This is the conclusion of a long interview I conducted with UFC commentator, Joe Rogan, If you missed the first two segments, they can be found here:

Part I

Part II

Stephie Daniels: With several fighters in their 30s using TRT, such as Frank Mir, Chael Sonnen, and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, do you feel that they should be allowed to bring their levels to that of a 25 year old, or should they be restricted to maintain levels that are age appropriate?

Joe Rogan: First of all, when you test them, when exactly are you testing them? You can test a guy after a hard workout or after sex, and he's going to test low. You can test a guy when he hasn't had sex or masturbated in a week, and he will test high. If you haven't been training, your levels will test high. There's a lot of different factors to consider. You can also fudge the test with big meals.

When you say the levels of a young man, or the levels of where they're supposed to be at, that's a thing that they can fudge, and also, they're only testing urine. That's a real problem. It's too expensive to test blood, but the reality is, you're not going to get accurate readings unless you test blood. When you're only testing urine, all you're testing for is blatant sh*t like these guys that test positive for oil based synthetic hormones and steroids like Deca or Nandralone, and things like that, but there's a lot of stuff that they can take to get it out of their system in just a few days. Then they can show up and test "clean". Now the prohibited substance isn't in their system at the time that they're actually competing.

That was sort of the argument that Alistair Overeem used. Overeem said that he got shot up by this doctor, he didn't know there was testosterone in it and that's what f**ked up his T/E ratio, which may or may not be true. If you're going to compete, and you're supposed to be clean, you've got to follow the rules. The rules are, you're not supposed to take steroids, period. It's not that you're not supposed to take steroids just when you fight, you're not supposed to take them at all, even in training. If you haven't had a TUE for TRT therapy, you're not supposed to be allowed to go to a doctor and have the doctor shoot you up with testosterone.

Yes, it will make you heal. Yes, it can fix your body. That's why hormones are produced. They're all about recovery and rebuilding your broken down tissue, but they're not endogenous. You're adding them. You're putting new stuff into your body to fix things, stuff that's prohibited. It becomes a real weird thing when it's not prohibited, and you just have to get an exemption for it. It's like, who gets an exemption and why. A 30 year old guy can get an exemption to use testosterone? What? What the f*ck is going on?

The one thing that I absolutely agreed with that doctor on, is that Chael probably couldn't have competed at a really high level in wrestling with hypogonadism. If his body wasn't producing testosterone, how could he have been a really good wrestler? How is that even possible? Then I looked online and found that hypogonadism can actually occur as you get older, and it's not necessarily something that you have to be born with.

That's something for Chael to answer, because I don't know if Chael is telling the truth. When he says, 'I was picked on. I didn't have a testicle', [laughs] he'll just start making sh*t up, and you don't know how much of it is real and how much of it is just marketing. I think if Chael owes us any truth at all, it's when did this happen. When were you not making testosterone? When did it all go down?

In Chael's case, just like it could be with anybody else, it might be head trauma. There are also some fighters that, as they get older, their body stops producing as much testosterone. On top of that, if you're training like a f**king wild animal, it's going to produce even less than that. So, there's the beatdowns you get from training, and there's the fact that your body's just not producing as much anymore. Then you just go to a doctor who says, 'Look, we can fix all that. You just need some TRT', and BOOM! You're up to 21 year old levels again. All you have to do is justify it, and when you get interviewed, you talk about your low testosterone and how terrible it was. 'Oh, it was awful. My dick didn't work. Oh , I couldn't work out in the morning', and now you've got some synthetic stuff in your body that lets you compete like a 21 year old.

Stephie Daniels: What do you think about nanomedicine and cutmen? How would you feel about a cutman administering nanomachines to a cut to seal it and heal it during a fight?

Joe Rogan: Well, we are going to have to deal with that at some point. We're going to have to deal with genetic engineering on every level. That's the question about this testosterone thing. I mean, should we allow people to supplement their testosterone? I don't know, but they're doing it. They're allowing it, so what happens now? Should we look at a guy like Frank Mir and say, 'Well Frank shouldn't need hormone injections in his 33 year old, healthy body. What's going on?' Should we say Frank Mir has got to retire? Should we say, 'Frank Mir, your body has taken so much punishment, that your brain is not producing enough testosterone anymore. We say that this is really unusual for a 33 year old man, and we recommend you retire from your fighting career before you do irreparable damage to yourself.'? That's a very legitimate argument, as well. The argument that when a 33 year old man isn't producing enough testosterone, because he's taken ferocious beatings for over a decade. Maybe no more ferocious beatings.

I think I'm for the idea of people competing naturally. I just think that there's going to come a point in time where that's going to be ridiculous. It's not yet, but there's going to come a point in time where your mailman can go to a f88king GNC, and take a pill and it turns him into the Hulk [laughs]. I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to say, 'But I'm all natural.' I don't care if you're all natural, my f**king mailman can jump over my house. Why would I want to watch some guys fight that are all natural when my mailman is flying through the f**king neighborhood like the Hulk? It sounds ridiculous, and I am half joking, but we've opened the door with TRT, and it's just the beginning of what is eventually going to be a crazy debate over what we are allowed to do with our bodies.

Stephie Daniels: I sometimes play devil's advocate and toy with the idea of leveling the playing field entirely, by letting the athletes take whatever they want. What are your thoughts on that notion?

Joe Rogan: When it comes to competing, I don't think you should be able to do something that's cheating. I think we have to really look at what is causing guys to stop producing hormones, and if it is that these guys are taking too many shots to the head. Look, we might love to see Frank Mir fight, and I do love to see him fight, but we should look at what the f*ck is going on. Your body is not producing hormones anymore, man. That's just step one in the ultimate deterioration.

Should you say, 'F*ck it, let's go Phil Baroni style, and ride this bitch until the wheels fall off'? That's an option, and I support a person's right to make that choice, but to say that everything should be legal, then you're going to make kids take them. If you give someone some crazy sh*t, and they can just run faster and they're stronger, how is a regular person supposed to compete with that?

Stephie Daniels: Do you feel that the punishment levied against Nick Diaz by the NSAC was unnecessarily severe?

Joe Rogan: Absolutely. They're punishing him for daring to question them, and I believe his lawyers were intending to sue them at one point. I forget what the exact wording was. Not only that, he didn't even test positive for marijuana, he tested positive for a non psycho-active marijuana metabolite, which let them deduce that he had smoked marijuana within X amount of days before his competition.

Saying that marijuana is something that you can't take is really ridiculous when you're talking about a guy that has a marijuana license. Marijuana and TRT have now been approved in California now, and they're saying he could have requested an exemption, and that he didn't, and that is the problem, that he didn't do the proper paperwork.

You know, I think if that is the case, if that's all it would have required, then maybe what you should do is give him a very small fine. Here's my thoughts. If he showed up high as f*ck and fought baked, yeah, you should probably suspend the guy. I do think it's a performance enhancing supplement. I do think it's a PED. If you're fighting high, I think it aids you. People say, 'Why?' Well, Nick Diaz is high all day long, son. He can manage that.

If you get Kelly Slater out on a surf board, he's been there, done that. He can ride the waves. Well, Nick Diaz rides the weed waves. Some people can't ride those waves. Some people would take the amount of weed that Nick Diaz smokes in a day, and they'd f**king hide under their couch. Nick Diaz smokes that weed and gets on a bike and does a triathalon. You know why? Because he rides that weed wave every day. That weed wave is his friend.

When he's high as f*ck, I bet he performs outstanding. If you let Nick Diaz fight high, I bet nobody would beat him. How about that? He'd probably be in a f**king zone you couldn't even deal with, man. He'd probably be doing weird sh*t like sitting in his corner in a lotus position in between rounds. He might fight you with his back turned to you [laughs]. He rides those weed waves every day. I don't think that you should allow Nick Diaz to fight high. If you did, it would be fascinating, and I think it would prove that marijuana is a performance enhancing supplement.

I do jiu jitsu high all the time. It's not something that I invented. It's something that Brazilians invented. I can't tell you how many high level BJJ black belts I know that smoke weed, and they tell you that it improves your flow. It makes you single minded. It makes you concentrate almost entirely on what you're doing. It drowns out the rest of the world.

The thing is, Nick Diaz wasn't high when he fought Carlos Condit. It was very clear that he wasn't high. He had non psycho-active metabolites in his system, and just a trace amount of them. All that means is that he didn't stop his intake of marijuana in time. What's not fair about it, is that he's not fighting impaired, and he's not fighting enhanced. He's fighting in a normal, sober state of mind. That was proven, so he hasn't violated the rules. He wasn't fighting under the influence of a performance enhancing supplement.

What they did was a vindictive thing. What they did was because they wanted to punish him. If you're saying that he could have applied for an exemption, and because he didn't, you're going to make him sit out for a year, you're an asshole, and you shouldn't be in charge of deciding anything. That's a sh*t decision. That's an unfair, unjust decision by a bunch of people, who just for whatever f**king reason, were voted in, or elected in or appointed, have too much power. You're not doing a good job with that power. I strongly disagree with that judgement. I found the whole thing to be gross.

*I hope you all enjoyed this series. Let me know if you guys have requests for anyone in particular for a super series similar to this one. Thanks for reading.*

Follow Joe via his Twitter, @JoeRogan



