The Joe Rogan Experience - #1019 - Bryan Fogel

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

Bryan Fogel is an American film director, producer, author and playwright. His documentary "Icarus" available now on Netflix, documents the uncovering of the Russian doping scandal. GoFundMe Page for Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov https://www.gofundme.com/how-is-grigory

All right, we're live. You cool with that bar in your teeth, or are you good? No, no. How are they? Those things stick. They stick, those green belly meal bars. So, first of all, man, your documentary, Icarus, I say that wrong all the time. I say Icarus, but it's Icarus, right?

Icarus. Yeah, that's the guy with the wings that flew too close to the sun. Exactly. It's fucking amazing. It's an amazing documentary. I contacted you. We'd gone back and forth a little bit on Twitter, and then I finally sat down and watched it the other day, and I was like, holy shit. I finally sat down and watched it the other day, and I was like, holy shit.

The extent of the cover-up and the, first of all, for folks who don't know what it's about, the documentary started off just kind of about doping, right? And then it became about the state-sponsored Russian doping program. And then it all imploded while you were doing the documentary. That's right. The documentary, how long did it take you to put this together? Three and a half years. And so what was the initial idea behind it?

So the initial idea, I guess I'll say it's streaming on Netflix right now. They released it a month ago. And the initial idea had come to me essentially when Armstrong confessed. And I'd been a lifelong cycling fan, and I had followed him for my whole journey with him. And what struck me the most about his confession was that if you talk to anybody outside of the sport, they all thought that he got caught. But the reality is, is he actually never got caught. I mean, to this day, this guy is past 500 anti-doping controls clean. So I'm going, wait, not what's wrong with Armstrong. What's wrong with this global anti-doping system that they can't catch the most tested athlete on planet earth. And I'm going, wait, he's tested clean 500 times.

Who should we be mad at? Should we be mad at Armstrong? Or should we be upset at this system that is essentially making an athlete not have a choice as to what they do or not do if they actually want to have a possibility of winning if the system itself is not able to catch them well that's a big factor right i mean that is really an important thing to talk about like it in the high level world of cycling when they took away armstrong's victories in the tour de france i think this the person who got who did not test positive in any tests before that i think

was like 18th place. Is that correct? Somewhere along? I don't remember exactly, but yeah. But there was no one. And then even after his confession, if you remember how they get him to confess, is essentially the feds come in on a criminal investigation, and they basically go to all of his teammates over the years that he had race and basically you know point guns to their head and say hey did you dope or did you not dope

now if you tell us that you doped and that armstrong doped you go free and we aren't going to punish you but if you lie to us there's going to be a price to pay and in doing that all of his teammates who did the exact same thing that he did ratted him out in exchange for their own immunity and um and the rest is history well there's a little more to it too right like he was actually suing people that were saying that he was doping and he was going after them and threatening them with lawsuits and which you know that's and that's you know why before i ever picked up a camera um i had named the film icarus and i had named it icarus um because of what i deemed the armstrong story which was a story of a guy who just kept pushing the boundaries and pushing the boundaries

and pushing the boundaries until he the boundaries and pushing the boundaries until he flew too close to the sun and his, you know, wings burned and he plummeted to the earth. And that to me was a story of, you know, ambition that wouldn't stop and having no filter on how far you went to win and what you were willing to do and who you were willing to destroy in that process to win. And to me, you know, when you take the doping out of it, that's, you know, the problem that, you know, I would have on a personal kind of level with the lance of it, that, you know, it's one thing if you're doing something that everybody else is doing, but it's another thing when you literally are going out and destroying other people's lives to, um, to try to protect your own lives.

Yeah. I mean, I kind of see his position and I see how he got caught up in it and the momentum of it all just sort of brought him to this place where it was almost no, there's no way to do it. Either, you know, you go after these people and try to silence them or you come clean and eventually he was forced to come clean you knew though um and most people did that he was doing something yeah i mean i i had always felt that he was doing something um but i also having been kind of deeply involved in the sport believed that everybody else was doing something also.

So his confession to me wasn't really the shocker. What was the shocker and what set me out on this journey was like in the public court of opinion and what you saw going on in the news was it was essentially like, you know, we've got Gotti, we've got Al Capone, we've got the ringleader, we've got the, you know, the biggest criminal in the history of sport, essentially, and we finally got him. And to me, it was like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. You didn't get him because the system didn't work to get him. And so I started looking at, forget about cycling, I was looking at, well, what does this mean in all sports? What does this mean in terms of the Olympics? What does this mean in terms of basketball and football and baseball and all these other sports if the most tested athlete on planet Earth can't be caught and and that's what set me out on

to make the film initially was to explore using kind of just the armstrong story as the framework but to explore what was what was wrong with the anti-doping system in sport and essentially use myself as a human guinea pig to explore that. And then along that way, kind of show whether or not this system worked and then essentially present hypotheticals about what could be done or what couldn't be done and whether or not we as a society care about drug use and sport. And that was the original concept and construct of the film. Well, drug use and sport is very complicated because it's so prevalent, and it's almost impossible to separate the two when you think about it, particularly the Tour de France, right?

And professional cycling, I mean, it is just a dirty sport. Well, I think that from what I know is over the last several years, it's really cleaned up quite a bit, quite a lot. And if you start looking at the times also, they've started to come down and slow down. But I think that we're probably in a, what I would call it, I don't know, a glory period between the science kind of catching up to the cheaters in some way. And then the cheaters basically figuring out how to out-science the science again. So they're in like a holding pattern. out-science the science again. So they're in like a holding pattern. I feel like in the world of cycling,

at least that's going on to some extent. Didn't somebody just get caught just a couple days ago with an engine in his bike? Oh, that's the new thing, yeah. They're putting engines in bikes. I've read that they're now figuring out how to replicate EPO erythropoietin at the genetic level, basically how to make your cells naturally create more erythropoietin. So there's always going to be

something on that cusp of medical technology and human evolution trying to outsmart the system and the testing. So when you contacted the Russian gentleman, what was his name again? Gregory Rychenkov. And Gregory is the guy, and he's right now in the Witness Protection Program. Protective custody. Protective custody. Now, how did you get a hold of him, and how did you set that up? Because it was fascinating watching you shoot your ass full with like 100 different kinds of steroids.

I mean, it was just, how many different things did you take um i took a lot over how much of a period um about nine months uh about nine months and and what had uh what had happened is is so i decided that i was going to go on this supersize me-esque journey into the world of performance enhancing drugs. And I spend about a year doing all this research shortly after Armstrong confesses, which is 2013, early 2013. And I actually picked up a camera in May of 2014. And over this year, I start talking to all these scientists and I'm contacting people on a global level in Switzerland and Germany and the UK and all over the US.

And essentially each one of these scientists I'm asking essentially the same questions. I'm saying, hey, do you believe the anti-doping system in sport works? And every single one of them said no. And I said, do you believe that you can catch an athlete who is doping? And every single one of them told me no. I said, do you believe that you could still essentially do what Lance Armstrong did and get away with it with the proper advisors? And every one of them said to me, yes. And then I would pose the question to each one of these guys. I said, are you able, would you have this knowledge to advise me how to essentially evade positive detection. And the vast majority of them said,

yes. And I said, but will you do that? And they said, no. And they said, the biggest variable is that you've got to get your samples into a WADA lab, a World Anti-Doping Agency lab. And that becomes very difficult because if you can just get your samples into a WADA lab, a world anti-doping agency lab. And that becomes very difficult because if you can just get your samples into a WADA lab, amateur, professional, anybody, right? Well, you can start figuring out all the, you know, loopholes and what you can do and what you can't do if you can essentially know how to be tested. So the variable was how I was going to get my samples into a water lab. And I start talking to a scientist here by the name of Don Catlin in Los Angeles. And he's considered the grandfather of anti-doping. He created all the tests for the first test for steroid detection in sport.

And he actually is the first guy who did the testing for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, which was the first time they ever did anti-doping testing in sport. So Catlin has developed all these tests and I get in touch with Catlin and he's retired. He's still alive. I think he's about 80 years old and he retired, I't know five six years ago and I quickly realized in talking to Catlin that he's he's very frustrated he basically has felt that he spent his entire life and career in a system that he was never going to win at and that no matter what he did and he would develop one methodology to catch somebody, the very next day there'd be another way around it.

And then he would develop another methodology, and then the very next day there'd be someone around it. Or he would propose that the league or the NFL or baseball or whoever you want to say should use this test to catch, you know, this sort of substance abuse. And the leagues would not use that test intentionally. Or he would find positives and report the positives and then be told basically to, you know, pretend that there wasn't a positive because his job was simply to report, not to police. And he had spent an entire career

with this. And so he has, you know, I think a lot of frustrations with the anti-doping system. And he said that he wouldn't help me do it because A, he would have had to prescribe me drugs, and he didn't want to be liable for that. B, he didn't know how he was going to get my samples into a water lab because he doesn't have access to that anymore. And he was worried about his legacy. He didn't want to, as much as he felt all the fallacies in the system, he didn't want to be out there, you know, basically almost in a way making a mockery of all of his work. And he says, hey, I know this scientist in Russia, Gregory Rechenkov.

He runs the WADA lab, the World Anti-Doping Agency lab for all of Russia. And I think he might help you. And, you know, essentially he said that because he knew that the Russians had, you know, always been kind of trying to figure out ways to game the system. And he had met Gregory in like 1983. And that's a whole other story.

Because Gregory had basically come to the United States as a spy to figure out what the Americans were going to beat him against in the 1984 Olympics, which I can talk about later. But I get in touch with Gregory, connects us through email, and I start emailing Gregory. And we spend about eight months back and forth on emails, calls. At the time, he had just done the Sochi Olympics. So he was doing all the testing for the Sochi Olympics. And he invites me out to Oregon, and this is July of 2014, to go meet him. He's lecturing at this symposium. And he doesn't know at the time that I want to dope. He just thinks

that I'm an American filmmaker making a documentary exploring the anti-doping system in sport. So I go out to Oregon, and I make a decision that I'm not going to bring my camera crews. I'm not going to, you know, do anything other than to just meet him. And we start talking, and I say to Gregory, and he had just finished the Sochi Games, I said, do you believe that a medal in the Olympics can be won without performance enhancing drugs? And he goes, no. And I say, why? And he says, well, I should believe, I try to believe, but I don't believe a medal in the Olympics can be won without performance enhancing drugs. And then he takes this pause. I'll never forget this. And he goes, I don't know, maybe I'm a bad man. And he says this

to me. And, um, and that, you know, was this moment where I went, okay, clearly there is a, a deeper story here that the, the head of the anti-doping laboratory in Russia is telling me that, A, he doesn't think you can win an Olympic medal cleanly, and, B, he doesn't know whether or not he's a bad man. What was going through your head? It was like I think I just hit the mother load for what will be a riveting film and a global story. And I say to him, and we had really bonded, and I really like the guy. As you see in the film, I mean, he's impossible not to like. And I like him, I liken him kind of like Bryan Cranston in Breaking

Bad. I mean, he's this guy who's living this, you know, he's, you love him. And at the same time, he's doing things that he shouldn't be doing. And he'd been living this double life. His entire life was living a double life, which is insane. And he agrees that he's going to help me dope and avoid detection. But before this, he agrees, but he's not admitting to anything. No, not admitting to anything. So he's just showing you how it can be done. But he says, look, you know, you're an amateur cyclist. You're not a professional.

And in his mind, even though I was, quote, unquote, cheating, I wasn't cheating anyone out of anything. Right. And you were doing it very openly. Yeah. And I was doing it very openly. And so he viewed it as kind of like, hey, this is a cool project to get involved in. And in his mind, I think he also looked at it as, hey, what's the big deal if I expose the fallacies in the anti-doping system because maybe they'll actually do something about it

if I show essentially how it doesn't work. So he agrees that he's going to be my doping advisor. And this is now July, 2014, but I had to do the race clean first. I then had to go and, you know, through this whole thing. And I wasn't going to actually start doping until essentially the beginning of, of the next year and beginning of 2015. So you had to do the race clean to get a base? Yeah, to do. And because my whole premise was, Hey, I'm going to do this race twice. So you had to do the race clean to get a base? Yeah to do and because my whole premise was hey I'm going to do this race twice. I'm going to go in it and do it clean.

See how good I do and then the next year I'm going to go in just dope to the gills with the hope that I'm going to win it. Now how much cycling had you done before this? A lot. A lot. I grew up racing when I was 13. I'd race seriously until I was 19. But then I moved out to L.A. I was in a huge, like a horrific bike crash when I was 19 in a race. And that essentially, I guess, I didn't have the balls after that. I went back and raced another year. I lost eight teeth. All of these were shattered.

This one was knocked out entirely. And it was like, it was a bad wreck. And when I was 19, I just, my freshman year in college, and so I went through college basically with plastic teeth in my mouth as I was going through essentially like reconstructive dental work. And it made me really think twice about being a professional athlete or pursuing cycling. And I came back to it the following year. And as you know, you know, in any sort of competitive realm in sport, you can't be thinking about whether or not you're going to get injured. You can't be

thinking about what those risks are. You have to, you know, be fully committed or you're going to lose or you're going to get dropped. And, and I found myself, you know, not following the wheel close enough. I found myself holding back on descents. I found myself like in my mind of, oh my God, what if this crash happens again? And so I decided to stop racing and moved out to LA. I got into the entertainment business. I was doing stand-up comedy originally. But cycling remained like my passion in life. So it's just like my life's therapy. Like you know, when I'm stressed out, I go on the bike.

And so I've always rode, but I stopped racing. But to go back and do this, it was like, okay, there's a part of me where I'm going to kind of go relive my, my youth or the idea of how good I could possibly be. And, um, and the bigger element was it is, I thought it was going to be, um, a compelling film and something that would be very interesting, not for cycling, you know, people that were into cycling, but into sports and curious about, you know, drug use and sport and performance enhancing drugs and what they do and what they don't do. So the first run at it, you had been off cycling for how long? I'd been, uh, I had still been training and riding and riding, but the first

run at it, I mean, I like radically amped up my training program for like six months ahead of time because I was going to do this thousand mile race through the French Alps in Europe. What's the race called? Called the Haute Route. So you get ready for this. Now, when you say clean, are you taking any supplements, multivitamins? Are you doing anything? I was taking vitamins. I was taking creat. I was taking

creatine, but I was always doing protein shakes. I was doing, um, you know, all sorts of recovery drinks and, you know, essentially training, uh, you know, getting my blood monitored and eating super, super healthy and, you know, essentially training as, you know, as scientifically as I could without using any sort of illegal substances. And so what kind of results did you get the first race? I got 14th out of 440 guys. That's pretty damn good. It's pretty good. I was destroyed after it, but it was pretty good

So then the race is over how long after that do you start doping? Six months, so you wait six months six months. I wait six months. Are you training at all during then? Yeah? Yeah, I'm training. I'm training, but I'm filming I'm filming interviews because I was filming I I'm filming interviews because I was filming. I probably had 50, 60 interviews that never made it into the film because the film took this pivot. Have you thought about releasing those in some way? Maybe YouTube or something like that? have the rights to that or you know at least the first right to it um so you know perhaps i would do like a a side series um behind icarus where i could right you know roll out all these various interviews because i interviewed so many interesting people yeah because i was so compelled by the end of it you know it could have been a series i could have could have kept going with it um so

six months after then you you get back together with Gregory. Yeah. And so I get back to him. Exactly. So I get back to Gregory. And in the film, you see this Skype call. And so, you know, in a creative filmmaking process, editorially, you're always faced with decisions of, okay, do I spend 10 minutes of this film on all these emails back and forth to Gregory before we see him on Skype? Well, that's not as dynamic as boom, you see him on Skype. So that very first call, which was the very first time I had had him on Skype, and it was the first time that I had seen him since Oregon in July 2014. And now I'm beginning my protocol. And there he is, shirtless and willing to help me. And at almost that very moment, this German television show comes out, like a 60 Minutes piece called ARD is the station. And this German investigative reporter, Hajo Sepet,

who unbeknownst to me at the time had been following the story of essentially the possibility of Russia having a state sponsored doping program had already interviewed Gregory. And he puts together this like 30 minute explosive, like 60 minutes show alleging that Russia has a state-sponsored doping program and that he's working with these two whistleblowers that have basically fled Russia to go work with him in Germany and tell their story.

And these two whistleblowers are now like enemies of the state, and they're worried about their lives, and there's threats to their lives. And they essentially start bringing forward information about a state-sponsored program. And the information is so compelling that WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, launches an investigation into the claims behind this German television show. And there's a backstory to that, which is that WADA had had this information for four years, and they sat on it, because they're essentially in bed with the IOC and the Olympics. So the only reason why they finally acted on this information out of Russia

was they were forced to, because it was now in public and this German show had done kind of the equivalent of putting it on a front page of a New York Times. And so they had to take action. So WADA launches this investigation. It's now January 2015. And I'm just working with Gregory and Gregory shows me he says, hey, have you seen this television show on me? And at the time, I hadn't. And I watched this show, and there it is. There he is being alleged as essentially the guy who is doping all the Russian athletes, that he knows everything. There's athletes on camera saying that Dr. Rechenkov is the guy you go to.

And it was a major pivot point in the story. But for me at the time, I made a very, very succinct decision, which was I'm going to continue behind the scenes to follow this story, this investigation, because I didn't know where it was going to go. But in the meantime, I have Gregory, this Moscow scientist, he's helping me to avoid detection. And that's the movie that I set out to make. And so I'm going to stick on that journey while doubling down on the other side of the story, should this side of the story end up truly being something. And so this is essentially a year. And so he's doping me this entire year, while he's under investigation, while I'm literally going to guys like Dick Pound, who founded WADA, and Richard McLaren, who's investigating him, and the guys within WADA and different guys in global anti-doping. And I'm saying, hey, what do you know about this Russia investigation? What do you think if this proves true?

Do you think Gregory Rechenkov is involved? And none of these people that I'm interviewing know that I'm working with Gregory. They have no idea that I'm doping. They have no idea that I know Gregory. And so I'm getting these very, very candid, honest responses. And we cut to November 2015, and this 335-page report breaks, and it's alleging that he's the mastermind of a state-sponsored doping program in Russia. But again, it's all smoke and mirrors, and it's mandated to track and field. And that's when things got incredibly serious. Putin gets on state television, it's a huge worldwide story, denies that any of this is true. But he makes a statement stating that if any of this is true, that it will be the individuals that are held accountable and that punishment will be absolute. And that was essentially Gregory's death sentence. And we were Skyping and we were talking during this entire period as this crisis is unfolding in Russia, and he's forced to resign from the lab. The lab is shut down. Everybody's let go.

Russia is suspended from world track and field. Gregory tells me that the KGB, the FSB, have plotted a suicide plan to make it look like he's killed himself. And that he needs to get out of Russia. How did he know that they had planned that? So Gregory had FSB clearance because he was essentially fsb he was part of a secret operation by russia to essentially dope all of its athletes have them avoid detection swap urine etc and so gregory was you know had high clearance and other people within the f FSB that liked him basically said, hey, you got to get out. And so I got him a plane ticket. I put it on my credit card, and he arrives in Los Angeles. This is November 2015. How did they just let him fly? So this, I am sure, to Putin and the other Russian ministry officials, this has probably been the behind closed doors, screaming, shouting matches, I'm going to cut your head off, how did you allow this to happen conversation.

But he gets out of Russia five days after this 335-page report breaks. And he had been working with the ministry. So A, they didn't consider him a flight with. B, he was still going to the lab every day to clean up the mess. And C, he had a visa to come to the United States to lecture, but they weren't thinking that he had a visa at that moment. They weren't viewing him as a flight risk, even though they put two FSB agents living in his home to guard him.

And it was a blip. It was a blip. They hadn't tagged his passport. It happened so fast. He had this visa. And you bought the ticket, so they didn't know that he had a ticket, probably. That's right. Wow. And he gets out. And he gets out. And I'm sure that, I mean, there's probably been endless, you know, people getting their, you know, jobs lost in Russia because this guy was able to get out. At the least.

Yeah. Now, and that's at the least is a very important point because at least one guy wound up dead. Two. Two. What was their circumstances? Like very suspicious circumstances, right? So Gregory arrives to Los Angeles and he brings with him three hard drives. And on these hard drives essentially is the irrefutable evidence of essentially Russia's state-sponsored doping program. system, when I began to truly understand what this was, I mean, this upends all of world sport.

This changes whether the Olympics want to acknowledge it or not. This changes all of Olympic history. It changes the last 40 years of the Olympics because it basically shows that because it basically shows that pretty much every medal ever won by Russia in Olympic competition was won through illicit means, that Gregory was behind a state-sponsored doping program where essentially pretty much every athlete on the Russian national team was, you know, an employee of the Russian state and that Russia had, you know, went into each one of these Olympic Games and world competition cheating to use sport as a way to assert itself geopolitically and as a way to show itself as a strong country. And we forget, I think in the U.S., I mean, A, I mean, sport is what people care about on this planet. But, you know, Orwell said it best, that sport is war without the weapons. And if you look at what these Olympic Games are every two years, And if you look at what these Olympic Games are every two years, it's every country on planet Earth coming together, and from the information that I have, they essentially did the same thing that Russia did in the Sochi Olympics.

The world has never seen an Olympic Games like those Beijing Games, the opening ceremonies, the closing ceremonies. What that was was that was China showing the world we're a first world power. We can kick your ass. We have nukes. We are a global economic force. And look what we can do world because the entire world's eyes are on the Olympics being watched by billions of people. You think that China is a great country? Look what we're able to do.

And on top of that, they needed to win. Because it's not enough just to show this infrastructure that they can build. It's also we can win. We are superior. And that is what countries have been doing for the last 40 years in the Olympic Games, just like Hitler did in the 1936 Games that helped unify his power and help, you know, bring Germany together. And so this is what the history of the Olympic Games have been, shrouding under this mask of peace and goodwill and unity and handshakes. This is countries around the world going in and showing the rest of the world their strength and power. And Russia certainly has viewed

that every two years as a platform for Russia to assert itself geopolitically. And in so doing, they put together a state-sponsored doping program to help, you know, advance Russia's geopolitical goals and show itself as a world power. Is there any evidence that China's done the same thing, or is it just speculation that they've got a state-sponsored program as well? Well, I personally don't have the evidence. According to Gregory, and I have no reason to doubt Gregory, especially in light of everything that he has said has proven to be true, he was at the 2008 Beijing Games.

And according to him, what would happen, different than what Russia did in Sochi, but according to him, what would happen is that the Chinese athletes, and if you look at the medal count out of Beijing, China swept those Olympics, just like Russia swept their own Olympics. And according to Gregory, what the Chinese athletes would do is they would show up for their doping tests. And certain collectors, meaning when the athlete shows up, they have to be chaperoned.

And they're basically chaperoned, and that chaperone watches them pee into, you know, a container. And then they put the pee in these two different bottles, and this is the whole safeguard system. According to Gregory, what was happening in China is that the collectors were actually Chinese government agents, essentially like, you know, secret service for China, and that the athlete would go in to have his, you know, urine collected and this agent would give the athlete a bag of his clean urine and the athlete would put that urine under his armpit and then collect the urine. And that's apparently what China did in the Beijing Olympics, according to Gregory.

And he had knowledge of that. And that is where the idea started to come for how to put into place what they ultimately did in Sochi, where they swapped out clean urine for dirty urine, but they did it in a much more complicated manner because of the camera systems, because of all the technology that was in place. Russia took it to a whole other step further. Those lids that they had used, those supposedly unbreakable lids or unremovable lids?

Yes. Had they been in place before, Sochi? Yes, yes. So what we're talking about is when an athlete reports for a drug test in sport, they pee into one, like a a cup and then they separate their urine between an a sample and a B sample and these two bottles are made by this Swiss company called Berlinger and they are kind of the Fort Knox of urine collection bottles they've created this tamper proof top it seals like it's a vault And this has been considered the global standard. There it is right there. We can see it on the screen.

And these are considered the global standard in world sport. And they're unpenetrable. And if you see here on these bottles, the A sample is allowed to be opened by the lab, right? So they have a machine. It's this special machine that cracks the top, and then you can test it. The B sample is sealed forever. It's only to be opened if the A sample turns positive, and that B sample is put into long-term storage for 10 years. Basically, should testing evolve or whatever or something come up, they have this B sample to go back and test that athlete's urine up to 10 years

in the Olympic vault, in the Olympic, you know, labs where they're holding these samples. So basically what Russia figured out is that they needed to swap out both the A urine and the B urine. But in order to get into those B samples, they had to break into these bottles. So through a couple years of testing, the FSB got involved in a program where they figured out using these tools how to essentially break into these bottles undetected, dump out the dirty piss, put in clean piss, and reseal these bottles. So both the A sample would be negative because that was swapped, and the B sample had been swapped, and it was in long-term storage. How did they swap the A sample? So if they removed the top of the B sample and they swapped that out, what did they do with the A sample?

Well, the A sample, they were legally able to open it for testing. But it was supposed to be tested under, you know, a bunch of other people watching. So what they would do, and this gets into detail into the film, is that they would take basically the A sample that was already in this room, they'd smuggle in the B sample. The B sample shouldn't even been there. And they would crack open the A sample like they were allowed to crack open for testing, but they would do this at like two o'clock in the morning. And they would bring this A sample and the B sample through a secret hole in the wall

of the room where they were aliquoting the urine. There a secret hole in the wall of the room where they were aliquoting the urine. There's the holes in the wall. And they would pass these bottles through the hole in the wall. And once they got through the hole in the wall, on the other side in this makeshift room, which looked like a storage closet, but there were no cameras in there, and they had designed the whole lab for this. I mean, there was a lot of thinking that went into this. Blueprints,

I mean, Gregory showed me the blueprints. I mean, this was thought out years ahead of time, how to do this. And they would swap, they'd bring the bottles into the storage room. They would dump out the dirty urine of the A sample because that was open. They would put in the clean urine of that same athlete that they had collected about a year earlier. They took all the athletes off the drug and would have them collect clean samples. And then the B bottle would go out secretly to a KGB building, an FSB building that was about 100 yards across the street from where the lab was, a secret building. And there they would open up this B sample.

They would dump out the urine, bring it back to Gregory sitting in this room, and Gregory would then put that same clean urine into that B bottle, reseal the B bottle, put the two bottles through the hole in the lab. They'd then take the B sample, smuggle it into where it was supposed to be, the long-term storage container, and all the athletes test it negative. Wow. Now, what did they do in the past? If they did that in Sochi, what did they do in Beijing? What did they do in all the previous Olympics? Well, so that's where it's interesting because, Well, so that's where it's interesting because, and this is kind of the Lance Armstrong of it, or you want to call it the anti-doping system evasion of it, where in the past it was always about the science, right? Which is, okay, what can you take?

What can you not take? How long will you wash out? How long will you, you know, what can, you know, and at what time would you be positive and negative? And that goes into the weeds like, you know, HGH is hard to detect after 12 hours. If you take micro doses of EPO, there's all these, you know, different ways around it. And they were essentially doing that, but they were doing it on a higher level. But they were doing it on a higher level. Gregory, and this is just, again, the incredible two lives that he was leading, so he's the head of the anti-doping lab in Russia.

So he's responsible for testing all of Russian athletes and international athletes coming into Russia for competition. At the same time, he is developing tests to catch these athletes. And he develops a test called the long-term metabolite test. And what this test does is it increases the detection window to detect steroids in the blood of athletes. So prior, they could essentially detect steroid use. It was about a six-week window, something about that, right? If you hadn't been taking steroids for about six weeks, you weren't going to test positive. He develops this test that is able to detect steroid use up to like seven or eight months in the system.

And this is different types of steroids, correct? Because some steroids have a long life inside the body. They're fat soluble. Exactly. So he's able to determine, to develop a test that's the long-term metabolites to basically see that you took these drugs, you know, even if you hadn't taken them for six months. Well, at the same time that he develops this test, and this has now been adopted on a global level, and specifically at the London Olympics of 2012. And I think, don't quote me on this, I think this test really got approved in like 2011, somewhere around there. metabolite test that's catching all these athletes from all over the world because now they can catch them up to six seven months he figures out the anti-venom to his own tests and what he develops is a three drug cocktail where he is able to dissolve the steroids in in a solution of either vermouth martini for the women shivas for the men for the men, whiskey for the men. And he would give the athletes basically the steroids in like a shot and a solution of alcohol.

And what he figured out through the science is that if the steroids were taken with alcohol, they wouldn't actually go into the blood system. So you would get all the benefits of the steroid, but your body would pass it out in a very, very quick time. And so you were undetectable what yeah wow how the hell did he figure that out because he's a genius so wow so so so this guy is you know essentially you know at one time you know so he's figuring

out so all the russian athletes are basically knowing you know, so he's figuring out. So all the Russian athletes are basically knowing, you know, they're on his system. And so they're taking steroids while the other athletes, if they were doing the same thing on a global level, are getting caught. And the world system is using the methodology that Gregory developed. Wow. And so this was the cat and mouse game going on for a very long time and and you know before that it's you know it's the microdosing it's the lance of it it's all the the how do you how do you get away with it um but what they did for sochi is they just said, well, hey, screw that. You know, we don't want to take any chances.

We're going to have our athletes dope full tilt so they can be at their very, very best. And they're going to be dirty as hell, but we're going to swap out their urine. So there's no—and because in Sochi, Russia controlled the lab. They basically owned the keys to the vault They were the policeman. They they were the judge the jury the executioner They had full control and they had a record number of golds. They had a record number that they won 13 golds in Sochi 33 overall medals, which was the highest of any country and And for them for Putin and Russia I which was the highest of any country. And for Putin and Russia, I think when you go into, you know,

what's going on in the U.S. and Russia, the Cold War has never really ended. It's the illusion of a Cold War ending. And what you're seeing is, you know, a country where economically it's always been, you know, you have a lot of wealth in a very, very small number of hands, but the rest of the country is pretty much living in second world conditions. You know, once you get out of Moscow and St. Petersburg and where the main money is. But Russia on a global level is always wanting to assert itself as a, you know, as a world geopolitical power. They have nukes. They have a lot of resources, natural resources. And in the case of Sochi, this was a way for essentially Putin to show, like China did on a global level, look what we're able to pull off in these Olympics.

They spent $50 billion on those Olympics. Nobody had ever done that. His approval rating had been on the decline, but if he could win the Olympics, he could unify Russia, just like Germany winning the World Cup or any, you know, this is because this is what sports is on a global level. Or, you know, the Denver Broncos winning the Super Bowl, the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, and every single person in New England shows up for a parade. People care. And so the Olympics were Putin's way to basically show the world that Russia was an economic power, a superpower, geopolitical power. And if those Russian athletes could win, that's the same thing of going to war. That's showing that they are you know that russia is strong and so the mandate was win at all costs gregory was the mastermind behind that program

and right after they win those sochi olympics putin's approval rating soars to 95 percent and he uses that approval rating to go into the Ukraine and to go into war with Ukraine. I had never connected those together until your documentary when you were talking about them invading Crimea. It instantaneously made me reconsider the impact of sports, like geopolitically. I really didn't think about it that way before that movie. And after the movie, what stuck with me the most, and one of the most disturbing things is, I remember the news where they were talking about kicking them out of Brazil, where they were saying that the International Olympic Committee was going to remove all the Russian

athletes from competing in Brazil. And I saw the story, and I think we probably even talked about it on the podcast. I was like, this is insane. Like I've never, this is unprecedented. And then it went away. Then it went away. And, and what you see in the film and what's going on right now, which is so upsetting in the state of the world that we're in right now is is first is in in the film from this investigation that gets launched from Gregory going to the New York Times and us presenting all this evidence they launched this three months investigation and I'm essentially behind the scenes kind of as a puppet master because

Gregory can't talk he's in protective custody and so I'm the behind the scenes kind of as a puppet master because Gregory can't talk. He's in protective custody And so I'm the guy with his lawyers helping facilitate all the evidence helping to decipher all the documents and we had hired on a whole team of people to do this and That's that scene in the movie where you see where I'm sitting at the table with the leaders of water basically You know telling them that the Easter bunnies and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy don't exist all at the same time. And, and, and so this investigation goes on for two and a half months. And during this investigation, Richard McLaren gets the samples, the, the Sochi samples out of the long-term storage from the Olympics,

the IOC and Luzon. They do forensics on these bottles and they see the scratches on the bottles. They see how the bottles were opened. They bring in Interpol and other agencies and they figure out the tools, how Russia gets into the bottles and they see all the evidence on the bottles. And then they also find an extraordinary amount of salt content in the urine, because what Gregory was doing, which we don't get into the film, is in order to make the clean urine match, he also had to adjust the gravity of the urine. And he would use human table salt to do that. And so when they went back, urine and he would use human table salt to do that. And so when they went back, yeah, when you, when you, when you, when you pee, depending on how hydrated you are, dehydrated you are,

what you ate that day, the gravity, essentially the weight of your urine changes basically what the content of what, what's, what, what your body is. Is that why like dehydrated people have dark urine? Exactly. Is that a thicker urine? Is that what they're doing? Exactly. It's like a heavier urine. Oh. Right? So every athlete, when they would give their sample, part of the doping control form is they mark the specific gravity, essentially the weight of the urine. The biological passport. Is that a part of it? Different.

Because the biological passport is blood. Okay. And that's measuring blood. So they're just measuring the weight of the urine well they're they're measuring part of when they do the intake form on the urine they weigh oh i see uh aliquot and so that so that it's also another thing against fraud because okay so your specific gravity is i'm making this up 0.020 and that's in that sample well so if they were to go back and retest that sample and the specific gravity was wrong well they'd know that something was something was up right so part of swapping the urine is he would also adjust the specific gravity with with table salt he figured out that salt salt would would change the gravity of urine so because he's trying to match on the doping control forms exactly, you know, what's in these bottles, he puts in table salt. And when they go back and test these samples, sure enough, in 100% of the samples they test, they find evidence of the scratches.

They find evidence of tampering. And they find the table salt in the urine. of the scratches, they find evidence of tampering, and they find the table salt in the urine. So this is, this is like, I mean, this is beyond a reasonable doubt that this system happened. This is a slam dunk. And it's now the Rio Olympic Games, and we're sitting there and going, well, every country in the world is calling for Russia to be banned. Every anti-doping agency around the world is calling for Russia to be banned. Every op-ed and New York Times and paper from around the world is saying you have to ban Russia from Rio. And Thomas Bach, the president of the Olympics, essentially has the audacity to call these findings and all this evidence allegations and does not ban Russia from the Rio Olympics, allows them in. So 281,

I think of their 390 athletes go to Rio. And the only athletes that are banned are the World Track and Field Team because he kicked the buck down to the sports federations to decide what to do. And because this investigation had started in track and field, track and field and Sebastian Coe upheld the ban for the Rio games. And here we are now a year and a couple months later, and now the Olympics are trying to decide whether or not to allow Russia into the next Winter Olympic Games. And not only have they essentially removed Richard McLaren from this investigation, and he was able to continue the work through December. And in December of last year, 2016, he is able to release his full findings. And these full findings have 1,200 documents of evidence of emails between Gregory and the ministry,

emails between, you know, on and on that have been forensically proven using metadata where these emails were coming from. The spreadsheets of what every single athlete was taking, when they were taking it. The bottle collection numbers. I mean, you're talking because I've seen the evidence. I mean, it's a graveyard. It's mind-boggling. It's a graveyard. It's mind-boggling. And Richard McLaren concludes that over 1,000 athletes across all sports were involved in this state-sponsored doping operation. And the Olympics, until a couple weeks ago, had done essentially nothing with this information.

They have only trying to figure out essentially how to push it under the carpet and pretend that this didn't happen, how to allow Russia into the next Winter Olympics by finding loopholes, by saying that you can't, you know, that it should be the individual athletes right, etc., etc. And they have an investigation going on right now, which is the investigation to investigate Richard McLaren's investigation, which was already forensically proven. Everything was already shown beyond a reasonable doubt, but to essentially figure out whether

or not they are going to allow Russia into the Winter Olympics. And they are finally reaching out to Gregory, even though he has been available for a year and three months to speak to them. They are finally reaching out to him to have him provide the same evidence that he provided to Richard McLaren and the investigators on that team. So they're very reluctantly pursuing this or very reluctantly even contemplating banning Russia. I think what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, I set out making a movie exploring the anti-doping system in sport. And I uncovered essentially the biggest scandal in sport history. But behind that scandal is I'm seeing essentially the geopolitics and the business interests of all these organizations that basically stand for one thing. They say that they're for something and that they're doing everything to protect their own business interests and do the exact opposite of what they say that

they stand for. And it calls into question that if the Olympics are up there going, play clean, be true, be fair, don't do this, play by the rules, come into these competitions, you know, and respect fellow athletes. And then they're presented with a scandal on epic proportions, a scandal that changes its entire history, that has been forensically proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and then they don't uphold their own rules and they don't act or have a punishment for this? I mean, you have to ask, what's the point of the Olympics? Why even have the Olympics? Why should any athlete on planet Earth who is competing cleanly, who's training their whole lives to go into these games with the belief that they are on at least a level playing field theoretically, and then you have the organization itself not protecting the rights of clean athletes, you have to call into question why have the Olympics? What's the point of it if this kind of behavior is allowed and it's

unpunishable? What do you think is going on? I think that you have billions and billions and billions of dollars at stake. You know, look, I mean, Russia is hosting the World Cup this summer. Vitaly Mutko, who was the sports minister, who was elevated to essentially the vice president of Russia, the deputy prime minister after this doping scandal to basically because Putin took him out of harm's way. You know, he was sitting on the board of FIFA. He helped Russia get the World Cup bid, you know, so that they're hosting the World Cup next year. This is billions of dollars. You know, Putin and Bach are known to be very good friends. I mean, Bach and the Olympics, you know, brought in billions and

billions of dollars from Russia hosting those Sochi games. You know, this is business. There is no interest in essentially just, you know, knocking over the apple cart in the protection of fair sport or geopolitical interests and business interests. And I mean, we see this across all sports, but this is a case where it's night and day. And you're literally sitting at evidence that is basically like unable to act in any sort of ethical or moral capacity to implement any sort of justice against what has been thousands and thousands and thousands of athletes stolen, thousands and thousands and thousands of medals stolen from clean athletes all over the world, not just American athletes. But, I mean, any athlete who went into those games clean and a Russian beat them, they basically got their medals stolen from them. Wow.

Are they hoping that this is just going to be swept under the rug and that there's going to be more news that sort of drowns this out? In my personal opinion, that's how I see it. You know, Gregory Rechenkov, he wrote a op-ed to the New York Times. It was published last week. And the op-ed, his attorneys, because he's in protective custody, were able to facilitate this op-ed to the New York Times. And in the op-ed, if you read it, he goes into detail about the evidence that he's provided, the IOC's lack of interest in doing anything, and essentially, you know, his opinion on Russia's cover-up. And here we are. Not once has Russia accepted any responsibility for this. In fact, they've denied that this ever happened. They're continuing to blame Gregory that this is like a solo act. How could

this man have pulled off this system, this huge elaborate system by himself? And then in so doing, after the New York Times op-ed, Russia issues an arrest warrant for Gregory. And there's already been criminal charges against him in Russia. They've seized all of his property and assets in Russia. They've taken, in the process of taking a home that he bought for his daughter, they're trying to take his wife's property. They took his dacha.

And this is all a man who was working for the Russian ministry, who had the backbone to become a whistleblower, and we're still in this cycle of fake news and denial. And I'm witnessing this on a daily basis, and it's unbelievable because when you look at this story and then you draw a line, which is so easy to draw into the current U.S. political climate and what is going on with Russian meddling into our election, you go, well, if Russia was willing to do this for the last 40 years and we have all the evidence now that they actually did this and they have denied it and continue to deny it and don't take any responsibility. And not only that, anybody who has spoke out against them ends up dead or, you know, or they end up in jail or they end up, you know, in a fake news cycle. I think it's pretty, you know, I think there can be a straight analogy into if there's any question as to whether or not our election was meddled with or whether or not Russia is able to assert its power geopolitically. I think this film answers that question and that I'm hoping that our country is going to wake up and go, hey, we're not going to tolerate this. This is not acceptable. We're not going to allow a foreign power to meddle into our election process or of the bigger implications of what this scandal is and was on a global level and then looking at what that means even for America.

Well, it's essentially highlighting the intentions and what the Russians are willing to do in sport. The evidence, though, of doping is so far and beyond the evidence that we have so far about election tampering, right? We have evidence of election tampering, but what you're telling me is just so ridiculously undeniable and what your documentary shows is so Ridiculously undeniable. It's just stunning that they're allowing the Russians to compete I mean, it's it's really scary When you really think about it that way mean like what is are they being threatened? I mean, what is it just a simply a money thing as you're saying? I mean we're talking about thousands and thousands of athletes and Over who knows I mean there was recently a couple Russian wrestlers had their medals taken away

After the fact because they had new detection methods i believe it was from i want to say 2008 or 2012 yeah right yeah they're finding a lot of positives yeah from 2012 2008 uh has been a little bit harder because of statute of limitations on the retesting of samples. And for a lot of reasons, the IOC doesn't really want to go in there and get all those samples to retest them. Well, there's been so much. Then it proves that the Olympics are a fraud. But there's been so much in the past.

There's been so many allegations of deception and fraud when it came to the Olympics in the first place. There's always been some brewing behind the scenes. But you must have been stunned in the process of making this documentary about one thing. And then while this is happening, you know, just completely, I mean, it seems like synchronicity or something like you just tapped into it at the very moment that this This stream was becoming a raging river publicly it was a weird moment because I Like I like Russia. I love Russians have tons of Russian me to love Russia. I really do guys I really do I mean, you know, I mean it's Scott. I mean, I I mean. I love Russians. I have tons of Russian friends. Me too. Love Russia. I really do. Hey, guys.

I really do. I mean, it's God. I mean, for anybody who's been to Russia, I mean, it's pretty awesome. I mean, Moscow and St. Petersburg are world-class cities. I have so many Russian friends. So we're caught back up in these Cold War politics where essentially all of us individuals, on an individual level, go, hey, I love Russia. I love Russians. And Russians go, I love Americans. And yet we're caught up into the geopolitics like we were in the Cold War between our leaders and the government workings and the ministry that we have nothing to do with it.

government workings and the ministry while we're seeing the government do things and we're learning things of Russian tampering and involvement that I think that Americans a year or two ago couldn't have imagined. And the fact that this story that I uncovered then collides with the election meddling and hacking and Russian involvement into Syria, et cetera, et cetera, and that those things are all coming together at the same time. I mean, I couldn't have imagined because even as I uncovered this scandal and worked to expose this and bring it forward, I had no idea at the time that there would be claims of that our election

was hacked. Yeah, that was never even a discussion before this cycle That was never even a discussion. I can't imagine that Now where when you when this all came out and you put this all together I mean you had to think to yourself like what I've just made is going to change sports Because what you I think your documentary is the most powerful anti-doping documentary ever made I really do and I think what you've done fortuitously for you to be involved in this and be involved with Gregory as this was all going down I mean it's really crazy how the two

coincided together and produced this staggering result. When you're sitting there at the table with all these water guys and you're discussing everything, it's almost like they didn't want to hear it. It's almost like what you were doing was exposing incompetence and corruption in an indefensible way. That's right. That's right. That's right. They didn't want to hear it because it basically showed that their system had been utterly

ineffective at catching cheaters. It showed that it caught them with their pants down. that it caught them with their pants down. And as I got into the weeds on this, you realize that WADA essentially is co-funded by the Olympics. So 50% of WADA's budget is through the Olympics. So they're in bed together. They don't want to do anything that's going to hurt the other. They don't want to do anything that's going to hurt the other. You also realize that there are many board members of WADA are part of the IOC.

So like Craig Reedy, who is the president of WADA, is also the vice president of the IOC. Dick Pound, who founded WADA, was running for the presidency of theIOC and was a vice president of EIOC. So the Olympics and WADA are totally interconnected to each other. And in my opinion, or at least what Gregory has told me, is that WADA was essentially established as an arm of E IOC to help protect its sponsorship dollar and to make the Olympics appear as clean, as, you know, as up to their Olympic ideals. So, you know, what you're seeing within these organizations is WADA has no power to actually do anything. So all that they can do is observe and report. So in the case of this, the scandal gets uncovered. They then do an investigation. They corroborate everything as truth. And then they advise the Olympics. WADA, bless their heart, advise the Olympics that they should ban Russia from the summer games in Rio and that they should

ban Russia from the winter games coming up in Pyeongchang. WADA, that was WADA's recommendation, to which the Olympics did not take that recommendation. And WADA doesn't have any power to actually enforce punishment. So in the case of Russia, in talking to people inside of WADA that were dealing with this over those four years, is they're getting all this information from Russia. But ultimately WADA is going, we don't have the budget. We don't really have the money to do this. They have like a $25 million a year global budget for the entire world. So we don't have the budget to do this. We don't have the manpower to do this. And ultimately, we don't have the power to do anything anyway. And how are we going to go take on Russia? So they sat on the information, realizing that they were ultimately going to be powerless to do anything. So, you know, it's a very complicated system because, you know, at least from what I've seen is there's so much politics and geopolitics around it that keeps these operations essentially, you know, ineffective and actually really doing something. And the anti-doping sport almost becomes an ethical and moral decision if the organizations and leaders themselves are not really trying to do anything about it.

Wow. Now, do you think the banning of the track and field team was just a slap on the wrist, or was it a compromise that was reached where they just said, look, we have to do something? that was reached where they just said look we have to do something what should we do well what had happened is is so the first report was all track and field mandated and and there was so much evidence in regards to track and field more than other sport more than other sport because there was an individual investigation that only focused on track and field. And even after they released this investigation, all these athletes are saying, well, wait, you've got to go investigate biathlon.

You've got to go investigate bobsled. You've got to go investigate speed skating and wrestling and soccer and basketball. You know, everything. But they didn't do that. And so there was so much in the track and field investigation, the athletics investigation, that the IAAF, the International Athletics Federation, dealing with their own scandal. If you remember this a few years ago, the head of the IAAF was arrested on bribery and Lamani Diak and his son. I mean, it's a whole thing. And Lamonti Diak and his son.

I mean, it's a whole thing. And Sebastian Coe became the president. And there was all this proof that the IAAF had been taking bribes for years and years and years to cover up positive results. And that's a whole other story. So the IAAF upholds the ban. And they uphold the ban because of Gregory's evidence. So they were trying to figure out whether or not to uphold the ban, and it was on the eve of the Rio Olympics. And Gregory, through the authorities that he was been working with, was able to get that evidence and information to the IAAF. The IAAF was able to see that and they upheld the ban for Russia's track and field team, which is a pretty big punishment.

At least it's taking a stance of this kind of behavior is not going to be tolerated. Some. Some. Some. Yeah. Now, Gregory, what a courageous and bold move on his part. And what a sacrifice to come forth with all this evidence to risk his life and to, I mean, essentially blow the lid off all this. I mean, if it wasn't for him, what do you have? What do you have? Nothing. You know, it's been a, you know, I worry about him every day. I'm sure. I don't, I'm not able to talk to him.

I'm not in contact with him. Can you get any messages from anyone else to him or him to you? I've been told by his attorneys that he's healthy, that he's in good spirits. that he's healthy, that he's in good spirits. I know he's continued to work and provide information to WADA, apparently the IOC. He will be providing information to the Olympics as part of their investigation. I've been told that he's worked with global authorities and global police agencies to help provide information because he has so much information, not just about Russia, but of all sorts of other things that were going on, of bribes and payments being made. And, you know, not, you know, I don't know what evidence in that regards that he has, but he at least has the, you know, he knows so much. And I know that he has been working effortlessly through his legal counsel to provide this information and to work with global authorities, to work with WADA, now hopefully the IOC, the Olympics, U.S. authorities. But, you know, I don't know what his life's going to be like. Yeah, that's what U.S. authorities. But, you know,

I don't know what his life's going to be like. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. And I don't know if and when he'll ever be able to see his family. We launched a month or so ago, if anybody's interested on my

Twitter page, we launched a GoFundMe for Gregory through an organization called Fair Sport. Fair Sport was launched by one of the producers on my film and a guy by the name of Johan Kass, who's been a huge advocate in anti-doping. And Fair Sport was basically launched to help other whistleblowers in sport come forward with information, but also to help Gregory in this ongoing battle. We're being told that he needs to get money to his wife for an attorney for legal help. And she's stuck in Russia, right? She's stuck in Russia.

They took her passport away. They won't let her leave. That's what we're being told. So he has incredible legal bills and other help that he needs and so we've launched this go fund me to try to to try to um provide him a lifeline over the next years years um because um you know his his future is so uncertain i mean where where is he going to live how's he going to live how's he going to live? How's he going to live? How's he going to pay his bills? And he wants to continue to, you know, be, you know, kind of Frank Abagnale, you know, a guy who had, you know, committed wrongdoings, but he was under the orders of the ministry. But he has a lot of information that he's risked his life to bring forward to the world because he felt a huge burden to do this.

And he wanted to do this. This was his doing. And ultimately, he entrusted me as his conduit to bring this story forward. And also, Gregory has attempted suicide in the past, and under much less dire circumstances. He's essentially a wanted man right now with no freedom. I mean, he's in hiding, and the Russians most likely want him dead. Absolutely.

and the Russians most likely want him dead. Absolutely. You know, you see in this response to his New York Times op-ed that there had been a lot of, if you followed the news in Russia, they had already taken lots and lots of action against him to kind of silence him, to make him irrelevant. In the film, I think one of the most shocking moments was at the end of every year, Putin gives a huge press conference with hundreds of journalists, and the doping scandal gets brought up, of course.

And he goes, and this is just, you know, six months ago, goes, and he goes, and this is just, you know, six months ago, goes, oh, the guy who defected, the citizen who defected, the scientist, I don't even remember his name. And you're literally going there, are you kidding me? Putin just says he doesn't remember Gregory's name yet. Yet Gregory dominated Russian news for the past year. He has been front page story for a solid year. This has been the single biggest scandal in sport and in Russian history. He's arguably the biggest whistleblower in the history of Russia. And you have the president of a country saying he doesn't even remember his name. And what that is, is that's George Orwell. That's 1984. That's doublethink. That's essentially fake news. That's pretending

that by not acknowledging, you know, him is not to acknowledge the truth. And that is what is going on in this world. And so here you see that Putin looks straight to the camera and say, I don't even remember Gregory's name. I mean, that would be the equivalent of asking an American, who's our president right now? And somebody saying, I don't remember his name. I mean, that is the level of lies and deception. his name. I mean, that is the level of lies and deception. And then you see their reaction to the New York Times op-ed by issuing an arrest warrant for Gregory to again paint him as a criminal, to again pretend that this didn't happen, to again try to obstruct the truth and shift the focus away from the truth and the punishment and what all this evidence is and his bravery

of coming forward and instead try to turn him into a criminal. So it's startling and it's incredibly upsetting. It was one of the reasons why we latched on to 1984 and Orwell in the film because everything that is Gregory's life was double think, but everything that's going on in our geopolitical cycle and with Russia and Putin, it's double think. The truth is no longer the truth and you don't know what news to believe or what not to believe. This is obviously very unexpected for you. I mean, you set out to do one documentary and another thing reveals itself in the middle of it and something incredibly serious.

What is the impact of this been like for you? I mean, the weight of this all, carrying this around with you. It's been a lot. From November of last year when Gregory came to Los Angeles to us ultimately going to the New York Times in May of last year, May 2016, there was about a seven-month period where myself and my producing partner, Dan Kogan, with Impact Partners, and my other producers, Jim Swartz and David Fialco, we had this information and this evidence, and we knew crisis navigation of, A, how do we keep this information protected? We moved our production offices three times. We moved Gregory into different safe houses three times. Why did you move your production offices?

Because we didn't know if we were under surveillance. Did you feel like you were under surveillance? Felt like we were under surveillance, yeah. What was giving you in that indication? It was, you know, we'd see like a car, um, Gregory, who was not in protective custody at the time, uh, was getting information from his people out of Russia that they were, you know, that they were looking for him, that they were, you know, concerned. And we knew the gravity of what this was. Like, I understood once I dove into this evidence with Gregory how big this was, like what this truly meant. And that I felt that, you know, Russia and the Olympics, but Russia would probably do anything at all costs to try to, you know, not have this come forward. Because what this meant, and it meant that their Olympic Games were a fraud and that they had been cheating global sport for the entire modern history.

and that it showed the extent to which Russia and the ministry was willing to, you know, to tamper in international affairs, not just sport. And so I understood that, and Gregory understood that. So it was a daily crisis management. We went through about five months where we couldn't even get him a lawyer because every law firm that we would go to would have some sort of conflict of interest with Russia. We couldn't, it was, it was really, really intense. And during that time, two of his friends die within two weeks of each other of heart attacks at age 52 and 59. And Nikita Kamayev, who's 52 years old, and he's running, he had resigned from running the Russian anti-doping agency. So technically the Russian anti-doping agency shouldn't be working with Gregory's lab, the WADA, the World Anti-Doping

Agency lab. Those should be two independent things. But these two were working together because there was never any anti-doping in Russia. It was the anti-anti-doping system posing as anti-doping. So Nikita is still in Russia. He's been forced to resign and Gregory and him are still talking via Skype. And Nikita tells Gregory that he's going to go, that he's writing a book, and that he's been in contact with David Walsh, and David Walsh is the Sunday Times journalist that chased Armstrong for 10 years. He's probably one of the most renowned, famous sports journalists in the world.

That's Stephen Freer's film, The Program, based on David Walsh. And so Nikita had reached out to David Walsh and him and David Walsh were making a plan to meet. And Nikita had told Gregory that, you know, he was going to meet with David Walsh. Gregory was like, this is, you can't do this. You're still in Russia, Nikita. You're still in Russia. What are you doing? And a day later, Nikita dies of a heart attack. And this was a guy who was healthy, had never had a heart problem in his life, was a lifelong athlete. And he was 52?

52. And apparently he died over about three and a half hours while Nikita's wife was on the phone to Gregory crying. Did they have any suspicion of how they did it? You know, Gregory goes, you just die of a heart attack. They poison you or whatever. I don't know how they do it. But, you know, Russia isn't like ISIS.

They don't do something and then take responsibility for it. Right, obviously. You know, there's been so many stories like in BuzzFeed last year of the 14 deaths in London you know, various adversaries of Russia, there's been multiple books written on it. Even, you know, which was not widely reported, the Russian agent that co-offered apparently the Trump dossier with the MI6, the former MI6 agent, he was found dead in the back of a Lexus about five months ago outside of Moscow. So, you know, clearly they play by a different set of rules. And so this is all going on as we're figuring out how to bring this story to the world. And our government, the U.S. government, and our government, the U.S. government gets involved, the Department of Justice and FBI, they start investigating. And we realized that we have to bring this story public and that it's the best way for Gregory to hopefully be protected

and that once it's public, it'll be in the world. And so we brought it to the New York Times with Gregory and sat with them for three days, and then they broke the story, and then as a film we then followed that story as it unraveled. But, yeah, it's been very heavy and very worried about Gregory and also incredibly frustrating to see that what you kind of read about in conspiracy novels and you read about and, you know, all these guys who believe that, you know, and you read about and, you know, all these guys who believe that, you know, everybody, you know, of how the system works and then getting to witness this firsthand. And also, I think, as an athlete, having kind of my Olympic ideal of what the Olympics is being shattered and seeing that this organization really has no regard for anything other than their own business interests.

Now, how much time does Gregory have in protective custody? Do they have a determined time period where they're willing to protect him? I mean, it's to my understanding, um, you know, that is, uh, that, that is, uh, the case, but, um, I am not being given, uh, updates. Um, and, uh, and I don't, you know, I, I don't want to have that information. Um, but, uh, you know, uh, I, I'm very optimistic that he'll continue to be OK and that and that also if if something were to go wrong, we'll be able to help him with that, you know, through his counsel and team. But it's it's certainly very concerning. but it's certainly very concerning. You know, I think he clearly understood the risks before coming forward. We had tried to get his family out of Russia, and they didn't understand the gravity of the situation,

which I'm sure they do now. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, he's, you know, in the film you fall in love with him. You just fall in love with this guy and you see him for who he is, which was incredibly important for me as the filmmaker and as his friend, was I knew that it would be very easy to paint him into an illusion of somebody that he wasn't, some despicable guy who doped all the Russians. And then what you see in the film is truly this loving, kind character who essentially is caught up in a system that he helped perpetuate, but he certainly didn't create and that he is ultimately an employee of the

Russian government. And he was doing his job. And that was his job. It's such a complex issue. And when you put all the pieces out on a table and you just take into account all the different variables with doping and trying to catch these people and what the future holds. And then what you were talking about with EPO, with some sort of a biological way to get your body, a genetic way to get your body to reproduce the same sort of chemicals. It seems like there's no real solution. Like you lay it all out and you look at what happened in Sochi,

you look at what's going on right now with the Olympics, allowing the Russians to still compete in the Brazilian Games, even after all this, and it doesn't seem like, oh, this has to happen, or oh, you just put this over there. You just look at this big mess, and you go, where does this go? You know, I think that that is a valid question, because when you start to look at where it goes, first of all, I really believe in the concept behind clean sport. I really believe in that, and I believe that athletes should go and compete clean because those are the rules.

I mean, you know, you come from the MMA world, and you're going into a fight, at least it's enough of a fight that it's a fight that at least you want to believe that you're shaking the guy's hand and that if he kicks your ass if he kicks your ass he kicks your ass but he did it through hard work and through hard work and plan by the rules you know and and that's the the the concept I think that fans go into watching sports and that athletes in general go go into go into sport and and

but we have the flip side of that, which is, you know, human beings are in a constant, we're not done evolving. There's a great philosopher, futurist, but he's also an investor. His name's Juan Enriquez, if you've seen his TED Talks and stuff. No, I haven't. And really interesting. seen his TED Talks and stuff. No, I haven't. And really interesting.

And he gets into how, and he makes this whole scientific argument about how human beings are not done evolving, that we're just not done evolving. We believe that we've done evolving. But he shows through history how we're not done evolving, just like we went from, you know, from Neanderthals and humans and da-da-da, you know.

And he goes through the whole history of it and he shows how basically humans are not done evolving. And part of that not being done evolving is we're constantly figuring out how to live longer. I sat with a guy yesterday who said the problem isn't whether or not human beings are going to start living to 110 or 120 years old. The problem is that we're figuring out how to, how to keep our body, you know, healthy, but we haven't figured out how to keep our minds healthy. And that all these people that are going to be living longer lives, there's the problem with Alzheimer's now and dementia that, you know, even though you live a longer life, your, your brain is still deteriorating.

The point being is that we're in a, we're in're in an age of medical and scientific technology that every single day is another invention, another advance. And, you know, for $200,000 or whatever it is right now, in the embryo, you can change your kid's eye color. You can go in and decide that your kid's going to be six foot and I'm five eight. You know, I mean, wow, I would have loved my parents to have seen to it that I was six feet tall. You know, and all these kind of things that are going on right now in the medical science and technological advancement world are also things that the world is going to have to start figuring out what they do on the fields of play and athletic because

the humans of the future are going to be better versions of what we have right now, just through science, just through technology. And then the question again goes into the world of what's clean, what's not clean, what's, you know, what's anti-doping, how do you police sport? And those are very hard questions to answer. Yeah, they really are. And you don't, on one hand, you don't want to stop medical technological progress, right? You don't want to stop people from being able to cure diseases. And it's almost like some of the technology that they use for aerospace makes its way into everyday use well some of the technology that they're going to use for all these different medical innovations all these different ways to cure diseases and increase human performance

they're going to make their way into athletics and it's going to be a very blurry line between what is natural and what's not natural i mean if your parents decide to genetically alter you in the womb and change you to a super athlete is that your fault and if it's not your choice or your fault should you be allowed to compete that was always the argument about corellon you know alexander corellon his parents were like five five and five6 they were these tiny people and he was a fucking giant and a gorilla and um they used to call him in Russia they used to call him the experiment and if you look at Carell and you look at him physically I mean there's very few athletes you're ever going to see that look like that guy I mean he was close to 300 pounds moved like a cat

and would literally launch grown men through the air. They were so terrified of his physical prowess that grown men used to flatten out on their stomach and literally try to cling to the earth to avoid being thrown by him. Are you aware of him? No. Look at this motherfucker. Whoa. Yeah.

Whoa. He was undefeated in Olympic Games up until Rulon Gardner beat him, who was an American. And go to that picture which shows his full body, which shows his legs in that image. There's a black and white that you have up there? How many years ago it says? Several. Jeez. I forget when he's done.

This is all. No, go to the, there's a full image of that, Jamie. Try to find that image on the right, but there's a full one where you get to see his entire build. I mean, he was a fucking freak. And so his thing was throwing these men, and he's a heavyweight, so these guys are 300 plus pounds. He would throw them through the air. Like, in a way that very few people could do look at that picture of him with his arm raised right below that the black and white he was

fucking monstrous wow and without a doubt juice to the tits i mean no question about especially given the information that was disclosed in your documentary, I mean, this was all, I believe, I believe he was through the 80s or the 90s and into the early 2000s. Yeah. That's when he retired. But, I mean, he was the freak of all freaks and the most terrifying man in all of Russian amateur wrestling for sure. Everybody was afraid of him. And this is him standing above the greatest mixed martial arts heavyweight of all time,

Fedor Emelianenko. And you see how much bigger he is than Fedor. Look at that. He was a fucking giant. See if you can find a picture of him with his parents. And the story was always that he was basically a genetic mutant. Well, that they did something. I mean, no one knows. It was so long ago, it's very

difficult to ascertain what was capable, what was possible back then. But his performance in wrestling was just stunning. Obviously, trained hard. Obviously, very skilled. I mean, one of the things about Russian wrestlers is not just the fact of their physical prowess, but they're incredibly technical. Some of the most technically advanced wrestlers in the world

in terms of their tactics and the way they would drill. I mean, they really had it down to a science, and there was so much gravity to it all. It was so important. And on top of that, juice to the tits. So there was like so many factors that came into play. And when you're talking about this state-sponsored Russian you know doping program I mean you have to really think and include Karelin in that because he

was just a massive massive part of it yeah I'm sure I mean you know and people have always speculated for for many years like Fedor who is arguably the greatest heavyweight of all time was uh competing in pride which was an openly dirty league when pride was opposite the ufc the ufc had very rudimentary testing at the time what they would essentially do is do urine testing at the weigh-ins which victor conte famously said is just uh an intelligence test yeah i know i know victor yeah well i got to meet him. I got to know him pretty well through this.

Yeah, Victor did the podcast a few years back and was talking about it. And this was pre-Usada. Now the UFC has hired Usada and Nowitzki. And Jeff Nowitzki has done a fantastic job and, unfortunately, just caught Jon Jones, who re-won the title, knocking out Daniel Cormier. They stripped him of his title, and now Cormier's going to be the champion again. It's so fucking confusing and distorted. Because in mixed martial arts,

as opposed to even any other sport, even wrestling, wrestling, your health is on the line, but nowhere near as much as it is in mixed martial arts. So the cheating, it's not a matter of a guy getting across the finish line faster than you. It's a matter of a guy landing blows, or a woman landing blows

that they would not have been able to land had they not been cheating. And it gets very, very tricky because you're talking essentially about not just illegal activity, not just cheating, but potentially assault. And what if someone dies? Like what if someone is doping and it's proven that they're doping and the beating they give their opponent leads to that opponent dying? You can make a real argument that manslaughter charges at the very least should be filed. Wow. If not murder. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly, you know.

The implications are massive. You can certainly make that implication. Yeah. And, you know, and in this story, even the the idea where you have thousands of athletes essentially waking up and going, wait, maybe I would have got a medal. Yeah, I would have got a medal. And had I got a medal, what would be different in my life today? Would change their whole world. It's changed the whole world. It's, it's, it's, and that is why, you know, this, this problem is so, I think, hard and difficult to combat because when you look at what is at stake, the, the economics at stake, what, you know, the, the, the box of Wheaties essentially that, that, you know, going in and nobody remembers second place. Doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean anything. It's nothing. It's all one win or you don't yeah

You win or you lose and if you win comes all the you know Spoils and if you're not the winner you might as well almost never been there Well in different than any other athletic endeavor endeavor because essentially it is their life But it's not professional Which is a really weird thing because you have so much money involved in the Olympics. Billions and billions of dollars are going into the hands of people who don't even fucking compete, which is insane. It's unlike any other athletic pursuit.

If you look at professional sports, I mean, whether it's the NBA or boxing or what have you, the vast majority of the money goes to the athletes themselves. Now, not in the Olympics. In the Olympics, fucking zero. No, it's like college basketball. Yeah, it's insane. You know, it's purely an honor to be in the Olympics, to go to the Olympics and the athletes themselves, you know, and this is why it's actually you're able to understand a state-sponsored

system, which I think the American mentality is hard to understand. Because here, we're looking at $205 million NBA contracts, and sport is privatized, and the athletes get paid. And that even when you go to the Olympics as an American athlete, you might be competing for America, but America is not paying your way yeah to the Olympics you're not on the US payroll Michael Phelps is not being paid by the US government to go compete in the Olympics right but in China in Russia in an any essentially you know post communist communist any any sort of country like that the athletes are employees of the government.

And they're essentially state employees, and their job is to go and compete for their country. And they're being paid to do so. for the athletes, even in America, that people are still going to be willing to put it on the line and compete because you could be that Michael Phelps guy that winds up getting incredibly rich and famous from winning the Olympics. So people are willing to compete and essentially risk their physical body, risk all of their time, their effort, their dedication to try to accomplish something that all the world's going to be watching. Massive profits being made, and they don't see a fucking penny of it unless they win that's right and even if they win they it's a consequence of them winning that they see the money exactly but if they win if you're simone biles if you're phelps if you're any one of these athletes in basically sport that people don't really watch and there's money behind any other time of the year other than the Olympics,

every four years people care about gymnastics. They don't care about gymnastics any other time, but once every four years everybody cares about gymnastics. Who's watching swimming today? Exactly. Nobody gives a fuck about swimming. Nobody cares about swimming, but once every four years they care about swimming. And if you can go in and capitalize on that, you have a life. It's just so crazy.

And if you don't, you don't. I mean, that's the whole kind of Armstrong argument of it. He's a basketball player for the Australia team. He's actually an NBA player putting together a shower curtain for where he was staying. He's actually an NBA player putting together a shower curtain for his where he was staying and on the side here describes the 196 cabin nine-deck super ship that the men and women's US basketball teams were staying on and had 250 police officers watching them Yeah, and I didn't say who paid for that either Well, if they paid for their own, yeah, who. But the point being that the Olympics are essentially a professional endeavor

where the athletes, the ones who people are watching, are not getting any of that money. And it's a dirty organization in that regard because it's not amateur. If it was amateur, the world would see it for free. I mean, it's not. You have to pay massive amounts of money. I don't know how many billions and billions and billions of dollars. I can't remember the contract.

It's staggering what NBC paid for the Olympic rights for the next however many games it is. Yeah, and what they get paid from the advertisers. And that's just the U.S. Yeah. That's just the U.S. So on a global level, this is the most watched sporting. This is the most watched event on planet Earth. Yeah.

Nobody. World Cup soccer in the Olympics, but the Olympics even more. Yeah. It's the most watched event on planet Earth. And it's, there it is, $7.75 billion through 2032. That's what NBC paid. Wow. It's stunning.

I mean, I don't know what the solution is, but it never set right with me. I always felt like it was gross. I mean, it just didn't make any sense that everyone is getting paid but the athletes. Situation in place a long long time ago, and then it became this massive global business this huge Empire and They managed to keep the athletes out of the pay loop It's it's really it's really a mess and and not only that there were so many people that have profited to the tunes of millions and millions of dollars through the essentially bribery of other countries into, you know, all the politics behind that to protect their athletes so that the athletes can continue to win medals. Gregory told me a story, which I wonder when this will come true, because I certainly can't verify it, but he told me a story of the former Olympic medical director,

and the guy apparently was the head medical director of the Olympics for like 15 years or something. And according to Gregory, this guy lives in an incredible chateau somewhere in Switzerland. It's like a mind-boggling house. And he's like an orthopedic doctor, but he's the head medical director of the Olympics. And according to Gregory, he's accepted millions and millions and millions of dollars in bribes through different countries to conceal positives over all these various Olympic Games that whatever it was you know Slovakia or whatever there'd be a positive and this

guy would get you know a half a million dollars to conceal it there's a positive here and he'd take the money and conceal it and and I wouldn't be surprised if that's I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg because this is huge money and these countries are willing to pay this big money because for a country like Russia or China or, you know, even Jamaica, right, to win medals, what that does for its country on a world level. All of a sudden when Jamaica's winning medals, everybody's going, wait, we want to go to Jamaica. I mean, just what that Jamaican team did, probably did for tourism dollars to Jamaica. If you could, I mean, it's staggering, right?

It made Jamaica, and Victor Conte will talk about this, you know, in detail, how the five fastest runners on planet Earth are Jamaican and Conti will go, yeah, right. And Don Catlin goes, yeah, right. But look at the money that that had to have brought Jamaica of the tourism, of advertising, of interest, of everybody's going, wait, I want to go to Jamaica. Oh, I should go to Jamaica. I should go see Jamaica. You know?

Where did these people come from? Yeah, where did they come from? Yeah. You know, when Fedor was the king of the world as far as the heavyweights and mixed martial arts, Putin was regularly at his fights. And it was always like this big deal that, you know, Putin was there and Fedor would smash these people, especially when Fedor fought in Russia. there and Fedor would smash these people, especially when Fedor fought in Russia. And,

you know, I mean, it's a massive, massive deal to have a top fighter or top athlete representing your country. I mean, it's just a huge deal for you to have the number one guy. Oh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, you look at, you know, like Sharapova, you know, and, you know, Gregory would tell me stories of, you know, how many he knew for years what she was taking, what she was up to. He was advising her family. I mean, it's just according to him, she even lied about her age. According to him, she even lied about her age. I don't, that apparently the age that she was playing at, that she was reported as a couple years younger. That was all part of, but Russia helped with that.

Wasn't there a situation with Serena Williams where the testers came to her house and she locked herself in a safe room and called the police? Oh, I didn't hear that one, but. Yeah, was it Serena or Venus? Was it Serena? See if you can find that story. Yeah, the tester showed up at her house, and she's like, not now, motherfucker. Click. Locked herself in a safe room.

Gregory. You've got to think about the amount of money that's involved in these things. And, you know, if you know that other people, Serena Williams locks herself in panic room and drug test mix up oh it's just a mix-up ladies and gentlemen in our los angeles mansion no worries mansion the tennis legends assistant called 9-1-1 6 a.m local time last wednesday and told the emergency operator that a prowler had been spotted at the luxurious property. She retreated to her panic room in a bid to protect herself. Boy, that is, boy, they are giving her every benefit of the doubt in that one, huh? I mean, it's hard.

It's really, but the intruder turned, hold on, turned out to be a random drug tester who stopped by unannounced for a urine sample. Well, you know, the cops responded 9 to 1, but quickly left the property when the misunderstanding was discovered. It was not known whether or not Williams submitted to the drug test. Well, that's, yeah, that means she didn't. If it's not known, that means she didn't. Or potentially in the panic room with lots of saline solution.

God damn. I mean, but I couldn't imagine if you're thinking about the amount of money that a certain person who is a world-renowned athlete in whatever sport is, I mean, the amount of money that's involved is fucking staggering. And if you have stringent drug testing, you know, that's why the John Jones thing was so disheartening because, you know, John Jones, who who's arguably if not the greatest mixed martial arts fighter of all time he's number two you know um maybe mighty mouse is number one but you would say that mighty mouse has not faced this kind of competition that john has so that would put john

into number one a lot of people's eyes but to have him test positive like that was so disheartening for people and just such a heartbreaker because people had just hoped and prayed that you know him coming back and winning that way like maybe he'll get his shit together you know when you see a guy with massive potential and he's been involved in all these fuck-ups in the past maybe finally he's got his shit together or maybe what happened is he is he came back and he realized that he was never going to be what he was going to be. And that whole psychology kicked in. And I think you see that in so many guys.

I think that once you've been on that program or you understand that program, I think it's probably very, very hard psychologically to go off of it. And also, you're always going to be pushing those limits. It's always the Icarus story. There's, you know, in Armstrong in 2009 when he staged that comeback, you know, I believe that he was trying to do it clean. And then all of a sudden realized he was going to get his ass kicked doing it clean. And you look at that comeback year, which is so interesting, that Contador, who beat him, set the all-time fastest times in that year, and that was supposed to be the clean tour. That was the redemption tour. That was the tour to prove that it's clean. And yet in that tour,

Contador set the all-time fastest times. And funny enough, that year where Armstrong got third, had he been doing the tour any other year, the watts per kilo that he had put up, the power that he had put up,

it was actually his best tour ever. Ever. ever so he came into that tour going i'm gonna win it and yet his teammate and contador and schleicher out doping them essentially wow and and it was the and and so had it been any other year he would have won that tour it's so crazy and now with crisper you know now with this new technology that allows people to uh essentially i mean it's the the it's on the table what the how the potential is going to completely play out but other countries are using it right now on embryos you know whether or not humans uh in the united states whether they're going to use it and you're

going to see these it's not when or it's not if rather, it's more like when. As this technology progresses and it gets better and better, if you find out that your children have the genetic markers that could essentially lead to Alzheimer's down the road, why would you want your children to have Alzheimer's? You wouldn't. You wouldn't. You would edit them.

You would say, well, they'll say, well, it's just a simple procedure. It's no more dangerous than other medical procedures that we do every day. We're just going to do it. It'll be real simple. By the way, do you have a height preference? Would you like your child to have a ridiculous VO2 max? Would you like your kid to be one of the most ridiculous mesomorphs the world has ever known? Do you want a Herschel Walker type body for your child?

Well, they can do it. Yeah, they can do it. The technology's there right now. Well, it's close. The technology's there right now. I mean, I was reading all these articles right now, which is funny. Silicon Valley did a show with the blood bags. If you saw that episode where the Gavin Belson character is having his blood swapped out by like a 21-year-old really good-looking young kid.

Peter Thiel does that on a regular basis. And that was the lampooning of it. But they've been doing all this tests in mice that if you take an old mouse and give it the blood of a young mouse that the old mouse starts you know basically reverse aging and if you give the old mouse blood to the young mouse that the young mouse turns into an old mouse so I mean this is this is on the on the horizon I mean yeah this is there so the question is what what do you do about it I mean you're you're like a, you know, you're an enthusiast, and the sports that you care about are dangerous, violent sports.

So what do you do about it? It's a real question. You know, and it's like all those things we were talking about earlier. You put all the pieces on the table, and you try to imagine what's the solution. I don't see the solution. I don't know what it is because I don't think. We were talking about this with some friends We were saying like if everybody decides to stay clean, but yet the technology becomes viable for the average person

You're gonna have a mailman that looks like the Incredible Hulk and you're gonna be watching these scrawny guys fight in the UFC No one's gonna tolerate that, you know You we're just gonna have to assume at some point in time that all these people are enhanced You know, we're just going to have to assume at some point in time that all these people are enhanced. We're just going to assume that it's more than just dedication and hard work. And honestly, it's going to be a sad day when that happens. Because when that does happen and we just accept the fact that we've created these genetic freaks, they're not going to be special. It's not going to stand out. Like when you saw Mike Tyson, it was a special thing because it was the 1980s and there

was really nothing. I mean, who knows? It's probably, there was probably some steroids involved in that too. I mean, there's steroids involved in a lot of different things that we've just assumed there weren't. Well, let's just leave that on the table. But it wasn't genetics. I mean, what you saw is a guy who was born that way, who was born with that freakish power and speed. You didn't get it from a laboratory. You didn't get it from a laboratory. You didn't get it from somebody literally taking the embryo and altering the genetics in the embryo and making him a destruction machine, making him a violent force of nature like Mike Tyson was in his prime. The idea that you could take a regular person like

young Jamie over there and turn him into some sort of crazy freak athlete it's just it's weird because when a freak athlete comes along you you see them and you go wow that guy's a freak this is crazy no one can do that I've never seen anybody do that before but then you look at the money behind it yeah and then you look at as in this film you see all of a sudden the geopolitics behind it yeah that in the U.S. or whatever, we're looking at it on the, you know, the $40 million a year contract level of it and whether or not that's ethical and what do we do about that? All of a sudden we have athletes as genetic mutants. And what is that future? But then when you look at it on the geopolitical level and what a country is willing to do to win and what it means for their athletes to win and assert power.

I mean, like I remember when, you know, a couple of years ago when Germany won the World Cup. I mean, that was I mean, I mean, German pride had to have been at a staggering level. at a staggering level. I mean, you probably could have went into any bar in Germany and said something, you know, and you would have got your face beaten. I mean, it is because of the emotion that people get connected to with their athletes and their sports team. And I think governments, in the case of Icarus, you understand what that is.

And in the case of Icarus, you understand what that is. This is so far beyond, you know, it goes into global power. And how do you consolidate power? And sport, in many ways, is that vehicle, at least as I see it. Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, it's such a huge part of the recreation of the people and, you know, giving people something to be excited about. Now, when you do take into consideration this new technology that's on the horizon, CRISPR, and who knows what's after CRISPR, right? And then you look at what Russia's been willing to do with their state-sponsored doping program.

You've got to think they're already involved in that. You've got to think they're already. Well, you know, Gregory said something to me interesting. You've got to think they're ready. Well, you know, Gregory said something to me interesting. He says, well, you know, whatever they put on that WADA list, meaning whatever banned substances they put on the list, we've already got in Russia,

we've already got another 10 or 20 that we're messing with. If you remember last year, the whole Maldonium scandal with Sharapova and all these athletes. A couple guys in the UFC got kicked out for it. On Meldonium. Well, that was a substance that Russia had been messing with for years, knowing that it wasn't on the ban list. And then they essentially put it on the ban list like that. And then they started testing for it and they did it as a, you know, it was very intentional to go catch everybody on Maldonium. But, you know, according to Gregory, they're already figuring out the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.

Especially when you have a state-sponsored program. And there are no state-sponsored programs that we know of like that in America. I mean, that would give them a massive advantage. No, we don't know of any program where, I mean, when you think about what that is, it would be like the equivalent of Obama or Trump, you know, going, hey, American athlete, you need to be on this program. If you're going to be on the national team and represent America, you go on this program. And if you don't want to be on this program, well, you're not on the team. Right. And what Gregory was doing, which was part of the whole ethical and moral conundrum, which is an interesting thing, which we never get into in the film, is he was constantly being forced to sacrifice athletes.

So part of this system, the only way that it would work is you had to have lambs. If nobody ever tested positive, right, well, it would look like there's something wrong with the system. So they had to have positive tests, and they would consistently have positive tests. And the guys who would test positive, what they would do is they were the guys who either were past champions that the ministry looked at and said, hey, you're not going to go and win another gold medal. You're not, you know, you're not who you are anymore. Or it was an athlete who they believed could be a champion, never lived up to his potential and

was on the state program. So they would sacrifice athletes along the way to make it appear that the system was catching them. And that was a whole conundrum for Gregory because he got to know a lot of these guys. And these athletes would think that they were being protected because they thought that they were on the state state program so they think that they're being protected and all of a sudden they're positive and they're banned and they're going wait wait you you told me you told me to take this and i'm and what do you mean i'm banned you told you told me i'd be negative be like you're positive jesus well they were always positive So it was just a matter of who to sacrifice and whether or not they would swap the urine.

God. He had, this we never get into the film, but this is mind-blowing to think. So he had developed, right after the London Olympics, they figure out how to break into the bottles, right? So they figure out how they can break into these bottles and swap the urine. But he personally was never doing that. What he would do is the FSB, these guys would come in, they had this device, and like once a week, whenever they needed to do it, they'd come in and swap out all these B samples that they'd keep in storage, you know, just for safekeeping. And the A sample was always swapped.

But the B sample, they would like, you know, there wasn't going to be a need to retest it right that moment. So they'd keep it for a week or whatever. And then the guys would come in and they would swap out all the samples. So part of this system was as he kept a urine database. So he had 16,000 matching urine samples that he was holding in the laboratory that they should have all been disposed of after three months, according to the code. So any international athlete that would come into Russia to compete in the games, Kids, gymnasts, anybody competing in Russia. And if they tested clean, Russia would hold their urine, put it down for the specific gravity, the steroid profile, keep it in a database, you know, the urine's being kept frozen.

So they would always have samples to swap for any of the Russian athletes at any time, even if they didn't have a clean sample for that athlete. So because most of the Russian athletes at any time, even if they didn't have a clean sample for that athlete. So because most of the Russian athletes, they were on the program. In Sochi, they took extraordinary precaution. They collected clean urine of each of the athletes on the program. But outside of that, what they were doing was just going, hey, 16 000 samples to choose from so whatever is going to best match the russian athlete to swap with we can take the urine of another athlete you know a clean athlete and make it look you know pretty much identical to that russian athletes because

they could choose from 16 000 samples wow so they had it all indexed as far as the weight. All indexed. Everything. They have it like color profile and everything? It was crazy. I got to see a spreadsheet. And then on the eve of this investigation breaking, and WADA is going to go raid this laboratory,

and there's thousands of missing samples. And then the report, this report, this 335-page report, I'm trying to remember, it was something like 1,400 samples are missing, or 1,400 samples were destroyed. Well, the real number was 8,200-something. It was truly 8,000 samples matching in two bottles, 16,000 samples. And they had to bring in these containers, industrial trash containers, and in a dark of night operation, emptying out the lab and bringing all these bottles to like some industrial trash where they dumped them and crushed them and incinerated them. Wow.

And so it was, I mean, this was a pretty nutty operation going on. And they did this for the collegiate competition. So the world junior track championships were in Russia. They did it for that. They did it for the swimming championships. They did it for everything. So these were kids too. Any of the collegiate athletes.

It's amazing that all the athletes kept their mouth shut. That no athlete got a bad conscience and just like i can't do this anymore and need to come clean well there's been athletes that have come forward yeah i mean there's been whistleblowers there's been there's been multiple ones but i think you know what what you start seeing in that system and which is very hard i think for an American to understand. And we talk very openly against our government, you know, what's going on in the current administration. You know, people are very, you know, anti-Trump or pro-Trump or anti-Obama, whatever. I mean, that's what, as Americans, we do that. And we have that mentality.

Well, in China and in Russia and other countries like this that go through communism and everything, that mentality never goes away. The mentality is always that the state can take everything from you. They can put you in jail. They can take your passport. They can seize your assets. They can launch fake news against you. They can put you in jail, just like they did to Gregory, just like they're doing. And so everybody, no matter how powerful, they all had that fear of the government in their mind. And what you see, because I saw this firsthand in Russia, where I have some very wealthy, very powerful Russian friends, and they will never talk bad about the government in public, everywhere. Now, off camera or, you know, or whatever, enclosed doors, one-on-one, they'll be

like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't, you know, they'll tell you how it is. But in public, among their friends, any social setting, there's always this belief that somebody's watching you or somebody might rat you out or somehow you're going to lose your wealth or or you're going to cross the paths of a wrong person and that's what we've what we've seen in all these stories year after year after year out of out of russia and certainly you know other countries or you know the mysterious death of uh Jong Il's brother, etc. Yeah. I mean, they're operating under a system that's ancient. I mean, this is the way people have been dictators for thousands of years. But they're just doing it in the age of information.

They're doing it right under everyone's nose. Fake news, fear. Yeah. They did a, this was interesting, about two weeks ago, Russia's trying to get reinstated for the Winter Olympics, or, well, not reinstated, they're trying to make sure that they can go to the Winter Olympics. So they release a story through Sputnik News and RT, the Russian, you know, Times, Russia Today, and they release this story that McLaren, the investigator in the film behind all the Gregory's evidence, in the film behind all the Gregory's evidence, that McLaren is willing to forgive Russia, that he believes that there's errors in his report, and that WADA believes that Russia should be reinstated and allowed to go to the Winter Olympics. None of this is true. And this is picked up by worldwide media. It's picked up by papers all over the world.

And Russia just put this out there basically to fuel the fuel the propaganda and then you know next day McLaren's out there you know going that's not true but his press release was picked up by a handful of outlets where the where the Russia release because of how they're able to disseminate news went global I always watch a guy like that I wonder like you look at the Russian administration it's in right now and you want how long can they went global. I always watch a guy like that and I wonder, like you look at the Russian administration that's in right now and you wonder,

how long can they keep that going? And you would look at it in terms of America, like Americans would revolt. But like you were saying in Russia, I mean, I remember the story about some Russian oligarch who spoke ill of Putin

and I don't remember what the deal was that he was discussing, but they stripped him of all his money, took his company away, and put him in jail. Oh, wasn't that, not Medvedev, I know who you're talking about, what's his name? He's very famous, very famous case. He was the richest man in Russia at the time. They just took his entire fortune, locked him in a cell, kept him there for years, then eventually released him, which is an even bolder move.

They're like, look, we just dismantled you, and now we'll just let you go. And you're not going to do shit. It's terrifying. What do you think after seeing the film and what you're following? That's him. Rush's once richest man

had his last $170 million. He hid his last million. Was it the same? Go back to the top of the title, Jamie. How he hid his last $170 million. Hmm. So how do you say his name? For the other $14.8 billion, it's only money.

Just freed after 10 years in jail, told journalists at a press conference in Berlin two days ago that he didn't know how much money he had left. Leonid Bershidsky, a columnist for the Russian edition of Forbes, thinks he has an idea. I don't know how to say his name. Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky. Grew rich in Russia freewheeling in the 1990s by acquiring state oil assets. At one point he was ranked 15th in the Forbes billionaire list with a personal net worth of $15 billion. So yeah, this is the guy.

They put him in jail for quite a long time, 10 years. 10 years in jail and just let him go. Yeah, don't mess with Russia. But even the letting him go thing, it's just amazing that they just decided to let him go. Like, they put him in jail, took all his money, and then go, yeah, the fuck out of here. Yeah, well, once he was no longer a threat.

Yeah, but it's just... And it's also... Learned his lesson. It's let everybody know, like, this can happen to you. Yeah, exactly. And by freeing him, it also, like, lets him know, him know like do you see what happens you want to mess with us you're gonna pay the price stunning what what do you what do you make of what's going on in the in the u.s right now with all the allegations after seeing the film or where where's your head at well i didn't put the two of

them together because when i was watching the film, essentially, I was just thinking about the anti-doping ramifications. But, I mean, it's pretty obvious that if they're doing this, and there seems to be a lot of evidence that they've at least attempted. I mean, there was some new thing recently about Facebook ads. Yeah, Facebook, Twitter ads. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something going on, but we're doing it too. We're doing it to them. They're doing it to us.

It's essentially been a part of global politics forever. I mean, we influence their elections and not just theirs. We influence the elections of countless countries all over the world. Look, it's gross. It's disgusting. And the only thing that I could think is that with the information age that we're currently experiencing, I feel like we're in the adolescence of this. And that what seems to highlight this age is that the distance between people and information just keeps getting shorter and shorter.

And the ability to hide things, hide devious acts and hide money and hide influence and hide manipulation seems to be, it seems to be able to, people seem to be able to find out things quicker and quicker now. other day where where if it's you know i mean look at the instagram age and facebook and everything everybody seems to know everything about everyone and that anything eventually comes out you know and i think again we're experiencing the adolescence of this i think there's going to come a point in time with and i believe it's going to be through technological innovation that we're going to be able to read each other's minds i think it's inevitable i think the idea of the internet if you went to someone in the 1800s and told them one day you're going to be able to read each other's minds. I think it's inevitable. I think the idea of the Internet, if you went to someone in the 1800s and told them one day you're going to be able to talk to your phone and ask your phone a bunch of different questions

that will literally give you the answer, they would go, what the fuck is a phone? Like, what are you talking about, man? Like, are you crazy? This guy's a crazy person. You're talking about witchcraft. No, no, no, no, I'm talking about all the world being connected and you'll be able to share photos.

What's a photo? We'll be able to share photos What's a photo? We'll be able to capture time with a small device in your pocket and video as well with perfect sound and you'll be able to download hundreds of hours Hundreds of hours of music and put it on your phone. You'll be able to listen to that. They'd like recorded music The fuck are you talking about? This is just a couple hundred years ago I mean, what are we gonna experience a couple hundred years from now? I think we're going to be able to read each other's minds. I think the idea that we're, the way we operate now, our operating system of language, the way we communicate with each other through mouth noises, and that we have a dictionary, we understand what the noises are, and are you say some things like the entire time you've been talking here i've referred to my database of information i said i know exactly what he's saying and you know brian means this and he means and as you're talking all the people

that are listening are doing the exact same thing i think it is entirely possible that in the future we will swap that out for some sort of universal system some sort of universal system, some sort of universal system that is neurologically connected, that we're going to have something that is either embedded into our minds, embedded into our brain itself, embedded into our neurological system. That's minority report. Yes. I mean, it's just inevitable. If technology keeps going and we keep progressing and there's no reason to think other than

some sort of a natural disaster or some sort of a human-created disaster that doesn't keep going the way it's going. We're going to get to some place where we can see each other's minds. We're going to be able to read each other's thoughts. And for good or bad. And I tend to think both. Both good and bad. We're going to long for the good old days when you have some privacy. We're going to long for the good old days when you can keep a secret.

No, I mean, because right now we're already in an era where almost anything is discoverable. Anything, you know, nothing, nothing is private anymore. And there's always something to come out. And then there's some sort of electronic trail of it. Right. I mean, even in the, which we don't, which I, you wouldn't know about the film, but the way that that evidence was truly corroborated was the electronic trail. And here's the amazing thing, which people probably don't realize is so like Gregory, when he comes to the U.S., he had erased all of his phones because he was under the ministry order to erase everything. And what was happening is the athletes were snapping a photo of their

doping control forms. So that's how Gregory would know what number corresponded to what athlete. I mean, this was very intricate how this was going down because nobody in the lab, you know, which, you know, if you're the scientist and you're getting Armstrong sample, you don't know what's Armstrong sample. It's numbered. It's got a seven, eight digit number on it. It's just a random number. But so what the Russians were doing, they were snapping a photo of their doping control form, which only they could do. Right. And then they were sending this photo to an FSB agent who was also a coach.

And she would send the photo to Gregory and the KGB guy in the lab who was assisting him, and so that they would know that that number, number 11744, corresponded to this athlete, right? The point that I'm getting at is that, so he was erased all of that. They told him to erase it all from his phone, all from his computers, everything. And when he comes here, he brings his old computer and he brings his old phones because this guy, he just knows. And when he turns over all the evidence to WADA and the U.S. authorities and Interpol, what they're able to do is they're able to get all this erased information, all this erased stuff that was on his phone and computer and retrieve it. Wow.

And that's like a massive portion of this evidence. What they were also able to do is what we probably don't realize, and this goes into what you're saying, is like when you send an email, if you've got the metadata behind it, so like he was getting emails sent through the Russian ministry. So you're sitting there going, well, how do you know where this came from? They can go back in the actual, through the metadata that is being sent in a computer and show exactly from what computer, where, date, time that email was sent. And that's how they were able to corroborate all his evidence through basically forensics of whatever that study is of electronic forensics. When you talk about reading minds and that kind of stuff, I mean, half of that technology

is already there. I mean, any photo you take on your phone, even if you delete it, they can get it back and they can figure out exactly where you were, where it was sent, how it was sent, the spot that you sent it from, where it's nuts. And it's going to get crazier. It's just going to get crazier. I mean, for sure, there's going to be some new technologies a couple of years from now that's going to make it even easier to do than that. going to be some new technologies a couple years from now that's going to make it even easier to do than that it's and and when you read about you know there's all these apps with encryption software and stuff and i mean i've given up the idea that that i you know that you can be essentially invisible or that you can uh you know that if somebody wants to get your information they're

gonna get your information yeah unquestionably you know, another thing that's really interesting is that we're looking at photos and we're looking at video and email, and we're assuming that it's going to be in the future, more access to photo, more access to email, more access to video. But what is coming down the pipe? I mean, what is the new thing? I mean, there could be something that's even fucking crazier than video. I mean, we're just assuming that it's going to stay video and it's going to stay photos like why those things didn't even exist a couple hundred years ago well everything that's going now is going into

this world of vr yes we're essentially you know the you know the idea is is that as you can see things and you can create your own reality i mean there's lots of discussion even in the in the world of sex that you know the sex of the future is why do you really need a another human you can essentially simulate that and program it and make it everything you wanted and more sure never know the difference well mean, whether it's through augmented reality, virtual reality, or robots. I mean, we're just a few steps away from all this stuff. And if it's not 10 years from now, it's 50. If it's not 50, it's 100.

I mean, it's inevitable. Human beings don't destroy ourselves. We stay alive long enough. We're going to see a complete dissolving of reality as we know it. Which I think even goes into like the whole anti-doping world of it in sports where, you know, you actually just made me think about like Terminator. Yeah. Where you're sitting there going, well, wait, you think it's a real person and it's a Terminator.

But you think of all the technologies that are going on right now and why won't there be a chip in your brain that basically takes away pain so that you can, you know, persevere in an MMA fight that takes away your, you know, all these different technologies that are essentially create, you know, controlling your synapses, controlling your reflexes. It's all there. How is that not going to happen? And then obviously enhancing the human body itself. I mean, there was a technology that we had been talking about recently where they were trying to combine spider silk with human skin tissue to make an artificial skin, a replacement skin that's bulletproof. Wow. That just blew bulletproof. Wow.

That just blew my mind. Yeah. That just blew my mind. Yeah, they're going to genetically engineer human skin, so it'll look like human skin, it'll have much of the same properties of human skin, but it'll be bulletproof. And you'll wear it?

It'll be you. It'll be you. They'll replace your skin. And then how do they stop? I mean, the power of that bullet would still, like, really mess you up. Well, sure, you could do some tissue trauma underneath the surface, but the actual skin itself won't break. It'd be like having a bulletproof vest all over your body.

I mean, that's what Kevlar essentially is. What Kevlar is is a material that is so dense and so thick and so impenetrable that when you shoot a regular bullet into it, the regular bullet hits it, does not go through it, and just spreads out and expands. It's still very painful for the person who gets shot, but it protects your life. And we could easily see that happen with entire bodies made out of that stuff. I mean, you've got to believe it's probably already out there. Like in some secret lab, they've already developed the skin and it's sitting in like a Petri dish that's bulletproof skin.

Yeah, if I'm reading it on a science website, for sure I'm not the first one to get the information. I mean, this is getting to the highest level. I mean, where is the real money, right? The real question is, and I don't know this answer, is the top scientists in the world, the top innovators in the world, I mean, when do they scoop those people up? When does the government come in with some black ops money and say, hey, you know, we would like to hire you and give you X amount of money to create this. And this is what we know so far about that. And, you know, here we're going to take you to Groom Lake out middle of nevada and show you some lab that you didn't even know existed yeah but you got to believe that that's already way into going on because there's nothing that we spend more money

on than military basically defense then this is what we spend money on and that is actually you know i think as you probably know the uh the I read that the single biggest export of the United States is our weapons Yeah, that's what we make and sell to the rest of the world. We sell them the stuff That's not as good as the stuff. We're making right now right yeah We sell the world our weapons and that's and and that is what is employing like millions and millions of people in this country is basically our military and our defense and ultimately developing spider skin. Yeah. I mean, this is what we're seeing, right?

This is what we get to see and look at. Who knows how many different programs are going on right now as we're speaking that we have no knowledge of whatsoever. we're speaking that we have no knowledge of whatsoever I mean when they released stealth bomber and a couple other there's these like sort of experimental vehicles where they were putting together these things once they they actually released them when they actually put you know had press conferences and showed people the they had been working on these things forever it means under wraps for like 20 years and all of a sudden you see this thing you're like whoa have you ever seen one in person?

A stealth? Yeah. No. I was in Palmdale, and that's near Edwards Air Force Base, and we were filming Fear Factor out there. And this was right after September 11th, and so they were doing all these exercises, and these things were flying over the desert. It was like being in Star Wars. I mean, once you see them in real life, you're like, holy shit, that's a fucking UFO. This black thing, not shaped like any plane you've ever seen before, flying across the sky.

And you just look at it and go, what the fuck is that thing? Yeah, and that's like 20 years old now. Yeah, old as shit. So think about what's out there now. Oh, yeah, for sure. Think about what's out there now. I mean, they probably have some ridiculous stuff. And then there's some theoretical ideas

You know there's some magnetic drives. They're trying to put together There's some I mean there's there's a bunch of speculation about different types of weapons that they're trying to to anti-matter weapons some things that are just gonna be able to just Completely annihilate anything they touch and whether or not they're gonna go completely through the earth if you hit things And who knows who knows what's on on the horizon i mean they're just going to keep getting better and better at blowing shit up you know i mean the the amount of power that we have in the nuclear arsenal today and the amount of power and the weapons in comparison to the weapons that we used in hiroshima and nagasaki it's i mean it's it's insane it's not even close. I mean, they're hundreds and hundreds of times

more powerful now. No, it's staggering to kind of understand what kind of destruction is possible. Like nothing, I don't think on the level of what we're seeing in natural destruction of what nature can do alone. Yeah, but it's also fascinating when you think about the implications that your film has sort of brought to light is that a lot of this destruction like when you were talking about the ukraine a lot of this destruction and a lot of this the the confidence that they have to to go into these places and and use these weapons

is kind of dependent upon public opinion that's dependent upon sport right and dependent on basically kicking somebody else's ass yeah without the weapons yeah and then that allows you to almost like weaponize because you have the the power of the country behind you you know it was uh what was interesting um is is um after sochi and putin's rating goes up to you know 95 or something like that, that everybody in Russia supported him going into Ukraine, too. It was, this was a good idea. You know, we're strong, we're powerful, let's go in and take back a part of territory that

we lost. Let's go do it. And you see that that sort of nationalistic pride is real. I mean, I grew up in Colorado, which is, you know, Denver Bronco territory. And, I mean, people would paint and they still do. I mean, you know, around football, you're driving around the city, you see thousands of houses painted in orange and blue. People are in orange and blue. I mean, it's literally, it's it's literally it's

a religion it's a cult it is it is an ethos it is and it's something to even fight about yeah like i mean you talk bad about the broncos where i mean that that's that's that's a that's a point of fight yeah and and i remember you know the few years ago when the Broncos won the Super Bowl and you're looking at like the statistic was something like 85% of the city of Denver showed up for a parade on a Monday. That's incredible. Whoa. This is crazy. And this is what people – so if you don't believe that the governor – whatever, the governor of Colorado that day could have been like, hey, we're going to go seize Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, and Utah.

Everybody in the state of Colorado would have been like, hell yeah, go Broncos. Almost, right? Yeah, and that is what this is, masking behind a playing field. I mean, look, it's just people care about this because you're basically beating somebody else without weapons. You're manipulating their opinions. You're manipulating the way people feel and public opinion. What do you think should be done? How do you?

That's what I was saying before. If you put all the pieces on the table, I don't, I feel like we're at a, it's, I don't think you can stop technology. Right. I don't, I just don't think, I think it's what we do. I mean, I think if you, if you looked at human beings as a whole and you look at what we used to be versus what we are now, if you were some sort of an objective life form from another planet that didn't have any vested interest in, you know, understanding our culture and just tried to examine us as a super organism, what do we do?

We make better shit every year. That's what we do. We're always going to make better shit. We're always going to make better shit. As long as we stay alive, as long as we don't get hit by an asteroid, killed by a hurricane, swamped in an earthquake or tsunami we're going to continue to make better shit we're going to continue to become better humans technically technically technically not maybe from hay i think even from a moral standpoint

i think we're better now than we were before which is why things like putin are so disturbing which is what you know if you go back to like the genghis khan era it was the norm right that was how dictators ran that's how kings ran and emperors ran their dynasties. It's more uncommon now and more disturbing because the main superpower doesn't do it that way, the United States of America. And that's one of the reasons why people are so patriotic about America because when you look back at human history,

we are as fucked up as we are and undeniably fucked up as it is we are the shining example of what's possible in the future that we you can keep going and eventually create some sort of a system that's different some sort of a experiment and self-government that's different than has ever existed before where you can get to a point where a fucking reality show president or a reality show uh host becomes the president of the United States of America for good or for bad. It opens people's eyes to the possibility like, wow, like this, this is a new thing. Like this in terms of human history, this is a new thing. This whole experiment, this whole thing called the United States, it's only a few hundred

years old is a very new thing. If you looked at us objectively, if you were something from another planet, you would say, well, what are they, what's the end game with these fuckers? What are they trying to do? Well, what they're trying to do is make better and better stuff. And I think the real issue with that is artificial intelligence, because we look at artificial intelligence, we say the word artificial intelligence, and we think of it as like a thing that we can turn on or turn off. We think of it as a device, a VCR or a fucking television. We think of it as a piece of equipment that a human has created that may be able to think for itself.

I think it's a life form. I think it's just a life form that exists from parts and pieces that we're designed to put together. I think our entire thing about being attached to materialism, our constant thirst for innovation, we always want the iPhone 8 is out, but iPhone 10's around the corner. Do you hold out or do you get the new one now? You have two options.

No one's going to stick with the iPhone 7. Fuck that, man. You know, well, you're going to get the update. The update's going to make it slower. You know that happens, right? I mean, we're thirsty for this shit. But what we're fueling is innovation. And innovation will inevitably lead

to a new life form. It's going to lead, call it artificial, call it whatever you want. It's fucking real. It's not artificial. It's just a life form that's not based on blood and bones. It's a life form that's based on circuits. A life form that's based on something that human beings have created. And once it's sentient, once it can think for itself, it's going to make better life forms. It's going to make something way, way different than us.

It's going to make something that doesn't have any emotions. It's going to make something that doesn't have any biological needs. It doesn't have any weird jealousy or weird issues that have been holding us back forever. What do you do with that? Exactly. And what is its motivation? Why does it even exist? Why does it even want to do anything? There's a lot of questions involved in this. And, you know, maybe it can find some sort of motivation. Maybe it can figure out some reason to exist and to innovate

and to keep going better and better. But we're limited. We're limited by the scope of our evolution. You look at me talking about human beings haven't been. We're not done. No, that's what I was getting into with Juan Enriquez, which is which is, you know, where his argument and I'd actually interviewed him for the film and ended up not using it because of where the story went. But his argument was not the moral, ethical argument around anti-doping and sport. It wasn't anything.

the moral ethical argument around anti-doping and sport it wasn't anything it was just purely the argument of hey look at evolution look at reality look at where we're going look at where human beings are essentially transcending to and then how do you ever have the basis of what is the concept behind like clean sport or or you know even transcending sport whatever you want to call it is is being a pure ethos because there are so many technological and really evolutionary variables that are that seem to make that uh fundamentally difficult and we're resisting the future. I mean, it's almost like resisting performance-enhancing drugs is futile in the first place. It's like foolish, because these performance-enhancing drugs represent technology.

They represent our ability to manipulate our biology. To recover. Yeah, and manipulate our biology to not just recover, but also to grow at a rate that we've never been able to grow before. It's not just recover. If it was just about recovery, some steroids allow you to grow. Like, look at bodybuilders. Like, look at freaks like Lee Haney when he was in his prime.

That's not just about recovery. That's also about growth. It's also about, I mean, the speed that Ben Johnson had when he won the gold medal, you know, when he tested positive. But it turns out that Carl Lewis was on some shit, too, and they hid that. Yeah, Catlin in 1984, there were nine samples that went missing to this day. Yes. C came to Don Catlin because Catlin had found the positives, and basically those nine samples just vanished. And you remember when Ben Johnson tried to compete clean after that?

It was hilarious. Yeah, forget it. It's like you're looking at a regular guy trying to race against superstars. Forget it. It's like if I was running. Here's an interesting story, slightly off topic, but on the topic of Ben Johnson. Dick Pound, Richard Pound. What a great name, by the way.

Yeah, Dick Pound. I mean, you cannot mess with a guy by the name of Dick Pound. Why the fuck did he ever go with Dick when his name was Richard? Richard Pound is okay. Because I think he just went to it and just been like, yeah, hey, I'm Dick Pound. Maybe it was back in the day like Dick Nixon. Did people call him that? went to it and just been like, yeah, hey, I'm Dick Pound. I mean, you know. Maybe it was back in the day like Dick Nixon. How do you resist that? I mean, just go through your life. I mean, you're...

Introduce yourself to a girl like, hey, what's your name? Dick Pound. Really, what's your name? But did they call it a dick back in the 70s and the 60s? I think, yeah. I mean, Richard Nixon, wasn't he Dick... No, I guess all of his friends called him Dick Nixon or something. Yeah, but that's not my point. My point is, was a penis called a dick? I don't know when a penis became a dick.

Yeah, exactly. I don't know. I wonder if Dick Pound adopted the name prior to penises being a dick, or if when he started calling himself Dick Pound, he knew that it was a dick, or if he adopted it You know like post dick air or or at what point he basically said yeah, I'm gonna be dick pound Well Richard to dick is always a weird one too. It's not not as weird as John to Jack John to Jack is the weirdest one. Yeah, I mean how the fuck do you get Richard should be rich? Yes rich rich

How do you go from yeah? How do you go from? Richard dick how do you go from Richard to Dick? How do you go from John to Jack? Jack Kennedy is John F. Kennedy. That makes no sense. It doesn't make sense at all. What about Jack Johnson? Is he John Johnson?

I think he was Jack. I think his name was actually Jack. You can have a name Jack Johnson. I'm not wearing it right now. I was wearing it earlier today. I was wearing a Jack Johnson t-shirt this morning. It was funny. When you said that, I thought I still had it on. interest here. So, so Richard Pound was an athlete, a swimmer, an Olympic swimmer, actually. And then he got into being in the IOC and he's a lawyer and his law firm has been representing

the Olympics for the last, I don't even know how many years, 30 years in all of their sale of the Olympics to the entire world is Richard Pound's law firm, Strikeman Pound. Whoa. And Richard Pound's also the vice president of the IOC. And Richard Pound establishes WADA. He's the first head of WADA in 1999. Now, an interesting story is he's Canadian, and he is essentially like the ambassador to Canada during the time that Ben Johnson tests positive. And so Ben Johnson tests positive, and Canada sends Richard Pound in there to basically see if they can do something to make this go away.

Is this true? Is there some way that basically Ben Johnson cannot be positive? And Dick Pound, as he will tell you, was there essentially trying to negotiate, find a loophole on behalf of Canada that Ben Johnson would not be positive, but that apparently he was just so radically positive. And there was just like, there was just nothing that anybody could do about it. It was just like a, you know, Hey, we'd really like to help you, but this is really, really bad. There's like a lot of drugs. I remember an article that described the whites of his eyes being

yellow because his liver was overwhelmed trying to process the amount of steroids over his body. I mean, he argues that the coaches, you know, that he had no idea. Oh, yeah. No idea. They just kept telling him just, you know, it's fine. You're fine. Don't worry about it.

You're fine. You're fine. Might be true. I mean, I wonder what they really did think was going to happen or how they thought they would pull it off. Well, I mean, it was these kind of scandals that forced the IOC to create WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, because they looked at a brand in crisis. And how are they going to regain public trust? What year was this?

Well, WADA gets established in 1999. If I remember, Ben Johnson was, that was the, wasn't that the 84 Olympics? It might have been the first Olympics where they tested. Yeah, that was the 84 Olympics where Ben Johnson was tested positive. So maybe they just didn't understand the scope. But all the Americans, but according to everybody that I've talked to, the entire American team was positive too. He was just so positive. They're like, hey man, you went too far.

You just pushed it way too far. Well, he looked like a freak too. He was so jacked. He was so big. He looked so different. You watch that stuff. I mean, we had, I think we have some footage of him in the film at the end. I mean, he is a machine.

Yeah. He looks so different than the other track and field sprinter. He is just a machine. Yeah, he looked like an MMA fighter. He was just fucking jacked. Look at him! He's jacked! Look at that guy. Look at Carl Lewis. He's like, shit, I need a better doctor. I mean, he was jacked.

I mean, look at his shoulder there. Everything. Yeah. Shredded. Yeah. I mean... Look at Carl Lewis. Yeah. Shredded. Yeah. I mean. Look at Carl Lewis. Yeah. And then look at Johnson. And Carl Lewis was on some shit too. That's what's really crazy. It's like all these guys were on some shit.

I mean, we have this idea. Like, look at his eyes. He's got like hyena eyes. He looks like a werewolf or something. Like, my God. I mean, we have this idea that you'd be able to tell looking at someone whether or not they're on steroids. That was always the idea, like the sniff test. Well, Gregory, the funny thing is I was working with him all this time.

He'd run into guys and he'd be like, he's on the HGH. She's on the HGH. He took too much HGH. Oh, definitely. I mean, Gregory could just look at somebody and know whether or not they were like doping and there were a time you know because I was on this program for a year and he looks at me he's like Brian you're taking too much

HGH really so he could tell looking could you tell no he's like looking at me and he's like you know and seeing like your jaw it's getting a little bigger your forehead he's like you need to cut down the dose the voice is perfect I mean he would it was just uh you know he could just look at somebody and know like he just he just anybody he knew and we would meet people over that year um

there's a funny story when i was in moscow um when i go to to meet him after this hot route hot route race and i and i bring with me which again we don't get into in the film it's pretty crazy i'd i'd figured out essentially because i wasn't going to be tested every day that i was going to simulate the protocol so during this this second race i'm peeing every single night into ziploc bags and basically sealing the ziploc bag and storing this frozen urine in like a little thermos. And the idea is, is I'm going to bring all my frozen urine with me to Moscow. And I had all these blood tests done too, before, after to build the biological passport and the, and the steroid profile. Um, so I bring him, you know, like all my frozen urine to Moscow.

And he had went into the process of literally, you know, testing this urine that I'd brought him in Ziploc bags that I'd smuggled with me into Russia. Russia. And, and the second part of the investigation comes out before he's able to covertly test all of my urine within his lab, which he shouldn't have been doing. But I go to this birthday party, and it's the, and in the film, it's the, it's, I shot it on my iPhone, that scene of chaos with the birthday party. And he's there, and he's singing, and he's introducing me, and he's there and he's singing and he's introducing me and he's doing karaoke and he's dancing so that party was for like a a russian gold medal like shot putter and everybody at that party were like former gold medal shot putters wrestling decathlon and these were human giants and gregory was like yes i had doped him, I doped him, I doped him. He was on this, he was on this, he was on this, he was on this.

I mean, it was every single person at this party was like, I can't remember the names. This is whatever. This is Maria da-da-da. She won three Olympic gold medals. She was on this. Yes, and we threw out her positive. Oh, wow. It was like it was every single, if we threw out their positive. Oh, wow.

It was like it was every single, if we were at this party and there was like 30 of them. And I have these pictures of me with like giants. I mean, literally like just the biggest human beings you've ever seen in your life. And Gregory's like, yes, it was. Yes, I helped him. I helped him. I helped him. I helped him.

I helped him. Wow. And they were all now him. I helped him. Wow. And they were all now part of the sports ministry. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Listen, man, let's wrap this up. Your documentary is fantastic.

I really enjoyed it. And I really do think it's probably the most powerful anti-doping documentary ever made. I think you fucking nailed it. It's really amazing. And I really appreciate you coming on here. And I want everybody to see it. If you're interested in this stuff, it's on Netflix, Icarus.

Go check it out. It is really, really good. Thank you, Brian. Really appreciate it, man. Thanks, Joe. And I'll say to your listeners, anybody that wants to throw a bone to Gregory, he's got a GoFundMe page, and he could really, really use that.

And that GoFundMe page is on your Twitter page? It's on my Twitter feed right now. I posted a tweet today with the link to his GoFundMe. And if you go on GoFundMe and search for Gregory Rodchenkov, you'll find it too. But this is, it's right there on my Twitter, at Brian Fogel. And, yeah, he's in some dire straits. And really, it's a story that hasn't, it's still unfolding. It is still unfolding. It's history.

We captured history. And the history involving the history is still unfolding in the news on a daily basis. It is. But, again, you nailed it. Really amazing work. Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. Alright folks, we'll see you tomorrow.