Nov. 2, 2010 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:49:59
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Four, three, two, one. | |
| Boom. | ||
| Got a little thing going on here now. | ||
| A little circle. | ||
| Hello, Jeff. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
| What's up, Joe? | ||
| You too? | ||
| How you living? | ||
| Not been the easiest week in my life or my career is last week, but hanging in there. | ||
| To make this stand-alone so that people don't have to go figuring this out on their own, and I'm sure many, many fans that are tuning in already know the gist of the details, let's lay this out from the beginning. | ||
| John Jones' initial failed test. | ||
| Yeah, so that was July of 2017. He tested positive for approximately 20, anywhere from 20 to 60 picograms of a long-term metabolite known as the M3 metabolite of a substance called dihydrochloromethyltestosterone, DHCMT, also known as oral terinabol. | ||
| And this was over a year ago. | ||
| What was determined to be the source of this stuff? | ||
| Never determined what the source was. | ||
| So John went through a full arbitration hearing, was never able to determine where it came from, tested all the supplements he was using, went through many interviews with USADA, had a full-on arbitration hearing. | ||
| The source was never determined where it came from. | ||
| Why was his suspension so low or so short if it wasn't determined? | ||
| There's many factors that go into what that suspension was. | ||
| I would argue in the totality of the evidence that was presented in that arbitration that it wasn't a short suspension because really one key thing came out of that arbitration. | ||
| John went to arbitration before an individual by the name of Richard McLaren. | ||
| Richard McLaren has an arbitration group up in Canada, and McLaren is probably worldwide known as one of the most credible guys in anti-doping. | ||
| I know you had the Icarus producer-director on. | ||
| The McLaren report was the report that came from all that. | ||
| He basically investigated the Russian state being involved in doping in the Sochi games and put out actually a series of reports on it detailing that up to 1,000 Russian athletes We're breaking the rules, and the Russian laboratory was helping them get around it. | ||
| He's a very, very respected guy. | ||
| He's independent of, obviously, the UFC. He's independent of USADA. He acts on his own. | ||
| And his determination was? | ||
| His determination and I'll read you kind of what he said. | ||
| He said, I find that all evidence available to me leads me to conclude that the violation was not intended nor could it have enhanced the athlete's performance. | ||
| So, A, non-intentional. | ||
| So, non-intentional ingestion. | ||
| I mean, there's no argument that it was in his system, but he found the evidence to show non-intentional use. | ||
| And then he went further, saying that based on the numbers of what he saw in the evidence, there was not even a performance-enhancing benefit afforded to John for having this long-term metabolite in his system. | ||
| And I think that's significant when you talk about, hey, 15 months, that's kind of light being that this is the second time through. | ||
| I would argue that That if there was an argument, that maybe it's on the higher end. | ||
| And certainly, you know, we'll talk about the California Commission. | ||
| Andy Foster took that position in John's recent California hearing. | ||
| He was a little bit critical of USADA. He thought, you know, he's intimately familiar with his evidence, both in the previous case and this occurrence, and he also saw that there was no evidence that an independent arbitrator, you know, made this statement and decision of John intentionally cheating. | ||
| So if anything, I'd say that potentially there could be an argument that it was on the higher end versus the lower end. | ||
| Because of the fact that it was an unintentional ingestion. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Now, what is John's excuse? | ||
| What has John said, how he got this into his system? | ||
| Yeah, well look, you know, it's detailed in the arbitration hearing at all. | ||
| John fully admits that, you know, some of the lifestyle decisions he was making, you know, the partying and things, you know, probably did not lead to making smart decisions and making smart choices in terms of what was being ingested in the body. | ||
| But certainly his testimony was under oath that I have never intentionally cheated and did not intentionally put this substance in my body. | ||
| And not only this case, but as we talk about the subsequent case here, I think you'll see that based on the numbers coming out of his tests and based on some studies that have been done on some of these substances, it would tend to support that. | ||
| Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't John test negative, then test positive for extremely low numbers? | ||
| This is the initial test, before we get into the most recent failed test. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Test negative, then test positive very shortly after with a very small trace amount. | ||
| So we had two negative tests on July 7th and July 8th, I believe, of 2017. And then weigh-in day, I think it was July 28th, he was positive for a very low level of the M3 metabolite. | ||
| And we might as well start here. | ||
| So... | ||
| Again, going back to Icarus, remember the doctor? | ||
| I mean, he's the main character in that, Rechenkov. | ||
| In 2011, he put out a study on oral turinibol. | ||
| He actually, my understanding, has dosed himself And then studied the excretion of his urine and what was coming out of it over the weeks and months after and determined that there were multiple, maybe up to 50 metabolites that once this DHCMT was ingested into the body, the body converted into other substances and these metabolites stayed around. | ||
| He identified some short-term metabolites. | ||
| Some medium-term metabolites and some long-term metabolites, specifically the M3 that John's tested positive for. | ||
| So these long-term metabolites would indicate that it was taken a long time ago? | ||
| They would stay around for the longest. | ||
| Why was he testing negative and then testing positive for these extremely low numbers? | ||
| That's a good question, and that's basically the question and point. | ||
| But what was not occurring and what has never occurred in any of John's samples is any presence of the short and medium-term metabolites. | ||
| And if you look at Rechenkov's study, he identifies a couple of these medium-term metabolites, Roman numeral I and Roman numeral II. | ||
| And he says these metabolites, based on his study, will stay in the body at least 22 days. | ||
| Well, let's look back to the July 7th and 8th positive tests. | ||
| He's negative on July 7th and 8th for everything, for the parent compound, for the short-term, medium-term metabolites, and the long-term metabolites. | ||
| Go 21 days later, so within that 22-day window, which his study shows the short- and medium-term metabolites would still be showing up, and there's no presence whatsoever of the short- or medium-term metabolites. | ||
| Now, again, we'll get into this a little bit more, but I think the science, what it's showing, is a pulsing effect for this long-term metabolite, meaning once you ingest, whether intentionally or non-intentionally, oral tyrinobol into the body, the body breaks it down, produces oral tyrinobol into the body, the body breaks it down, produces short-term and medium-term, which is visible for a short and medium amount of and then this M3, which is produced for a long period of time. | ||
| I think what the issue appears to be, and we'll get into this, the UFC program is not the only program that's seen this. | ||
| There's another professional sports league that has seen it very frequently. | ||
| USADA has also seen this on the Olympic side. | ||
| But we're seeing this strange action with the long-term M3 metabolite. | ||
| And the theory is... | ||
| It may be hiding in the fat tissues surrounding organs and maybe have a pulsing effect where it's released at certain times and other times you can't detect it. | ||
| And this is not the actual substance itself, but it's a metabolite. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Which indicates a reaction to this substance? | ||
| It indicates the body breaking down the parent compound, the oral torinobol, and turning it into these other things which are stored in the body. | ||
| These metabolites are not... | ||
| Performance enhancing drugs that are the result of the breakdown of the parent drug in the body. | ||
| Now, how much time is it detectable, the actual drug itself? | ||
| So, pretty quick. | ||
| It's a pretty quick clearance time. | ||
| I think Rechenkov's study says, you know, maybe a week. | ||
| So it's not around for very long, and that's why he conducted the study. | ||
| Ironically enough, and I was going to go watch Icarus here last night, and I've had too much going on the last week to kind of refresh my mind, but apparently, this was part of his protocol for Russian athletes. | ||
| He knew a coach that was still giving the oral torrental ball to Russian athletes, and he had a falling out with the coach. | ||
| So he goes off on the side and studies, hey... | ||
| The parent compound is going to get in and out of the body pretty quick. | ||
| It's going to be difficult to detect that. | ||
| Let's try to figure out what stays around and leaves markers in the body for a long time. | ||
| And so he developed these short and long-term metabolite tests and was able to catch some of this coach's athletes for using the oral turinable. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So the actual drug itself is gone from the system, but the metabolite remains. | ||
| Now, what is the window that this metabolite is supposed to be detectable in the body? | ||
| Because we're talking now, what are we at, like 18 months? | ||
| Yeah, so here's the problem. | ||
| Supposed initial ingestion? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| Because my question is, these same long-term metabolites, these existed a year plus ago? | ||
| It was more than a year? | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| So July 2017 was the initial test. | ||
| So what all the experts, and we'll get through this, what all the experts are telling us is there is no evidence of re-ingestion. | ||
| And most likely, this is still remnants from the July 2017 test, however it was to enter into a system. | ||
| And we'll go through some of these testing numbers that have shown negatives followed by very low-level picogram quantities. | ||
| My question, though, was that The ingestion that happened that he tested positive for in July of 2017 indicated a long-term effect, right? | ||
| It was a long-term metabolite. | ||
| Long-term metabolite, correct. | ||
| So, meaning it had already been in his system for a year or so. | ||
| It absolutely could have predated. | ||
| You know, the theory the first time through was something had to have entered his system between July 7th and July 8th, those negatives, and this low picogram reading on July 28th. | ||
| Over this last year, there's been a lot of study into this long-term metabolite. | ||
| As I mentioned, this isn't just a UFC issue. | ||
| There's another major professional sports league that, for the time being, wants to keep their testing confidential, but they've shared that information with scientists, with USADA, with myself. | ||
| They saw it on multiple occasions, this pulsing effect over a year where you'd see... | ||
| But this is well over a year. | ||
| We're talking two and a half years now, right? | ||
| If it's in July, he had taken it a year ago. | ||
| Well, July 2017. We're talking a year and a half, right? | ||
| July 2017. A year and a half from July 2017, but it could have been in his system a year prior. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, it could have been a couple months, a year. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He had never showed up for that M3 metabolite 4. He had been tested for it. | ||
| He had been tested multiple times in the program. | ||
| Can you correct me if I'm wrong? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Isn't the same level? | ||
| Isn't it approximately the same picograms that exist today in 2018 that were there in 2017? | ||
| Generally, if you look, and we can go over these numbers, it fluctuates from single digits, it never gets into triple digits, to mid-double digits. | ||
| So there's some as low as 9 picograms over that time. | ||
| There was some at 60 picograms. | ||
| Let's explain a picogram to someone, because it's a preposterously small thing. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And the analogy that I heard early on was, and I think John used this, throw a pinch of salt in an Olympic swimming pool. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, well that's... | ||
| You kind of wrap your head around that. | ||
| Let's go to the other side. | ||
| Let's talk about something really small that we know of and how many times you have to break down that small particle to get to a picogram. | ||
| So one grain of salt, and we all know what that looks like, right? | ||
| You put that in front of you, and you split that, and I mentioned this week 50 million. | ||
| It's actually 58 million. | ||
| If you split that 58 million times, a grain of salt, each one is a picogram. | ||
| I mean, it's incomprehensible. | ||
| The detection level and how small that is. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And how many picograms did they find in his system? | ||
| So he's gone from, and I'll read through it here. | ||
| So here's, since the initial appearance of the M3 metabolite, here's what John's tests look like in those picogram readings. | ||
| So the first one's collection date was July 28th, 2017. He had a concentration of 80 picograms. | ||
| However, let me caution and I'll read something from an expert. | ||
| When you get down to these picogram levels, the science is somewhat inexact because it's such a small amount. | ||
| So the variable, the plus or minus, you know, can be anywhere from 20, 30, I've seen in some instances 50 or 60. So what this scientist's name is, his name is Larry Bowers. | ||
| He was formerly the USADA science director. | ||
| He's currently retired and independently consults. | ||
| Before that, he ran an Olympic program. | ||
| Olympic Committee accredited laboratory at the University of Indiana. | ||
| The guy's got 20 to 25 years of anti-doping experience. | ||
| Here's what he told me about, you know, when you're analyzing small picogram levels. | ||
| Although the two respective laboratories... | ||
| Report a concentration. | ||
| I would caution against becoming too fixated on the numbers. | ||
| First, the numbers are really estimates of concentration and probably should be considered a range of about plus or minus 20 picograms per ml. | ||
| And he said the December 9th result would be in the range of John's, and we'll get to that, between 60 and 100. Second, while the adjustment of concentration by specific gravity attempts to deal with the variability of urinary excretion rates, it is inexact and adds variability to the estimates. | ||
| Finally, and most importantly, science has no clear understanding of the variance of urinary excretion of drugs at ultra-trace concentrations. | ||
| So basically saying, look, we have a general idea how this works in science, but... | ||
| And I think this instance comes to play. | ||
| Be real careful if you're going to be the guy with the pseudoscience out there saying, wait a second, John jumped from 20 to 60 from September to December, and that means he re-ingested it. | ||
| What he's saying here is slow your roll on that, that it's such a small, incomprehensible level that we don't really know what those variances are going to look like. | ||
| Now, I think if we saw jumps in John from single-digit 8 or 9 picogram to multiple 100-digit picograms, there would be a concern and maybe some re-administration. | ||
| But the experts I'm speaking to, when you're talking variability of 10, 20, 30, 40, it's not that significant at the picogram level. | ||
| What is the window where this long-term metabolite starts to express itself? | ||
| You said there's short-term and there's medium-term. | ||
| This is the long-term. | ||
| How long does it take before the long-term one? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't have the answer to that. | ||
| It may be in Rechenkov's report here. | ||
| And I would encourage those that are home, you know, playing scientists at their computer. | ||
| The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Rod Chinkov, writes a report, Detection and Mass Spectrometric Characterization of Novel Long-Term Dehydrochloromethyl Testosterone Metabolites in Human Urine. | ||
| I'm not sure when that long-term metabolite, how long it takes to show up. | ||
| Here's the problem, though, with this substance. | ||
| He did a real brief study. | ||
| My understanding is administered it to himself. | ||
| That's the only study that exists. | ||
| Oral terinobol, DHCMT, to my understanding, is not approved for use for human consumption anywhere in any country. | ||
| So you can't have clinical trials ethically in the medical world because it's just not legal to give this to human beings. | ||
| So, you know, we're already kind of behind the eight ball here in that As compared to other substances where you can do clinical trials because they're readily available via prescription or whatever, this substance is not. | ||
| The substance was created by the East Germans in the 70s and 80s and was part of their state-sponsored doping program where they were doping their athletes. | ||
| And can you correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe what I've read is that this is particularly effective when people are cutting weight. | ||
| Yeah, I mean— Is that true, or is this just more— I think some may be confusing terinabol with oral terinabol, two completely different substances. | ||
| There's very different effects on the body. | ||
| There's very different windows in terms of detection time. | ||
| Explain that to me, please. | ||
| You've got to be really careful in this world of performance-enhancing drugs. | ||
| There's names that are interchangeable. | ||
| There's different chemical names where you change a little bit of that chemical name. | ||
| It could mean a completely different substance. | ||
| There's instances where the chemical name is different, but the substance is actually the same. | ||
| So when trying to compare two substances, you know, make sure if you're at home doing that analysis, you're comparing the right ones. | ||
| Straight terinobol is different than oral terinobol. | ||
| What is the difference? | ||
| Yeah, I can't tell you. | ||
| I'm not as familiar with terinobol other than it's not oral terinobol. | ||
| So, but there is a difference in terms of the detection window? | ||
| Yeah, there would be. | ||
| I mean, different substances create and throw out different metabolites, and different substances have different detection windows. | ||
| So I haven't done my study and research on straight terinobol other than knowing it's different than the substance here. | ||
| So Grigory Richenkov, that's how you say his last name, right? | ||
| He was the only guy to do an actual verified study? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Now, has this study been peer-reviewed? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, it's published in... | ||
| The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. | ||
| So in order to get something published, it needs to be peer-reviewed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So has it been replicated anywhere? | ||
| Not that I'm aware of. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| So we have one study, which is really fascinating. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So we know that, first of all, we know this is an effect of steroid. | ||
| We know it works. | ||
| Yeah, the East Germans, I think, show that. | ||
| They wouldn't have been using it. | ||
| It's not an easy substance to get a hold of. | ||
| Look, when it's not approved for use anywhere in the world, it's only available on the black market, so you probably have to go to China to get it manufactured. | ||
| You know, a research chemical supply company. | ||
| It's not supposed to be provided to humans. | ||
| Now, I'm certainly not attributing this to you, but there were rumors, this was one discussion, was that one of the possible ways he could have ingested this, and let's be very kind, John likes to party. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| One of the things about partying is people do cocaine. | ||
| One of the things about cocaine is sometimes cocaine is cut with creatine. | ||
| One of the things about creatine is oftentimes you're buying cheap creatine. | ||
| That's one of the things that we've had with Onnit. | ||
| Onnits, our products are all third-party verified. | ||
| But in the initial goings, when we tried different manufacturers, especially for AlphaBrain, we found there were other trace elements that were in AlphaBrain that weren't supposed to be in there. | ||
| And it's because of the vats that they mix these things up with. | ||
| And one of the things that we had heard was that creatine oftentimes is made in the same place where they might be making oral terinobol, they might be making anabol, they might be making a bunch of different things, and trace amounts of this stuff can get into the creatine. | ||
| They use creatine to cut cocaine with. | ||
| Is this possible, or am I just... | ||
| Yeah, it's absolutely a theory. | ||
| I can't sit here and say that happened, but I will. | ||
| But you have heard similar things. | ||
| I have heard similar things. | ||
| I know for a fact, based on my previous career, I worked closely with the DEA. I was with the FDA. I worked cases involving street distribution of recreational drugs, including cocaine. | ||
| I know for a fact that creatine is one of the most common substances that cocaine is cut with because of a similar look, similar color, similar feel. | ||
| So getting back to McLaren's arbitration decision, I mean, this is a publicly available record, so I'm not saying anything new. | ||
| But McLaren addresses at least John's lifestyle around this time. | ||
| And he says the athlete openly admitted to USADA that prior to and for a period of time after the reporting of his second adverse analytical finding on July 28, 2017, the athlete used illicit so-called street drugs, including cocaine. | ||
| Now, for me to sit here and say, hey, that's where it came from, I don't know that. | ||
| the time period he's talking about? | ||
| That prior to and for a period of time after the reporting of a second adverse analytical finding on July 27, 2017, admitted. | ||
| So before that test and sometime after. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, does that make sense, though? | ||
| If it's cut, if that's where the source of it is, does it make sense that that would show up as a long-term metabolite? | ||
| Doesn't it need a long time in the body to digest, or do we not know enough about the window of time? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if we know enough about the window of time. | ||
| My theory in looking at it is, even if there's a small amount Of the oral torinobol in that. | ||
| It's going to, for a period of time, show that parent compound at a small picogram amount and the short and mid-term metabolites in the small picogram amount. | ||
| We have never seen those in the history of John's testing. | ||
| It's only this long-term metabolite. | ||
| So that may be indication that it occurred maybe even prior to what we're talking about here. | ||
| Is it something that could be accentuated in some way by the weight cutting process? | ||
| I absolutely think that could be a factor. | ||
| There are studies, not necessarily with this, but another substance, clomiphene. | ||
| And look, while I'm cautioning people... | ||
| To be careful about comparing different substances. | ||
| The commonality between clomiphene, which there are multiple clinical studies on because it is approved for use to be distributed to humans, and oral terinobol is they're both chlorinated. | ||
| So they both contain a chlorine atom on the molecule. | ||
| And there is a recently published study on clomiphene and its excretion rates. | ||
| Again, for those at home that want to look it up, The study was published in the Endocrine Society publication. | ||
| It's peer-reviewed. | ||
| The name of it is HPT Access Effects in Urinary Detection Following Clomiphene Administration in Males. | ||
| So what they did is they basically, you know, got a group of males, gave them a one-month cycle of clomiphene, you know, I think 25 milligrams a day, and then had them get off. | ||
| And then continue to look at their urine up to 261 days after. | ||
| And what you saw and what you see in this study is that pulsing effect. | ||
| So, you know, I'm looking at some of the study subjects here. | ||
| Subject 1. On day 121, still showed 147 picograms of clomiphene. | ||
| Day 128 showed 174 picograms. | ||
| Day 135 shows nothing. | ||
| He's below the minimum reporting limit. | ||
| And then day 149, he's back up to 236. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 out of, I think, 12 subjects in that study that showed this pulsing effect of this chlorinated substance coming and going. | ||
| Again, it's different than oral terinobol, but it has that common factor of being chlorinated. | ||
| In this study, they do talk about a fat tissue called the adipose tissue. | ||
| This is fat that surrounds the internal organs. | ||
| It's one of the last things that the body burns when it's starving itself and going to fat. | ||
| It protects those organs. | ||
| But yeah, you look at these extreme weight gains and cuts that the UFC athlete goes through, I don't think you're going to find possibly another human subject anywhere that goes through putting weight on, cutting up. | ||
| Other than Olympic wrestling. | ||
| Maybe, but I don't think Olympic wrestling matches with an MMA fighter goes through, at least in my experience over these three or four years, talking to those in the Olympic world. | ||
| I think we're at the extreme, and it's something obviously we've talked about before We're trying to curtail, but there's clearly never been a study for anybody who dehydrates and rehydrates themselves to the extent that some of our athletes do. | ||
| You could never find... | ||
| There would never be anybody with any ethics that would support a study because some of that dehydration exceeds World Health Organization standards. | ||
| So there's no studies out there on this stuff. | ||
| But clearly, looking from afar, I'd say that it likely has some impact over what's being released by this adipose tissue. | ||
| We should certainly talk about that in the future, about the weight cutting aspect of it. | ||
| But this adipose tissue loss at extreme weight cuts could potentially be the reason why this stuff is excreting itself. | ||
| It's definitely a theory out there. | ||
| What about microdosing? | ||
| So here's the thing with microdosing. | ||
| Microdosing is done with endogenous substances. | ||
| Only? | ||
| Well, I mean, someone could try it with something else, but the reason you microdose with endogenous substances is they're already produced in the body. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the theory of, okay, I'm going to microdose oral terenobol. | ||
| Well, oral terenobol is still producing these short-term and long-term metabolites. | ||
| In theory, whether you're taking 100 milligrams or 1 milligram of oral terenobol, Those excretion rates of those metabolites are still going to be consistent. | ||
| They're going to be in a much smaller level. | ||
| Is there a way to bypass those excretion rates? | ||
| Is there a way to mask that in some way? | ||
| I'm not aware of any. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| The only study we have is Gregory... | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| But just taking it from a common sense approach, it's certainly those that know about microdosing know that you microdose with endogenous substances, things that are already appearing in the body. | ||
| So your body knows what to do with them. | ||
| Knows what to do, and you're fooling, you know, not only are these metabolizing and there's no metabolites of them, but you could also be fooling the biological passport. | ||
| That's the concern, I think, and why people microdose. | ||
| So USAD is looking not only testing for specific substances, but are testosterone to epitestosterone ratios going up? | ||
| They're looking at blood values, how many young red blood cells, how many mature red blood cells. | ||
| So microdosing in those two areas wouldn't set off alarms in the biological passport world. | ||
| I've never heard personally of microdosing of exogenous substances that are not found in the body. | ||
| Microdosing, in my understanding, is done with things that are endogenous. | ||
| And again, for people that are not familiar with this terminology, we're just talking about microdosing, performance-enhancing drugs. | ||
| Because microdosing in today's world is a very common thing with mushrooms and LSD and a lot of other things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I mean, I saw a ton of microdosing in the cycling world. | ||
| That was testosterone, EPO, HGH, all those natural occurring in the body. | ||
| And so they don't produce any really red flag metabolites. | ||
| If you do them at very, very small levels, the parent will clear quickly, not produce any metabolites, and will not throw off the biological passport analysis. | ||
| When Victor Conte came out with Clear and all that stuff with Balco, they were fooling people. | ||
| One of the things we've talked about before is that it's a constant race to try to keep up with more advanced cheaters. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And you know what's interesting in this? | ||
| I mean, if I were to talk to you, and maybe the first time we did talk a couple years ago, it's come a long way from then. | ||
| But clearly, if I were to talk to you 15, 16, 17 years ago, when I got my start in the anti-doping world, I would have told you definitively, the testing is way behind what's being used out there. | ||
| They were able to test to multiple nanogram limits. | ||
| That's as far down as we can go. | ||
| Now they can go down to single-digit picogram. | ||
| There's another professional sports league out there that recently had a one-picogram M3 metabolite case. | ||
| I mean, do the math coming down from four or five nanograms, which used to be the lower limit, now to one picogram. | ||
| 10,000, 20,000 times, I am almost under the theory that the pendulum has swung maybe a little bit too far in the other direction. | ||
| And that certainly is part of my job to the UFC. Look, I want to catch every intentional cheater that's out there. | ||
| I want to make sure we have a rock-solid program, use all the latest and greatest techniques to do it, but I also want to keep an eye on it to make sure it's being administrated fairly. | ||
| And when you're getting down to detection of one single-digit picograms, I have a concern that what kind of level of sensitivity are we talking about? | ||
| Are we going to talk about environmental contamination where you walk through a room and somebody has just opened a container of something and there's minuscule powders in the air? | ||
| There are documented cases that some of the regularly prescribed prescription drugs, specifically diuretics, Are getting in water supplies in some areas. | ||
| You know, you get a lot of old people on them that flush their old pills down the toilet. | ||
| There's documented cases of it getting into the water supply and being detectable at that picogram level. | ||
| So you've got to be really, really careful about that. | ||
| And I think, you know, this case exemplifies that USADA and really the World Anti-Doping Agency world and community are aware of that. | ||
| You know, with greater sensitivity and testing, in my opinion, makes greater responsibility to be objective and look fairly at what really we're doing here when we're detecting in that small amount. | ||
| But this test of John's, where he's testing for the same level of picograms today as he was in July of 2017, is it safe to say that this is unprecedented? | ||
| Repeat that again? | ||
| That John's test for the same levels of picograms of these metabolites in 2018 that he was testing for in 2017, this is unprecedented. | ||
| No, the answer is no. | ||
| So maybe unprecedented in the UFC program, but what What the United States Anti-Doping Agency did over these last five or six months is they reached out to the science community outside the scope of the UFC. They reached out to other professional sports organizations, | ||
| they reached out to other WADA laboratories, and what they were seeing was multiple instances of this pulsing effect, where over time you would see a reading, the next test it would go away, And the next time you'd see that reading again, maybe back up to or even above what that was. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you see that in the clomiphene study here, too. | ||
| I mean, almost 260. They stopped the study. | ||
| It was still appearing in picogram levels in some subjects, and they stopped the study at 261 days. | ||
| And you see those numbers I was reading to. | ||
| You see this one subject at 174 days. | ||
| He's negative the next time, and then he pops up in the 200s after. | ||
| So it's actually more than the time before. | ||
| Again, apples and oranges, different substances, but the commonality here is chlorinated substance. | ||
| Chlorine-based. | ||
| So is it safe to say that this is an emerging science and that we're still... | ||
| Learning and understanding this as we go along. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's still very young. | ||
| Look, the first, you know, the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were established, the first drug testing laboratory by Dr. Catlin. | ||
| So really, you know, in the scope of science, going back to the earliest days then, you're talking about, you know, what? | ||
| 30 years, 30, 35 years. | ||
| Again, when I started off in this 16 or 17 years, the science still wasn't good. | ||
| They were unable to detect anything in the picogram level. | ||
| Again, for reference, very interesting. | ||
| So the WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agencies, accredits laboratories across the world. | ||
| And they have certain standards that those laboratories must meet in order to retain that accreditation and keep that accreditation. | ||
| So they have a technical document called the minimum required performance levels of their laboratory. | ||
| So what they tell the laboratories is you must detect these substances down to this amount. | ||
| If you can't get them down to this amount, then you can't have an accreditation from WADA. So the class of substances that oral terinobol would be in, which would be other anabolic agents, the required minimum level that they must detect to is only two nanograms. | ||
| So, look, WADA even says, as long as you can get to two nanograms, you can retain our accreditation. | ||
| Well, what's happening is in arms race in these laboratories, they're saying, well, two is the minimum standard, but I can get down further. | ||
| And, you know, these are private entities that, you know, are looking for customers. | ||
| So to be able to reach out and say, well, even though WADA tells us two is as low as we need to go, we can go down to one picogram. | ||
| I think in a sense, maybe you need to slow the reins on that a little bit that we're getting too far and too sensitive of a level of detection when it comes to implementing a fair program, because you can't determine where one picogram came from. | ||
| You could be breathing, again, contaminated air, drinking contaminated water. | ||
| It gets real dangerous when you get down that low. | ||
| Now, how does this reflect on past suspensions? | ||
| This is, when you deal with something like, let's bring up Frank Mir, for example. | ||
| Didn't Frank Mir also test for oral turn of ball? | ||
| Okay, I want to get back to Frank Mir, but let's go back to John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And this instance and why USADA has come out and said, look, this is not a violation. | ||
| So if you go to the WADA, the World Anti-Doping Code, there's a section 10.7.4.1. | ||
| Our UFC program basically mirrors that. | ||
| And we're bringing that up on the screen there. | ||
| So for purposes of imposing sanctions under 10.7, an anti-doping rule violation will only be considered a second violation if the anti-doping organization can establish the athlete or other person committed the second anti-doping rule violation after the athlete or other person received notice pursuant to Article 7, etc. | ||
| This is what's known as a double jeopardy clause. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what it means is a guy tests positive for something, and if he's test positive for the exact same substance that is still in his system a year later, or whatever the amount of time is, you don't include that as a new positive test. | ||
| One more thing has to happen. | ||
| Science has to determine that there hasn't been a re-administration. | ||
| So test positive for the same substance, and science says, based on all the numbers we see, there's no evidence of any re-administration. | ||
| And the non-evidence of the re-administration is the lack of short-term and medium-term metabolites. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| Never, ever in John's... | ||
| Is there an issue, though, that this is only one test, that Gregory Wachenko's test is the only study that showed that these medium and short-term metabolites exist? | ||
| It's the only study, but I think then, if there's only one study, you have to go to anecdotal evidence, right? | ||
| Why don't we just do studies on UFC employees? | ||
| Get Sean Shelby to take Oral Terenabol. | ||
| He'll do it. | ||
| Oral Terenabol is illegal to distribute. | ||
| Let's do it in Mexico. | ||
| In any country throughout the world, it's illegal. | ||
| Every country. | ||
| But I thought Mexico, they just let you do whatever you want to do. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe we can look into that, but Shelby may be up for that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's the reason for living there. | ||
| I have a problem with that in that we're relying on one study. | ||
| This seems to me to be like a critical thing that could affect... | ||
| I mean, we're hoping and we're putting faith in this study that this is the only way that these metabolites express themselves. | ||
| Is it possible... | ||
| That these, like you see with the pulsing effect, that you see positive effects and negative, or positive results and negative results, that these short-term and medium-term metabolites don't always express themselves, and that what we're considering a long-term metabolite could, in fact, just be a metabolite. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess it's possible, but are you going to sanction an athlete again because, you know, potentially it's possible in the theory of the universe? | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| Let me read to you real quick what these experts came out at in terms of re-administration. | ||
| Dr. Daniel Eichner runs the Salt Lake City. | ||
| It's called the Sports Medicine Research Testing Laboratory, or SMIRTLE. They're one of two water-accredited laboratories in the United States, the other one being at UCLA. Again, one of the most respected minds in anti-doping, PhD, chemist. | ||
| His answer in terms of re-administration was this, and you very rarely see scientists at his level talk in absolutes. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And here he says, there is no evidence that DHCMT has been re-administered. | ||
| That's in writing to us, so very definitive on that. | ||
| Usada is science director. | ||
| Now, Daniel is independent even of Usada. | ||
| So those who criticize, hey, Usada's in bed with the UFC. Daniel Eichner doesn't work for Usada. | ||
| He runs an independent laboratory. | ||
| Usada sends samples there. | ||
| The NFL sends samples there. | ||
| Major League Baseball sends samples there. | ||
| The NCAA. He's independent. | ||
| Owns his own laboratory. | ||
| USADA also put out a letter to us in writing, upon careful consideration of the very low concentration of the DHCMT long-term metabolite in Mr. Jones' sample and taking into account the human pharmacokinetic characteristics of this particular long-term anabolic steroid metabolite, | ||
| Based on data to which USADA has access to and in consultation with scientific experts, some of whose opinions are enclosed, USADA has concluded, consistent with prior residual amounts detected in Mr. Jones' sample, that the presence of DHCMT long-term metabolite is consistent with residual amounts from exposure prior to July 28, 2017. Look, I'm not an expert. | ||
| I don't profess to be. | ||
| My background's in finance and accounting. | ||
| I traced the money back in the old days, but I know who those experts are out there in the world, and these are them. | ||
| By putting these things in writing, putting their reputations on the line now and forever going forward. | ||
| They're never going to do something like that because the UFC pays USADA to administer our program or because Jon Jones is a popular fighter and they want to see him fight this weekend. | ||
| That's just not the way this world works. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| In fact, it works the opposite way. | ||
| There would be a great benefit if they could catch him cheating. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And historically, experts like this are very, very conservative when it comes to talking in absolutes like this. | ||
| They don't normally do it. | ||
| In all fairness, the real question is guys like you and me, because we are UFC employees. | ||
| So are we going to handle this fairly? | ||
| I get that argument. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| And I saw that left and right, that, hey, Jeff and Joe are paid by the UFC. Of course they're going to come out in this way. | ||
| But look, all these things that I'm reciting today— I would never do that in regards to cheating. | ||
| I wouldn't either. | ||
| I side with the UFC on a lot of things because I support the sport and I want it to excel. | ||
| I don't side ever with cheating. | ||
| If I think that there's some way, somehow, that someone is given an unfair advantage and this is somehow being covered up, I would rather not work for them. | ||
| Joe, my last 17 years of my career, everything that I've worked for is to protect the rights of clean athletes and to eradicate cheating from the sport. | ||
| I can't tell you how strongly I feel about that. | ||
| Sport's given me everything in my life. | ||
| My dad was a high school basketball coach. | ||
| It paid for my college and scholarships. | ||
| At least the good characteristics in me, I can all trace directly to sports and sports. | ||
| Entering into the equation the issues of breaking the rules, the issues of the health and safety aspects when you have young, and I talk to many parents whose kids use steroids because they saw the professional athletes doing. | ||
| Entering that into the body when your hormonal levels are already out of control is very, very dangerous, both short and long term. | ||
| I can't tell you how passionate I am about this issue. | ||
| And those out there that are saying that I'm corrupt, that my reputation is out the window, I would never, ever, in a million years... | ||
| You can't listen to those people. | ||
| I mean, obviously you have, but you can't listen to those people because they want to find things wrong. | ||
| One of the things that I've said about you is you're a guy who loves to catch people cheating. | ||
| You like it. | ||
| You enjoy it. | ||
| No, that's not true, man. | ||
| You do. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Come on, if someone is cheating and you catch them, tell me you don't like that. | ||
| In the UFC program, now with what we've established here, absolutely. | ||
| Back in the old days, and we've talked about this, look, when you had in baseball or in cycling... | ||
| No testing going on. | ||
| Literally, the organizations were looking in the other direction. | ||
| I've often said, look, I don't agree with what they did, but there's a portion of me, and that's why I think a lot of these athletes respected me and shared that information. | ||
| There's a portion of me that said, I don't agree with what you did. | ||
| I'd like to think I wouldn't have made the same decision, but I damn well understand why you did this. | ||
| You're fighting for millions of dollars in contracts. | ||
| You know your teammates are doing it. | ||
| You know, your competitors are doing it, and you know your professional sports organization doesn't give a shit because of the weakness of the testing program or total lack thereof. | ||
| So in instances like that, I never came away saying, that guy's an idiot or an asshole for choosing. | ||
| I came away saying, I kind of get why he did it. | ||
| If I was 21 or 22 years old and immature, I may have made the same decision. | ||
| Now, coming to our program here, where you have an organization that cares very much, that spends multi-million dollars a year, this program has done nothing but cost the UFC money. | ||
| It costs us money on how we implement the program. | ||
| It costs us money on canceling fights. | ||
| Anybody who thinks moving this fight to California is at a financial benefit to the UFC is crazy. | ||
| We're taking a bath on this one. | ||
| People really do need to understand that the UFC decided themselves, they self-imposed USADA's sanctioning of fights. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Nobody forced us to do that. | ||
| So this was a big step in the right direction of trying to make the sport cleaner because we recognized that, first of all, there was some legal stuff with the testosterone replacement therapy that just threw everything out of whack, where it was essentially It was sanctioned cheating. | ||
| I mean, let's be honest about what that was. | ||
| It was clearly, in my understanding, being manipulated. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Very easy to manipulate when you get permission to use any prohibited substance like that. | ||
| And we went from that to unbelievably strict protocols, and now what you're seeing is, you're seeing, first of all, we saw a radical change in the physiques of some fighters, where we did have some suspicions, and those suspicions, at least in my eyes, had been confirmed. | ||
| And now we're seeing the good side of this with what, in your estimation, might have been moved over into a position where, okay, now it's getting a little bit ridiculous in terms of what we can detect and what is causing fights to be canceled. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, interestingly enough, the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, their next code revision is 2021. And so they regularly put out, hey, what are the issues going forward that we want to address? | ||
| And one of the major issues is potentially establishing thresholds for these low-level substances that keep appearing, DHCMT being one of them. | ||
| Osterine being one of them. | ||
| And so the idea that WADA is looking at and has a working group of worldwide experts is, hey, if something gets reported back at under 50 picograms, all the evidence is showing, more likely than not, this is from a very low-level contaminant issue. | ||
| We've never seen an issue of a microdosing or an intentional use that's reached that level. | ||
| Why are the labs even reporting at We're good to go. | ||
| Fairness due process in a program is just as important as the strength and comprehensiveness of that program. | ||
| You'll lose faith in your athletes. | ||
| You could have the strongest loophole-free program in the world, but you start implementing things unfairly, you'll lose faith just as much as if you had a bunch of loopholes in the program. | ||
| It's got to be fair. | ||
| Are you aware of the female skier that tested positive because of lip balm? | ||
| Yeah, I vaguely recall about that. | ||
| Someone else used a lip balm before her? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It was a lip balm for sunburn. | ||
| It was for sunburnt lips, and it had some ridiculously small trace amount. | ||
| Was it Osterine? | ||
| Her name is Joberg? | ||
| I'm trying to remember her name. | ||
| Well, there was the cocaine kissing defense, which actually won an arbitration, so something similar. | ||
| Somebody tested positive for low-level metabolites of cocaine and basically said, look, hey, whether that was good or not, but... | ||
| The arbitrator bought it and the science shows, hey, that is a possibility. | ||
| The detection levels are so low, if you kiss somebody who had just done cocaine, they're now able to detect at those levels in the person that kissed that person. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Did you find this woman? | ||
| Yeah, there's a doping label on the label, which is why they gave her a penalty, apparently. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What is the... | ||
| Who the fuck's reading labels on lip balm? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| See, that's how crazy it's gotten. | ||
| I mean, all our athletes know when they're using a creatine or a protein or whatever, I think most of them are pretty careful right now, but... | ||
| To tell them, hey, you need to read your lip balm and your deodorant. | ||
| I mean, what level are we getting to here in these levels of detection? | ||
| So she, 29-year-old star of Norway's powerhouse squad of skiing, cross-country skiing, tested positive for an anabolic agent listed in the contents of a treatment for sunburn. | ||
| This could be similar in some ways to what Chad Mendes tested positive for, for something for psoriasis, correct? | ||
| Chad Mendes has obvious psoriasis. | ||
| You can see it on his body. | ||
| He's talked about it pretty openly and he used some sort of a cream and accepted his penalty. | ||
| He wasn't aware that this cream had something, some type of a steroid into it. | ||
| Yeah, I'd seen him publicly state that. | ||
| Now, he chose not to present a defense or go to arbitration, so I haven't seen anything in detail to give you a knowledgeable opinion on that. | ||
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| So let's get back to the Frank Mir case. | ||
| Frank Mir tested positive. | ||
| Was it also oral terinabol? | ||
| Also, same thing, long-term metabolite of oral terinabol. | ||
| Here's the difference. | ||
| Frank Mir, the same as John Jones his first time through, was sanctioned. | ||
| John didn't get off the first time this showed up in his system. | ||
| He was looking at potential for years, went to arbitration, presented evidence, enacted some other clauses in the policy that reduced his sanction. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well, one of them was substantial assistance, where he assisted USADA in some way, shape, or form, and he got a reduction for doing that. | ||
| Assisted in what way? | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| And this is the exact reason why I do this. | ||
| So I insulate myself from that interaction between USADA and the athlete. | ||
| They are the sole adjudicator in this. | ||
| They do not, you know, get me on the phone and say, hey, we're thinking about going this way. | ||
| They adjudicate completely in a vacuum. | ||
| And you're, just so people know, your title is... | ||
| Safety, health and safety? | ||
| Athlete Health and Performance. | ||
| Vice President of Athlete Health and Performance. | ||
| So you no longer work for USADA? I've never worked for USADA. That's a big misconception. | ||
| A lot of our fighters think that. | ||
| I've never worked for USADA. I was a federal agent for 22 and a half years. | ||
| The latter part of my career got involved with all these PED distribution cases. | ||
| 2015, Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White, through a mutual friend, contacted me and said, hey, would you come out and Kind of talk to us. | ||
| We're contemplating maybe putting our own program together. | ||
| We've had some recent high-profile positives. | ||
| So I came out to Vegas, talked with them, and a week later I get a phone call asking if I want to come work for them and kind of implement this new program. | ||
| But I've never been an employee of USADA. Okay, so that's good to know because that's been stated by some public figures that you used to work for USADA and now you work for the UFC. Never worked for USADA. And that you're a shill. | ||
| That's one of my favorite words. | ||
| So you never worked for USADA. You brought USADA to the UFC or communicated with USADA and facilitated this agreement? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So I never worked for USADA. I did work very closely with USADA. So USADA, when I first started these series of investigations back in 2002, look, I knew all about how to work a heroin distribution organization, a cocaine distribution organization, methamphetamine organization. | ||
| But when it came to performance-enhancing drugs, there was no class that myself or really any other federal agent or law enforcement agent goes through surrounding distribution of performance-enhancing drugs. | ||
| So I was examining the discarded garbage of Balco every week when they put it out to the curb. | ||
| Began seeing notes, wrappers, all these substances. | ||
| I had no idea what these things were. | ||
| I didn't know the difference between testosterone, epitestosterone, erythropoietin, HGH. I knew nothing. | ||
| So what I did is I figured out who those experts were, who were the people that could very quickly get me up to speed on what I was looking at. | ||
| Dr. Catlin, who ran the UCLA Olympic lab, was one of the first, and he started kind of walking me through this. | ||
| He put me in touch with USADA, and they began educating me as well. | ||
| So over the course of those investigations, I got a lot from them in terms of educating on these substances. | ||
| They were bringing some of their cooperating witnesses to me, and then we'd go off and running on criminal investigations, but never worked for them. | ||
| So, USADA, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way they would work would be very compartmentalized. | ||
| Like, they would not specifically communicate with you on all of the details of this? | ||
| Correct, and they don't now. | ||
| I mean, that's the independence aspect. | ||
| I don't, as these deliberations are going on, what they're looking at, I don't know. | ||
| Cooperation, just for me, to be frank, in my eyes, would mean that something was done purposely, illegally, and this person had some knowledge of purposeful, illegal activity, and that they would somehow communicate this to facilitate some sort of catching of someone involved in a criminal act or an act of cheating. | ||
| Yeah, that would make sense to me too. | ||
| So that would be what we're talking about. | ||
| USADA would allow John a shorter suspension if he actively participated in helping them catch people that were cheating. | ||
| That's the understanding. | ||
| That would be implied. | ||
| I don't know to what level that was done. | ||
| I don't know if it was that or if it was, hey, here's how this drug works in more general. | ||
| I don't know what it was. | ||
| But that would mean that John would have to know about cheating. | ||
| If you're saying, like, this is how this drug works, this is how I used it, I mean, that would mean his initial defense would have to be thrown out the window because it wasn't an accident. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't know about that. | ||
| If he knew something separate from, you know, that he wasn't doing, but someone else, yeah. | ||
| And again, I don't want anybody to reach that conclusion. | ||
| I have no idea what his substantial assistance entailed. | ||
| None. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's a slippery slope. | ||
| It is a slippery slope. | ||
| And look, transparency is important in any program, But, you know, only to a certain level. | ||
| Look, if you were transparent about what everyone's, you know, cooperation or substantial assistance was, and the whole world knew about it, you're never going to get anybody after that coming in and cooperating. | ||
| I saw this definitely on the criminal side with, you know, informants. | ||
| You don't, that's not something that you want to be transparent about or disclose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But there's going to be a bunch of people that have a real issue with that. | ||
| The idea that John Jones, one of the greatest fighters of all time, is actually working as an informant. | ||
| I mean, it's listed in McLaren's ruling that that was one of the reasons for the mitigating factor and the reduction, but I don't... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Again, Joe, I'm telling you, I know nothing about it. | |
| Nothing about it. | ||
| It's been stated. | ||
| We know what it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Or we know that it's a thing. | ||
| When it comes to John's initial test where he was sanctioned and was suspended for a determined period of time, Frank Mir also... | ||
| Was sanctioned for a determined period of time as well. | ||
| He was two years. | ||
| John was shorter than that because John cooperated in a bunch of other deals. | ||
| Two things. | ||
| He not only cooperated, he went to arbitration and put on a defense. | ||
| He put on a defense that, look, the evidence here shows no intentional ingestion of it. | ||
| In fact, McLaren gave him a further reduction based on there was no evidence that this was intentionally done. | ||
| Frank Mir didn't put on any, he had every right to go to arbitration, put on his own offense, didn't do that. | ||
| What about Josh Barnett? | ||
| Josh Barnett, you know, completely different set of facts. | ||
| His came from a contaminated supplement. | ||
| It was a different substance. | ||
| He went to an arbitration hearing. | ||
| The arbitrator ruled with Josh and said, yep, you know, based on where we are now. | ||
| I think that's a good example of the checks and balances in place here. | ||
| You've got me overseeing the program, taking a look at how these things come out. | ||
| You've got the ability from the athlete to go to McLaren's group and And judge, you know, the set of facts. | ||
| And in that case, McLaren's group said, USADA, I think maybe you overreached a little bit here. | ||
| And I believe Josh and Josh is, you know, basically time served. | ||
| So, you know, you want to see them get it perfect, right every time. | ||
| But, you know, the reality in the real world is that doesn't necessarily happen. | ||
| And that's why you have these checks and balances available. | ||
| Um, Josh Barnett's take on the matter is that they tried to paint him as guilty even though he was not and that he feels like he definitely got a bad deal and that he was labeled as someone who was taking this substance. | ||
| He was suspended for a long period of time while he was going through this and although he was found not guilty, that he feels like not enough emphasis was... | ||
| Put into establishing that he was not guilty and that, you know, he feels like they chased him down over something that he didn't do. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, here's what he did do is he used a supplement that if he would have listened to anything that we educate on, that USADA sends out regular reminders our fighters are required on a quarterly basis to go through videos in their whereabouts filing that deals with these issues. | ||
| If he would have followed any of that advice when it came to his supplement choices, he would have never chosen the supplement he used. | ||
| When I heard about that supplement and what was on the label and how it was marketed, I said, okay, well, that's likely the candidate of where it came from. | ||
| So, I mean, the analysis would be, hey, that pool, be careful. | ||
| There are sharks swimming in that pool. | ||
| They can eat you. | ||
| And the person jumps in the water anyway saying, look, I didn't want to get eaten by a shark, but a shark comes up and ate them. | ||
| it's like, hey, we told you that this was the case. | ||
| You didn't follow that. | ||
| Now, there also needs to be a differentiation between someone who's intentionally cheating and someone that just makes a naive supplement choice. | ||
| There needs to be a differentiation between that, and there was in that case. | ||
| Josh didn't get the full penalty of what that substance would have rendered. | ||
| But he did have to go through a long period of time where he was unable to fight. | ||
| He did, but again, he had the prohibited substance in his body. | ||
| USADA has to look at, hey, even though you didn't do that on purpose, did that give you a performance-enhancing benefit? | ||
| Did it allow you to recover a little bit better? | ||
| Did it make you a little bit stronger? | ||
| And that's why those strict liability provisions are in there. | ||
| Otherwise, people would just take these prohibited supplements and say, oh, I didn't know it was an accident. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And meanwhile, they're getting a benefit from it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So they have to have some sort of penalty in place. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Now, I also think, again, there needs to be a differentiation between the intentional and non-intentional, and we do have that in our policy. | ||
| There are definitely mitigating factors available in our policy that if you didn't do a thing on purpose, you're not sanctioned. | ||
| Tim Means is a great example there. | ||
| So Tim Means used a relatively benign supplement. | ||
| It was a creatine. | ||
| Creatine, you know, generally doesn't have an issue as opposed to like testosterone booster supplements. | ||
| We tell our athletes, stay away from anything marketing as a testosterone booster. | ||
| It's one of the most common with contaminants or purposeful spikings. | ||
| Tim Means uses a creatine. | ||
| It had Osterine in it, a very small amount. | ||
| We found it in there. | ||
| You know, Osterine is a two-year sanction. | ||
| He got six months. | ||
| You know, so back relatively quickly. | ||
| Was the same thing with Yoel Romero? | ||
| So, correct. | ||
| Yoel Romero used a natural diuretic product that had a SARM in it. | ||
| In all these cases, not only does the prohibited substance need to show up in what the athlete has said they've used already, but to protect against making sure the athlete isn't purposely spiking it, USADA will go out on their own, on the market, independently procure hopefully the on the market, independently procure hopefully the same lot of product. | ||
| And in the case of Yoel and Tim, they were able to do that, test it completely independently of the athlete, determine what level the prohibited substance is in that. | ||
| Based on the interview with the athlete of how much did you use, when's the last time you used it relative to this test, do the science calculations just to make sure an athlete's not saying, well, I know this creatine has spiked with Osterine, so I'm going to go use Osterine. | ||
| And then I have a built-in excuse when I test positive for Osterine. | ||
| In order to be able to match contaminant levels with what's being excreted in the urine, you would literally have to have a PhD chemistry degree, and I'm not aware of any of our athletes having that. | ||
| It would be very, very difficult to do that. | ||
| And so these detection levels, again, we're talking about nanograms. | ||
| We're not talking about large quantities that would indicate... | ||
| Or picograms. | ||
| Picograms, okay. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Now, why was this moved from Vegas to California? | ||
| And why did the California State Athletic Commission, why did they accept this fight taking place here? | ||
| And why did Vegas say no to it? | ||
| So... | ||
| Internally, UFC-wise, we first—in fact, Donna Marcolini, who you know who works with me— Shout out to Donna. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We're a two-person shop, and the woman's a hawk. | ||
| She's one of the hardest workers I know. | ||
| She's awesome. | ||
| She's taking a look at something that we have access to called the Clearinghouse, and it's basically a recording of all the tests on our athletes. | ||
| So we can get on there. | ||
| Somebody says, hey, how many times was John tested last quarter? | ||
| We can get on there and pull that up. | ||
| The public also has access to our testing records, not with a specificity that the Clearinghouse has, but the public can get on. | ||
| And you saw it on a weekly basis, updates how many tests an athlete's done. | ||
| So there's some guys out there on the Internet from the day one of the program have kept track of what week their numbers tick up. | ||
| So you can go find spreadsheets on the Internet, at least from a weekly basis of when our athletes were tested and how many times every week. | ||
| Crazy, huh? | ||
| So the Clearinghouse program is very specific. | ||
| We can get on there and see the actual date of the collection, and next to that we see negative, positive, or pending. | ||
| So Donna came to me late November, early December, saying, hey, I'm looking at John's tests, and I'm seeing pending still back from, I think it was maybe August, September. | ||
| You think something's going on here? | ||
| And of course I'm like, okay, well he's fighting pretty soon. | ||
| I hope not, but... | ||
| Let me reach out to USADA. So I reached out to them. | ||
| They said, we're working on something. | ||
| We're conducting a study. | ||
| We're talking to other professional sports leagues. | ||
| We're talking to the laboratories out there. | ||
| And don't have an answer for you now, but stand by. | ||
| So I think it was December 6th, they sent a letter to us. | ||
| And they sent a letter to the Nevada State Athletic Commission saying... | ||
| Just so you're aware, over the last six months, early in this six months, we've seen a re-emergence of this long-term metabolite in John's samples. | ||
| So when was this? | ||
| So this was early December, December 6th. | ||
| We and the Nevada Athletic Commission were notified. | ||
| You were notified, but the test was from previous? | ||
| Yeah, so these tests covered from August through November of 2018. Okay, so there's more than one test. | ||
| Several of them. | ||
| Oh, so more than one test showed this metabolite. | ||
| So what they said was August 9th, negative. | ||
| August 29th, eight picograms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eight. | |
| September 18th. | ||
| Eight. | ||
| September 18th. | ||
| So, I mean, there's a good... | ||
| So he's negative on the 9th. | ||
| 20 days later, so inside Rechenkov's 22-day window, he shows an 8 picogram, no short-term metabolites, no long-term, no parent. | ||
| No medium-term. | ||
| No medium, I'm sorry. | ||
| No medium, only long-term. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We then go to the 18th of September, 19 picograms. | ||
| And then that's followed by four negative tests. | ||
| September 21st. | ||
| October 2nd, October 11th, and November 14th. | ||
| So at this point, late November, early December, USADA says, okay, we've done our studying. | ||
| Those two low levels in August Are residual. | ||
| There's no evidence of any re-administration based on lack of short and medium term and parent. | ||
| Based on our consultation with other leagues, with these labs that are seeing this, we're calling this, this would be double jeopardy if we did them again. | ||
| Okay, so this is something that should be really emphasized because there's a lot of people that don't understand this. | ||
| This is not just this one test. | ||
| These are many tests that have been done over the course of John's suspension and then ultimately relicensing that are showing this exact same metabolite at a very similar level that according to previous tests, specifically on clomiphene, that this could be this specifically on clomiphene, that this could be this pulsing result of existing and not existing. | ||
| But this is not indicative of... | ||
| In any way that can be provable of microdosing. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And not only that, but this is over, we're talking about this being over long term, long periods of time, many months. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, and consistent numbers over many months. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And again, going back to what one expert, Dr. Bauer, said, you've got to be careful. | ||
| What you're talking about, single, double picograms, and you see some variants, you've got to be careful about saying, well, it went from 9 to 18. That means re-administration. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's inexact science at that level. | ||
| The WADA labs, this is a non-threshold substance. | ||
| So all WADA requires them to say, to report back to WADA, Positive or negative. | ||
| They're not required to quantify. | ||
| However, these water labs have also realized there's an issue when you're getting down to picograms. | ||
| So what they're doing is going back after reporting the positive. | ||
| Hey, let's see if we can estimate what this level is. | ||
| It's an inexact science at picogram quantities, in my understanding, to estimate what those levels are. | ||
| And you can see some variations. | ||
| So Nevada... | ||
| Is unwilling to sanction the fight based on all this information? | ||
| So they get the initial notice that we got also, I think it was December 6, saying, look, there was an issue in August. | ||
| These long-term metabolites reappeared again, but we've since had four negative tests. | ||
| We don't believe that the August reappearance is a readministration. | ||
| There's no sanction here. | ||
| Nevada, you don't even have jurisdiction over the August test. | ||
| Again, keep in mind, these are UFC tests. | ||
| Nevada doesn't mandate it. | ||
| But Nevada says, look, closer to a fight, we do take jurisdiction. | ||
| We will adopt these USADA tests. | ||
| So USADA didn't need to notify. | ||
| They thought, out of an abundance of caution, let's let Nevada know that this issue exists. | ||
| God damn you, Sada. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| But hey, wait. | ||
| That's all good. | ||
| Nevada gets this. | ||
| I talk with them. | ||
| They're like, whoa, this is concerning, but we don't see anything within our jurisdiction here. | ||
| So I certainly hope that no subsequent tests show up positive because that could be an issue. | ||
| And sure enough... | ||
| USADA collects a sample from John on 12-9. | ||
| They expedited the results because they knew a fight was coming up, and they do that now when the collections are done close to a fight. | ||
| And here, you know, he pulses back up to, you know, between 60 and 80 picograms. | ||
| So Nevada gets this. | ||
| This was last week, man. | ||
| The days have run together for me. | ||
| So a week ago Friday, we have in Bob Bennett, who's the executive director. | ||
| Well, I'm a big fan of. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| I should say, I talk shit about Nevada, but I really like Bob. | ||
| Former FBI agent, so we've got a ton in common. | ||
| And he doesn't fuck around. | ||
| He is. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| One of the reasons why it probably wasn't sanctioned in Nevada was because they're so by the book. | ||
| I get angry because I wanted the fight to be in Nevada, but I understand Bob's position implicitly. | ||
| So let me make clear what happened. | ||
| Bob came in, Anthony Marnell, the chairman of the commission came in, and a couple of representatives from the Nevada Attorney General's office. | ||
| So they are the ones that prosecute cases involving PED use that violates Nevada regs. | ||
| So we share all this with them. | ||
| Like this, like you did with me. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Share it all with them. | ||
| And look, there's some misconception out there. | ||
| They did not say, this fight's absolutely not happening next week. | ||
| In fact, they, I think, were understanding these issues, but said, look, you know... | ||
| Optically, this doesn't look great, and we feel that out of an abundance of caution that we need to have a public hearing and be very transparent about this, because this is some weird shit. | ||
| This was last Friday, so we're eight days out from the fight. | ||
| So we start talking about, hey, when can we potentially have this? | ||
| And unfortunately, Christmas holiday, several of the commissioners weren't even in town. | ||
| And basically what they said is, look, we will absolutely do this if you want us to, but likely that hearing would not be until today, Thursday, or maybe tomorrow, Friday. | ||
| And And, you know, Marnell's like, look, I'm starting to get my head around this, but I can't guarantee you that my other commissioners or me are going to come out the same way. | ||
| So you're taking a chance here that we could say, well, we need more information. | ||
| So basically, they were willing to listen to it. | ||
| I think they were starting to wrap their heads around it, but didn't feel that they were up to speed enough on it. | ||
| They didn't have the luxury that Andy Foster and California have. | ||
| Remember, when John tested positive in July 2018, that fight was in California. | ||
| Because that fight was in California, California retained jurisdiction. | ||
| They've had two very public hearings on John when they suspended his license, and most recently, a week and a half ago, when they reinstated his license. | ||
| So Andy and the Commission were very familiar with oral turinibol. | ||
| They were very familiar with the long-term metabolite. | ||
| And in fact, Andy was somewhat critical of USADA during the last hearing. | ||
| He thought, after looking at all the details, after reading McLaren's position, that there was no evidence that this was done on purpose. | ||
| He thought, man, maybe they went a little bit hard on him, and he stated that in that second hearing. | ||
| So with the reemergence of the picogram quantity of this M3 long-term metabolite, Andy and the commission, unlike Nevada, didn't need to get up and speed on it. | ||
| They've already had two public hearings on John's issue. | ||
| They were intimately familiar with some of these dynamics of this drug and the metabolites, and that's why he felt comfortable based on their familiarization with it and based on these written absolute statements by these experts that there was no re-ingestion, one. | ||
| And then the second thing, which we haven't covered, is these experts said, based on these low-level picograms, there's no performance-enhancing benefit. | ||
| And that's an important point. | ||
| Because if you would have told UFC, look, this is still remnants from a year and a half ago, but we can't rule out that he's not getting a performance-enhancing benefit from it. | ||
| Well, in that instance, I'll tell you, and I stand by this, I would leave this company if somebody told me otherwise. | ||
| If there was any indication that there would be a benefit from him, even though it technically wasn't a violation, I'm not going to stand by, well, anybody licenses that guy to fight. | ||
| Could this have been somehow or another mitigated by communicating these results to Nevada earlier? | ||
| Well, we didn't announce the fight that John was going to fight in Nevada until October. | ||
| But in October, could you have said, hey, look, here's this issue... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Potentially, but the issue was USADA hadn't come to that. | ||
| They were in the middle of that point of consulting with other professional sports leagues, with the other WADA labs. | ||
| They hadn't reached their conclusion. | ||
| Their science expert hadn't determined, hey, this is definitely residual, no performance enhancing. | ||
| They were still going through that data at that point. | ||
| So what they've told me is, look, we tried to hurry that along as fast as possible. | ||
| We wanted to make sure that we went through this in very, very detailed and no stone left unturned. | ||
| When did they reach this conclusion? | ||
| So this was early December. | ||
| So December 6th, that letter went out saying, we've had these two low-level positives back in August. | ||
| Well, okay, but here we are. | ||
| I mean, this is the end of December. | ||
| Could this have been headed off at the pass? | ||
| Well, again, when Nevada first got notified... | ||
| We were hoping, well, he's had four negative tests, so he's probably going to be negative going forward here, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what the layperson would think. | ||
| Okay, he's probably out of the woods now. | ||
| But, again, getting back to what period of time is this in John's preparation? | ||
| And if you look at some of these numbers and when these metabolites appear and disappear... | ||
| In early August, John was preparing his defense for this arbitration. | ||
| I think he had an idea based on talking to his attorneys. | ||
| Like, hey, we got a pretty good shot here of some mitigating factors where this is potentially going to get reduced. | ||
| So I think, you know, he starts to get a little bit motivated, gets in the gym, starts training again. | ||
| Clearly, in early December, that's the period of time when our fighters that close to a fight are bringing down that body weight, right? | ||
| They're cutting body fat. | ||
| They're losing, you know, a little bit of water. | ||
| So it certainly seems to correlate these pulsing effects with when... | ||
| This is just theoretical, right? | ||
| That it's released in the adipose tissue? | ||
| Absolutely, it is. | ||
| So this positive result was announced when? | ||
| So, a week ago yesterday... | ||
| And this is USADA's announcement. | ||
| USADA notifies us, the UFC, that always happens, and they notify if any commission has jurisdiction. | ||
| At this point, this close to a fight, Nevada has jurisdiction. | ||
| So, I get the call, and you can imagine what's going through in my head. | ||
| I mean, I've gotten so many of these calls now, I literally, for the first five or ten minutes, can bury my head in my hand and think through exactly how this thing's going to play out. | ||
| And, you know, it's going to be, hey, Nevada's going to say, wait a second, what's going on here? | ||
| We need to root this out. | ||
| John's going to say, Jesus Christ, what is going on in my life? | ||
| I can't get a fucking break. | ||
| I'm trying to be careful. | ||
| I even went through how DC is going to react and he react. | ||
| He's going to be, I fucking told you this was the case. | ||
| This guy's a cheater. | ||
| You know, USADA's bullshit. | ||
| Nowitzki's bullshit. | ||
| All this stuff goes through my head in the first five or ten minutes. | ||
| How's Dana going to react? | ||
| How's Hunter going to react when I have to go over to his office and explain this out to them? | ||
| It played out exactly as I saw it. | ||
| It's some of the worst days of my career when I get these calls. | ||
| But, you know, everyone was notified, and Nevada was in our office two days later, and again, I mean, there's been some criticism of them out there. | ||
| I don't fault them. | ||
| This is a complicated issue that optically doesn't look great, and to do anything in a rushed manner would be difficult. | ||
| They did everything they could to afford us having a hearing. | ||
| Problem was, it was just too close to a fight. | ||
| So essentially... | ||
| To get this out, this issue with optics, right? | ||
| Because you go on Twitter, everybody's calling them a cheat. | ||
| Everybody's saying that, you know, anybody that sanctions this, you're sanctioning cheating. | ||
| For someone to get an understanding of what this is like, it actually requires probably more than we've done now over the last hour and 15 minutes. | ||
| Yeah, and I appreciate this forum. | ||
| I mean, Dana and I went on SportsCenter and announced it in a three-minute hit, and I came out of there going, absolutely, everyone in the world is going to say, this is bullshit. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| We're going to have a hard time doing this in two hours here. | ||
| Yeah, most things. | ||
| Yeah, you've got to delve into it, and you also have to put your trust and reliance on these experts. | ||
| They have... | ||
| years to come up with these absolutes there's no one else in the world but maybe a dozen people that can come up with these conclusions you do have to put your you know your faith in in their background and their careers and their knowledge and education and you know i read what those absolutes were that there was no evidence of any re-ingestion this is by multiple um experts and that john would not have retained any performance benefit based on these low-level picogram amounts | ||
| Well, I'm happy that we're going to have this out there, so people, if they have the time, if they're really that interested in it, this is probably a more in-depth discussion of this than you're going to get anywhere else. | ||
| But I really wish we could have gotten something like this to Nevada, and Nevada could have gone over this and looked at what I'm seeing, what you're saying. | ||
| It seems to me that we could have just had some sort of a meeting and kept this fight in Nevada, and it would have saved everybody a lot of heartache. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think things were pointing in that, but there was no guarantees in that. | ||
| Roll the dice, baby! | ||
| It's Nevada! | ||
| Come on, it's Vegas! | ||
| You know, the other thing that was being looked at was fairness to these athletes. | ||
| Really, you're going to put John and Gus, maybe more importantly, in a position where he doesn't know until two days or a day before whether this fight is happening or not. | ||
| And not even mentioning the other fighters on the card. | ||
| And look, you can talk to, and I have, to Sean and Mick and Dana and Hunter. | ||
| All these fighters want to be on the big pay-per-views. | ||
| the fight at the top of the card the more eyes are on that fight and when you have a spectacular fight in the first second fight on the card if it's on a big pay-per-view with a giant fight at the top of it that can propel your career your next fight you could be fighting the main event on you know a fight pass and progress from there so I think you know I think it's accurate to say that generally everybody wants these these cards to be as big as possible and | ||
| And when all the experts are telling us, A, 100% this isn't a sanction, B, he's not retaining any performance-enhancing benefits, I think, and clearly Dane and Hunter thought this, we have an obligation to do what we can do for fairness, for John, definitely, for Gus, for the rest of the card, to try to make this fight happen. | ||
| Going forward, is there any way we could ever prevent something like this from happening again with a similar situation in a place like Nevada? | ||
| So here's... | ||
| I think we have a couple solutions to that, and it's not necessarily relative to the commission, but one thing that obviously protected John a lot in this was the frequency of testing. | ||
| You know, if you look at his numbers, and these were... | ||
| These were instances where they collected samples, but in many of these cases, they did multiple tests on him. | ||
| And that means, you know, the tests I'm reading were for the anabolic steroid panel. | ||
| But in addition to that, they may have done a biological passport test on that same collection. | ||
| They may have done an HGH test, an EPO test. | ||
| And this is all confidential that USADA doesn't release all this information? | ||
| They release numbers on the publicly available website, but you don't see what those tests are done. | ||
| So the reality, and they just told me this, is John was one of the most, if not the most, tested athlete over these last six months. | ||
| When you look at total amount of tests on his samples, excuse me. | ||
| One thing that obviously protected them here was that volume of testing. | ||
| And so, USADA came to us and said, you know, hey, we think that you probably should, you know, up the amount of tests that you're doing. | ||
| So, we just renewed a contract with USADA and we're increasing our testing numbers by 30 to 40%. | ||
| We currently The first three years of the program, we're under contract for approximately 2,700 tests. | ||
| And starting this next year, we're going to up that to around 4,300, 4,400 tests. | ||
| So I think it's going to be more of a burden. | ||
| You're just out of showing up in more doorsteps early in the morning of more of our athletes. | ||
| But I think this is a perfect example that that increased volume of testing actually can be a protectant. | ||
| To the athlete, especially when you're talking these low-level picogram quantities and contaminated cases and things like that. | ||
| We just got to get athletes to stop taking any supplement that's not third-party tested. | ||
| Great point. | ||
| So here's what we've done in that area. | ||
| So... | ||
| About three months ago, USADA hosted a working group. | ||
| It included the UFC, myself, and our sports nutritionist, Clint Wattenberg, who you've met, were there. | ||
| Major League Baseball was there. | ||
| The Department of Defense was there. | ||
| There's been warfighters who have purchased supplements at bases over in Iraq and Afghanistan that contain ephedrine and other bad products. | ||
| Some of them potentially have died as a result of ingesting them, so they definitely have an interest in safety and dietary supplements. | ||
| And USADA's experts were there. | ||
| What we did is we invited in the major third-party certification companies, and each one took a half day presenting what their programs look like. | ||
| We went back and huddled after each one and huddled at the conclusion and said, what is a platinum standard third-party certification look like? | ||
| All these presentations we got, what was strengths in ones, weaknesses in the others, and we have to put a perfect one together, what does it look like? | ||
| Over the last month, we've been authoring a paper that's going to be published in a scientific journal going over what that gold standard, platinum standard, looks like. | ||
| Going forward, any third-party certification company that can meet that, and there are some that are very close, I think will be able to do it very quickly. | ||
| We are going to say, USADA is going to say, this is an approved line of supplements. | ||
| We approve you to take this. | ||
| And this is something that we've been unable to do in the first three and a half years of the program. | ||
| And I tell you, Joe, it's the most common question I get from our athletes. | ||
| What's USADA approved? | ||
| And as soon as I say, USADA doesn't approve any supplements, but here's how you ensure your safety. | ||
| They stop listening. | ||
| Goes in one ear, out the other. | ||
| This is a silly suggestion, but why doesn't the UFC come up with its own supplement line and provide them to the fighters and say, you can't take anything else? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been talked through. | ||
| If they had sponsorships with other supplement lines. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's a lot of dynamics to it. | ||
| It's not as easy as doing it overnight and the distribution method. | ||
| If you could say, hey, you could take creatine, you could take all the multivitamins, you could take branched-chain amino acids, all these things that have been proven to be effective, but that's weird too, right? | ||
| It's like they're effective, meaning they enhance performance and recovery, but they don't do enough to be considered a performance-enhancing drug. | ||
| Yeah, and they're present in the food supply, too. | ||
| So, like, you know, basically, you can go eat 10 chicken breasts or, you know, have a couple scoops of protein if you're on the go and don't have time to do it. | ||
| So, I think, again, apples and oranges in terms of performance enhancing or not. | ||
| So, the theory would be we have an approved – when I'm – or Donner asks that question, what's approved? | ||
| I can say – Here's, let's say, NSF. NSF has 1,200 supplements that are approved. | ||
| I'd say, all 1,200 of these are approved. | ||
| You should only use these. | ||
| If something were to happen to an athlete that used an approved line of supplements, it's a get-out-of-jail-free card. | ||
| If they can prove it, and you saw it independently prove it, there's no sanction. | ||
| I think that is going to go a long way, and I'll give you a reason for that. | ||
| Major League Baseball does that. | ||
| They have for the last couple of years, now they have some advantage in that all their athletes are employees and are coming into the same facility during the season. | ||
| So they have some control over theirs. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| Our athletes are spread amongst, I think, 46 countries throughout the world. | ||
| So it's more of a challenge. | ||
| But baseball said the only supplements we're allowing in the clubhouse or in a facility are, and they use NSF supplements, they had zero contaminated supplement cases last year. | ||
| They had, I think their testing numbers were four times the amount of our testing numbers and zero contaminated supplements. | ||
| I mean, the proof's in the pudding right there. | ||
| So they have some sort of a deal with NSF? I don't know if it's a deal other than they've examined who those certification companies are and they feel that they're, you know, at the top of the line. | ||
| We don't want to exclude any. | ||
| That's why we're contributing to this paper to say, look, anyone could be one of these approved lines, but you must meet this criteria for a platinum standard program. | ||
| But it's coming from someone who's in a supplement business, me. | ||
| That's the Wild West out there. | ||
| Boy, is it. | ||
| I mean, there's a... | ||
| There's a lot of shit out there that's just... | ||
| They purposely add performance-enhancing drugs to their stuff because it's cheap, and people take it, and they experience these gains, and then they sell a lot of it. | ||
| Yeah, and then you get a following. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I saw that when I was with the FDA. What they normally will do for maybe the first six months of the product, they'll spike it with something if they're going that route, and then to decrease liability thereafter, they've already got the following... | ||
| They back off. | ||
| The stuff's working like hell, and then they back off just in case the government starts sniffing around. | ||
| And it doesn't work anymore. | ||
| People go, oh, my body must have adapted. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No, you're off the juice, son. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's really such a shame because this is such a fantastic fight. | ||
| I mean, there's so much drama involved already, just having Jon Jones returning, having Alexander Gustafson looking absolutely sensational in his last fight with Glover Teixeira, all the trash talk and hype and intensity and the fact that this is really, other than DC vs Jon, this is the fight that people want to see in the light heavyweight division. | ||
| And look, nobody's saying, and I'm certainly not saying that John didn't do anything wrong. | ||
| He obviously did. | ||
| John has two times now tested positive for prohibited substances. | ||
| However, in both occasions, arbitrators have determined that it was not done intentionally. | ||
| So anyone who says that, oh, John's getting off light on this, he's been suspended for almost two and a half years. | ||
| With a lack of evidence of any intentional use or cheating. | ||
| You know how much money he's probably lost in those two and a half years? | ||
| I mean, tens of millions of dollars, his reputation. | ||
| Anybody who says that he got off scot-free on this, I would argue the otherwise. | ||
| He was settled to the strictest of liability standards out there. | ||
| Someone at the top of their game, money earning potential like him. | ||
| There's also an incredible amount of stress and pressure that's on him. | ||
| He's a human being. | ||
| He feels and he hears what people are saying about them. | ||
| And that's got to be very difficult. | ||
| Also, coming off of this massive suspension. | ||
| So he's coming off of this suspension, which was huge, very public, very worldwide. | ||
| After the cocaine, the car accident, the dick pills that had the stuff in it. | ||
| I mean, there's so many things. | ||
| And then to have this happen literally the week of and have the fight move to California. | ||
| And I get the skepticism that's out there. | ||
| Again, without delving into this, I've spent hours and hours, and these experts have spent their careers looking into that. | ||
| That's really what's required to get a comprehension and understanding of it. | ||
| Another thing, another argument, John's being treated specially because he's John. | ||
| But we had another athlete that this somewhat identical thing happened to, but nowhere near at the level of John. | ||
| So a kid by the name of Grant Dawson. | ||
| So Grant Dawson last summer was in the Dayton White Contender Series. | ||
| We had an awesome fight. | ||
| Dana's like, you got a contract, kid. | ||
| We get them into the USADA program. | ||
| The USADA program requires you to disclose everything you've used going back 12 months or one year. | ||
| The idea being, look, even though you weren't under the program, if you used oral torrentibole eight or nine months ago, There could still be an advantage that you'd be getting. | ||
| We're not going to necessarily suspend you because you weren't subject to the program then, but we're not going to let you fight right away. | ||
| You're going to have to be in the program for a certain amount of time testing clean. | ||
| So he didn't disclose that he was using anything. | ||
| His first test, he tests positive for M3 metabolite, low levels. | ||
| He goes to arbitration, argues, testifies under oath. | ||
| I've never heard of this substance. | ||
| I've never taken it. | ||
| I would never cheat. | ||
| Here are all the supplements I was using. | ||
| I can't find it. | ||
| The arbitrator hears the hearing. | ||
| USADA goes to them and says, hold on a second. | ||
| We're looking into this matter, talking to baseball, whatever. | ||
| USADA comes out that, hey, we can't prove that this didn't enter his substance a year before that disclosure required him to disclose what he was using. | ||
| So he was basically let off and eligible. | ||
| So John's not the only person in the UFC that this has happened to, notwithstanding other professional sports leagues, other Olympics. | ||
| It's happened to other athletes. | ||
| He's not the only one. | ||
| So, I think what's important for people, I get the skepticism, but I think it's very important that people don't accuse someone of something that they didn't do. | ||
| And I want you, if you're listening to this, I want you to imagine if you're Jon Jones and you're trying to get your shit together and you didn't do anything new, you didn't do anything different. | ||
| We've got to have a path of redemption for people. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| And if John, as you're saying, and all these tests conclude, if he didn't do anything, folks, you've got to stop saying he's cheating. | ||
| He's not cheating. | ||
| If he's not cheating, and if it's showing that these are these long-term residual metabolites that are in incredibly small dosages, There's real cheaters out there, and John's fucked up. | ||
| He has fucked up, and you were all right to be upset at him when he fucked up. | ||
| This is not, at least as my conclusion after talking to you, and I've talked to some independent scientists that were skeptical about some of the aspects of it, but they're also... | ||
| They're skeptical because they're not up to date, perhaps, on the differences in this pulsing effect or the fact that this is something that is relatively... | ||
| There's not a lot of... | ||
| A lot of documentation on this. | ||
| This is something that's relatively new in terms of our ability to understand picograms, our ability to understand this pulsing effect, all these different variables that you have to take into account when it comes to this. | ||
| People love to call it cheat. | ||
| They love to. | ||
| And it's good. | ||
| It's good that the people are out there keeping people honest. | ||
| But I think we've got to look at this the right way. | ||
| And I think the right way is the way you're laying it out here. | ||
| I don't see any holes in this. | ||
| So, you know, a couple things in the future that people can look forward to. | ||
| We want, and John wants to fight Nevada again, and Nevada has basically said, look, I think we understand this issue, but we need to have this hearing. | ||
| There will be a public hearing on this, my understanding is early quarter one. | ||
| So, look, you know, don't take my word for it. | ||
| Wait until January. | ||
| I'm sure they'll call some of these experts to testify, introduce some of these documents into the public record. | ||
| And this will likely be far longer even than this conversation. | ||
| Yes, that would be my guess. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, that's to come. | ||
| The whole thing is such a disaster for everybody else on the card. | ||
| For Amanda Nunes and Chris Cyborg and for all the people on the undercard. | ||
| I mean, it's just to have them to move all the way to California. | ||
| What I'm happy about, though, is that the fight is still happening. | ||
| I'm very happy the fight is still happening. | ||
| I am. | ||
| And again, I have to take an objective look about is this fair as it relates to how our policy and what the rules are. | ||
| And, you know, when you have, you know, one of the experts in the world, Dr. Daniel Eichner of the Smyrtle Laboratory, issue an absolute statement like there is no evidence that DHCMT has been readministered. | ||
| And that based on these low levels, he does not retaining a performance enhancing benefit. | ||
| How out of fairness and implementing the program do you prevent this fight from happening? | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| That would be categorically unfair. | ||
| Moving forward from here, what changes and what do we do to stop something like this from happening? | ||
| Well, again, I think the increased volume of testing is going to help. | ||
| I think being able to specifically direct our athletes to approve line of supplements will help. | ||
| But, you know, hey, we can, Don and I can message the hell out of these things, but, you know, it takes the athletes in their camps to listen to what we're saying. | ||
| So, I mean, if anything good comes out of this, hopefully it's a warning to those others out there about how careful you need to be. | ||
| So, just to wrap this up, so people understand, if you want to put a button on this, there's no evidence whatsoever of any microdosing. | ||
| So this is one of the concerns. | ||
| People are worried about microdosing. | ||
| No evidence whatsoever of microdosing. | ||
| It wouldn't be a substance you would generally microdose. | ||
| You do endogenous substances, not exogenous. | ||
| There's also no evidence of the short-term and medium-term metabolites that were recognized by Rechenkov. | ||
| Is that how you say his name again? | ||
| I think it is, yep. | ||
| Why do I say Grigory? | ||
| I have a tough time with it, too. | ||
| Because it's Grigory. | ||
| It's not even Grigory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Grigory. | |
| That's the only test we have. | ||
| No parent compound ever found as well. | ||
| These are the only tests we have that show these long-term, short-term, and medium-term The short-term and the medium-term ones that would be indicative of him taking it recently don't exist at any point in time during these testings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| So this is most likely something that is inside of his body that is in incredibly small levels. | ||
| And is it safe to say that the detection levels, that the detection methods are far superior today than they were a year ago, two years ago, three years ago? | ||
| Increase by thousands of percentage points in sensitivity. | ||
| I mean, again... | ||
| And how recently? | ||
| Over the last five years. | ||
| And how recently have they improved from today versus a year ago? | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| Again, you know, when I heard about the one picogram detection of the M3 metabolite, you know, that was something that happened this year. | ||
| I'm not aware of that ever being that low of a number in any time in the past. | ||
| So I think... | ||
| You know, literally week by week, month by month, as we're going here, that level of sensitivity is increasing exponentially. | ||
| And also, no possible performance-enhancing benefits from these incredibly low levels? | ||
| That's what the experts are telling me. | ||
| Look, and again, I'm not the expert. | ||
| I don't want to profess that I am, but what do I have to go to? | ||
| I need to go to those experts that have made careers out of studying these substances and the benefits, and they are all... | ||
| Universally telling me that there's no performance enhancing benefit. | ||
| Full compliance by Jon Jones in terms of being there for USADA at every single test, notifying his whereabouts, doing everything by the book in terms of what the UFC requires and what USADA requires. | ||
| Yeah, so our program has a three-strike policy. | ||
| So basically, you know, if you miss a test for an unexplained reason three times, then it could be a violation. | ||
| Jon's never had one whereabouts strike. | ||
| He's always been available when USADA's tried to test him. | ||
| And again, especially recently, one of the most tested athletes in the UFC. Wasn't there one test in the past where USADA showed up at the gym and there was some sort of speculation that John was hiding under the ring? | ||
| Pre-USADA. That was pre-USADA before I got here. | ||
| I've heard about that. | ||
| I don't know details. | ||
| I don't know whether it's true or not. | ||
| I think it was a Nevada State Athletic Commission test. | ||
| My recollection is right, but it wasn't a USADA test. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So there's no reason in terms of how you're looking at this particular case that this fight should not take place or that John should be sanctioned any further? | ||
| There isn't. | ||
| And look, it's the least compelling argument, but I think you have to look at it. | ||
| You have to look at the common sense approach to this. | ||
| A guy who went through a year and a half almost suspension, two very, I would categorize as embarrassing public hearings in California, a long arbitration hearing before McLaren. | ||
| all this science is rooted out about how long this stuff stays in your system, long-term metabolites for months, maybe years, you're going to choose to use oral tyrinobol still after going through all that leading up to a fight? | ||
| I don't buy that. | ||
| See, I agree with what you're saying, but in terms of people fucking up, there are no bounds. | ||
| On human stupidity, and in terms of people's ability to do impulsive things that are irrational, that wind up sabotaging their career, there's almost more of an indication that people are willing to do that than not. | ||
| You're less likely, and this is in terms of, especially in fighters. | ||
| Fighters are ridiculously impulsive. | ||
| It's one of the things that categorizes, it's a characteristic of the type of human being that gets involved in that John is a new level crazy guy. | ||
| Least compelling argument. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Least compelling, but I think we'd be remiss if we didn't at least consider that. | ||
| Okay, I see your point. | ||
| I don't buy it. | ||
| That part I don't buy. | ||
| I buy all the science, and I'm a big Jon Jones fan. | ||
| I mean, you can call me a Jon Jones suck-up all day long. | ||
| I think he's one of the greatest of all time, and I think it's not over for him. | ||
| I think he still could reach... | ||
| I don't even think he's at his peak. | ||
| I think he's still got time to be the greatest of all time if he hasn't already achieved that. | ||
| But I think that he's also a wild man. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why he's so great. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why he opened up the fight with Shogun at 22 years old with a flying knee. | ||
| He's a wild motherfucker. | ||
| That's who he is. | ||
| And it's one of many reasons besides his talent that he's so goddamn good. | ||
| I know the lows of the lows he's gone through these last two years. | ||
| You wouldn't believe how low those lows were. | ||
| So again, look, I don't disagree with you that that's not out of the area of consideration, but man, I just don't think anybody could be that reckless. | ||
| I hope you're right. | ||
| I also worry that fighters... | ||
| Oftentimes and I'm not accusing John of doing this but oftentimes surround themselves with morons and these morons give them poor advice and these morons Think that they have ways to skirt systems and and get around the rules and they have people that you know Throw much fancy words their way and they want to believe and this happens all the time this happens all the time with fighters in regards to financial management and And advice that they get with that. | ||
| I mean, I've seen, like, world-class fighters do ridiculous shit in terms of strength and conditioning because some asshole with a good vocabulary talks them into some nonsense. | ||
| This is just one of the things that happens with fighters, and oftentimes they can be around someone who gives them poor advice in terms of what they can and cannot get away with. | ||
| When it comes to supplementation and when it comes to steroid use. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And I see that all over the place. | ||
| In John's case, however, to give credit where credit's due, you know, his team, after the initial positive with the dick pills, was very interactive with me and Donna. | ||
| And, you know, checking supplements, hey, what line should we go to show? | ||
| They, you know, to give them credit, they definitely showed an increased exercise of care when it came to supplementation with John. | ||
| Well that's great to hear and I really hope this is a thing of the past and I hope this is the last time we ever have to talk about John in this term and that moving forward we just talk about him in terms of his performances and his fights and what he's already achieved. | ||
| He's already the youngest UFC champion of all time. | ||
| Anything else? | ||
| Yeah, so I was going to bring this up at the beginning but the golden snitch. | ||
| First of all, that's Brendan Schaub's name. | ||
| He gave it to you. | ||
| So taking on a life of its own, and I think the last time we talked about Donna asking Alexa who Jeff the Golden Snitch is. | ||
| Let's see what Siri says. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Let's see what Siri says. | ||
| I've never tried this. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Who is the Golden Snitch? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's some information. | |
| Oh. | ||
| Quadditch? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's something in Harry Potter. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't know either. | ||
| Is that Quadditch? | ||
| After the last time on, and I mentioned, you know, it was in, I think, my Wikipedia profile, it had me as, aka, the Golden Snitch. | ||
| Somebody took that down. | ||
| Hey, Siri, who is the Golden Snitch? | ||
| No, Siri. | ||
| Siri keeps going with quad itch. | ||
| So someone took it down from Wikipedia? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Why would they do that? | ||
| Well, I think we talked about it. | ||
| You're like, hey, I don't know. | ||
| They just did it. | ||
| How dare you people? | ||
| So, I think I told you last time. | ||
| I bet it's back up already. | ||
| Coworkers call me in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| My family calls me in. | ||
| They call you the golden fish. | ||
| Friends call me in. | ||
| I was at the MMA Awards last year, and some yahoo had a few pops back at me screaming in between presentations, the golden snitch is in the... | ||
| I'm slinking down in my chair. | ||
| My girlfriend and I... There it is. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| The golden snitch is back up already. | ||
| And that UFC on the end of the neck popped up. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Just fucking... | ||
| When they do that, just put your hands up in the air. | ||
| Make a shirt. | ||
| Like you won. | ||
| Yeah, you definitely should make a shirt. | ||
| During shows, I'll sit pretty close to the cage, go out in between a fight into the bathroom. | ||
| And it's not Joe Rogan level. | ||
| We're half the damn arena standing up excited to see you walking in and out of the fighter walk. | ||
| But two or three people in that walk, when I go backstage to check on, you saw the golden snitch. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Steve Reed, you know Steve Reed, our bald security, that badass looking guy on stage? | ||
| He'll come backstage and go, mate, they're calling me the snitch out there, man. | ||
| I think I'm you. | ||
| That poor guy pays for it. | ||
| Steve's a scary guy. | ||
| Dude, he's a great dude. | ||
| That guy is at the top of his game in security. | ||
| Oh, I trust that motherfucker. | ||
| His background is unbelievable. | ||
| I saw him one time in Las Vegas during a fight. | ||
| He was sitting on the floor. | ||
| Something's happened in the fight. | ||
| The crowd goes fucking bananas. | ||
| And everybody stands up on the floor. | ||
| Steve stands up. | ||
| And just motions, sit down, and the entire fucking section sat down. | ||
| 200 plus people. | ||
| I'm like, dude, if you can, without even having to touch somebody, just stand up by your presence alone and control something like that, I mean, the best I've ever seen. | ||
| He's as legit as it gets. | ||
| Are you going to do anything to market this? | ||
| Well, that's getting to my story here. | ||
| It's not marketing, but let me finish the story here. | ||
| I'm in Chicago this year. | ||
| I think that was a pay-per-view. | ||
| You were there, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So something happened, and I was late getting to the arena, and they had cut off kind of the loading dock. | ||
| I couldn't get to it. | ||
| So I had my oldest daughter with me, and so we're having a walkthrough where all the crowd's walking in, and, you know, dude's all over. | ||
| Golden Snitch! | ||
| Hey, can I get a picture of Golden Snitch? | ||
| My daughter's like, what the fuck's like? | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| How old's your daughter? | ||
| So she's 22. Okay. | ||
| So, two days ago, Christmas morning, I'm opening up presents. | ||
| So I get the presents from my daughters, the three of them, and my middle daughter's very artistic, and so they create these cool sculpted beer mugs, and there's four of them. | ||
| One of them's like Bald Guy Brewing Novitski something, and one of them says Golden Snitch Brewing Company. | ||
| So it's a cool looking thing, and she drew me a black and white kind of rendition of all four, which I'm going to hang up really cool. | ||
| So then my girlfriend's there, so she hands me the box, and she's been telling me all along, she goes, I got you the best fucking present ever in the history of presents. | ||
| I'm like, what the hell is this? | ||
| So I open up the box. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she's got this series of t-shirts. | |
| And I think... | ||
| What size are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Large. | |
| Large. | ||
| There we go, man. | ||
| So you... | ||
| Since you created it, you literally and figuratively have to wear it now. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| So that picture... | ||
| There's some... | ||
|
unidentified
|
There we go, baby. . | |
| Ladies and gentlemen, the circle is closed. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| Come on! | ||
| You look like a boot on this or something, man. | ||
| That picture is taken in Moscow. | ||
| I think I can say this. | ||
| Hopefully they'll let me back in. | ||
| It's out in front of KGB or FSB headquarters. | ||
| So that building in the background is... | ||
| KGB, now known as FSB. Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, so I posted a picture. | ||
| She got me like 20 shirts. | ||
| I put them on private Instagram, Facebook. | ||
| Everybody in the world is like, take my money, man. | ||
| Where can I get one? | ||
| Guess what I'm wearing at the weigh-ins tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| You guys created it. | ||
| You gotta own it now. | ||
| I got one for Schaub, too. | ||
| You can throw it on. | ||
| Schaub's mad at you. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| Yeah, he called you the golden rat now. | ||
| He's changed the name. | ||
| I thought maybe you'd have him in here. | ||
| He's misinformed. | ||
| He thinks, first of all, that you were an employee of USADA. Oh, there you go. | ||
| And that now you're an employee of the UFC. He's misinformed about that. | ||
| And I think he likes to call skeptical. | ||
| He's skeptical hippo. | ||
| I am skeptical as well, but I... One thing that I've learned from doing this podcast over the years is that there's no fucking way. | ||
| It's impossible to know everything. | ||
| It is impossible. | ||
| And you have to rely on the expertise of the people who have spent a lifetime studying these things. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| Here's another thing. | ||
| There's no way these people could be lying about this and it wouldn't massively damage their career going forward. | ||
| They'd be done. | ||
| Someone would find out. | ||
| Someone would get to them. | ||
| The other scientists would out them. | ||
| There would be studies done. | ||
| There would be papers done. | ||
| The internet would find out about it. | ||
| Everybody would know. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| It's pretty unprecedented in writing with the lack of these studies, the Rechenko one being the—am I saying it even right? | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
| Rechenko. | ||
| Rechenko. | ||
| It's pretty unprecedented that they would put these absolutes in writing. | ||
| I think they looked at it very hard and detailed, and obviously they weren't quick in turning it around. | ||
| We would have loved this decision to be made a lot earlier, so we could have rooted and vetted it out with Nevada. | ||
| But they did indeed, you know, sign their names to these pretty absolute statements. | ||
| And what else can the UFC and I do when these experts are putting those absolutes out there? | ||
| And I get that people go, oh, what else can the UFC do? | ||
| You've got to understand, folks, this would be career suicide. | ||
| This is... | ||
| This is cutting-edge science we're talking about. | ||
| There's too many people that would have a vested interest in calling bullshit. | ||
| They don't fuck around when it comes to these things. | ||
| The people that are at the front of the line when it comes to catching people on these things and the science that they're imploring, that they're involved with, you can't guess on the outside with no education. | ||
| It's just not wise. | ||
| And this is what I keep seeing over and over again. | ||
| It's people that have some knowledge, a little bit of knowledge, and they're pretending that they have a PhD in this shit. | ||
| For those that want to do more detective work, go read McLaren's written decision on John's July 2018 test. | ||
| Go read the Rechenkov study on the DHCMT and the metabolites, and go read the recent clomiphene study where it shows this chlorinated substance. | ||
| It's pulsing. | ||
| It goes away, comes back higher than before, goes away, comes back lower, goes away, comes back higher. | ||
| Crazy stuff. | ||
| Okay, are we good? | ||
| When can someone get one of these? | ||
| She only made about 15 of them for me. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here, man. | ||
| You gotta sell these. | ||
| You have to sell these. | ||
| Maybe do something for charity or something. | ||
| YoungJamie.com. | ||
| Yeah, someone needs to sell these. | ||
| We can talk. | ||
| But then it's not exclusive. | ||
| You want to have the exclusive shirt where nobody else can get them. | ||
| I don't want anything exclusive. | ||
| I'm not into that, man. | ||
| Alright, Jeff, thank you very much. | ||
| I appreciate the opportunity. | ||
| Thanks for coming on here and clarifying. | ||
| Please, folks, please have an open mind. | ||
| Please. | ||
| I know you want to call bullshit. | ||
| There's times. | ||
| There's times to call bullshit, but there's times to recognize that this is a complicated issue and that we've laid it out as... | ||
| I'm pretty convinced. | ||
| Appreciate it, Joe. | ||
| And I'm dumb. | ||
| So, you might be smarter than me. |
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