The Joe Rogan Experience - JRE MMA Show #9 with Jeff Novitzky

00:00:02.000 Four, three, two, one.

00:00:05.000 Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Nowitzki.

00:00:08.000 How are you, buddy?

00:00:08.000 What's up, Joe?

00:00:09.000 Doing good.

00:00:10.000 I have to ask you, do you mind the nickname The Golden Snitch?

00:00:13.000 It's the first thing I was gonna bring up. 0.99

00:00:16.000 This Golden Snitch bullshit. 0.94

00:00:19.000 I just want to say, it's not my nickname. 0.99

00:00:21.000 It's Brendan Chobbs.

00:00:23.000 He came up with it 100% on his own.

00:00:25.000 I was going to ask you.

00:00:26.000 It's all good, though.

00:00:27.000 It's okay?

00:00:28.000 It's all good.

00:00:29.000 So, a couple funny stories about that.

00:00:31.000 So, when did he come up with this?

00:00:32.000 About a year ago?

00:00:33.000 At least.

00:00:34.000 Yeah.

00:00:34.000 So, people in the office started coming up to me saying, hey, Golden Snitch.

00:00:39.000 What the hell's that?

00:00:41.000 So, I do a little research.

00:00:42.000 I see something about Harry Potter or some character named there.

00:00:45.000 I'm like, what the hell does this have to do with me?

00:00:47.000 So, about a month ago, somebody lets me know, hey, check out Wikipedia.

00:00:52.000 So, for whatever reason, there's a Jeff Nowitzki Wikipedia page.

00:00:56.000 You go to that page now, it says actually my formal name, Jeffrey John Nowitzki, a.k.a.

00:01:01.000 the Golden Snitch.

00:01:04.000 So last week, Donna Marcolini, you know Donna, long, 15-year employee of the UFC, now works with me and talk about her a little later.

00:01:13.000 She's a great asset to what we're doing.

00:01:15.000 She sends me a text.

00:01:16.000 She says, check this out.

00:01:18.000 So she's got one of those Amazon Echoes.

00:01:22.000 Alexa, I think.

00:01:23.000 So she says, Alexa, who's Jeff Nowitzki?

00:01:25.000 And Alexa's name says, Jeffrey John Nowitzki, a.k.a.

00:01:29.000 the Golden Snitch.

00:01:32.000 So thanks a lot, Shab.

00:01:34.000 Oh, Shab, what have you done? 1.00

00:01:36.000 That's hilarious.

00:01:36.000 I love Donna.

00:01:37.000 She's amazing.

00:01:38.000 She's awesome. 0.83

00:01:39.000 It's great that she's over there.

00:01:40.000 She's so good.

00:01:41.000 Yeah, I mean, you know about kind of her history.

00:01:43.000 She's one of the five original employees of the UFC, was Dana's assistant to start out with, went on to become VP of event operations.

00:01:50.000 So basically...

00:01:52.000 You know, she got everybody to the event, set up hotel at the event, ran the crew, you know, the blue shirts backstage that run the event. 0.71

00:02:01.000 You know, I think after doing it for many years, she got a little burnout on it.

00:02:05.000 So went to Dana midsummer and says, look, I don't think I want to do this anymore.

00:02:11.000 But I'd really love to do something else.

00:02:13.000 And I've seen kind of what Jeff's doing in his program.

00:02:16.000 I'd really like to go over there and work with him and kind of learn, you know, what he's doing.

00:02:21.000 And so Dana pulled me into the office and said, hey, what do you think about this idea?

00:02:25.000 And it took me literally a half second to say 100% on board.

00:02:29.000 This woman, as you probably know, is about as attention to detail and passionate about her work as anybody.

00:02:36.000 And really, my positioning, unlike the name The Golden Snitch, is an advocate to our athletes to make sure our athletes are successful under the program, not that they fail under the program.

00:02:47.000 It's definitely the wrong nickname.

00:02:48.000 It's just catchy.

00:02:49.000 It is.

00:02:50.000 It's unfortunately catchy.

00:02:51.000 Again, I'm all good with it.

00:02:53.000 Better roll up my back.

00:02:54.000 But the real golden snitch is Victor Conte.

00:02:57.000 He's the golden snitch, right?

00:02:59.000 Yeah.

00:02:59.000 I can see that.

00:03:01.000 Because he was a guy who was giving guys steroids.

00:03:04.000 You were a guy that was always catching people.

00:03:06.000 Correct.

00:03:06.000 So it's the wrong moniker.

00:03:07.000 Yeah, correct.

00:03:08.000 Giving them steroids and then talking about it after, right?

00:03:11.000 Snitching.

00:03:11.000 Yeah.

00:03:12.000 That's the snitch. 1.00

00:03:12.000 That's the golden snitch. 1.00

00:03:14.000 Not you, man.

00:03:15.000 But it's all good.

00:03:15.000 I was hoping Schaub would be here.

00:03:17.000 Call him up.

00:03:18.000 We'll call him up later in the show.

00:03:19.000 Not that I could do anything to him, but it'd be interesting to look at him in the face.

00:03:22.000 He would say, I'm sorry, bro.

00:03:24.000 Sorry.

00:03:25.000 It's all good.

00:03:26.000 Yeah, well, anyway, back to Donna.

00:03:27.000 She's awesome, so I'm super psyched that she's with you.

00:03:30.000 So what exactly does she do for you guys?

00:03:32.000 Again, when I sat her down this summer, I said, look, your role here is going to make sure that the athletes are successful under the program.

00:03:39.000 And in a program like this, there are so many landmines, whether it be making sure your whereabouts filing is on time, making sure USADA knows where you're at so they can come do a collection from you at any time.

00:03:52.000 Making sure you make safe supplement choices.

00:03:55.000 Making sure the medications you're taking are correct.

00:03:59.000 So she, you know, works hard for all those things.

00:04:01.000 I give you the prime example of what she brings to this program.

00:04:05.000 So every three months, every quarter, every single athlete on the roster is required to file what's called quarterly whereabouts.

00:04:13.000 Can I pause right here?

00:04:15.000 Just so this can be a standalone if people don't know exactly what you do.

00:04:18.000 Sure.

00:04:20.000 Jeff is in charge of making sure that all the UFC athletes are clean and free of performance enhancing substances.

00:04:29.000 And it was a huge issue.

00:04:32.000 Before you came along, a huge issue in the sport and continues to be in other organizations, particularly overseas.

00:04:38.000 I mean, there's just rampant speculation about companies that literally encourage people to take steroids.

00:04:44.000 It was always the case with Pride in Japan.

00:04:47.000 That was one of the big things about Pride.

00:04:50.000 in any way who fought for them many times came on the podcast and literally was saying in the contract, in like capital letters, it says, we will not test you for steroids.

00:05:00.000 Like they wanted everybody to take steroids.

00:05:01.000 I had friends who went to fight over there.

00:05:04.000 They told them to take steroids and move up a weight class.

00:05:07.000 So it was always an issue in the sport that this was a dirty sport, air quotes, right?

00:05:13.000 But since you've come along and since you guys started instituting this incredibly strict testing, we've seen some pretty radical changes.

00:05:22.000 We've seen some amazing fights and amazing performances, and I don't think the performance levels dropped.

00:05:26.000 In fact, I think it escalated and elevated, rather, which is something that people were really concerned about.

00:05:30.000 But one thing that we did see is some people that you suspected of doing stuff, their bodies radically changed.

00:05:37.000 It was really, I mean, that became a meme, pre-USADA and post-USADA. I mean, and there's some comedy memes out there because of it, because people's bodies change so radically.

00:05:48.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:05:48.000 You know, the last time I was on, we talked about kind of the smell test, you know, looking at somebody.

00:05:53.000 And, you know, it's difficult to say definitively whether or not, you know, changes in bodies are due to that or not.

00:05:59.000 But, you know, you can't help but look at some of these pictures before and after you saw it and think that's the case.

00:06:04.000 That's something I always struggle with.

00:06:06.000 How do you judge the success of a program?

00:06:10.000 Do you judge it on numbers of positive tests?

00:06:13.000 I don't think that's necessarily the case.

00:06:15.000 Maybe you're not catching everybody.

00:06:18.000 Maybe there's no one to catch.

00:06:20.000 Do you judge it on before and after pictures?

00:06:23.000 I don't know.

00:06:23.000 I mean, that could be one factor.

00:06:25.000 I like to judge it a lot anecdotally.

00:06:28.000 A big part of my job is getting out and building relationships with our fighters, With managers, with coaches, and just, you know, chewing on their ear and figuring out what they're seeing and what they're hearing.

00:06:42.000 And almost universally, the feedback I get from them is, this is making a big difference.

00:06:49.000 You know, one thing I brought with me today, and really the coolest piece of data I think I've seen in any anti-doping program, are some really objective, measurable statistics in the UFC anti-doping program.

00:07:02.000 USADA is the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

00:07:05.000 They're the official anti-doping agency of the United States by an act of Congress.

00:07:10.000 They're in charge of all drug testing for U.S. Olympic sports.

00:07:15.000 Back in 2015, we made the decision to outsource the administration of our program to USADA. The primary reason being the independence factor.

00:07:26.000 When you look at all these other professional sports leagues, some have better programs than others.

00:07:32.000 None really have any independence in the administration of that program.

00:07:35.000 And what that means is there's no way of telling whether or not, you know, when an athlete is sanctioned, it's done for business reasons or done for favoritism.

00:07:44.000 So in our program, you know, no one can say that any of the administration of our program is done for that reason.

00:07:50.000 It's a truly independent authority.

00:07:53.000 So what USADA did recently is they went back and they've been in existence since I think about 2001 on the US Olympic level.

00:08:00.000 They went back and took a look at every single doper, I think for steroids. 1.00

00:08:05.000 Everyone was caught for steroids in the existence of the USADA program.

00:08:09.000 And took a look at each of those athletes' biological passports and biological markers.

00:08:14.000 And they looked at what was the most common factor for the doper versus, you know, the non-doper.

00:08:21.000 And what they determined was what stood out the most was large variance in testosterone excretion in the urine.

00:08:30.000 And when you think about it from a common sense point of view, that kind of makes sense in that someone who's using steroids at that time presents a sample, their testosterone excretion is probably going to be on the higher end.

00:08:43.000 And if they were to catch a doper on an off cycle, what happens when you get off steroids is your body suppresses production of testosterone.

00:08:51.000 So in that case, you're going to see a very low excretion of testosterone.

00:08:56.000 So they looked at that and plotted it out and saw, hey, every doper has a very large variance in testosterone excretion.

00:09:02.000 Then what they did is they took all the UFC samples and they plotted them out by quarter and actually brought a graph along with me.

00:09:10.000 And it's some really drastic, I think, visual evidence of the success and the impact of this program.

00:09:17.000 I don't know if you can throw that up and take a look at it.

00:09:22.000 So what year exactly did USADA take over?

00:09:27.000 Yeah, so USADA came into play July of 2015. So USADA has been in existence for two years.

00:09:33.000 So you see here that first quarter, quarter three of 2015, a pretty decent variance there, which means in any given test, an athlete was up on an average, a little bit of 30, a little in the mid-20s.

00:09:48.000 And then look at, as you plot out that graph, That variance becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and more in the medium range as it gets out to quarter three of 2017. That's very interesting.

00:10:01.000 You don't usually see statistics.

00:10:04.000 This is the first.

00:10:05.000 I've been involved in anti-doping world since 2002. And I can unequivocally say that this is the strongest visual, objective, measurable evidence of success of a program that I've ever seen.

00:10:18.000 One of the things that's so fascinating about this, and this goes to credit to the UFC 100%, is that they decided to do something about this.

00:10:27.000 They didn't have to.

00:10:29.000 This wasn't like someone coming after them because, you know, so many people had been caught and someone said, hey, we're going to put a program on you guys to make sure you're not doping.

00:10:40.000 Well, the UFC said, we've got to clean this up.

00:10:42.000 And there's only one way.

00:10:43.000 The one way is to go with the very best testing possible and the most rigorous, the most, I mean, check in everywhere you go.

00:10:50.000 We're going to give you random tests at 6 o'clock in the morning, knock on your door, like The whole full gamut of tests.

00:10:58.000 And the results have been pretty amazing.

00:11:00.000 And that alone, that speaks volumes when you see the size of the variance between the test when you guys first started versus now.

00:11:09.000 Definitely.

00:11:09.000 Hey, it's a credit to two people, Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White, that made that decision.

00:11:15.000 That's a hell of a risky decision, but done for all the right reasons.

00:11:19.000 You know, anybody that contends that, you know, Dana doesn't care about his athletes need look no further than this program.

00:11:25.000 This program is of tremendous risk to the company and to the bottom line.

00:11:29.000 When you're testing athletes 365 days a year, unannounced, no predictability of when the test is coming, there can be some very severe consequences.

00:11:39.000 And there have been.

00:11:40.000 We've lost several main events.

00:11:42.000 There has been.

00:11:42.000 I mean...

00:11:43.000 UFC 200, arguably the landmark event in the history of the UFC. We lose our main event the Wednesday before UFC 200. Millions, if not tens of millions, into the marketing of that.

00:12:01.000 The success of the pay-per-view probably hinges on that great main event between John and Daniel.

00:12:08.000 And we lost it three or four days before, and that could happen at any given moment.

00:12:13.000 Now, we talked about this before the podcast, what you could or could not talk about with the current state of John Jones' investigation.

00:12:20.000 So where's it at right now?

00:12:22.000 Yeah, so, you know, generally, we don't talk about a case.

00:12:26.000 So how the process works, when an athlete tests positive, USADA will notify me.

00:12:32.000 I usually pick the phone up right away and call Dana and let him know.

00:12:36.000 And the UFC puts out an announcement.

00:12:38.000 They say, you know, in the case of John, John tested positive in an in-competition test on this date.

00:12:46.000 You know, more information will be provided at the appropriate time.

00:12:49.000 That's generally all we'll talk about.

00:12:51.000 Now, if the athlete chooses to talk about, you know, scenarios of what happened, then they're free to do that.

00:12:58.000 At that point, you saw it in the UFC. You can comment on it.

00:13:01.000 So there's been some things talked about in the John case by John.

00:13:06.000 Particularly, he had two clean tests on July 7th and July 8th.

00:13:12.000 Before his positive test on, I think, July 30th, which was weigh-in day.

00:13:16.000 And the positive test was for dihydrochloromethyl testosterone, or oral terenobol.

00:13:23.000 This is a substance that was used by the East Germans regularly in the late 60s, and then came into the fold a little bit more of what's come out recently out of Russia.

00:13:34.000 So I know you had Brian Fogel on for the Icarus movie.

00:13:38.000 I think he talked a little bit about this.

00:13:42.000 Gregory, the head of the Moscow Wada laboratory, this drug became kind of part of his protocol with his athletes.

00:13:49.000 He then, ironically enough, developed a test for the long-term metabolites of the drug.

00:13:56.000 So previous to that, the detection window of this drug was a couple of days.

00:14:00.000 So it was a drug that, you know, even if you run a strict program, an athlete may gamble with taking because it had a quick clearance time.

00:14:08.000 After he discovered the long-term metabolite test, that changed.

00:14:12.000 It went from a detection window of a couple days to a detection window of several months.

00:14:18.000 And this was widely known.

00:14:20.000 It wasn't a secret.

00:14:21.000 Initially, they kept it quiet.

00:14:23.000 They went back and retested some samples, and there was a whole bunch of positives.

00:14:27.000 And then it got out 2013 around that there was this new test.

00:14:32.000 Right up front, you know, I've said this a while now, is would not make a lot of sense for an individual, a UFC athlete that knew, you know, especially, you know, a champion contender like John Jones that knew, hey, I'm tested quite regularly in this program, would not make a lot of sense that that would be your drug of choice if you were intentionally trying to cheat.

00:14:54.000 I think it's come out after the fact that USADA did another test on John a month or two or a couple months after his positive test, and he was negative during that test.

00:15:06.000 So that would be indicative that the prohibited substance entered his system sometime after July 7th or 8th and was likely a pretty small amount in that it cleared his system pretty quickly.

00:15:23.000 Again, who knows where it plays out, but certainly on the surface of things I have said, at this point in the game, with that type of information out there, it wouldn't indicate intentional use.

00:15:36.000 Now, that could be wrong.

00:15:37.000 I don't know that definitively, and we'll see how this plays out.

00:15:41.000 Right now, where the process is, is John and USADA are working closely.

00:15:46.000 I'm aware that there was a meeting a week or two ago, a pretty lengthy meeting, Which I was told was productive.

00:15:52.000 I wasn't given details of what productive meant.

00:15:55.000 But I think that's an important thing right now and that John's following through with is to retrace all of his steps between that last July 8th negative test and the positive test on July 29th or July 30th.

00:16:09.000 It certainly seems like, based on what you just said, that this is something that was accidentally taken.

00:16:15.000 But if you can't prove that something was accidentally taken, like if you can't nail it down, what happens there?

00:16:22.000 Yeah, it's difficult.

00:16:23.000 And that's kind of the nightmare scenario that an athlete can face.

00:16:27.000 And a big role of what Donna and I do to prevent that from happening, to show them what type of care and consideration is needed to make sure you don't get into a scenario like that.

00:16:38.000 You know, under a program like this, you have to be careful about everything that's put into your body.

00:16:45.000 Everything.

00:16:46.000 And if you're not, there can be, you know, severe consequences.

00:16:51.000 So, yeah, we'll see where this plays out.

00:16:53.000 I tell you the one thing that I can say about this is, you know, this is obviously John's second time in the program with testing positive.

00:17:01.000 And the first time He went through a pretty lengthy appeal process, and there was a publicly issued decision, 50, 60 pages, that went through all the evidence that the independent arbitrators heard and decided on.

00:17:20.000 And what they said definitively in that case was John, there was no evidence that John intentionally cheated.

00:17:27.000 However, he operated with careless, reckless disregard.

00:17:30.000 So he ended up getting the maximum for those substances he tested positive for a year. 0.99

00:17:35.000 And that was for some gas station Viagra type shit? 0.89

00:17:38.000 Well, it was actually a couple of anti-estrogen drugs, but what was shown and what the evidence pointed to was that he took... 0.99

00:17:46.000 A pill that was manufactured from a website by the name of All American Peptide.

00:17:51.000 The pill was reported to be a Cialis pill, so an erectile dysfunction pill that was tainted with these two drugs.

00:18:00.000 Now the problem with what the arbitrator said is if he would have gone to that website, and the arbitrators did and I did, you would have seen that that same website offered Tons of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs.

00:18:13.000 And the website said, not for human consumption, for research purposes only.

00:18:18.000 So it really was careless disregard.

00:18:21.000 That being said, however, John's second time through the program now, the second sanction, this time for an anabolic-type steroid, would have a starting point, potentially, of a four-year suspension.

00:18:35.000 That's a starting point.

00:18:37.000 That could be a starting point, right, unless there are mitigating factors.

00:18:40.000 Now, I don't, you know, again, the beauty of this program is it's not the UFC or not me deciding, you know, what the sanction is going to be.

00:18:47.000 No one can accuse us of, you know, operating for business purposes or favoritism or whatever.

00:18:53.000 But that being said, You know, when we put this program together and figured out, you know, what sanctioning would look like, I don't necessarily think that we put up a four-year sanction for a second-term offense when the first-term offense was shown that that person didn't cheat intentionally, just operated with careless disregard.

00:19:11.000 So, who makes that distinction then?

00:19:13.000 USADA? USADA makes that distinction.

00:19:15.000 They have a whole team looking at it.

00:19:18.000 They compare it to other cases under the WADA Olympic-type umbrella, similar cases.

00:19:25.000 I will say this, that I think we've had a few over 60 positive adverse events in this case and those that have been adjudicated.

00:19:34.000 I've been comfortable every time that they've made a fair and balanced and reasonable decision.

00:19:40.000 Part of my job is to be the eyes and ears for athletes to make sure not only is the program being administered properly and has strength, but also that they're being treated fairly and that they have due process.

00:19:51.000 So I have all the confidence in the world, however this does come out, that it will be the right decision.

00:19:56.000 The other really cool thing about the program is the transparency of the program.

00:20:00.000 So, you know, it won't just be me saying this.

00:20:03.000 However it does come out, whether it goes to arbitration or whether John and USADA reach a settlement, it'll be well spelled out about why that sanction was determined.

00:20:13.000 Now, you say starting point, meaning that it could potentially be more?

00:20:18.000 It could.

00:20:18.000 So when there's something called aggravating circumstances, so more than just knowingly taking the drug, taking the drug and lying, trying to cover it up.

00:20:28.000 Taking multiple drugs, one trying to hide the other.

00:20:31.000 Yeah, you could get double the sanction amount.

00:20:35.000 So on a second time, anabolic steroid, four years is kind of the starting point.

00:20:40.000 You can go lower for mitigating factors.

00:20:42.000 You can go higher for aggravating factors, up to eight years.

00:20:47.000 So yeah, it would have to require something really severe and egregious to get up that high.

00:20:54.000 Has anybody ever gotten that hit?

00:20:56.000 Not in the UFC program, no.

00:20:57.000 What is the biggest hit that anyone's ever gotten in the UFC? I think thus far it's two years.

00:21:02.000 And who's that?

00:21:03.000 I think a few people.

00:21:05.000 Chad Mendes comes to mind.

00:21:08.000 And Chad Mendes, his was some sort of psoriasis cream or something?

00:21:13.000 His was an insulin growth factor one, so IGF one.

00:21:16.000 And did he say that it came from a psoriasis cream?

00:21:19.000 I think he may have said that.

00:21:20.000 Yeah.

00:21:21.000 That was never proven, or...?

00:21:23.000 No.

00:21:23.000 I mean, there was nothing in USADA's reasoning or their announcement of why it was two years about, you know, any type of mitigating factor coming from another substance.

00:21:29.000 Because I know he has psoriasis.

00:21:32.000 And someone had said, or had read, I didn't really investigate very deeply into this, but I remember reading that he had put some sort of cream on, and that that cream was responsible for him testing positive.

00:21:41.000 Is that...?

00:21:42.000 Yeah, I don't know if that's the case.

00:21:44.000 I do recall him saying that, but an athlete can say anything they want about why it happened.

00:21:48.000 If there was something mitigating, they are afforded that right to share with USADA that, look, I didn't do this on purpose.

00:21:55.000 It wasn't on the label of the cream.

00:21:56.000 Usually in those instances where the evidence does show that, you will see a mitigating factor come into play and a reduction in a sanction.

00:22:04.000 There wasn't any in that case.

00:22:05.000 It was the two years.

00:22:06.000 And there have been some guys that have gotten pretty low sentences, like Tim Means is a good example, right?

00:22:11.000 Tim Means did take something that was tainted, and you guys, or USADA, got some of those samples from independent stores, found out those were also tainted.

00:22:21.000 Yeah, Tim Means took a supplement.

00:22:23.000 It was a creatine.

00:22:25.000 And, you know, after he tested positive, and again, this is where Donna and I come into play quite a bit.

00:22:32.000 You know, when athletes test positive, we reach out to them right away saying, We're here to help you here.

00:22:37.000 If there's help to be had, we'll believe you, tell you to give us reason not to.

00:22:42.000 I did that with Tim.

00:22:43.000 Tim said, I'd never heard of this substance.

00:22:46.000 Jeff, you've got to believe me.

00:22:47.000 I didn't take it.

00:22:48.000 I said, all right, well, let's start doing retracing steps.

00:22:50.000 What have you been taking?

00:22:53.000 He sent me, you know, maybe a half dozen supplements.

00:22:57.000 Did some research on them, reached out to contacts I still have in the industry from my law enforcement days and said, hey, any of these raise suspicions?

00:23:06.000 And there was one that did by a company that made some other kind of sketchy products.

00:23:11.000 We narrowed in on that one pretty quickly.

00:23:14.000 sent it to USADA to a WADA laboratory, tested it.

00:23:17.000 Sure enough, it had the substance in it.

00:23:19.000 Then what happens is USADA will independently procure some themselves.

00:23:24.000 So outside of the kind of touch of the athlete to make sure the athlete's not contaminating with it for a built-in excuse, they were able to get some that was sealed and unopened.

00:23:34.000 And sure enough, it had that substance in it.

00:23:37.000 It had the same amount of the substance in it that kind of matched up with how much was in Tim's system and when he said he had taken it last.

00:23:44.000 So there's a lot of detective work that comes into it.

00:23:47.000 And I get this question a lot from fighters saying, hey, the supplement excuse is a bullshit excuse that, you know, There's athletes using stuff, and they have supplements in their closet that they know are tainted, and then boom, if they test it positive, they just have that built-in excuse.

00:24:03.000 And what I tell them is it goes deeper than that.

00:24:06.000 There's literally scientific detective work that's going on from the USADA side, making sure everything matches, making sure they independently procure the product, Making sure what turns up in the athlete's system based on when they say they were taking it matches exactly the level that's in the product based on metabolism timings.

00:24:27.000 So it's much more than that.

00:24:28.000 And I do have a lot of confidence when USADA says, hey, it does match that this came from an unknowingly or unintentional ingestion that it really is that.

00:24:38.000 Now, in a case like Tim Means, why is he suspended if someone does give him a tainted supplement and he takes it in good faith, thinking that it's just creatine?

00:24:49.000 Right.

00:24:49.000 So there's strict liability in the program, and they look at all the factors.

00:24:54.000 So creatine is a relatively low-risk product.

00:24:57.000 However, the creatine Tim took was not third-party certified.

00:25:02.000 And that, you know, get a lot of questions about, man, the supplement industry is dangerous, and, you know, this sucks for athletes.

00:25:09.000 There's nothing they can do.

00:25:10.000 There is something that you can do, and it's actually pretty simple to do.

00:25:14.000 We were talking earlier about Onnit.

00:25:17.000 A company you're involved with, and you guys third-party certify a lot of your product.

00:25:22.000 And what that means is you outsource random testing of the product and sampling of the product from these independent companies to make sure they contain no...

00:25:33.000 Prohibited substances.

00:25:35.000 And, you know, what Don and I educate our athletes, too, is you can go to these third-party certification companies.

00:25:41.000 I think you guys use Catlin's group, Banned Substance Control Group.

00:25:45.000 There's that group.

00:25:46.000 There's Informed Choice.

00:25:49.000 There's NSF for sport.

00:25:51.000 And you can go to their websites, and they have lists of all certified products, and there's hundreds of them.

00:25:57.000 So there's no excuse that you can't find, as a UFC athlete, products that are tested and independently certified as banned substance-free.

00:26:07.000 And if it were the case, and it's not saying that it couldn't happen because those companies aren't testing every single bottle of product, but if you're an athlete, you take a third-party certified product, you record it, you log it, and it turns out to be from that product, I think then you're reaching a level where the mitigating factors maybe do get you down to No sanction, you know a public warning or something.

00:26:30.000 Hey, you know, maybe you shouldn't use supplements at all type of thing, right?

00:26:33.000 So his error was just taking something that was not third-party correct and just not doing his homework on a company Seems like a lot but in reality most fighters It's really he's really only got about three months off because most fighters after a fight are gonna take a few months off anyway Probably.

00:26:48.000 I mean, it seems harsh, but there is an obligation that fighters need to do their homework, and you need to have a bit of a deterrent there to make sure they do it, and that's that deterrent.

00:26:58.000 Now, one of the things that I thought was really cool about the UFC Performance Institute, which is just...

00:27:04.000 There's so much cool about that place.

00:27:06.000 But one of the things that was really cool is that you guys have a station where an athlete can go in and check any sort of substance, any cold medication they're taking, anything, type in the name of it, and it'll tell you on this giant tablet whether or not...

00:27:21.000 What you're taking is banned.

00:27:22.000 Yeah, so it's a kiosk.

00:27:24.000 So it's the USADA kiosk and we have like a little iPad in there and it's between the locker rooms and the recovery room.

00:27:30.000 So it's, you know, you've got your hot cool and your cold pool and your sauna and your cryo and all that stuff.

00:27:37.000 So it's a constant reminder as our athletes are in that flow between that area because they all walk through there every day that USADA is a part of the sport, that we're a clean sport.

00:27:47.000 That you have an obligation to check on medications, supplements, and you have an obligation to file your whereabouts.

00:27:53.000 They can also file whereabouts at that kiosk. 0.95

00:27:56.000 And we get athletes all the time walking down that corridor saying, ah, shit, forgot to tell USADA, flew out to Las Vegas at the PI. Boom, they can get on in a minute or two and update where they're at. 0.76

00:28:06.000 Do you guys have an app?

00:28:08.000 They do.

00:28:08.000 So they can update by app?

00:28:10.000 Yep.

00:28:10.000 So it's on your phone as well.

00:28:12.000 So every quarter, athletes are required to get through a web browser, what's called the quarterly USADA whereabouts filing.

00:28:19.000 They usually have to watch an instructional video.

00:28:21.000 Most of the time, reminders about smart supplement choices, things like that.

00:28:26.000 And then they tell USADA where they're going to be for the next three months.

00:28:30.000 And most of the time, hey, I mean, Donna and I do the whereabouts filing as well.

00:28:35.000 We both say, hey...

00:28:36.000 Who knows where I'm going to be next week, let alone two, three months from now.

00:28:40.000 But you make your best guess at it.

00:28:41.000 And then all that information you put through the web browser is downloaded to your mobile phone app.

00:28:47.000 So that as your plans change over the next couple weeks, couple months, you can do 45 second to one minute updates through your mobile app.

00:28:56.000 So the convenience is there.

00:28:58.000 There's really no excuse in not letting USADA know where you're at.

00:29:03.000 There are repercussions if you don't let them know where you're at because you want to avoid somebody ducking and dodging a test.

00:29:11.000 I know Cowboy had a situation where he was actually in Vegas at the fights and they were mad at him because he didn't say that he was going to be in Vegas. 0.98

00:29:18.000 He's like, I'm at the fucking fights. 0.97

00:29:20.000 I'm right here. 1.00

00:29:21.000 I'm on TV. Don and I do everything we can to try to let USADA know when we know that a fighter has a UFC obligation.

00:29:29.000 So whether they're a guest fighter on the road, whether they're at a competition, we're always passing that information along to USADA. But we also tell them that ultimately it's your responsibility as an athlete.

00:29:40.000 We'll try to, but we can't guarantee it ultimately is going to fall on you if you don't update USADA. Now, the good thing about this is you're afforded a couple mistakes under the whereabouts program.

00:29:49.000 So it's not until three whereabouts failures in any rolling 12-month period that there can be sanctions because, honestly, I mean, things happen in your life.

00:29:58.000 Everybody's human.

00:30:00.000 Sometimes you forget.

00:30:01.000 I'll give you the perfect example.

00:30:02.000 So again, getting back to Donna, the most attention to detail person that I've ever worked with in my working career.

00:30:10.000 She comes over, joins our program here.

00:30:13.000 We get her signed up for Whereabouts.

00:30:14.000 She's like, this is great.

00:30:16.000 I can talk knowledgeably about how to do this.

00:30:18.000 We went out to Anaheim for UFC. I forget what number that was.

00:30:24.000 We take a trip down from Anaheim to San Diego.

00:30:27.000 We went down to this clinic that we were checking out for brain therapy.

00:30:31.000 She forgot to update that she was going to San Diego.

00:30:33.000 She was more than two hours outside of where she was supposed to be, where USADA knew she was going to be.

00:30:38.000 She would have gotten a whereabouts failure.

00:30:40.000 Again, one of the most responsible people that I've ever been around goes to show that it's challenging.

00:30:46.000 So she has to notify where she's going to be?

00:30:48.000 We do it voluntarily just so we can talk knowledgeably to our athletes so that when they say, hey, this is too hard, we say, well, we do it.

00:30:58.000 Here's a little trick that I have to remind myself each day where I said I'm going to be at, things like that.

00:31:03.000 Now, when you have a fighter like Holly Holm, I think, said she was tested nine times in preparation for this fight against Cyborg. 0.75

00:31:11.000 When that happens, is there a...

00:31:15.000 I know you can't say when the test is going to happen because it won't be random, but is there any consideration about the sleep cycle of the fighters?

00:31:23.000 Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, USADA never lets me know when a test is coming.

00:31:27.000 I have zero input in terms of who's being tested, and that is the reality.

00:31:32.000 A lot of times they show up 5.30, 6 in the morning.

00:31:35.000 That seems like it would really suck for fighters.

00:31:37.000 There is no doubt about it.

00:31:39.000 Is it just a urine test?

00:31:41.000 Or it can be blood as well.

00:31:42.000 I mean, imagine.

00:31:43.000 You're dead asleep.

00:31:45.000 Six in the morning.

00:31:46.000 Someone's knocking your front door. 1.00

00:31:48.000 That's scary shit to begin with. 1.00

00:31:49.000 You go downstairs. 1.00

00:31:51.000 You're trying to get ready for a fight.

00:31:53.000 Prepare yourself sleep-wise, mentally. 0.85

00:31:55.000 And you've got to have a needle stuck in you to draw blood.

00:31:58.000 Wait until you've got to take a pee.

00:31:59.000 Could be some fighters wait hours.

00:32:03.000 You know, I don't think enough attention is being paid to the burden that's on the athletes and the credit they should be getting.

00:32:10.000 Holly Holm, I think, I saw a statistic that she's the most tested athlete since the inception of the program. 1.00

00:32:16.000 I think she's around 32 or 33 samples that she's provided.

00:32:20.000 I mean, that's crazy.

00:32:23.000 But that, I think she should, not enough credit is given to her.

00:32:27.000 Now, why do they test her so many times? 0.99

00:32:29.000 Because I haven't heard any suspicions of her being dirty. 0.99

00:32:32.000 No, neither have I. And, you know, I think as you look at the testing statistics, and that's another cool thing about this program, I don't know if you know that, but all these test numbers are publicly available.

00:32:43.000 So the transparency in this program is unprecedented, unparalleled as it comes to professional sports.

00:32:49.000 There's no other professional sport on the planet where you or I, as a fan of the UFC, could say, Let me see how many times Holly's been tested, how many times Cyborg's been tested.

00:32:59.000 That's unparalleled.

00:33:01.000 But if you look at those numbers, and I'll occasionally look at them, I think those athletes with staying power, those athletes that are at the tops of their division have more tests directed to them versus, you know, athletes at the bottom that are jumping in and out.

00:33:14.000 They want to make, I think, you saw a good use of their resources to make sure that they're directing most of those tests.

00:33:20.000 Those athletes are going to be around for a while.

00:33:22.000 I mean, we saw what a badass Holly is on Saturday night. 1.00

00:33:26.000 That woman's incredible. 1.00

00:33:27.000 And, you know, I think Sada probably realizes that, too, and she's going to be around for a while and wants to set, you know, an example.

00:33:34.000 And I tell athletes a lot.

00:33:36.000 I say, hey, wear this as a badge of honor.

00:33:38.000 You know, I know it's a burden, but, man, that makes you even more special of an athlete that you, you know, take that burden on and embrace it and show the world that you're, you know, not only a badass athlete, but you're doing this clean.

00:33:51.000 One of the things I thought was really fascinating about the UFC Performance Institute is that machine where you lie down, and it scans your entire body, and it shows where your muscle imbalances are.

00:34:02.000 What are all the different details that that thing focuses on?

00:34:05.000 Yeah, I mean, we talked about this when you toured it, but you've got to get some of the personnel from the PI in there that can really talk knowledgeably and have that education experience.

00:34:14.000 I'm going to bring those guys in.

00:34:15.000 They're going to come on.

00:34:17.000 Not only is that as you saw that facility world-class but they staffed it with the perfect world-class personnel so that machine is called a DEXA scan and you know I can't give it the justice that the personnel can there but it yet measures body composition so it'll measure you know fat hydration levels bone density bone density yeah and how's it how's it doing that Some type of low-level x-ray.

00:34:44.000 Again, you've got to get those guys in there to describe it specifically.

00:34:47.000 But, you know, and I'm sure it's a topic we'll cover today, the whole weight issue, being in the proper weight class and weight cutting.

00:34:55.000 Both the equipment and now the personnel is in place at the Performance Institute that there's no excuse for an athlete to not, A, find their right weight class, and B, You know, safely, efficiently meet that weight goal when they're fighting.

00:35:11.000 Everything is in place now there for that.

00:35:13.000 Now, when a fighter comes to you guys and lies down on that machine, and you read their hydration levels and say they're slightly dehydrated, and yet they're still 10 pounds above the weight class, how do you handle that?

00:35:27.000 So we have a director of sports nutrition, a guy by the name of Clint Wattenberg.

00:35:32.000 And Clint was a Division I All-American at Cornell.

00:35:37.000 Ivy League educated, smart as hell.

00:35:39.000 Went on to wrestle with Team USA. He's actually wrestled with a lot of our fighters.

00:35:44.000 I've had several conversations with guys that wrestled him before Clint came here.

00:35:50.000 So he's got a ton of pure respect for that.

00:35:54.000 Super smart guy.

00:35:55.000 But yeah, he works.

00:35:56.000 He'd be the guy to ask.

00:35:58.000 He's Ivy League educated in sports nutrition.

00:36:02.000 And in a situation like that, Yeah, he's, you know, giving advice to the fighters about how the importance of hydration and trying to change that around so that they can meet those goals.

00:36:13.000 Yeah, there's the machine right there.

00:36:14.000 What is it called?

00:36:15.000 Dual Energy X-Ray Absorpiometry.

00:36:21.000 How do you say that?

00:36:22.000 We call it DEXA scan.

00:36:26.000 That sounds like something that someone would say in a cartoon, like a fake word.

00:36:30.000 It measures body composition, including lean mass, muscle tissue, fat mass, and bone density.

00:36:34.000 Measuring and tracking all three of these components is important for weight class sport athletes and helps guide nutrition recommendations.

00:36:41.000 Fascinating stuff.

00:36:42.000 So it just sort of scans over you.

00:36:45.000 How long does that test take?

00:36:46.000 I've never gone through it or actually never seen it.

00:36:49.000 I've got to get over there and check it out.

00:36:50.000 I don't know.

00:36:51.000 It was interesting when Forrest was doing, Forrest Griffin was telling me that when he had it done, he found out that one of his legs has two pounds more muscle than the other leg because he had had some knee injuries and he really had no idea.

00:37:01.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:37:02.000 I mean, so Forrest is a big part of that.

00:37:05.000 Performance Institute was a big part of, you know, touring other facilities around the world.

00:37:10.000 I think him and James Kimball, who's our VP of Operations at the PI, went to 61 or 62 facilities throughout the world and took what they believe were the best parts of these facilities and put them all to one.

00:37:22.000 And Forrest's role there is, you know, kind of similar to my role in the anti-doping program, an advocate for our athletes.

00:37:30.000 He's there to make sure, as a former fighter, knowing what works and what doesn't work.

00:37:35.000 We're looking at a video of this thing right now and it looks like Star Trek.

00:37:38.000 Is it saying anything, Jamie?

00:37:40.000 At the very end, it pans over and shows what shows up on the screen.

00:37:44.000 There's a bunch of different data points.

00:37:47.000 This is amazing.

00:37:48.000 I mean, I talked to you.

00:37:49.000 I thought maybe last week we can get you out there earlier, but you've got to come.

00:37:51.000 I'm going to.

00:37:52.000 Next time.

00:37:52.000 Next time in March.

00:37:53.000 Next time I'm going to come day early.

00:37:54.000 Excuse me.

00:37:55.000 Day early, just do this.

00:37:56.000 They'll put you through the whole thing.

00:37:57.000 You get your DEXA scan done, your body composition.

00:38:00.000 You then have a meeting with Clint.

00:38:01.000 Talk about nutrition and goals.

00:38:04.000 Maybe go see the physical therapist.

00:38:06.000 Talk about any issues you have.

00:38:09.000 Therapy you need go work out with our strength and conditioning coach Bo Sandoval puts you through the the ringers and the equipment there Then do a little recovery after that really give you the full experience.

00:38:20.000 Yeah, that place is amazing how you guys get it set up and it's it's really a Massive resource for fighters that if because there's a lot of great gyms out there But I don't think I've ever seen one that's that well equipped that you guys have everything you have Complete strength and conditioning system area.

00:38:40.000 Then you have a complete area with heavy bags, a cage, boxing ring, and then you have a complete recovery area.

00:38:49.000 You have cryo machines.

00:38:50.000 You have that, what is that, light machine?

00:38:53.000 Yeah, it's like low-level laser light therapy.

00:38:56.000 That looks like a giant tanning bed that you get in, and I've seen that thing before, and what is that supposed to do?

00:39:01.000 It's supposed to somehow or another stimulate the blood flow to the area?

00:39:03.000 Yeah, work on recovery at the cellular level.

00:39:06.000 Again, you need to get these PI personnel in here to explain it in detail.

00:39:11.000 You guys even have sleep pods, which I thought was the craziest thing ever.

00:39:14.000 So if a fighter just has an hour to chill, They can just get in there and recover and relax.

00:39:19.000 Yeah, I mean, the idea is you come to the Performance Institute.

00:39:22.000 Yeah, there they are.

00:39:24.000 Those are dope. 0.77

00:39:25.000 And I hear this all the time.

00:39:26.000 They see the equipment, the personnel that's available to them.

00:39:31.000 They see when it's time to unwind that they have a room like this to relax in.

00:39:34.000 They see they have free use of the cafeteria and custom-cooked meals.

00:39:39.000 They don't want to leave the place.

00:39:41.000 They're there all day long.

00:39:42.000 Francis and Gano.

00:39:44.000 Yeah.

00:39:45.000 Has lived there the last six months.

00:39:47.000 There's a running joke in the office.

00:39:48.000 Francis is constantly walking around the office in between workouts.

00:39:52.000 It's like, Francis, we've got to get you an office here or something.

00:39:54.000 What are you doing?

00:39:56.000 Yeah, that's a guy.

00:39:57.000 Incredible.

00:39:58.000 I mean, the dude moved to Los...

00:40:00.000 He saw the place, and he moved up and moved everything he had.

00:40:03.000 I don't think he knew anybody in Las Vegas or had any friends there, because he's just walking around the office all day long when he's not at the PI. From France.

00:40:11.000 From France.

00:40:12.000 Yeah, from another country.

00:40:13.000 He said...

00:40:14.000 Exactly, but you know a perfect example of seeing what that place could do for him and that's available to every single fighter on the roster.

00:40:21.000 Yeah, I mean there's nothing like it and my prediction is that the UFC is going to be the hub where most people live.

00:40:27.000 The only thing that's wrong there is the altitude.

00:40:30.000 That's the only thing that's wrong and I know you guys have a hypoxic room where you can stimulate or simulate a high altitude and Yeah, I think 22,000 feet.

00:40:39.000 But isn't the way you're supposed to do it, you're supposed to work at sea level but sleep at high altitude?

00:40:44.000 Isn't that how it's supposed to be done?

00:40:45.000 I think that's what it is.

00:40:46.000 You know, what is Vey?

00:40:47.000 So 2,500, 3,000 feet.

00:40:50.000 Is it even?

00:40:50.000 Is it really?

00:40:51.000 That's interesting.

00:40:52.000 I didn't even know it was that high.

00:40:53.000 I think it is, yeah.

00:40:54.000 I thought it was like sea level, because it's like desert.

00:40:58.000 No, it's got a little bit of altitude.

00:41:00.000 I know Nevada has some good mountain areas, though, just outside, where guys can run and do things like that.

00:41:06.000 Does the Performance Institute take people on any treks or anything like that?

00:41:10.000 No, I don't think we've gotten to that level yet.

00:41:12.000 Seems like that would be a good thing to do, right?

00:41:13.000 Take them off to Red Rocks for runs?

00:41:15.000 There you go.

00:41:15.000 That's a good idea.

00:41:16.000 I mean, I just think that if really high-level coaches start moving there, and obviously we just lost one of the best, Robert Foles, which is a huge, huge loss, and what a great guy.

00:41:26.000 I was going to say, I mean, universally, the nicest guy ever, always a great demeanor.

00:41:31.000 Universally loved.

00:41:31.000 Very few people that are fight coaches that are universally loved, and Robert really was.

00:41:36.000 But, you know, Vegas has some good coaches, but I anticipate more and more gyms moving and relocating there and bringing fighters there. 0.94

00:41:42.000 Because I just think high-level fighters are going to see that place and go, how can I recreate this anywhere without fucking millions and millions of dollars? 0.91

00:41:49.000 I think so. 0.76

00:41:50.000 I think we'd love to see that happen.

00:41:51.000 It's, you know, a good, low-cost, relatively low-cost-of-living area.

00:41:55.000 So it's a place that's affordable.

00:41:57.000 And, yeah, I think you spend a little bit of time at the PI and see what it can do for you as a UFC athlete.

00:42:03.000 And just when I was...

00:42:04.000 Oh, go ahead.

00:42:04.000 I think the other cool thing, and I know Duncan French, he's Dr. Duncan French, he's our VP of performance there, which he explained a little bit to you about, is that not only are we looking to influence the UFC athlete, but also influence positively MMA, the whole, the entire sport.

00:42:23.000 And what you're seeing is UFC athletes can come in there and use it, but they can also bring along with them training partners, We're only seven or eight months into this, but what we've already seen is training ideas, proper nutrition, going back out to these gyms, not only across the U.S., but across the world.

00:42:44.000 So we definitely hope to be a positive influence throughout all of MMA and really, really grow this sport.

00:42:52.000 Yeah, I saw that with Bobby Green.

00:42:53.000 Bobby Green, who was there, brought a couple of his training partners.

00:42:56.000 And just on a random day, Wilson Hayes was there.

00:42:58.000 Angela Hill was there.

00:43:00.000 There's quite a few fighters there.

00:43:01.000 It's the coolest thing ever.

00:43:01.000 I love.

00:43:02.000 I'll go over there when I'm in the office multiple times a day just to see who's in there that day and have that five, ten-minute conversation with Wilson Hayes that he knows me going forward in the future.

00:43:14.000 And Jeff's a cool guy.

00:43:15.000 And when that medication or supplement question comes up, He's talked to me before.

00:43:21.000 He knows who I am.

00:43:21.000 He's not afraid to pick up the phone and ask me that question versus, hey, this Golden Snitch character, I don't know.

00:43:26.000 I don't know who this guy is.

00:43:28.000 I'm not going to call him or trust him.

00:43:29.000 It's a big part of what I do is try to develop that trust.

00:43:32.000 So thanks to Shah for sending me back about two and a half years worth of work of developing that trust.

00:43:37.000 It's a nickname that doesn't even make sense.

00:43:39.000 It literally doesn't make sense.

00:43:40.000 But it's funny.

00:43:42.000 Is there any other plans to expand or do more things with the Institute?

00:43:47.000 There is.

00:43:47.000 So we didn't show you this, but there are other areas upstairs for that very reason.

00:43:52.000 They thought about, hey, technology in a couple years or maybe new machines or devices that come on the line that we may want.

00:43:58.000 So there is additional room for expansion there.

00:44:00.000 I talked to you guys and I talked to Duncan about a tank, about you guys getting tanks in there.

00:44:06.000 Sensory deprivation tanks.

00:44:07.000 I think that would be massive.

00:44:08.000 I know a lot of football teams are using them now, and it's starting to spread.

00:44:12.000 Excellent source of magnesium, because you're absorbing it through the skin, but just for relaxation and recuperation, I would be fascinated to see if you guys had those, like, what kind of results you'd get.

00:44:23.000 Yeah, I mean, it sounded to me, and I was there when you were talking about it, that Duncan was open to it and was talking about some research.

00:44:28.000 I think he said Ohio State University is conducting some research on the benefits of that, so...

00:44:32.000 I know there's tanks in Vegas now.

00:44:34.000 I know there's a place in Vegas.

00:44:35.000 So I'm sure whoever runs that tank thing is going to reach out to me.

00:44:38.000 So I want to get you in touch with them and just have you try it.

00:44:42.000 Just to get a beat on it.

00:44:45.000 It's a freaky experience.

00:44:46.000 And it's really good for your body.

00:44:49.000 Everything in your back will just loosen up because you're essentially zero gravity.

00:44:53.000 You're floating.

00:44:54.000 Everything pops and loosens up.

00:44:57.000 It's amazing.

00:44:57.000 It's cool.

00:44:58.000 I want to try it.

00:44:58.000 I saw yours a little bit ago.

00:44:59.000 A little intimidating or scary-looking person.

00:45:01.000 Weird-looking, yeah.

00:45:02.000 My wife made me move it out of the basement.

00:45:05.000 I had one in the basement.

00:45:06.000 She's like, people come over, they think you're a freak.

00:45:08.000 I think I'm a freak.

00:45:10.000 But the idea behind it, I think, is pretty sound.

00:45:13.000 And I think there's a lot of benefits for it for fighters as far as concentrating on technique as well.

00:45:19.000 I think it's an amazing place to focus on strategy and game plans and movement and things along those lines where you can visualize.

00:45:26.000 One of the most amazing things with the sport.

00:45:29.000 Coming over to the UFC, I call myself a fringe fan.

00:45:33.000 I mean, I would follow it a little bit, but I'm hook, line, and sinker into the sport now.

00:45:37.000 And the most remarkable thing I find about the sport is the mental game.

00:45:42.000 It is the most incredible...

00:45:45.000 Mental game of any athlete in any sport in the world.

00:45:50.000 When you're walking out into an octagon and facing one of the baddest mixed martial artists on the planet. 1.00

00:45:58.000 I know you've seen a ton of fights over your career, but I think one thing that I've seen in the two and a half years that you may not is that progression through fight week.

00:46:07.000 So when I go out to these events or events are in Vegas, I'm there check-in day, Monday or Tuesday of fight week.

00:46:14.000 And typically when we're on the road, I'm there every day in the same hotel.

00:46:18.000 I'm watching these guys and girls eat breakfast.

00:46:20.000 I'm watching them at the gym prepare, try to make weight on Friday.

00:46:23.000 I'm watching them Saturday morning with the prospect of the fight ahead of them.

00:46:27.000 What an incredible mental journey it is to know that you're about to get into a cage with one of the baddest fighters on the planet.

00:46:36.000 And even if you win, probably come out with a little bit of damage.

00:46:40.000 I mean, everything to fight night.

00:46:43.000 Fight night, these athletes are in a locker room, typically with three or four other athletes.

00:46:49.000 And especially if you're one of the last athletes on that card, one by one, your locker mates are walking out.

00:46:55.000 And then coming back in.

00:46:56.000 And you see, you know, damage on even the ones that win.

00:47:00.000 And unlike other sports where you get out on the field and you warm up and you get a little sense of what the atmosphere is like, these athletes are walking out, you know, into the lion's den, seeing it for the first time.

00:47:12.000 And the sensory, overwhelming sensory things that are going on when doing that and to be able to, you know, control your emotions and And, you know, compete against somebody is just absolutely the most incredible thing that I've ever seen.

00:47:26.000 I'm so amazed.

00:47:28.000 And, you know, very few of these fighters, and I talk to a lot of them, that doesn't get to them in some way or form.

00:47:35.000 That is, you know, I talk to Forrest often about that.

00:47:37.000 And Forrest says, He equates it to if you've never jumped out of an airplane, the whole time you're on the way up saying, what the hell am I doing?

00:47:45.000 This is crazy.

00:47:46.000 And then, you know, when the bell rings and you start fighting, then it kind of calms down and you're back in your kind of zone.

00:47:53.000 But just what an incredible mental game this is.

00:47:57.000 And I just have so much respect for our athletes because of what they have to go through and they're able to do it time and time again and control those emotions.

00:48:03.000 You bring up an important point, and mental training is something that a lot of athletes have really concentrated on more over the last few years than I think ever that I could recall.

00:48:14.000 And a lot of them bring in hypnotists and a lot of them bring in sports psychologists.

00:48:18.000 Has there ever been any talk of bringing that to the performance institute?

00:48:21.000 Yeah, I've talked briefly with Duncan about it, who has a ton of resources in the athletic performance field.

00:48:29.000 So we've talked briefly about that, but nobody on the staff currently.

00:48:35.000 It's kind of a give and take.

00:48:37.000 Look, we want to provide all these resources to our athletes, but we also want them to retain their independence.

00:48:43.000 I mean, if you notice in the Performance Institute, there's no MMA coaches there.

00:48:49.000 There's no striking, wrestling coaches, jiu-jitsu coaches, none of that.

00:48:53.000 That's for the athlete to bring in because there needs to be some level of independence.

00:48:57.000 You don't want to train the entire roster the same way.

00:49:00.000 Against itself.

00:49:01.000 Exactly.

00:49:01.000 Yeah, that sounds like it would be.

00:49:03.000 I saw early on in my tenure here with UFC, I saw one of the most incredible things that I've ever seen.

00:49:10.000 I've only seen it once, but I saw a fighter show up fight night and Outside the locker room and basically said, I don't want to go in.

00:49:19.000 I don't want to do this.

00:49:20.000 At the arena.

00:49:22.000 Really?

00:49:22.000 And I mean, I was just blown away.

00:49:25.000 And actually, Sean Shelby went up and thought it was awesome.

00:49:28.000 Had a great conversation with the fighter.

00:49:31.000 Said, look, you're not feeling anything that everybody doesn't feel.

00:49:36.000 Every single fighter on the roster feels what you're feeling right now.

00:49:39.000 You're just letting it get the best of you.

00:49:41.000 You know, you're a badass fighter. 0.99

00:49:43.000 You know, you've kicked ass before. 0.98

00:49:45.000 You've gotten beat before. 0.99

00:49:47.000 You know, what's the worst going to happen?

00:49:49.000 You're going to get beat.

00:49:50.000 You're going to live through this thing.

00:49:51.000 You're just letting it surface.

00:49:52.000 Everybody feels what you're feeling.

00:49:54.000 And for a second, you know, the fighter came back a little bit and then, boom, left the arena.

00:50:00.000 Whoa.

00:50:00.000 Crazy.

00:50:02.000 I think that must enter into the head or the prospect of that of every single person, every single fighter that comes to the arena.

00:50:09.000 I'm sure there's just a little bit of that in the back of the head.

00:50:11.000 It's just an incredible journey to see them mentally overcome that amount of stress pre-fight.

00:50:19.000 That's why it's so interesting to see a guy like Connor who's so relaxed in there.

00:50:25.000 rubber-armed strut when he's walking around the cage.

00:50:28.000 He's kind of like letting you know how he is dealing with this better than you are.

00:50:33.000 You know the one fighter that...

00:50:35.000 Because I pay really close attention after having seen that early.

00:50:38.000 Pay really close attention just to see that fighter on the walkout. 0.98

00:50:41.000 I like to sit pretty close to the cage and just look at that fighter's eyes.

00:50:46.000 I tend to see a little bit of nervousness and fear in everyone.

00:50:49.000 I think it's probably healthy.

00:50:51.000 One person that sticks out that I looked at and I saw nothing in this dude's face.

00:50:56.000 I saw a little smirk like he was so happy to be in there.

00:50:59.000 It's the first time I've seen this guy fight.

00:51:02.000 That's Justin Gagey.

00:51:04.000 When he fought Michael Johnson, I remember looking.

00:51:06.000 He walked in first.

00:51:07.000 I was sitting on one side and he was on the other side of the cage.

00:51:11.000 Looking in his eyes, and I had never seen him fight before.

00:51:14.000 And I'm like, who is this guy?

00:51:16.000 He looks like he's happy to be in there.

00:51:18.000 Like, this is, you know, some party he's at.

00:51:21.000 And that fight was incredible. 0.99

00:51:22.000 Well, he's crazy.

00:51:23.000 Wasn't it? 1.00

00:51:23.000 He's legitimately crazy. 1.00

00:51:25.000 He said that getting knocked out by Eddie Alvarez is the greatest thing that ever happened to him in his life. 0.95

00:51:29.000 He's a different breed. 0.89

00:51:31.000 Yeah, well he's got a mindset and that mindset is I'm coming to go to war and he said it when he got signed he said over the next couple years I'm gonna get knocked out.

00:51:40.000 Someone's gonna knock me out.

00:51:41.000 He goes but I'm gonna knock a lot of people out and I'm gonna break people.

00:51:46.000 And the only way to stop me is to shut me off.

00:51:48.000 And he goes, I'm human.

00:51:49.000 I can be shut off.

00:51:50.000 I want to watch that guy fight every time.

00:51:52.000 Every time!

00:51:53.000 Every time.

00:51:54.000 Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible mindset.

00:51:56.000 And I don't know if you can teach that.

00:51:59.000 I think a lot of people say you can't teach mental strength. 0.98

00:52:02.000 And I think that's horseshit. 0.72

00:52:04.000 I think you can teach everything. 0.91

00:52:05.000 I think the mind...

00:52:08.000 Can be can be trained.

00:52:10.000 I mean, this is what they do in boot camp, right?

00:52:12.000 I mean, and it works to varying degrees of success.

00:52:14.000 I think the mind can be trained.

00:52:16.000 It's just a matter of what's your baseline.

00:52:18.000 Where are you coming in at?

00:52:19.000 Are you a total scaredy-cat or are you a pretty stoic, rugged dude to begin with?

00:52:24.000 And what can they do?

00:52:26.000 And maybe you're too stoic.

00:52:28.000 Maybe you're too non-emotional and you're too non-vulnerable and you're delusional in your perceptions.

00:52:34.000 It's amazing seeing the different ways that different athletes deal with it.

00:52:37.000 So, Saturday night, I'll give you a perfect example.

00:52:39.000 So, fight night, you know, USADA's the one doing the testing.

00:52:44.000 A lot of times, fight night, there's not a lot going on in my world.

00:52:47.000 I'm there to put out fires in case something does go on.

00:52:50.000 I like to watch the fights close, just to see those things we're talking about here.

00:52:55.000 But occasionally, I'll pop in backstage just to make sure everything's going good.

00:52:59.000 So, I walked back there before the Holly-Cyborg fight, Holly was out in the hallway getting ready to do that long walk for the championship bout. 1.00

00:53:11.000 She was there for probably about 10 minutes, cameras getting ready, and she was doing that Holly pacing back and forth, jamming her hands together, firing herself up. 0.74

00:53:21.000 She did it for a good 10 minutes back there, and then you see once she gets out in the cage, she was the first one in there, pacing back and forth for 10 minutes, right? 0.92

00:53:30.000 Hitting the hands together.

00:53:32.000 Between every single round, she'd get off that stool, back and forth, pacing, hitting the hands together.

00:53:37.000 That's the way she fired herself up. 1.00

00:53:39.000 See Carla Esparza walk out? 1.00

00:53:41.000 She walks out with, like, zero emotion on her face.

00:53:45.000 Like, is this girl ready to go? 0.99

00:53:46.000 She gets in the cage, walks over to one side, and just stands there. 1.00

00:53:49.000 Doesn't bounce around at all.

00:53:51.000 But, you know, hey, you see both of them, you know, can have success doing that way, dealing with it, you know, in different ways.

00:53:58.000 It's amazing to see it.

00:53:59.000 There's a groove that they get into.

00:54:01.000 They get in a comfort zone.

00:54:02.000 They're just like, this is what I do every time I compete.

00:54:05.000 And everybody's is different.

00:54:07.000 And, you know, some people don't like to bounce around.

00:54:09.000 But I remember when Holly did that during the Ronda Rousey fight. 1.00

00:54:12.000 I remember how I was looking at her.

00:54:14.000 I'm like, this girl's got some legs. 1.00

00:54:17.000 I was like, I'd seen her fight before and I knew that she was an amazing fighter.

00:54:19.000 And some stamina.

00:54:20.000 Between the 10 minutes backstage, before she walked out, the five minutes after she was in the cage and Cyborg was walking out, the 10 or 15 seconds between every round, she probably, you know.

00:54:32.000 Ran a couple miles.

00:54:33.000 Yeah, the equivalent of a couple extra rounds.

00:54:34.000 And she was as fresh at the end as she was in the beginning.

00:54:37.000 Tremendous cardio in that girl.

00:54:38.000 Well, Jackson's camp, you know, that Michael, excuse me, Greg Jackson and Mike Winklejohn camp, they spend a lot of time working on endurance training and strength and conditioning.

00:54:50.000 They do a lot of hill running.

00:54:51.000 You know, they have this famous mountain that they run that they all do and just hop.

00:54:56.000 Holly's been known for not just her cardio, but like I said in the Ronda fight, her legs, the way she can move. 0.99

00:55:03.000 That's one of the things that I thought was going to be a big problem with her, with Ronda.

00:55:06.000 I was like, Ronda's got to catch her.

00:55:07.000 You know, like the way she's bouncing and moving, I don't think Rana can move like that. 0.99

00:55:12.000 I'm like watching her bounce and move in that crazy kickboxing style that she'd had for all those years, her ability to do backflips and stuff. 1.00

00:55:19.000 Yeah, she's really athletic. 1.00

00:55:20.000 She's a different level of athlete. 0.76

00:55:22.000 Yep.

00:55:24.000 Yeah, but Cyborg was just too big.

00:55:26.000 Too big, too skillful, too tough.

00:55:28.000 She showed a lot of skill in that fight. 1.00

00:55:31.000 Her previous UFC fight, she was just kind of coming at people. 1.00

00:55:34.000 I thought she was really skillful in this fight. 0.98

00:55:37.000 Very.

00:55:38.000 Very patient, too. 0.85

00:55:39.000 A lot of people want to say that she's just a brute.

00:55:43.000 But she's not.

00:55:44.000 She knows what her skills are, which is big power and excellent Muay Thai. 1.00

00:55:51.000 But she also administered that power. 0.74

00:55:53.000 The way she delivered it was very skillful, very methodical, very professional.

00:55:59.000 And that was a workmanlike performance.

00:56:01.000 It really was.

00:56:01.000 It was interesting.

00:56:02.000 I talked to somebody in her camp, and they wanted to see a little bit more of that brute power come right at them.

00:56:06.000 They thought she was holding back a little bit, maybe a little too...

00:56:11.000 Skillful, but I thought it was great.

00:56:12.000 Well, they want her to stop, you know, Holly, but you run into a risk of getting head kicked.

00:56:18.000 Sure.

00:56:19.000 You know, you got to be real careful with Holly. 1.00

00:56:20.000 Holly pulls stuff out of her ass. 1.00

00:56:22.000 You know, like you saw in the Jermaine Durandamy fight. 1.00

00:56:25.000 You saw it in, obviously, the Ronda fight.

00:56:27.000 She's very sneaky. 1.00

00:56:28.000 She knows how to, especially that left high kick, man. 1.00

00:56:30.000 She knows how to sneak that sucker in. 1.00

00:56:32.000 That was a great fight. 0.95

00:56:33.000 Loved watching that fight.

00:56:34.000 Yeah.

00:56:35.000 Yeah, the women's MMA talent level has risen. 1.00

00:56:40.000 I remember when it first came on the scene and Ronda was the champ and she was just kind of steamrolling these girls who really didn't belong in the ring with her. 1.00

00:56:50.000 Yeah, it has.

00:56:51.000 And, you know, interesting, bringing back to the Performance Institute, you know, I talk with guys a lot over there that what they're finding out is you need to train a female athlete in a much different manner than you train a male athlete.

00:57:03.000 You know, you see a lot of times when female athletes cut weight, difficulties they have cutting that weight because of, you know, menstrual cycles potentially.

00:57:12.000 And you also see, in a lot of cases, a rebound effect.

00:57:16.000 Where a female will fight, get down to weight, fight, and then bounce way back up and just lose the body's ability to regulate. 1.00

00:57:24.000 Where they'll be cutting down on calories, working out like crazy, and they're still putting on weight.

00:57:29.000 So I think that's something that you'll see the Performance Institute doing is try to figure out and then knowledgeably disseminate information about how to train the female athlete.

00:57:39.000 They may need a little bit more time off in recovery between fights than a male athlete will.

00:57:45.000 One thing I say time and time again is every time we have a female fight, they come to fight. 1.00

00:57:52.000 And you often see cards that are, you know, kind of lagging a little bit.

00:57:55.000 And you look down on the list, you're like, okay, here comes a female fight. 1.00

00:57:58.000 And boom, turns the card right around.

00:58:00.000 Because, you know, inevitably they give ultimate maximum effort in there.

00:58:06.000 That's at least what I see.

00:58:07.000 There's a lot of that.

00:58:08.000 Well, there's the talent level...

00:58:12.000 Is rising, they're very hungry, and they're looking to be that next person.

00:58:17.000 They realize, like, look, Ronda Rousey's gone.

00:58:19.000 No one has really filled her place.

00:58:21.000 I mean, there's some very popular fighters, you know, like Rose Namajunas, obviously now is going to be one of the most popular fighters after the knockout of Ioani and Jacek. 0.70

00:58:29.000 Cyborg's obviously very popular, but there's plenty of room for more.

00:58:32.000 And they realize that, look, this is the time to go for it.

00:58:35.000 And I just think that, you know, the women that get involved in fighting in the first place, it's not, there's a lot of men that get involved in fighting that are not going to fight after a while. 0.95

00:58:44.000 But the women that get involved in fighting, they tend to be crazy. 1.00

00:58:47.000 Like, in a good way. 0.86

00:58:49.000 You know, like, these are wild women. 1.00

00:58:51.000 You know, like Kat Zingano type characters.

00:58:53.000 You know, they're just wild.

00:58:54.000 And like, when you watch them fight, I mean, you're going to see some chaos.

00:58:58.000 I mean, they're not going to be playing it safe.

00:58:59.000 They're going to be going for it.

00:59:01.000 Yep, I love that about them.

00:59:02.000 Now, Kat is an interesting example because she was telling me the exact same thing that you were saying, that with a lot of women, their body responds very poorly to the weight cut and then immediately wants to gain weight afterwards. 0.94

00:59:13.000 Do you think that that's some sort of an evolutionary feature because of the fact they carry babies and they need fat, and so their body freaks out?

00:59:23.000 I've definitely thought that, sure.

00:59:24.000 Some sort of a response, like your body's like, hey, I don't know what this crazy person's doing, but we've got to put some fat on.

00:59:30.000 Absolutely.

00:59:30.000 And that's something, again, going back to the Performance Institute, that they're diving deep into.

00:59:36.000 And Clint Wattenberg, especially on the nutrition side, seeing those endocrine profiles after a fight, what can you do, both in cutting back and training and through your diet to help control and regulate that.

00:59:49.000 And Kat was telling me about a program that you guys were just you were just mentioning briefly in San Diego where they're using some sort of magnetic frequencies on fighters that have had brain injuries like what what is this?

01:00:03.000 Yeah, well, it was something that Dr. Duncan French kind of brought into the mix here.

01:00:07.000 So, previous to coming to UFC, he was Director of Sports Performance at University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.

01:00:14.000 And they were looking into, you know, traumatic brain injury in football and possible therapy.

01:00:22.000 And they came across a clinic in San Diego that was using this therapy, an FDA-approved device.

01:00:26.000 It's basically...

01:00:28.000 Low level magnet therapy.

01:00:30.000 In conjunction with that, they do some EKGs, a reading of the electrical waves in the brain.

01:00:37.000 And, you know, initially we're finding that this therapy was bringing some of those readings back together.

01:00:43.000 And I think very early in the process of figuring out whether this can really work or not, but certainly what the UFC wants to be is ahead of the curve in terms of potential therapies out there for treating the brain.

01:00:59.000 And so, yeah, Kat's been going there for a while, and she says she's experienced some positive results.

01:01:07.000 Yeah, she told me she got some outstanding results.

01:01:10.000 And what's interesting is there's been a ton of research and studies done on transdermal stimulation, all these different ways to increase the brain's ability to learn.

01:01:21.000 And there was a Radiolab podcast on this.

01:01:24.000 I think it was called something Nine Volt.

01:01:27.000 See if you can find it.

01:01:27.000 Nine Volt, something or another.

01:01:29.000 But it basically detailed how they use this for a sniper simulation.

01:01:34.000 And what they did is they took this woman who was a reporter They put her through this sniper simulation game.

01:01:41.000 It's like a video game.

01:01:42.000 She scored poorly, and then, yeah, 9-volt nirvana.

01:01:46.000 Thank you, Jamie.

01:01:47.000 And so then they attached these electrodes to various areas of her head and stimulated her brain with a small charge, and she went through the exact same thing, and she said it felt like The 20 minutes went by in two minutes and her score was perfect.

01:02:05.000 And this is being echoed throughout like many different people that have done tests on these very, and there's a lot of like home hacking where people are literally going to radio lab and making their own setups.

01:02:18.000 But I'm curious to see if the UFC has looked into some of these things.

01:02:22.000 Like maybe perhaps there's a way you could stimulate the body's ability to learn certain techniques or like carve pathways by stimulating areas of the brain.

01:02:33.000 Yeah, man, another great reason for you to get Duncan in here, because he can talk real knowledgeably about this therapy.

01:02:39.000 He told me when at the University of Notre Dame, you know, they'd have football players that would, you know, have migraine headaches for long periods of time that underwent this therapy, and in a matter of weeks, they went away.

01:02:51.000 When Donna and I visited the facility down in San Diego, they talked about employees of the facility bringing in their kids A, kids that had some levels of autism that after this therapy were more engaging with people.

01:03:05.000 They also talked about kids that had tests or finals coming up the day after where they go in for this therapy the night before and their test scores were improving as a result.

01:03:17.000 They deal with a lot of Special Forces soldiers down in the San Diego area that have had traumatic brain injuries because of IEDs.

01:03:25.000 And I've seen some success there.

01:03:27.000 So, I mean, I think some real exciting potential there that, again, you know, the UFC wants to be at the forefront of and, you know, be the first to, you know, to suggest some of these things to our athletes and, you know, potentially even looking, getting some of these devices at the PI and be able to treat some of our athletes there.

01:03:46.000 Yeah, that would be amazing.

01:03:48.000 And I think that we're in an interesting time now where because so much research is being put on CTE and traumatic brain injuries that we're looking at potential ways to mitigate those problems and maybe even rehab some of the issues that fighters are having.

01:04:04.000 Yeah, so one thing we didn't show you on your tour is we now make part of the onboarding process at the PI, the C3 logic testing, which is this 25, 30 minute neurocognitive test that came out of the Cleveland Clinic brain study.

01:04:19.000 And it's an iPad based test.

01:04:22.000 It's a mix of memory.

01:04:24.000 Shape, recognition, balance.

01:04:26.000 You actually put the pad onto a belt.

01:04:29.000 You stand on this unstable surface and close your eyes.

01:04:32.000 It basically gives you measurements or readings after 25 or 30 minutes.

01:04:37.000 And then, over time, you can compare those readings.

01:04:40.000 If they're declining, maybe it's time to take a little bit of time off from training and fighting.

01:04:44.000 If they're staying stable, then maybe you know you're doing all right.

01:04:48.000 The California Athletic Commission requires that for all fights.

01:04:52.000 So all fighters in any card in California, the Wednesday or Thursday before the fight, goes through the C3 logic testing.

01:04:59.000 All of it's uploaded to a cloud.

01:05:01.000 So after a period of a couple years, a fighter can have access to some real objective data on what their neurocognitive capabilities are looking like.

01:05:11.000 That would be a great way to find out, I mean, maybe one of the only ways to find out, without a fighter disclosing it, whether or not a fighter's been knocked out in camp.

01:05:21.000 Because that's a common occurrence, that fighters get knocked out in camp in hard sparring, and then a week, two weeks later, have to fight, and their ability to take a shot is gone.

01:05:32.000 Sure.

01:05:33.000 Yeah, it's interesting, you know, often asked about that and comparing it to other sports leagues.

01:05:38.000 And the one thing I will say, you know, with MMA, now this is excluding things that are going on in the gym, but in a fight that's regulated by an athletic commission, I think MMA has some of the most conservative return-to-play policy, I know it does, of any sport wherein if you're an NFL quarterback and you get knocked out on a Sunday, Yeah, you're in a concussion protocol, but they're trying to get you back playing probably the next Sunday or the Sunday thereafter.

01:06:02.000 Which is crazy.

01:06:03.000 A big concussion in MMA, as you know, is like a 45-60, mandatory 45 days, no activity, 60 days before you fight.

01:06:10.000 I mean, we've seen suspensions out to six months mandatory medical suspension.

01:06:15.000 And some of them, I think, are very warranted.

01:06:16.000 I mean, there's some brutal, brutal knockouts, like Alistair Overeem and Francis Ngannou.

01:06:21.000 Like, I don't want to see Alistair fight next month.

01:06:23.000 You know what I mean?

01:06:24.000 And here's a question about a guy like Alistair.

01:06:28.000 Alistair, we looked it up one day on a podcast, has been stopped or knocked out somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 times in MMA, and then three times more in kickboxing.

01:06:41.000 What's the number where you're like, that's enough?

01:06:43.000 Yeah, I don't know the answer to that.

01:06:46.000 I know you talk with Alistair and he's got all his wits about him.

01:06:49.000 That's what's crazy.

01:06:50.000 Alistair doesn't even seem remotely punchy.

01:06:52.000 Not only that, he doesn't seem deterred.

01:06:56.000 It's crazy.

01:06:57.000 He gets knocked out and he's like, well, we go back to the drawing board and we'll be better next time.

01:07:02.000 I think it's an unknown now, but you also look at, you know, the UFC has been the largest contributor to the Cleveland Clinic Fighter Brain Health Study.

01:07:08.000 So we, you know, made, I think, multi-million dollar commitment.

01:07:12.000 We upped it once.

01:07:15.000 So yeah, we're looking to invest resources into finding out what those answers are, definitely, and be at the forefront of any innovative therapies that are out there, innovative, you know, testing that's out there.

01:07:25.000 We want to be at the front.

01:07:26.000 Okay.

01:07:27.000 Well, the issue with CTE is that you really can't test for it until after a fighter is dead.

01:07:33.000 Correct.

01:07:33.000 But haven't they recently figured out a way to test people while they're alive?

01:07:38.000 Yeah, and I've read some of that.

01:07:39.000 I've also read that scientists arguing that that, you know, that's bunk, and that's not right.

01:07:43.000 So I don't know where we're at on that.

01:07:45.000 Yeah, because, boy, it just seems like...

01:07:50.000 And it also affects people differently, right?

01:07:53.000 Depending upon what genes they have, some people are more predisposed to CTE. Yeah, and that's my understanding of it.

01:08:00.000 Again, a lot of unknowns, but I think that the UFC has shown a dedication to contributing to areas where we can find out some of those answers.

01:08:10.000 Yeah, I know that you guys recently had Mark Hunt come to Vegas because Mark Hunt had talked about suffering damage from fights and the UFC said, you know what, we can't just hear him say that.

01:08:23.000 We're going to pull him off this card.

01:08:25.000 And he was furious and they said, look, we love you.

01:08:28.000 Don't get it wrong.

01:08:29.000 But we want you to be safe.

01:08:31.000 And you say that you're slurring your words, and then he changed it and said, well, it's after a few drinks.

01:08:36.000 And then they went, okay, well, come by, and let's give you the full gamut of tests.

01:08:42.000 Yep, that's exactly what happened, and we're always going to act out of an abundance of caution in a scenario like that.

01:08:47.000 And so now he's back on the roster and back with a fight schedule.

01:08:50.000 Yep, he's fighting in Perth in February.

01:08:53.000 So when a guy says something like that, you just kind of have to.

01:08:58.000 When a guy says, I'm slurring my words, I've been taking too much punishment, like, okay, we got a red flag here.

01:09:03.000 You have to, right?

01:09:04.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:09:05.000 I mean, that happened.

01:09:06.000 I look back to, I don't know if you remember when Kane was going to fight at the end of last year.

01:09:10.000 I think he came out a week or two previous saying, man, I'm in so much pain from this back issue.

01:09:15.000 I'm having to use medical marijuana, CBD leading up to this fight.

01:09:20.000 It's the only way I can train.

01:09:21.000 I'm going to have this surgery directly after the fight.

01:09:23.000 It was actually the Nevada Commission that saw this and said, wait a second.

01:09:28.000 If you're really in that much pain, like, man, we can't with good conscience license you to fight.

01:09:34.000 And sure enough, they didn't do that and ended up having the surgery and hopefully is back pretty soon.

01:09:40.000 But it's been like a year now.

01:09:42.000 Yeah.

01:09:42.000 He's a guy that is almost too tough for his body, or maybe is too tough for his body.

01:09:48.000 If you watch Kane fight particularly early in his career when he's in his prime, you just couldn't believe the amount of endurance that a 240 pound man can have.

01:09:57.000 Just the pace that he would put on guys.

01:10:00.000 And you'd see them just drowning in that pace.

01:10:03.000 But the only way you get...

01:10:05.000 I mean, you have to have some physical gifts, cardiovascularly, and I think Kane will admit that he has some natural cardio, but unbelievable work ethic and mental toughness.

01:10:17.000 And that mental toughness also makes you push through injuries.

01:10:20.000 And pushing through injuries is how injuries become chronic, and that's how injuries become unmanageable and require surgery.

01:10:27.000 I mean, you would know.

01:10:28.000 I was an athlete and went through my share of injuries, but I played basketball and ran track.

01:10:33.000 And in those sports, depending on your injury, you can control, I think, your exposure and protect your body.

01:10:39.000 I mean, how do you do that in fighting?

01:10:41.000 You can't.

01:10:42.000 You can't.

01:10:43.000 You can't prevent certain positions that your body are going to be in.

01:10:46.000 And if you're not completely healthy, you're going to be probably exposed from whatever little injury you have.

01:10:51.000 The only thing you can do is drill.

01:10:51.000 I mean, if you're really injured and you have a good training partner, you can drill on certain things and say, hey man, you just can't touch my shoulder.

01:10:59.000 But there's no way you can spar.

01:11:01.000 And there's no way you can really prepare for a fight without really hard training.

01:11:06.000 And hard training with injuries is virtually impossible.

01:11:11.000 With some injuries, you know, I mean, some of them you can work around.

01:11:14.000 There's ways to figure a way around things.

01:11:16.000 And that's one of the things I found was really interesting also about the UFC Performance Institute is there's a lot of different things that you guys have devised or have, you know, you guys have brought in and implemented that other people have devised to help people with injuries that are trying to still train hard, like that gravity treadmill thing.

01:11:33.000 Yeah, that's in our altitude chamber.

01:11:36.000 So you strap that around you and you're getting, you know, I don't know what the ratio is to...

01:11:41.000 You know if you're true weight to what you know type of stress you're putting on your body But it's much less than going out and running on a regular treadmill on the street You also have the underwater treadmill which you saw.

01:11:50.000 Yeah, that was weird too.

01:11:51.000 I think Angela Hill was on that when you were there.

01:11:52.000 Yeah, she was.

01:11:53.000 I was like what's that like?

01:11:54.000 She's like it's weird.

01:11:55.000 Yeah.

01:11:55.000 It's like it's like it just seems like the floor is moving you got to try to keep up with it.

01:12:00.000 You know basically it's a rising floor so you rise up to the top you step on it and then it drops down and it works like a regular treadmill because you're but because you're underwater You're putting less stress on, obviously, your lower extremities.

01:12:13.000 If you notice also, there's cameras underwater with a TV screen right in front of the person using it.

01:12:20.000 The idea there is if you have an ankle injury or a knee injury, you can take a look at how your foot's coming down and are you favoring it and what's your gait looking like.

01:12:29.000 It's a really cool piece of equipment.

01:12:31.000 Connor was using that quite a bit in the run-up to Floyd.

01:12:34.000 He put a lot of stuff out there on social media on that thing.

01:12:36.000 I think he liked it.

01:12:37.000 Yeah, well, he's got a bum knee, right?

01:12:39.000 I think so.

01:12:39.000 He's got a knee that he's had some issues with in the past.

01:12:41.000 There it is.

01:12:42.000 There it is.

01:12:43.000 Look at that stud. 0.95

01:12:44.000 There's Duncan French off there to the right.

01:12:46.000 So that thing just drops you down, and then you run on that thing.

01:12:49.000 Yep.

01:12:51.000 Yeah.

01:12:51.000 Oh, man.

01:12:52.000 I'm not 100% sold on that, to be honest with you.

01:12:54.000 Well, that's why you should come out and get on it.

01:12:56.000 Yeah.

01:12:56.000 I mean, I'm sure it's difficult, but I think that actually carrying your weight and running on hills...

01:13:03.000 There's a way to go.

01:13:04.000 Yeah, probably.

01:13:04.000 Now, look, if you're coming off an ACL surgery and you're taking baby steps to get back to running, it's probably there.

01:13:11.000 Otherwise, if you're healthy and training for a fight coming up in a couple weeks, I don't know if that's necessarily a piece of equipment for you.

01:13:19.000 He's a guy that I'm puzzled by Connor.

01:13:22.000 Obviously, I'm a gigantic fan, but man, his cardio, it seems like there's a thing there.

01:13:27.000 There's something there.

01:13:28.000 Whether it's the style that he fights, the explosive sprinting style that he fights is unsustainable, you know, or whether or not there seems to be some sort of an issue that needs to be addressed.

01:13:39.000 Some much more radical approach to strength and conditioning.

01:13:42.000 And I would love to see the guys at the Performance Institute try to tackle that and try to figure out, I mean, I'm sure they've run VO2 maxes on them and But he gets tired.

01:13:51.000 He did most of his camp there, but he had his own team around him that was kind of directing him.

01:13:56.000 But in his defense, this was a very quick camp.

01:13:59.000 Sure.

01:13:59.000 You're getting ready for a 12-round fight with the greatest fighter of all time in boxing.

01:14:03.000 Jesus Christ.

01:14:03.000 It was like six or seven weeks, I think.

01:14:05.000 And Floyd knew what he was doing.

01:14:06.000 I'll tell you one of the incredible things about that, and there wasn't a lot said about it going back to kind of my world, the anti-doping world.

01:14:12.000 So Floyd does this for all his fights.

01:14:14.000 He basically hires USADA to do testing.

01:14:19.000 It's not the same as a UFC program where you're subject to testing year-round.

01:14:24.000 In boxing, once the fight is made, USADA then comes in and does collecting.

01:14:29.000 So it depends on how far out the fight was made.

01:14:31.000 But Conor and Floyd signed that contract, was it seven weeks out maybe?

01:14:36.000 They were each tested 16 times in that seven weeks.

01:14:40.000 And I guarantee you, they are the two most tested athletes in that year.

01:14:44.000 Pure short period of time ever in the history of anti-doping.

01:14:48.000 So not only was it an incredibly cool event, but I think incredibly cool and clean for the fans to know how out of the way those two guys went to ensure that that fight was fair and clean.

01:15:00.000 They don't get enough credit for that.

01:15:02.000 It's too bad there's not two performance institutes.

01:15:04.000 You could have one right next to each other where opponents could train.

01:15:08.000 You could film things at the performance institute at a level.

01:15:14.000 Forrest Griffin was showing me how the octagon is set up with 360-degree cameras, and you could literally film and then rotate angles up, down.

01:15:24.000 You can move around and show...

01:15:28.000 Oh, when you're throwing this punch, your back foot is coming off the ground.

01:15:31.000 When you're leaning to your left, you're dropping your hand.

01:15:34.000 Yeah, it's like the John Madden telestrator.

01:15:36.000 You can stop action and draw on that huge big screen next to the octagon.

01:15:39.000 But you can move it around.

01:15:41.000 Exactly.

01:15:41.000 When Forrest was showing me how you can move it around, I was like, this is insane.

01:15:47.000 What a tool this is for technique development.

01:15:50.000 It really, and I think we're at the infancy of these coaches coming in and figuring out how they can use these things to the extent that they can benefit their fighters.

01:15:58.000 I mean, there it is right there.

01:16:00.000 Yeah, this thing.

01:16:01.000 Oh, there's my tour.

01:16:02.000 Oh, did somebody put that up on? 1.00

01:16:04.000 These fucking weirdos. 1.00

01:16:05.000 Already they put it up. 1.00

01:16:07.000 I didn't put this up.

01:16:08.000 Oh yeah, I put it on my Instagram stories.

01:16:10.000 But I didn't put it on YouTube.

01:16:11.000 Somebody put it on YouTube here.

01:16:13.000 So what Forrest was showing me was how they can pause it in slow-mo and back it up and then change angles and that all the fighters sparring sessions are filmed.

01:16:24.000 They're filmed from an overhead, they're filmed from the sides, and there's cameras all around the octagon.

01:16:30.000 I mean, it's just what a facility, man.

01:16:33.000 Yeah, I mean, I really think, and we talked about this, this is bringing this sport to a whole new level.

01:16:37.000 Yeah.

01:16:39.000 Well, Francis is going to be your first test tube sort of child.

01:16:44.000 Yeah, you know, you talked about, wouldn't it be nice to have two opponents working side by side?

01:16:49.000 The PI has that capability.

01:16:51.000 I mean, as you saw, it's set up specifically so you have certain things downstairs and certain things upstairs.

01:16:56.000 So you'd have to schedule.

01:16:57.000 So Stipe says, hey man, I want to come out and use this.

01:17:00.000 It is open to Stipe.

01:17:01.000 We could schedule it so Stipe's downstairs doing a strength and conditioning while Francis is upstairs.

01:17:06.000 It's a lot of what Forrest does.

01:17:08.000 Forrest could be the intermediary to make sure Francis goes out one door, Stipe comes in another, never run into themselves.

01:17:15.000 Well, those two guys are gentlemen.

01:17:16.000 They are.

01:17:17.000 They're both, yeah.

01:17:17.000 But if I was Stipe, I would not want to be doing strength and conditioning and then in between sets, just like have your ear and you hear...

01:17:27.000 And Francis is hitting the heavy bag and scaring everybody.

01:17:31.000 You tried that punch machine?

01:17:34.000 Yeah, he's got the world record punch on that.

01:17:37.000 What it is for folks, it's a pad, it's adjustable, it moves up and down.

01:17:42.000 And you punch it and not only did he break the world record, he broke it by several thousand pounds per square inch.

01:17:50.000 Yeah, I think his reading, and I don't know what the reading is, was 129,000-something.

01:17:57.000 Yeah, he's terrifying.

01:17:58.000 There it is.

01:17:59.000 You hit it a couple times, man.

01:18:00.000 I thought you were hitting pretty hard.

01:18:01.000 What did you register, like a 35,000 or a 40,000?

01:18:03.000 I got 46 was my hardest one until I hurt my hand.

01:18:08.000 You've got to put gloves on to do that, too.

01:18:10.000 I would imagine that being wrapped up...

01:18:12.000 And that's an argument that I've had many times when it comes to MMA in general.

01:18:16.000 I like how you can angle it so you can throw an uppercut as well.

01:18:20.000 That's an argument that I've had for MMA in general. 0.87

01:18:24.000 I think it's weird that we are allowed to elbow with no pad, knee with no pad, kick with no pad on the shin, but the knuckles are protected.

01:18:35.000 And I think that it really...

01:18:38.000 Probably allows people to deliver more damage with the knuckles padded.

01:18:42.000 I don't think padded knuckles helps your opponent as much as it helps you.

01:18:47.000 And especially wrist protection.

01:18:49.000 Like when I was trying to punch that thing with just my bare hands... 0.99

01:18:54.000 Which is stupid, especially when you haven't warmed up, right? 0.99

01:18:56.000 But you realize your wrist moves around. 0.98

01:18:59.000 You slam into that thing, and if you're hitting it hard, your wrist moves around.

01:19:03.000 That's the case when you're punching a person, too.

01:19:05.000 You have to be much more precise with where you're targeting and what you're hitting.

01:19:10.000 You can't hit foreheads and elbows.

01:19:12.000 You'll break your hand very easily.

01:19:15.000 It seems barbaric to people to fight bare knuckle.

01:19:19.000 Which to me is kind of crazy because you're kicking, like you're shinning people in the head.

01:19:24.000 Like I don't understand, like we have this weird sort of childish view of like what should and shouldn't be legal.

01:19:31.000 Elbows are some of the hardest, I mean you can just do that with an elbow and it doesn't hurt at all.

01:19:36.000 You know, your knees, your shins, those guys that spar Muay Thai for years and years, their shins develop calcification all over the top where they can kick baseball bats.

01:19:48.000 Trees.

01:19:49.000 Yeah.

01:19:49.000 There's a great one of Bukow kicking a banana tree.

01:19:54.000 And he's one of the greatest TIE fighters of all time.

01:19:57.000 But he's chopping at this banana tree and cuts it in half.

01:20:00.000 And you're like, Jesus.

01:20:01.000 Like, how is it okay that that guy can kick someone in the face with that, but you have to have pads?

01:20:07.000 Here he is right here.

01:20:08.000 Look, give me some volume on this. 1.00

01:20:09.000 This guy's breaking a fucking tree on his shins. 1.00

01:20:21.000 Yeah! 1.00

01:20:23.000 He's not doing that with his bare knuckles, I'll tell you that. 1.00

01:20:26.000 That's insane Fuck getting hit in the face with that But see the difference? 0.99

01:20:35.000 Like, that's hard bone. 1.00

01:20:37.000 It's no padding.

01:20:38.000 Why do you have to have padding on your knuckles but you don't have to have it on your shins and your knees and your elbows?

01:20:44.000 That seems to me to be a silly way of approaching this.

01:20:48.000 Either we pat up everything.

01:20:51.000 I mean, maybe we could pat up everything, but then people get mad.

01:20:53.000 Like, we're pussifying the sport.

01:20:55.000 I think you go the other way.

01:20:56.000 I think you don't pat up anything. 1.00

01:20:58.000 I think you pat up your dick, and that's it. 1.00

01:21:00.000 That's what I think. 1.00

01:21:01.000 Pat up your teeth, pat up your dick, let it rip. 1.00

01:21:04.000 I really think they should fight bare knuckle. 1.00

01:21:06.000 I just don't think it makes any sense whatsoever.

01:21:08.000 Especially considering the fact that eye pokes are one of the major considerations, right?

01:21:12.000 You're not going to mitigate that with those gloves.

01:21:15.000 Unless they develop some sort of a new design where the gloves are much more curled in.

01:21:22.000 The eye pokes are always going to be an issue.

01:21:23.000 It would be the exact same issue if you had bare knuckle. 0.78

01:21:27.000 Well, yeah.

01:21:27.000 I mean, now you can take away with the new unified rules, which, ironically enough, aren't unified.

01:21:32.000 So we go from commission to commission, and, you know, a fighter...

01:21:37.000 We have to inform them, fight week, hey, what are the rules here?

01:21:40.000 That's so unfair to these fighters that are training and developing that instinct to some of these rules.

01:21:47.000 But anyway, the new unified rules, which aren't unified, anybody who's extending the fingers, if the referee has to warn them first, but if they continue to do that, a point can be taken away.

01:21:56.000 I think they should take a point every time a guy gets poked in the eye.

01:21:59.000 My thought process is, even if it's unintentional, the damage has been done.

01:22:04.000 And if you can see it on the replay, legitimate eye poke, and you see the guy wincing, which we've seen many, many times, that guy's compromised.

01:22:11.000 And I think that it's only fair that a point be taken away, even if it was unintentional.

01:22:16.000 It's like kicking or kneeing a down fighter, too.

01:22:19.000 You have to show intent to take a point away.

01:22:22.000 How is the referee going to get in the head of a fighter to say whether or not that was intentional or not?

01:22:27.000 It should almost be, I think, that if it's done, a point's taken away.

01:22:31.000 Remove the intent from it.

01:22:33.000 Because the damage is already done at that point.

01:22:35.000 Yeah, it doesn't matter whether or not it's intentional.

01:22:37.000 I mean, we're not putting the blame on the fighter.

01:22:39.000 It just happened.

01:22:40.000 It's one of the unfortunate things.

01:22:41.000 But the fighter that got hit is the one who suffers the consequences of it.

01:22:45.000 There's no way it should be an even exchange.

01:22:47.000 Like, oh, I'm sorry, I accidentally need your eye socket in.

01:22:51.000 You know, no point taken, and now you can't go on.

01:22:53.000 That, to me, sounds...

01:22:55.000 I think there's room to alter the rules.

01:22:59.000 And I mean, I'm beating a dead horse with my bare knuckle thing, because I've been talking about that for years.

01:23:04.000 Because I just think people have a greatly exaggerated perception of the effectiveness of punching people in the face.

01:23:10.000 And I think that greatly exaggerated perception is due to the fact that they wrap their hands, you wrap up your wrists, and your wrist...

01:23:18.000 And your hand becomes a cast where it's not bending at all.

01:23:21.000 I mean, you get deep in there with athletic tape and gauze and they cover the knuckles and everything gets padded. 0.98

01:23:26.000 And you could just fucking blast something with that.

01:23:29.000 But when you just have just your hands, it feels very delicate. 0.99

01:23:32.000 I always tell people you should punch the bag, occasionally at least, bare knuckle. 0.99

01:23:37.000 Just go and punch the bag. 0.98

01:23:39.000 And you realize you can't really hit it nearly as hard. 0.95

01:23:42.000 That's interesting. 0.99

01:23:44.000 I just think that we have, like, you can't tape the shit out of your ankles, right? 0.97

01:23:49.000 I mean, we've stopped fighters from walking into the octagon with fully tie-taped up ankles, you know? 0.97

01:23:55.000 Yeah, well, some commissions allow light tape and then a neoprene sleeve over it.

01:23:59.000 Others say no, nothing.

01:24:01.000 Yeah, again, the uniformity is...

01:24:02.000 Again.

01:24:03.000 You know, I want to talk about uniformity, kind of bringing it back to the anti-doping world.

01:24:06.000 This is a big point of contention I have with athletic commissions.

01:24:11.000 Really, really frustrated, and that's the marijuana rules.

01:24:15.000 You're talking my language.

01:24:16.000 The UFC, I thought so.

01:24:18.000 The UFC follows the WADA rules, World Anti-Doping Agency, kind of sets the world standard.

01:24:24.000 They have scientists that study these drugs and determine, A, is something performance-enhancing, B, is it a health and safety issue?

01:24:32.000 And over the last couple years, they raised the marijuana threshold, used to be 15 nanograms per milliliter, now must exceed 150 nanograms per milliliter.

01:24:42.000 Which, everybody metabolizes differently, but, you know, from scientists that I've talked about, the ingestion of marijuana, THC, the psychoactive ingredient, has to be pretty damn close to that collection in order to exceed 150 nanograms per milliliter.

01:24:57.000 Which means you literally almost have to be high the day of.

01:25:00.000 Pretty much.

01:25:01.000 So if an athlete just takes a day or two off, they're most likely cleaned.

01:25:06.000 I suggest longer than that, just because you never know how different people metabolize things differently as you're cutting weight, whether you're releasing some from your fat cells.

01:25:14.000 I don't know.

01:25:15.000 I would suggest several weeks, but...

01:25:17.000 The reality is it could be a lot closer than that.

01:25:19.000 We're running into several athletic commissions, Texas being one, New York being another.

01:25:25.000 We had probably the most extreme one last month in Michigan that have lower thresholds.

01:25:32.000 Texas and New York have 35 or 50. Michigan, where we just came from, has a no tolerance policy for marijuana.

01:25:43.000 So any measurable amount of THC would cause a positive test.

01:25:48.000 And we lobbied them hard in anticipation of our event there saying, do you realize what this means?

01:25:54.000 I mean, a fighter could walk through a cloud of secondhand smoke.

01:25:58.000 You know, on the way to weigh in or a fight, and it's going to show up a measurable amount, and you're going to, that fighter could win a championship on that, and then you're going to take that championship away and overturn the win.

01:26:09.000 We had in Texas a couple wins overturned for thresholds, which I think were a little bit, I think 35, it's either 35 or 50 was there, but they were slightly over that, well under the, you know, established world standard.

01:26:21.000 And, man, I think these athletic commissions got to take a serious look at, you know, bringing those into uniformity.

01:26:27.000 You have, you know, in the U.S., you have certain states now where it's legal medically and recreationally, but, you know, arguably federally still illegal.

01:26:36.000 But you have some countries where it's completely legal, and you have doctors prescribing this for, you know, pain control or stress or anxiety.

01:26:46.000 And, you know, A commission like Michigan, one of those fighters from one of those countries that is completely legally doing it under the care of a doctor, and in lieu of doing a synthetic drug like an opioid or a Xanax or something like that, sense would tell you it's much healthier and safer to do that.

01:27:07.000 You know, you're setting up this barrier that, you know, could negatively affect a fighter's career if they have any discernible amount in their system.

01:27:15.000 And, you know, not only from the unified rules, but from an anti-doping marijuana's perspective to these commissions have got to come together and, you know, realize what the white thing to do is and stop, you know, in a lot of instances, stop governing or policing just because you Yeah.

01:27:32.000 We ran into that with the whole Courtney Casey thing in Texas.

01:27:36.000 I don't know if you're familiar with that.

01:27:37.000 Yeah, just explain what happened.

01:27:39.000 So, Courtney fought in Texas, had a great win against Jessica Aguilar. 0.99

01:27:45.000 I think it was probably the defining moment of her career.

01:27:48.000 She looked really, really good.

01:27:51.000 A couple weeks later, I was actually at our event in Stockholm, Sweden.

01:27:54.000 I mean, it was vividly on a Friday night.

01:27:58.000 I get a call from her, and I can't even understand what she's saying.

01:28:01.000 She's just crying uncontrollably, saying, Jeff, you know, what is going on?

01:28:05.000 I didn't even understand what had happened.

01:28:06.000 I said, slow down.

01:28:07.000 What happened?

01:28:08.000 She said, there's stuff on the internet about me testing positive.

01:28:11.000 I've never even thought about using a prohibited substance.

01:28:14.000 I'm super careful about what I use.

01:28:17.000 So I said, okay, let me check into it.

01:28:19.000 And so I called a guy on the Texas Commission.

01:28:22.000 I said, hey, what's going on, you know, with this Courtney Casey thing?

01:28:25.000 And he tells me, yeah, she tested positive.

01:28:28.000 We just announced it.

01:28:29.000 And I said, for what?

01:28:30.000 She said, oh, her TE ratio was elevated.

01:28:33.000 It was over a four to one.

01:28:35.000 And, you know, knowing what that measurement means, I said...

01:28:40.000 Could you explain what it means?

01:28:40.000 Yeah, so TET is testosterone, E is epitestosterone.

01:28:45.000 And every human being, male and female, have, on average, a one-to-one ratio naturally occurring in them.

01:28:52.000 And if you take anabolic steroids, it can have a tendency to raise that ratio, where the T becomes higher than the E. However, what anti-doping has found out and evolved into the last few years, that especially mildly elevated ratios, sometimes there are natural reasons for that happening.

01:29:12.000 Especially in females, especially females on birth control, which is, you know, a legal medication. 1.00

01:29:20.000 And so what you do now in anti-doping, when you have an elevated TE ratio, you go to a backup test.

01:29:26.000 And that backup test is called an isotope ratio mass spectrometry or ERM's test.

01:29:31.000 And that reads the carbon atom in the testosterone in a sample to determine whether or not it's plant-based, which would mean a synthetic, or it's naturally occurring.

01:29:40.000 Because testosterone is synthesized through wild yams, right?

01:29:44.000 So that's how they find out it's plant-based?

01:29:45.000 That's correct.

01:29:47.000 So Texas tells me, hey, her ratio was a little bit higher than a 4 to 1. That means she's positive.

01:29:53.000 And they tell me, we're just following your guy's rules.

01:29:56.000 And I tell the guy, that's not our rules.

01:29:59.000 I go, you just announced a positive test for this girl.

01:30:04.000 And hey, you know, maybe she did do something. 0.95

01:30:06.000 I don't know.

01:30:07.000 But you're supposed to run the backup test for this.

01:30:09.000 And it was basically told me, well, it was a Friday as well.

01:30:12.000 Our office is closed Monday.

01:30:14.000 We'll get back to you on Tuesday.

01:30:16.000 And really thereafter, it was radio silence.

01:30:19.000 So we were working with Courtney, worked with USADA closely, and USADA stepped in and said, absolutely, that is wrong.

01:30:27.000 We're going to go back and look at her biological profile, and we'll share that with Texas. 0.92

01:30:31.000 We'll take a look at these TE readings over the time of the samples that she submitted.

01:30:36.000 Sure enough, most of the samples were mildly elevated, and sure enough, USADA did the right thing, and they went and did that backup testing, and every time they did it, she was negative.

01:30:46.000 So they reached out to Texas, said, hey, we'll share this information with you, and in our historical records, this girl does have a naturally occurring, mildly elevated TE ratio. 0.99

01:30:57.000 Then went through a several-week process of figuring out, hey, is there some of that sample remaining?

01:31:02.000 Because if there is Texas, you have an obligation to go ahead and do this backup testing on it.

01:31:09.000 Took them a number of weeks where poor Courtney was in limbo. 0.99

01:31:13.000 And finally, Dana put them on blast, basically said, Texas Commission, you know, get your shit together. 0.99

01:31:19.000 We're not coming back there. 0.98

01:31:21.000 And we got a hold of that remaining sample, her B sample, had it tested at a WADA laboratory and was negative on the IRMS. How crazy is it that putting someone on blast works?

01:31:35.000 That's just no it's it's an ego thing like you people are bitching at you You're gonna succumb to that but yeah sometimes that's what it takes to get someone to do the right thing It does so so this poor girl is living with the fact that she's labeled as a cheater for two to three months talked about It's one of those things like once someone says you're a steroid cheater Probably always.

01:31:56.000 She lives on Maui, so small community.

01:31:59.000 She talked about going to the store and people pointing at her and talking bad about her.

01:32:04.000 She's a coach in a gym there, coaches kids, about parents not wanting her to coach their kids when this was in limbo.

01:32:11.000 And how many of those people heard that she was exonerated?

01:32:13.000 Headlines on page one, retraction on the back page, right? 1.00

01:32:17.000 Nobody pays attention to that shit. 0.99

01:32:19.000 And, you know, her performance since she fought in Detroit, right? 1.00

01:32:22.000 Yes.

01:32:23.000 Was not a great performance for her, and I can't help but wonder if that had affected her, you know, over those last couple months.

01:32:30.000 I think that was just stylistic.

01:32:32.000 You know, I just think the way she matched up with Felice Herrick was just, those two bulldogs were just clashing heads with each other.

01:32:39.000 They just couldn't get anything done.

01:32:40.000 Could be.

01:32:41.000 I mean, but that's, again, going back to the mental game, a tremendous amount of stress to carry with yourself through, you know, these last six or so months.

01:32:48.000 Well, I hope she gets past that because she's a lot of fun. 1.00

01:32:50.000 She is.

01:32:51.000 I like her a lot.

01:32:52.000 And I got to tell you, man, it's one of the most satisfying things.

01:32:55.000 Again, going back to the golden snitch thing, really my role here is an advocate for Someone who looks out for athletes in situations like that.

01:33:04.000 There's been other things that we do.

01:33:06.000 When we put this program together, the USADA program, it's unprecedented.

01:33:12.000 There's no other professional sport that has the comprehensiveness of the program.

01:33:16.000 There's also no other professional sport that's quite put together like the UFC is.

01:33:21.000 In terms of you have individual athletes that are competing against each other.

01:33:26.000 It's not a team sport where if one person tests positive, you have another person to step on in.

01:33:31.000 So a lot of what I've done over those first, you know, couple years is take a look at, you know, hey, we took what we think was a pretty good shot at the rules to begin with, but look and see how those rules played themselves out as time went on.

01:33:43.000 And after about a year and a half, there were a couple instances where I saw, hey, this isn't quite fair to an athlete.

01:33:49.000 We need to change that.

01:33:50.000 We did.

01:33:50.000 So after a year and a half, there was a couple rules that we changed.

01:33:53.000 The first one, there's kind of a funny story behind this, too, was, I don't know if you remember when Nate fought Connor, I think the second time, He goes to the press conference after and takes out a vape pen.

01:34:04.000 Do you remember that?

01:34:05.000 And someone asked him what he was doing, and he said he was CBD. And at the time, the rule was the in-competition period where CBD was prohibited lasted until four hours after the conclusion of the fight, and he was clearly within that time period.

01:34:23.000 So USADA contacted me and said, hey, technically Nate was in violation of this.

01:34:28.000 And I said, hey, look, this was not the intent of the rule.

01:34:32.000 They never indicated that they were going to sanction him, but I made it clear.

01:34:36.000 Let's explain CBD for anybody that might not know what we're talking about.

01:34:40.000 Sure.

01:34:40.000 So CBD is part of the, you know, the marijuana plant, but it's not psychoactive part of it.

01:34:46.000 I know a lot of our fighters anecdotally use it for anti-inflammatory purposes.

01:34:54.000 I think, I mean, have you ever used it?

01:34:56.000 Yes.

01:34:56.000 What other benefits is Anxiety.

01:34:59.000 It's great for people that are under stress.

01:35:02.000 It actually has a great response for that.

01:35:05.000 I know a lot of people that use it just for anxiety.

01:35:07.000 But anti-inflammation is a big one.

01:35:10.000 That's the big one people use it for.

01:35:11.000 People with arthritis love it.

01:35:13.000 Yeah, again, comparing to, you know, a natural plant-derived product versus a synthetic, you know, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, Advils, Tylenols can be toxic on you.

01:35:23.000 Probably common sense would, you know, in addition to science, would say that CBD is maybe a little bit healthier for you.

01:35:30.000 Nevertheless, it was prohibited in competition.

01:35:32.000 Is it still?

01:35:33.000 No.

01:35:33.000 So that was actually a rule change.

01:35:35.000 The WADA prohibited list, which we followed, took it completely off the prohibited list starting in 2018. So that's great.

01:35:43.000 So all these athletes can just take CBD the entire time they're training.

01:35:46.000 Obviously, there's no performance benefit.

01:35:48.000 There's no psychoactive effect.

01:35:50.000 It just reduces inflammation, and it does it in a natural way.

01:35:53.000 Way healthier.

01:35:53.000 And it was the case before.

01:35:55.000 They could do it in training.

01:35:55.000 It was only prohibited in competition.

01:35:57.000 So weigh-in day and fight day.

01:35:59.000 Now it's completely been taken off the list and it's okay to use it anytime.

01:36:02.000 That's fantastic.

01:36:03.000 That's fantastic.

01:36:04.000 So it was good.

01:36:04.000 But we identified a problem with the rules in that when Nate finished that fight with Connor, USADA came to the post-fight medical tent and said, Nate, we need to make a collection from you.

01:36:15.000 And I don't know whether it was blood or urine, but they got a sample from him.

01:36:19.000 He then went to the press conference after and took the CBD. What I said is, look, you can't punish him.

01:36:26.000 You have the sample that shows what was in his system.

01:36:29.000 Yes, CBD was prohibited in competition, but you have a sample to show whether or not he was using it.

01:36:34.000 It's clear that he was using it after the fight.

01:36:37.000 We just put those extra four hours in there.

01:36:39.000 Why?

01:36:39.000 With the thought of if a fighter finishes a fight and somehow USADA is not able to get to him, say gets in the ambulance right away, goes to the hospital, you increase that window just in case they can't get them.

01:36:50.000 Come to find out as we started putting this program together, USADA can always get to that fighter after. 1.00

01:36:55.000 If they're transported, they can hop in.

01:36:58.000 It wasn't an issue where we needed those extra four months.

01:37:01.000 So we changed that rule.

01:37:03.000 And now, basically, the rule is the in-competition period ends with a collection immediately after the fight, or USADA has a reasonable amount of time after the fight.

01:37:14.000 So the funny thing is, after we change this rule, Nate and Nick Diaz come to a fight and they're sitting, call it the Zufa section, you know, kind of Dana's section right there behind Dana's table.

01:37:26.000 So I go over to Nick and Nate.

01:37:28.000 I say, hey, Nate, man, hey, we changed that rule, you know, the whole CBD thing.

01:37:33.000 And actually, we kind of refer to it as the Nate Diaz rule.

01:37:37.000 And When the Diaz brothers are out of fight, I mean, it's pandemonium and chaos.

01:37:41.000 Everybody's yelling their name.

01:37:42.000 And I literally, I'm like, I didn't even register with them.

01:37:45.000 He didn't look at me.

01:37:45.000 He was looking somewhere else.

01:37:47.000 So about a month later, Nate, I see him.

01:37:50.000 I think it was in Vegas.

01:37:51.000 I'm in the kind of walkout tunnel.

01:37:53.000 And here comes Nate.

01:37:54.000 So he sees me, comes over me, gives me kind of the bro hug.

01:37:57.000 What's up?

01:37:58.000 He's with Yancey Medeiros.

01:38:00.000 And so Yancey and I start talking.

01:38:02.000 And Yancey, beyond being just an unbelievably entertaining fighter, is one of the best dudes on the roster.

01:38:08.000 Great guy.

01:38:08.000 So I'm talking to Yancey.

01:38:09.000 All of a sudden Nate goes, Hey Jeff, man, tell Yancey about my USADA rule.

01:38:14.000 I got a USADA rule named after me, dawg.

01:38:18.000 And so I thought, man, you're doing something right when Nate Diaz is excited about a change in a USADA rule, right?

01:38:24.000 Yeah, that is a very good rule.

01:38:26.000 I'm really excited about that.

01:38:29.000 What's the story with Nick?

01:38:30.000 He can't fight?

01:38:31.000 Does he still have some sort of a fine that he has to pay?

01:38:34.000 Well, Nick was our first fighter that ran into the whereabouts issue.

01:38:37.000 So he got three whereabouts failures in a rolling 12 months.

01:38:41.000 So he's currently going through that process.

01:38:44.000 It's a tough one because I don't...

01:38:45.000 Does he want to fight?

01:38:47.000 I think he does.

01:38:48.000 I think he does.

01:38:49.000 I mean, I've sat down with him over the last couple months and talking about trying to resolve this whereabouts issue.

01:38:54.000 I mean, the unfortunate thing there is, look, the whereabouts failure sanctions are meant to catch people that are cheating and trying to avoid testing.

01:39:01.000 And I just think Nick's lifestyle led to those three kind of whereabouts, not that he was trying to avoid testing.

01:39:09.000 Which is Nick being Nick.

01:39:11.000 Yeah, we're trying to work through that.

01:39:12.000 He put...

01:39:14.000 He trusted certain individuals to do his whereabouts for him, I think is what happened over time, and those individuals would come in and out of his life, and it's kind of unbeknownst to him that he was missing a lot of these things.

01:39:25.000 Nevertheless, again, there's strict liability here, and he's currently under sanction, but we're hoping to resolve that pretty quick.

01:39:32.000 Now, last time you were on, you talked about this new potential testosterone that was derived from animals and that there might be a way that people could take this stuff and go undetected.

01:39:47.000 Yeah, I mean, I haven't heard much about that since then.

01:39:50.000 Was it just a theoretical thing?

01:39:53.000 No, it's out there.

01:39:54.000 It's real.

01:39:55.000 But, you know, again, some of the things to combat that are the biological passport program where you're looking over time at somebody's TE ratio.

01:40:05.000 And even though that, you know, won't trigger a positive on the isotope ratio mass spectrometry, if you see wild variances in TE ratios over time, that could potentially trigger...

01:40:16.000 A biological passport violation.

01:40:18.000 Sorry, would there be a way to mitigate that biological passport thing by making a specific time that you inject it every day and doing it on a regular basis?

01:40:30.000 I know it was one of the ways that some fighters have gotten caught is that they knew they were going to be in Vegas or something for a long period of time, so they maybe would take it twice a week, so they doubled their dose and took it in one shot, and then they got hit with a random.

01:40:45.000 And then it showed that they had this massive testosterone spike.

01:40:48.000 Yeah, it's a potential.

01:40:49.000 I mean, you know, someone who has the resources and sophisticated and somebody has someone who's educated in chemistry, it's definitely a cat and mouse game, anti-doping.

01:40:59.000 And, you know, Fogle talked about that when he was on here.

01:41:02.000 I mean, the premise of Icarus initially was, right, he was going to show that anti-doping doesn't work.

01:41:09.000 And it was actually something I was, I watched your podcast with him and watched the movie as well.

01:41:14.000 And initially I was a little bit turned off on that premise because he gave, he gave the examples of Armstrong, Marion Jones, he said, look, anti-doping just doesn't work and I'm going to go out and prove that.

01:41:24.000 Well, that doesn't make any sense if both those people got busted.

01:41:27.000 Right.

01:41:27.000 That's the reality.

01:41:28.000 But look how they did.

01:41:29.000 They got busted through the investigative element of anti-doping.

01:41:32.000 And that's what something that was learned and came out of, I think, the investigations I was involved in.

01:41:37.000 And all, you know, USADA does this, WADA does this.

01:41:42.000 The drug testing is not enough.

01:41:44.000 You know, drug testing is a necessity.

01:41:46.000 You need to have that, but you also need to have a strong investigative element.

01:41:50.000 You have to liaison and USADA does this with law enforcement throughout the world so that if you can't catch somebody because they're sophisticated in the techniques they're using, you know, maybe you catch them through, you know, informants or other investigative resources.

01:42:06.000 Pressure.

01:42:07.000 Exactly.

01:42:08.000 Now, that documentary blew my mind.

01:42:11.000 It was incredible.

01:42:12.000 For people who haven't seen it, it's on Netflix.

01:42:14.000 It's called Icarus.

01:42:15.000 It's by Brian Fogel.

01:42:16.000 And the documentary, the premise was he was a guy who was a cyclist and decided to compete in a race, first clean, and then come back and do it again under the assistance of a guy who is an expert in anti-doping that showed him, like, what's the stuff that you should take?

01:42:31.000 Right.

01:42:32.000 Along the line, he makes friends with this guy, Gregory...

01:42:35.000 How do you say his last name?

01:42:36.000 Redchenkov? 0.81

01:42:36.000 Something like that. 0.81

01:42:37.000 Yeah.

01:42:38.000 And during this time period, it's discovered that the entire Soviet Olympic team is on steroids and that they cheated during the games at Sochi.

01:42:50.000 And he explains how they did it, and then the investigation comes down, and the guy has to flee Russia, and then he comes to America, he goes under protective custody, and Brian Fogle just... 0.99

01:43:00.000 You talk about like just stepping in shit. 0.99

01:43:03.000 Holy smokes. 1.00

01:43:04.000 Did he come across something?

01:43:05.000 He did an awesome job of telling the story and this Gregory guy making him kind of the sympathetic character, yet he was the kind of the evil villain that was doing all this over in Russia.

01:43:14.000 It was just an incredible movie.

01:43:17.000 The one thing that he didn't cover too much in the movie, I was a little bit disappointed is who really the true heroes were of that whole thing.

01:43:24.000 So there was a husband and wife couple, Vitaly and Yulia Stepnova.

01:43:30.000 And Yulia was an 800-meter runner for Russia.

01:43:34.000 And Vitaly actually worked for Rosada, the Russian anti-doping organization, as a drug collecting officer.

01:43:41.000 And they were the ones, basically, that caused this German documentary to come out exposing what Gregory was doing.

01:43:50.000 And then at that point in time, the heat came on Gregory because this information was out there and he was either forced to stay there and likely be arrested and put the blame on or flee to the US. It was dealt with very briefly in that movie, but those two, I think, the true heroes because you know they just did this because it was the right thing to do um gregory did it you know obviously with a lot of self-preservation in mind and that he had one of two choices

01:44:16.000 uh either take off and come clean or stay there and face the consequences but nevertheless man fogel did i thought an awesome job in that movie it's just an incredible incredible And it's really tough, I'm sure, for Olympic athletes to say, God, man, this is what we're up against when you're talking about state-sponsored doping and the KGB being involved.

01:44:38.000 There's almost a sense of hopelessness out there that, you know, how am I ever know that as a clean athlete, my rights are going to be protected?

01:44:45.000 But again, going back to what we're doing with the UFC, the beauty of what we're doing is you never see that because you have an independent authority, USADA, who's operating and administering our program.

01:44:58.000 So unlike the Russian government, where they have interests of Russian athletes doing well and winning gold medals, USADA could, in a sense, give a crap about who's being caught and who isn't.

01:45:14.000 So one of the things that came up in the film that was really disturbing was the collusion between WADA and the IOC and that they really it was in their best interest to not sanction Russia.

01:45:24.000 Yeah, you have people sitting, you still do, on the WADA board and on the IOC board.

01:45:29.000 So there's a conflict of interest.

01:45:31.000 WADA is going to come in and say, hey...

01:45:34.000 This was clearly state-sponsored doping.

01:45:36.000 We're going to exclude Russia from the Olympics for the next however many years.

01:45:41.000 Well, that's a hit to the IOC because IOC is getting money from these television networks putting on the games in Seoul or in Tokyo coming up.

01:45:50.000 So, you know, a conflict of interest there.

01:45:52.000 USADA is a non-profit organization.

01:45:54.000 So the UFC, yes, the UFC does pay them to administer our program, but it's not lining the pockets of anybody.

01:46:00.000 Their CEO is not making more money because the UFC is here.

01:46:03.000 They maybe have a few more personnel to administer the program, but, you know, if we go away, USADA is still in existence.

01:46:10.000 They're still doing Olympic testing and, you know, nobody's pocketbooks are hurting.

01:46:14.000 Yeah, that independence, I think, is critical.

01:46:17.000 And that's something that you brought up earlier.

01:46:19.000 I think that's so awesome.

01:46:20.000 And, you know, what a massive credit to the UFC that they decided to do it this way and not do it in-house.

01:46:25.000 Not just take on your protocols.

01:46:27.000 It takes a lot of courage to do that.

01:46:28.000 And it takes a real commitment to try to clean up the sport.

01:46:31.000 One of the things that was really weird was, like, they banned some players.

01:46:36.000 Some teams from Russia, like not all the sports, but the sports they banned were like, nobody gives a fuck about what the sports were.

01:46:44.000 Yeah, well, I think in Rio...

01:46:45.000 Did you see if you could find out what they banned?

01:46:47.000 They were gonna ban the entire team, but the outrage from that was just so strong, and then they realized the economic impact of that would be literally in the billions of dollars.

01:46:56.000 Yeah.

01:46:56.000 I think they banned the track and field team from Rio games, which is pretty significant, track and field being a pretty big Olympic sport.

01:47:03.000 There was a new...

01:47:04.000 Here, Russia banned from Winter Olympics, but clean athletes can compete.

01:47:07.000 So this is new, right?

01:47:09.000 Russia athletes... 1.00

01:47:11.000 Make that a little bigger for my fucking shitty eyes. 1.00

01:47:14.000 Russia has been banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea over the country's systematic manipulation of anti-doping rules. 0.99

01:47:20.000 However, Russian athletes who can prove that they are clean will be invited, in quotes, to compete in...

01:47:27.000 Say that.

01:47:29.000 Pyeongchang.

01:47:30.000 Look at Jamie.

01:47:31.000 It was...

01:47:31.000 Degree in Korean.

01:47:33.000 The International Olympic Committee said Tuesday.

01:47:36.000 So that's fascinating.

01:47:37.000 So they'll be literally competing under the Olympic flag, which is like, woof.

01:47:42.000 It's the most wide-ranging punishment ever meted out by the IOC on a participating nation, let alone a powerhouse of the Olympic movement.

01:47:52.000 Yeah, I mean, you're competing under the Olympic flag, but everybody's still going to know.

01:47:55.000 The commentators are still going to say the Russian athlete competing under the Olympic flag.

01:47:59.000 But that's bizarre, right?

01:48:00.000 I mean, is this unprecedented?

01:48:03.000 Someone competing under the Olympic flag?

01:48:05.000 I'm not sure whether it's happened before or not.

01:48:07.000 Man.

01:48:08.000 Has it?

01:48:09.000 I'm pretty sure.

01:48:09.000 I remember just random people.

01:48:11.000 They might not have had a country to perform, or their whole country might not have sent them, but they were going to have to qualify or something.

01:48:16.000 Okay.

01:48:17.000 Wow. 0.56

01:48:18.000 Crazy.

01:48:18.000 But there was also certain teams that were kicked out of, or certain gold medals that were rescinded.

01:48:26.000 But that was the other thing that I thought was really interesting about USADA's protocol, is that they freeze samples.

01:48:34.000 So just in case the testing improves in the future...

01:48:37.000 Yeah, huge deterrent.

01:48:38.000 Again, there's no denying it's a cat-and-mouse game going on out there, but a deterrent is that it's not all of them, but certain samples can be frozen up to 10 years, and as new tests come online, like the long-term metabolite test that Gregory developed after five or six years, they may go back and retest those samples.

01:48:58.000 When we go out and educate our athletes, I tell them, look, maybe you're not in the UFC anymore, but your legacy is around forever, and that's a smear to your legacy forever.

01:49:07.000 It's all about creating that.

01:49:09.000 My job...

01:49:09.000 I work for the UFC. My job is not, hey, let's see how many athletes we can catch.

01:49:14.000 My job is to try to get out there, educate, develop relationships, and create that deterrent, saying, look, you don't want to do this.

01:49:22.000 It's going to catch you eventually if you're going to do something.

01:49:26.000 I'll give you every resource and bit of knowledge I have to make sure you're successful under the program.

01:49:31.000 But success, in my eyes, is...

01:49:35.000 Very few positive tests.

01:49:36.000 I don't equate the program with success because we've had 60 or so positives over time.

01:49:42.000 I'd love to see none and see more of those graphs showing those common markers of a doper come more into line.

01:49:50.000 Right.

01:49:51.000 You're not in the position of a detective or a prosecutor anymore.

01:49:54.000 Your position is now an athlete liaison.

01:49:57.000 It is.

01:49:57.000 And it's a much different role, but it's a role I really enjoy.

01:50:00.000 It's probably a lot less stressful.

01:50:01.000 Definitely a lot less stressful.

01:50:03.000 And, you know, Dana says it all the time.

01:50:05.000 The importance level in the UFC and MMA is off the charts.

01:50:10.000 I still have a strong belief in ethics and sports and beliefs.

01:50:14.000 Sports are so good for kids and teaching them life lessons that transcend sports.

01:50:19.000 I have three daughters that played sports growing up.

01:50:23.000 A couple of them still do.

01:50:24.000 And I know when they get out into the real world and that work environment, there's nothing they can't handle because they've already handled it in sports. 1.00

01:50:31.000 They've run up against a coach who's an asshole. 1.00

01:50:33.000 They've run up against teammates that are selfish. 1.00

01:50:35.000 They've had...

01:50:36.000 Great occurrences when they've worked well as a team.

01:50:39.000 All of that is going to come into play to help them in their lives.

01:50:43.000 And when you introduce something and something is so pure and good that's breaking the rules that short-term, mostly long-term, is not healthy for you.

01:50:53.000 Sports is about to be healthy for you.

01:50:55.000 And at some level, especially the way these performance enhancing drugs are used, they're not really being used in a healthy environment.

01:51:01.000 Healthy manner and So yeah, but I feel I feel very strongly and very positive about what we're doing in the role that I'm playing here Well, it's interesting that the UFC unlike a lot of sports the the history is pretty transparent and the history of doping is also pretty transparent like everybody's really aware of What the Wild West days were like?

01:51:20.000 I mean, it's every people talk about they laugh about it It's it's sort of an it's not a secret at all in particular as we were saying about pride but You know, I think that ultimately what sports should be about, it should be about effort, skill, determination, focus, discipline.

01:51:39.000 And those are the lessons that you can pass on.

01:51:40.000 Not who has the best pharmacist, not who has the best team of scientists that can hide the results better.

01:51:46.000 And that's one of the more disturbing things about Icarus or any of these other things that have shown that You know, there's systematic anti-doping or doping or state-sponsored doping.

01:51:59.000 It's just, it distorts the whole thing, like what a victory is or why.

01:52:04.000 You've got some athletes that probably would have won anyway.

01:52:06.000 If everybody was clean, they might have been the best athlete anyway, and they could have won.

01:52:11.000 Floyd Landis told me that all the time about Lance.

01:52:14.000 He said, that dude was the baddest-ass bicycle rider ever and take away all the drugs that were taken in the sport.

01:52:21.000 He would have been the best writer ever.

01:52:23.000 He had something going on there, but the reality was everybody was using something. 0.99

01:52:27.000 That's a fucked up sport. 0.89

01:52:29.000 I think I talked about this last time, but I really, you know, people are surprised to hear this, but I had a lot of compassion and understanding for a lot of these dopers after they told me their stories. 0.99

01:52:38.000 I mean, You're a young kid, a vulnerable kid that wasn't really worldly, that all your teenage life you aspire to go over to Europe and get on a bike and compete in these awesome races, and all of a sudden you're over there, dropped off, and a coach sits you in a room and says, You want to stay here, kid?

01:52:55.000 Here's the program that we're on.

01:52:57.000 If I heard one, I heard a dozen of those stories.

01:52:59.000 Grown men crying, retelling those stories.

01:53:04.000 I feel good about changing the culture in this sport.

01:53:08.000 Radically.

01:53:09.000 Yeah, I mean, I would love to have a podcast with you and Lance sit down together and discuss this now that the dust has kind of settled and, you know, he's been pretty open about it and transparent about the whole process himself.

01:53:19.000 Yeah, I mean, I think the difference that he has with everybody else is, you know, again, this is back to Fogle's contention that they didn't catch Lance.

01:53:29.000 As you look back at his history, and they did actually.

01:53:32.000 In 99, I think he had a corticosteroid positive.

01:53:34.000 In 2001, I think he had a test that showed high likelihood of EPO use that wasn't followed on.

01:53:42.000 But what he did is he became very powerful in the sport, and the International Cycling Union was corrupt and basically used that power and wielded it, and they covered up a lot of those tests.

01:53:58.000 Crazy.

01:53:58.000 Yeah, it is crazy.

01:54:00.000 And the crazy thing about combat sports is that we're not just talking about crossing a finish line quicker.

01:54:07.000 We're talking about the ability to deliver more damage on your opponent.

01:54:10.000 And that's why it's so critical that people fight clean.

01:54:13.000 Whole new level.

01:54:14.000 It's a completely different thing.

01:54:15.000 There's just really no comparison.

01:54:17.000 Now, let's get into, we briefly touched on weight cutting, but I know that the UFC has recognized that there's a real issue, and what steps have we taken to try to mitigate the problems that are caused by weight cutting?

01:54:33.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

01:54:34.000 And another one of the reasons why I love the Performance Institute and the staff that we have there, and that before them, it really stemmed from the USADA program, where under the WADA code, you ban the use of IVs.

01:54:46.000 And so, because I was kind of the point person, obviously.

01:54:49.000 Explain why IVs are problematic.

01:54:51.000 Yeah, it goes back to the cyclists.

01:54:53.000 They were using IVs to basically flush their system of drugs to manipulate their biological passport.

01:55:00.000 So if they're blood doping or using EPO, it would have a tendency to lower those and normalize those biological passport levels. 0.61

01:55:09.000 And so WADA learned that through some of the investigations that were conducted and determined that IV use in excess of 50 milliliters every six hours would be prohibited.

01:55:21.000 So when we announced that we were adopting the water prohibited list and prohibited methods, there was some blowback within the UFC community saying, hey, these things are used regularly because fighters are pushing themselves to the edge to make weight.

01:55:36.000 And do you understand what you're doing here?

01:55:37.000 You're going to put fighters in unsafe positions where they're going to get in and not be rehydrated.

01:55:43.000 So we took a look at that and spoke with USAID and said, hey, you know, maybe we should, you know, slowly roll out the IV ban.

01:55:51.000 So we actually delayed that by three months.

01:55:53.000 The program went into effect July 1st and we instituted the IV ban October 1st.

01:55:59.000 So we had three months of getting fighters prepared for it, educating them why that they were banned.

01:56:06.000 Nevertheless, I mean, Real quickly, the whole weight cutting issue came kind of into my plate.

01:56:12.000 And while I wasn't an expert in it, I had to get out and talk to a lot of fighters, camps, coaches about IVs and give them alternatives to rehydrating the right way.

01:56:24.000 I, again, being an expert myself, I reached out to what I found were experts in the world.

01:56:29.000 A certain guy by the name of Dr. Robert Kenefik, who is a PhD exercise physiologist, works at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, studies environmental effects on soldiers, his expertise being dehydration.

01:56:44.000 So soldiers in the Middle East that are marching for hours, days upon a time, run out of water, How do we get these soldiers back rehydrated and back into the fight?

01:56:57.000 And thought, hey, this is the type of expert that we need to talk to.

01:57:00.000 Extreme dehydration, not some kid that has diarrhea and is mildly dehydrated with some Pedialyte.

01:57:07.000 So we brought him in, had him actually the week of UFC 200. He was in town, got a chance to talk to a lot of the fighters coming in and analyze the messes they were using.

01:57:19.000 He recommended to us, hey, here's the maximum amount of weight fighters that you should recommend.

01:57:26.000 Fighters are losing that fight week.

01:57:27.000 And that's how we came up with our weight guideline of 8%.

01:57:30.000 So we recommend when those fighters check in Tuesday, For a Saturday fight, they're within 8% of their goal weight, usually on Friday.

01:57:39.000 Not a requirement, a recommendation, but we put that out there and educated heavily on that.

01:57:46.000 Since then, you talked I think last week about Andy Foster, the Executive Director of California, who's really taken the lead in terms of commissions on combating dangerous weight-cutting.

01:57:56.000 He worked with us pretty closely on developing his 10-point weight cutting plan or plan to combat serious weight cutting.

01:58:05.000 Includes his commission making calls to fighters on the card 30 days out, 10 days out, making them a little bit more accountable.

01:58:13.000 Farther out than fight week.

01:58:15.000 He's also got a provision where fight night, he takes the fighter's weight, weighs them, and their recommendation is you only put on 10% of your weight back on, plus a pound.

01:58:26.000 If they're over that, California can recommend the fighter move up a weight class. 0.98

01:58:31.000 So really, yeah, just a lot of education, recommendations.

01:58:35.000 And I hear a lot of people talk about, and I'm curious for your thoughts on this, Hey, we can stop this instantaneously.

01:58:42.000 Just put rules out there.

01:58:44.000 If you lose this much weight or put this much weight back on, you're suspended for 6 months, 12 months, whatever.

01:58:50.000 We're just not going to let you fight.

01:58:52.000 My concern there is when you have absolute rules, Fighters gonna do everything possible to make weight.

01:59:01.000 Say you had a rule that if you miss weight, you can't fight again for 12 months, you have to move up a weight class.

01:59:06.000 Fighters gonna kill themselves to make weight.

01:59:08.000 My fear would be that you put an absolute rule out there and someone get hurts because of the rule that you put in place.

01:59:15.000 Which is, hey, you know, I think it's a measured approach.

01:59:17.000 You have to continually reevaluate it.

01:59:19.000 But I think right now, the rules that are out there between our recommendations, California's rules are more guideline recommendations.

01:59:26.000 And then that, in conjunction with what we're doing at the Performance Institute, where, I mean, you saw last week, there is no excuse.

01:59:35.000 If you have issues making weight or you're not sure where your weight class is at, you have every resource available, the best in the world to you, to come in and find that out, to be given a plan on how to safely make weight.

01:59:49.000 So, you know, it's a multi-million dollar investment that the UFC has put, I think, toward that problem.

01:59:55.000 And, you know, hey, maybe two, three years from now we say, Hey, that was with good intentions, but not enough.

02:00:00.000 We need to do more.

02:00:01.000 But I think right now, that's our strategy on the issue.

02:00:06.000 Well, I think a couple things would have to happen to really stop weight cutting.

02:00:10.000 One thing, you're going to have to blow up these weight classes.

02:00:12.000 Because there's going to be champions in these weight classes that really won't be in that weight class anymore.

02:00:16.000 If you cut...

02:00:18.000 All the real heavy-duty weight cutting out of the picture.

02:00:22.000 I think what 1FC is trying to do is they're doing hydration tests, and they do a series of them.

02:00:28.000 I believe they do three leading up to the fight, which really, was it Benavidez was telling me this?

02:00:34.000 Someone was telling me this, that they've essentially made it almost impossible for you to cut weight.

02:00:40.000 So are they doing hydration tests on weigh-in?

02:00:42.000 At the weigh-in?

02:00:43.000 They're doing hydration tests three different times.

02:00:46.000 Okay.

02:00:46.000 Three different times leading up to the fight.

02:00:48.000 I don't know the exact protocol, but what they've done is essentially made it so that you can't be dehydrated. 0.98

02:00:52.000 Like, you can't, when you weigh in, you have to weigh in at a, you know, like, if you're fighting at 170, but, you know, you get on the scale and you're fucking dying. 0.95

02:01:00.000 Yeah.

02:01:01.000 Like, they're like, no, you're not really 170. And that's really where it should be.

02:01:05.000 This idea that the best way to fight is to cheat and to drain all yourself of fluids and then pretend that you're 160 pounds and then get back on the scale, you know, 15 hours later at 185, that's fucking crazy. 0.92

02:01:20.000 That doesn't make any sense. 0.77

02:01:22.000 You're not really a 160 pound fighter.

02:01:25.000 You're a 185 pound fighter who almost died.

02:01:28.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

02:01:29.000 You know, I talk with Forrest a lot about this because he went through it.

02:01:32.000 And again, why he's such, you know, a great asset to the company.

02:01:37.000 But he says, look, there's certain guys and girls that have genetic ability.

02:01:43.000 That carry, you know, that have good muscle mass usually, that just carry a ton of water, and it's not difficult, it's not dangerous for them to drop 10 or 15 pounds.

02:01:53.000 It's not, but it would be if they fought 15 pounds under.

02:01:56.000 See, if they're fighting at 170 pounds, they really weigh 185. And if they cut down to 170, they make that weight, and then fought right then.

02:02:05.000 Then it would be dangerous.

02:02:06.000 Their performance would be radically diminished.

02:02:08.000 So we're lying when those people get on the scale.

02:02:10.000 When they get on the scale and they flex and they say 170. Sure, you're 170 for about an hour.

02:02:16.000 And then you're going to go right back up to what you were before you dehydrated yourself.

02:02:20.000 This is madness to me.

02:02:22.000 This goes against what fighting is supposed to be.

02:02:25.000 What we talked about before, about discipline and focus and technique and training.

02:02:30.000 That's what competing is supposed to be about.

02:02:32.000 It's supposed to be about a fight.

02:02:34.000 We're two equally skillful individuals trying to figure out who's got the best strategy and who's got the best will and technique.

02:02:41.000 It's not supposed to be about who can do this legal cheating thing best.

02:02:46.000 Because that's what weight cutting is.

02:02:48.000 Well, you know, really the modern history of the UFC and the reason I think it's so successful is Lorenzo and Dana ran toward regulation, right?

02:02:55.000 Yes.

02:02:56.000 They said, hey, this is a no, you know, marketed as no rules, no hold bar event.

02:03:01.000 They ran toward rules.

02:03:03.000 And I actually had a discussion with Bob Bennett about this, the executive director of Nevada, last week.

02:03:09.000 And he's looking at what California's doing.

02:03:12.000 He says, look, we have physicals after the weigh-in.

02:03:16.000 So we do the weigh-ins now at the host hotel, so it's usually done in a ballroom.

02:03:20.000 The fighter gets up on the scale, makes weight, immediately goes behind the curtain and has their pre-fight physical.

02:03:26.000 Right, but do they have a hydration test?

02:03:28.000 They don't.

02:03:29.000 I know California does some hydration testing fight night, but what Bob told me is I have the most experienced ringside physicians in the world that have seen more combat sports events than everywhere.

02:03:39.000 I'm comfortable that these guys are evaluating, these medical professionals are evaluating these fighters in this scenario, and if they feel or see something's not safe for that fighter to compete the next night, that they'll call them off.

02:03:51.000 I think that's wonderful, but I think all that does is keep fighters from getting to the point of death.

02:03:56.000 I mean, getting to the point where they're sick and terrible.

02:03:58.000 They're definitely compromised.

02:03:59.000 When they're making the weight, they're not really at that weight.

02:04:02.000 What I would really love, in a perfect world, besides the bare knuckle thing, what I would really love is a weight class every 10 pounds.

02:04:09.000 I mean, there's just giant gaps. 0.95

02:04:12.000 The gap between 85 and 205 is 20 fucking pounds. 0.98

02:04:15.000 That's a lot of weight. 0.96

02:04:17.000 I hear that, but let me give you a scenario where it shows that alone ain't gonna work.

02:04:23.000 Female, new division for the UFC, 125, right? 0.86

02:04:27.000 Because we had a 115 to 135 pound gap.

02:04:30.000 What happened in our first championship fight?

02:04:34.000 So Jara Eubanks couldn't make weight. 1.00

02:04:38.000 So that in and of itself, just making a weight class, I don't think solves the problem.

02:04:43.000 Yeah, but she's also relatively inexperienced, young to the sport, and this is a brand new weight class that they really didn't have.

02:04:50.000 I'm not saying more weight classes wouldn't help, but they're not going to help by themselves.

02:04:54.000 It's got to be a multiple-prong attack.

02:04:57.000 I think the hydration test should be along with that.

02:05:00.000 The hydration test and weight classes every 10 pounds.

02:05:03.000 And then give the champion the benefit of the doubt.

02:05:05.000 Whoever is a champ in each division, whatever weight class, we find out what they really weigh and they have an opportunity to fight for the title in that weight class.

02:05:17.000 Yeah, I think we talked about it when you toured through the PI, but we have on a couple of occasions used that bioelectrical impedance machine to determine, is that the proper term?

02:05:26.000 I don't know.

02:05:27.000 But basically, you step on the scale and you hold on to these handles and it gives you some type of hydration reading.

02:05:35.000 We've done that a few times on check-in day.

02:05:39.000 weigh-in day.

02:05:39.000 We're not sure exactly what the numbers look like, but that's something that, you know, we're looking into.

02:05:44.000 Clint also does a lot of specific gravity testing fight week on fighters where, you know, it'll be a Tuesday or Wednesday.

02:05:50.000 And I think he showed you that, that chart.

02:05:53.000 He'll look at how much weight a fighter has to lose and then look at what their specific gravity reading is, how diluted or concentrated the urine is.

02:06:01.000 And, you know, if he sees someone with a bunch of weight to lose that is, you know, relatively dehydrated, specific gravity wise, then, you know, can alter their plans.

02:06:10.000 So yeah, I mean, we've got a lot of, a lot of that stuff going on.

02:06:13.000 I don't necessarily...

02:06:15.000 Disagree with you that more needs to be done, but right now our plan of attack is to use these resources, use the facility of the PI. You know, in an ideal world, I think rather than making these absolute rules, trying to educate our fighters, trying to show them.

02:06:30.000 I'll tell you one thing.

02:06:30.000 You can talk until you're blue in the face about things being bad, unhealthy for a fighter.

02:06:37.000 They're like, I'm bulletproof.

02:06:39.000 Not only that, they're fighters.

02:06:41.000 They're fighting.

02:06:42.000 That's bad for you anyway.

02:06:43.000 Right.

02:06:43.000 Like, oh, cutting weight's bad for me too?

02:06:45.000 Okay.

02:06:45.000 Where they start listening, and I think this is where the Performance Institute comes into play, when you start talking about the effect on your performance.

02:06:52.000 So if you tell them, hey, look, if you can come to your proper weight in a more measured approach and not lose a whole bunch and put that...

02:07:03.000 Look at the difference it's going to make on your performance, 24 to 30. Yeah.

02:07:08.000 Hours later.

02:07:09.000 Because you see this.

02:07:09.000 I mean, you see this occasionally when fighters go through, you know, tough weight cuts.

02:07:12.000 You see them gas after a round or two.

02:07:15.000 Look how good he's looked moving up to 170 pounds.

02:07:18.000 I mean, it's just phenomenal.

02:07:19.000 I also think, now it's interesting, there's, you know, on one side of it, the criticism will be, well, you're just encouraging even greater weight cuts and regains.

02:07:26.000 But I think this morning weigh-in thing that we've put together, I think has had a positive impact in a couple of areas.

02:07:34.000 Explain that for people who don't know what we're talking about.

02:07:36.000 Yeah, so actually, Andy Foster, again, California, before UFC 199, came to me and said, hey, we've been doing this morning weigh-in for a couple regional, local shows.

02:07:46.000 Would you guys be interested in it?

02:07:47.000 Were we do it at the host hotel?

02:07:49.000 We do it, you know, we'd open the scales from 9am to 11am, and the idea would be a fighter gets on weight in their hotel room upstairs, hops on the elevator, steps on the scale, they make weight, they can start eating and drinking again right away.

02:08:05.000 They don't have to wait until 4 p.m.

02:08:07.000 in the afternoon.

02:08:07.000 Exactly.

02:08:08.000 With the idea of, I think, one of the dangers of weight cutting and being dehydrated is the amount of time that you're at a loss of that water.

02:08:16.000 And in the past, when we'd have the weigh-ins at an arena, it would be the fighter would have to check in downstairs.

02:08:23.000 Say we had the weigh-ins at 4 o'clock in an arena.

02:08:25.000 The fighter would check in downstairs at maybe 2 p.m.

02:08:30.000 2.30, the bus would leave.

02:08:32.000 I remember in Rio, we were one time on a bus for an hour, hour and a half to the arena.

02:08:36.000 Everybody's depleted and dehydrated on the bus ride.

02:08:39.000 You step on a scale in a cold, environmentally unfriendly arena.

02:08:45.000 You then get back on the bus, drive another hour, hour and a half.

02:08:48.000 You're talking multiple hours where these fighters are in a depleted state.

02:08:52.000 So I think the morning weigh-in protects against that.

02:08:54.000 I think the other benefit we've seen out of it, and I think it's more of a long-term than a short-term benefit, is we've seen a lot more fighters missing weight since we went to the morning weigh-ins.

02:09:03.000 And I think that's a product of timing.

02:09:06.000 In the past, you had four or five in the afternoon, you had all day long to cut weight.

02:09:11.000 And you would see fighters at 10 or 11 say, I can't do any more.

02:09:15.000 And at 1 or 2 o'clock, they say, no, I can do a couple more pounds and just all day long.

02:09:19.000 Now, unless you're literally not sleeping the night before you fight, you have a shorter window in the morning to do that.

02:09:25.000 And I think a lot of those missed weights has helped identify those fighters that I'm probably in the wrong weight class.

02:09:31.000 If I can't make that weight of waking up, you know, 5 or 6 in the morning in a couple hours, then it's probably too much weight to lose.

02:09:37.000 And we've seen some fighters move up in weight class because of that.

02:09:40.000 We've also seen some fighters that have decided, hey, I've got to take this more professionally and hire a nutritionist like Khabib, Khabib Nurmagomedov, who made weight easily for his last fight.

02:09:50.000 And the fight before that obviously fell out of the fight because his body shut down and he had to go to the hospital to be rehydrated.

02:09:57.000 Yeah, I mean, again, I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all solution.

02:10:00.000 You have to be careful.

02:10:01.000 Hey, Khabib missed weight that last time, went to the hospital.

02:10:05.000 You know, a knee-jerk reaction would be, you can't fight this weight anymore.

02:10:08.000 Well, we saw this time, he just changed the way he did things.

02:10:11.000 He came in, he was on weight the night before.

02:10:13.000 He had a couple pounds to lose fight week.

02:10:15.000 Yeah.

02:10:16.000 So it can be done, and again, that reverts back to the Performance Institute, I think.

02:10:20.000 There's no excuse now that if you're a new fighter, and you're not making a hell of a lot of money, and don't have the resources to hire, you know, George Lockhart, whoever.

02:10:29.000 you know have clint wattenberg who's an ivy league educated sports dietitian that can provide you all that remotely if you can't get to vegas he'll give you a full plan over you know over the phone over email um if you can get to vegas not only will clint plan things out for you but you have a kitchen and cooks and staff that'll provide you that meal throughout your whole fight camp that's you want to be there for free so amazing The place is incredible.

02:10:56.000 And we will have Clint and Duncan on the podcast explain all that.

02:11:01.000 What's in that little silver...

02:11:03.000 Yeah, so this is...

02:11:05.000 So one of the things that we want to do with this program, again, is, you know, first and foremost, it's to protect the UFC athlete, protect the rights to clean athletes.

02:11:13.000 But we also...

02:11:15.000 Want to influence other sports, influence anti-doping as a whole.

02:11:19.000 So USADA came to us earlier this year and said, we've got some new technology.

02:11:23.000 What do you guys think about using your program to be the first to kind of roll it out?

02:11:28.000 And so the answer was, well, is the science good?

02:11:31.000 Is it validated?

02:11:31.000 They said, yeah, it is.

02:11:33.000 I was actually at a conference mid-summer back in New York and sat on a panel with Major League Baseball PGA Tour and the UFC and a bunch of anti-doping scientists there and they were talking about this technology and the other leagues were asked, hey, you guys going to institute that?

02:11:50.000 And they're like, nah.

02:11:52.000 You know, I don't think enough's there.

02:11:54.000 And they went to me.

02:11:55.000 I'm like, absolutely.

02:11:55.000 If USADA science...

02:11:57.000 It tells me this works.

02:11:58.000 We want to be the first, especially if it's more convenient and more efficient for our program.

02:12:03.000 So what this is, is it's a leaching device.

02:12:06.000 And, you know, until this came out, basically to get any blood tests from... 0.98

02:12:11.000 Oh, shit, you got some scissors? 0.99

02:12:13.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:12:14.000 Nice.

02:12:16.000 I was ready for you.

02:12:18.000 Until this came out, basically any blood tests done from our athlete had to be done with a phlebotomist, the full-on needle in the vein, take out a vial of blood.

02:12:29.000 So with this leaching device, it's got 30 microneedles in it, the size of about an eyelash.

02:12:36.000 You put it up on your arm.

02:12:38.000 You hit this button, and painlessly, the microneedles reach into just the capillary, so just the blood at the top of the skin, and draw out a small amount of blood.

02:12:48.000 And this light turns red when that blood's drawn out.

02:12:52.000 The blood is then deposited onto an index card.

02:12:56.000 It's called dry blood spot testing.

02:12:58.000 So a drop or two of blood on the four corners.

02:13:01.000 The card's then sealed up, placed in the mail, and sent to a WADA laboratory.

02:13:07.000 Does this all have to be done on video?

02:13:09.000 No, it's not the athlete doing it themselves.

02:13:11.000 You have a collector doing that.

02:13:13.000 I mean, that could be the future where an athlete is doing it themselves.

02:13:16.000 Like on FaceTime or something?

02:13:17.000 Exactly.

02:13:18.000 But here are the benefits of that.

02:13:20.000 A, and this is huge for me, I want to make things as convenient for our athletes as possible.

02:13:25.000 So, you know, you talk to our roster and ask them, would you prefer...

02:13:28.000 Big needle stuck in the vein of your arm and a vial of blood taken out versus a completely painless, you know, leech of some blood from your capillaries.

02:13:36.000 They're all going to say, obviously, this.

02:13:39.000 You talk about cost.

02:13:40.000 So blood taken out of a vein of your arm requires a phlebotomist.

02:13:45.000 So in those cases where USADA is doing a blood test, they usually take a drug collection officer and a phlebotomist to take out the blood.

02:13:53.000 I mean, that's a couple hundred dollars there.

02:13:56.000 A vial of blood needs to be cold shipped to the water laboratories.

02:14:00.000 Here you're talking about dried blood on an index card that just needs to be sealed up.

02:14:05.000 It becomes tamper-proof once it is and put in the mail for 55 cents.

02:14:09.000 Wow.

02:14:10.000 So I think incredible efficiency, convenience to the athlete for our program.

02:14:15.000 And again, we want to lead.

02:14:17.000 And I think, you know, when you talk about, I'm asked this question regularly about local or regional MMA shows saying, hey, this is great what you guys are doing for your program, but how much does this program cost you?

02:14:28.000 And it is a multi-million dollar program a year.

02:14:31.000 And they say, hey, we'd love to do something like that, but, you know, we can't afford that.

02:14:35.000 Something like this, where now you cut your costs down from sending blood to, you know, from maybe $1,000 to, you know, maybe $100, this device in one DCL, going to collect it out and put it on a card.

02:14:47.000 I think it has some really great implications.

02:14:49.000 That's amazing.

02:14:50.000 Not just for the UFC, but, you know, throughout the sport.

02:14:52.000 Can I see that thing?

02:14:53.000 Sure.

02:14:53.000 That's pretty badass.

02:14:55.000 Wow.

02:14:57.000 Wow.

02:14:58.000 Incredible.

02:15:00.000 Anything else?

02:15:01.000 Should we wrap this up?

02:15:02.000 We good?

02:15:03.000 I think we're good.

02:15:04.000 Listen, you guys are doing an amazing job.

02:15:05.000 I mean, it's incredible, the results.

02:15:08.000 It's so cool to see the results on the biological passport that you guys could show it in a chart.

02:15:14.000 And, I mean, pretty much everyone agrees.

02:15:18.000 I mean, it's really changed the nature of fighting.

02:15:20.000 It really has.

02:15:21.000 It changed the sport.

02:15:23.000 It almost eliminated doping.

02:15:25.000 Yeah, as I told you, I really appreciate the platform you have here.

02:15:29.000 Literally, every fighter and camp and manager on our roster watches this.

02:15:33.000 So to be able to get in and talk about these things, talk about that new technology.

02:15:37.000 We just used that, actually.

02:15:38.000 I think Rose Namajunas was the first fighter that you saw to try that out on.

02:15:43.000 So a center of tech's going, hey, Rose, I heard they did the leaching device and the dried blood spot test.

02:15:48.000 What'd you think?

02:15:49.000 She said, awesome.

02:15:51.000 Didn't feel a thing.

02:15:52.000 And she said, my mind is blown by how far technology has come here.

02:15:57.000 And that's a big part of anti-doping and that deterrent when you're now saying, look at how the technology is evolving here.

02:16:03.000 And you get an athlete that thinks, well, you know, I think I can outwit them or outcott and mouse them. 0.99

02:16:09.000 They see shit like this. 0.98

02:16:11.000 And perception is almost as important as reality in a lot of these occasions, and they start seeing things like this, and that deterrent factor is built up, I think, higher and higher. 0.99

02:16:20.000 Yeah, it seems like at one point in time there was a race, and the dopers were just like one half step ahead, but now it seems like it's even, and with the possibility of freezing your sample and then looking towards it to the future, you're...

02:16:33.000 It's not worth it.

02:16:34.000 Yeah, I don't know if I call it even yet, but that gap is definitely narrowing, and you're affecting the way that dopers are doping these days.

02:16:42.000 I think, you know, now the, you know, microdosing, I think, is big, and it's difficult to catch microdosing, but you've altered the behavior of the doper from taking, you know, drugs really unabated to very small amounts so the benefits aren't going to be as great.

02:16:57.000 I think you've got to consider that a win for anti-doping.

02:17:00.000 I think that gap continues to narrow.

02:17:02.000 And when they microdose, would that be like testosterone or something like that?

02:17:07.000 Testosterone, EPO, probably the two most common, very fast clearing.

02:17:10.000 How much of a window do you have of detection?

02:17:12.000 Matter of hours.

02:17:13.000 Hours.

02:17:14.000 But, you know, again, going back to, I think I might have told this story the last time I was on, but the Floyd Landis, Lance days, they were manipulating during the Tour de France an eight-hour window.

02:17:24.000 So from 10 p.m.

02:17:26.000 to 6 a.m., They wouldn't test them during the tour.

02:17:29.000 The thought was these guys are racing up the side of the mountain for five, six hours a day.

02:17:33.000 We've got to let these guys sleep.

02:17:34.000 And they figured out, hey, if we do something at 10.01, by 6.01, the earliest the test can come and be clear.

02:17:41.000 So, you know, yeah, that prospect's always out there.

02:17:44.000 That's why the UFC program, there's no limits on the test now.

02:17:47.000 Right.

02:17:47.000 It's just a bummer in terms of their sleep cycle.

02:17:50.000 It is.

02:17:50.000 Yeah, it's brutal, but I think most appreciate that that's the price of a clean sport and trying to ensure safety.

02:17:57.000 Would there be a way to change that?

02:17:59.000 Would there be some sort of a wearable device that would detect changes in your body?

02:18:03.000 I've often thought that.

02:18:04.000 How about a wearable device that was tamper-proof that collected everything 24 hours a day that you peel it off after a couple weeks and it's tested?

02:18:11.000 Yeah, or give them the wearable device so when they're sleeping, so you don't interrupt their sleep cycle, so 10 p.m.

02:18:19.000 to 8 a.m.

02:18:19.000 or whatever it is that you decide would be the window that they need to sleep.

02:18:23.000 While they're doing that, they must have this device on that detects any changes to their metabolism, any changes in input, and then they can't eat while they're on.

02:18:30.000 Yeah, I mean, believe me, the anti-doping community is always thinking about things.

02:18:34.000 I talked to Travis Teigart, the CEO of USADA, last week, and he made it clear and That USADA, I think, dedicates $3 million a year grants toward research and anti-doping, things like that.

02:18:46.000 So, I mean, that race is always going on and is always, you know, continuing. 1.00

02:18:51.000 Beautiful.

02:18:52.000 Great work, Mr. Nowitzki.

02:18:54.000 Thanks, Joe.

02:18:54.000 I'm sorry about the nickname.

02:18:56.000 It's all good.

02:18:56.000 I hope you get over it.

02:18:57.000 You're okay with it?

02:18:57.000 Rolls right off the back, man.

02:18:58.000 All right.

02:18:59.000 Beautiful.

02:18:59.000 Thanks, brother.

02:19:00.000 Appreciate it, man.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 24, 2010

JRE MMA Show #9 with Jeff Novitzky

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