Name: Joe Rogan Experience #685 - Jeff Novitzky
Uploaded: 2015-08-19T03:58:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #685 - Jeff Novitzky' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-08-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #685 - Jeff Novitzky' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-08-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #685 - Jeff Novitzky

Ah, we're live. All right, Jeff. Thank you very much, man. Appreciate you
coming on here.
It was very cool talking to you in Brazil, and even though it was a very short
conversation,
I learned a lot, and I got very fired up about this podcast.
Awesome, man. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you, and thank you for all the stuff you've done.
For folks who don't know, you're the guy who essentially took down Lance
Armstrong,
or at least made the case, or solidified. I mean, how would you describe it?
Yeah, I mean, I was involved in the investigation. You know, it was a case run
by the Department of Justice out of Los Angeles.
I was one of the case agents on it, so I was associated with it.
That's one of the things that's creepy about it, is that the government was
going after bike riders.
It's like, wouldn't you think that they've got some really important shit to do?
I think that bothered a lot of people about the baseball thing with Barry Bonds
and with Mark McGuire and all that Sammy Sosa stuff.
It's like, why is the fucking Congress involved? And it seems...
Yeah, you know, on one hand, these were laws that, you know, the agencies I was
with were tasked to investigate.
On the other hand, in terms of importance, you know, I was on a personal level.
I looked at the message that was being sent to the youth, not only of this
country, but of the world.
And that it became a fact that in, you know, the mid to late 90s, steroid use
was so pervasive in sports that, you know, kids are smart these days.
They're, you know, on the Internet. They know what's going on.
That you really did see it trickling down to kids, you know, in high school.
And at some point, if you wanted to take that sport far enough, you ultimately
had to make that decision.
Hey, do I want to keep going?
And if I do, I'm going to have to make a decision whether or not, you know, I'm
going to use these things.
So I think, you know, the I think about the number of conversations that
probably happened around dinner table between parents and kids because of these
cases.
Got to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
And that alone right there, you know, I think would justify the resources that
were spent.
Defendants in those cases always, it was always overblown in terms of the
resources that the government did spend doing it.
You know, you heard often the Barry Bonds case was 50, 55 million dollar case.
It really wasn't, you know, and that case involved not steroid use,
but lying in front of a grand jury.
So it transcended steroid use.
It was about lying and telling the truth and misusing the justice system.
I've had agents all across the country on non-steroid related cases come up to
me and say,
hey, thanks.
Thanks for that case, because we can use that as an example when we go out and
interview witnesses
or witnesses come before a grand jury that, look, you need to tell the truth.
And if you don't, look what can happen.
You know, the government went after Barry Bonds or certainly will go after you.
And when that truth starts being told like that, our legal and justice system
starts working.
When it doesn't, it breaks down.
So it wasn't 55 million dollars?
How much was actually spent around?
You know, it's funny.
49?
Yeah.
49.50.
No, not even close.
Some media outlet did a freedom of information request with the U.S. Attorney's
Office in San Francisco
who prosecuted the case.
So this was after the case was done.
So they put the dollar figures together of what the trial costs, not
necessarily, you know, the entire investigation,
but the trial itself, I think it was less than $100,000.
And the comment was, geez, this is the most cost-efficient, high-profile trial
that's probably ever happened.
But that's not a full account of all the money that was spent trying to bring
him down.
It's not.
And again, this wasn't trying to bring anybody down.
This was a situation where he went before a grand jury, didn't tell the truth.
His grand jury transcript, ironically enough, was leaked by the Balco, one of
the Balco attorneys, defense attorneys.
And so the public all of a sudden got to read exactly what he said in there.
It was obvious that he at least was obstructing, if not outright, not telling
the truth.
And so I think the Justice Department was faced with, what do we do now?
What kind of message are we sending if we don't prosecute this guy?
It sends a message that, you know, far transcends steroid use in sports.
There's thousands of witnesses every day that appear before grand juries.
So it was almost a necessity to have to do it.
It wasn't about steroids, but it was about steroids, because the only reason
why he was there was questioning him about steroids.
So it essentially was.
And that's how a lot of people feel like when it comes to, like, organized
crime, like, didn't they bust Al Capone on tax evasion?
Like, that's how a lot of people get caught.
They get caught lying while they're in the middle of committing a crime.
But it's really about the original crime, wasn't it?
Well, they did.
I mean, that's why he was brought in there.
But, you know, when he was brought in, it was made very clear that, look, you're
not prosecuting you for using steroids.
He was given immunity, actually, showing that as long as you tell the truth,
you're not a target of this thing.
You're just a witness.
So tell the truth.
But he was never convicted for using steroids, right?
Correct.
Like, and wasn't he off the hook even as far as the investigation goes?
Like, he never did any time.
And was he even penalized?
Like, how was he penalized other than having to go through trials and spend a
lot of money?
Yeah.
I mean, ultimately, you know, after he was convicted in the jury trial, the
judge sentenced him to house arrest.
I bet he's got a sweetie house.
It's not really that bad.
Can you even watch TV when you're in the house arrest?
I think you can, you know.
That seems a little ridiculous.
I like being at home.
But I tell you, even in a situation like that, I tell people all the time, man,
being under investigation to begin with,
going through a public trial with, you know, potentially embarrassing things
about you, man, that's rough.
I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, notwithstanding what the ultimate, you
know, sentence was.
But the most embarrassing thing was that he did what everybody knew he did,
which was take steroids to get bigger.
I mean, that was the most embarrassing thing about it all, right?
It wasn't anything else.
I mean, there was more things.
It was, you know, ex-girlfriends that were called it, that, you know, went on
the stand.
I saw him shoot it running in his ass.
He got bigger right in front of my eyes.
The thing that people have a problem with is that there's, like, legit problems
in the world,
and they're chasing people for hitting a ball with a stick better.
You know, like, baseball is boring as shit.
And the best part about baseball is when they hit home runs.
And people are saying, well, finally these guys are doing something that makes
them hit more home runs,
and it turns out that this something involves science and chemicals, and we don't
like it.
So we're going to come down on these people, and we're going to spend a lot of
taxpayers' money,
and we're going to bring these people before Congress, and Joe Biden's going to
get all goofy about it.
That's how a lot of people felt about it.
Well, I think any time you could spend resources on something that's going to
directly affect the youth of society
and sending them a message about what is right and what is wrong.
You know, having grown up in a sporting household myself, three daughters,
which, you know, played sports growing up,
and I look at kind of what I went through and what my daughters have gone
through
and the life's lessons that you learn in sports that transcend sports.
I mean, you learn how to work under pressure, how to work, you know, as a team,
how to individually succeed.
There's so many great lessons to be learned.
The health aspects of, you know, being healthy and working out.
All of a sudden, you introduce into that equation, number one, breaking the
rules, and so there's, you know, the ethics to look at surrounding it.
And number two, you know, ultimately, there can be risk and health consequences
with using these things,
especially if you're young doing that.
So, you know, again, going back to the message, I think, that it sent to our
kids and to parents with where I think society was going back then
with the pervasive use of drugs in sports, I think was a positive one that's
going to benefit people positively.
And I think it did.
It did have an impact.
The landscape has changed in the last 10 or 15 years.
Yeah, I think you're definitely right about that.
And that is a – that's the most compelling aspect of it as far as, like, the
argument for chasing it down is if kids are growing up
and the, you know, kid says, hey, I want to be a professional baseball player,
how many people are going to tell that kid,
look, you've got to take steroids.
If you want to get into a good college, if you want to get, you know, a bunch
of recruiters looking at you,
you've got to start making some noise right now.
And the way to do it is this stuff right here.
Squirt that stuff in there.
The amount of conversations I had with young athletes, baseball players,
definitely cyclists,
where they talked about that moment that all their life growing up, you know,
they aspired to be a professional.
And then they got to a certain point in baseball, it was, you know, minor
league, maybe triple A.
In cycling, it was, hey, about to get signed on to a pro team going over to
Europe and realizing,
oh, shit, to go any further, I'm seeing what's going on around me here.
I'm going to have to make that decision.
I have had, I can't even count the number of athletes I've had sitting across
the table from me,
recounting those days when those decisions were made, that were balling like
little babies, talking about that.
And I think a lot of it was guilt in terms of the decision that they ultimately
did make.
But just the pressure of coming to that moment, either giving up your lifelong
dream or, hey, kid,
if you want to go further, this is what you got to do.
And in some instances, you know, kind of rebuffing that and not doing it.
And then after you're realizing, shit, I really do need to do this or I can't
go any further.
I've had many, many of those stories told to me.
Yeah, it is really crazy that sports like professional cycling, especially, we
talked about this when I saw you in Brazil,
that I had a buddy that was a professional cycler for a while.
And he told me this long before the Lance Armstrong stuff went down, before he
got caught.
He said, they're all doing it.
He said, you can't compete at that high level.
He said, not only that, but the doctor that he talked to said,
you could make an argument that it's actually more dangerous to compete in that
sport without the drugs.
And then I said, well, what kind of a fucking sport is this, man?
Like, this is crazy.
Then after you and I had this conversation, I started looking into the Tour de
France times.
We spoke about this briefly in Brazil, that the guy who was winning the Tour de
France,
I don't even know what his name is.
He was breaking records that were set by guys that were on drugs.
And we were trying to figure out how the fuck that's possible.
Yeah, it's a bit suspicious.
A bit?
I mean, these are hyperhuman levels of performance.
And he's beating guys that we know, or the elite of the elite, we're also on
steroids.
We're also on EPO.
Yeah, the cycling, I think we talked about this,
in terms of level of sophistication versus all the sports that I saw where drug
use was prevalent,
was by far at the top.
Where, you know, they were investing in machines to bring along with them
as they were competing and traveling to test their blood every night
to make sure that their levels were within r