StarTalk Radio - #ICYMI: The Murky World of Doping in Sports

Episode Date: July 20, 2017

Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly dive into the widespread world of doping in cycling, football and other sports with the help of Lance Armstrong, Neil deGrasse Tyson, skeptic and author Michael Shermer, psychologist Dr. Tom Hildebrandt and bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan.Don’t miss an episode of Playing with Science. Subscribe to our channels on:Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/playing-with-science/id1198280360?mt=2GooglePlay Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Iimke5bwpoh2nb25swchmw6kzjqSoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/startalk_playing-with-scienceStitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/startalk/playing-with-scienceTuneIn: http://www.tunein.com/playingwithscienceNOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

I'm Gary O'Reilly and I'm Chuck Nice and this is Playing With Science and I hope you are ready to take a trip into the clandestine and murky world of doping. This is the show we promised you so snuggle up get comfy whatever works we promised you. So snuggle up, get comfy, whatever works best for you. Some call it performance enhancement. Others simply call it cheating. And some call it a waste of doing drugs because, well, there's only one reason to really do them. So if you're an elite athlete and you took that decongestant by mistake, or maybe you made a grab for that unaccredited food supplement. Chances are that in the eyes of the WADA, you broke the rules and you're just a drug cheat. So what does it do?

And how does it do it? And how do you get away with it, most importantly? And if you're a bad guy, you'll want to hear about that. Right. In Neil deGrasse Tyson's interview with Lance Armstrong, the two got to grips with doping in cycling as well as other sports and just how much of a boost your performance can get when you dope. And then go on to debate whether the future will be clean. And I assure you, you are going to want to hear what Lance Armstrong says about that one. Yeah. Their extensive expertise are the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and the author of The Moral Arc, Michael Shermer, clinical psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Dr. Tom Hildebrand, and medical ethicist and author of The Ethics of Sports, Dr. Arthur Kaplan. Yeah, that space is covered there. Busy show. So start the clock. See if we break any records. And if we do, it'll be sample time. But don't worry, Chuck, we'll flip a coin for it.

Oh, no, don't worry. I'm having somebody else pee in a cup for me. Okay, that's that covered. Right. So we know people dope. We know athletes are dope. We go back to ancient Greece and know that they chewed on animals' testicles to get testosterone. And if you did that now, you're banned. Sexy.

Isn't it just? testosterone and if you did that now you're banned sexy isn't it just so now we now now we're just getting to this point where people have been outraged but it's been going on for so long and now we're coming to terms with the fact that maybe one in 30 get caught right now that's a real discrepancy between the world anti-doping Agency, the athletes, their entourages, the teams, state-sponsored doping, whatever the stages are there. But they're always playing catch-up. It always seems to be a real problem. So we're going to try and find out how we shorten the gap, if we can shorten the gap. If we can shorten the gap.

And, you know, these are all questions that we'll discuss and explore during the show is can we shorten the gap if we can if we can shorten the gap and you know these are all questions that that we'll discuss and and um explore during the show is can we shorten the gap uh is it cheating why shouldn't we just allow guys to do it i mean i certainly have questions that i want answered during this show because there's i may feel i know you feel i feel a little different let the world let it go hey man what do you want hey look it's an arms race, okay? According to our latest president who said about nuclear arms, let it be an arms race, you know? And I kind of feel like I want, I have a saying. I want my rock stars high and I want my home run hitters on steroids. So, I mean, that's, but listen, listen. But there's the other side of the equation where people say, no, I want my athletes clean.

Pure. The TV want this to be that way. And so, well, let's see. You feel that way. Two horses pulling in opposite directions. And here's the way I feel. You feel that way until you go back to watching baseball like it was in, like, 1960-whatever. And, like, you know, guys hit home runs, like, every other day.

Okay? We don't, you know, people say they want it, but you want the excitement. And that excitement comes at a cost. and guys hit home runs every other day. People say they want it, but you want the excitement, and that excitement comes at a cost, and for me that cost is dope. We've seen such an enhancement in training methods, understanding the appliance of medical science legitimately to an athlete, so we're able to do specific things to improve performance just in the biomechanics without introducing any chemical advantage so we are going to see a progression what we're not going to see is off the chart

immediate breaking records and results so it's a case of are you patient enough to see the evolution of naturally of athletes hey listen that is a great point you're making there and i'm i can't say that i'm not in agreement with that. So, you know what? Speaking of agreement, disagreement, why don't we get into this show? dilemma, author of The Moral Arc, How Science Makes Us Better People, and most importantly, a prolific cyclist himself. Please welcome to the show, Michael Shermer. Michael, how are you? Hello, everybody. I'm doing well. Thank you. All right. Before we get into the controversy surrounding Lance Armstrong, let's first listen to a clip where our own Neil deGrasse Tyson sat down with Lance himself. How much would you say your performance was enhanced as a percent of yourself from when you were at your peak response to these chemicals?

So these, and I've talked about this in the past, so that generation, the problem was in cycling, you always had some of that. And you had, and I break it up into two categories, low octane and high octane. And you've always had, and maybe still have, some low octane. So these one, two percenters. And then came- Low octane enhancements. Yeah. So whatever.

One or two percent, if you're world class and you just have to beat the one person, that'll do it. Right, but assuming that everybody opts in for low octane, which they did in the old days. But then what happened is somebody came along, big pharma, came along with something that was high octane. And that was EPO, and that was not one or 2%, that was 10%. And so it was so great. EPO.

Urethra poison. So the red cell booster, which, again, power, weight, oxygen. How you get that power is the- Is this what they call the Edgar Allan Poe? Well, that was the nickname we gave it back then. So you had this, the sport, not even cycling, but the entire endurance world, whether it's running or cycling, whatever, anything that's a multi-hour event. I mean, you could argue a lot of it. They discovered it. And it was so beneficial to the ones that made that.

It spread like wildfire. And then everybody's faced with this, this quandary, like, oh my God, like what? One or 2%, you can almost manage that. You could say, you know what? I'm not going to, I'm not going to do that. And I, and I can still compete 10%. Then you're faced with the decision, do I opt in or do I go home? This is a lot to unpack there, Michael. And before we let you respond to that, first of all, let's give a little bit of cred to why you are deemed able to speak about this. You were, starting in 1979, a cyclist. You made the jump to cycling and you became a professional rider, right?

Yeah, in the 1980s, I competed in long distance cycling. So I was one of the co-founders of the 3,000 mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle race called Race Across America, or RAM for short. And I did that five times, rode across the country five times. And I was race director for 15 years. So I went across America 20 times total by biker car so I know the sport inside and out in the early in the middle 80s I knew all the Olympic cyclists and this is back when blood doping where you pack in your own blood that you took out earlier right it was legal it wasn't even banned and everybody was doing it I didn't do it for various reasons but I knew a lot of people that did. And it was

right when doping was becoming much more effective as a tool for performance enhancement. And therefore the rules then began to be designed by the governing bodies of what should be allowed and not allowed. And that's really when the whole doping thing became an issue. As Lance noted, you know, the doping had been part of the sport for all the way back to the early 20th century for sure but it wasn't a thing that anyone really cared about I mean it was just knowing everybody did it you had to do it it wasn't until the 80s and 90s that it became a thing to regulate and that's when it became a moral issue so now let's talk about this because I'm not sure if it's because of the controversy that surrounds Lance I'm not sure if it's because of the controversy that surrounds Lance.

I'm not sure if he was equivocating or if this is exactly the case, the way he broke it down. Can you unpack that for us and give us a sense of what he is talking about? What he's talking about there is for endurance athletes in particular, like cyclists, the best thing you can have for performance enhancement is delivering oxygen to your muscles so when you talk about power weight and then oxygen he's talking about uh once you've trained up to your maximum uh performance output say watts per minute that you can push uh up a hill um the only thing you can do uh to change your performance is to reduce your weight.

So you're pushing less weight up the hill and deliver more oxygen to the muscles, which is what EPO does. So EPO is a genetically modified form of erythropoietin, which is naturally in your body, that stimulates the production of red blood cells. So people that are anemic, they take this. We think probably around 91, 92 or so, the Amgen-produced drug erythropoietin, or EPO, was introduced into the professional Peloton. So once you get wind that somebody is or may be doing this and that it may make a big difference then then it becomes a rational choice to do it because you have to do it and when lance is talking about one

percent well what he meant was maybe i don't want to do the one percent uh performance enhancements i could just train a little bit harder you might get away with that but something like epo the reason it was a game changer was because it was probably between 7% and 10% performance difference. And that you can't— So what you're saying is once you get to a certain, I don't know, let's call it dew point or equilibrium, there's no way that you can reproduce those results yourself naturally. That's right. Gotcha.

So doping was part of cycling for decades. But the drugs they were doing probably didn't make that big a difference. Maybe blocking pain or just stimulants so you could keep going. But it didn't make any difference on what you were actually doing on the bike. It was more off-the-bike recovery kind of stuff. What EPO does, and then also blood doping. I mean, blood doping is the same thing. You take your blood out, say, early in the season.

You put it back in when you need it. You're just putting more red blood cells, which is what EPO does. But it's your own blood is what you're talking about, right? Yes, yes. It's your own blood. But it's a little risky because it involves needles and storing blood for long periods of time. Blood cells automatically start dying the moment you take them out of your body. So you've got to preserve them and keep them, you know, fresh in a refrigerator somewhere, a freezer maybe for a while, and then deliver it back into your body. So you got to be agile with needles. And, you know, imagine these guys in hotel rooms with a bag of blood on the hook

on the wall where they took the picture off. I mean, it's just insane. And, you know, it gets contaminated. So there are risks. What are the ways will a cyclist try and enhance their performance? Okay, EPO. It's pointless getting the weight because that's destroying the whole equation. So where else do they go? Well, really, that was the game changer, the EPO. And then once there was a test for EPO, so they shifted back to to blood doping which is the older technology what are they doing now I don't know because the drug takers are always about five years ahead of the drug and all and it will always be like that and

the biggest controversy now are these therapeutic use exemptions TUEs in which you get exemption from the racing organization that it's okay to take this particular drug because you have asthma or allergy. So the one that came out this year was thanks to the Russian hackers, the Fancy Bear hackers, in retaliation for the hacking and release of their drug use. So it's a little bit of an arms race internationally. It turned out that a lot of the top riders were using these cortisone taking cortisone shots under the pretense that

they had allergies or asthma and funny they all got allergies and asthma just before the tour de france of course you're such a cynic well the way i look at it is from a scientist perspective is from a game theory like think of this as a rational choice these guys are making don't think of it as a moral choice although it is the question is why do they do it right so instead of condemning them as sinners let's just try to analyze the game matrix to make the incentives higher to not dope than to dope and that's the hard part because the moment you think somebody is doing something that might make a difference, even if they're not thinking, then the pressure is on you to do it also.

Because as Lance said, you know, that it gets to a point where you either do it or you pack up and go home. You can't be a bicyclist. And, you know, so that, that's what makes it such a dilemma for a lot of these guys. A lot of them are uneducated, poor. They didn't go to college. They started racing when they were young. They don't have life options.

Okay, I'm not going to dope, so I'm going to go back and work on Wall Street. No, it's not like that. Michael, stay with us. We're going to go to our next clip. Interesting one, this one, because it addresses the fact that does Lance believe he actually won seven Tour de France's? Let's have a listen. If everyone does it, this is a very big, I don't know who did it, but that's not the point of my question. If everyone does it, including you, and you still win, aren't you still better than everybody else? Because I could take it and I'm not going to win the Tour de France.

Right. So the person still matters. Right. The person still matters. There's a bunch of arguments here. Okay. First of all, I'm the wrong person. It would be like me asking you, hey, Neil, how was your lecture last week?

Was it good? And you would say, well, I think it went pretty good, but you should probably ask the 2000, the students or the people that were there, ask them. So we can't answer that, right? I mean, I have, I mean, I would say, look, ask my, ask my peers, ask my rivals. You could argue that certain substances are more beneficial to certain people and less beneficial to others. So that starts to cloud the picture. But then you just don't know what all, I mean, it was the wild, wild west back then. You didn't have testing, you didn't have,

these guys were, it was crazy. And so it just all gets murky. Where I go to on that is, I mean, if you ask me, do you think you won the tour de france seven times i say yes and and i say that because i think i believe in my heart and soul that my rivals and my peers would support that okay super michael that's a great michael what do you agree with lance that he won seven tour de france and and seriously and and it's not it's not even a glib question because you're a cyclist, man.

You're really into this. You know exactly what it takes to do this kind of endurance sport. And so speaking from, you know, the truest sense of a cycling, an athlete cyclist, is he right? Did he win seven Tour de France? Yeah, I think he's right. If you ask, say, his key rival throughout those years, Jan Ulrich, the great German cyclist, who did win the Tour, won the Olympic gold medal, was busted for doping. If you asked him, I'm sure he would say, yeah, Lance really did beat me fair

and square, because he was doping too. And in fact, if you look at the podium finishes, the second and third place finishers of every one of lance's seven tours they all were busted for doping so we know for sure i can't say all 100 of every tour rider dope i can't say that we don't know that for sure but absolutely virtually all of them are almost all of them are nearly whatever adjective you want to use certainly all the top ones so wow okay does that It doesn't mean the playing field is perfectly level because the doping is not a perfect art. It's a science that has some flexibility. So maybe one of the things that Lance did that was different from the previous doping programs was he hired the best doctor, this Michele Ferrari,

the best doping doctor there was to work exclusively for the postal team and not for other athletes. So the other athletes had to go to other doctors. Now Tyler Hamilton talks about this in his book, The Secret Race. He hired this other guy who wasn't so good. And this is how he trusted. And this guy didn't have the same kind of sophisticated program that this Michele Ferrari guy did. So the same kind of sophisticated program that this McKellie Ferrari guy did. So the problem is we'll never know for sure because we can't rerun the experiment. And we're knowing dopes and we see if Lance wins anyway.

My guess is he probably would because, again, it's a one-trial experiment. And the other guys he beat were doping. And they were probably, you know, the German team that Jan Ulrich was on was pretty sophisticated. So their doping program was probably pretty good, probably the same as Lance's. Wow. That's big news, man, for me. I mean, seriously, you've really changed the way I think about the entire situation. I mean, right with what you just said, I have a completely different mindset on the whole situation. Okay. So if everybody on road racing was doping, how do you feel if you're the guy that always came last?

Here's the other aspect of it. Yeah. The things we don't't know like the guys that didn't dope and we don't and they didn't win we we don't know what could have happened we only know what did happen and so like i talked to for my that article i wrote for scientific america and i interviewed quite a few cyclists including one of lance's teammates is frankie andreau who was never going to win the tour he was there as a domestique he was there to help his team leader in this case lance and what he told me was he didn't want to dope, but he had to do it just to do his job, that he was getting dropped on gradual hills

by guys who used to not be able to even stay on his wheel. Everybody was dropping him. So he had to do it just to stay in the race. Just to keep up. Wow. Stay with us. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we'll dive even deeper into the murky world of performance enhancement with Neil deGrasse Tyson's interview with this, that man himself, Lance Armstrong. And of course, Michael Shermer. Don't go away. We'll be back with Playing With Science very shortly.

Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly. And I'm Chuck Nice. Isn't he just? Yes. And this is Playing With Science. And today we are diving deep into the murky terrain of performer enhancements, a.k.a. doping. You might call it cheating.

Whichever way you look at it, we are shedding the light on it. And with us via video call, we have Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and columnist for Scientific Americans. And a man who has changed my entire perspective of the Tour de France in every single way. Unbelievable. Cyclists on rocket fuel. So I guess we should take a listen to another clip. Let's do that. Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewing Lance Armstrong, and they get stuck into the debate regarding public demand for records. Let's take a listen. Can you imagine a future where records level off and then the public sentiment changes?

And we say we want you to chemically enhance so that we can see records broken because that's what brings people to the sport. I I get that question a lot and is that different from? suma wrestlers who So they're not they're not lab chemically changed, but they're diet Terrily changed so a suma wrestler doesn't look like anybody else and they've shorter life expectancies It affects their health or a bodybuilder long or bodybuild bodybuilders. There's a whole other thing going on there and we pay to see that. Faster, higher, stronger. Again, I get this question a lot, but again, I'll say, I mean,

I'm probably the worst person in the world to try to answer this. I have the least credibility of almost anybody when it comes to this. I don't like that idea. I think that it even is remarkably ineffective, and it's a fact, remarkably ineffective that the anti-doping agencies are, you know, for spending tens and twenties of millions of dollars to catch, you know, less than 1% of the population. You know that's not right. You know that somehow they're missing some. So people see that and say, well, if they're so ineffective, why don't we just legalize it? And that's where I sit here as a father or as a friend. And I say, well, I don't know. My son plays football and he's a great football player. And my little guy who knows what he's going to grow up to do. And I don't want him playing in that sport or playing in that system.

So I see it all. If I got to vote, I'd say, no, let's not do that. Even if the public kind of wants it. I mean, we want to see records broken. I'm just wondering, I'm imagining a future where an entire Olympics goes by and not a single world record is set. I think your average NFL fan doesn't care what those athletes, I mean, look big, fast, strong, aggressive. They want their team to win. Somehow, that average NFL fan that thinks that way about the Dallas Cowboys or the Pittsburgh Steelers, when it came to looking at me on the Twitter, it changed their view of that.

But when they go back to watching football, they have the same view they have. So it's just different. Inexplicably. Inexplicably. I can't explain it. You're the smart one. Maybe you can. I'm going to explain it. You're the smart one. Maybe you can. I'm going to explain it.

And with all due respect to Lance Armstrong, none of my NFL guys who I know for a fact are juicing. Okay. If you ask them about juicing, they go, hey, man, you know, that's not really something I want to get into. And then that's the end of it. That is all they do. You will never find an NFL player talking about juicing. Never. OK, because they know they're all doing it.

It's an unspoken, accepted thing. And they're like, don't get into that. Whereas Lance Armstrong stood America down eye to eye and said, no way. No, dude, are you kidding me? I'm carrying the American flag. I'm over there in France. I'm representing this country. I'm clean, baby. I'm a good guy. I'm Dudley Do-Right. I'm carrying the American flag. I'm over there in France. I'm representing this country. I'm clean, baby.

I'm a good guy. I'm Dudley Do-Right. I'm Captain America. Well, F you, buddy, because you lied. I'm sorry. Oh, wait a minute. I did not mean to get into all that. That is not my place here.

I'm sorry. No, no, no. So it's more offensive for you that he lied to his country rather than he performance enhanced. Absolutely, because what he said is right. And I don't know, Michael, maybe you can tell me about this because you're a guy who writes about this stuff. So maybe you could tell me about my own psychology here. But what he said is right. I am a huge NFL fan. I'm a huge NFL fan. And when I see these guys dish out the punishment they dish out on Sunday, and then I see them right back at practice on Wednesday,

I know the only way they can do that is if they're sticking a needle in their butt or they're using some type of recovery drug. I know that in the back of my mind. I don't care because come Sunday, I want to see the best wide receiver in the league out there catching an 80-yard bomb from my quarterback. So, you know, talk about that, man. Michael, are you surprised at Lance's stance from that interview? Yeah, actually, I am. He's being pretty forthright and

I think showing a lot more integrity now. Let me just comment on that. I think he has served his time, his punishment. His punishment has been worse than for anybody else. And I think the reason for that is because of his own personality, his temperament, the way he handled it, the line. Not just the line. It was the destroying of people's lives and careers, the things he did, say, to Greg Lamond, who was a super good guy, and, you know, to other people he sued, to reporters and so on. The other guys I mentioned, like Jan Ulrich and the other dopers, they just served their time and kept their mouth shut like your NFL friend, you know. It's like, yeah, yeah, well, first they all lied initially, but, you know, then they just shut up

and go away and go back to work. And, you know And Lance didn't do that. But I think he's served his time. I mean, we have in America really two kinds of justice systems. There's retributive justice where we want retribution. We want to punish the sinner for their bad deeds. Then restorative justice, which is not a big thing in America. It's a bigger thing in Europe now. We want to restore the damage that was done. So what brought Lance down was not the doping. They were doping before. They're still doping. They doped during

Lance's time. That's not it. What is is it was the way it was handled, the line, and destroying people's lives. So restitution, how we can restore that. Well, he needs to make amends with the people he hurt, really, and also help the sport clean up if he believes that and the sport still wants to do that, as opposed to legalizing it all, which I don't think will ever happen. That's really what he needs to do. That's hard to do. It's hard to call people up and go, you know what, I'm sorry I did what I did. It's hard for any of us to do that. Okay. You know, but he's making, you know, he has this forward podcast.

He wants to get back into public life. You know, the guy could be governor of Texas. I mean, there's so much he could do, but he's got to restore the damage done. And the retribution, I think, has been done. You know, leave, you know, leave. There's people who want to punish him more. Forget it. Come on.

It's been done. Right. I'm with you on that. Let's go to our last clip and take a listen to the last one of neil's little questions with lance himself it reminds me of this skit on saturday night live back in the 80s where they were making fun of all of the you know the doping and they said uh we're gonna have a new event a weight lifting where all drugs are allowed all enhancements are allowed. And so they get

like one of these Hans and Franz type guys and he goes up and he goes to pick up the weight and the weight is too heavy, but his grip is so strong that he pulls his arms off. He said, oh, he pulled his arms off, his blood splurting out of his shoulders. That's great on Saturday. That's just never going to happen. By the way, too, the pressure, it won't happen because the ultimate governing body, the International Olympic Committee, all the individual sports committees, the media, the sponsors, they don't want that. So they will put enough pressure on that that that will never happen. But it makes a good skit.

It was a great skit. It was a great skit. There's another thing we've learned. Neil's a big fan of Saturday Night Live. There you go. Okay. Is Lance right there? I mean, yes, tremendous athlete. We know he did some wrong things, seven times or more. But with his understanding of the holistic picture of sport

and in particular cycling, is he right to say, you know what? People aren't going to stand for it. The TV want role models. They want guys to look up to them, the clean, pure image of sporting heroes and heroines. Is he right? TV and the public won't stand for it. And we're going to see something like he envisaged in the future. Yeah, no, the drugs don't make that much of a difference.

You rip your legs off and you're like, I hope not. So I should add parenthetically to this that, you know, these athletes are just phenomenal. Without any drugs at all, they are freaks of nature. I mean, they are six standard deviations out on the genetic bell curve of performance without any drugs. And even Lance's teammates that have spoken, like Tyler Hamilton in his book, you know, he said Lance is just a kick-ass hardcore great athlete just by nature without doing anything he was and not just genetically but also training him that's a huge part of it takes an unbelievable amount of discipline to get out there and cycling is hard really hard you know it's you're out there in the weather you know most of the year is cold and miserable in

europe i mean these guys are they are hard. They are really tough without the drugs. And so the drugs don't make that much of a difference. It's not that huge. They're still great athletes and they should be admired for that. We're up against a break and we got to wrap things up, but could you just from your perspective as a, as a cyclist, as a man of science and as someone who is intimately acquainted with this subject, could you kind of just put a button on this for us? Where do you see this going? And what do you think really needs to be done so that this can be, I won't say remedied, but managed in a far better way? Yeah. Well, probably the drug testers need more sophisticated tests to keep up with the drug takers. But more importantly, the sport itself, I think, needs to reconfigure the incentives and

make the consequences of doping such that the cyclists don't want to do it. And also the biological passport, so to speak. You have sort of a profile of where you begin of all your measures and we know that training can only bump you up to here and then if all of a sudden within six months you're up here then we know okay so more of that out of out of competition testing those sorts of things biological passports early on in somebody's career we know where you stand genetically here's what you can do by training those kinds of things more of that is the only thing short of just just legalizing everything but i don't think that's a good idea because we don't know the consequences of the drugs but i also worry about the evolutionary

arms race trickling down into the lower ranks of kids you know junior ranks pretty soon high school kids junior high school kids because they think well if i want to get to it's like the people that want to go to harvard and they they send their kids to Harvard and they start them in kindergarten at some private schools, like, oh, come on. So do you get that? You know, I got to start right away early. And so I would worry about drugs being used by teenagers and kids. Absolutely. Wow. Hey, man, this is just super, super great stuff, Michael. Thank you. Thank you so much for being with us, man. This has been a fascinating conversation. Yeah, Michael, thank you so much.

We must get you back on the show sometime soon. So we'll take that break now. And thank you to Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine. Please make sure you go and check that out, too. Up next, we'll hear from both Dr. Tom Hildebrand and Dr. Arthur Kaplan. We'll hear from both Dr. Tom Hildebrand and Dr. Arthur Kaplan. Arthur Kaplan is a professor at NYU of medical ethics and author of The Ethics of Sport, while Tom Hildebrand is clinical psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital

and we'll get both their views on doping in sport. This is Playing With Science. Do not go away. Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly. And I am Chuck Nice. And this is Playing With Science. And today we are exploring the murky world of doping. Yes, we've heard from Michael Shermer. We've heard from Lance Armstrong and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And so far, we've mostly considered the effects doping has on the sport and sports itself. But now let's take a closer look at what the negative effects it has on an athlete's body, athlete's brain. And to do that, let's bring in Dr. Tom Hildebrandt. Welcome to the show, Tom. Hi, how are you guys? We are good. Just so as people know, you're a clinical psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

Yes. With direct studies on the psychiatric behavioural and physical consequences of using performance-enhancing drugs. Imagine I'm on the Lance Armstrong team doing a Tour de France, one of the seven that he's won. I could possibly be on EPO. I could be blood doping. I'll then be taking steroids, most likely for recovery, because I've got 21 days out of 23 that I am going to be hitting the road.

Then I'll be taking masking agents. So as I pass that sample test, I'm a pharmacy on wheels, really going uphill and downhill. What on earth is happening to me in a molecular sense? And then what is going off in my head? Good. Well, I think what you do is you strip your your certainly your brain's natural ability to adapt to those situations by manipulating it. Pharmacologically, you sort of you take the normal ups and downs and and swings and adaptability out of it. You provide this sort of constant either high dose or during

withdrawal, low dose, right? So it takes time for your system to catch back up and re-regulate itself. So either too high or too low, you end up in situations where you act outside of your normal behavior. Hey, can you do me a favor? And what Gary just explained sounds absolutely frightening. I never really thought of it that way. So take us through what the body and the brain is going through with each one. So we know about the oxygen to the bloodstream. That we discussed already with Michael Shermer. So then you want to talk about adding on top of that the steroids for recovery. What does that do to you?

Synthetic androgens, as they hit the brain, they sort of they occupy the primary receptors that male hormones work on. And depending on your baseline development, you're either more or less sensitive to those signals. If you think of what androgens do, they kind of motivate people to act externally in the world. So they can provide energy, confidence, they make you feel really strong and impervious to pain. They also start to change the signaling in the opiate system. So part of that confidence or invincibility really comes from a true kind of knockout of pain signals that are coming up through the central nervous system. So what you have is kind of a perfect storm of competitiveness. You have increased muscle strength and power, and you have a brain that's primed to feel less pain and act more aggressively outwardly on the world. Now, take that away.

When you take sort of that unnatural stimulation away, all the natural ability to sort of maintain those behaviors and that action fall with those reduced levels of male hormone. Okay, so Tom, all right, so we've decided we're building the perfect beast here in terms of bringing these these factors together if you then say well some athletes have different sensitivities to certain things you put in their system in terms of doping and then how does that affect them going on through their competition and recovery then once once they finish, the long-term effects to their body,

to their brain, to their personalities. If you could sort of open that up for us, please. So I think thinking about the sensitivity, there are probably some genes that are involved in it, but maybe even more potently, there's a sensitive window during adolescence where exposure to these substances likely puts you on a different trajectory. Your brain is being organized by hormones during that time. And if you amplify the synthetic androgen effect during that time, you set people on a completely different trajectory and they become more aggressive, more likely to want to seek pleasure and act externally in the world in that way. In terms of the long-term effects, we're really looking to see just the beginning of the data that are coming out about this. And probably the most dangerous part of it are those withdrawal

periods. If you have periods of time where you uh cycled on the drug and then cycled off and you've gone into a low testosterone state you essentially age the brain more quickly uh so you sort of uh uh the the data look more and more like uh kind of a um a dementia like syndrome that happens in the brain that comes from likely low periods of low testosterone or low hormone levels in the brain. That serious? Yeah. Is that serious from your research you've been able to discover that it could? With that in mind, and I'm only asking as a devil's advocate here,

and by that I mean I'm the devil. I believe that perhaps, and I've gone on record with this, and there are a lot of arguments against it that I accept willingly. But why isn't there a push to find a way to make these agents safe, healthy, and be able to be utilized in a healthy way. I am not talking about in children. The developing brain is a minefield of uncertainty. You just can never know. I'm talking about for a professional athlete, why can't we find a way to make this safe and regulate it and say, here are the acceptable parameters in which you're able to use these agents?

Well, I think there are two reasons why that hasn't happened. One is because it's associated with cheating. Okay. So that initially will eliminate any of the kind of scientific investigation into that very question. Gotcha. Because if you try to answer, can this be safe, but safe for people who use it already to cheat to begin with, no one's going to fund that.

No one's going to support that kind of research, even if it's a good idea. Okay. Well, you know what? As succinctly as you have put that, that is the best answer that could be given. Hey, listen, you know, we got to wrap it up. Do me a favor just before we let you go. Give me just the, give me the one punctuated statement to keep me from sticking this needle in my butt

when this show is over. Because I got to tell you. You want to break a record? As far as I can tell, I'm ready to break some records. Doctor, let's stop him. Ask yourself if it's worth having early dementia in your 50s and cardiac problems so that all of that muscle that you're carrying around, you have a weak heart and a failing brain to carry it with you. All right. You know what? You've done your job because I already have a weak heart and a failing brain to carry it with you. All right. You know what? You've done your job because I already have a weak heart and a failing

brain. So I certainly don't need to make that. Let's not put it on the express train. Exactly. We don't have to exacerbate that situation. Hey, Tom, thanks so much, man. Great to have you on the show. Pleasure. Thank you. Anytime. I have to tell you that I started off, and we all know my position has been, I don't care. I just want to see home runs hit. I want to see the fastest football player on the field. I got to admit, slowly, I'm kind of changing my mind about this.

I don't know. From one doctor to another. Say goodbye to Dr. Tom Hildbrand, and thank you very much. And say hello to Dr. Arthur Kaplan, professor of bioethics at NYU, director of medical ethics division, author of The Ethics of Sport, and a man who I think, Chuck, is going to open your eyes even wider. Okay, let's see. Hey, Dr. Kaplan, how are you? Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Welcome. Thank you, Dr. Kaplan, for joining us. Before we get into anything, here's what I need to know. From an ethical standpoint, why is doping wrong?

Okay? And listen, the reason why I'm asking this, to be honest, is because I don't care. I don't care if my athlete is doped up, okay? I want my rock stars high on drugs, and I want my home run hitters juiced up. Okay. I don't care. I want my rock stars high on drugs and I want my home run hitters juiced up on steroids. I don't care. I do. Doping and steroids and a lot of other performance enhancement things are dangerous for athletes and might say, Hey, they take their, they make their choices. They take the risk, but kids do what athletes do. Young people do what athletes do. It doesn't take too long for all that stuff to hit the high school weight room or even

the elementary school training program. If the stars do it, people they admire do it, they'll do it. The earlier you do it, the worse the side effects. Second, it's just not fair. If you like sports and you like all your home run hitters doped up and half of them aren't, they can't compete, you know, against the rest. So either everybody's got to do it and you're sort of coercing the people who don't want to do it into saying, I got to do it because how am I going to compete against people who are on drugs or who have other advantages? Because how am I going to compete against people who are on drugs or who have other advantages? So one of it is danger, not just to the athlete, but to, you know, the people they look up, the people that look up to them. The other is basically a kind of coercion that once you take doping in, everybody's got to do it whether they like it or they don't like it.

Is there a simple one-stop shop that will cut all of it out? I don't think so. And in fact, it may get worse for a science reason that's pretty interesting. A lot of the doping now is drugs, maybe moving things like red blood cells, you know, moving them up in your body. But the future is genetic engineering. Yes. I was on the Olympic committee that met a couple years ago on gene engineering and athletes, just trying to look forward. The problem is,

if I start to tweak my genes, there are various ways to do it. Doesn't matter how, but I can. They'll make more chemicals, they'll make more substances, and it's all my stuff. That's right. That's undetectable at that point, because it's your own body creating what's necessary to improve your performance. With that in mind, this is what I want to know. Isn't that just called a fair advantage? Why not allow everyone to do something like that? There are some improvements. There's another issue here, which I want to compare the athletes of today to the athletes of yesterday, right? There's some of this notion of, is Babe Ruth better than Barry Bonds? But Barry Bonds, gee, he was steroidal. He had a head the size of

a pumpkin. Is that fair? On the other hand, we kind of know that Babe Ruth, I think, did pretty well at the bar. So, you know, everybody has their issues. But the idea being baseball cares about its history, its comparative statistics. You said at the beginning, I don't care what they're taking. If they jump as high as possible, I'm loving it. Well, some people like wrestling, pro wrestling. It becomes an exhibition at some point if the competition is about who's got the best pharmacist. But what we really have to think hard about is do we want to do things that encourage dangerous behavior?

That should be one standard, particularly in kids who emulate what the adults do. Do we want to do things that make the sport so distorted, people vaulting 50 feet that you know it's just exhibition now it's it's like some crazy steroidal weightlifting contest yeah you could do it but it's not a sport anymore and then are we going to make sure that everybody has a chance to do it even things like sleeping in those uh oxygen uh chambers the the tents that athletes use. Brazil uses them. Argentina uses them. They play these poor countries. They can't afford that technology. So they do better. I don't like that in my sports. I like it at least when what we try for is a level playing

field. Performance enhancement undercuts that. Last point quick, some of those bikes had tiny motors buried in them right it wasn't some of them some of them have been found to uh to carry motors in them yes so that's that's technique that's technical doping it's bike doping rather than the cyclist i don't like that again it's like you got a real advantage here you're cheating you're not transparent about it so another aspect of this drug issue or whatever the technology is, is you got to be open about it. If you're hiding it, that's trouble. And now listen, I'm with you on that. And listen,

that last example is clearly, I mean, that's the kind of assistance that you can't have. That is clearly cheating. That'd be like finding out that, you know, Michael Phelps had a propeller for a penis. I mean, it's not cool, okay? We just know that's- Thanks for that image. We just know that that's not cool. People did say he had big hands

and we know what Donald Trump is saying. Don't encourage him, doctor, please. And I'm with you about the genetic doping. That is the scary thing. It's, I mean, I've got- I'm for it. I am so for genetic doping, that is the scary thing. I mean, I've got all for it. I am so for genetic doping. Here's the way I feel.

There's already genetic doping. It happened in your lineage. Two people got together somewhere in the past, and they passed down those genes to you. Those genes came together in a certain combination that made you a phenom. That is genetic doping through natural selection as far as I'm concerned.

I'll tell you why you won't like this. One of the dirty secrets of science when it starts to look at sports is you're right. We're not rooting for effort. We're not rooting for training. We're rooting for subtle genetic differences. It's great that, you know, sprinter A goes faster than B, but it's probably mainly because of some biological difference in their muscle makeup. I kind of like to think they're trying harder. They trained harder. You know, sports is all about virtues. We like to see the ethics on display there. But if you're right, and I think you are, genetics plays a key role in who can do what. And it may undercut our admiration for athletes if we start to think, hey, we're just

rooting for the biologically lucky. But see, the thing is, this becomes a geographical disposition. So you can find gene variants in certain parts of West Africa and the Caribbean that are extra fast twitch and are naturally occurring. The thing that would just really kind of destroy me would be if all of a sudden I turned up, stuck a syringe in a guy and gave him that gene variant and off he goes at 3,000 miles an hour. That's really going to be a problem. Now, there is one proposed solution that everybody gets a genome passport, a biological passport with all of their coding on it. And then if all of a sudden I come along and stick that syringe in somebody's thigh, then

that change in their passport occurs. Are we close to that or is that just me? It's a great idea. It's probably the way to monitor genetic engineering in the future, but we're not there yet. There are so many small changes we don't understand that we can't really build that passport.

Maybe 20 years. Yeah, not today. Well, I have to say that the one thing that I agree with you on and that you have made a very cogent case for is the future of any sport in young people. And so that creates definitely a rift within my reasoning, because I have no answer for that whatsoever. So on that level, in that level alone, I'm with you guys, but everything else, screw that. Everything else,

I'm like, screw that, man. Back to the rock star doctor, Dr. Arthur Kaplan. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Dr. Arthur Kaplan, director of medical ethics at NYU and author of The Ethics of Sport. Make sure you check that book out. So, well, that's our show.

Thanks to our guests, and we mustn't forget. Of course, none other than Lance Armstrong himself and the man, the. And we mustn't forget. Of course, none other than Lance Armstrong himself and the man, the myth, and not the legend. Oh, no, the man, the legend, and not the myth, Neil deGrasse Tyson. So Chuck's mind's been changed. I wonder if yours has, regards doping.

I'm Gary O'Reilly. I'm Chuck Nice. And this has been Playing With Science. You know what we're going to say next. See you all soon.