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

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Joe Rogan sits down with Jeff Novitzky, who is currently the Vice President of Athlete Health and Performance for UFC.

Four, three, two, one. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Nowitzki. How are you, buddy? What's up, Joe? Doing good. I have to ask you, do you mind the nickname, The Golden Snitch? It's the first thing I was going to bring up with you. This Golden Snitch bullshit.

I just want to say, it's not my nickname. It's Brendan Schaub's. He came up with it 100% on his own. I was going to ask you. It's all good, though. It's okay? It's all good. So a couple funny stories about that.

So when did he come up with this? About a year ago? At least, yeah. So people in the office started coming up to me saying, hey, golden snitch. What the hell is that? I do a little research. I see something about Harry Potter or some character name there. I'm like, what the hell does this have to do with me? So about a month ago, somebody

lets me know, Hey, check out Wikipedia. So for whatever reason, there's a Jeff Novitsky Wikipedia page. You go to that page. Now it says, it says actually my formal name, Jeffrey John Novitzki, a.k.a. the Golden Snitch. So last week, Donna Marcolini, you know Donna, long 15-year employee of the UFC, now works with me and talk about her a little later. She's a great asset to what we're doing. She sends me a text. She says, check this out. So she's got one of those Amazon Echoes, Alexa, I think. So she says, Alexa, who is Jeff Nowitzki? And Alexa's

name says Jeffrey John Nowitzki, a.k.a. the Golden Snitch. So thanks a lot, Shob. Oh, Shob, what have you done? That's hilarious. I love Donna. She's amazing. She's awesome. It's great that she's over there. She's so good. Yeah, I mean, you know about kind of her history. She's one of the five

original employees of the UFC. Was Dana's assistant to start out with, went on to become VP of event operations. So basically, you know, she got everybody to the event, set up hotel at the event, ran the crew, you know, the blue shirts backstage that run the event. You know, I think after doing it for many years, she got a little burnout on it. So went to Dana mid-summer and says, look, I don't think I want to do this anymore, but I'd really love to do something else. And I've seen kind of what Jeff's doing in his program. I'd really like to go over there and work with him and kind of learn what he's doing.

And so Dana pulled me into the office and said, hey, what do you think about this idea? And it took me literally a half second to say a hundred percent on board. This woman, I mean, as you probably know, is about as attention to detail and passionate about her work as anybody. And really my positioning, unlike the, the, the name, the golden snitch is an advocate to our athletes to make sure our athletes are successful under the program, not that they fail under the program. It's definitely the wrong nickname. It's just catchy. It is. It's unfortunately catchy.

Again, I'm all good with it. Better roll up my back. But the real Golden Snitch is Victor Conte. He's The Golden Snitch, right? Yeah. Because he was actually a snitch. I can see that. I can see that.

Because he was a guy who was giving guys steroids. You were a guy that was always catching people. Correct. So it's the wrong moniker. Yeah, correct. Giving them steroids and then talking about it after, right? Snitching. That's a snitch.

That's the golden snitch. Not you, man. But it's all good. I was hoping Shab would be here. Call him up. We'll call him up later in the show. Not that I could do anything to him, but it'd be interesting to look at him in the face. He would say, I'm sorry, bro.

Sorry. It's all good. Yeah, well, well anyway back to donna she's awesome i'm so i'm super psyched that she's with you so what exactly does she do for you guys again her you know when i sat her down this summer i said look your role here is going to make sure that the athletes are successful under the program and in a program like this there are so many landmines, you know, whether it be making sure your whereabouts filing is on time, making sure USADA knows where you're at so they can come do a collection from you at any time, making sure you make safe supplement choices, making sure the medications you're taking are correct.

So she, you know, works hard for all those things. I give you the prime example of what she brings to this program. So every three months, every quarter, every single athlete on the roster is required to file what's called quarterly whereabouts. Can I pause right here just so this can be a standalone, if people don't know exactly what you do? Sure. Jeff is in charge of making sure that all the UFC athletes are clean and free of performance-enhancing substances.

And it was a huge issue before you came along, a huge issue in the sport, and continues to be in other organizations, particularly overseas. I mean, there's just rampant speculation about companies that literally encourage people to take steroids. It was always the case with pride in Japan. That was one of the big things about pride. Ensign Inoue, who fought for them many times, came on the podcast and literally was saying in the contract, in like capital letters, it says, we will not test you for steroids. Like they wanted everybody to take steroids. I had friends who went to fight over there. They told them to take steroids and move up a weight class. So it was always an issue in the sport that this was a dirty sport, air quotes, right?

But since you've come along and since you guys started instituting this incredibly strict testing, we've seen some pretty radical changes. We've seen some amazing fights and amazing performances, and I don't think the performance levels dropped In fact, I think it escalated and elevated rather which is something that people were really concerned about But one thing that we did see is some people that you suspected of doing stuff their bodies radically changed It was really mean that became a meme pre USADA and post USADA I mean and there's some comedy memes out there because of it, because people's bodies change so radically. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, the last time I was on,

we talked about kind of the smell test, you know, looking at somebody and, you know, it's difficult to say definitively whether or not, you know, changes in bodies are due to that or not, but, you know, you can't help, but, but look at some of these pictures before and after you saw it, I think that's the case. That's something I always struggle with. How do you judge the success of a program? Do you judge it on numbers of positive tests? I don't think that's necessarily the case.

Maybe you're not catching everybody. Maybe there's no one to catch. Do you judge it on before and after pictures? I don't know. That could be one factor. I like to judge it a before and after pictures? I don't know. I mean, that could be one factor. I like to judge it a lot anecdotally. A big part of my job is getting out and building relationships with our fighters, with managers, with coaches, and just chewing on their ear and figuring out what they're seeing and what they're hearing.

And almost universally, the feedback I get from them is this is making a big difference. You know, one thing I brought with me today, and really the coolest piece of data I think I've seen in any anti-doping program, are some really objective, measurable statistics in the UFC anti-doping program. USADA, so USADA is the United States anti-doping agency. They're the official anti-doping agency of the United States via an act of Congress. They're in charge of all drug testing for U.S. Olympic sports. Back in 2015, we made the decision to outsource the administration of our program to USADA. The primary reason being the independence factor. You know, when you look at all these other professional sports leagues, some have,

you know, better programs than others. None really have any independence in the administration of that program. And what that means is there's no way of telling whether or not, you know, when an athlete is sanctioned, it's done for business reasons or done for favoritism. So in our program, you know, no one can say that any of the administration of our program is done for that reason. It's a truly independent authority. So what USADA did recently is they went back and they've been in existence since I think about 2001 on the U.S. Olympic level. They went back and took a look at every single doper, I think for steroids, everyone was caught for steroids in the existence of the USADA program, and took a look at each of those athletes

biological passports and biological markers. And they looked at what was the most common factor for the doper versus, you know, the non doper. And what they determined was what stood out the most was large variance in testosterone excretion in the urine. And when you think about it from a common sense point of view, that kind of makes sense in that someone who's using steroids at that time presents a sample, their testosterone excretion is probably going to be on the higher end. And if they were to catch a doper on an off cycle, what happens when you get off steroids is your body suppresses production of testosterone. So in that case, you're going to see a very low excretion of testosterone.

So they looked at that and plotted it out and saw, hey, every doper has a very large variance in testosterone excretion. Then what they did is they took all the UFC samples and they plotted them out by quarter and actually brought a graph along with me. And it's some really drastic, I think, visual evidence of the success and the impact of this program. I don't know if you can throw that up and take a look at it. Pull that up. So what year exactly did US usada take over yeah so we can't usada came into play july

of 2015 so usada has been in existence for two years so you see here um that first quarter quarter three of 2015 a pretty decent variance there um which means in any given test an athlete you know was up on an average a little bit of 30, a little in the mid-20s. And then look at, as you plot out that graph, that variance becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and more in the medium range as it gets out to quarter three of 2017. That's very interesting. You don't usually see statistics. This is the first. I've been involved in anti-doping world since 2002. And I can unequivocally say that this is the strongest visual, objective, measurable evidence of success of a program that I've ever seen.

Well, one of the things that's so fascinating about this, and this goes to credit to the UFC 100%, is that they decided to do something about this. They didn't have to. This wasn't like someone coming after them because so many people had been caught, and someone said, hey, we're going to put a program on you guys to make sure you're not doping. The UFC said, we've got to clean this up, and there's only one way. The one way is to go with the very best testing possible and the most rigorous, the most, I mean, check in everywhere you go. We're going to give you random tests at 6 o'clock in the morning, knock on your door, like the whole full gamut of tests.

And the results have been pretty amazing. And that alone, that speaks volumes when you see the size of the variance between the test when you guys first started versus now. Definitely. Hey, it's a credit to two people, Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White, that, you know, made that decision. That's a hell of a risky decision, but done for all the right reasons. You know, anybody that contends that, you know, Dana doesn't care about his athletes need look no further than this program. This program is of tremendous risk to the company and to the bottom line. When you're testing athletes 365 days a year, unannounced,

no predictability of when the test is coming, there can be some very severe consequences. And there have been. There has been. We've lost several main events. There has been. I mean, UFC 200, arguably the landmark event in the history of the UFC. We lose our main event the Wednesday before UFC 200. Millions, if not tens of millions, into the marketing of that.

The success of the pay-per-view probably hinges on that great main event between John and Daniel. And we lost it three or four days before, and that could happen at any given moment. Now, we talked about this before the podcast, what you could or could not talk about with the current state of John Jones' investigation. So where's it at right now? Yeah. So, you know, generally we don't talk about a case. So, so how the process works when an athlete tests positive, USADA will notify me. I usually pick the phone up right away and call Dana and let him know. And the UFC puts out an announcement. They say, you know, in the case of John, John tested positive and in competition

tests on this date. More information will be provided at the appropriate time. That's generally all we'll talk about. Now, if the athlete chooses to talk about scenarios of what happened, then they're free to do that. At that point, you saw it in the UFC, you can comment on it. So there's been some things talked about in the John case by John. Particularly, he had two clean tests on July 7th and July 8th before his positive test on,

I think, July 30th, which was weigh-in day. And the positive test was for dehydrochloromethyl testosterone or oral turennibal. This is a substance that was used by the East Germans regularly in the late 60s and then came into the fold a little bit more of what's come out recently out of Russia. So I know you had Brian Fogle on for the Icarus movie. I think he talked about a little bit about this. Gregory, the head of the Moscow WADA laboratory, this drug became kind of part of his protocol with his athletes. He then, ironically enough, developed a test for the long-term metabolites of the drug. So previous to that, the detection window of this drug was a couple of days. So it was a drug that, you know, even if you run a strict program,

an athlete may gamble with taking because it had a drug that, you know, even if you run a strict program, an athlete may gamble with taking because it had a quick clearance time. After he discovered the long-term metabolite test, that changed. It went from a detection window of a couple days to a detection window of several months. And this was widely known. You know, it wasn't a secret. Initially, they kept it quiet. They went back and retested some samples, and there was a whole bunch of positives. And then it got out 2013 around that there was this new test. So right up front, I've said this a while now, would not make a lot of sense for an individual UFC athlete that knew, especially a champion contender like John Jones that knew,

hey, I'm tested quite regularly in this program, would not make a lot of sense that that would be your drug of choice if you were intentionally trying to cheat. I think it's come out after the fact that USADA did another test on John a month or two or a couple months after his positive test, and he was negative during that test. So that would be indicative that, you know, the prohibited system entered his system, or the prohibited substance entered his system, you know, sometime after July 7th or 8th and was likely, you know, a pretty small amount and that it cleared his system pretty quickly. Again, you know, who knows where it plays out, but certainly on the surface of things I have said,

at this point in the game with that type of information out there, it wouldn't indicate intentional use. Now, that could be wrong. I don't know that definitively, and we'll see how this plays out. Right now where the process is is John and USADA are working closely. I'm aware that there was a meeting a week or two ago, pretty lengthy meeting, which I was told was productive. I wasn't given details of what productive meant. But I think that's an important thing right now and that John's following through with is to retrace all of his steps between that,

you know, last July 8th positive test and, or negative test and the positive test on July 29th or July 30th. It certainly seems like, uh, based on what you just said, that this is something that was accidentally taken. But if you can't prove that something was accidentally taken, like if you can't nail it down, what do you, what happens there? Yeah, it's, it's difficult. And difficult and that's you know that's kind of the nightmare scenario that a lot of you know that an athlete can face and a big role of what don and i do to prevent that from happening to show them what type of care and consideration is needed to make sure you don't get into a scenario like that you know under a program like this you have to be

careful about everything that's put into your body, everything. And if you're not, there can be, you know, severe consequences. So yeah, we'll see where this plays out. I tell you the one thing that I can say about this is, you know, this is obviously John's second time in the program with testing positive. And the first time he went through a pretty lengthy appeal process and there was a publicly issued decision, 50, 60 pages that went through all the evidence that the independent arbitrators heard and decided on. And what they said definitively in that case was John, there was no evidence that John intentionally cheated. However, he operated with careless, reckless disregard. So he ended up

getting the maximum for that, for those substances he tested positive for a year. And that was for some gas station Viagra type shit? Well, it was actually a couple of anti-estrogen drugs, but what was shown and what the evidence pointed to was that he took a pill that was manufactured from a website by the name of All American Peptide. The pill was reported to be a Cialis pill, so an erectile dysfunction pill that was tainted with these two drugs. Now, the problem with what the arbitrator said is if he would have gone to that website, and the arbitrators did and I did, you would have seen that that same website offered tons of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs. And the website said, not for human consumption, for research purposes only.

So it really was careless disregard. was careless disregard. That being said, however, John's, you know, second time through the program now, the second sanction this time for, you know, an anabolic type steroid would have, you know, a starting point potentially of a four-year suspension. That's a starting point. That could be a starting point, right? Unless there are mitigating factors. Now, I don't, you know, again, the beauty of this program is it's not the UFC or not me deciding, you know, what the sanction is going to be. No one can accuse us of, you know, operating for business purposes or favoritism or whatever. But that being said, you know, when we put this program together and figured out, you know, what sanctioning would look like, I don't necessarily think that we put up a four-year sanction for a second-term offense

when the first-term offense was shown that that person didn't cheat intentionally, just operated with careless disregard. So who makes that distinction then, USADA? USADA makes that distinction. They have a whole team looking at it. They compare it to other cases under the WADA Olympic-type umbrella, similar cases. under the WADA Olympic-type umbrella, similar cases. I will say this, that I think we've had a few over 60 positive adverse events in this case,

and those that have been adjudicated, I've been comfortable every time that they've made a fair and balanced and reasonable decision. And that's part of my job is to be the eyes and ears for athletes to make sure not only is the program being administered properly and has strength, but also that they're being treated fairly and that they have due process. So I have all the confidence in the world, however this does come out, that it will be the right decision. The other really cool thing about the program is the transparency of the program. So, you know, it won't just be me saying this. However it does come out, whether it goes to arbitration or whether John and USADA reach a settlement, it'll be well spelled out about why that sanction was determined.

Now, you say starting point, meaning that it could potentially be more? It could. So when there's something called aggravating circumstances, so more than just knowingly taking the drug, taking the drug and lying, trying to cover it up, taking multiple drugs, one trying to hide the other. Yeah, you could get double the sanction amount. So, you know, on a second time, anabolic steroid, four years is kind of the starting point. You can go lower for mitigating factors. You can go higher for aggravating factors, up to eight um so yeah i mean it would have to require something you know really severe and egregious to get to get up that that high has anybody ever gotten that hit not in the ufc program no what is the biggest hit that anyone's ever gotten in the ufc i think thus far it's two years. And who's that? I think a few people. Chad Mendez comes to mind.

And Chad Mendez, his was some sort of psoriasis cream or something? His was an insulin growth factor one, so IGF-1. And did he say that it came from a psoriasis cream? I think he may have said that. Yeah. That was never proven? No. I mean, there was nothing in USADA's reasoning or their announcement of why it was two years about, you know, any type of mitigating factor coming

from another substance. Because I know he has psoriasis and someone had said, or had read, I didn't really investigate very deeply into this, but I remember reading that he had put some sort of cream on and that that cream was responsible for him testing positive. Is that? Yeah. I don't know. That's the case. I do recall him saying that. But, you know, an athlete can say anything they want about why it happened. If there was something mitigating, they are afforded that right to share with USADA that, look, I didn't do this on purpose. It wasn't on the label of the cream.

Usually in those instances where the evidence does show that, you will see a mitigating factor come into play and a reduction in a sanction. There wasn't any in that case. It was the two years. And there have been some guys that have gotten pretty low sentences, like Tim Means is a good example, right? Tim Means did take something that was tainted, and you guys or USADA got some of those samples from independent stores,

found out those were also tainted. Yeah, Tim Means took a supplement. It was a creatine. And, you know, after he tested positive, and again, this is where Donna and I come into play quite a bit. You know, when athletes test positive, we reach out to them right away saying, look, we're here to help you here. If there's help to be had, we'll believe you until you give us reason not to.

I did that with Tim. Tim said, I'd never heard of this substance, Jeff. You got to believe me. I didn't take it. I said, all right, well, let's start doing retracing steps. What have you been taking? He sent me, you know, maybe a half dozen supplements, did some research on them, worked, reached out to kind of contacts I still have in the industry from my law enforcement days and said, hey, any of these kind of raised suspicions? And there was one that did by a company that made some other kind of sketchy products. We narrowed in on that one pretty quickly, sent it to USADA, to a WADA laboratory, tested it. Sure enough, it had the substance in it.

Then what happens is USADA will independently procure some themselves. So outside of the kind of touch of the athlete to make sure the athlete's not contaminating with it for a built-in excuse, they were able to get some that was sealed and unopened. And sure enough, it had that substance in it and had the same amount of the substance in it that kind of matched up with how much was in Tim's system and when he said he had taken it last. So there's a lot of detective work that comes into it. And I get this question a lot from fighters saying, hey, the supplement excuse is a bullshit excuse. There's athletes using stuff, and they have supplements in their closet that they know are tainted. And then, boom, if they test it positive, they just have that built-in excuse.

And what I tell them is it goes deeper than that. There's literally scientific detective work that's going on from the USADA side, making sure everything matches, making sure they independently procure the product, making sure what turns up in the athlete's system based on when they say they were taking it matches exactly the level that's in the product based on, you know, metabolism timings. So it's much more than that. And I do have a lot of confidence when you saw it. It says, hey, it does match that. This is, you know, came from an unknowingly or unintentional ingestion. That really is that now in the case like Tim means, why is he suspended? If someone does give him a tainted supplement and he takes it in good faith, thinking that it's just creatine?

Right. So there's strict liability in the program. And, you know, they look at all the factors. So, you know, creatine is a relatively low-risk product. However, the creatine Tim took was not third-party certified. And that, you know, get a lot of questions about, man, the supplement industry is dangerous and, you know, this sucks for athletes. There's nothing they can do.

There is something that you can do, and it's actually pretty simple to do. We were talking earlier about Onnit, a company you're involved with, and you guys third-party certify a lot of your product. And what that means is you outsource random testing of the product and sampling of the product from these independent companies to make sure they contain no prohibited substances. And what Don and I educate our athletes to is you can go to these third-party certification companies. I think you guys use Catlin's group, Banned Substance Control Group. There's that group. There's informed choice. There's NSF for sport, and you can go to their websites and they have lists of all certified products and there's hundreds of them. So there's,

there's no excuse that you can't find as, you know, UFC athlete products that are tested and independently certified as banned substance free. And if it were the case, and it's not saying that it couldn't happen, because those companies aren't testing every single bottle of product. But if you're an athlete, you take a third party certified product, you record it, you log it, and it turns out to be from that product, I think then you're reaching a level where the mitigating factors maybe do get you down to no sanction, a public warning or something. Hey, maybe you shouldn't use supplements at all

type of thing. Right, so his error was just taking something that was not third-party sanction. Correct, and just not doing his homework on the company. There is a responsibility to that. Six months off or something like that? Yeah, six months. Which seems like a lot, but in reality,

most fighters, he's really only got about three months off, because most fighters after a fight are going to take a few months off anyway. Probably. I mean, it seems harsh, but there is an obligation that fighters need to do their homework, and you need to have a bit of a deterrent there to make sure they do it, and that's that deterrent. Now, one of the things that I thought was really cool about the UFC Performance Institute, which is just, there's so much cool about that place. But one of the things that was really cool is that you guys have a station where an athlete can go in and check any sort of substance,

any cold medication they're taking, anything, type in the name of it, and it'll tell you on this giant tablet whether or not what you're taking is banned. Yeah, so it's a kiosk. So it's the USADA kiosk, and we have a little iPad in there, and it's between the locker rooms and the recovery room. So you've got your hot-cool and your cold pool and your sauna and your cryo and all that stuff. So it's a constant reminder as our athletes are in that flow between that area

because they all walk through there every day that USADA is a part of this sport that we're a clean sport that you have an obligation to check on medication supplements and you have an obligation to file your whereabouts they can also file whereabouts at that kiosk and we get athletes all the time walking down that corridor saying oh shit forgot to tell you USADA flew out to Las Vegas at the PI. Boom, they can get on in a minute or two and update where they're at. Do you guys have an app? They do. So they can update by app? Yep. So it's on your phone as well. So every quarter, athletes are required to get through a web browser, what's called the quarterly USADA whereabouts filing. They usually have to watch

an instructional video, most of the time reminders about smart supplement choices, things like that. And then they tell USADA where they're going to be for the next three months. And most of the time, hey, I mean, I do, Don and I do the whereabouts filing as well. We both say, hey, who knows where I'm going to be next week, let alone two, three months from now, but you make your best guess at it. And then all that information you put through the web browser is downloaded to your mobile phone app. So that as your plans change over the next, you know, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, you can do 45 second to one minute updates through your mobile app. So the convenience is there. There's really, you know, no excuse and not letting you

know where you're at. There are repercussions if you don't let them know where you're at because you want to avoid somebody ducking and dodging a test. I know Cowboy had a situation where he was actually in Vegas at the fights and they were mad at him because he didn't say that he was going to be in Vegas. He's like, I'm at the fucking fights. I'm right here. I'm on TV. Don and I do everything we can to try to let USADA know

when we know that a fighter has a UFC obligation. So whether they're a guest fighter on the road, whether they're at a competition, we're always passing that information along to USADA. But we also tell them that ultimately it's your responsibility as an athlete. We'll try to, but we can't guarantee it ultimately is going to fall on you if you don't update. Now, the good thing about this is you're afforded a couple mistakes under the whereabouts program. So it's not until three whereabouts failures in any rolling 12-month period that there can be sanctions. Because honestly, I mean, things happen in your life. Everybody's human.

Sometimes you forget. I'll give you the perfect example. So again, getting back to Donna, the most attention to detail person that I've ever worked with in my working career. She comes over, joins kind of our program here. We get her signed up for whereabouts. She's like, this is great. Like I can talk knowledgeably about how to do this. We went out to Anaheim for UFC. I forget what number that was. We take a trip down from Anaheim for UFC, I forget what number that was. We take a trip down from Anaheim to San Diego. We went down to this clinic that we were checking out for brain therapy. She forgot to update that she was going to San Diego. She was more than two hours outside of where she was supposed to be,

where you saw it and knew she was going to be. She would have gotten a whereabouts failure. Again, one of the most responsible people that I've ever been around goes to show that it's challenging. So she has to notify where she's going to be? We do it voluntarily just so we can talk knowledgeably to our athletes so that when they say, hey, this is too hard, we say, well, we do it. Right. Yeah, here's a little trick that I have to remind myself each day where I said I'm going to be at, things like that. to remind myself, you know, each day where I said I'm going to be at, things like that.

Now, when you have a fighter like Holly Holm, I think said she was tested nine times in preparation for this fight against Cyborg. When that happens, is there a, I know you can't say when the test is going to happen because it won't be random, but is there any consideration about the sleep cycle of the fighters? Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, USADA never lets me know when a test is coming. I have zero input in terms of who's being tested. And that is the reality.

A lot of times they show up 5.30, 6 in the morning. That seems like it would really suck for fighters. There is no doubt about it. Is it just a urine test? Or it can be blood as well. I mean, imagine you're dead asleep, 6 in the morning. Someone's knocking your front door. That's scary shit to begin with. You go downstairs, you know, you're trying to get ready for a fight, prepare yourself sleep wise, mentally, and you got to have a needle stuck in you to get to draw blood. Wait till you got to

take a pee. Could be, you know, some fighters wait hours. You know. I don't think enough attention is being paid to the burden that's on the athletes and the credit they should be getting. Holly Holm, I think I saw a statistic that she's the most tested athlete since the inception of the program. I think she's around 32 or 33 samples that she's provided. I mean, that's crazy. But I think not enough credit is given to her. Why do they test her so many times? Because she, no, I haven't heard any suspicions of her being

dirty. Neither have I. And, you know, I think as you look at the testing statistics, and that's another cool thing about this program. I don't know if you know that, but all these test numbers are publicly available. So the transparency in this program is unprecedented, unparalleled as it comes to professional sports. There's no other professional sport on the planet where you or I as a fan of the UFC could say, let me see how many times Holly's been tested, how many times Cyborg's been tested. That's unparalleled. But if you look at those numbers, and I'll occasionally look at them, I think those athletes with staying power, those athletes that are at the tops of their division have more tests

directed to them versus, you know, athletes at the bottom that are jumping in and out they want to make. I think you saw a good use of their resources to make sure that they're directing most of those tests. Those athletes are going to be around for a while. And I mean, we saw what a badass Holly is on Saturday night. That woman's incredible. And I think Sada probably realizes that too, and she's going to be around for a while and wants to set an example. And I tell athletes a lot.

I say, hey, wear this as a badge of honor. I know it's a burden, but, man, that makes you even more special of an athlete that you take that burden on and embrace it and And show the world that you're you know, not only a badass athlete, but you're doing this clean And one of the things I thought was really fascinating about the UFC Performance Institute is that machine where you lie down? And it scans your entire body and it shows where your muscle imbalances are and like what what are what are all the different details? I think focuses on? Yeah.

I mean, we talked about this when you toured it. But you've got to get some of the personnel from the PI in there that can really talk knowledgeably and have that education experience. I'm going to bring those guys in. Yeah. They're going to come on. We're going to schedule that. Not only is that, as you saw, that facility world class, but they staffed it with the

perfect world class personnel. So that machine's called a DEXA scan. And, you know, I can't give it the justice that the personnel can, uh, there, but it, yeah, it measures body composition. So it'll measure, you know, fat, um, hydration levels, bone density, bone density. Yeah. And how's it, is it, how's it doing that? Some type of low level x-ray, uh, again, you got to get those guys in there to describe it specifically. But I'm sure it's a topic we'll cover today, the whole weight issue, being in the proper weight class and weight cutting. Both the equipment and now the personnel is in place at the Performance Institute

that there's no excuse for an athlete to not, A, find their right weight class, and, B, safely, efficiently meet that weight goal when they're fighting. Everything is in place now there for that. Now, when a fighter comes to you guys and lies down on that machine, and you read their hydration levels and say they're slightly dehydrated, and yet they're still 10 pounds above the weight class. How do you handle that? So we have a director of sports nutrition, a guy by the name of Clint Wattenberg. And Clint was a Division I All-American at Cornell, Ivy League educated, smart as hell, went on to wrestle with Team USA.

He's actually wrestled with a lot of our fighters. Went on to wrestle with Team USA. He's actually wrestled with a lot of our fighters. I've had several conversations with guys that wrestled him before Clint came here. So he's got a ton of peer respect for that. Super smart guy. But yeah, he works. He'd be the guy to ask. He's Ivy League educated in sports nutrition.

And in a situation like that, yeah, he's, you know, giving advice to the fighters about how the importance of hydration and trying to change that around so that they can meet those goals. Yeah. There's the machine right there. What is it called? Dual energy x-ray absorpt, absorptiometry. How do you say that? We call it DEXA scan. Absorptiometry. How do you say that? We call it DEXA scan. Absorptiometry. That sounds like something that someone would say in a cartoon, like a fake word. It measures body composition, including lean mass, muscle tissue, fat mass, and bone density. Measuring and tracking all three of these components is important for weight class sport athletes and helps guide nutrition recommendations. Fascinating stuff. So it just sort of scans over you. How long does

that test take? I've never gone through it or actually never seen it. I got to get over there and check it out. I don't know. It was interesting when Forrest Griffin was telling me that when he had it done, he found out that one of his legs has two pounds more muscle than the other leg because he had had some knee injuries and he really had no idea. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, so Forrest is a big part of that performance Institute was a big part of, you know, touring other facilities around the world. I think him and James Kimball, who's our VP of operations at the PI went to 61 or 62 facilities throughout the world and took what they believe were the best parts of these facilities and put them all to one. And force his role there, um,rest's role there is kind of similar to my role in the anti-doping program,

an advocate for our athletes. He's there to make sure, as a former fighter, knowing what works and what doesn't work. We're looking at a video of this thing right now, and it looks like Star Trek. Is it saying anything, Jamie? At the very end, it pans over and shows what shows up on the screen. There's a couple of like, bunches of different data points. This is amazing. I mean, I talked to you. I thought maybe last week

we can get you out there earlier, but you gotta come. I'm gonna next time. Next time in March. Next time I'm gonna come day early. Excuse me, day early, just do this. They'll put you through the whole thing. You get your DEXA scan done, your body composition. You then have a meeting with Clint. Talk about nutrition and goals. Maybe go see the physical therapist, talk about any issues you have

and therapy you need. Go work out with our strength and conditioning coach, Bo Sandoval, put you through the ringers and the equipment there. Then do a little recovery after. That will really give you the full experience. Yeah, that place is amazing how you guys got it set up. It's really a massive resource for fighters. Because there's a lot of great gyms out there.

But I don't think I've ever seen one that's that well equipped. You guys have everything. You have a complete strength and conditioning system area. Then you have a complete area with heavy bags, a cage, boxing ring. And then you have a complete recovery area. Then you have a complete area with heavy bags, a cage, boxing ring, and then you have a complete recovery area. You have cryo machines. You have that, what is that, light machine? Yeah, it's like low-level laser light therapy. Yeah. That looks like a giant tanning bed that you get in. And I've seen that thing before. And what is that supposed to do? It's supposed to somehow or another stimulate the blood flow to the at the cellular level again you need to get these these pi personnel

in here to explain it in detail you guys even have sleep pods which i thought was the craziest thing ever so like if a fighter just has like an hour to chill they can just get in there and recover and relax yeah i mean the idea is you come to the Performance Institute. Yeah, there they are. And I hear this all the time. They see the equipment, the personnel that's available to them. They see when it's time to unwind that they have a room like this to relax in. They see they have free use of the cafeteria and custom-cooked meals. They don't want to leave the place. They're there all day long.

Francis Ngann lives has lived there the last six months there's a running joke in the office francis is constantly walking around the office in between workouts it's like francis we got to get you an office here somewhere what are you doing yeah that's incredible he saw i mean the dude moved to law he saw the place and he moved up and moved everything he had i don't think he knew anybody in Las Vegas or had any friends there because he's just walking around the office all day long when he's not at the PI. From France. From France.

Yeah, from another country. He said, perfect. But, you know, a perfect example of seeing what that place could do for him, and that's available to every single fighter on the roster. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing like it. And my prediction is that the UFC is going to be the hub where most people live. The only thing that's wrong there is the altitude. That's the only thing that's wrong. And I know you guys have a hypoxic room where you can

stimulate or simulate a high altitude. Yeah, I think 22,000 feet. But isn't the way you're supposed to do it, you're supposed to work at sea level but sleep at high altitude. Isn't that how it's supposed to be done? I think that's what it is. What is VEA? So 2,500, 3,000 feet. Is it even? Is it really? That's interesting.

I didn't even know it was that high. I think it is, yeah. I thought it was like sea level because it's like desert. No, it's got a little bit of altitude. I know Nevada has some good mountain areas, though, just outside where guys can run and do things like that. Yeah. Does the Performance Institute take people on any treks or anything like that? No, I don't think we've gotten to that level yet.

Seems like that would be a good thing to do, right? Could be. Come up to Red Rocks for runs. There you go. It's a good idea. I mean, I just think that if really high-level coaches start moving there, and obviously we just lost one of the best,bert folos which is a huge huge loss and what a great guy and it's gonna say i mean universally the nicest guy ever always a great universally loved very few people that are fight coaches that are universally loved and robert really was

but um you know vegas has some good coaches but i i anticipate more and more gyms moving and relocating there and bringing fighters there because i just think high level fighters are going to see that place and go how can i recreate this anywhere without fucking millions and millions of dollars i think so i think we'd love to see that happen it's you know good low cost relatively low cost of living area um so it's a place that's affordable and uh yeah i think you spend a little bit of time at the pi and see what you can do what it can do for you as a ufc athlete and just when i was oh go. I think the other cool thing, and I know Duncan French, he's Dr. Duncan French. He's our VP of performance there. And which he explained a little bit to you about is that not only are we

looking to influence the UFC athlete, but also influence positively MMA, the whole, the entire sport. And what you're seeing is UFC athletes can come in there and use it, but they can also bring along with them, training partners, coaches, and, you know, we're only seven or eight months into this, but what we've already seen is, you know, training ideas, proper nutrition, going back out to these gyms, not only across the U.S., but across the world. So we definitely hope to be a positive influence throughout all of MMA and really, really grow this sport. Yeah, I saw that with Bobby Green.

Bobby Green, who was there, brought a couple of his training partners. And just on a random day, Wilson Hayes was there. Angela Hill was there. There's quite a few fighters there. It's the coolest thing ever. I love. I'll go over there when I'm in the office multiple times a day just to see who's in there that day. And have, you know, that five, ten minute conversation with a Wilson Hayes that he knows me going forward in the future.

And Jeff's a cool guy. And when that medication or supplement question comes up, he's talked to me before. He knows who I am. He's not afraid to pick up the phone and ask me that question versus, hey, this golden snitch character, I don't know. I don't know who this guy is. I'm not going to call him or trust him. It's a big part of what I do is try to develop that trust. So thanks to Shaw for sending me back about two and a half years worth of work developing that trust.

It's a nickname that doesn't even make sense. It literally doesn't make sense. But it's funny. Is there any other plans to expand or do more things with the Institute? There is. So we didn't show you this, but there are other areas upstairs for that very reason. They thought about, hey, technology in a couple years or maybe new machines or devices that come on the line that we may want. So there is additional room for expansion there.

I talked to you guys and I talked to Duncan about a tank, about you guys getting tanks in there, sensory deprivation tanks. I think that would be massive. I know a lot of football teams are using them now and it's starting to spread. Excellent source of magnesium because you're absorbing it through the skin, but just for relaxation and recuperation, I would be fascinated to see

if you guys had those, like what kind of results you'd get. Yeah, I mean it sounded to me and I was there when you were talking about it, that Duncan was open to it and was talking about some research. I think he said Ohio State University is conducting some research on the benefits of that. I know there's tanks in Vegas now. I know there's a place in Vegas. So I'm sure whoever runs that tank thing is going to reach out to me.

So I want to get you in touch with them and just have you try it. Just see if you, you know, just to get a beat on it. Because it's a freaky experience. And it's really good for your body. Everything, like, in your back will just sort of just loosen up. Because you're at essentially zero gravity. You're floating. It's just everything sort of pops and loosens up.

And it's amazing. It's cool. I want to try it. I saw yours a little bit ago. It's a little intimidating or scary looking. Weird looking. Yeah. My wife made me move it out of the basement.

I had one in the basement. She's like, people come over, they think you're a freak. I think I'm a freak. The idea behind it I think is pretty sound and I think there's a lot of benefits for it for fighters as far as concentrating on technique as well. I think it's

an amazing place to focus on strategy and game plans and movement and things along those lines we can visualize. One of the most amazing things with the sport. Coming over to the UFC, I call myself a fringe fan. I mean, I would follow it a little bit, but I'm hook, line, and sinker into the sport now. And the most remarkable thing I find about the sport is the mental game. It is the most incredible mental game of any athlete in any

sport in the world. When you're walking out into an octagon and facing one of the baddest mixed martial artists on the planet. And, you know, I know you've seen a ton of fights over your career, but I think one thing that I've seen in the two and a half years that you may not is that progression through fight week. So when I go out to these events or events are in Vegas, I'm there check in day, Monday or Tuesday of fight week. And typically, as we're on the road, I'm there, you know, every day in the same hotel, I'm watching these guys and girls eat breakfast, I'm watching them at the gym, prepare, try to make weight on Friday. I'm watching them Saturday morning with the prospect of the fight ahead of them. What an incredible mental journey it is to know that you're about to get into, you know, a cage with one of the baddest fighters on the planet. And even if you win, probably come out, you know, with a little bit of damage.

I mean, everything to fight night. I mean, fight night, these athletes are in a locker room, typically with three or four other athletes. And especially if you're one of the last athletes on that card, one by one, your locker mates are walking out and then coming back in. And you see, you know, damage on even the ones that win. And unlike other sports where you get out on the field and you warm up and you get a little sense of what the atmosphere is like, these athletes are walking out, you know, into the lion's den, seeing it for the first time. And the sensory, overwhelming sensory things that are going on when doing that and to be able to, you know, control your emotions and, you know, compete against somebody is just absolutely the most incredible thing that I've ever seen. I'm so amazed. Very few of these fighters, and I talk to a lot of them,

it doesn't get to them in some way or form. I talk to Forrest often about that. Forrest says he equates it to if you've never jumped out of an airplane, the whole time you're on the way up saying, what the hell am I doing? This is crazy and then you know when the bell rings and you start fighting then it kind of calms down you're back in your your kind of zone but just what an incredible mental game this is and i just have so much respect for our athletes because of what they have to go through and they're able to do it time and time again and control those emotions you bring up an important point and um mental training is something that a lot of athletes

have really concentrated on more over the last few years than I think ever that I could recall. And a lot of them bring in hypnotists and a lot of bringing in sports psychologists. Is there ever been any talk of bringing that to the performance institute? Yeah, you know, I've talked briefly with Duncan about it, who has a ton of resources in the athletic performance field. So we've talked briefly about that, but nobody on the staff currently. It's kind of a give and take. Look, we want to provide all these resources to our athletes,

but we also want them to retain their independence. I mean, if you notice in the Performance Institute, there's no MMA coaches there. There's no striking, wrestling coaches, jiu-jitsu coaches, none of that. That's for the athlete to bring in because there needs to be some level of independence. You don't want to train the entire roster the same way. Against itself. Exactly. Yeah, that sounds like it would be.

I saw early on in my tenure here with the ufc i saw one of the most incredible things that that i've ever seen i've only seen it once but i saw a fighter show up fight night outside the locker room and basically said i don't want to go in i don't want to do this at the arena really and? And I mean, I was just blown away. And actually, Sean Shelby went up and thought it was awesome, had a great conversation with the fighter said, Look, you're not feeling anything that everybody doesn't feel every single fighter on the roster feels what you're feeling right now, you're just letting it get the best of you. You know, you're a badass fighter. You know, you've kicked ass before you've gotten beat before. You know, what's the worst going to happen? You're going

to get beat. You're going to live through this thing. You're just letting it surface. Everybody feels what you're feeling. And for a second, you know, the fighter came back a little bit and then boom, left the arena. Whoa, crazy. But I think that must enter into the head or the prospect of that of every single person every single fighter that comes the arena i'm sure there's just a little bit of that in the back of the head it's just an incredible journey to see them mentally overcome um that amount of stress pre-fight is incredible that's why it's so interesting to see a guy like connor who's so relaxed in there it's kind of weird you know like when he does that rubber-armed strut when he's walking around the cage, he's kind of like letting you know how he is dealing with this better than you are.

You know the one fighter that, because I pay really close attention after having seen that early, pay really close attention just to see that fighter on the walkout. I like to sit pretty close to the cage and just look at that fighter's eyes. And I tend to see a little bit of nervousness and fear in everyone. I think it's probably healthy. One person that sticks out that I looked at and I saw nothing in this dude's face. I saw like a little smirk, like he was so happy to be in there. And it's the first time I've seen this guy fight. And that's Justin Gagey. When he fought Michael Johnson, I remember looking. He walked in first, and I was sitting on one side, and he was on the other side of the cage. I was looking in his eyes, and I had never seen him fight before.

I'm like, who is this guy? He looks like he's happy to be in there. This is some party he's at, and that fight was incredible. Wasn't it? He's legitimately crazy. He said that getting knocked out by Eddie Alvarez is the greatest thing that ever happened to him in his life. Yeah, he's a different breed. Yeah, well, he's got a mindset, and that mindset is, I'm coming to go to war.

And he said it when he got signed. He said, over the next couple of years, I'm going to get knocked out. Someone's going to knock me out. He goes, but I'm going to knock a lot of people out, and I'm going to You know, and the only way to stop me is to shut me off. And he goes, I'm human. I can be shut off. I want to watch that guy fight every time. Every time. Yeah. It's mean, that's an incredible mindset. And I don't know if you can teach that. I think a lot of people say you can't teach mental strength and I don, and I think that's horseshit. I think you could teach everything. I think the mind can be trained.

I mean, this is what they do in boot camp, right? I mean, and it works to varying degrees of success. I think the mind can be trained. It's just a matter of what's your baseline. Where are you coming in at? Are you a total scaredy cat, or are you a pretty stoic, rugged dude to begin with? And what can they do? And are you a pretty stoic, rugged dude to begin with? And what can they do? And maybe you're too stoic. Maybe you're too non-emotional and you're too non-vulnerable and

you're delusional in your perceptions. It's amazing seeing the different ways that different athletes deal with it. So Saturday night, I'll give you a perfect example. So fight night, USADA is the one doing the testing. A lot of times fight night, there's not a lot going on in my world. I'm there to put out fires in case something does go on. I like to watch the fights close just to see those things we're talking about here. But occasionally I'll pop in backstage just to make sure everything's going good. So I walked back there before the Holly cyborg fight. I walked back there before the Holly cyborg fight.

And so Holly was out in the hallway getting ready to do that long walk for the championship bout. And she was there for probably about 10 minutes, cameras getting ready. And she was doing that Holly pacing back and forth, jamming her hands together, firing herself up. She did it for a good 10 minutes back there. And then you see once she gets out in the cage, she was the first one in there pacing back and forth for 10 minutes, right? Hitting the hands together. Between every single round, she'd get off that stool, back and forth pacing, hitting the hands together. That's the way she fired herself up. See Carla Esparza walk out? She walks out with like zero emotion on her face. Like, is this girl ready to go? She gets in the cage, walks over to one side and just stands there. Doesn't bounce

around at all. But you know, Hey, you see both, both of them, you know, can have success doing that way dealing with it, you know, in different ways. It's amazing to see it. There's a groove that they get into. They get, they get in the comfort zone. They just like, this is what I do every time I compete. And everybody's just different. And, you know, some people don't like to bounce around. But I remember when Holly did that during the Ronda Rousey fight.

I remember how, and I was looking at her, I'm like, this girl's got some legs. I was like, I'd seen her fight before and I knew that she was an amazing fighter. And some stamina. I mean, between the 10 minutes backstage before she walked out,

the five minutes after she was in the cage and Cyborg was walking out, the 10 or 15 seconds between every round, she probably, you know. Ran a couple miles. Yeah, the equivalent of a couple extra rounds. And she was as fresh at the end as she was in the beginning. Tremendous cardio on that girl. Well, Jackson's camp, you know, that Michael, excuse me, Greg Jackson and Mike Winklejohn camp, they spend a lot of time working on endurance training and strength and conditioning. And they do a lot of hill running. You know, they have this famous mountain that they run that they all do.

And just Holly's been known for not just her cardio, but like I said in the Ronda fight, her legs, the way she can move. That's one of the things that I thought was going to be a big problem with her, with Ronda. I was like, Ronda's got to catch her. You know, like the way she's bouncing and moving. I don't think Ronda can move like that. I'm like watching her bounce and move in that crazy kickboxing style that she had had for all those years, her ability to do backflips and stuff. Yeah, she's really athletic.

She's a different level of athlete. Yep. Yeah, but Cyborg was just too big too big too skillful too tough so she showed a lot she showed a lot of skill in that fight i was you know her previous ufc fights she was just kind of coming at people and i thought she was really skillful in this fight very very patient too you know i mean a lot of people want to say that she's just a brute but she's not like she's she. She knows what her skills are, which is big power and excellent Muay Thai, but she also administered that power.

The way she delivered it was very skillful, very methodical, very professional. That was a workman-like performance. It really was. It was interesting. I talked to somebody in her camp, and they wanted to see a little bit more of that brute power come right at him they they thought she was holding back a little bit maybe a little too skillful um but i thought it was great well they want her to stop you know uh holly but you run into a risk of getting head kicked sure you know you got to be real careful with holly holly pulls stuff out of her ass you know like you saw

in the germaine germaine de ronda me fight you saw it and obviously the ronda fight she's very sneaky she knows how to especially that left high kick man she knows how to sneak that sucker that was a great fight love watching that fight yeah yeah the women's mma uh talent level has risen and risen and it it is i mean i remember when it first came on the scene and Ronda was the champ and she was just kind of steamrolling these girls who really didn't belong in the ring with her. Yeah, it has. And, you know, interesting, bringing back to the Performance Institute, you know, talk with guys a lot over there that what they're finding out is you need to train a female athlete in a much different manner than you train a male athlete. different manner than you train a male athlete. You know, you see a lot of times when female athletes cut weight, difficulties they have cutting that weight because of, you know, menstrual cycles potentially. And you also see in a lot of cases, a rebound effect where a female

will fight, get down to weight, fight, and then bounce way back up and just lose the ability, the body's ability to regulate where there will be cutting down on calories, working out like crazy, and they're still putting on weight. So, I mean, I think that's something that you'll see the Performance Institute doing is try to, you know, figure out and then knowledgeably disseminate information about how to train the female athlete that they may need a little bit more time off in recovery between fights than a male athlete will. But one thing I say time and time again is every time we have a female fight, they come to fight. And you often see cards that are, you know, kind of lagging a little bit.

And you look down on the list, you're like, okay, here comes a female fight. And boom, turns the card right around. Because, you know, inevitably they give ultimate maximum effort in there that's at least what i see there's a lot of that well there's the the excuse me the talent level is uh rising they're very hungry and they're they're looking to be that next person they realize like look ronda rousey's gone no one has really filled her place i mean there's some very popular fighters you know like rose nama unis obviously now is going to be one of the most popular fighters after the knockout of Ioanni and Jacek. Cyborg's obviously very popular, but there's plenty of room for more.

And they realize that, look, this is the time to go for it. And I just think that, you know, the women that get involved in fighting in the first place, it's not, there's a lot of men that get involved in fighting that are not going to fight after a while. But the women that get involved in fighting they tend to be crazy Like in in a good way, you know, like these are wild women, you know, like Kat Zingano type characters You know, they're just wild and like when you watch them fight. I mean you're gonna see some chaos I mean, they're they're not gonna be playing it safe. They're gonna be going for it. Yep. I love that on them Now Kat is an interesting example because she was telling me the exact same thing that you were saying, that with a lot of women, their body responds very poorly to the weight cut and then immediately wants to gain weight afterwards.

Yep. Do you think that that's some sort of like an evolutionary feature because of the fact they carry babies and they need fat? Yeah. And so their body freaks out? I've definitely thought that, sure. Yeah. and they need fat, and so their body freaks out. I've definitely thought that, sure.

Some sort of a response, like your body's like, hey, I don't know what this crazy person's doing, but we've got to put some fat on. Absolutely, and that's something, again, going back to the Performance Institute, that they're diving deep into. And Clint Wattenberg, especially on the nutrition side, seeing those endocrine profiles after a fight,

what can you do, both in cutting back in training and, you know, through your diet to help, you know, control and regulate that. And Kat was telling me about a program that you guys were just mentioning briefly in San Diego, where they're using some sort of magnetic frequencies on fighters that have had brain injuries. Like, what is this? Yeah, well, it was something that Dr. Duncan French kind of brought into the mix here. So previous coming to UFC, he was director of sports performance at University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.

And they were looking into traumatic brain injury in football and possible therapy. And they came across a clinic in San Diego that was using this therapy, an FDA-approved device. It's basically low-level magnet therapy. In conjunction with that, they do some EKGs, or reading of the electrical waves in the brain. And, you know, initially, we're finding that this therapy was bringing some of those readings back together. And I think very early in the process of figuring out whether this can really work or not. But, you know, certainly what the UFC wants

to be is ahead of the curve in terms of potential therapies out there for, you know, for treating the brain. And so, yeah, Kat's been going there for a while. And, you know, she says she's experienced some positive results. Yeah, she told me she got some outstanding results. And what's interesting is there's been a ton of research and studies done on transdermal stimulation, all these different ways to increase the brain's ability to learn. And there was a Radiolab podcast on this. I think it was called something nine volts. See if you could find it nine volts, something or another. But it basically detailed

how they use this for a sniper simulation. And what they did is they took this woman who was a reporter. They put her through this sniper simulation game. It's like a video game. She scored poorly. And then then yeah, nine volt nirvana. Thank you, Jamie. And so then they attach these electrodes to various areas of her head and stimulated her brain with a small charge. And she went through the exact same thing. And she said, it felt like the 20 minutes went by in two minutes and her score was perfect. And this is being echoed throughout like many different people that have done tests on these very – and there's a lot of like home hacking where people are literally going to radio lab and making their own setups.

But I'm curious to see if the UFC has looked into some of these things. see if the UFC has looked into some of these things. Like maybe perhaps there's a way you could stimulate the body's ability to learn certain techniques or like carve pathways by stimulating areas of the brain. Yeah, man. Another great reason for you to get Duncan in here because he can talk real knowledgeably about this therapy. He told me when at the University of Notre Dame, you know, they'd have football players that would, you know, have migraine headaches for long periods of time that underwent this therapy.

In a matter of weeks, they went away. When Donna and I visited the facility down in San Diego, they talked about employees of the facility bringing in their kids. A, kids that had some levels of autism that after this therapy were more engaging with people. They also talked about kids that had tests or finals coming up the day after where they go in for this therapy the night before and get their test scores were improving as a result. There was a lot of they deal with a lot of special forces soldiers down in the San Diego area that have had traumatic brain injuries because of you know know, IEDs and I've seen some success there. So, I mean, I think some real exciting potential there that again,

you know, the UFC wants to be at the forefront of and, you know, be the first to, you know, to suggest some of these things to our athletes and, you know, potentially even look and get in some of these devices at the PI and be able to treat some of our athletes there. Yeah, that would be amazing. And I think that we're in an interesting time now where because so much research is being put on CTE and traumatic brain injuries, we're looking at potential ways to mitigate those problems and maybe even rehab some of the issues that fighters are having. Yeah. So one thing we didn't show you on your tour is we now make part of the onboarding process at the PI, the C3 logic testing, which is this, you know, 25, 30 minute neurocognitive test that came out of the Cleveland Clinic brain study. And it's an iPad based test. It's a mix of memory,

And it's an iPad-based test. It's a mix of memory, shape recognition, balance. You actually put the pad onto a belt. You stand on this unstable surface and close your eyes. And it basically gives you measurements or readings after 25 or 30 minutes. And then over time, you can compare those readings. If they're declining, maybe it's time to take a little bit of time off from training and fighting. If they're staying stable, then maybe you know you're doing all right. The California Athletic Commission requires that for all fights. So all fighters in any card in

California, the Wednesday or Thursday before the fight, goes through the C3 logic testing. All of it's uploaded to a cloud. So after a period, after a period of a couple of years, um, a fighter can have access to some real objective data on, you know, what their neurocognitive capabilities are looking like. That would be a great way to find out. I mean, maybe one of the only ways to find out without a fighter disclosing it, whether or not a fighter has been knocked out in camp, because that that's a common occurrence that fighters get knocked out in camp in hard sparring and then a week, two weeks later have to fight and their ability to take a shot is gone. Sure. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, often asked about that and comparing it to other sports

leagues. And the one thing I will say, you know, with MMA, now this is excluding things that are going on in the gym, but in a fight that's regulated by an athletic commission, I think MMA has some of the most conservative return-to-play policy, I know it does, of any sport. If you're an NFL quarterback and you get knocked out on a Sunday, yeah, you're in a concussion protocol, but they're trying to get you back playing probably the next Sunday or the Sunday thereafter. Which is crazy. A big concussion in MMA, as you know, is like a 45-60 mandatory 45 days, no activity 60 days before you fight. I mean, we've seen suspensions out to six months mandatory medical suspension. And some of them, I think, are very warranted. I mean, there's some brutal, brutal knockouts.

Like Alistair Overeem and Francis Ngannou. Like, I don't want to see Alistair fight next month. You know what I mean? And here's a question about a guy like Alistair. Alistair, we looked it up one day on a podcast, has been stopped or knocked out somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 times in MMA and then three times more in kickboxing. What's the number where you're like, that's enough?

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I know you talk with Alistair and got all his wits about him. That's what's crazy. Alistair doesn't even seem remotely punchy. I mean, he is, not only that, he doesn't seem deterred. Like, it's crazy. Like, he gets knocked out and he's like, well, we go back to the drawing board and we'll be better next time.

I think it's an unknown now, but you also look at, you know, the UFC has been the largest contributor to the Cleveland Clinic fighter brain health study. So we, you know, made, I think, multimillion dollar commitment. We've upped it once. So yeah, we're looking to invest resources into finding out what those answers are definitely and be at the forefront of any innovative therapies that are out there, innovative testing that's out there. We want to be at the front. Well, the issue with CTE is that you really can't test for it until after a fighter's

dead. But haven't they recently figured out a way to test people while they're alive? Yeah. And I've read some of that. I've also read that scientists arguing that that's bunk and that's not right. So I don't know where we're at on that. Yeah, because, boy, it just seems like I don't want to. And it also affects people differently, right?

Depending upon what genes they have, some people are more predisposed to CTE. Yeah, and that's my understanding of it. Again, a lot of unknowns, but, you know, I think that the UFC has shown a dedication to contributing to areas where we can find out some of those answers. Yeah. I know that you guys recently had Mark Hunt come to Vegas because Mark Hunt had talked about suffering damage from fights. And the UFC said, you know what? We can't just hear him say that. We're going to pull him off this card. And he was and they said look like we love you don't get it wrong

but we we want we want you to be safe and you say that you're slurring your words and then he changed it and said well it's after a few drinks and then they went okay well come by and let's give you the full gamut of tests yep that's exactly what happened and we're always going to act out of an abundance of caution in a scenario like that. And so now he's back on the roster and back with a fight schedule. Yep, he's fighting in Perth in February. So when a guy says something like that, you just kind of have to. When a guy says, I'm slurring my words, I've taken too much punishment, like, okay, we've got a red flag here.

You have to, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that happened. I look back to, I don't know if you remember when Kane was going to fight at the end of last year. I think he came out a week or two previous saying, man, I'm in so much pain from this back issue. I'm having to use medical marijuana, CBD leading up to this fight. It's the only way I can train. I'm going to have this surgery directly after the fight.

It was actually the Nevada Commission that saw this and said wait a second if you're really in that much pain like and we can't with good conscience license you to fight and sure enough they didn't do that and ended up having the surgery and Hopefully is back pretty soon, but it's been like a year now Yeah He's a guy that is almost too tough for his body. Or maybe is too tough for his body. If you watch Kane fight, particularly

early in his career when he's in his prime, you just couldn't believe the amount of endurance that a 240 pound man can have. Just the pace that he would put on guys, and you'd see them just drowning in that pace. But the only way you get, I mean, you have

to have some physical gifts cardiovascularly. And I think Kane will admit that he has some, some natural cardio, but unbelievable work ethic and mental toughness. And that mental toughness also makes you push through injuries and pushing through injuries is how injuries become chronic. And that's how injuries become unmanageable and require surgery. I mean, you would know, I was an athlete and went through my share of injuries, but you know, I played basketball and ran track and, and in those sports, you know, depending on your injury, you can control, I think your exposure and protect your body. I mean, how do you do that in fighting? You can't, you can't, you can't prevent certain positions that your body are going to be in.

And if you're not completely healthy, you're going to be probably exposed from whatever little injury you have. The only thing you can do is drill. I mean, if you're really injured and you have a good training partner, you can drill on certain things and say, hey, man, you just can't touch my shoulder. But there's no way you can spar. And there's no way you can really prepare for a fight without really hard training. And hard training with injuries is virtually impossible. I mean, with some injuries. You know, I mean, some of them you can work around.

There's ways to figure a way around things. And that's one of the things I found was really interesting also about the UFC Performance Institute is there's a lot of different things that you guys have devised or have, you know, you guys have brought in and implemented that other people have devised to help people with injuries that are trying to still train hard, like that gravity treadmill thing. Yeah, that's in our altitude chamber. So you strap that around you and you're getting, you know, I don't know what the ratio is to, you know, if you're true weight to what type of stress you're putting on your body. But it's much less than going out and running on a regular treadmill on the street.

You also have the underwater treadmill, which you saw. Yeah, that was weird too. I think Angela Hill was on that when you were there. Yeah, she was. And I was like, what's that like? She's like, it's weird. Yeah. It's like, it's like, it just seems like the floor's moving.

You got to try to keep up with it. Yeah, so it's, you know, basically it's a rising floor. So you rise up to the top, you step on it and then it drops down and it works like a regular treadmill because you're, but because you're underwater, um, you're putting less stress on obviously your lower extremities. And if you notice also there's cameras underwater with a TV screen right in front of, of the, uh, the person using it. And the idea there is if you have an ankle injury or a knee injury, you could take a look at how your foot's coming down and are you favoring it and what's your gait looking like. It's a really cool piece of equipment. Connor was using that quite a bit in the run-up to Floyd.

He put a lot of stuff out there on social media on that thing. I think he liked it. Yeah, well, he's got a bum knee, right? He's got a knee that he's had some issues with in the past. There it is. There's Duncan French off there to the right. That thing just drops you down, and then you run on that thing. Yep. Yeah. Oh, man. I'm not 100% sold on that, to be honest with you.

Well, that's why you should come out and get on it. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's difficult, but I think that actually carrying your weight and running on hills is a way to go. Yeah, probably. weight and running on hills is a way to go. Yeah, probably. Now, look, if you're coming off an ACL surgery and you're taking baby steps to get back to running, it's probably there.

Otherwise, if you're healthy and training for a fight coming up in a couple weeks, I don't know if that's necessarily a piece of equipment for you. He's a guy that I'm puzzled by, Connor. Obviously, I'm a gigantic fan, but man, his cardio, it seems like there's a thing there. There's something there. Whether it's the style that he fights, the explosive sprinting style that he fights, it's unsustainable. Or whether or not there seems to be some sort of an issue that needs to be addressed. Some much more radical approach to strength and conditioning.

And I would love to see the guys at the Performance Institute try to tackle that and try to figure out, I mean, I'm sure they've run VO2 maxes on him, but he gets tired. He did most of his camp there, but he had his own team around him that was kind of directing him in his program. But in his defense, this was a very quick camp. You're getting ready for a 12-round fight with the greatest fighter of all time in boxing. Jesus Christ.

It was like six or seven weeks, I think. Floyd knew what he was doing. I'll tell you one of the incredible things about that, and there wasn't a lot said about it, going back to kind of my world, anti-doping world. So Floyd does this for all his fights. He basically hires USADA to do testing. It's not the same as a UFC program where you're subject to testing year-round. In boxing, once the fight is made, USADA then comes in and does collecting. So it depends on how far out the fight was made. But Conor and Floyd signed that contract, was it seven weeks out maybe?

They were each tested 16 times in that seven weeks. And I guarantee you, they are the two most tested athletes in that short period of time ever in the history of anti-doping. So not only was it an incredibly cool event, but I think incredibly cool and clean for the fans to know that, you know, how out of the way those two guys went to ensure that that fight was fair and clean. That is amazing. They don't get enough credit for that. It's too bad there's not two performance institutes. You could have one right next to each other where opponents could train. You could film things at the performance institute at a level.

Forrest Griffin was showing me how the octagon is set up with 360-degree cameras, and you could literally film and then rotate angles up, down. You could literally film and then rotate angles up, down. You can move around and show, oh, when you're throwing this punch, your back foot is coming off the ground. When you're leaning to your left, you're dropping your hand. Yeah, it's like the John Madden telestrator. You can stop action and draw on that huge big screen next to the octagon. But you can move it around. Exactly.

When Forrest was showing me how you can move it around, I was like, this is insane. Like this, what a tool this is for technique development. It really is. And I think we're at the infancy of these coaches coming in and figuring out how they can use these things, the extent that they can benefit their fighters. I mean, there it is right there. Yeah.

This thing. Oh, there's my tour. Oh, did somebody put that up on? Yeah. These fucking weirdos. Already they put it up. I didn't put this up. Oh, there's my tour. Well, did somebody put that up on yeah, he's fucking weird. Oh, yeah already they put it up Um, I didn't put this up. Oh, yeah, I put it on my Instagram stories But so I didn't put it on YouTube somebody put it on YouTube here so what what force was showing me was how they can pause it and slow-mo and back it up and then change angles and

That all the fighters sparring sessions are filmed. They're filmed from an overhead. They're filmed from the sides. And there's cameras all around the octagon. I mean, it's just what a facility, man. Yeah, I mean, I really think, and we talked about this, this is bringing this sport to a whole new level. Yeah. Well, Francis is going to be your first test tube sort of child.

Yeah, you know, you talked about wouldn't it be nice to have two opponents working side by side. The PI has that capability. I mean, as you saw, it's set up specifically so you have certain things downstairs and certain things upstairs. So you'd have to schedule it. So Stipe says, hey, man, I want to come out and use this. It is open to Stipe. We could schedule it so Stipe's downstairs doing a strength and conditioning while francis is upstairs it's a lot of what force does force you know it could be the intermediary to make sure francis goes out one door steepay comes in another never run into

themselves but that definitely was taken they are they're both yeah but what i if i was deep i would not want to be doing strength and conditioning and then in between sets just like have your ear and you hear and francis is hitting the heavy bag and scaring everybody you used that uh you tried that that punch machine yeah he's got the world record punch on that there's a what it is is like uh for folks it's a pad it's adjustable it moves up moves up and down. And you punch it. And not only did he break the world record, he broke it by several thousand pounds per square inch. Yeah, I think his reading, and I don't know what the reading is, was 129,000 something. Yeah, he's terrified.

There it is. You hit it a couple of times, man. I thought you were hitting pretty hard. Now, what did you register, like a 35 or a 40,000? I got 46 was my hardest one until I hurt my hand. You got to put gloves on to do that, too. I would imagine that being wrapped up. And that's an argument that I've had many times when it comes to MMA in general. I like how you can angle it so you can throw an uppercut as well. That's an argument that I've had for MMA in general. I think it's weird that we are allowed to elbow with no pad,

knee with no pad, kick with no pad on the shin, but the knuckles are protected. And I think that it really probably allows people to deliver more damage with the knuckles padded. I don't think padded knuckles helps your opponent as much as it helps you, and especially wrist protection. Like when I was trying to punch that thing with just my bare hands, which is stupid, especially when you haven't warmed up, right?

But you realize like your wrist moves around. You slam into that thing, and if you're hitting it hard, your wrist moves around. But that's the case when you're punching a person too. like you have to be much more precise with where you're targeting and what you're hitting you can't hit foreheads and elbows you'll break your hand like very easily and i wonder it's just it seems barbaric to people to to fight bare knuckle which to me is kind of crazy because you're kicking like you're you're shinning people in the head. Like I don't understand. Like we have this weird sort of childish view of like what should and shouldn't be legal.

Elbows are some of the hardest. I mean you can just do that with an elbow and it doesn't hurt at all. You know, your knees, your shins. Those guys that spar Muay Thai for years and years, their shins develop calcification all over the top where they can kick baseball bats. Trees. Yeah. There's a great one of Buakaw kicking a banana tree. And he's one of the greatest Thai fighters of all time.

But he's chopping at this banana tree and cuts it in half. And you're like, Jesus. How is it okay that that guy can kick someone in the face with that, but you have to have pads? Here he is right here. Give me some volume on this. This guy's breaking a fucking tree on his shins. He's not doing that with his bare knuckles, I'll tell you that that's insane

fucking hit in the face with that but see the difference like that's hard bone yeah it's no padding why do you have to have padding on your knuckles but you don't have to have it on your shins and your knees and your elbows. That seems to me to be a silly way of approaching this. Either we pat up everything. I mean, maybe we could pat up everything, but then people get mad. Like, we're pussifying the sport. I think

you go the other way. I think you don't pat up anything. I think you pat up your dick and that's it. That's what I think. Pat up your teeth, pat up your dick, let it rip. I really think they should fight bare knuckle. I just don't think it makes any sense whatsoever, especially considering the fact that eye pokes are one of the major considerations, right? You're not going to mitigate that with those gloves. Unless they develop some sort of a new design where the gloves are much more curled in, the eye pokes are always going to be an issue.

It would be the exact same issue if you had bare knuckle. Well, yeah. I mean, now you can take away with the new unified rules, which ironically enough, aren't unified. So we go from commission to commission and a fighter would have to inform them fight week. Hey, what are the rules here? That's so unfair to these fighters that are training and developing that instinct to some of these rules but anyway the new unified rules which aren't unified anybody who's extending the fingers that the referee has to warn them first but if they continue to do that a point can be taken away i think they should take a point every time a guy

gets poked in the eye and my my thought process is even if it's unintentional the damage has been done and if if you can see it on the replay, legitimate eye poke, and you see the guy wincing, which we've seen many, many times, that guy's compromised. And I think that it's only fair that a point be taken away, even if it was unintentional. Well, it's like kicking or kneeing a downed fighter, too, that you have to show intent to take a point away. Well, how is the referee going to get in the head of a fighter to say whether or not that was intentional or not? It should almost be, I think, that if it's done, a point's taken away. I agree.

Remove the intent from it because the damage is already done at that point. Yeah, it doesn't matter whether or not it's intentional. I mean, we're not putting the blame on the fighter. It just, it happened. It's one of the unfortunate things. But the fighter that got hit is the one who suffers the consequences of it. There's no way it should be an even exchange. Like, oh, I'm sorry.

I accidentally need your eye socket. Yeah. You know, no point taken. And now you can't go on. That to me sounds. I think there's room to alter the rules. And I mean, I've beaten a dead horse with my bare knuckle thing because I've been talking about that for years. Because I just think people have a greatly exaggerated perception of the effectiveness of punching people in the face. And I think that greatly exaggerated perception is due to the fact that they wrap their hands.

You wrap up your wrists and your wrist and your hand becomes a cast where it's not bending at all. I mean, you get deep in there with athletic tape and gauze, and they cover the knuckles, and everything gets padded. And you could just fucking blast something with that. But when you just have just your hands, it feels very delicate. I always tell people you should punch the bag occasionally at least, bare knuckle. Just go and punch the bag. And you realize you can't really hit it nearly as hard. That's interesting.

I just think that we have Like you can't tape the shit out of your ankles, right? Right, I mean we've stopped fighters from walking into the octagon with fully tie taped up ankles, you know Yeah, well some Commission's allow light tape and then a neoprene sleeve over it others say no Yeah, again uniformity is again. Yeah, you know I talk uniformity, kind of bringing it back to the anti-doping world. This is a big point of contention I have with athletic commissions, really, really frustrated. And that's the marijuana rules. So you're talking my language.

The UFC, I thought so. The UFC follows the WADA rules, World Anti-Doping Agency, kind of sets the world standard. They have scientists that study these drugs and determine, A, is something performance enhancing? B, is it a health and safety issue? And over the last couple of years, they raised the marijuana threshold, used to be 15 nanograms per milliliter, now must succeed 150 nanograms per milliliter, which everybody metabolizes differently. But, you know, from scientists that I've talked about, the ingestion of marijuana or THC, the psychoactive ingredient, has to be pretty damn close to that collection in order to exceed 150 nanograms per milliliter. Which means you literally almost have to be high the day of.

Pretty much. So if an athlete just takes a day or two off, they're most likely clean. I suggest longer than that, just because you never know how different people metabolize things differently as you're cutting weight, whether you're releasing some from your fat cells. I don't know. I would suggest several weeks, but the reality is it could be a lot closer than that. Well, we're running into several athletic commissions, Texas being one, New York being another. We had probably the most extreme one last month in Michigan that have lower thresholds. Texas and New York have 35 or 50.

Michigan, where we just came from, has a no tolerance policy for marijuana. So any measurable amount of THC would cause a positive test. And we lobbied them hard in anticipation of our event there saying, do you realize what this means? I mean, a fighter could walk through a cloud of secondhand smoke, you know, on the way to weigh in or a fight, and it's going to show up a measurable amount. And you're going to, a fighter could win a championship on that. And then you're going to, that fighter could win a championship on that. And then you're going to take that championship away and overturn the win. We had in Texas a couple wins overturned for thresholds,

which I think were a little bit, I think 35, I think 35 or 50 was there, but they were slightly over that, well under the established world standard. And, man, I think these athletic commissions got to take a serious look at bringing those into uniformity. established world standard. And man, I think these athletic commissions got to take a serious look at, you know, bringing those into uniformity. You have, you know, in the U.S., you have certain states now where it's legal medically and recreationally, but arguably federally still illegal. But you have some countries where it's completely legal and you have doctors prescribing

this for, you know, pain control or stress or anxiety. And, you know, a commission like Michigan, one of those fighters from one of those countries that is completely legally doing it under the care of a doctor. And in lieu of doing a synthetic drug like an opioid or a Xanax or something like that, common sense would tell you it's much healthier and safer to do that. You know, you're setting up this barrier that, you know, could negatively affect a fighter's career if they have any discernible amount in their system. And, you know, not only from the unified rules, but from an anti-doping marijuana's perspective, too, these commissions have got to come together and, you know, realize what the white thing to do is and stop, you know, in a lot of instances,

stop governing or policing just because you can. Yeah. We ran into that with the whole Courtney Casey thing in Texas. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Yeah. Just explain what happened. So Courtney, we fought in Texas, had a great win against Jessica Aguilar. I think it was probably the defining moment of her career. She looked really, really good. A couple weeks later, I was actually at our event in Stockholm, Sweden. It was vividly on a Friday night. I get a call from her, and I can't even understand what she's saying.

She's just crying uncontrollably, saying, Jeff, what is going on? I didn't even understand what had happened.. She's just crying uncontrollably saying, Jeff, you know, what is going on? I didn't even understand what had happened. I said, slow down. What happened? She said, there's stuff on the internet about me testing positive. I've never even thought about using a prohibited substance. I'm super careful about what I use.

So I said, okay, let me check into it. And so I called a guy on the Texas commission. And I said, hey, what's going on, you know, with this Courtney Casey thing? And he tells me, yeah, she tested positive. We just announced it.. I said, hey, what's going on with this Courtney Casey thing? And he tells me, yeah, she tested positive. We just announced it. And I said, for what? She said, oh, her TE ratio was elevated. It was over a four to one.

And knowing what that measurement means, I said- Could you explain what it means? Yeah, so TET is testosterone. E is epitestosterone. And every human being, male and female, have, on average, a one-to-one ratio naturally occurring in them. And if you take anabolic steroids, it can have a tendency to raise that ratio where the T becomes higher than the E. where the T becomes higher than the E. However, what anti-doping has found out and evolved into the last few years that especially mildly elevated ratios, sometime there are natural reasons for that happening, especially in females, especially females on birth control,

which is, you know, legal medication. And so what you do now in anti-doping, when you have an elevated T-E ratio, you go to a backup test That backup test is called an isotope ratio mass Spectrometry or EIRMS test and that reads the carbon atom in the testosterone in a sample to determine whether or not it's plant-based Which would mean a synthetic or it's naturally occurring because testosterone is synthesized through wild yams correct, right? So that's how they find out this wild yams. That's correct. So that's how they find out it's plant-based? That's correct. So Texas tells me, hey, her ratio was a little bit higher than a 4 to 1.

That means she's positive. And they tell me, we're just following your guy's rules. And I tell the guy, that's not our rules. I go, you just announced a positive test for this girl. And hey, maybe she did do something. I don't know. But you're supposed to run the positive test for this girl. And hey, maybe she did do something. I don't know. But you're supposed to run the backup test for this. And it was basically told me, well, it was a Friday.

He goes, well, our office is closed Monday. We'll get back to you on Tuesday. And really thereafter, it was radio silence. So we were working with Courtney, worked with USADA closely. And USADA stepped in and said, absolutely, that is wrong. We're going to go back and look at her biological profile, and we'll share that with Texas. We'll take a look at these TE readings over the time of the samples that she submitted.

Sure enough, most of the samples were mildly elevated. And sure enough, USADA did the right thing, and they went and did that backup testing, and every time they did it, she was negative. So they reached out to Texas, said, hey, we'll share this information with you. And in our historical records, this girl does have a naturally occurring, mildly elevated TE ratio. figuring out, hey, is there some of that sample remaining? Because if there is Texas, you have an obligation to go ahead and do this backup testing on it. Took them a number of weeks where poor Courtney was in limbo. And finally, Dana put them on blast, basically said, Texas Commission, you know, get your shit together. We're not coming back there.

And we got a hold of that remaining sample, her B sample, had it tested at a WADA laboratory and was negative on the IRMS. How crazy is it that putting someone on blast works? Sometimes it does. You would think that that's just, no, it's an ego thing. Like when people are bitching at you, you're going to succumb to that. But yeah, sometimes that's what it takes to get someone to do the right thing. It does. So this poor girl is living with the fact that she's labeled as a cheater for two to three months talked about probably still will be yeah by some people it's one of those

things like once someone says you're a steroid cheater probably always she talked i mean she lived she lives on maui so small community she talked about going to the store and people pointing at her talking bad about her she talked about she's a coach in a gym there, coaches kids, about parents not wanting her to coach their kids when this was in limbo. And how many of those people heard that she was exonerated? Headlines on page one, retraction on the back page, right? Nobody pays attention to that shit. And her performance since she fought in Detroit, right? Yes.

Was not a great performance for her. And I can't help but wonder if that had affected her, you know, over those last couple months. I think that was just stylistic. You know, I just think the way she matched up with Felice Herrig was just those two bulldogs just clashing heads with each other. They just couldn't get anything done. Could be.

I mean, but that's, again, going back to the mental game, a tremendous amount of stress to carry with yourself through you know these last six or so months well I hope she gets past that because she's a lot of fun she's she is I like her a lot and I got to tell you man it's one of the most satisfying things again going back to the golden snitch thing really my role here is is an advocate someone who looks out for athletes in situations like that. There's been other things that we do is, look, when we put this program together, the USADA program, it's unprecedented. There's no other professional sport that has the comprehensiveness of the program. There's also no other professional sport that's quite put together like the UFC is, in terms of

you have individual athletes that are you know, are competing against each other. It's not a team sport where if one person tests positive, you have another person, you know, to step on in. So a lot of what I've done over those first, you know, couple years is take a look at, you know, hey, we took what we think was a pretty good shot at the rules to begin with, but look and see how those rules played themselves out as time went on. And after about a year and a half, there were a couple instances where I saw, hey, this isn't quite fair to an athlete. We need to change that. We did. So after a year and a half, there was a couple rules that we changed. The first one, there's kind of a funny story behind this too, was, I don't know if you remember

when Nate fought Connor, I think the second time, he goes to the press conference after and takes out a vape pen. Do you remember that? And someone asked him what he was doing, and he said he was CBD. And at the time, the rule was the in-competition period where CBD was prohibited lasted until four hours after the conclusion of the fight, and he was clearly within that time period. So USADA contacted me and said, Hey, you know, technically Nate was in violation of this. And I said, Hey, look, this was not the

intent of the rule. This is, you know, and they never indicated that they were going to sanction him, but I made it clear. Let's explain CBD for anybody that might not know what we're talking about. Sure. So CBD is part of the, you know, the marijuana plant, but it's not psychoactive part of it. I know a lot of our fighters anecdotally use it for anti-inflammatory purposes. I think, I mean, have you ever used it or what other benefits is? Anxiety. It's great for people that are under stress. It actually has a great response for that. I know a lot of people that use it just for anxiety. But anti-inflammation is a big one.

That's the big one people use it for. People with arthritis love it. Yeah, again, comparing to a natural plant-derived product versus a synthetic, non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory, Advil's, Tylenol's can be toxic on you. Probably common sense would, in addition to science, would say that CBD is maybe a little bit healthier for you. Nevertheless, it was prohibited in competition. Is it still? No. So that was actually a rule change.

The WADA prohibited list, which we followed, took it completely off the prohibited list starting in 2018. So that's great. So all these athletes can just take CBD the entire time they're training. There's no, it's obviously there's no performance benefit. There's no psychoactive effect. It just reduces inflammation and it does it in a natural way, way healthier. And it was the case before they could do it in training. It was only prohibited in competition. So weigh in day and fight day. Now it's completely been taken off the list and it's okay to use it

anytime. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So it was good. So, but we identified a problem with, with the rules in that when Nate finished that, that fight with Connor, USADA came to the post-fight medical tent, said, Nate, we need to make a collection from you. And I don't know whether it was blood or urine, but they got a sample from him. He then went to the press conference after and was on, you know, took the CBD. What I said is, look, you can't punish him. You have the sample that shows what was in his system. Yes, CBD was prohibited in competition, but you have a sample to show whether or not he was using it. It's clear that, you know, he was using it after the fight. We just put those extra four hours in there with a thought of if a

fighter finishes a fight and somehow USADA is not able to get to him, say, gets in the ambulance right away, goes to the hospital, you increase that window just in case they can't get them. Come to find out, as we started putting this program together, USADA can always get to that fighter after. If they're transported, they can hop in the ambulance with them. It wasn't an issue where we needed those extra four months. So we changed that rule. And now, basically, the rule is the in competition period ends with a collection immediately after the fight, or, you know, you saw it has a reasonable amount of time after the fight. So the funny thing is,

after we change this rule, Nate and Nick Diaz come to a fight, and they're sitting called the Zufa section, you know, kind of Dana's section right there behind Dana's table. So I go over to Nick and Nate. I say, Hey, Nate, man, uh, Hey, we changed that rule, you know, the whole CBD thing. And actually we kind of refer to it as, as the Nate Diaz rule. And when the Diaz brothers are at a fight, I mean, it's pandemonium and chaos. Everybody's yelling their name. And I literally, I'm like, I didn't even register with them.

He didn't look at me he was looking somewhere else so about a month later Nate I see him I'm and I think it was in Vegas I'm in the kind of walkout tunnel and here comes Nate so he sees me comes over me gives me kind of the bro hug what's up he's with Yancey Medeiros and so Yancey and I start talking, and Yancey, beyond being just an unbelievably entertaining fighter, is one of the best dudes on the roster, great guy. So I'm talking to Yancey. All of a sudden, Nate goes, hey, Jeff, man, tell Yancey about my USADA rule. I got a USADA rule named after me, dog. And so I thought, man, you're doing something right when Nate Diaz is excited about changing a USADA rule, right?

Yeah, that is a very good rule. I is like excited about a change in a USADA rule right yeah that is a that is a very good rule I'm really excited about that um what's the story with Nick he can't fight is he still have like some sort of a so yeah well Nick was our first fighter that ran into the whereabouts issue so he got three whereabouts failures in a rolling 12 months so he's currently going through that process you know it's a tough one because i don't does he want to fight i think he does i think he does i mean we've you know i've sat down with him over the last couple months and talking about trying to resolve this whereabouts issue i mean the unfortunate thing there is look the whereabouts failure sanctions are meant to catch

people that are cheating and trying to avoid testing. And I just think Nick's lifestyle led to those three kind of whereabouts, not that he was trying to avoid testing. It was just Nick being Nick. Yeah, we're trying to work through that. He put – he trusted certain individuals to do his whereabouts for him, I think is what happened over time, and those individuals would come in and out of his life. Of course.

It's kind of unbeknownst to him that he was missing a lot of these things. Nevertheless, you know that again, there's strict liability here and it's currently under sanction, but we're hoping to resolve that pretty quick. Now, uh, last time you were on, you talked about this, uh, new potential testosterone that was derived from animals and that there might be a way that people could take this stuff and go undetected. Yeah. I mean, I haven't heard much about that since then. Was it just a theoretical thing? No, no, it's out there.

It's real. But, you know, again, some of the things that to combat that are the biological passport program where you're looking over time at somebody's T-E ratio. passport program where you're looking over time at somebody's TE ratio. And even though that, you know, won't trigger a positive on the isotope ratio mass spectrometry, if you see wild variances in TE ratios over time, that could potentially trigger a biological passport violation. Sorry, would there be a way to mitigate that biological passport thing by making a specific time that you inject it every day and doing it on a regular basis.

Like instead of, I know it was one of the ways that some fighters have gotten caught is that they knew they were going to be in Vegas or something for a long period of time, so they couldn't take any, maybe they would take it twice a week, so they doubled their dose and took it in one shot, and then they got hit with a random, and then it showed that they had this massive testosterone spike. Yeah, it's a week. So they doubled their dose and took it in one shot and then they got hit with a random and then it showed that they had this massive. Yeah, it's a potential. I mean, you know, someone who has the resources and sophisticated and somebody has someone who's educated in chemistry. Um, it's, it's definitely a cat and mouse game, anti-doping. And, you know, um, Fogle talked about that when he was on here. I mean here I mean the premise of Icarus initially was right he was going to show that anti-doping doesn't work

and it was actually something I watched your podcast with him and watched the movie as well initially I was a little bit turned off on that premise because he gave the examples of Armstrong, Marion Jones he said look anti-doping just doesn't work and I'm going to go out and prove that

that doesn't make any sense if both those people got busted. Right. That's the reality. But look how they did. They got busted through the investigative element of anti-doping. And that's what something that was learned and came out of, I think, the investigations I was involved in and all, you know, USADA does this, WADA does this. The drug testing is not enough. You know, drug testing is a necessity. You need to have that, but you also need to have a strong investigative element. You have to liaison, and USADA does this with law enforcement throughout the world, so that if you can't catch somebody because they're sophisticated in the techniques they're using, you know,

maybe you catch them through, you know, informants or other investigative resources. Pressure. Exactly. Now that documentary blew my mind. It was incredible. For people who haven't seen it, it's on Netflix. It's called Icarus. It's by Brian Fogle. And the documentary, the premise was he was a guy who was a cyclist and decided to compete in a race, first clean, and then come back and do it again under the assistance of a guy who is an expert in anti-doping that showed him, like, what's the stuff that you should take? Right. Along the line, he makes friends with this guy, Grigory, how do you say his last name?

Redchenkov? Something like that. Yeah. And during this time period, it's discovered that the entire Soviet Olympic team is on steroids and that they cheated during the games at Sochi. And he explains how they did it. And then the investigation comes down and the guy has to flee Russia. And then he comes to America.

He goes under protective custody. And Brian Fogle just, you talk about like, just stepping in shit. Holy smokes. Did he come across something he did an awesome job of telling the story and this gregory guy making him kind of the sympathetic character yet he was the kind of the evil villain that was doing all this over in russia it was just an incredible uh a movie the one thing that he didn't cover too much in the movie i was a little bit disappointed is who really the true heroes were of that whole thing. So there was a husband and wife couple, Vitaly and Yulia Stepanova. And Yulia was an 800 meter

runner for Russia. And Vitaly actually worked for RUSADA, the Russian anti-doping organization, as a drug collecting officer. And they were the ones basically that caused this German documentary to come out exposing what Gregory was doing. And then at that point in time, the heat came on Gregory because this information was out there and he was either forced to stay there and likely be, you know, arrested and put the blame on or flee to the U.S. It was dealt with very briefly in that movie. But those two, you know, I think were the true heroes because, you know, they just did this because it was the right thing to do.

Gregory did it, you know, obviously with a lot of self-preservation in mind and that he had one of two choices, either take off and come clean or stay there and face the consequences. But nevertheless, man, Fogel did, I thought, an awesome job in that movie. It's just an incredible, incredible story. And it's really tough, I'm sure, for Olympic athletes to say, God, man, this is what we're up against when you're talking about state-sponsored doping and the KGB being involved.

hopelessness out there that, you know, how am I ever know that I'm as a clean athlete, you know, my rights are going to be protected. Again, going back to what we're doing with the UFC, the beauty of what we're doing is you, you never see that because you have an independent authority, USADA, who's operating and administering our program. Um, so unlike the Russian government, where they have interests of Russian athletes, you know, doing well and winning gold medals. You know, USADA could, you know, in a sense, give a crap about, you know, who's being caught and who isn't. Yeah. So. One of the things that came up in the film that was really disturbing was the collusion between WADA and the IOC.

And that they really, it was in their best interest to not sanction Russia. Yeah. You have people sitting, you still do, on the WADA board and on the IOC and that they really, it was in their best interest to not sanction Russia. Yeah, you have people sitting, you still do, on the WADA board and on the IOC board. So there's a conflict of interest as WADA is going to come in and say, hey, this was clearly state-sponsored doping. We're going to exclude Russia from the Olympics for the next, you know, however many years. Well, that's a hit to the IOC because IOC is getting money from these television networks putting on the games in Seoul or in Tokyo coming up. So a conflict of interest

there. USADA is a nonprofit organization. So the UFC, yes, the UFC does pay them to administer our program, but it's not lying in the pockets of anybody. Their CEO is not making more money because the UFC is here. They maybe have a few more personnel to administer the program. But, you know, if we go away, USADA is still in existence. They're still doing Olympic testing and, you know, nobody's pocketbooks are hurting. Yeah, that independence, I think, is critical. And that's something that you brought up earlier. I think that's so awesome. And, you know, what a massive credit to the UFC that they decided to do it this way and not do it in-house. Not just take on your protocols.

Takes a lot of courage to do that. And it takes a real commitment to try to clean up the sport. One of the things that was really weird was, like, they banned some teams from Russia. Like, not all the sports, but the sports they banned were, like, nobody gives a fuck about what the sports were. Yeah, I think in Rio they— Let's see if we can find out what they banned were like nobody gives a fuck about what what the sports were Yeah, I think in real you could find out what what they banned They were gonna ban the entire team But the outrage from that was just so strong and then they realized the economic impact of that would be literally in the billions of Dollars, yeah, but I think they banned the track and field team from from Rio games

Which is pretty significant track and field being a pretty big Olympic sport There was a new here Russia banned from Winter Olympics, but clean athletes can compete. So this is new right? Russia athletes a little bigger for my fucking shitty eyes Russia has been banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea over the country's systematic manipulation of anti-doping rules However, Russian athletes who can prove that they are clean will be invited, in quotes, to compete in, say that, Pyeongchang. Look at Jamie, his degree

in Korean. The International Olympic Committee said Tuesday. So that's fascinating. So they'll be literally competing under the Olympic flag, which is like woof. It's the most wide ranging punishment ever meted out by the IOC on a participating nation, let alone a powerhouse of the Olympic movement.

Yeah. I mean, you're competing on the Olympic flag, but everybody's still going to know the commentators are still going to say the Russian athlete competing on the Olympic flag. But that's bizarre, right? Competing. I mean, is this unprecedented? Someone competing under the Olympiclympic flag i'm not sure whether it's happened before or not man before has it i'm pretty sure i remember just

random people i don't they might not have had a country to perform or their whole country might not have sent them but they were gonna have to qualify or something okay wow crazy um but there was also uh certain teams that were were kicked out of or certain gold medals that were rescinded. But that was the other thing that I thought was really interesting about USADA's protocol is that they freeze samples. So just in case the testing improves in the future. Yeah, huge deterrent. Again, there's no denying it's a cat and mouse game going on out there. But a deterrent is that it's not all of them, but certain samples can be frozen up to 10 years.

And as new tests come online, like the long-term metabolite test that Gregory developed, after five or six years, they may go back and retest those samples. And when we go out and educate our athletes, I tell them, look, maybe you're not in the UFC anymore, but your legacy is around forever. And that's a smear to your legacy forever. And it's all about creating that my job, I work for the UFC, my job is not, hey, let's see how many athletes we can catch. My job is to try to get out there, educate, develop relationships, and create that deterrent saying, look, you don't want to do this, it's going to catch you eventually. If you're going to do something, I'll give you every, you know, resource and bit of knowledge

I have to make sure you're successful under the program. But, you know, success in my eyes is very few positive tests. I don't, you know, I don't equate the program with success because we've had, you know, 60 or so positives over time. I'd love to see, you know, none and see more of that, those graphs showing those, you know, common markers of a doper come more into line. Right. You're not in the position of a detective or a prosecutor anymore. Your position is now an athlete liaison. It is. And it's a much different role, but it's a role I really, I really enjoy. It's probably a lot less stressful. Definitely a lot stressful, a lot less stressful. And, you know, Dana says it all the time. The importance level in the UFC and MMA is off the charts. I still have a strong belief in ethics and sports and believe sports are so good for kids and teaching them life lessons

that transcend sports. I have three daughters that played sports growing up. A couple of them still do. And I know when they get out into the real world and that work environment, there's nothing they can't handle because they've already handled it in sports. They've run up against a coach who's an asshole. They've run up against teammates that are selfish. They've had great, you know, occurrences when they've worked well as a team. All of that is going to come into play to help them in their lives. And when you introduce something and something that's so pure and good that's breaking the rules, that short-term, mostly long-term, is not healthy for you.

Sports is about to be healthy for you. And at some level, especially the way these performance-enhancing drugs are used, they're not really being used in a healthy manner. So, yeah, but I feel, I feel very strongly and very positive about what we're doing in the role that I'm playing here. Well, it's interesting that the UFC, unlike a lot of sports, the history is pretty transparent and the history of doping is also pretty transparent. Like everybody's really aware of what the wild west days were like. I mean, it's every people talk about it, they laugh about it. It's, it's sort of an, it's not a secret at all. And particularly as we were saying about pride. But, you know,

I think that ultimately what sports should be about, it should be about effort, skill, determination, focus, discipline. And those are the lessons that you could pass on, not who has the best pharmacist, not, youist, not who has the best team of scientists that can hide the results better. And that's one of the more disturbing things about Icarus or any of these other things that have shown that there's systematic anti-doping or doping or state-sponsored doping. It's just it distorts the whole thing, like what a victory is or why. You've got some athletes that probably would have won anyway.

If everybody was clean, they might have been the best athlete anyway. And they could have won. Floyd Landis told me that all the time about Lance. He said, that dude was the baddest-ass bicycle rider ever. And take away all the drugs that were taken in the sport, he would have been the best rider ever. He had something going on there, but the reality was everybody was using something. That's a fucked up sport. Yeah.

I think I talked about this last time, but I really, you know, people are surprised to hear this, but I had a lot of compassion and understanding for a lot of these dopers after they told me their stories. I mean, you're a young kid, vulnerable kid that, you know, wasn't really worldly, that all your teenage life, you aspire to go over to Europe and get on a bike and compete in these awesome races. And all of a sudden you're over there dropped off and a coach sits you in a room and says, you want to stay here, kid? Here's the program that we're on. I mean, if I heard one, I heard a dozen of those stories, grown men crying, retelling those stories.

So, yeah, I mean, I feel good about, you know, change in the culture and in this sport. Radically. Yeah. I mean, I would love to have a podcast with you and Lance, sit down together and discuss this now that the dust has kind of settled. And, you know, he's been pretty open about it and transparent about the whole process

himself. Yeah. I mean, I think the difference, the difference that he has with everybody else is, you know, again, this is back to Fogel's contention that they didn't catch Lance. As you look back at his history, and they did actually. In 1999, I think he had a corticosteroid positive. In 2001, I think he had a test that showed high likelihood of EPO use. It wasn't followed on.

But what he did is he became very powerful in the sport. And the International Cycling Union was corrupt and basically used that power and wielded it. And they covered up a lot of those tests. Crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. And the crazy thing about combat sports is that we're not just talking about crossing a finish line quicker. We're talking about the ability to deliver more damage on your opponent. And that's why it's so critical that people fight clean.

Whole new level. It's a completely different thing. There's just really no comparison. Now, let's get into, we briefly touched on weight cutting. But I know that the UFC has recognized that there's a real issue. What steps have we taken to try to mitigate the problems that are caused by weight cutting? Yeah, it's interesting. Another one of the reasons why I love the Performance Institute and the staff that we have there,

and that before them, it really stemmed from the US program, where under the WADA code, you ban the use of IVs. And so, because I was kind of the point person, obviously. Explain why IVs are problematic. Yeah, well, you know, it goes back to the cyclists. They were using IVs to basically flush their system of drugs to manipulate their biological passport. So if they're blood doping or using EPO, and it would have a tendency to lower those and normalize those biological passport levels. And so WADA learned that through some of the investigations that were conducted and determined that IV use in excess of 50 milliliters every six hours would be prohibited. hours would be prohibited. So when we announced that we were adopting the water prohibited list and prohibited methods, there was some blowback within the UFC community saying, hey, these things are used regularly because fighters are pushing themselves to the edge to make weight. And do you

understand what you're doing here? You're going to put fighters in unsafe positions where they're going to get in and not be rehydrated. So we took a look at that and spoke with Usad, and he said, hey, maybe we should slowly roll out the IV ban. So we actually delayed that by three months. The program went into effect July 1st, and we instituted the IV ban October 1st. So we had three months of getting fighters prepared for it, educating them why that they were banned. Nevertheless, I mean, real quickly, the whole weight cutting issue came kind of into my plate.

And while, you know, I wasn't an expert in it, I had to get out and talk to a lot of fighters, camps, coaches about IVs and give them, you know, alternatives to rehydrating the right way. And so I, again, being an expert myself, I reached out to what I found were experts in the world. A certain guy by name of Dr. Robert Kennefic, who is a PhD exercise physiologist, works at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, studies environmental effects on soldiers, his expertise being dehydration. So soldiers in the Middle East that are marching for hours, days upon a time, run out of water, dehydrate themselves.

How do we get these fighters back or these soldiers back rehydrated and back into the fight and thought, Hey, this is the type of expert that we need to talk to. It's extreme dehydration, not, you know, some kid that has diarrhea and is mildly dehydrated with some Pedialyte. So we brought him in, had him actually the week of UFC 200. He was in town, got a chance to talk to a lot of the fighters coming in and analyze the messes they were using. He recommended to us, hey, you know, here's the maximum amount of weight fighters, you know, that you should recommend fighters are losing that fight week. And that's how we came up with our weight guideline of 8%. So we recommend when those fighters check in Tuesday for a Saturday fight, they're within 8% of their goal weight, usually on Friday. Not a requirement, a recommendation,

but you know, we put that out there and educated heavily on that. Since then, you talked, I think, last week about Andy Foster, the executive director of California, who's really taken the lead in terms of commissions on combating dangerous weight cutting. He worked with us pretty closely on developing his 10-point weight cutting plan or plan to combat serious weight cutting. Includes his commission making calls to fighters on the card 30 days out, 10 days out, making them a little bit more accountable farther out than fight week. He's also got a provision where fight night, he takes the fighter's weight, weighs them, and their recommendation is you only put on 10% of your weight back on plus a pound.

If they're over that, California can recommend the fight or move up a weight class. So really, yeah, I mean, just a lot of, you know, education recommendations. And I hear a lot of people talk about, and I'm curious for your thoughts on this. Hey, we can stop this instantaneously. Just put rules out there. If you lose this much weight or put this much weight back on, you're suspended for six months, 12 months, whatever. We're just not going to let you fight. My concern there is when you have absolute rules, fighters are going to do everything possible to make weight.

Say you had a rule that if you miss weight, you can't fight again for 12 months. You have to move up a weight class. Fighters are going to kill themselves to make weight. Say you had a rule that if you miss weight, you can't fight again for 12 months, you have to move up a weight class. Fighters are going to kill themselves to make weight. My fear would be that you put an absolute rule out there and someone gets hurt because of the rule that you put in place, which is, hey, I think it's a measured approach. You have to continually reevaluate it.

But I think right now, the rules that are out there between our recommendations, California's rules are more guideline recommendations. And then that in conjunction with what we're doing at the performance Institute, where, I mean, you saw last week, there is no excuse. If you have issues making weight, or you're not sure what your weight class is at, you have every resource available, the best in the world to you to come in and find that out, to be given a plan on how to safely make weight. So, you know, it's a multi-million dollar investment that the

UFC has put, I think, toward that problem. And, you know, hey, maybe two, three years from now, we say, hey, that was with good intentions, but not enough. We need to do more. But I think right now, that's our strategy on the issue. Well, I think a couple things would have to happen to really stop weight cutting. One thing you're going to have to blow up these weight classes because there's going to be champions in these weight classes that really won't be in that weight class anymore. If you cut all the real heavy duty weight cutting out of the picture. I think what one FC is trying to do is they're they're doing hydration tests And I do they do a series of them

I believe they do three leading up to the fight which really was it Benavides was telling me this Someone someone was telling me this that they've essentially made it almost impossible for you to cut weight So they doing hydration tests on weigh-in at the weigh-in? They're doing hydration tests three different times. Three different times leading up to the fight. I don't know the exact protocol, but what they've done is essentially made it so that you can't be dehydrated. When you weigh in, you have to weigh in. If you're fighting at 170, but you get on the scale and you're fucking dying, they're like, no, you're not really 170. And that's really where it

should be this idea that the best way to fight is to cheat and to drain all yourself of fluids and then pretend that you're 160 pounds then get back on the scale you know 15 hours later at 185 that's fucking crazy that doesn't make any sense yeah that. You're not really 160 pound fighter. You're 185 pound fighter who almost died. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I talk with Forrest a lot about this cause he went through it and again, why he's such a great asset to the company. But he says, look, there's certain guys and girls that have a genetic ability that carry, you know, that have good muscle mass carry, you know, that have good muscle mass usually that just carry a ton of water,

and it's not difficult, it's not dangerous for them to drop 10 or 15 pounds. It's not, but it would be if they fought 15 pounds under. See, if they're fighting at 170 pounds, they really weigh 185. And if they cut down to 170, they make that weight, and then fought right then then then it would be dangerous Their performance would be radically diminished So we're lying when those people get on the scale when they get on the scale and they flex and they say 170 Sure, you're 170 for about an hour, you know, and then you're gonna go right back up to what you were before you dehydrated yourself

This is madness to me. This goes against what fighting is supposed to be. What we talked about before, about discipline and focus and technique and training. That's what competing is supposed to be about. It's supposed to be about a fight where two equally skillful individuals try to figure out who's got the best strategy and who's got the best will and technique. It's not supposed to be about who can do this legal cheating thing best, because that's what weight cutting is. Well, you know, really the modern history of the UFC, and the reason I think it's so successful is Lorenzo and Dana ran toward regulation, right? Yes. They said, hey, this is a no, you know, marketed as no rules, no hold bar event. They ran toward rules. And so I think, think you know what you're talking i actually had a discussion with bob bennett about this executive director of nevada he's great last week and you know he's looking what california's doing he says look we have physicals after the weigh-in so you know we do the weigh-ins now at the host hotel so it's usually done in a ballroom

fighter gets up on the scale makes, immediately goes behind the curtain and has their pre-fight physical. Right. But do they have a hydration test? They don't. I know California does some hydration testing fight night. But what Bob told me is I have the most experienced ringside physicians in the world that have seen more combat sports events than everywhere. I'm comfortable that these guys are evaluating, these medical professionals are evaluating

these fighters in this scenario, and if they feel or see something's not safe for that fighter to compete the next night, that they'll call them off. I think that's wonderful, but I think all that does is keep fighters from getting to the point of death. I mean, getting to the point where they're sick and terrified. They're definitely compromised. When they're making the weight, they're not really at that weight.

What I would really love in a perfect world, besides the bare knuckle thing, what I would really love is a weight class every 10 pounds. I mean, there's just giant gaps. The gap between 85 and 205 is 20 fucking pounds. That's a lot of weight. I hear that, but let me give you a scenario where it shows that alone ain't going to work. Female, new division for the UFC, 125, right? Because we had a 115 to 135-pound gap.

What happened in our first championship fight? Sajara Eubanks couldn't make weight. She wasn't even, you know, so that in and of itself, just making a weight class, I don't think solves the problem. Yeah, but she's also relatively inexperienced, young to the sport, and this is a brand new weight class that they really didn't have. I'm not saying more weight classes wouldn't help, but they're not going to help by themselves. It's got to be a multiple prong attack.

I think the hydration test should be along with that. The hydration test and weight classes every 10 pounds, and then give the champion the benefit of the doubt. Whoever is a champ in each division, whatever weight class, we find out what they really weigh, and they have an opportunity to fight for the title in that weight class. Yeah, I think we talked about it when you toured through the PI, but we have on a couple of occasions used that bioelectrical impedance machine

to determine, is that the proper term? I don't know. But basically, you step on the scale, and you hold on to these handles, and it gives you some type of hydration reading. We've done that a few times on check-in day, weigh-in day. We're not sure exactly what the numbers look like, but that's something that we're looking into. We're not sure exactly what the numbers look like, but that's something that, you know, we're looking into. Clint also does a lot of specific gravity testing fight week on fighters where, you know, it'll be a Tuesday or Wednesday. And I think he showed you that that chart. He'll look at how much weight a fighter has to lose and then look at what their specific gravity reading is, how diluted or concentrated the urine is.

And, you know, if you see someone with a bunch of weight to lose that is, you know, relatively dehydrated, specific gravity wise, then, you know, can alter their plan. So yeah, I mean, we've got a lot of a lot of that stuff going on. I don't necessarily disagree with you that that more needs to be done. But right now, our plan of attack is to use these resources, use the facility of the PI, you know, in an ideal world, I think rather than making these absolute rules, trying to educate our fighters, trying to show them, I tell you one thing, you can talk till you're blue in the face about things being bad, unhealthy for a fighter. They're like, I'm bulletproof. Not only that, they're fighters, they're fighting. That's bad for you anyway. Right. Like, oh, cutting weight's bad for me too?

Okay. Where they start listening, and I think this is where the Performance Institute comes into play, when you start talking about the effect on your performance. So if you tell them, hey, look, if you can come to your proper weight in a more measured approach and not lose a whole bunch and put that – look at the difference it's going to make on your performance 24 to 30 um hours later because you see this i mean you see this occasionally when fighters go through you know tough weight cuts you see them hafell dos anjos gas after a round or two right look how good he's looked moving up to 170 pounds i mean it's just phenomenal i also think now it's interesting there's you know on one side of it the criticism

will be well you're just encouraging even greater weight cuts and regains but i think this morning weigh-in thing that we've we put together i think has had a positive impact in a couple of areas explain that for people don't know what we're talking about yeah so actually andy foster again california before ufc 199 came to me and said hey we've been doing this morning weigh-in for a couple regional local shows. Would you guys be interested in it? Where we do it at the host hotel. We'd open the scales from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. And the idea would be a fighter gets on weight in their hotel room upstairs, hops on the elevator, steps on the scale. They make weight. They can start eating and drinking again right away.

They don't have to wait until 4 p.m. in the afternoon. Exactly. With the idea of I think one of the dangers of weight cutting and being dehydrated is the amount of time that you're at a loss of that water. And in the past, when we'd have the weigh-ins at an arena, it would be the fighter would have to check in downstairs. Say we had the weigh-ins at 4 o'clock in an arena the fire would the fighter would check in downstairs at maybe two um 2 30 the bus would leave i remember in rio we were in one time on a bus for an hour hour and a half to the arena everybody's depleted and dehydrated on the bus ride you step on a scale in a cold

you know environmentally unfriendly arena you then get back on the bus, drive another hour, hour and a half, you're talking multiple hours where these fighters are in a depleted state. So I think the morning weigh-in protects against that. I think the other benefit we've seen out of it, I think it's more of a long-term than a short-term benefit, is we've seen a lot more fighters missing weight since we went to the morning weigh-ins. And I think that's a product of timing in that in the past you had four, you know, four or five in the afternoon, you had all day long to cut weight and you would see fighters at 10 or 11 say, Oh, I can't do anymore. And at one or two o'clock they said, no, I can do a couple more pounds and just all day long. Now, unless you're literally not sleeping the night before you fight, you have a shorter

window in the morning to do that. And I think a lot of those missed weights has helped identify those fighters that I'm probably in the wrong weight class. If I can't make that weight of waking up, you know, five or six in the morning, a couple hours, then it's probably too much weight to lose. And we've seen some fighters move up in weight class because of that. We've also seen some fighters that have decided,

hey, I've got to take this more professionally and hire a nutritionist like Khabib Khabib Nurmagomedov who made weight easily for his last fight and but the fight before that obviously fell out of the fight Yeah, because his body shut down and he had to go to the hospital to be rehydrated Yeah, I mean again, I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all solution You have to be careful. Hey Khabib missed weight that last time went to the hospital You know a knee-jerk reaction would be you can't fight right this weight anymore what we saw this time he just changed the way he did things he came in he was on weight the night before he had a couple pounds to lose fight week yeah so it can be done and again that reverts back

to the performance institute I think there's no excuse now that if you're a new fighter and you're not making a hell of a lot of money and don't have the resources to hire, you know, will clint plan things out for you but you have a kitchen and cooks and staff that'll provide you that meal throughout your whole fight camp that's you want to be there for free so amazing the place is incredible and we will have uh clint and um duncan uh on the podcast explain all that what's in in that little silver? Yeah. So, uh, this is, uh, so one of the things that we want to do with this program again is, you know, first and foremost, it's to protect the UFC athlete, protect the rights of clean athletes, but we also want to influence other sports influence anti-doping as a whole. So USADA came to us earlier this year and said,

we've got some new technology. What do you guys think about using your program to be the first to kind of roll it out? And so the answer was, well, is the science good? Is it validated? They said, yeah, it is. I was actually at a conference mid-summer back in New York and sat on a panel with Major League Baseball, PGA Tour, and the UFC, and a bunch of anti-doping scientists there. And they were talking about this technology. And the other leagues were asked, hey, you guys going to institute that? And they're like, nah, you know, I don't think enough's there.

And they went to me. I'm like, absolutely. If USADA science tells me this works, we want to be the first, especially if it's more convenient and more efficient for our program. So what this is, is it's a leaching device. And until this came out, basically to get any blood tests from – oh, shit, you got some scissors, right? Yeah.

Nice. I was ready for you. Until this came out, basically any blood tests done from our athlete had to be done with a phlebotomist, the full-on needle in the vein, take out a vial of blood. So with this leeching device, it's got 30 microneedles in it, the size of about an eyelash. You put it up on your arm, you hit this button, and painlessly, the microneedles reach into just the capillaries, so just the blood at the top of the skin, and draw out a small amount of blood.

And this light turns red when that blood's drawn out. Wow. The blood is then deposited onto an index card. It's called dry blood spot testing. So a drop or two of blood on the four corners. The card's then sealed up, placed in the mail, and sent to a WADA laboratory. Does this all have to be done on video? No, well, it's not the athlete doing it themselves.

You have a collector doing that. I mean, that could be the future where an athlete is doing it themselves. Like on FaceTime or something? Exactly. But here are the benefits of that. A, and this is huge for me, I want to make things as convenient for our athletes as possible. So, you know, you talk to our roster and ask them, would you prefer a big needle stuck in the vein of your arm and a vial of blood taken out versus a completely painless leech of some blood from your capillaries?

They're all going to say, obviously, this. You talk about cost. So blood taken out of a vein in your arm requires a phlebotomist. So in those cases where USADA is doing a blood test, they usually take a drug collection officer and a phlebotomist to take out the blood. I mean, that's a couple hundred dollars there. A vial of blood needs to be cold shipped to the water laboratories. Here, you're talking about dry blood on an index card that just needs to be sealed up. It becomes tamper-proof once it is and put in the mail for 55 cents. Wow.

So I think incredible efficiency, convenience to the athlete for our program. And, again, we want to lead. And I think, you know, when you talk about – I'm asked this question regularly about local or regional MMA shows saying, Hey, this is great what you guys are doing for your program, but how much does this program cost you? And it is a multimillion-dollar program a year. And they say, hey, we'd love to do something like that, but we can't afford that. Something like this where now you cut your cost down from sending blood to – from maybe $1,000 to maybe $100, this device and one DCL, going to collect it out and put it on a card. I think it has some really great implications.

That's amazing. Not just for the UFC, but, you know, throughout the sport. Can I see that thing? Sure. That's pretty badass. Wow. Wow. Incredible.

Anything else? Should we wrap this up? We good? Yeah, man. I think we're good. Listen, you guys are doing an amazing job. I mean, it's just incredible, the results. It's so cool to see the results on the biological passport that you guys could show it in a chart.

And, I mean, pretty much everyone agrees. I mean, it's really changed the nature of fighting. It really has. It changed the sport. It changed almost eliminated doping. Yeah. As I told you, I really has. It changed the sport. It changed, almost eliminated doping. Yeah. As I told you, I really appreciate the platform you have here. Literally every fighter and camp and manager on our roster watches this to be able to get in and talk about these things, talk about that new technology. We just use that actually. I think Rose Namajunas was the first

fighter that you saw to try that out on. So I sent her a text going, hey, Rose, I heard they did the leaching device and the dried blood spot test. What did you think? She said, awesome. Didn't feel a thing. And she said, my mind is blown by how far technology has come here. And that's a big part of anti-doping and that deterrent when you're now saying, look at how the technology is evolving here. And you get an athlete that thinks, well, you know, I think I can outwit them or out-cotton mouse them. They see shit like this.

They're going to think. And perception is almost as important as reality in a lot of these occasions. And they start seeing things like this. And that deterrent factor is built up, I think, higher and higher. Yeah, it seems like at one point in time there was a race and the dopers were just like one half step ahead. But now it seems like it's even. And with the possibility of freezing your sample and then looking towards it to the future, it's not worth it. Yeah, I don't know if I call it even yet, but that gap is definitely narrowing.

And you're affecting the way that dopers are doping these days. I think now the microdosing, I think, you know, now the, you know, microdosing, I think is big and it's difficult to catch microdosing, but you've altered the behavior of the doper from taking, you know, drugs really unabated to very small amounts. So the benefits aren't going to be as great. I think you got to consider that a win for anti-doping. I think that gap continues to narrow. And when they microdose, like what, what did like, say, would that be like testosterone or something like that? Testosterone, EPO, probably the two most common, very fast clearing. How much of a window do you have of detection? Matter of hours. Hours. Hours. But, you know, again, going back to, I think I might've told this story the last

time I was on, but the Floyd Landis, Lance days, they were manipulating during the tour to France, an eight hour window. So from 10 PM to 6m., they wouldn't test them during the tour. The thought was these guys are racing up the side of the mountain for five, six hours a day. We've got to let these guys sleep. And they figured out, hey, if we do something at 10.01 by 6.01, the earliest a tester can come, it'd be clear. So, you know, yeah, that prospect's always out there.

That's why the UFC program there's no limits on the test now right it's just a bummer in terms of their sleep cycle it is yeah it's brutal but I think you know I think most appreciate that that's that's the price of you know clean sport and trying to ensure would there be a way to change that like would there be some sort of a wearable device that would detect changes in your body I've often thought that how about a wearable device it was detect changes in your body. I've often thought that. How about a wearable device that was tamper-proof, that collected everything 24 hours a day, that you peel it off after a couple weeks and it's tested. Yeah.

Or give them the wearable device so when they're sleeping, so you don't interrupt their sleep cycle. So 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. or whatever it is that you decide would be the window that they need to sleep. While they're doing that, they must have this device on that detects any changes to their metabolism, any changes in input, and then they can't eat while they're on. Yeah, I mean, believe me, the anti-doping community is always thinking about things. I talked to Travis Tigard, the CEO of USADA last week, and he, you know, he made it clear

and that USADA, I think, dedicates $3 million a year grants toward research in anti-doping, things like that. So, I mean, that race is always going on and is always continuing. Beautiful. Great work, Mr. Nowitzki. I'm sorry about the nickname. It's all good. You're okay with it? Rolls right off the back, man. All right. Beautiful. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it, man. All right.