Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1597: The Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance With David Epstein

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin speak with investigative journalist and New York Times best selling author David Epstein about, nature, nurture, and athletic performance. The Sports Gene: A story of tragedy sparked by an interest in genetics. (1:51) Why are certain populations over misrepresented in sports? (3:37) Why he was more backwards than getting it right researching for his new book. (6:21) The generalization of skills. (9:38) When is the perfect time for specialization? (14:28) How would he mold his perfect athlete? (17:10) Why he believes athletes now are at a drug disadvantage. (22:36) How technological innovations have made a HUGE impact on the elite level in sports. (24:14) The democratization of sports. (28:13) How much of a role do steroids play in professional sports? (30:59) Comparing the impact of anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and erythropoietin (EPO). (36:10) The story behind his breakout investigation of Alex Rodriguez testing positive for steroids. (39:40) His personal beliefs on athletes using performance-enhancing drugs. (43:50) Should transgender athletes be allowed to compete or not? (49:45) The current research he finds interesting. (52:40) Are we jumping the gun on new drugs? (55:07) What will be the next big technological leap in sports? (59:47) Has his attitude changed towards blood doping in sports? (1:06:07) Featured Guest/People Mentioned Dave Epstein (@GrowingWisdom)  Twitter David Epstein Website Serena Williams (@serenawilliams)  Instagram Venus Williams (@venuswilliams)  Instagram Simone Biles (@simonebiles)  Instagram Michael Phelps (@m_phelps00)  Instagram Related Links/Products Mentioned July Promotion: MAPS HIIT and the No BS 6-Pack Formula 50% off!  **Promo code “JULYSPECIAL” at checkout** Visit Felix Gray for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! David Epstein: Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger? The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance The Campus - Judy Murray Tennis Camps Jesse Owens - Wikipedia Big Bang of Body Types: Sports Science at the Olympics and beyond Report: Alex Rodriguez Tested Positive for Steroids in 2003 The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia Joanna Harper on the Performance of Transgender Athletes Do transgender athletes have an edge? I sure don’t. The ONLY Way You Should Be Doing Dumbbell Bicep Curls! - Mind Pump TV What is Bully Whippet Syndrome? Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we interviewed David Epstein. He's the author of the book, The the sports gene inside the science of extraordinary athletic Performance this guy's pretty incredible so he did a lot of

Investigating as to why athletes keep breaking records and he actually has a very popular TED talk that talks about this A lot of it doesn't have to do with the fact that athletes are actually faster and stronger but rather Better technology like the track that they run on, or the pool that they're swimming in, or the shoes that they're wearing. It's actually quite remarkable, but we do also cover performance enhancing drugs in this episode, and the new horizon of drugs

that athletes are gonna start messing with. So, great episode, we know you're going to enjoy it. By the way, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Felix Gray Glasses. Now they make blue light blocking glasses that are clear. They don't change the color of the world around you, yet they're super effective, they're stylish,

and you know the studies, blue light blocking glasses can help improve your sleep and boost melatonin and growth hormone production when you do go to sleep. So it's good stuff. Go check them out, head over to FelixGreyGlases.com. That's F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y glasses.com forward slash mind pump. Also, we are running a sale on two programs. Maps hit. That's high-intensity interval training. And the no BS6 pack formula, which is a core training program. They're both 50% off. Go check them out at maps fitnessproducts.com.

Just use the code July special with no space for that discount. So David, I want to start off with, because I know you've written a lot of books and you've written quite a few articles and I love your first time I heard about you, I was one of your TED talks, it really blew me away. But I want to talk about one of your books in particular to start with, which is the sports gene. What motivated you to write that and what were some of the things that you discovered while writing that book? Yeah, it was kind of a twofold motivation. One is sort of a sad story, so just a warning of that, which is that I had a training partner track athlete. I was a, I was a, at one point, like a national level half mile or 800 meters.

And one of my training partners dropped dead at the end of a race. Actually, young guy, first in the family of Jamaican immigrants, you know, who was going to go to college and all this stuff. And, you know, one of the top ranked guys in his, in his age group in the country. And I sort of wondered how that could happen. And long story short, I investigated that. It turned out he had this genetic condition that was undiagnosed that's most commonly the cause of sudden death in athletes. And that got me interested in genetics in general. But I also had just

from my own sports participation and and spectating this sort of running list of questions in my head of things about development of skill and balance of nature and sports that eventually when I got to a space where I was the science writer at sports illustrator said you know. I want to sort of take those questions on whether it was like why can't baseball you know major league baseball hitters hit softball pictures or why do we see people from certain parts of the world overrepresented in certain sports? And so it's kind of a combination of a tragedy ignoring this interest in genetics with just my own running list of questions I wanted to explore from having been an athlete and watching athletes. Now, part of that is a bit controversial, right? Is to figure out why people from certain regions of the world do better at some sports versus others. For example, this one comes to mind.

Some Owens are, as a result, when you look at their total population, they're like 40 times overrepresented in the NFL. I think 3% of the NFL is made up of some Owens athletes, and if you consider their small population, it's like tremendous overrepresentation in that particular sport. How do you explain something like that?

Because there's lots of examples, right? Like you see Kenyans and Ethiopians and distance running, Jamaicans and sprinting and so on. What does that come from? I think it's easy for us to assume it's genetics, but is there more to it? There's always more to it. I think it's always a big mix. you know, this, this braid of, of nature, nurture. But I think since you mentioned Kenyans, that's kind of a good example.

Because when you go to Kenya, when I went to Kenya and you kind of look for, well, what's the secret of this running? The Kenyans point you to kind of one particular tribe called the Calendrian. So like, you know, in America, we say, oh, Kenyans, they're so talented, distance running. And Kenyans, they're like, those Calendon, wow, they're really talented, distance running. And it's this specific tribe that their total population

is like metropolitan Atlanta, basically. And they have a nature--neutral, perfect storm. I mean, on the nature side, they have their recent evolutionary history, like right around the equator. I was crisscrossing the equator when I was going to their training camps. And that leads to sort of body forms that tend to have what's called distally-longation, which means you have more of your weight

farther from your center of mass. And because that means you tend to have sort of slim outer extremities. And because the leg is like a pendulum, it takes a lot less energy to swing if you have less weight at the extremities. So there are like shoe companies have done experiments where they'll take a certain amount of weight and put it on someone's torso basically near their center of gravity and they'll consume like you know 1% more oxygen to go a certain pace and then if they move that same weight down to their ankles, it'll be like 8% or 10% more. And so it has something to do with sort of their history, but it's also, you know, become a cultural phenomenon there. They had a few breakout stars

and that those people become icons. And I think the best way to have a population over-represented in a particular sport is marketing the sport really well to that population more than anything. So I think it's a combination of having enough people who have the physiological characteristics that you're looking for with a sociological web of engagement in that particular sport. Now when you went in to do the research for the sports gene, how many things did you assume correctly and how many things were you completely off about? Oh, man, if you could see my book proposal,

I was assumed correctly very little. Not only that, I mean, I ended up contradicting things that I had written in sports illustrated because I only sort of realized, you know, after a year of basically, for a year, I didn't write anything. I just kind of read scientific journal articles and did interviews and realized that even scientists

had been telling me things that their data didn't prove. You know, that's how I got into the whole kind of criticizing the 10,000 hour rule stuff. I mean, I thought that things like the reflexes it takes to hit a hundred mile per hour fastball would be genetic, would be a genetic advantage that turned out to be the case at all. I thought things like the willingness to train would be totally volition or free will and it turned out there's a strong genetic component to that.

So I was, I was closer to backward than getting it right, I guess. Wow. You know, what you said about Kenyans having this culture around running kind of reminds me of how, for example, in America, we tend to dominate in certain sports. Then in other sports, we tend to not at all like soccer, for example. We have great runners, great track athletes, obviously great football players and baseball players. Then when it comes to soccer, we tend to get our butts kicked. But I guess if you look at our market for soccer, it's far smaller than what you would

find in, let's say, South America and Europe. So we just have less people focusing their energies and talents towards that. Is that correct? Is that accurate? Sort of. I mean, first of all, we're dominant to women's soccer. And in men's soccer, I think, I don't think it's totally correct that we don't have as many people as if you look at registered soccer players.

So these are tracked. The US has like more than Brazil. I mean, in women's soccer, we have more than like the rest of the world combined, which is one of the reasons we're so good. So many more oper- I think it's the success we see is very much a function of the opportunities we've provided. And that really aren't there in most other countries.

On the men's side, those opportunities have been there for longer. I think, honestly, that a lot of it has to do with basically not having street soccer culture. I don't live in Brooklyn anymore, but last time I did, there was a U7 travel soccer team that met at a park across the street for me. As if anyone in the world thinks that six-year-olds need to travel in a city of nine million people to find good enough competition. They don't, right?

But it's part of this professionalization of youth sports. And so they're learning how to run set plays and playing on full fields and all this stuff. And then you go to Brazil, and the kids are all playing food saw, right? Small balls stays on the ground. They're playing on sand one day. They're playing on cobblestones the next day, different shape area all the time. So they're getting this diverse problem solving

that I think is part of the essence of athletic creativity, whereas it's been overly formalized in US development. I think some of that is changing. I mean, I think people caught on to this and the French and their lead up to the World Cup, they had for about 20 years or more been steering their system to incorporate some of that more creative development.

And so I think some of it has been this overly formalized development, but that is in the process of being corrected. So I think we've got a brighter future in soccer, even without getting more athletes. Now talk about that a little bit more that generalization of skills. I know you did a talk that I watched recently,

which compared kids or athletes or artists, even who were very specialized and focused early on versus people who were kids that tried, you know, for example, many different instruments or different sports. And what are the differences between the two? Because you just talked about professionalization of sport versus, you know, like kids in Brazil that play this particular sport that resembles soccer but all over the place on different types of surfaces like what would the two produce? Yeah, I mean I think this gets to another thing that I was extremely wrong about when I was writing my book proposal for the sports gene which was I thought I was going to write about the so-called deliberate practice model which most people know as the 10,000 hour rule. What exactly that means to you kind of depends where you heard about it from, but scientists call the deliberate practice model.

This idea that, you know, basically your skill level is a direct function of how many hours you've spent in deliberate practice, which is, you know, technical, coached, error correction focused, not freeform. And that is obviously an important practice. But so I was going to write about this, and I assumed when I went and looked at studies, we'd see that if future lead athletes get a head start in their sport, into the liver practice, and they focus in very early, like the Tiger Woods model, and then I turned out to be totally wrong, that when I looked at these studies, that lead athletes were,

in fact, spending a lot more time in that kind of practice than were lower level athletes. But if you looked at when scientists tracked their development, the pattern was actually the future elites actually started outspending less time early on in deliberate practice than athletes who plateaued at lower levels. They had what scientists called a sampling period, where they did this variety of physical activity. This could be other sports, but it could also be things like dance martial arts, rock Athlete to plateau at lower levels. They had what scientists called a sampling period where they did this variety of physical activity This could be other sports, but it could also be things like dance martial arts rock climbing surfing whatever

They gain these sort of broader general so-called physical literacy learn about their interest and abilities and Systematically delayed specializing until later than peers and so I was surprised to see that and That got me investigating this in all kinds of other areas and I realized that An important part of development if you want somebody to be able to do transfer, and that got me investigating this in all kinds of other areas. And I realized that an important part of development, if you want somebody to be able to do transfer, okay, so if you want someone to do the same thing over and over and over again, then okay, you can have them trained by doing the same thing over and over and over again. But if you want transfer, which is their ability to take those skills and apply them to new challenges, which of course is like the essence of not only athletic creativity, but all kinds of creativity, then you want to broaden their training.

There's this classic finding in skill development that's breadth of training, predicts breadth of transfer. So transfer again, your ability to take those skills or knowledge, apply them new situations. Your ability to do that is predicted by the breadth of problems you face in training. And so if you're going to face a kind of challenge that needs creativity, like elite soccer players do, then you better build in a lot of that breadth of problem solving early on.

If you don't, you end up getting sort of more rigid performers. That's really interesting. Do you see, you know, an idea as a pop in my head about maybe an example of this? I don't know if this is an area that you looked into, but when children learn a language versus when children learn three or four different languages, now I know statistically if a kid learns three languages or even two languages at the same time, they tend to speak a little later.

But do they show better verbal fluency and creativity later on from doing something like that? Did you look in this particular area? I should say this, the research in multilingualism is kind of a muddled mess. There's a lot of disagreement, but my read of what I think the good studies were, were one, you're right, that kids were growing up with multiple languages tend to develop their language skills a little more slowly, but they do not end up behind at all They totally catch up and in fact

Their experiments that show that they retain an advantage for then learning any subsequent language even one that's like made up by the Scientists with made up grammar just by being thrown in like they don't need instructions to do it and those results So it's like as if having to, you know, work in these two different worlds gave them a more generalized skill of learning how to learn something like this language. And that looks very similar to some of the research in sports where like at the Australian Institute of Sport, they saw athletes who had participated in at least three so-called attacking sports.

That means like, you know, volleyball, basketball, soccer, whatever, something where you're having to judge things that are coming, like use anticipatory skills. And people who had participated at least three of those subsequently needed fewer hours to reach elite status in other sports. And so it seems very similar to language in the sense that diversifying causes you to build these sort of general skills that allow you to transfer and more quickly learn in other domains.

No, I imagine there's some sort of a bell curve with this though, right? Like at one point you do want to specialize, right? And did you come across it or did you put piece that together of like, okay, you would want your child to play multiple sports until this point. And then you would want to specialize. Did you get into that at all? Yeah, and this is kind of like a the bajillion dollar question in a way.

And I think the fact is we don't know the answer in terms of what would be the perfect timing for specialization. Because in all these studies, the track athletes, there's never a study that really allows them to develop in the perfect way, right, because there's whether it's scholarships or development pipelines or whatever. There are always these other pressures. Sometimes that you need, right? Because like your, you have, you have, you undergo physical changes.

Like you don't have unlimited time to do these sorts of things. And so I don't think we totally know. Although if you look at sort of people who wanted to be college athletes, but didn't make their team and ended up in intramurals versus those who became, got scholarships like in division one, you'll see that the scholarship athletes tended to specialize. I think the average age is about 15.3 and for the athletes at lower levels, it was like about 14 basically. And a famous German soccer study that had some players that went on to their World Cup Championship team, it wasn't until age 22 when the elites kind of stopped doing anything

outside of soccer, these other activities. So I don't think we know what the perfect time is, but I think the best approach to this challenge for a lot of reasons is to try to incorporate, because I don't think you have to, like, if you're a soccer player, you have to throw on a basketball, jersey and play basketball. I think it's about incorporating movement diversity and problem-solving diverse, and not about actually playing in other sport.

And so I think, like a genius way to deal with the social pressures and the best development is something that Judy Murray does. She's Andy and Jamie Murray, the tennis player's mother, and she runs a tennis development camp. And people feel okay taking their kids and giving them to her outside of the rest of the British system because of her name, basically. And she'll take them and she'll have them doing tennis, but she'll also have them doing, say, you know, using a deflated ball and playing through tree branches and stuff like that. And so it's, it's, it looks tennis like enough for the kids and the parents.

It is tennis like enough, but it's still building in all of this diversity of kind of problem-solving and physical movement. And so I think the way to go is to build that in kind of at all levels. Yeah, I was thinking that's what Futsal does for soccer development, basically. I think it's just like a proxy for that. I've heard a lot of world-class strength coaches actually promoting more general play in the beginning. They actually have come up with a formula for that in terms of through their youth. It's more general, and then they start to go into team sports and then individual sports.

If you were to mold your perfect athlete, let's just say hypothetically, what would that look like in terms of a timeline of what to get involved in, what type of training to start kind of fashioning down towards more of a specialization approach. I think it depends a bit on the sport, honestly, because so let's take golf, which has the most famous modern story of development ever, which is Tiger Woods, classic early specialization. And I think, you know, I've been talking about this importance of generalization, I think for such a popular sport, there's kind

of a dearth of good research on golf, but I think one could make a reasonable case that maybe early specialization in golf does work. I don't think it's, I think the jury's out from the research standpoint, but I think you could argue that in golf early specialization does make sense. But that's, that's probably because golf is kind of the pit of me of what the psychologist Rob and Hogarth called a kind learning environment where everything, like the rules and patterns never change. Like human behavior is not really involved.

You don't have to deal with other people trying to prevent you from reaching the goal. So you're trying to minimize deviation in your movements as much as possible. It's almost like an industrial process. You know, a lot of other sports aren't like that is you're having to make this dynamic decision making. And so I sort of think it depends what type of sports you're in. And I think the more the more dynamic the sport is the more it involves those so-called anticipatory skills where essentially you have to learn how to react to things more rapidly

Then you actually could if you were waiting to see what happens. Those are the sports where I think you want to build in early, multiple different attacking sports and some kind of foundational movement diversity, not only for to prevent burnout and to make people more injury resistant, but also to develop these general capacities. I was giving sort of a talk about some of this stuff like two years ago and to my Great dismay even though it was cool serena Williams comes and sits in the second row Oh, and I'm like all right. I'm talking about this how delayed specializations the norm No, I could marshal all the scientific data in the world and if she stands up and says you're an idiot

That's not how it is like it doesn't matter. Right. It's going to be like the worst day ever. And at the end, she raises her hand to ask the first question and goes, I think my dad was ahead of his time. He had Venus and I do gymnastics, Taekwondo, track and field. I think soccer, she said, I think it was soccer. She said, we to learn how to do an overhand snap for the serve, we would throw footballs, we still do that to warm up. And I'd been a writer at Sports Illustrated, and I'd never heard that story. So she had that combination where there was huge amounts

of early practice and tennis, but also this diversification outside of it that I didn't really know about. And I would argue she's a bit of a perfect storm of the athlete. Now, hearing you say that, it sounds like you attribute most of that, though, to the mental gains more than physical. And when I first heard the importance of the general play in different sports, the trainer and me thinks, oh, it's because the movement, you know, you have to move in different planes and more of like the proprioception that you're getting the benefits from that.

But it sounds like you're explaining it like it's more of the mentalception that you're getting the benefits from that. But it sounds like you're explaining it, it's more of the mental side and the problem side. Problem side. Well, I think it's a boat. And by the way, I left out ballet. That was one of the other ones, she said. And I think it's a boat. I think it's a boat.

I think the movement is actually super important. And not only just for making someone more physically literate in general, but for injury resistance also. There's some really cool, and you know, you guys probably know this, that up and down, but Cirque du Soleil has some really cool physiology data. I spent some time with their physiologists because they have some of their athletes, world Olympians, and they're doing tremendous amount of shows a year, and it's a Canadian company, I guess,

so they track their injury rates next to Canadian gymnastics. And looking at some of this data, they decided to have some of the performers learn like the basics of several other performers disciplines, not because they were gonna perform them, but to see if it would help in any way. And subjectively, they thought it made them more creative in designing their acts.

That was subjective, who knows? Objectively, it dropped their injury rates by like a third. Wow. That's huge gain, right? So I think there's this injury resistance, but I don't think they know exactly why that is. I think we can guess about it. And there's a lot of reasonable guesses.

So I think it's a combination of, you know, the mental, when it comes to anticipatory skills in sports, like the sports that move fast, the mental and the physical, the problem solving and the stuff you can do with your body are kind of like one in the same anyway. So I think it's part of the same thing. Yeah, it's interesting because at its face, it sounds so counterintuitive. Like you would think, well, yeah,, kid who just practices soccer from the age of four all the way through is going to be better than the kid who tries five different types

of sports. But it's showing the data, showing quite clearly it's actually the opposite. Something else you talked about that was very counterintuitive was where some of the reasons why world records get beat and broken in so many different sports. Now I remember thinking, oh, it's the advancements in, you know, in drugs and in performance enhancing drugs, like these athletes are taking animal steroids and growth hormones and that's the reason why people are so much faster and stronger these days. But you did a whole talk debunking quite a bit of that and it was very convincing in a blue my mind. Would you mind going into that a little bit? Yeah, and I would argue, let me address the drugs point head on, because for quite a while,

most of the work I was doing at Sports Illustrator was about drugs, so don't think I'm naive about them. But I would argue that athletes now, you know, and for some years now, have actually been at a disadvantage on the drug front compared to athletes in like the 80s and 90s. So there's plenty of athletes still getting away with doping, but I think, especially like the biological passport, which is kind of testing, it takes a whole bunch of tests over time and looks at blood profiles and you can see fluctuations in it, has at least meant that athletes have to dope less, more carefully, to avoid getting caught,

whereas there were decades past where they didn't even have to be careful. Oh, interesting. And so I think you can still see that if you look at world records, like in women's track and field, some of the records are still stuck in the 80s, this era of mega-doping.

And so it's not to say that I think drugs have are out of sports by any stretch of the imagination, but I think athletes now are at a drug disadvantage compared to athletes from a previous generation. But I think they have huge advantages in other areas. Technology and sort of innovation being a huge, huge one of those. So some of the examples I cited, we're

looking at like Jesse Owens who, he had to use a gardening trowel when he was racing to dig out a little hole to start in any run on cinders, which is basically running on course dust, essentially. And analysis of his joint speed showed that he was running about as fast as Carl Lewis. It's just that he was much slower because of the surface and the shoes and all those sorts of things. Or in swimming, you've had this incredible mix of sort of strategy innovation with technological innovation, where if you look at records and swimming, you'll see they come down sort of slowly and sometimes they'll plateau a little and then it's punctuated by these really steep cliffs.

And those will be things like the introduction of goggles, which allowed people to train a lot more, because their eyes didn't get a sore. Or gutters on the side of the pool, so the turbulence goes off instead of splashing back and slowing down the swimmers and things like the flip turn. And then, of course, low friction speed suits at a certain point. Or now, in practice, you were seeing all these records go down because these shoes with carbon fiber plates have been allowed. So I think a huge amount of improvement that often goes unrecognized are these sort of little technological changes that make a huge difference at the elite level. So when you control for these technological

innovations, when you do controls for those, are we much more similar to athletes of the past? And how would they compete now? Like if you took, you same bolt and you brought them back 60 years and you had to run on the same shoes, same track, same blocks, everything the same, how would he do compared to athletes of the past, for example? Bolt I think would still have been the best,

but he would have been a lot closer. Like Jesse Owens would have been within like a half stride of him. What? Instead of, if you just stack their times up next to each other, they would be, you know, it would be like a pro running in like, high school kid, basically. Not a high school kid, but it would be a blowout.

And I think, I do think athletes are different though. If we're talking about going way, like if we think about the Olympics 100 years ago, most of the world wasn't even competing. And you could, you could be basically the only person who was really talented or the only person who knew anything about training and show up in Winnegole Metal.

Now, many more people are ruled out by either their nature or their nurture, right? They don't have the physiology it takes or they don't have the training it takes. It's gotten so much more competitive and global that you need to have sort of everything falling into place. But I think from the sort of pure physiological perspective, not as different from the past as it seems. So if we look at someone who I think is like an unequivocal, you know, kind of a once

a generation kind of athlete is Simone Biles right now who's making all kinds of headlines. And when I remember in the last Olympics when she was when she was blowing everyone away, there was this meme going around that showed vault progression over the decades. And you could see like 40 years ago or 50 years ago or something, it would be like someone bounces on the springboard and they do like just like a single flip over the over the vault or something like that, like something pretty simple. And the idea was that well all this all this difference has come from training and some of it has but some of it hasn't like the average elite female gymnast has shrunk from 5'3 to 4'9 on average over the last

30 years, which makes them, they have a much higher power to weight ratio, they have a lower moment of inertia, which means they can spin a lot more easily, allow a lot of weight outside of center of gravity, it can spin more easily in the air, the surfaces have gotten bounce here. All these things, the athlete, there's no doubt there's better, and then she's the best, but there are these sort of unspoken changes both with athlete body selection and with the technology that has a big impact too. Yeah, so let's talk about, let's go a little deeper into that because, you know, studying sports and athletics and physical performance, you know, if you go back a long time ago, the ideal Olympic athlete was considered to be this kind of overall athlete that looked,

they all look kind of similar. The shot putter looked like the sprinter, looked like the swimmer. Today, if you put those three athletes together, they don't even look like they're in the same universe. I mean, Michael Phelps, for example, his leg length is like similar to a long distance runner who's a full 12 inches shorter than him or something like that. It's insane.

How different? Yeah, that's called the democratization of sports. Go into that a little bit for us. Yeah, I mean, Phelps, and that's what you want, right? If you want the long torso, it's like the long hull of a boat or a canoe where it makes speeds over the water. And he has these arms that are much longer in his height, which by the way is not people always talk about Phillips arms like not unusual for elite swimmers.

He's not an outlier in that regard compared to other elite swimmers, really. But you're right. So in the kind of mid-20th century, sports science was more dominated by German science essentially. And I went back when I was working on the sports gene. I had some of these German physical education journals translated. And you'd keep seeing this phrase that translated to the perfect form of man. And this meant only man, only white man, medium height, medium weight.

And the idea was that they would be the best for everything, kind of this like platonic ideal of the athlete. And it was part of this whole racial agenda. And, you know, they lost that war mid-century in there. Their science became a lot less influential and I think coaches and sports scientists started realizing instead of wanting this like single body that's good for everything, you actually want

bodies that fit into certain athletic niches. So like you were saying, in the mid-20th century, the average elite high jump or an average elite shot putter were identical size. Now you look at that today, the average elite shot putter is like a few inches and more than a hundred pounds heavier than the average elite high jumper.

So this is something that the people made this finding, these Australian scientists, with a plotted data points on a height weight graph for different sports in the mid-20th century. And then plotted data points for the same sports again on the same height weight graph for near the present time. They saw that all the athlete body types had blown away from one another.

So they called the big bang of body types, where the small athletes are getting smaller, the tall athletes are getting taller. It's all, there's this artificial selection going on for these bodies that fit into particular niches. Now David, I have to share a story on how I actually originally found you. I found you years ago, and ironically, the way I found you was I was trying to prove my point to my buddy. So I've got my buddies, we go all the way back since we were elementary school, we all

were into sports. And as I got older into personal training, I was around a lot of professional athletes and I was introduced to how much steroid use was amongst pro athletes. And I was the one to argue that it was steroids that has evolved sports so much. And I now thought I knew this because I was around it all time and I'm aware of it. And I was actually searching to prove my point and found your first TED Talk. And it actually blew my mind that, oh my God, maybe steroids play a much smaller role in the evolution of sports than I think based off of all the stuff that you found.

So I feel like you're a great person to ask to speculate on this. If you had to speculate how much of a role do you think steroids plays in professional sports? I think they are a big role. I think they're all over the place. I think they made from a standpoint. I think they're all over the place. I think they made, from a standpoint of pushing the frontier of human performance, I think their largest impact was from the mid-late 20th century, and that while they're still all over the place, as I mentioned, I think the current

athletes are at a doping disadvantage. So again, I remember when I was doing some reporting on this, just to give an example, I got some documents from a cycling team. So when the biological passport started, again, that's this kind of testing where instead of looking for the drug or the metabolites of the drug that's being tested for, you take a bunch of tests from the athlete over time and you just look at our certain parameters in their blood fluctuating in a way that can't be natural. And so this is a more powerful form of testing because you don't have to catch the actual drug or it's metabolites. Are all sports doing this? Are all sports? Because I didn't know about this. Not all sports. No, I mean the sports that the sports that don't have unions are doing it. Basically, more or less.

Not that's not 100% true, but like the Olympic sports have it. But you know, I was unaware of this. That's why I wasn't. And so that that's been kind of a technological for, you know, that was sort of a jump in anti-doping. It's not to say that most people are doping still aren't getting away with it. But so this cycling team that I got a document leak from basically when biological passports started, suddenly all these blood parameters, like things like how many new blood, new red

blood cells are, is your body making. All the guys on the team started looking like they were identical twins, right? So they saw that, oh, you have to, you start getting hemmed in. You say, we're not allowed to fluctuate a certain amount. So you have to start tailing that, tailoring that doping a lot more carefully, which meant they had to dope less. It didn't mean they weren't doping. In fact, it was totally improbable that they could have all looked so similar in their blood profiles all the sudden, but it did mean they had to start doping less. So I think, I think drugs are important. I think they made a huge impact on sport, but I think the hugeest impact that they made was most, mostly, I don't think they'll ever make as large an impact again

as they did in the 80s and early 90s and a bit later than that in baseball. And I think the sign of that, again, in the Olympic sports, if you go and look at where some of the women's records, because steroids are all chemical analogs of testosterone. And since women start with relatively so little testosterone, even a modest amount can make a huge performance difference. And so if you go look at where some of those women's records are still stuck, I think that's the signature of the era that had the biggest stoping difference. Yeah, I wanted to actually ask if there was going through and kind of looking at all these different performance

enhancing type drugs. Were there some interesting drugs that athletes were using for different sports that you would have never thought of? Like I know for one, for me I've heard of is some athletes using microdosing psilocybin as a bit of a performance enhancement. But that was surprising to me.

Was there any surprising drugs out there that we wouldn't have thought of? There was always funny stuff. I mean, I remember guys would say they'd take methyl testosterone for aggression. I felt players, they felt like it made them more aggressive. Whether that was true or not, I really don't know. But probably the most interesting stuff

was sort of like what happened with Belko where there would be some drug that like a company would have been trying to develop in a band in and some really bright person who was interested in this stuff would just go find this and re-engineer it. I think Norbole Thone I, was the name of one of those. And so I was thought that was interesting. If there were sort of particular drugs that I found to be particularly interesting, I don't know, I thought they were all kind of interesting. Every once in a while there would be something that I'd never heard of. There were drugs that

like really like never came to market and someone to re-engineer them. And now we've found that to be just to be sort of interesting in principle. Compare the impact that animal steroids had on athletes versus growth hormone, which is another, you know, it's not an animal steroid, but it's also can be considered performance in an insane drug. Yeah. And then another one that's very popular is EPO, which is the hormone that increases red blood cells. I compare the impact of all of those,

and I guess which ones make the biggest impact. I think there's still some unknowns about growth hormone. And I think that's partly to do with the fact that back when steroids, anabolic steroids, were, which of course people should not, they get confused with the corticosteroids in their inhaler or whatever, which will not grow your muscles,

but eat them if you take too much. Now in the olic steroids, when there was this big fuss about it in Congress in like the early 90s, I think, and they got moved, they became scheduled substances. They were already prescription substances, so there were limitations. But then they became drugs with criminal penalties.

And in the process of this legislation, Growth Hormone got moved into this special designation. And at the time, there were scientists testifying in front of Congress saying, like, let's not tar growth hormone with the same brush as some of these other things, because we don't know enough about it yet. And so I think the legislative history suggests to me

that they actually wanted to make it less restricted. And yet this law got interpreted as being even more restrictive that there's only like five legal uses for it. And so that really hindered research into human growth hormone. And so I think there's a lot we still don't know. So there's so much of, you know, if you talk to people who use growth hormone or you talk to, you know, lots of steroid dealers or users, the most common experience I had is they'll say, well, it doesn't do that much on its own, but when you put it in combination with

steroids, it has this huge effect. People would cite everything from their eyesight getting better to slimming down and all this kind of stuff. And I think it's hard to know what exactly of that is true because very few people take it in isolation, and when they do, there are very few good studies on it. So I think there's still a lot that isn't known about growth hormone. I think that's unfortunate that it became enmeshed in the law in that way. So I don't know.

But I think the major, I think the bigger impact has been from steroids or from testosterone itself, particularly. I mean, testosterone is a huge, you know, as any guy who's gone through puberty knows, like testosterone changes your athleticism, whether you lift weights or not. A lot of athletes used to say, you know, he's not doping, look at what he does in the weight room. Like, but you went through puberty and you may not have gone to the weight room and you still gained a lot of fat free mass. Right. You still got a lot of muscle. So I think that's been the biggest difference testosterone. I mean, EPO, you know, useful for any, so EPO is a synthetic version of a natural hormone that stimulates your body to create red blood cells, which carry oxygen. And so it increases your oxygen carrying capacity.

Most notably in the Tour de France, of course, where it totally changed the game. But I think an endurance sports, EPO, and blood doping, one of the hardest things to detect is when someone takes out their own blood, waits so their body regenerates blood and then re-injects their own blood. Very hard to detect and very effective for endurance. And I think that's had a huge impact on endurance sports especially. David, you have to talk a little bit about Alex Rodriguez. You were responsible for breaking his story, correct? As far as his steroid use.

Yeah, with my colleagues, Selena Roberts. So share with us a little bit about what that was like in your life. I had to be in a very pivotal moment in your life. Yeah, that was something. Gosh, what was it like? Well, let me give you, maybe this is a little bit of interesting background, but some of the way that story came together was, if you remember around, you know, in back when steroids were in baseball were like the main baseball headline and Congressy and dragged a,

dragged baseball in and said, hey, you do something about this, or we will. Baseball implemented in the early 2000s, they agreed to satisfy Congress. Baseball agreed with the players you need to do survey testing, where they would tell the players when they were going to get tested in majors and minors. Like telling them when they were going to test it on one date shouldn't fail when, if you you know when the test is coming. And they said, all right, if 5% or more of our players

test positive, then we have a problem and we'll implement testing. That was their deal with Congress basically. Thinking that no way our 5% or more players going to test positive when they know the day the test is coming. Right. We're giving you a heads up, everybody. Yeah.

Turns out they severely underestimated a number of people who would test positive and particularly in the miners. And so it was more than 5%. And these were all anonymized just for survey testing, right? So the names were separate from test results. But the players union was going to challenge this. They were going to try to get a bunch of them thrown out to get that below 5% so that they wouldn't have to implement testing. And when they were trying to get it thrown out, that at the same time, Belko was going on.

And law enforcement agents got a subpoena to go collect the survey testing data and match it to the names for like 10 players or something who might have been caught up in Balco. And so they show up at a lab and the lab's like, well, we can't give you anything. So they just take the whole computer and suddenly to have all the baseball survey results.

This ended up being a really important case for reasons that have nothing to do with sports, actually, about what is the government's right to like seize a huge amount of information on a computer? But basically those test results got matched up and my colleague and I learned that that meant they were still around and that maybe we could get a look at them and you know, I'll try to read his head tested positive in that in that survey testing and for me mostly it was it was scary because I was like a young journalist and I was like, you know This might be the end of my career.

I have no idea I was going to react to it. I haven't been in this kind of situation before. So it was scary, but then it was TJ Quinn of ESPN confirmed it. Like I went for a walk and made sure not to watch TV that morning. And then I got a call that ESPN was confirming it and A. Rott was going to admit it and all that sort of thing. I think it ended up as kind of a good trade for both teams. So I ended up getting hired as a staff writer at Sports Illustrated. I think he got maybe got rid of some of his perfectionist syndrome and you know, we're both doing okay.

Oh, so that was actually what got you hired with Sports Illustrated. I didn't know that. I started there as a temp fact checker because I was in my past life, I was training to be a scientist. I was like living up in the Arctic, studying the carbon cycle in a temp. You know, and so I started as a temp fact checker, and I sort of caught on, because I had done some crime reporting before I got to SI, and I had the science background,

and these oddball background things made me really unique at sports illustrated, so they kept sort of Extending my temp job and I was getting more and more involved and as I realized doping was an interesting issue I'm like, oh, I can here. I can I don't have a medical background, but I can Use my science background to understand some of this and I sort of had a had a nose for the investigative stuff and so they kept Hang in you know keeping me around and then when that story for the investigative stuff. And so they kept keeping me around. And then when that story came,

then they really wanted to keep me around even more. Now, what are your personal beliefs around professional athletes or athletes using performance enhancing drugs? I mean, because it's funny from the outside, obviously you see these private organizations like the NBA, NFL, MLB, testing, right? And quotations are athletes, but in testing, right? And quotations, they're athletes, but in reality, if everybody stopped using drugs,

performance would drop, attendance to the games would drop, people wouldn't watch as much. So they're kind of like, you know, doing this dance or whatever. I mean, what are your personal views? You think they should just let athletes look, it's your body, do what you want, let's see what happens. Full transparency.

Make it fun, still trying, yeah. Put up a facade. This is such a tough one because I don't think like, I don't think a sports body should say, go ahead and do things that are like against the law of your state or country, which some of this would be. And I think in general, the idea of treating drugs, and I don't mean sports drugs,

just drugs in general, I can medicine frivolously, is not such a great idea. The more medical reporting I've done, the more inclined I've been toward non-medical fixes for physical things, when possible. I don't at all think that everyone who dopes or anything like that is a bad person. I'm not like a purist about it. And when I was thinking about that question you asked me, I was trying to decide, do I care about doping? I mean, I was a

division one track athlete, you know, I'm sure I ran against some people who were doping, but at the time, you know, you're just blocked and I like like you can't think about that stuff. And I came to the work of this guy named Bernard Suites, this Canadian philosopher, and there was this kind of challenge in philosophy where this other famous philosopher said, there's no core that unites like all sports and games. There's nothing that they have will have in common. And Suites said, no, that's wrong in this brilliant book. And he said, he said, the core of all these games and sports is the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. And I thought that was so cool. And I kind of felt like if you're attempting

to circumvent these obstacles that you voluntarily accepted, I do think there's something in this endeavor that is lost. And so I think there's whatever meaning emanates from sports, I think has to do with some of that voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. So I'm not, I'm not pro-doping or just letting anything fly. At the same time, I understand the conflict that, that like NFL and NBA and MLB have where they're trying to police themselves, which nobody ever does well, right? Just it's not a thing that humans are good at. But I think there's some really interesting emerging tensions where like, you know,

testosterone prescriptions for men in their 40s quintupled over like the last 10 years. These are non-athletes, right? Most of the market for performance-hansing drugs is not pro-athletes. It's people who want to look better or feel younger or whatever it is. And so I think we may be approaching a situation

where you have this huge swath of the population taking some of these things, but it's banned for athletes. I think that's going to cause a fundamental re-evaluation of some of this question. I'd be curious to hear what you guys think, though, because I don't have a great answer to this question. I don't know what the best way to go about it is. I think that they know that everyone is trying to do the same thing, such as them, they feel like they're not necessarily cheating because the next guy is doing the same thing and we

have to get around this testing, but we're also trying to compete. So, I don't feel like I necessarily have, you know, this is just what I would think that they would think. I don't necessarily have an advantage because I know that they're doing the same thing, so it's a level of playing field. Well, it's also, there's another point that's really interesting to talk about or speculate about too, is that there's also a large spectrum on testosterone levels naturally found in people.

So, is it fair that there's a guy who's in the professional sports who maybe has a 250 free test and he's competing against somebody who's naturally has 900 free tests in his body? So, I mean, you gotta think about that too. And then you bring it at the point of almost half the population is utilizing, you know, hormones and things like that as it is. And so, how is that fair that these professional athletes don't get to, but then everybody else is?

Speaking of which, and the power of testosterone among other hormones, we're now in the year 2021, and there's a new challenge in sports, which is people transitioning to the opposite gender and then wanting to compete against their new, you know, in their new gender category. And this is mainly, the controversy is mainly with transgender women. You don't see it so much with transgender man or this is you know women transitioning a man. You see this more with men who transition to women. You have a lot of experience researching the effects of these hormones and what they have on people.

Do you think that an athlete transitioning blocking or lowering their testosterone erases the advantages they may have gotten that they got through going through puberty with testosterone, or you think there's a certain amount that is permanent, that's a permanent advantage. Okay, let me come, you said one other thing I wanted to comment on, so let me come back to that one in a sec, sure. The advantage was that both of the points

that two of the points that were made about the even playing field and uneven testosterone levels are interesting, because one thing that did surprise me when I was doing some reporting on doping and cycling is that like some of you know like Lance Armstrong's team, they wouldn't, they would go and they would actually look for people who had low levels of say like low hematic rate or proportion of their bloodstream that is red blood cells and say, oh, this person's good already. And they have more room to dope than someone who's already closer to this detection.

And so they would actually look for people who would have more doping potential, essentially. So the even playing field, I think, now doesn't work out that way. Kind of in practice. But to the issue of transgender athletes, I think there are, and most of them say here, I think is information where I'm paraphrasing to people who, I respect like crazy, to scientists Ross Tucker, a South African sport scientist and Joanna Harper, scientists who happens to be

a trans woman who was uh... an age group running champion and they've they've been involved in lots of the court cases adjudicating the stuff sometimes on different sometimes they sort of switch sides so to speak about whether transgender athletes should be allowed to to compete or not and the reason they do that is because is the reason it seems confusing i think

is because the answer is they confusing, I think, is because the answer is they think it's actually sport dependent. So I think Joanna has some pretty good data where she has tracked trans women through their physical transition. So as they underwent testosterone suppression, and it shows pretty well that their cardiovascular factors go from being typical male to typical female. And so I think you can make the argument in some of the sports where cardiovascular factors are the most important, some distance sports,

that the NCAA rule that's in place where athletes have to undergo a year of testosterone suppression is a pretty decent way to go, at least until we learn more. From the standpoint of muscle and bone, what Joanna's research shows is that a transgender woman ends up sort of between the, does not come, all of puberty is not erased, all of male puberty is not erased. Some of it is, but as she says,

she says like I'm still stronger than a typical female and then have more muscle and bone mass. And so I think it's kind of, a sport-by-sport basis in some way. So I know that one of the controversial cases that was going on recently was with World Rugby, where the question was, how should we think about transitioning

athletes who may bring more muscle mass and what kind of injury risk that might bring into play? I think it really depends a lot on the concerns of an individual support. Yeah, because you also have, you have so many factors to, I mean, just this is coming from an expert in fitness and this has just been a passion of mine. And I know it's just more than testosterone. You have Androgen receptor density, which is much higher in men.

You have muscle memory, which is a very real thing. So if you built 15 pounds of muscle and then later on lost it, gaining it back would take you a fraction of the time of course bone mass. It's actually much more complex than people realize. And it's an interesting position to be in. So I think I would agree with you.

It depends on the sport, but if strength and power are big factors, you're going to have an advantage if you went through puberty as a biological male. Anything David, you're currently researching right now that's interesting? You know, I've been, I don't know if this will resonate a little bit because some of it's, but there is some literature on this in sort of a movement, sciences. I've been kind of interested in useful constraints, so to speak, whether, you know, that's from the perspective of like the arts, like maybe the most simple thing that people are familiar with, is like a haiku, right? Any kid can write it because something about those constraints actually liberates people's That's from the perspective of the arts, maybe the most simple thing that people are familiar with.

It's like a haiku, right? Any kid can write it because something about those constraints actually liberates people's creativity instead of making them feel more boxed in. But I was just talking to a hitting coach who was a strength and conditioning coach, became a hitting coach in the Yankees system. And was seeing some of the stuff that this coach was doing where it would be like to get guys to open up their hips the right way, would make them like stand with part of their leg

in a hurdle and it would be like, okay, don't touch this part of the hurdle when you do this. And it was like using these physical barriers where instead of saying open your hip like this and move like this and move your arm like that, it was putting them as in this environment where the constraints of the situation naturally cause them to try to solve the problem with their movement in a certain way.

And I'm kind of interested in useful constraints in general, physical, artistic, you know, when it comes to scientific innovation, stuff like that. So I've been kind of nerding out on that. That's actually really interesting because that reminds me of a story I share as a personal trainer when I piece together This this way of helping a client do a bicep curl with good form Years I struggled with this somebody who was unathletic never trained before I No matter how times I explained it broke down the biomechanics of it displayed it for them I hand it to him and they would they would inevitably fuck up every time. And so I come up with this idea of introducing

a stability component to it where I make them stand on one leg in balance, and the reason why is a coach I do that is because I know that when you are standing with good posture, it's much easier for you to balance. If you're balanced when you go to do the bicep crow, inevitably you'll pull the shoulders back, keep the elbows by your side, and you won't rock the arms because that'll throw you off balance.

And instead of giving them all those nuance details, all I said was just balance and do the curl. And I found that they performed the exercise better than if I were to go through all the details of it, which I find that interesting that you're into that right now. I mean, I think, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was gonna say, David, you know, because you're somewhat of an expert on performance and seeing drugs and blood-doping, what about these future drugs and ways of improving performance that we've been reading about? I mean, I saw them.

Yeah, like, what about Psalms or Milestatin inhibitors? And there's that famous picture of the dog that was worshiped. Myostatin inhibited, you know, whip it dog that looks like it's like a bodybuilder compared to a regular dog, for example. What about these new introductions of ways of improving performance that are very different from the past ones? Yeah, and so myostatin is a, the myostatin gene, it codes for a protein called myostatin that tells

your muscles to stop growing, basically. And you'd say, well, why would we have something like that? Well, because in our ancestral state, muscle, as you know, is protein expensive, and it wasn't just like protein powder when we weren't living with grocery stores. And so you don't want your muscles to grow out of control. But if people want to see a fun picture, Google bully whip it for dogs or Belgian blue for cows. And you can see cows and dogs that have been bred to have no myostats.

And so their muscles grow like out of control. And I think the reason you bring that up is because it's been one of the early prospects for gene doping where you can create an engineer, a gene in a lab and put it in someone's body, and it can go to work. And I think for a long time, there's been a question of, is this sort of the end of anti-doping if we can do stuff like that?

And I don't think it necessarily is. I think there are still prospective ways that you could detect stuff like that. That said, I think we're usually jumping the gun about new drugs because the simple stuff, timing your testosterone use well, keeping the doses manageable, doping with testosterone and epitestosterone together because that's one of the common tests for the ratio of those. Taking out your own blood and re-injecting your own blood, these things are still really, really hard to catch.

And so I don't see much reason for athletes to be moving on from them, other than just like the sexiness of the next thing. So like I said, I think if we're talking about athletes who are subject to drug testing, I do think they're hemmed in more than they were in the past, but they just have to be smarter about it basically. And so I'm not sure, I think there's anything really better than testosterone in its analogs, which also, by the way, increases your red blood cell production. Testosterone does, which is one of the reasons why people who are on test osterone, even if it's medical, they often have to get tested or donate blood if they're

overproducing blood and stuff like that. So I'm less inclined to jump to the brave new world future than I used to be in the past. Are you, have you ever thought about investigating how large of a black market there is around coaches to take these athletes through that? Obviously, your professional athlete, your main focus is playing baseball your whole life. You're not probably thinking about, how do I cycle dope in and out so I don't get caught? Do you have any idea of how large that market is?

For, you mean the market for hiring like coaches that professionally teach you how to do this? So I mean, I doubt very, I really may even correct, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I don't think people had that on their business card as part of the team, but every team had that. I think it's around. One of the things that I learned in over some years of doping reporting was that the system basically doesn't function without doctors usually being involved at some level. That was a bit of a surprise to me. But at a certain point, usually a lot of time

traces back to doctors who either they think it's fun or they like to be around athletes or they just want to see what it can do or whatever. And so I think there are, I have no idea what the size of the market is. And I think the market among athletes is way smaller than the one among people who just want to look and and feel better, right?

Like if you go and Google hormone replacement therapy or whatever or you can get tons of places that will write you prescriptions without any sort of real Examination or anything like that. So I think that's the big market. I don't know how big the market is for actual athletes, but Sort of the most surprising thing to me was that it doesn't totally run at some level without doctors being involved. So you've kind of gone through the democratization of sports and kind of the evolution of how certain technology and thing has advanced. And I was curious, what the next huge leap you think is going to be for us. And if maybe even something like CRISPR or gene editing is going to be a part of that.

Yeah, CRISPR, I think that's a great question. Because on the one hand, I think there's an argument. So CRISPR, like you mentioned, I guess we don't need to explain a much more than that. But a technology that can edit select parts of people's genome, I think on the one hand, you can make an argument that we shouldn't be that concerned about CRISPR because back when the human genome was sequenced

just after the turn of the millennium, the idea was if you go back and look at news coverage, it was like, we're all gonna have a chip with our DNA on it in 10 years, which would have been like 2013. And we're gonna take it to our doctor and they're going to look at our genome and personalize our treatment, right? None of us have that, obviously.

We're basically not using genetic testing, except in, you know, sort of very specific circumstances at all. And I think part of that is because, like, the motto for learning about genetics has been, it's more complicated than we thought. So at the time, people thought, I remember, we're going to have huge amounts, like hundreds of thousands of genes because, I don't know, ring worms have some thousands and we're so much more complicated. It turns out we have 23,000, which was kind of a disappointment, like we have less DNA than

onions. And so it's like, huh, that's surprising, but it turns out that those genes work in very complicated interactions. Not to mention, genes are the parts of your DNA that code for specific proteins. Most of your DNA is what used to be called junk DNA, because it doesn't code directly for proteins, so the thinking was, well, it doesn't do anything. It's just, you know, byproduct. Turns out it does stuff.

It helps determine how all those other genes are working. And when you think about the possible combinations, it's incredibly complex. And so if you look at something as simple as adult height, adult height in industrialized world where everyone, where people have nutrition, you know, and they're not getting childhood infections a lot. So like in the United States, it's about 80% to 90%

heritable, meaning the differences between two adults in their height, on average, 80% to 90% of that will be because of the genes that they inherited. Not a huge surprise. And yet, something as simply measurable as height, when studies are done to figure out what genes control that, studies that have thousands of people, they will have found hundreds of thousands of spots on the genome that each influence height, a tiny, tiny, tiny bin. It may turn out that every gene has a little

bit of influence in your ultimate height. And what that means is that these most traits other than certain rare diseases are products of this huge interconnecting web of genes, each of which have tiny, tiny, tiny effects. So it's not like you can really isolate that very specific attribute. Right. And so how are you going to CRISPR all that stuff? You're not. Also, CRISPR has some off-target effects sometimes in studies, which is a different issue.

You might end up getting things you don't want to. Trying to get fast, you get, you know, a red eyes instead. Right. Which would be even cooler if you're fast and have red eyes. But, but I will say there are certain exceptions that make me think CRISPR could have an impact, which there are three cases I know of. The myostatin, a human, we know with double myostatin mutations, so this was a baby who was discovered to have no myostatin.

It had this explosive muscle growth as a little baby. And at a certain stage, at least that baby's mother was the only adult I knew of with a single myostatine mutation, and she'd been a professional sprinter. There was a case, I did a disAmerican life story on, that involved a bronze medalist sprinter who had a mutation that caused her to have fat wasting and explosive muscle growth. And that was from a single gene mutation. The Myosdatin one was a single gene mutation.

And then there was this famous case I wrote about in the sports gene in the last chapter of this finished skier, who was the greatest cross-country skier in the world for a while, one some gold medals named Aero Monturanta, who had a mutation that caused him to overproduce red blood cells. So you had this incredible oxygen-carrying capacity. So in those three cases, a single rare gene mutation was so powerful that it overwhelmed all this other stuff and produced an effect on its own. So those are cases where I could see maybe those are CRISPR targets that you could talk about. At the same time, I would still opt for

doping with my own blood versus trying to CRISPR my EPO receptor gene, but that's just me. Do you know of any negative side effects that were connected to those three cases? Like, okay, this person's got this double myostatin inhibition gene, but they also have high liver enzymes or high cholesterol, something like that. Yeah, yeah, and in all the cases, well, so the kid with the myostatin, the kid's identity was protected, so I don't know what that.

I should probably try to check in on that now, but I don't know. I know there was concern that there would be like excessive heart muscle growth. If it wasn't going to be so, I don't know if that was realized or not. In terms of the bronze medal sprinter, her name is Priscilla Lopes-Schleep, she's identified in the story, who had fat, waisting, and explosive muscle growth. She ended up with like super high triglycerides, and she hadn't even been checking that stuff out, because she's one of the best sprinters in the world. Does she really going to have a problem with something like triglycerides. And she hadn't even been checking that stuff out because like, you know, she's one of the best printers in the world. Does she really going to have a problem with something like triglycerides? Turn out she did. So she had the admied it and now she's she's, you know, being treated. In the case of Aero-Montoranta who overproduced red blood cells, he didn't turn out to really have

bad health effects. Other than his skin, I went and met him in the Arctic where he was a reindeer farmer many years later and his skin had turned kind of like purple and red. But he didn't really, he lived, he was strong into old age. But other conditions that tend to over reduce red blood cells, people sometimes do have conditions where they need to get like blood drawn. But in his case, he seemed to do quite well. Did your attitudes towards blood doping and performance enhancing substances?

Did it change as you did this research? When you started, where you like, I'm an athlete, you gotta not do it. It's cheating and then later on, did it change or vice versa? You mean because of like meeting someone who was naturally blood-doked? Yeah.

No, it didn't really because I never thought of sports as trying to standardize the genes. I never thought of as a level playing field else. We'd just like watch identical twins or something. And so, you know, and the idea that people have different levels of blood cells is like, if we were trying to divide sports by testosterone levels or blood cell count, then I'd say, okay, we should do that, but we're not. And so I never, I thought of it as more of like a cool playground for biological diversity as opposed to something that should be leveled as a playing field. So I like the expressions of the different abilities that people have, whether it's

on or off the field. Do you think there's any sports that are like great equalizers when it comes to doping stuff like that? For example, we've speculated before about, you know, it might be advantageous for some fighters to use steroids, but not at the cost of potentially putting them at a higher weight class. Like, who's stronger, the guy who is naturally 220 pounds or the guy that used anabolic steroids to get him to 220 pounds and probably in the fight game, it would be less advantageous to take steroids. Have you seen sports that you think are more equalizers

like that? That's a good question. I mean, I definitely think that's another thing that I think wouldn't get rid of doping, but would kind of hem it in to some degree where you wouldn't want to gain too much weight. Well, I think I think the potential advantage of the endurance drugs, of drugs like EPO or blood doping in fight sports are probably vastly underestimated by like the typical sports enthusiasts because those sports require ridiculous

endurance. And, right, and it's one thing to be the strongest in round one. It's another thing to be like the strongest at the end of a fight. And I think those can often be a different person. So, I don't think there's any sport that, like, doesn't have, I mean, it's thinking about steroids, particularly, a sport in which I would, my's thinking about steroids, particularly, a sport in which my hypothesis would be that testosterone doesn't give a large advantage would be a sport in which men and women perform

the same level. Good point. Because if they don't, then I think testosterone is typically the main source of that advantage, whether that was testosterone in puberty or current testosterone levels. And there are sports where male and female performance starts to come together. Like in running events, it's usually about a 10% difference between the best men and the best women in the world,

whether it's 100 meters or 10,000 meters. But in like long distance swimming, it's like 6%. So I don't think there's anything where the gap closes entirely. I mean, but we probably could, I mean, women outperform men in a lot of tests of fine motor skills. We just don't tend to organize sports around those skills, usually. Very interesting. This has been a very fun conversation, David. I appreciate you coming on the show. It was my pleasure. It's fun to talk to you guys. And yeah,

haven't talked about dopeing that much in quite a while. It's an interesting topic. And it's fun to talk to what I'm allowed to like not know the perfect answers to this stuff, because I certainly don't. Yeah, no, that's actually originally, like I said, how I found a few years ago, it was a long, long debate. And because of you, I lost the argument. It plays a lot. It makes you feel of you, I lost the argument. It's a place a lot. But it makes you feel any better. I'm constantly the things I'm, nobody knows, but in, when I write things, I'm constantly

finding out that I was wrong about what I taught before. Well, I was just so, I was so fascinated by that, that, that first head talk you did was just, it was phenomenal. And I had, I had assumed that the athletes on steroids is what really has made sports accelerate and that just blew my mind when I watched that. Yeah, I think your combination of being a scientist and a journalist is what makes it so good and compelling and objective, so I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

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