November 29, 2025 • 37 mins
This week we answer a question from listener Brandon, who’s noticed a rise in performance-enhancing drugs outside of sports. Nate and Maria discuss their own philosophies on PEDs, their impact on equilibriums, and what people risk when they decide to juice.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making
better decisions. I'm Maria Kannakova.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
And I'm Nate Silver.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I don't like it up, all right, Nate Silver. Today
on the show, we're actually doing an episode that's inspired
by one of our listeners, Brandon. So, by the way, listeners,
please do keep sending us questions. And Brandon is wondering
about performance enhancing drugs. He specifically asked for performance enhancing
(00:57):
drugs outside of sports, but I think we'll be talking
about sports as well. So in the army, he says
that they talk a lot about alertness, decision making under stress.
Caffeine is basically a field issue stimulant. He goes on
to talk about adderall modafinal and the fact that it's
being used not just in military, but you know, college students, professionals,
(01:21):
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So he wants to
know what are our thoughts and what are our experiences,
and you know, it definitely does say a lot about
modern performance culture. So this is a topic that I've
done a lot of thinking about, both in the past
but also obviously as I'm working on a book about cheating.
(01:45):
You know, I do think about all of these ways
to kind of enhance performance that may or may not
be legal in any given setting. And I think there's
a lot to say here. Do you want me to
start with some thoughts, Nate, or do you want to
kind of give you give your reaction. So, you know,
people have been trying to figure out for decades, like
(02:07):
how can I think better?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Right?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
How can I perform better? How can I run better?
How can I do everything just a little bit better?
You know, it's kind of a perfect storm with kind
of social media and technology and all of these things
where we're in a culture that's obsessed with I mean,
the culture has always been obsessed with youth, but now
we feel like, finally like we're in then do not
(02:32):
die ever moment that if I can just live for
another ten years, I'll be close to the moment in
time where we can all live forever or at least
greatly expand our life expectancy and our healthy life expectancy.
So don't die. And also let's absolutely optimize every single
moment of every single day cognitive function, physical function. In
(02:57):
the case of certain social media influencer gurus who also
happen to run big companies that sell supplements a rectile
function measured during the night. We won't be naming names,
but I think anyone who's online knows exactly who I'm
talking about right now. So how do you basically enhance
(03:21):
every single element of existence to the max? And we're
seeing things, Yes, some of them are pills. Modaffanel has
been kind of in in the mix for a long time,
so has adderall. There are other drugs that have been
basically tested for Alzheimer's and that are now also kind
(03:43):
of in that conversation. But it's not just drugs, right,
It's things like cold plunges, infra red saunas. You know,
do you do this to do that?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Like?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
What can I possibly do to get just like a
little bit better? And this is not a monolithic conversation
in the sense that there's a big difference between like
poker players who that they're going to microdose before a
tournament because they think it's going to make them more
creative and find better spots. This does happen, by the way,
(04:17):
I'm not just throwing this out in the blue and
like a Lance Armstrong who decides that, you know, everyone's
doping in cycling, so I'm going to do it too,
and we're going to create this culture where everyone is
taking drugs that are explicitly forbidden to enhance their performance. Right,
(04:37):
So we've got it's a huge spectrum, right, And there's
a huge spectrum between the college student who decides to
take adderall even though they technically don't have ADHD, so
that they can finish a paper, which, by the way, Nate,
is probably not happening anymore because you have chat GBT
who's your aderol, who could just finish the paper for you,
so you don't even need to take those supplements that
(04:58):
was you know, long before, or the investment baggers taking
cocaine in the middle of the night to kind of
stay up and make sure that they can get their
their spreadsheets or whatever it is that they're doing done
by the morning. And then the wellness gurus who say, well,
even though medafinil is a drug that was developed for
narcolepsy and sometimes to treat ADHD and may not be
(05:22):
the thing that I should be taken to kind of
enhance my concentration, even though there's a little bit of
data on that. But I'm going to do it just
in case because I want to kind of maximize my
ability to be the full me. All of these things
are different, right, and I have different opinions on these,
on the different gradations along the way, and even ones
(05:45):
that seem very straightforward, such as, you know, we should
not be allowing any performance enhancing drugs in sports, When
you start digging down, it ends up that some of
them might be like a little bit murkier than you
would think, right. I would I would love to say
that I'm just you know, we shouldn't be doing any
of this, but you know, as are as listener Brandon
(06:06):
points out, caffeine is a great performance enhancing drug, right,
So it's not like everyone is living this existence where
we're not taking any substances to increase performance. You need
to kind of figure out what exactly are you talking about.
And I think that this is one of those episodes
where there are going to be a lot of shades
(06:29):
of gray. I think that it's one of these case
by case basis where you have to really understand what's
the intention here, what are the data here, what is
the responsibility here, and what are the rules here?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, in the poker world, do you have an interesting
cross section of a little bit of everything. Right, you
certainly have some stimulant use ranging for people who are
probably taking out of all the people who are taking
zims or vaping you.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Oh yeah, by the way, let me just interrupt you
immediately just to say, we said caffeine, but nicotine is
another huge performance enhancing drug that people take all the time,
and zin is gaining huge market shares. I seeeson at
the poker tables all the time.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Please continue, Yeah, and in part because like those are
as weird as smoking cigarettes, right, which is more disruptive,
you know, those are kind of more discreet ways to
do with that, you know. But yeah, people are taking
anterall people are. There's varying amounts of drinking. People are
different tolerances. I will often have a best of one
(07:41):
or two at dinner a poker tournament, right, But like everyone,
we have differently different things, you know what I mean.
And so you have to know kind of your own
I'm not claim aning of this is game theory optimal, right,
you have to kind of know your own physiology a
little bit, but not as much drinking as you might
have seen twenty years ago, you know, I've always surprised
that there are some players who get quite stoned on
(08:04):
dinner breaks and stuff like that, or any break, right.
I mean, we were talking about the well known player
Maria the other day who seemed to me quite stone
and not playing optimally, And you have some of those,
but like there are some people who are microdocing on
different things, and like again I don't know, right, it's
also partly a matter of habit, right, for whatever reason,
(08:26):
probably done more drugs than you in my life, Maria
forever reason. Like I've just never really tried to play
poker under the influence of THC, though I'm not familiar
with THC, whereas I have on alcohol, and so like
you're just kind of like part of what you're familiar
with I think about poker. It's also important, though, is
like these are really long sessions, particularly in tournaments, right,
(08:50):
So things that sustain energy and focus for a long time,
like you know, you don't typically see like necessarily like
a lot of like cocaine used to take an extreme
example of poke returnaments because like that is a drug
where you kind of burn brightly for very quickly and
then crash out right. You know that will work if
(09:11):
you're playing from noon to midnight in some tournament. I mean,
unless you're taking a lot of it, I guess right.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
But adderall, which is kind of a controlled version of speed,
is something and riddle. These are things that are that
are actually incredibly common in the poker world, and they
are common not just in the poker world, but in
all sorts of professions that require concentration, right, that require
(09:39):
people to kind of pay attention for long periods of time.
And the funny thing is, so I've actually written about this,
and I have kind of dug a little bit deeper
into the data. With drugs like adderall, I think this
is true of a lot of performance enhancing drugs when
you are taking anything that is off label, right, which
(10:01):
means that it's not prescribed for this exact condition, especially
when it's something that is for a cognitive function and
meant to counteract something that is kind of a neurological
abnormality or something that is kind of not a neurotypical brain.
(10:24):
When you put it into a neurotypical brain that doesn't
have these issues, you might get some benefits, but also
some unintended side effects. So the funny thing I mean,
I think it's funny because I don't do adderall or
riddle an off label. The funny thing about it is
that there's actually a disconnect when you take these drugs,
(10:46):
quite often with what you think your work product is
and what it actually is, because it does put you
into this like laser focus where you think, oh, I'm
writing like a brilliant paper, or I'm creating this brilliant
work product, or if I'm playing pogram, you know, being
able to execute all these wonderful creative lines. But it
actually really dampens creativity and makes you create things that
(11:12):
to you might seem great, but that actually objectively you're
working a lot, but your work output is not necessarily
what you think it is. And so it's a very
funny disconnect between self perception and actual performance. And so
when it comes to cognitive enhancement, that is something that
(11:32):
you see now. Obviously when it's physical, usually there's no
disconnect between what you think you're doing and how you're
doing because you have an objective measure immediately, right, am
I running faster? Am I cycling faster? Am I able
to actually lift more weight?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Right?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
When I use steroids? Whatever it is? But when it
comes to cognitive enhancement, you have these funny things.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, we talked to Nick Thompson, the author of The
Running Round. Nick is one of the best runners in
the world and age class the other week. Right, Well,
one of the things about running is that there's not
much variation in it, right, You're running of existence. Most
people who a runners are running a few routes. If
they run commonly. That can be a few things. It
can be traffic, right, you can other joggers and stuff
(12:17):
like that, right, or wind or weather right, But like
for the most part, it can be a fairly objective
benchmark about your kind of overall partiovascular et cetera health
that day, in your effort level. Whereas in poker it's
extremely noisy. You know, the best poker players might have
(12:38):
in the tough field and ROI of plus ten percent
and a mediocre player on his B game, not the
C game, not the F game, but like on this
B game, right, might be minus ten percent, right, plus
ten which is minus saying oh, of course, of one
poker tournament. You don't protect the dissample of like hundreds
of tournaments to distinguish those And yeah, I certainly have had.
(12:59):
It's kind of a common thing among writers too, to
use like things like adderall. I've certainly been around people
who seem to be constantly on adderall and they're talking
a mile a minute and they're kind of hyper right
and kind of babbling, And you know, that's not a
drug that leaves me with a great impression. But like again,
(13:21):
I'm not gonna my own habits right, good and bad.
I'm not gonna creaque anybody. My empirical experience is that
one's a bit more noticeable than than some of the others,
maybe among the drugs that people are kind of using
for cognitive entancement.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, so just full disclaimer, I've never used any cognitive
enhancing pills. And I say pills because I drink a
fuck ton of caffeine. Okay, yeah, so like and I've
actually never used nicotine, so I've never I'm I'm gonna
come across those kind of this goody two shoes, but
(13:57):
I do I drink, and you know, I'm not doing
this for like moral reasons or anything. It's just not
I don't think it's right for me. And also I
have a lot of allergies and can stand smoke. But
I've never used any nicotine products. I've never smoked cigarettes.
No nicotine. By the way, poker players also love nicotine pills,
nicotine patches, not just poker players. Like this is stuff
(14:18):
that people use. They get into the science and they
listen to the kind of gurus of how to enhance
your performance peak performance at any given time, and they
do stuff like that. So just total disclaimer, I've never
used any of those, but I do use caffeine. And
when I play poker, I am always drinking green tea,
(14:38):
and I specifically drink green tea because I've done the
research and I know that green tea has the best
kind of way of absorbing elthonine into your brain, which
helps you sustain your attention for longer periods of time.
Am I using a performance enhancing drug, Nate, you know
(15:01):
what I mean? Like I realized, I'm not trying to
practice semantics here. All I'm saying is that we do
make choices all the time that try to optimize how
we're doing today. By the way, no amount of green
tea is probably going to make me at absolute peak
performance because I didn't get that much sleep. And what
we know is the number one cognitive enhancing drug is sleep.
Like nothing else, nothing else comes even close. So getting
(15:24):
proper amounts of sleep is just like, you know, light
years ahead of anything else. And so when you do
something like that, well obviously it's not a performance enhancing drug,
but it might as well be. So you know, there
are so let's just I guess put a disclaimer and say, Okay, yes,
there's things that everyone does, like caffeine and it might
(15:48):
give you a little bit more cognitive power. And then
there are other things that people use that are more
out there, and we can argue that while nicotine is
closer to caffeine, or we can argue that it's not,
but modafino definitely kind of on the other on the other.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Side of that.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
And do you have a prescription, right, is it something
that you are actually using correctly because you need to.
Oh and by the way, if you do have a
prescription for it because you need to, is that giving
you an unfair advantage? Is it giving you an unfair edge?
They're all of these, you know, when we start getting
into the ethics of it. Oh and by the way,
poker doesn't ban any sort of substances, So that's like
(16:35):
That's another thing here.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Right, there's a didn't sama, which is yes, there was,
there was.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
It's like, come on, yeah, he proposed a drug free
poker tournament where you could not where you'd get tested,
and you weren't allowed to use anything. I don't know
if caffeine was included in that, because if it was,
then you know, sorry, Tom, I'm I'm totally out. But
but yeah, I do want to say that it's not
against the rules in poker to take whatever the fuck
(17:05):
you want to take, And to be perfectly honest, I
would say, like, if you want to take it, go
right ahead, because I actually don't think it gives you
that much of an edge, and I think it sometimes
might make you play worse.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
And we'll be right back after this break.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
We can put some bounds on this, right, Like, It's
not like in poker there are look, you could make
educated guesses about exactly which helpful and or unhelpful substances
different players are taking, you know, maybe apart from the
really stone players and the really adderally ones. Right, And
(17:59):
it's not necessarily so obvious, right, you know, it's not
like there's some class of players that are like thirty
percent better than the rest. You're like, oh, they're all
on the drug apps, right, And there are exotic things
that are very subtle. You know, some of the players
take beta blockers. I'm not an expert in any of
(18:20):
this stuff, but I think it has the effect of
like lowering your heart rate and things like that, which
can be helpful to a remain calmer maybe when you're
under high stress, and or to reduce the appearance of
physical tells.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
I remember actually the main event of the World Series
right where there was a guy I put against a
day two or day three right saying, right across from him,
he just kind of thing where like his heart was
like literally kind of very visible, and it's whatever artery
carctorate or something artery, right, every player knows it corroded, corroded.
And it was the most visible instance of this I'd
(18:56):
ever seen. It's the main event. He had a fairly
big sack on day three whatever it was. And and furthermore,
he basically had like a running heart rate monitor for
this player at all times, right, Like furthermore, I quickly
do so there was a pattern that when he has
a good hand, some players actually more nerves than their bluffing, right,
this guy waiting in a big hand. Do you start
to see boom boom boom boom of this kind of
(19:18):
it was kind of funny, right, but like, yeah, but
the physical tell you know, if if you start having
a bunch of predictable involuntary takes, or if you can
suppress those ticks in some ways, you know, it's not
creating just like a pigd use. And poker is not
created as like some yeah moral panic wearers and the
other world I know sports then than it is of course, yeah,
(19:40):
And I think.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
So let's uh, let's actually talk about that a little
bit because so I have very very different perspectives about
using all of these drugs, all of these techniques, whatever
whatever you want to use when it is allowed versus
when it's not allowed. So poker, you know, knock yourself out.
If you are an investment banker and you want to
add her all it up or cocaine it up or whatever,
(20:01):
it is awesome, like you do you right, and if
your superiors are happy with your work, awesome. My onion
changes completely when we have explicit rules that say, okay,
you can not take you know, these performance enhancing drugs
right when we're talking about cycling. The argument but everyone's
(20:22):
doing it to me holds no water, right, I don't
fucking care like that. That is, if it's a rule,
that it means that everyone is cheating. If everyone is cheating,
either you call out the cheating, you quit the sport,
you know, you do something else. And it's interesting because there,
you know, as I've been kind of researching cheating in games,
(20:43):
I talked to a baseball player who was roommates with
another player who was suspended for for using steroids and
coast I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say anything else, Nate.
You know these sports a little too well. And it
was one of these things where you know, this roommate said,
(21:06):
like I, you know, people were doing I just thought
it was wrong, so I didn't and like, I have
no regrets about it, even though kind if my roommate
ended up having like a much more storied career for
a time than I did, because like I, you know,
I said, I basically said no, and my career ended
(21:26):
like I, you know, eventually kind of had to retire.
And but it's not like you're forced to do it.
You make choices. So anyway, you can. I don't care if, like,
if the culture is that everyone is doing it. What
I care about it is it within the rules or
is it not within the rules. And if you it's
not within the rules and you're doing it, then you're cheating.
(21:47):
And if you're trying to figure out ways of doing
it without getting caught by using these new drugs and
aren't yet detectable on tests, then again you're cheating, and
you're cheating in an even more kind of insidious way.
That is ruining the kind of sportsmanship right the the
playing field for everyone else, and that is kind of
(22:09):
ruining the integrity of your sport. And I you know,
things like Nate, you know, the enhanced games that were
announced like that. I'm like, yeah, like, what what are
we even talking about? Like, I guess people, you know,
you want to see a lot of people on steroids
(22:29):
go like to me, that's not even a sport. I'm like, well,
what are we even doing here? And I think a
lot of athletes felt the same way. So on the
one hand, I said, there were going to be a
lot of shades of gray here and this seems black
and white, But I'm actually going to take a step
back and put it back into the shades of gray.
So one of my favorite sports stories that I think
(22:54):
I've mentioned on this podcast before, but I'm just going
to say it again was this champion of Finnish skier
whom I've written about in the past, Iro Manturanta. I
apologize if I'm mispronouncing that I don't speak Finnish, but
he one seven Olympic medals over four games, three gold medals,
two silver medals, two bronze medals, and at the time,
(23:19):
like no one had done anything comparable, right, Like that's
insane if you're thinking about seven metals over four games, like,
holy shit. And he was accused of doping, and he
was tested, and it seemed to confirm that he was
doping because the red blood cells in his blood there
were multiple deviations away from the average range, and so
(23:42):
he was accused of doping. But then it turned out
that he didn't dope. He was actually clean, and he
carried a genetic mutation in a receptor that controls the
production of red blood cells, and that genetic mutation ran
in his family, right, So it turns out that basically
(24:05):
his entire family were kind of these mutants that had
this red blood cell the plant that was just constantly,
you know, basically constantly doping their blood. By the way,
this is not if people are listening to this and
it's like, who can I do this? Please don't because
this mutation also causes polythemia, which is a disease of
(24:27):
red blood cells, and monty Ante did have it, but
he didn't have any of the negative symptoms. But anyway,
so you have this person who was absolutely cleared right
and he wasn't doping, but he just naturally had this
insane advantage. Now you can look at someone like this
and say, well, if he has this mutation and he's
(24:49):
basically naturally doping, shouldn't we allow everyone else to kind
of dope to the same level. And I don't think
that's true because then, you know, you can start making
that argument with all sorts of different things. But that
just goes to show that there are so many different
variations here, and there's so much about the human body
that we don't know, and it's so easy to start
(25:11):
making the you know, the fairness argument that I think
that that's it's an argument that we shouldn't be trying
to make because people are different and so all we
can do is to try to make rules that control
that control to the best of our abilities, what substances
you can use to enhance your performance versus how you
(25:31):
can enhance your performance through your own physical merits and metal.
Because you know, isn't that the purpose of watching sports
and kind of watching competitors, right, that we see what
the human body is capable of on its own. We'll
be back right after this.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, look to some degree, especially in like maybe Olympic
type sports, which are sometimes sometimes a little bit more
linear functions of particular type of ability in one or
two areas, right, I mean you are selecting for people
who are genetic, yeah, genetic super You know the other
thing this comes up, it's gonna mention it once, right,
(26:26):
is you'll periorectically get athletes who are intersect in some form.
It's not really the same thing as frans, right, it's
you know, how they're born.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
They're born, yeah, chromosome.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
But inherently I have to draw some lines because you know,
we're not gonna talk about the gender binary vertus spectrum here,
But if you're looking for outliers, you're going to find
people who outliers in lots of different ways and that
and that creates issues, but they look, Yeah, the game
theory part of this that we haven't invoked yet is
that you do have any prisoners still limon when other
people are are doping. Right, So, like in any workplace
(27:03):
kind of culture, I mean, the initial question comes from
like the army, right, the you know, what is tolerated.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Versus tacitly encouraged versus not so tacitly encouraged versus you know,
but you also get to a point where like maybe
you're just kind of falling behind in an extremely high
performance area if if everyone else is doing something.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
You're not buried bonds. I guess the most famous slash
infamous steroid user in baseball history was kind of like
this fucking Mark maguire and Sammy Sosa guys, they're juicing, right.
I was better than them before steroids alleged, and I'm
gonna be better than these fucking guys afterwards. So I'm
(27:47):
gonna take steroids too. When he has like what are
still the best offensive seasons in baseball history and kind of,
you know, just this kind of huge nonlinear outlier season,
seventy three home runs in a year, you know whatever,
it was a six hundred on base percentage are very
very high. Right, But you a prison's love if you
don't have like you know, it's the same thing as
(28:08):
like cat GPT being used to cheat in college essays. Right,
if you don't have good enforcement, then like then you
get in the dilema where it's like all my classmates
are doing this shit, right, so like why do I
have to work five times as hard as them and
get like a worse grade? And look, I don't know
how effective these regimes actually are in different sports. You know,
(28:31):
if you told me that, hey, people are using things
that are hard to detect, that wouldn't surprise me, Right,
you know, I think sports have kind of figured it
out that, like to have a big moral outrage and
panic over this isn't necessarily good for business. Right. There
are still a couple baseball players that could suspend it
every year for different types of peds. Right, It's not
(28:53):
quite perceived as a pr thing that it was. And
like the in the you know, late nineteen nineties and
early two thousands, which is kind of considered the whole
steroid era, you know, baseball has this kind of record
book that's very sacred, right. People care a lot about
the home run record and the betting average record and
everything else, right whereas in football it's a bit less too.
(29:17):
People Football flavor a team sport. You know, football a
little bit more slaps on the wrist for different types
of pedus. You know, Look, you can even if you
want to get funky, you can even say, okay, are
you being a bad teammate by not using steroids? Right?
You know, well, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Mean I think that the only like the way out
of this prisoner's dilemma is through external enforcement and penalties,
right where the benefits in the moment of doping are
outweighed by the potential penalties. So you know what comes
to mind to me right now is Russia in the Olympics,
(29:55):
right where you had basically an entire delegation doping, including
including some athletes who didn't realize that they were doping
because the coaches just gave them supplements and like said,
this is the health regime, and we're giving these performance
enhancing drugs to everyone, or at least that's the story.
And I actually believe it in the sense that I
(30:16):
believe that there were athletes who had no idea that
they were doping, and then you know, you strip every
one of the medals, you disqualify them, and then the
team can't compete in the Olympics, and no one can
compete in the Olympics. That's a pretty big disincentive, right
That will tell people, Okay, you know what, maybe this
is not a good idea because the risks and the
(30:38):
penalties will have to pay far outweigh the benefit of winning,
you know, gold medal now, because we're going to lose
that gold medal anyway, and then we're not going to
be able to compete going forward. So if you had
standards like that across the board, and if you really
take the enforcement seriously, then I think that changes behavior
because that changes behavioral incentives, and that changes the culture
(31:01):
from everyone is doing it to okay, people are not
going to be doing it anymore. But you also have
to be smart, right, You also have to test correctly
and you have to stay on top of this shit,
right you can't. You have to have people who are
out in the field figuring out what are the latest drugs, like,
what is the cutting edge, what are people using? How
do we detect this so that you don't have situations
(31:23):
where cheaters are trying to kind of stay ahead of
the system, which also creates very perverse incentives.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, look, and that you're willing to like punish the
actual cheaters, you know, absolutely. Johnick Sinner, who is one
of the two best men'sness players in the world, has
been accused of doping taking case amounts of coster ball.
It looks like I'm not a steroid knowledgeable person, community
(31:50):
stairoid nolatile person. But you know, hey, if he's a
big draw, maybe each hearing the other cheek. I mean,
we've seen, you've seen the poker world as nothing great
about people who are big names get away with a
lot more.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Yeah, with that said, if you look at the whole
list of all Major League Baseball players who have been suspended,
which is kind of the longest, most consistent regime, there
definitely are some all stars, right. However, it has moved
more towards the more marginal players because, like, you know,
if you're ten percent better, I mean it's also an
(32:26):
open question kind of how much sexually helps, right, But
leaning that aside, if you get ten percent better and
you're already pretty good, I mean that definitely produces benefits, right, absolutely,
But you probably already have all the money you'll need
for life. I mean, baseball's a sport that has long careers.
If you are taking kind of like long term risks
with your health, right, I mean, you know, some of
these anacolic steroids are not about to be good for
your long term health, right, they may help in the
(32:48):
short run, right, Yeah, if you're on the margins of
the major leagues and you get in a major league roster,
where what's some minim cell I'm sure you know if
mid six figures now at least, right, you get that
for a couple of years, you get a major league tension,
you get your first post draft team contract, I will
use I'm gonna avoid more textual small terms here onence
(33:10):
being I know them, right, but like you know, if
you get like a real free agent contract.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
By your audience, you mean you're a co host night
my co host.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yeah, so some more marginal guys who are trying to
extend their careers, right, because ten percent better when there's
a whole threshold and anything all threshold of talent near
the break even line either just good enough to make
the major leagues you're just good enough to have a
regular starting job or just not good enough, right, And
most are the people where there's the most pressure, even
(33:37):
though it's the Vury Bonds and the Yonick Centers and
stuff the world that receive more public scrutiny.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, so I think kind of to to sum up,
I think we both agree that if we want to
keep it clean, like first of all, like performance enhancing drugs,
yeah or nay, like in things where it's where people
don't care, like poker, you know, whatever you do you
(34:04):
once again, because we don't even know what benefits necessarily
these are coming from any of these things. In areas
where there are explicit rules against them, right like sports,
then absolutely not. And I don't think there should be exceptions.
And I think that you know, big big names need
to get just as much, need to be penalized just
(34:27):
as much as smaller names. To bring it back to poker,
this means that you know, things that are illegal, like
cheating of different sorts which are not cognitive drugs or
anything like that needs to be like very strictly punished
no matter who you are, even if you're kind of
the number one name in the game. I don't care.
You need to realize that there are going to be
(34:48):
very strict penalties against these sorts of behaviors. And that's
the way that you kind of emerge from the prisoner's
dilemma that you were describing, Nate. So we've got, you know,
we've got areas like poker where it's legal. You've got
areas like sports where it's not. Then you've got areas
like the army where presumably they're doing their research and
they want people to function as well as they possibly can.
(35:11):
And that's its own Yeah, that's its own beast, right.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Sure, if you think that this is going to create
better soldiers and the soldiers are okay with it, then
by all means, right, like we want the best functioning force.
And there your analogy of are you hurting the team
if you don't do it?
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Well?
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Are you hurting the team if you're in the army
where the other country has people using this and you aren't, Yeah,
you kind of are. And so so that's like that's
its own different can of worms. Right, that's a totally
different area. But I would say that, you know, please
(35:49):
do try to figure out whether you're mortgaging your health
in the long term, because I think a lot of
people don't realize that there is a long term cost
to a lot of these performance enhancing drugs.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah. My general thing is assume that in competitive industries,
which basically everything is now in our capitalistic world. I
don't like capitalism, Maria, but like assume that people will
optimize for their incentives. Right, if you create rules that
are easily to work around or are poorly structured, and
there's a lot of money or fame or championships to
(36:23):
win on the line, assume that some substantial fraction of
your player of population in a sport or game, right,
will have no moral qualms about taking advantage of of
both words. Yeah, but that said, I'm going to have
a performance enhancing drug called lunch.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
Likewise, night, let's both go enhance our performance by food.
Let us know what you think of the show. Reach
out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM.
Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
And by me Nate Silver. The show was a Cool
production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced
by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya Gerwit Lydia,
Jean Kott, and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our
executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixinging by Sarah Bruger.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
If you like the show, please rate and review us
so other people can find us too, but once again,
only if you like us. We don't want those bad
reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.
Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making
better decisions. I'm Maria Kannakova.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
And I'm Nate Silver.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I don't like it up, all right, Nate Silver. Today
on the show, we're actually doing an episode that's inspired
by one of our listeners, Brandon. So, by the way, listeners,
please do keep sending us questions. And Brandon is wondering
about performance enhancing drugs. He specifically asked for performance enhancing
(00:57):
drugs outside of sports, but I think we'll be talking
about sports as well. So in the army, he says
that they talk a lot about alertness, decision making under stress.
Caffeine is basically a field issue stimulant. He goes on
to talk about adderall modafinal and the fact that it's
being used not just in military, but you know, college students, professionals,
(01:21):
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So he wants to
know what are our thoughts and what are our experiences,
and you know, it definitely does say a lot about
modern performance culture. So this is a topic that I've
done a lot of thinking about, both in the past
but also obviously as I'm working on a book about cheating.
(01:45):
You know, I do think about all of these ways
to kind of enhance performance that may or may not
be legal in any given setting. And I think there's
a lot to say here. Do you want me to
start with some thoughts, Nate, or do you want to
kind of give you give your reaction. So, you know,
people have been trying to figure out for decades, like
(02:07):
how can I think better?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Right?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
How can I perform better? How can I run better?
How can I do everything just a little bit better?
You know, it's kind of a perfect storm with kind
of social media and technology and all of these things
where we're in a culture that's obsessed with I mean,
the culture has always been obsessed with youth, but now
we feel like, finally like we're in then do not
(02:32):
die ever moment that if I can just live for
another ten years, I'll be close to the moment in
time where we can all live forever or at least
greatly expand our life expectancy and our healthy life expectancy.
So don't die. And also let's absolutely optimize every single
moment of every single day cognitive function, physical function. In
(02:57):
the case of certain social media influencer gurus who also
happen to run big companies that sell supplements a rectile
function measured during the night. We won't be naming names,
but I think anyone who's online knows exactly who I'm
talking about right now. So how do you basically enhance
(03:21):
every single element of existence to the max? And we're
seeing things, Yes, some of them are pills. Modaffanel has
been kind of in in the mix for a long time,
so has adderall. There are other drugs that have been
basically tested for Alzheimer's and that are now also kind
(03:43):
of in that conversation. But it's not just drugs, right,
It's things like cold plunges, infra red saunas. You know,
do you do this to do that?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Like?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
What can I possibly do to get just like a
little bit better? And this is not a monolithic conversation
in the sense that there's a big difference between like
poker players who that they're going to microdose before a
tournament because they think it's going to make them more
creative and find better spots. This does happen, by the way,
(04:17):
I'm not just throwing this out in the blue and
like a Lance Armstrong who decides that, you know, everyone's
doping in cycling, so I'm going to do it too,
and we're going to create this culture where everyone is
taking drugs that are explicitly forbidden to enhance their performance. Right,
(04:37):
So we've got it's a huge spectrum, right, And there's
a huge spectrum between the college student who decides to
take adderall even though they technically don't have ADHD, so
that they can finish a paper, which, by the way, Nate,
is probably not happening anymore because you have chat GBT
who's your aderol, who could just finish the paper for you,
so you don't even need to take those supplements that
(04:58):
was you know, long before, or the investment baggers taking
cocaine in the middle of the night to kind of
stay up and make sure that they can get their
their spreadsheets or whatever it is that they're doing done
by the morning. And then the wellness gurus who say, well,
even though medafinil is a drug that was developed for
narcolepsy and sometimes to treat ADHD and may not be
(05:22):
the thing that I should be taken to kind of
enhance my concentration, even though there's a little bit of
data on that. But I'm going to do it just
in case because I want to kind of maximize my
ability to be the full me. All of these things
are different, right, and I have different opinions on these,
on the different gradations along the way, and even ones
(05:45):
that seem very straightforward, such as, you know, we should
not be allowing any performance enhancing drugs in sports, When
you start digging down, it ends up that some of
them might be like a little bit murkier than you
would think, right. I would I would love to say
that I'm just you know, we shouldn't be doing any
of this, but you know, as are as listener Brandon
(06:06):
points out, caffeine is a great performance enhancing drug, right,
So it's not like everyone is living this existence where
we're not taking any substances to increase performance. You need
to kind of figure out what exactly are you talking about.
And I think that this is one of those episodes
where there are going to be a lot of shades
(06:29):
of gray. I think that it's one of these case
by case basis where you have to really understand what's
the intention here, what are the data here, what is
the responsibility here, and what are the rules here?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, in the poker world, do you have an interesting
cross section of a little bit of everything. Right, you
certainly have some stimulant use ranging for people who are
probably taking out of all the people who are taking
zims or vaping you.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Oh yeah, by the way, let me just interrupt you
immediately just to say, we said caffeine, but nicotine is
another huge performance enhancing drug that people take all the time,
and zin is gaining huge market shares. I seeeson at
the poker tables all the time.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Please continue, Yeah, and in part because like those are
as weird as smoking cigarettes, right, which is more disruptive,
you know, those are kind of more discreet ways to
do with that, you know. But yeah, people are taking
anterall people are. There's varying amounts of drinking. People are
different tolerances. I will often have a best of one
(07:41):
or two at dinner a poker tournament, right, But like everyone,
we have differently different things, you know what I mean.
And so you have to know kind of your own
I'm not claim aning of this is game theory optimal, right,
you have to kind of know your own physiology a
little bit, but not as much drinking as you might
have seen twenty years ago, you know, I've always surprised
that there are some players who get quite stoned on
(08:04):
dinner breaks and stuff like that, or any break, right.
I mean, we were talking about the well known player
Maria the other day who seemed to me quite stone
and not playing optimally, And you have some of those,
but like there are some people who are microdocing on
different things, and like again I don't know, right, it's
also partly a matter of habit, right, for whatever reason,
(08:26):
probably done more drugs than you in my life, Maria
forever reason. Like I've just never really tried to play
poker under the influence of THC, though I'm not familiar
with THC, whereas I have on alcohol, and so like
you're just kind of like part of what you're familiar
with I think about poker. It's also important, though, is
like these are really long sessions, particularly in tournaments, right,
(08:50):
So things that sustain energy and focus for a long time,
like you know, you don't typically see like necessarily like
a lot of like cocaine used to take an extreme
example of poke returnaments because like that is a drug
where you kind of burn brightly for very quickly and
then crash out right. You know that will work if
(09:11):
you're playing from noon to midnight in some tournament. I mean,
unless you're taking a lot of it, I guess right.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
But adderall, which is kind of a controlled version of speed,
is something and riddle. These are things that are that
are actually incredibly common in the poker world, and they
are common not just in the poker world, but in
all sorts of professions that require concentration, right, that require
(09:39):
people to kind of pay attention for long periods of time.
And the funny thing is, so I've actually written about this,
and I have kind of dug a little bit deeper
into the data. With drugs like adderall, I think this
is true of a lot of performance enhancing drugs when
you are taking anything that is off label, right, which
(10:01):
means that it's not prescribed for this exact condition, especially
when it's something that is for a cognitive function and
meant to counteract something that is kind of a neurological
abnormality or something that is kind of not a neurotypical brain.
(10:24):
When you put it into a neurotypical brain that doesn't
have these issues, you might get some benefits, but also
some unintended side effects. So the funny thing I mean,
I think it's funny because I don't do adderall or
riddle an off label. The funny thing about it is
that there's actually a disconnect when you take these drugs,
(10:46):
quite often with what you think your work product is
and what it actually is, because it does put you
into this like laser focus where you think, oh, I'm
writing like a brilliant paper, or I'm creating this brilliant
work product, or if I'm playing pogram, you know, being
able to execute all these wonderful creative lines. But it
actually really dampens creativity and makes you create things that
(11:12):
to you might seem great, but that actually objectively you're
working a lot, but your work output is not necessarily
what you think it is. And so it's a very
funny disconnect between self perception and actual performance. And so
when it comes to cognitive enhancement, that is something that
(11:32):
you see now. Obviously when it's physical, usually there's no
disconnect between what you think you're doing and how you're
doing because you have an objective measure immediately, right, am
I running faster? Am I cycling faster? Am I able
to actually lift more weight?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Right?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
When I use steroids? Whatever it is? But when it
comes to cognitive enhancement, you have these funny things.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, we talked to Nick Thompson, the author of The
Running Round. Nick is one of the best runners in
the world and age class the other week. Right, Well,
one of the things about running is that there's not
much variation in it, right, You're running of existence. Most
people who a runners are running a few routes. If
they run commonly. That can be a few things. It
can be traffic, right, you can other joggers and stuff
(12:17):
like that, right, or wind or weather right, But like
for the most part, it can be a fairly objective
benchmark about your kind of overall partiovascular et cetera health
that day, in your effort level. Whereas in poker it's
extremely noisy. You know, the best poker players might have
(12:38):
in the tough field and ROI of plus ten percent
and a mediocre player on his B game, not the
C game, not the F game, but like on this
B game, right, might be minus ten percent, right, plus
ten which is minus saying oh, of course, of one
poker tournament. You don't protect the dissample of like hundreds
of tournaments to distinguish those And yeah, I certainly have had.
(12:59):
It's kind of a common thing among writers too, to
use like things like adderall. I've certainly been around people
who seem to be constantly on adderall and they're talking
a mile a minute and they're kind of hyper right
and kind of babbling, And you know, that's not a
drug that leaves me with a great impression. But like again,
(13:21):
I'm not gonna my own habits right, good and bad.
I'm not gonna creaque anybody. My empirical experience is that
one's a bit more noticeable than than some of the others,
maybe among the drugs that people are kind of using
for cognitive entancement.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, so just full disclaimer, I've never used any cognitive
enhancing pills. And I say pills because I drink a
fuck ton of caffeine. Okay, yeah, so like and I've
actually never used nicotine, so I've never I'm I'm gonna
come across those kind of this goody two shoes, but
(13:57):
I do I drink, and you know, I'm not doing
this for like moral reasons or anything. It's just not
I don't think it's right for me. And also I
have a lot of allergies and can stand smoke. But
I've never used any nicotine products. I've never smoked cigarettes.
No nicotine. By the way, poker players also love nicotine pills,
nicotine patches, not just poker players. Like this is stuff
(14:18):
that people use. They get into the science and they
listen to the kind of gurus of how to enhance
your performance peak performance at any given time, and they
do stuff like that. So just total disclaimer, I've never
used any of those, but I do use caffeine. And
when I play poker, I am always drinking green tea,
(14:38):
and I specifically drink green tea because I've done the
research and I know that green tea has the best
kind of way of absorbing elthonine into your brain, which
helps you sustain your attention for longer periods of time.
Am I using a performance enhancing drug, Nate, you know
(15:01):
what I mean? Like I realized, I'm not trying to
practice semantics here. All I'm saying is that we do
make choices all the time that try to optimize how
we're doing today. By the way, no amount of green
tea is probably going to make me at absolute peak
performance because I didn't get that much sleep. And what
we know is the number one cognitive enhancing drug is sleep.
Like nothing else, nothing else comes even close. So getting
(15:24):
proper amounts of sleep is just like, you know, light
years ahead of anything else. And so when you do
something like that, well obviously it's not a performance enhancing drug,
but it might as well be. So you know, there
are so let's just I guess put a disclaimer and say, Okay, yes,
there's things that everyone does, like caffeine and it might
(15:48):
give you a little bit more cognitive power. And then
there are other things that people use that are more
out there, and we can argue that while nicotine is
closer to caffeine, or we can argue that it's not,
but modafino definitely kind of on the other on the other.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Side of that.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
And do you have a prescription, right, is it something
that you are actually using correctly because you need to.
Oh and by the way, if you do have a
prescription for it because you need to, is that giving
you an unfair advantage? Is it giving you an unfair edge?
They're all of these, you know, when we start getting
into the ethics of it. Oh and by the way,
poker doesn't ban any sort of substances, So that's like
(16:35):
That's another thing here.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Right, there's a didn't sama, which is yes, there was,
there was.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
It's like, come on, yeah, he proposed a drug free
poker tournament where you could not where you'd get tested,
and you weren't allowed to use anything. I don't know
if caffeine was included in that, because if it was,
then you know, sorry, Tom, I'm I'm totally out. But
but yeah, I do want to say that it's not
against the rules in poker to take whatever the fuck
(17:05):
you want to take, And to be perfectly honest, I
would say, like, if you want to take it, go
right ahead, because I actually don't think it gives you
that much of an edge, and I think it sometimes
might make you play worse.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
And we'll be right back after this break.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
We can put some bounds on this, right, Like, It's
not like in poker there are look, you could make
educated guesses about exactly which helpful and or unhelpful substances
different players are taking, you know, maybe apart from the
really stone players and the really adderally ones. Right, And
(17:59):
it's not necessarily so obvious, right, you know, it's not
like there's some class of players that are like thirty
percent better than the rest. You're like, oh, they're all
on the drug apps, right, And there are exotic things
that are very subtle. You know, some of the players
take beta blockers. I'm not an expert in any of
(18:20):
this stuff, but I think it has the effect of
like lowering your heart rate and things like that, which
can be helpful to a remain calmer maybe when you're
under high stress, and or to reduce the appearance of
physical tells.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
I remember actually the main event of the World Series
right where there was a guy I put against a
day two or day three right saying, right across from him,
he just kind of thing where like his heart was
like literally kind of very visible, and it's whatever artery
carctorate or something artery, right, every player knows it corroded, corroded.
And it was the most visible instance of this I'd
(18:56):
ever seen. It's the main event. He had a fairly
big sack on day three whatever it was. And and furthermore,
he basically had like a running heart rate monitor for
this player at all times, right, Like furthermore, I quickly
do so there was a pattern that when he has
a good hand, some players actually more nerves than their bluffing, right,
this guy waiting in a big hand. Do you start
to see boom boom boom boom of this kind of
(19:18):
it was kind of funny, right, but like, yeah, but
the physical tell you know, if if you start having
a bunch of predictable involuntary takes, or if you can
suppress those ticks in some ways, you know, it's not
creating just like a pigd use. And poker is not
created as like some yeah moral panic wearers and the
other world I know sports then than it is of course, yeah,
(19:40):
And I think.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
So let's uh, let's actually talk about that a little
bit because so I have very very different perspectives about
using all of these drugs, all of these techniques, whatever
whatever you want to use when it is allowed versus
when it's not allowed. So poker, you know, knock yourself out.
If you are an investment banker and you want to
add her all it up or cocaine it up or whatever,
(20:01):
it is awesome, like you do you right, and if
your superiors are happy with your work, awesome. My onion
changes completely when we have explicit rules that say, okay,
you can not take you know, these performance enhancing drugs
right when we're talking about cycling. The argument but everyone's
(20:22):
doing it to me holds no water, right, I don't
fucking care like that. That is, if it's a rule,
that it means that everyone is cheating. If everyone is cheating,
either you call out the cheating, you quit the sport,
you know, you do something else. And it's interesting because there,
you know, as I've been kind of researching cheating in games,
(20:43):
I talked to a baseball player who was roommates with
another player who was suspended for for using steroids and
coast I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say anything else, Nate.
You know these sports a little too well. And it
was one of these things where you know, this roommate said,
(21:06):
like I, you know, people were doing I just thought
it was wrong, so I didn't and like, I have
no regrets about it, even though kind if my roommate
ended up having like a much more storied career for
a time than I did, because like I, you know,
I said, I basically said no, and my career ended
(21:26):
like I, you know, eventually kind of had to retire.
And but it's not like you're forced to do it.
You make choices. So anyway, you can. I don't care if, like,
if the culture is that everyone is doing it. What
I care about it is it within the rules or
is it not within the rules. And if you it's
not within the rules and you're doing it, then you're cheating.
(21:47):
And if you're trying to figure out ways of doing
it without getting caught by using these new drugs and
aren't yet detectable on tests, then again you're cheating, and
you're cheating in an even more kind of insidious way.
That is ruining the kind of sportsmanship right the the
playing field for everyone else, and that is kind of
(22:09):
ruining the integrity of your sport. And I you know,
things like Nate, you know, the enhanced games that were
announced like that. I'm like, yeah, like, what what are
we even talking about? Like, I guess people, you know,
you want to see a lot of people on steroids
(22:29):
go like to me, that's not even a sport. I'm like, well,
what are we even doing here? And I think a
lot of athletes felt the same way. So on the
one hand, I said, there were going to be a
lot of shades of gray here and this seems black
and white, But I'm actually going to take a step
back and put it back into the shades of gray.
So one of my favorite sports stories that I think
(22:54):
I've mentioned on this podcast before, but I'm just going
to say it again was this champion of Finnish skier
whom I've written about in the past, Iro Manturanta. I
apologize if I'm mispronouncing that I don't speak Finnish, but
he one seven Olympic medals over four games, three gold medals,
two silver medals, two bronze medals, and at the time,
(23:19):
like no one had done anything comparable, right, Like that's
insane if you're thinking about seven metals over four games, like,
holy shit. And he was accused of doping, and he
was tested, and it seemed to confirm that he was
doping because the red blood cells in his blood there
were multiple deviations away from the average range, and so
(23:42):
he was accused of doping. But then it turned out
that he didn't dope. He was actually clean, and he
carried a genetic mutation in a receptor that controls the
production of red blood cells, and that genetic mutation ran
in his family, right, So it turns out that basically
(24:05):
his entire family were kind of these mutants that had
this red blood cell the plant that was just constantly,
you know, basically constantly doping their blood. By the way,
this is not if people are listening to this and
it's like, who can I do this? Please don't because
this mutation also causes polythemia, which is a disease of
(24:27):
red blood cells, and monty Ante did have it, but
he didn't have any of the negative symptoms. But anyway,
so you have this person who was absolutely cleared right
and he wasn't doping, but he just naturally had this
insane advantage. Now you can look at someone like this
and say, well, if he has this mutation and he's
(24:49):
basically naturally doping, shouldn't we allow everyone else to kind
of dope to the same level. And I don't think
that's true because then, you know, you can start making
that argument with all sorts of different things. But that
just goes to show that there are so many different
variations here, and there's so much about the human body
that we don't know, and it's so easy to start
(25:11):
making the you know, the fairness argument that I think
that that's it's an argument that we shouldn't be trying
to make because people are different and so all we
can do is to try to make rules that control
that control to the best of our abilities, what substances
you can use to enhance your performance versus how you
(25:31):
can enhance your performance through your own physical merits and metal.
Because you know, isn't that the purpose of watching sports
and kind of watching competitors, right, that we see what
the human body is capable of on its own. We'll
be back right after this.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, look to some degree, especially in like maybe Olympic
type sports, which are sometimes sometimes a little bit more
linear functions of particular type of ability in one or
two areas, right, I mean you are selecting for people
who are genetic, yeah, genetic super You know the other
thing this comes up, it's gonna mention it once, right,
(26:26):
is you'll periorectically get athletes who are intersect in some form.
It's not really the same thing as frans, right, it's
you know, how they're born.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
They're born, yeah, chromosome.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
But inherently I have to draw some lines because you know,
we're not gonna talk about the gender binary vertus spectrum here,
But if you're looking for outliers, you're going to find
people who outliers in lots of different ways and that
and that creates issues, but they look, Yeah, the game
theory part of this that we haven't invoked yet is
that you do have any prisoners still limon when other
people are are doping. Right, So, like in any workplace
(27:03):
kind of culture, I mean, the initial question comes from
like the army, right, the you know, what is tolerated.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Versus tacitly encouraged versus not so tacitly encouraged versus you know,
but you also get to a point where like maybe
you're just kind of falling behind in an extremely high
performance area if if everyone else is doing something.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
You're not buried bonds. I guess the most famous slash
infamous steroid user in baseball history was kind of like
this fucking Mark maguire and Sammy Sosa guys, they're juicing, right.
I was better than them before steroids alleged, and I'm
gonna be better than these fucking guys afterwards. So I'm
(27:47):
gonna take steroids too. When he has like what are
still the best offensive seasons in baseball history and kind of,
you know, just this kind of huge nonlinear outlier season,
seventy three home runs in a year, you know whatever,
it was a six hundred on base percentage are very
very high. Right, But you a prison's love if you
don't have like you know, it's the same thing as
(28:08):
like cat GPT being used to cheat in college essays. Right,
if you don't have good enforcement, then like then you
get in the dilema where it's like all my classmates
are doing this shit, right, so like why do I
have to work five times as hard as them and
get like a worse grade? And look, I don't know
how effective these regimes actually are in different sports. You know,
(28:31):
if you told me that, hey, people are using things
that are hard to detect, that wouldn't surprise me, Right,
you know, I think sports have kind of figured it
out that, like to have a big moral outrage and
panic over this isn't necessarily good for business. Right. There
are still a couple baseball players that could suspend it
every year for different types of peds. Right, It's not
(28:53):
quite perceived as a pr thing that it was. And
like the in the you know, late nineteen nineties and
early two thousands, which is kind of considered the whole
steroid era, you know, baseball has this kind of record
book that's very sacred, right. People care a lot about
the home run record and the betting average record and
everything else, right whereas in football it's a bit less too.
(29:17):
People Football flavor a team sport. You know, football a
little bit more slaps on the wrist for different types
of pedus. You know, Look, you can even if you
want to get funky, you can even say, okay, are
you being a bad teammate by not using steroids? Right?
You know, well, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Mean I think that the only like the way out
of this prisoner's dilemma is through external enforcement and penalties,
right where the benefits in the moment of doping are
outweighed by the potential penalties. So you know what comes
to mind to me right now is Russia in the Olympics,
(29:55):
right where you had basically an entire delegation doping, including
including some athletes who didn't realize that they were doping
because the coaches just gave them supplements and like said,
this is the health regime, and we're giving these performance
enhancing drugs to everyone, or at least that's the story.
And I actually believe it in the sense that I
(30:16):
believe that there were athletes who had no idea that
they were doping, and then you know, you strip every
one of the medals, you disqualify them, and then the
team can't compete in the Olympics, and no one can
compete in the Olympics. That's a pretty big disincentive, right
That will tell people, Okay, you know what, maybe this
is not a good idea because the risks and the
(30:38):
penalties will have to pay far outweigh the benefit of winning,
you know, gold medal now, because we're going to lose
that gold medal anyway, and then we're not going to
be able to compete going forward. So if you had
standards like that across the board, and if you really
take the enforcement seriously, then I think that changes behavior
because that changes behavioral incentives, and that changes the culture
(31:01):
from everyone is doing it to okay, people are not
going to be doing it anymore. But you also have
to be smart, right, You also have to test correctly
and you have to stay on top of this shit,
right you can't. You have to have people who are
out in the field figuring out what are the latest drugs, like,
what is the cutting edge, what are people using? How
do we detect this so that you don't have situations
(31:23):
where cheaters are trying to kind of stay ahead of
the system, which also creates very perverse incentives.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, look, and that you're willing to like punish the
actual cheaters, you know, absolutely. Johnick Sinner, who is one
of the two best men'sness players in the world, has
been accused of doping taking case amounts of coster ball.
It looks like I'm not a steroid knowledgeable person, community
(31:50):
stairoid nolatile person. But you know, hey, if he's a
big draw, maybe each hearing the other cheek. I mean,
we've seen, you've seen the poker world as nothing great
about people who are big names get away with a
lot more.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Yeah, with that said, if you look at the whole
list of all Major League Baseball players who have been suspended,
which is kind of the longest, most consistent regime, there
definitely are some all stars, right. However, it has moved
more towards the more marginal players because, like, you know,
if you're ten percent better, I mean it's also an
(32:26):
open question kind of how much sexually helps, right, But
leaning that aside, if you get ten percent better and
you're already pretty good, I mean that definitely produces benefits, right, absolutely,
But you probably already have all the money you'll need
for life. I mean, baseball's a sport that has long careers.
If you are taking kind of like long term risks
with your health, right, I mean, you know, some of
these anacolic steroids are not about to be good for
your long term health, right, they may help in the
(32:48):
short run, right, Yeah, if you're on the margins of
the major leagues and you get in a major league roster,
where what's some minim cell I'm sure you know if
mid six figures now at least, right, you get that
for a couple of years, you get a major league tension,
you get your first post draft team contract, I will
use I'm gonna avoid more textual small terms here onence
(33:10):
being I know them, right, but like you know, if
you get like a real free agent contract.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
By your audience, you mean you're a co host night
my co host.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yeah, so some more marginal guys who are trying to
extend their careers, right, because ten percent better when there's
a whole threshold and anything all threshold of talent near
the break even line either just good enough to make
the major leagues you're just good enough to have a
regular starting job or just not good enough, right, And
most are the people where there's the most pressure, even
(33:37):
though it's the Vury Bonds and the Yonick Centers and
stuff the world that receive more public scrutiny.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, so I think kind of to to sum up,
I think we both agree that if we want to
keep it clean, like first of all, like performance enhancing drugs,
yeah or nay, like in things where it's where people
don't care, like poker, you know, whatever you do you
(34:04):
once again, because we don't even know what benefits necessarily
these are coming from any of these things. In areas
where there are explicit rules against them, right like sports,
then absolutely not. And I don't think there should be exceptions.
And I think that you know, big big names need
to get just as much, need to be penalized just
(34:27):
as much as smaller names. To bring it back to poker,
this means that you know, things that are illegal, like
cheating of different sorts which are not cognitive drugs or
anything like that needs to be like very strictly punished
no matter who you are, even if you're kind of
the number one name in the game. I don't care.
You need to realize that there are going to be
(34:48):
very strict penalties against these sorts of behaviors. And that's
the way that you kind of emerge from the prisoner's
dilemma that you were describing, Nate. So we've got, you know,
we've got areas like poker where it's legal. You've got
areas like sports where it's not. Then you've got areas
like the army where presumably they're doing their research and
they want people to function as well as they possibly can.
(35:11):
And that's its own Yeah, that's its own beast, right.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Sure, if you think that this is going to create
better soldiers and the soldiers are okay with it, then
by all means, right, like we want the best functioning force.
And there your analogy of are you hurting the team
if you don't do it?
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Well?
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Are you hurting the team if you're in the army
where the other country has people using this and you aren't, Yeah,
you kind of are. And so so that's like that's
its own different can of worms. Right, that's a totally
different area. But I would say that, you know, please
(35:49):
do try to figure out whether you're mortgaging your health
in the long term, because I think a lot of
people don't realize that there is a long term cost
to a lot of these performance enhancing drugs.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah. My general thing is assume that in competitive industries,
which basically everything is now in our capitalistic world. I
don't like capitalism, Maria, but like assume that people will
optimize for their incentives. Right, if you create rules that
are easily to work around or are poorly structured, and
there's a lot of money or fame or championships to
(36:23):
win on the line, assume that some substantial fraction of
your player of population in a sport or game, right,
will have no moral qualms about taking advantage of of
both words. Yeah, but that said, I'm going to have
a performance enhancing drug called lunch.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
Likewise, night, let's both go enhance our performance by food.
Let us know what you think of the show. Reach
out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM.
Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
And by me Nate Silver. The show was a Cool
production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced
by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya Gerwit Lydia,
Jean Kott, and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our
executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixinging by Sarah Bruger.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
If you like the show, please rate and review us
so other people can find us too, but once again,
only if you like us. We don't want those bad
reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.
Hosts And Creators
Maria Konnikova
Nate Silver
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