, and what he was surprised was that he had tested negative during camp, but then positive after the fight, and that's when they decided to check out I wasn't aware of that.

01:34:09.000 That didn't come up in the hearing.

01:34:11.000 Yeah, that's why Bas Rutten was critical of it.

01:34:13.000 Bas Rutten was saying that he's changed his story more than once.

01:34:16.000 And Bas was saying that this is what he had said, that he had taken it to heal up his leg, and then, you know, then it was this new excuse with the liquid Cialis.

01:34:25.000 And if there's a lesson I learned over the years of seeing so many of these high-profile athletes kind of get brought to the table and their reputations kind of tarnished forever is come to the table and just...

01:34:40.000 Be transparent.

01:34:41.000 Exactly.

01:34:42.000 Transparency.

01:34:43.000 The public's very forgiving.

01:34:45.000 Very forgiving.

01:34:46.000 Especially in a sport like this where most people believe that a large percentage of the athletes at one point in time have done something that at least now would not be legal, including testosterone replacement, which was legal just a little bit more than a year ago in Nevada.

01:35:01.000 Yeah, I mean, again, going back to what I said, the understanding of why things happen, my personal understanding of why athletes chose to go that route, I think most of the public would be like that.

01:35:10.000 Hey, there wasn't much testing going on, you know, maybe a couple weeks out the night of the fight. 0.95

01:35:16.000 You know, you were probably stupid if you weren't doing something based on your risk in your life every time you got in there. 0.99

01:35:22.000 So definitely under those old circumstances. 0.99

01:35:24.000 Now under the new one here, I don't think people should be as forgiving because everybody should know now how serious this is, that it's, you know, year-round, that there are serious consequences, and the risk is far going to outrage, you know, the reward, hopefully.

01:35:40.000 Now, as far as inadvertent contamination, as far as accidental dosing, if you buy something from some protein powder or vitamin that comes from some shop, you know, and you don't know, you know,

01:35:55.000 it's supposed to boost testosterone naturally or something like that, and then it turns out it has steroids in it.

01:35:59.000 How often does that happen? 0.97

01:36:01.000 Is that a real issue with athletes or is it a bullshit excuse they use to cover up the fact they took steroids? 0.98

01:36:06.000 Very real issue. 0.92

01:36:08.000 So the career I just left to come to the UFC, I was with the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigation.

01:36:14.000 We investigated the dietary sports supplement industry.

01:36:19.000 And there's hundreds of products out there on the shelves.

01:36:23.000 Not prescription, over-the-counter, with steroids and other substances which would cause our athletes to test positive for.

01:36:30.000 And as we're getting out and going out and educating our athletes, that is a huge portion of the education.

01:36:36.000 It is that you have to be...

01:36:39.000 More than careful, extreme careful about what you take.

01:36:42.000 Ultimately, you're liable for everything that goes into your body.

01:36:46.000 Hey, we'll be here and we'll be a resource for you to help kind of wade through those issues and those landmines that are out there.

01:36:53.000 But ultimately, you're responsible for what goes in your body.

01:36:56.000 Now, we have built in our policy mitigating factors that can reduce sanctions so that if somebody did test positive, For a steroid, they were able to show because they kept a sample of it.

01:37:10.000 They told us what the lot number, what the bottle was.

01:37:13.000 Someone went and got that off the shelf to ensure that, hey, they didn't just spike the sample they had, that there was that steroid in it, that there were other circumstances about, you know, occurrences like that.

01:37:24.000 Something like that could be grounds for a reduction in sanction to as low as, you know, maybe a public warning for the first time, maybe.

01:37:33.000 But nevertheless, there's still going to be some type of sanction, and that'll be your first one, so that the next one that came about could, you know, double potential penalties.

01:37:41.000 It's a tough issue, man.

01:37:43.000 One that I worry about a lot because all of our fighters take supplements.

01:37:47.000 We're not going to get up there and say, don't take supplements to anybody.

01:37:50.000 I don't think that's realistic.

01:37:52.000 But isn't that kind of contradicting?

01:37:55.000 If you think about the fact that all these athletes take supplements, right?

01:37:59.000 Why are they taking supplements?

01:38:01.000 Why?

01:38:02.000 To gain a performance-enhancing advantage, right?

01:38:05.000 I mean, how much of an advantage are we talking about?

01:38:07.000 We're talking supplements.

01:38:08.000 You're talking, you know, derivatives of food.

01:38:10.000 We're not talking drugs here.

01:38:12.000 But some of these derivatives of food have been known to enhance testosterone development or production?

01:38:18.000 Theoretically.

01:38:18.000 You know, I haven't seen some of these natural testosterone boosters.

01:38:23.000 You know, personally, I think a lot of it's hocus-pocus and just marketing and sales pitches.

01:38:28.000 Well, the standard ones, things like creatine, we know that has an athletic advantage.

01:38:33.000 There's a performance-enhancing benefit of creatine.

01:38:36.000 But creatine's legal, right?

01:38:37.000 It is, yeah.

01:38:38.000 So the amount is just small enough so that it's under the wire.

01:38:43.000 It doesn't reach this steroid-like level where you guys have to step in so you can't use it.

01:38:48.000 Yeah, I guess that would be the reasoning why WADA has not prohibited creatine in terms of the level of what it's really going to do for you.

01:38:55.000 It's minor.

01:38:57.000 Is there an avenue that fighters have where they can send you guys stuff that they're thinking about taking and then you could test it?

01:39:03.000 Like say if a guy is at, you know, some vitamin store or something like that and see some human growth hormone booster that's all amino acids and totally natural.

01:39:13.000 I'm like, I don't know, man.

01:39:14.000 Can they send it to you?

01:39:16.000 No, we don't have anything in place where they can send it to us.

01:39:19.000 I'm sure we get inundated with things and be spending money.

01:39:23.000 We could be spending on testing on that.

01:39:25.000 But what they do do is, shoot, I get 20 to 30 a week, maybe, emails from athletes about, hey, here's what I'm taking.

01:39:33.000 Can I take this one?

01:39:35.000 That one.

01:39:36.000 And typically what I do is forward that to the United States Anti-Doping Agency, USADA, where they actually have a PhD woman who's, she is probably the nation's expert on dietary supplements. 0.96

01:39:52.000 And she buys, USADA will buy on their own. 0.93

01:39:58.000 We're good to go.

01:40:02.000 We're good to go.

01:40:07.000 We're good to go.

01:40:27.000 We're good to go.

01:40:41.000 A vitamin company that had a vitamin B, I don't know if it was 12, I think it was, manufactured in Long Island a couple years back.

01:40:50.000 And the guy that was manufacturing it on the run before the vitamin did a run of a raw product that he got from some guy in the south.

01:41:00.000 Ran that through the machine with instructions of how much to put in each capsule.

01:41:03.000 Sent that off to the guy in the south.

01:41:05.000 The vitamin company's product is next on the machine.

01:41:08.000 He didn't clean the machine off well enough.

01:41:10.000 And that previous product had a designer, anabolic steroid, Superdrol, methasterone, which is one of the most powerful anabolic steroids.

01:41:19.000 It's orally taken.

01:41:20.000 That got into the B12. The B12, I'm thinking it was maybe...

01:41:28.000 It was a reputable retail store where it was sold.

01:41:31.000 A week or two later, elderly people started presenting themselves at hospitals in this area where it was being sold with yellow eyes, yellow palms, because they were ingesting a vitamin that had this very toxic steroid in it, and they were getting sick from liver damage.

01:41:48.000 Luckily, that's the extreme, but there have been cases of...

01:41:53.000 And then we start talking the sports supplement industry, which is, you know, testosterone boosters, maybe more edgy stuff.

01:41:59.000 You see that happen way more often.

01:42:01.000 I invite you after, go on the USADA site.

01:42:03.000 It's publicly available.

01:42:05.000 It's Supplement 411. They have listed all of the dietary supplements that they've bought this year and tested.

01:42:11.000 I was just looking at it last night.

01:42:13.000 I don't know if it's over 100, but it's probably more than 50 in there, which the public can still go out and buy.

01:42:19.000 They're on the shelves of stores, and they contain, in many instances, anabolic steroids, in all instances, compounds which would cause our athletes to test positive.

01:42:30.000 Wow, that's crazy.

01:42:31.000 There's that many of these things.

01:42:33.000 Here it is right here.

01:42:34.000 There it is.

01:42:34.000 Supplement 411, realize, recognize, and reduce.

01:42:37.000 So if you scroll down.

01:42:38.000 Let's scroll down and see the list.

01:42:40.000 Keep going.

01:42:41.000 Oh, go back up a little bit.

01:42:42.000 High-risk list there on the left.

01:42:45.000 High-risk supplement products.

01:42:47.000 Now you're going to have to enter.

01:42:47.000 You can put my name in there.

01:42:49.000 Maybe put Joe's name in there.

01:42:50.000 You have to put a name?

01:42:52.000 I think the idea behind that... 1.00

01:42:53.000 Don't put my name in there, motherfucker. 0.98

01:42:56.000 The idea behind that is actually a protection of the athlete so that if you went in there and you put your name in and then later said, hey, I went and searched, you know, USADA's site, there would be a record of you having searched that. 0.99

01:43:14.000 All right, let's see what we got here.

01:43:16.000 Okay, you got it.

01:43:18.000 What do we got?

01:43:20.000 Here's all these different...

01:43:24.000 You're scrolling down, but scroll the page down first so we get a full screen.

01:43:28.000 So there you go.

01:43:30.000 AndroLiquid.com And that stuff has got DHEA, product contains a list of prohibited substance, label lists of prohibited substance, product contains prohibited substance testing, revealed presence of one,

01:43:46.000 androstenediol, and that stuff's illegal now, though, isn't it?

01:43:49.000 Androstenediol, those pro-hormones, you used to be able to sell those.

01:43:52.000 There is.

01:43:53.000 There was a new law passed, it was late last year, early this year, the Designer Anabolic Steroid Control Act, or DASCA. And it basically made it easier to quantify some of these designer drugs as steroids and took a whole bunch of known ones that weren't on the steroid list yet and converted them to controlled substances.

01:44:11.000 But here, we're still only at the A's on the antibiotic name on the left.

01:44:14.000 This is a crazy list.

01:44:16.000 Look, looking at all this stuff, a lot of it is Anderstein Diol.

01:44:20.000 Yeah.

01:44:21.000 Wow.

01:44:23.000 This is amazing.

01:44:24.000 Now, it used to be just a few years ago that you could basically, I mean, I guess more than a decade ago now, but you could basically buy steroids from like GNC. I mean, the stuff that they had was oral steroids.

01:44:34.000 Yeah, there's still some of these out there.

01:44:36.000 They've just become more designer nature. 1.00

01:44:41.000 Look at the fucking list of prohibited substance and this angel does shit. 1.00

01:44:44.000 Oh my god. 1.00

01:44:46.000 Wow, okay.

01:44:47.000 Well, we'll leave it to anybody who wants to look into this.

01:44:50.000 Yeah, so I mean our athletes were constantly directing them toward that.

01:44:53.000 Obviously, if it's on this list, don't take it, but there's hundreds of others, you know, that aren't on that list.

01:44:58.000 They only have so much time and resources to buy these.

01:45:00.000 They could probably hire another two or three PhDs and buy these full-time and Triple or quadruple that list based on what I know of the industry.

01:45:08.000 That's crazy.

01:45:09.000 So an athlete going to a vitamin store and just buying a bunch of these things off the counter, there's a very good possibility that he's going to get actual steroids in these things.

01:45:17.000 Yeah, I'd be very concerned.

01:45:18.000 And that's what we pass along to them.

01:45:20.000 They should be concerned.

01:45:21.000 Now, the story that you told about the B12 is really disturbing because I would think that if they cleaned it at all, how would it be possible if these trace amounts would get into these people's vitamins to the point where they're getting sick from liver damage from this toxic steroid?

01:45:34.000 They obviously didn't do a good job.

01:45:36.000 Or didn't clean it at all, it seems like.

01:45:39.000 You know, so the laws here in the United States, for foods and dietary supplement, there's no pre-market review of a product.

01:45:48.000 So you and I, and in fact, I think the Bells you had on last week, as part of Bigger, Faster, Stronger, did a little piece on what the dietary supplement industry is.

01:45:57.000 And I think he hired a couple people off the street to make supplements and showed you could put them right to the shelf.

01:46:02.000 That's accurate.

01:46:03.000 So it's up to the FDA after the fact.

01:46:07.000 After something's already been on the shelf, after probably somebody's already got sick or hurt, unless you have somebody in the FDA being very proactive, which I tell you, coming from the FDA, they're not proactive.

01:46:18.000 They're a reactive agency that typically either a complaint has to be made or somebody Gets hurt before they go out and, you know, enforce what the law is.

01:46:29.000 That product shouldn't be on the shelf.

01:46:31.000 They need to do a much, much better job.

01:46:34.000 And especially in my position now, where I have this, you know, group of athletes, which I feel very fatherly over, I would call on the FDA to do, you know, a way better job than what I saw was happening on the inside.

01:46:47.000 It's a huge organization, mostly regulatory.

01:46:49.000 I was on the criminal side, but they have A huge population of regulatory employees that they could be doing a much better job in managing and taking these products off the shelf.

01:47:01.000 It just seems almost like there's no way to keep up with it.

01:47:05.000 I mean, you looked at so many different supplements right there that just were the letter A. And how many of them all told do they have on their list?

01:47:13.000 Jamie, you could answer that.

01:47:15.000 Is there a number that shows how many they have?

01:47:19.000 No, these were all even just tested this year.

01:47:22.000 She's been doing that for a period of years.

01:47:24.000 Oh my god, that's so crazy.

01:47:27.000 Wow.

01:47:28.000 Because, you know, you'd heard about that before from athletes.

01:47:31.000 We've all heard, you know, that he took a supplement and it turned out to have a banned substance in it and inadvertently tested positive for steroids. 1.00

01:47:40.000 And a lot of times you think they're full of shit and that's just their excuse. 0.99

01:47:43.000 But, wow, I'm looking at it a different way right now because of that. 1.00

01:47:47.000 Yeah, it's no doubt concerning.

01:47:50.000 Now, what about, is it possible that one of these things like an HVAC machine or altitude training, or is it possible that one of those things will eventually be so effective that you guys are going to have to think about banning that as well?

01:48:06.000 I don't know.

01:48:07.000 I mean, we're following the WADA prohibited lists and WADA prohibited methods, so it ultimately would be if WADA decided this, it would fall under our program.

01:48:16.000 And actually, under our program, you know, I think we'd have the ability to evaluate it and determine whether or not we wanted to adopt it.

01:48:24.000 We likely would.

01:48:25.000 I mean, WADA is the gold standard.

01:48:27.000 You know, they're not just arbitrarily throwing things out there that wouldn't give someone an unfair advantage to put on their prohibited list, so we'd follow along, likely.

01:48:35.000 Now, one of the things that I really wanted to make sure I talked to you about, because it was one that really raised my eyebrows when we were talking in Brazil, is gene doping.

01:48:44.000 And it seems like we are at this very strange point when it comes to technology and innovation that I don't think they're more than a decade away from doing something very bizarre to human bodies where it might be undetectable or might be so prevalent that it might change the rules.

01:49:05.000 If you're aware of CRISPR, do you know about this innovation that they created in 2012 called CRISPR that allows them to much more efficiently manipulate genes?

01:49:16.000 And they're doing it mostly, you know, they're testing it.

01:49:20.000 Non-viable embryos in China, and they're doing it in different animals and different things, but the idea being is that within a certain amount of time, it's just undoubtedly going to be something that they experiment with with people.

01:49:36.000 In fact, I have a friend who knows someone that was they were traveling to the Middle East where in this one lab they were performing these tests where they were going to make it so that you could determine I mean this is all a lot of it is in the preliminary stages and a lot of it is it hasn't totally proven that it's effective and But they're going to be able to manipulate eye color,

01:50:03.000 they're going to be able to manipulate sex, change the hair color. 1.00

01:50:06.000 They're going to be able to do all sorts of different things to the baby in the embryonic stage to change what they are as adults.

01:50:15.000 And the idea of creating a super athlete through genetic manipulation is not that far away.

01:50:23.000 It's crazy.

01:50:24.000 I know anti-doping, when they get together many times during the year and have their conferences and bring together leading scientists, it's almost always a one or two hour block on where gene doping is going, where it is now.

01:50:38.000 Where is it now?

01:50:40.000 I don't know the technicalities of where it is now, how close athletes are doing it.

01:50:45.000 But God, man, you talk about taking a risk.

01:50:47.000 One thing to take a drug, but when you're manipulating your gene, who knows, you know, in five, shoot, one or two years, what that's going to do to you.

01:50:56.000 Yeah.

01:50:57.000 It feels like an X-Men movie, though, doesn't it?

01:50:59.000 It does, like Jurassic Park, you know, or getting out of control real quick.

01:51:03.000 Wolverine.

01:51:03.000 Can you see that happening?

01:51:04.000 I'm talking about Wolverine.

01:51:06.000 Guy heals like that.

01:51:07.000 Insane.

01:51:07.000 Yeah, yeah, I mean Jurassic Park Wolverine although I mean, I just feel like There people are gonna be the first to take the leap There's gonna be someone or some government or some you know who it's gonna be it's gonna be the bodybuilding community And every drug that I've seen used in athletics,

01:51:27.000 performance anti-benefits, that is the community that always tries it first. 0.97

01:51:31.000 Those guys are willing to risk anything.

01:51:34.000 What is it?

01:51:34.000 Get big or die trying?

01:51:36.000 Kind of the motto.

01:51:37.000 That is very common.

01:51:40.000 Saw it firsthand.

01:51:41.000 They're willing to try and be the guinea pig for anything. 1.00

01:51:45.000 And those fucking guys die young. 1.00

01:51:47.000 They do. 1.00

01:51:48.000 A lot of those guys die young.

01:51:49.000 They're usually the ones that refine how the drugs are taken and determine, hey, even though it's marketed or promoted for this, actually we'll do this for you as well.

01:51:59.000 And saw that firsthand where non-bodybuilding athletes would rely on advice from them of how to do it and what the effects were.

01:52:08.000 Well, they take things like insulin, right?

01:52:11.000 Yeah.

01:52:12.000 Which is super dangerous, isn't it?

01:52:13.000 No doubt, yeah.

01:52:15.000 Make you a diabetic real quick.

01:52:20.000 Myostatin inhibitors.

01:52:21.000 That's something that I've been fascinated ever since I saw a photo of those whippets that have that genetic... 1.00

01:52:26.000 Crazy, huh?

01:52:27.000 Just an aberration in the whippets from breeding.

01:52:30.000 And they've been able to manipulate cows and pigs and cause it to happen now.

01:52:36.000 And pigs, I think, are the latest ones they've been able to do it to where they have double muscle. 0.87

01:52:40.000 Yeah, I've seen some of those photos.

01:52:41.000 Insane. 0.96

01:52:42.000 And they've been able to do it to mice, and the fucked up thing about mice is they live longer. 0.98

01:52:47.000 They've doubled their lifespan, I think. 0.95

01:52:49.000 And they look awesome.

01:52:51.000 Go to the beach.

01:52:52.000 Flex.

01:52:53.000 They look like Kevin Randallman mice.

01:52:56.000 I mean, what's going to happen when that stuff makes its way into MMA? What do you do?

01:53:01.000 Yeah, I mean, my guessing in anti-doping is you're going to at some point get to some type of gene testing and the ability to look at human genes and see if they've been manipulated or inhibited.

01:53:15.000 But what if someone has a natural manipulation, like there's a boy that was born, I think there's been more than one person, but I know of one that was born in Germany that has that same issue that these cows have and these whippets have.

01:53:27.000 And this young boy, there he is. 0.99

01:53:29.000 Jesus fucking Christ! 1.00

01:53:31.000 Is that real? 1.00

01:53:32.000 That's not real.

01:53:33.000 Oh, come on. 0.87

01:53:34.000 Is that real?

01:53:35.000 Wait a minute.

01:53:35.000 Scroll up.

01:53:36.000 Scroll up.

01:53:36.000 Don't...

01:53:37.000 Hold on.

01:53:38.000 How genetic engineering to make us look like bodybuilders naturally?

01:53:41.000 Just scroll down so I can hear what...

01:53:43.000 In the past pose... 0.95

01:53:46.000 Well, look into this, because this might be bullshit, because that's Chris Bell right there posing with that cow. 0.88

01:53:50.000 That's from Bigger, Stronger, Faster. 0.97

01:53:52.000 Find out if...

01:53:53.000 Because I know there was a young boy who looked different than that, because that looked like a kid with an adult arm.

01:53:58.000 The other one looked like a kid that had like a six-pack.

01:54:01.000 It was really bizarre.

01:54:03.000 He had really thick leg muscles.

01:54:04.000 And they were saying that this child was born without that gene.

01:54:08.000 He had the myostatin inhibitor gene.

01:54:11.000 And that this is something that's...

01:54:13.000 It might be him.

01:54:14.000 Yeah, myostatin muscle inhibitor.

01:54:16.000 That looks real.

01:54:16.000 Like, look at that.

01:54:17.000 That does look real. 0.99

01:54:18.000 That kid is fucking shredded. 1.00

01:54:20.000 Look at his six-pack. 1.00

01:54:21.000 That's nonsense. 0.97

01:54:23.000 He looks like he's got a turtle shell growing out of his stomach. 0.99

01:54:25.000 Jesus Christ.

01:54:27.000 That kid is going to be a stud.

01:54:29.000 So what do you do with a kid like that?

01:54:30.000 If a kid like that wants to compete in the UFC, do you say, no, you're a mutant?

01:54:33.000 You have to compete in the X-Men games?

01:54:35.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:54:37.000 I always like seeing that.

01:54:39.000 That genetic freak of nature that comes along every once in a while.

01:54:42.000 Whether it's Herschel Walker or even like Babe Ruth who had a boiler on him but was obviously strong as hell.

01:54:48.000 So maybe he's one of those cool people that come along once every generation and everybody can get behind because they're knowing that that's real.

01:54:56.000 I don't know.

01:54:57.000 Well, it's real, but it's also a genetic freak accident.

01:55:01.000 I mean, he is definitely a real kid.

01:55:03.000 I mean, he wasn't born, as far as we know, wasn't created in a lab, but he has some sort of a freak advantage.

01:55:11.000 I mean, LeBron James is a genetic freak accident, is he?

01:55:14.000 I mean, one could argue that.

01:55:16.000 Yeah, no, you absolutely can, and you would be right, but he's not competing in fighting.

01:55:22.000 I see.

01:55:22.000 That is a little bit more extreme there.

01:55:24.000 I don't know how you deal with that.

01:55:26.000 I mean, obviously, he's going to be able to show through medical records that it's been that way all through his life and didn't just suddenly appear when he was 16 and did manipulate his genes.

01:55:36.000 So, I mean, I guess you can show that it is natural.

01:55:38.000 I don't know.

01:55:39.000 I don't know what the answer to that is. 0.96

01:55:41.000 It seems like a, for your job, it seems like there's like a window of time for you to enact change before all this crazy genetic shit starts rolling in from China and Russia and who knows where. 0.96

01:55:53.000 Not accusing China and Russia, but they have been known to do some funky things in the past. 0.85

01:55:58.000 Yeah, you know, I worked, part of my last job, I worked at the airmail facility in San Francisco.

01:56:04.000 International Airport and part of that job was to monitor everything coming in from China and the stuff that came through there and my primary focus was on drugs and raw product and compounds that were put into dietary supplements here but The majority of bad stuff going into these supplements coming here,

01:56:24.000 that's where it's coming from.

01:56:25.000 From China?

01:56:26.000 It is, yep.

01:56:27.000 They don't have a lot of rules over there.

01:56:29.000 They don't, and that's why it's also scary.

01:56:31.000 The manufacturing standards over there aren't good, so that they'll send something over to a U.S. manufacturer here saying, hey, here's what's in...

01:56:39.000 This product or this raw compound, and the U.S. manufacturer will take that at its word and really not know what's going into his product, and that's why often you see supplements that don't have on the label what's really in them.

01:56:52.000 It's not cost-effective for them to test every batch and every lot that comes in.

01:56:56.000 So you see a lot of that as well.

01:56:58.000 Well, I learned from the Sopranos that most of the shipping containers that come into the United States don't get tested.

01:57:04.000 Isn't that true?

01:57:05.000 The volume that comes in, you'd have to hire...

01:57:27.000 It's kind of disturbing.

01:57:29.000 Wow.

01:57:30.000 It's amazing to consider that there's so many shipping containers that are coming in from somewhere like China on a daily basis, and who knows what could be possibly in them.

01:57:39.000 Scary, yeah.

01:57:40.000 Now, as far as what is prohibited and banned right now, how many different things are prohibited and banned?

01:57:49.000 We could actually pull up, WADA's got their prohibited list available.

01:57:54.000 One of the cool things about our policy is how transparent it is.

01:57:59.000 Everything that we're doing, our rules, the UFC rules, our fighters can go look at, their support personnel can look at, the public can go look at.

01:58:07.000 They can look at the WADA prohibited list, the WADA prohibited method.

01:58:11.000 It's out there for everyone to see.

01:58:13.000 Another thing that You know, a lot of people are surprised at this, but actually when we, as our testing, we're testing now, but it goes forward and starts really in earnest.

01:58:23.000 USADA will start posting who's tested and how many times they're tested by athlete name.

01:58:30.000 By the end of this year, public can pull up the USADA UFC website and say, ooh, UFC fighter A was tested eight times.

01:58:37.000 UFC fighter B, they were tested three times.

01:58:41.000 Total transparency.

01:58:42.000 And that's done, again, to go back to what we talked about earlier, trust and credibility of the system.

01:58:48.000 It's paramount.

01:58:49.000 It's huge for us, for USADA, to be able to say, we're not hiding anything here.

01:58:54.000 It's all out in the open what we're doing so that athlete, you know, if you don't really think you know what's going on or think this is going, it's all out there in the open for you.

01:59:05.000 Take a look at exactly what we're doing.

01:59:07.000 It was one of the things that people found disturbing about the Anderson Silva allegations was that it was revealed that he had never been tested outside of competition except this one time where he tested negative.

01:59:18.000 Most of our athletes fall under that same circumstance.

01:59:21.000 Nevada California started doing it, too.

01:59:24.000 It was probably the best.

01:59:25.000 I think maybe New Jersey, where they would do what we call enhanced testing, where they would maybe take the top two or three fights on a card and go out for maybe six weeks.

01:59:35.000 That was the extent of any out-of-competition test.

01:59:40.000 As we educate, we're going out to different gyms.

01:59:43.000 We're educating the fight cards on the Wednesday before a Saturday fight.

01:59:48.000 We usually ask the question, The competition test, very few hands go up, you know, maybe a couple per session.

01:59:58.000 So, yeah, I mean, in terms of, again, understanding why an athlete will do something, hey, when you're not testing anybody, unless it's on the day of the fight, which is really just an IQ test, as long as you're smart enough to know how fast a drug will clear your system, you could easily use drugs in the past.

02:00:16.000 And get off them, you know, a week or two ahead of time, have them clear your system and maintain the benefits of those drugs, most of them through the fight.

02:00:24.000 So is it any surprise why, you know, especially when you're risking your health and in some arguments your life when you're getting in that octagon, is it any surprise why a lot of athletes have made that?

02:00:37.000 Under really no testing in the past?

02:00:39.000 It's not to me.

02:00:39.000 But a guy like Anderson Silva, who's widely considered to be, if not the greatest of all time, one of the top two or three greatest of all time, the fact that he was only tested once out of competition and failed, that's really disturbing to a lot of people.

02:00:53.000 They go, well, you know, you're looking at these spectacular performances that he was able to have.

02:00:58.000 Who knows what he was under or on when he pulled those off?

02:01:03.000 Yeah, I mean, not just looking at him individually, but yeah, you extrapolate that out with everybody in this sport that likely, if he wasn't tested out of competition, how about the other 549 behind him if he's at the top of the game?

02:01:19.000 So you extrapolate that out, it's scary.

02:01:22.000 So, hey, we'll see real quick here.

02:01:25.000 I mean, I think a lot of it, though, early on, Thank you for this platform today, but just getting the message out, being that deterrent effect up front, having those athletes in support look now, saying, okay, the game's changed now.

02:01:40.000 It's no longer.

02:01:41.000 You're not going to be tested.

02:01:42.000 You don't trust your opponents.

02:01:43.000 Now the game's changed.

02:01:45.000 That they're using every method and tool available.

02:01:48.000 They're using blood, urine.

02:01:50.000 They're testing for specific drugs.

02:01:52.000 They're looking at a biological passport.

02:01:54.000 So if a specific drug doesn't show up, they could catch somebody that way.

02:01:57.000 Hell, they're freezing our blood and urine.

02:01:59.000 That if a test isn't available today, it may be in a year or two.

02:02:02.000 And they'll go back and test that.

02:02:04.000 And then maybe if I'm not fighting, my legacy is done.

02:02:08.000 Hopefully everybody's hearing all these things that we're doing.

02:02:11.000 Hearing me talk about experiences I've had with athletes in the past, about how damn stressful it's going to be for a UFC athlete right now to use drugs and get away with it.

02:02:20.000 They are going to be thinking about that 24-7, I guarantee you. 0.98

02:02:25.000 Oh shit, who's coming tomorrow? 0.99

02:02:26.000 Okay, how long do I got before this clears my system? 1.00

02:02:28.000 Can I trust the person that's telling me that? 0.95

02:02:31.000 All this shit's going to be happening from now out, and the hope would be Being that to turn up front so the decisions made on the front end, okay, this is something we can do now as opposed to all of a sudden dozens of positive tests on the back end. 0.96

02:02:44.000 The hope is I can get out and do a good enough job of expressing how serious this is going to be that our population of fighters hear that. 0.98

02:02:52.000 Now, what about the difference between in-competition and out-of-competition testing as far as what the penalties are for out-of-competition testing?

02:03:01.000 And what about recreational drugs in-competition and out-of-competition testing?

02:03:06.000 Like, John Jones tested positive for cocaine.

02:03:09.000 And it was out of competition, so he was still allowed to compete, and a lot of people were kind of critical of that, like, how is that possible that you test a guy, he tests positive for a banned substance, and yet he's still allowed to compete, and you don't even hear about it.

02:03:22.000 But the results were known before he fought, and they never went public.

02:03:27.000 Yeah, I mean a lot of different issues there, so let me one at a time.

02:03:30.000 So first, our UFC policy.

02:03:32.000 So out of competition, the test for out of competition drugs, those drugs or those substances will be your hard substances, your anabolic steroids, your human growth hormones, your blood doping type drugs.

02:03:44.000 Those are tested for both out and in.

02:03:46.000 Those are tested 365 days a year.

02:03:49.000 In competition, and the definition of in competition under our policy is six hours before the weigh-in to six hours after the fight.

02:03:57.000 During that period of time, the drugs tested will be your recreational drugs, marijuana, stimulants including cocaine, other drugs.

02:04:08.000 So there's only really a 48 hour or so window that those will be tested for.

02:04:12.000 Those recreational drugs are not tested for at a competition.

02:04:16.000 In the John Jones situation, that was a Nevada State Athletic Commission test.

02:04:21.000 They had the same rules at the time.

02:04:23.000 Drugs of abuse were to be tested for only in competition.

02:04:27.000 When you say drugs of abuse, you mean recreational drugs like cocaine?

02:04:32.000 My understanding is somebody made a mistake and checked the box to do recreational drugs in an out-of-competition collection.

02:04:40.000 Oh, so he wasn't supposed to be tested for cocaine.

02:04:44.000 Correct.

02:04:45.000 Their policy was not to test for cocaine, marijuana, other stimulants out of competition.

02:04:50.000 It was a mistake of checking a box.

02:04:53.000 So when it turns out positive, he's not punished for it because they weren't supposed to test for it in the first place?

02:04:58.000 That's my understanding, yep.

02:05:01.000 You know, it's unfortunate.

02:05:02.000 I don't like when any mistakes are made like that.

02:05:05.000 I think, you know, even though it was Nevada State Athletic Commission, it taints the entire anti-doping, you know, arena.

02:05:12.000 I think anti-doping needs to be almost perfect.

02:05:16.000 Because, again, going back to that trust and credibility factor, regardless of who's doing it, when they make mistakes in anti-doping, like a false positive, I mean, to me, a false positive could never happen because no one then would ever trust anything that's going on for mistakes like that.

02:05:36.000 Collection errors where the collectors aren't going observing.

02:05:39.000 If you have holes in the system and it gets out, it doesn't matter who's doing it.

02:05:43.000 I think it taints all of anti-doping.

02:05:45.000 And so that's one of the reasons we went to USADA is these guys have been in the business longer than anybody else.

02:05:51.000 They're known as kind of the gold standard entity in all the world.

02:05:55.000 They are in that business.

02:05:57.000 They've been doing it for 15 years.

02:05:59.000 They know what all the pitfalls are, and they expect themselves to be perfect.

02:06:03.000 And I think that's huge to lend that credibility and trust to our athletes.

02:06:08.000 Nevada recently changed its levels of acceptable use of marijuana.

02:06:13.000 They changed the levels of acceptable metabolites in the system.

02:06:16.000 What is it at now?

02:06:18.000 And what you were discussing with me in Brazil, you were saying that you essentially would have to fight high in order to test positive.

02:06:24.000 Yeah, likely.

02:06:25.000 So Nevada adopted, in terms of marijuana, what the WADA standard was, and that's 150 nanograms per milliliter.

02:06:34.000 It probably doesn't mean much to most people, but to give you some perspective, it used to be 15 nanograms per milliliter.

02:06:43.000 Ten times.

02:06:44.000 Ten times, exactly.

02:06:47.000 So you'd have to be under the influence while you're fighting.

02:06:49.000 Yeah, it's tough because as we're out educating, the next question we get is, hey, if I was a chronic smoker, how long would I have to be off it?

02:06:58.000 It's tough to say.

02:06:59.000 Each individual varies in terms of how they metabolize.

02:07:03.000 The fat content on your body may store it longer.

02:07:05.000 So we can't Give our athletes guidance like, hey, if you do it a week out or two days out, you're fine.

02:07:12.000 The only thing we can give them is just kind of what statistics have borne out.

02:07:18.000 USADA's tested all their Olympic athletes, thousands now under this standard of 150 manograms per milliliter over the last couple years.

02:07:28.000 They've had very few positive tests, maybe, you know, a couple.

02:07:33.000 Then along comes Nick Diaz.

02:07:37.000 I think he was under the 150 nanogram per milliliter standard at that point.

02:07:41.000 Was he?

02:07:41.000 He was under?

02:07:41.000 Yeah.

02:07:42.000 But he still tested positive.

02:07:43.000 He was over that.

02:07:44.000 Oh, he was over.

02:07:45.000 When I mean under, he fell under that standard.

02:07:48.000 What was his test results?

02:07:50.000 I don't know specifically what it was other than it would have been over 150. So he essentially fought high.

02:07:56.000 Probably.

02:07:57.000 Respect.

02:07:59.000 Imagine that.

02:08:00.000 You're not just fighting Anderson Silva, you're fighting him while you're stoned. 1.00

02:08:05.000 Goddamn. 0.99

02:08:05.000 Nick Diaz is a beast. 0.99

02:08:08.000 I mean, I don't advise it, but I respect it.

02:08:11.000 It's kind of crazy though, right?

02:08:13.000 That you could fight in the UFC in the main event like that.

02:08:17.000 Yeah, I was a basketball player, a college basketball player, and when I played, I had guys on my team that would get stoned before practice, dominate practice.

02:08:29.000 Yeah, people love it.

02:08:31.000 Jiu-Jitsu, too.

02:08:32.000 Jiu-Jitsu, it's a huge part of the Jiu-Jitsu world.

02:08:34.000 So many guys, like you go to a lot of Jiu-Jitsu schools and you'll see the parking lot before everybody goes into training, guys are smoking pot.

02:08:40.000 It's very, very common because they feel like it puts them in a zone.

02:08:43.000 My own personal experience, I feel like it does.

02:08:46.000 It puts me in a zone.

02:08:48.000 It makes me understand the techniques better.

02:08:49.000 It gives you more of a sensitivity to training.

02:08:52.000 Well, how about in the MMA world?

02:08:53.000 Because you're worried about so many different things.

02:08:56.000 A strike, a take.

02:08:57.000 You've got so many things to worry about.

02:08:59.000 I mean, do you find that you're focusing in on one thing and you're not paying attention to...

02:09:03.000 No, no, no, no, no, no.

02:09:05.000 Unless you're not ready.

02:09:07.000 This is what I find.

02:09:08.000 I find that it's not that good for learning things.

02:09:11.000 I find that when you're learning something, especially like if you're drilling something, I find the drilling is better done sober.

02:09:19.000 Like, I'm better off at learning things sober.

02:09:22.000 But once something is committed to my nervous system, once I understand how to do the move, like, there's certain positions, there's certain positions that they just fall into.

02:09:31.000 The way Eddie Bravo describes it best, I love this analogy, is like, you know when you tie your shoes?

02:09:36.000 You don't even think about it, you just...

02:09:38.000 You just tie your shoes because you've tied your shoes every day for your whole life, and it just becomes natural.

02:09:42.000 There's certain positions where you find yourself sinking into submission.

02:09:46.000 You don't even know what's happening until you've done it because you've done it so many times in drills that it just becomes automatic.

02:09:52.000 Those are enhanced by marijuana.

02:09:55.000 But the learning part, I feel like sometimes you don't get all the finer details, but maybe that's me.

02:10:02.000 I think there's also the possibility that everybody has their own different way of Experiencing marijuana the biodiversity aspect of human beings.

02:10:12.000 It's some people just don't like it at all I have friends that just can't do it.

02:10:16.000 They'll smoke a little pot like fuck They just hate it freaks them out They don't like doing anything on it and then other people they like doing everything on it So I don't know I don't know what other folks feel but for me I feel like I learn things better when I'm not high but I feel like once I'm Once I understand something, 0.95

02:10:35.000 it's like a second nature thing, then I feel like I'm more tuned in, if that makes any sense. 0.99

02:10:41.000 Yeah, it is.

02:10:41.000 That's interesting, because there's the argument out there from a lot, like, why is that even banned?

02:10:46.000 How is marijuana performance enhancing?

02:10:48.000 So it's interesting to hear you say that.

02:10:49.000 I think it can be a performance enhancing drug.

02:10:52.000 I really do.

02:10:53.000 How about deadening?

02:10:54.000 It's obviously used for pain relief, so what do you think about...

02:10:58.000 It could mask pain.

02:10:59.000 Certainly could.

02:11:00.000 It's certainly possible.

02:11:01.000 It's definitely not baseline.

02:11:03.000 You're not sober.

02:11:05.000 So the idea that anything that you could use that could possibly give you an advantage, I just know it gives you an advantage in jiu-jitsu.

02:11:14.000 I know it does.

02:11:15.000 I know so many guys use it.

02:11:16.000 So many guys roll with it.

02:11:18.000 Like big name guys that are high level jiu-jitsu competitors.

02:11:21.000 They train high every time and they love it.

02:11:24.000 And I just think you can't ignore that.

02:11:27.000 I think that it's quite possible that there's an advantage to using it.

02:11:31.000 And then the pain relief aspect of it, look, you can't fight on pain pills.

02:11:35.000 And if there was a pain blocker that allowed you to not feel impacts of strikes, and you just went out there and fought and dealt with the consequences tomorrow when it wore off, that would be illegal, for sure.

02:11:47.000 Well, marijuana is absolutely used to help people with pain management.

02:11:51.000 Absolutely.

02:11:52.000 So I don't think it should be legal to compete with.

02:11:55.000 I just think there's too many possibilities.

02:11:58.000 I also don't think a lot of testing has been done on the performance-enhancing aspects of marijuana.

02:12:04.000 But what has been revealed recently is the benefits that ultramarathon runners experience with doing marijuana.

02:12:10.000 That they can push through better.

02:12:12.000 Just put their mind in a different place and not focus on the hours and hours of monotony.

02:12:18.000 I don't think you can ignore that.

02:12:20.000 I think that's certainly something that should be considered.

02:12:23.000 And if you're going to ban a lot of different things...

02:12:26.000 And obviously, I like marijuana.

02:12:27.000 I'm an enthusiast.

02:12:29.000 But I think that there's absolutely potential that it could be a performance-enhancing drug in a lot of ways.

02:12:36.000 People mocked me on that for a long time.

02:12:38.000 But now that this...

02:12:39.000 These new studies are coming out, especially with ultramarathon runners.

02:12:43.000 I feel vindicated.

02:12:44.000 Jeff, I feel vindicated.

02:12:45.000 Good for you.

02:12:46.000 Thank you.

02:12:47.000 Is there anything else we should cover?

02:12:49.000 We've pretty much nailed almost everything.

02:12:51.000 The comprehensive aspect of the drug testing policy, the randomness.

02:12:56.000 I believe the top athletes are going to be tested five times a year, randomly.

02:13:00.000 Is that what's going on now?

02:13:01.000 I think if you look at the average with our population versus how many...

02:13:04.000 Tests that were contracted to do or that you saw this contracted to do with us It'll average that but you know again everybody will be able to go on and see starting soon here Who's tested by name how many times and you're not gonna see across the board five for everybody likely you're gonna see Ten or a dozen per year for some people.

02:13:23.000 Really?

02:13:23.000 Maybe two or three.

02:13:25.000 And it's not random testing.

02:13:28.000 It's intelligent testing.

02:13:30.000 USADA is not going to say, hey, we're going to roll the dice and whoever comes up, they're going to look at everything from tips they may get.

02:13:37.000 Hell, they'll even look at physical appearances of athletes.

02:13:41.000 You know, does this athlete pass kind of the physical appearance smell test?

02:13:46.000 And if they don't, hey, maybe we need to test that person a little bit more.

02:13:49.000 The physical appearance smell test.

02:13:52.000 Really?

02:13:52.000 So, like, you look at a guy and you go, man, that guy just looks juiced.

02:13:57.000 He looks different.

02:13:57.000 Come on.

02:13:58.000 You've seen it?

02:13:58.000 Yeah, but I don't know, man.

02:14:00.000 I mean, I've seen it on guys that have tested negative, and I've seen it on guys that have been accused of things, but they've tested negative every time.

02:14:06.000 I agree.

02:14:07.000 Rafael dos Anjos.

02:14:08.000 Rafael Dos Andres was the UFC lightweight champion.

02:14:11.000 When he beat Pettis, and he beat Pettis in such a convincing way, boy, there were so many people accusing that guy of being on performance-enhancing drugs.

02:14:18.000 But if you look at his body over the years, it really hasn't varied that much.

02:14:23.000 A little bit from the first time he was in the UFC, but that was before he was on a comprehensive strength and conditioning program.

02:14:28.000 You look at him over the last few years, he's pretty consistent.

02:14:33.000 But yet once he wins the title everybody starts pointing fingers at him and if you look at him like pull up a picture of Rafael dos Anjos UFC a lightweight champion of the world When he is fighting and when he's in shape and he's fit Yeah, he looks like like I would like to look like if you're on steroids I would say people would take steroids if they could look like this guy So does he pass the smell test?

02:15:00.000 See if you can find a picture of him where he just looks jacked.

02:15:05.000 There's a picture of him over in the far left up there.

02:15:08.000 That's him after he beat Pettis.

02:15:10.000 But look there, that looks just like an athlete.

02:15:13.000 Okay, that's a perfect one.

02:15:15.000 That's him when he was fighting Pettis, I believe.

02:15:19.000 Is that from the same fight?

02:15:21.000 Yeah, 185. Look at that!

02:15:24.000 He's fucking shredded! 1.00

02:15:26.000 His six-pack has a six-pack. 0.99

02:15:29.000 I mean, but not much different physically other than, like, a little bit less body fat. 0.99

02:15:35.000 I mean, he's a fucking stud, you know? 0.98

02:15:37.000 I mean, that's why he's the champ. 0.99

02:15:39.000 Obviously, there's a lot of hard work that goes into that, but when people look at him, you know, you say, well...

02:15:46.000 That looks like a guy who, if someone didn't look like that and they took something and looked like that, you would say, well, then the guy's on steroids.

02:15:54.000 But if he always looks like that, it's hard.

02:15:57.000 Yeah, I agree with you.

02:15:58.000 There's outliers.

02:16:00.000 You know, over that 15-year law enforcement career I had involved with all these cases, I mean, I knew of...

02:16:08.000 Many athletes who look like they did who didn't, or at least no evidence appeared of it, many who didn't look like they did, did.

02:16:16.000 This is strictly, you know, another tool, this to be used.

02:16:21.000 It doesn't mean all the time that, you know, an athlete that doesn't pass the smell test will test positive, but a lot of the times it does.

02:16:28.000 Hey, all it means is a test.

02:16:30.000 It doesn't mean that person's, oh, you're positive because you look like you did.

02:16:33.000 It's like, hey, maybe an extra test or two.

02:16:36.000 And if I was that athlete that was that freak, I'd say, hey, yeah, man, test me more because people are accusing me of it.

02:16:42.000 So it'll be cool at the end of the year, everybody will look at my stats on the webpage and see I was tested 10 times and no positive test for me here.

02:16:50.000 So I'm hoping a lot of, you know, this is...

02:16:54.000 It's going to be, you know, in terms of the whereabouts program, the amount of tests our athlete's getting, it's going to be an inconvenience, but I'm hoping that there's a lot of acceptance and embracement of it, that like, hell yeah, not only is this the baddest sport in the world, we're the toughest dude, but we have the toughest anti-doping program,

02:17:11.000 and bring it on.

02:17:13.000 I'm hoping that there's a lot of that, and the sentiment that I get as we go out and talk is...

02:17:18.000 A lot of that.

02:17:18.000 Maybe it's lip service, I don't know, but I would like to think that, you know.

02:17:23.000 It'll certainly become that.

02:17:24.000 If it's not that right now, it'll certainly become that.

02:17:26.000 Is there any potential for manipulation by opponents calling into hotlines, accusing someone of something, and having them test, giving false information, you know, false tips?

02:17:37.000 Sure, there always is.

02:17:39.000 I could see Connor doing that.

02:17:40.000 I dealt with that all the time in law enforcement, right?

02:17:44.000 The first thing a tip comes in, you have to evaluate, who is this person?

02:17:47.000 Are they an ex-wife or an ex-husband?

02:17:49.000 Okay.

02:17:50.000 Hey, are they being sued by this?

02:17:51.000 You know, you've got to evaluate that.

02:17:52.000 And you saw it all do that, too.

02:17:55.000 So does someone have to say who they are when they give a tip, or can they leave anonymous tips?

02:17:59.000 They can leave it anonymously. 0.97

02:18:00.000 Yeah, if I was Conor McGregor, I'd be calling that fucking Aldo hotline all day. 1.00

02:18:04.000 I bet he would just to fuck with him, you know? 0.99

02:18:06.000 There's gotta be guys that are gonna do that, right? 1.00

02:18:08.000 The brogue might give it away, I don't know.

02:18:10.000 Yeah, right? 1.00

02:18:11.000 This fucking shite. 1.00

02:18:13.000 But a guy like, say, Dos Anjos, you know, like, who has that appearance, just looks absolutely shredded, and is beating everybody, there's automatically gonna be people that point fingers at a guy like that, right? 1.00

02:18:28.000 Potentially, sure.

02:18:29.000 Is there any other type of testing that they're working on, you know, that's on the pipeline that may perhaps be even more effective than what they're doing now?

02:18:39.000 Oh, sure.

02:18:40.000 Yeah?

02:18:40.000 Sure.

02:18:40.000 I mean, again, I'm not...

02:18:41.000 The scientists, I don't get too far in the weeds when the scientists in these conferences break off in their little group, or if ever I have, a lot of it goes over my head.

02:18:49.000 I don't understand what they're talking about, but...

02:18:51.000 I mean, there's really, really smart people that their profession and life is dedicated to this arena of anti-doping, figuring out what's out there, figuring out if there's not a test for something, how to do it and develop it.

02:19:06.000 There's some...

02:19:07.000 Super intelligent people on that mission out there.

02:19:09.000 So I'd be concerned if I was using anything that at some point someone's not going to come up with a test for it or detect what it was.

02:19:18.000 I would.

02:19:19.000 And that's, you know, again, part of the stress that's going to be out there from someone who's still under this program, chooses to do something.

02:19:25.000 It's going to be stressful.

02:19:26.000 Yeah, I mean, this is really the gold standard program now, isn't it?

02:19:29.000 I mean, in professional sports.

02:19:31.000 Okay, so there's no other professional sport that has, number one, a truly independent authority administering it.

02:19:38.000 And what that does...

02:19:39.000 It shows you there's not going to be any business interest in carrying out the program. 0.98

02:19:46.000 USADA doesn't give a shit if it's our number one earner. 0.94

02:19:50.000 If they test positive, they test positive. 0.98

02:19:52.000 It doesn't benefit them.

02:19:52.000 They don't care.

02:19:53.000 All they care about is clean sport.

02:19:55.000 There's going to be no allegations of favoritism.

02:19:59.000 USADA doesn't care who the athlete is, where they live.

02:20:02.000 They're all about clean sport again.

02:20:10.000 Independent nature.

02:20:11.000 Olympic sports have that.

02:20:12.000 They have independent agencies, but professional sports don't.

02:20:15.000 That's huge to begin with.

02:20:17.000 365 days a year testing.

02:20:19.000 I mean, you look at the other professional sports here, at least in the United States, they can't say that.

02:20:27.000 Urine and blood tests at any point.

02:20:30.000 Blood, by the way, we have a lot of concerns from athletes like, man, how much blood are you taking from me?

02:20:33.000 That's going to be a deterrent.

02:20:35.000 That could affect my performance if you take blood from me.

02:20:38.000 It's less than a tablespoon of blood.

02:20:40.000 Really?

02:20:40.000 So very little amount.

02:20:42.000 Science shows it will have no effect whatsoever on your performance even later that day.

02:20:48.000 You know, the biological passport's huge. 0.79

02:20:50.000 So even if you don't find a specific drug, you know, we can go over time and look at abnormal variances.

02:20:58.000 And so you throw all those things together and, you know, in my experience of both dealing with sports here in the U.S. and worldwide, there's no other organization that touches what this thing is.

02:21:09.000 Now, there's some sports that you could argue really that just can't exist without performance-enhancing drugs.

02:21:15.000 Bodybuilding, of course, comes to the front line.

02:21:17.000 That's the first one that everybody thinks about.

02:21:19.000 If bodybuilding instituted something like this, the sport would change radically overnight.

02:21:24.000 I mean, you would see people shrink to the point where they bared no resemblance to, like, Dorian Yates or Lee Haney or any of these guys that were in their prime that were just these freaks.

02:21:37.000 They didn't even look like real people.

02:21:39.000 Yep, I'd agree with that.

02:21:40.000 But what about pro football? 0.99

02:21:42.000 Like, those guys are fucking gigantic. 0.94

02:21:44.000 How much of that is strength and conditioning programs? 0.95

02:21:47.000 I mean, do you know how much of that is that they didn't have those strength and conditioning programs in the 60s?

02:21:52.000 And how much of it is steroids and growth hormone and...

02:21:55.000 Yeah, it's hard to say.

02:21:56.000 I mean, they do have, and I know and have worked with their people who are instituting their program.

02:22:02.000 Their program is not independently administered.

02:22:07.000 It's them.

02:22:07.000 It's in-house.

02:22:08.000 In-house.

02:22:09.000 So say if they have a star athlete that tests positive, they can kind of...

02:22:12.000 You don't know that.

02:22:13.000 I don't think that's happening, because you looked at some of the athletes that have, and I don't think that's happening, but that question would always pose itself, because it is the fox guarding the henhouse there.

02:22:26.000 And it's not nearly as comprehensive.

02:22:28.000 It's not, and you know, one thing that I found in anti-doping programs, you could have the most solid program all the way around.

02:22:36.000 If you have one little weakness in it, the tiniest weakness could be a loophole that you can drive a tractor trailer through.

02:22:44.000 I'll give you a perfect example.

02:22:47.000 The program has everything that we have.

02:22:49.000 365 day a year testing.

02:22:51.000 Say it's even, you know, USADA administering it.

02:22:54.000 And say, in the collection process during the season, the collector would call up somebody on the team or in the organization the night before and say, hey, I need a parking pass tomorrow to get in.

02:23:07.000 I'm going to be showing up.

02:23:08.000 That one little phone call, despite all the strength, comprehensive strength, Could be the weakness that would cause everybody to run through.

02:23:17.000 That employee is friends with the players on the team, knows who's hot or not, makes a call the night before.

02:23:24.000 Hey man, they're coming tomorrow.

02:23:26.000 Don't show up tomorrow.

02:23:28.000 Do the professional sports leagues, I don't think they do, have a three-strikes-whereabout policy where if they're not there for a certain day, then that can be used against them.

02:23:37.000 Or if they're not there for that day as a tester said, oh, I'll just get that person later.

02:23:41.000 So little things like that can be manipulated to, again, drive a truck through.

02:23:47.000 What did you think about the Vanderlei Silva situation?

02:23:51.000 For people not aware of it, Vanderlei Silva, they showed up for a random drug test out of competition.

02:23:57.000 He wasn't scheduled for a fight and just bolted.

02:24:00.000 And when he bolted, they gave him a lifetime suspension.

02:24:04.000 They said, you're done.

02:24:05.000 Your career is over.

02:24:07.000 You avoided a drug test.

02:24:11.000 What did you think about that?

02:24:12.000 So first, under our program, we have this whereabouts where you get basically three strikes in a rolling 12 months, and then there's a sanction.

02:24:20.000 That's if, you know, they just can't locate you, or you didn't do a good enough job, or you didn't complete your whereabouts.

02:24:26.000 If a tester comes to test one of our athletes, say at a gym, says, hey, I'm here from USADA to test you, and that athlete says, screw you, and runs out the back door, that's a sanction right there, a penalty.

02:24:38.000 And potentially under our system, with aggravating circumstances, could be four years.

02:24:43.000 That may be an aggravating circumstance where this guy or girl said, screw you, I'm not doing this thing, and runs out the back door. 1.00

02:24:50.000 So that's four years on the first time.

02:24:52.000 His case, he'd had one before, had he had a positive before, or that was the first one?

02:24:57.000 No, it was his first one.

02:24:58.000 Well, he obviously didn't test positive even then because he didn't test at all.

02:25:01.000 But then he admitted that he was, in his words, he was taking some sort of...

02:25:06.000 It wasn't a steroid.

02:25:09.000 I think it was a diuretic, he was saying, because he had fluid buildup or something.

02:25:14.000 It didn't make any sense to me.

02:25:16.000 But like Aldo, he avoided taking a drug test in Brazil, correct?

02:25:21.000 I mean, I don't know if that's the case, that he avoided it.

02:25:24.000 I mean, there was...

02:25:26.000 Obviously, I think Nevada publicly disclosed what was played out. 0.60

02:25:31.000 They sent a collector here from the United States down there, showed up at the gym.

02:25:37.000 They disputed whether or not they should take it.

02:25:39.000 Yeah, who knows what happened.

02:25:40.000 One thing, I don't know exactly how everything went down there.

02:25:45.000 One thing I can say is under our program, and that's one of the reasons we went to USADA, USADA needs to go to another country to do a collection like that.

02:25:53.000 They reach out to the national authority of that country so that when somebody shows up on behalf of USADA or with USADA at a gym, you're not going to get an instance or, you know, a reasoning that, hey, we didn't know who this person was.

02:26:06.000 They'll be credentialed.

02:26:07.000 Everyone will know who they are.

02:26:09.000 There'll be a representative from that nation there.

02:26:12.000 I think they tested Aldo's sample anyway, if I'm correct, and he tested negative.

02:26:17.000 Is that true?

02:26:17.000 They did.

02:26:18.000 Ultimately, I think it was the next day that he provided a sample, and that did test negative.

02:26:24.000 But there was some issues about the day before a sample wasn't provided because...

02:26:31.000 Because he went 24 hours and he could have, whatever he had, could have cleaned out of his system.

02:26:35.000 Sure.

02:26:36.000 That would be a concern, sure.

02:26:39.000 So they can test for human growth hormone now too, which was something that they couldn't test for for a long time?

02:26:46.000 They couldn't, true.

02:26:47.000 And there's also another test that came out for it where they can run back a couple weeks.

02:26:53.000 It used to be with a blood test.

02:26:55.000 You would have had to detect it within maybe 24 hours of its use.

02:27:00.000 There's now an isoform test, which isn't necessarily for the drug itself, but kind of like with the biological passport, if you take growth hormone, it will affect certain markers in you that will last over time, even if the drug has cleared your system.

02:27:14.000 So it gives anti-doping that ability to reach back a couple weeks and determine if it was used.

02:27:20.000 So again, an evolving tool that, you know, maybe some organization says, oh, it's a new test.

02:27:27.000 Two weeks, we can go back.

02:27:29.000 All those frozen samples, let's go back and retest them and see that maybe it wasn't within 24 hours an athlete used, but two weeks.

02:27:35.000 So that...

02:27:37.000 Factor I think is always you know hanging out there for somebody chooses to do to use a substance as ban Well Jeff Thank you very much for coming on here and taking the time to explain all this stuff and thank you very much for this Incredibly comprehensive effort to clean up the sport.

02:27:53.000 I think it's awesome And I think what you're doing is just it's very it's very it's very intriguing It's inspiring and I think ultimately it's great for the sport Appreciate it, yeah.

02:28:02.000 Anything else to say?

02:28:03.000 No, I think I'm good, man.

02:28:04.000 Thanks for having me on.

02:28:05.000 Thanks for the platform, and yeah, I look forward to seeing you at an event soon.

02:28:09.000 Absolutely.

02:28:10.000 My pleasure.

02:28:11.000 Jeff Nowitzki, ladies and gentlemen.

02:28:12.000 We'll be back tomorrow with Jeff Ross, and that's it.

02:28:16.000 Enjoy your day.

02:28:17.000 Thank you, everybody.

02:28:17.000 Bye-bye.

02:28:20.000 All right, we did it.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 18, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #685 - Jeff Novitzky

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