#ICYMI: The Murky World of Doping in Sports

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=2 GooglePlay Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Iimke5bwpoh2nb25swchmw6kzjq SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/startalk_playing-with-science Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/startalk/playing-with-science TuneIn: http://www.tunein.com/playingwithscience NOTE: 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/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly

• 0:12Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice

• 0:13Gary O'Reilly?

  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 best for you. Some call it performance enhancement, others simply call it cheating.

• 0:30Chuck Nice?

  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 supple, 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?

• 0:56Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and bringing us their extensive expertise are 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 Hildebrandt, and medical ethicist and author of The Ethics of Sports, Dr Arthur Kaplan.

• 1:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, that's bases 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.

• 1:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh no, don't worry, I'm having somebody else pee in a cup for me.

• 1:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, that's that covered. Right, so we know people dope. We know athletes 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.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  Sexy!

• 2:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Isn't it just? So 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.

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:20Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 2:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Always seems to be a real problem, so we're gonna try and find out how we shorten the gap, if we can shorten the gap.

• 2:41Chuck Nice?

  If we can shorten the gap, and you know, these are all questions that, uh, that we'll discuss and, and, um, explore during this 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 a little...

• 2:58Gary O'Reilly?

  See, I know you feel...

• 2:59Chuck Nice?

  I feel a little differently.

• 3:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Let, let the world, let it go.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man.

• 3:02Gary O'Reilly?

  And what do you want?

• 3:03Chuck Nice?

  Hey, look, it's an arms race, okay? Uh, according to our latest president, who said about nuclear arms, let it be an arms race, you know, and I, I kinda feel like I want, I, I, 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.

• 3:20Gary O'Reilly?

  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 that, that, so, well, let's see.

• 3:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you feel that way.

• 3:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Two horses pulling in opposite directions.

• 3:34Chuck Nice?

  And here's the way I feel, you feel that way until you go back to watching baseball like it was in like nineteen sixty whatever, and like, you know, guys hit home runs like every other day, okay? We, we don't, you know, people say they want it, but you want the excitement, and that excitement comes at a cost, and for me, that cost is, is doping.

• 3:50Gary O'Reilly?

  We've seen such an enhancement in training methods.

• 3:52Chuck Nice?

  True.

• 3:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Understanding.

• 3:53Chuck Nice?

  True.

• 3:54Gary O'Reilly?

  The appliance of medical science legitimately.

• 3:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:57Gary O'Reilly?

  To an athlete, so we're able to do specific things to improve performance in, just in the biomechanics without introducing any chemical advantage. So, we are going to see a progression. What we're not gonna 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?

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  Hey, listen, that is the, the great point you're making there, and I'm, I can't say that I'm not in agreement with that, so, uh, you know what? Speaking of... Agreement disagreement, why don't we get into this show? Now it's time to bring in our first guest, Michael Shermer. Publisher of Skeptic Magazine and Scientific American columnist, who wrote a column titled "The Doping 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?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Hello, everybody. I'm doing well, thank you.

• 4:57Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Well, so these, and I've talked about this in the past, that generation, the problem was in cycling, you had, 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...

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Low octane enhancements.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so whatever.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One or two percent, if you're world-class and you just have to beat the one person, that'll do it.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Right, but assuming that everybody opts in for low octane, right? Which they did in the old days. But then what happened is somebody came along, Big Pharma, right? Came along with something that was high octane. And that was EPO, and that was not one or two percent, that was 10%. And so it was so great...

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  EPO...

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Eurythropoietin, so the red cell booster, which, you know, again, power, weight, oxygen, right? How you get that power is...

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this what they call the Edgar Allan Poe?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Well, that was the nickname we gave it back then, but yeah. 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 that that made that it it it's spread like wildfire and then everybody's faced with this uh this quandary like oh my god like what one or two percent you can almost manage that you could say you know what I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do that and I and I can still compete 10% then you're

• 6:59Speaker 02

  faced with the decision do I opt in or do I go home?

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  This is a lot to unpack there Michael and before we uh before we let you respond to that first of all let's give a little bit of cred to why you are um deemed um able to speak about this uh you were um starting in 1979 a um a cyclist you made the jump to cycling and you became a professional rider right?

• 7:25Michael Shermer?

  Yeah in the 1980s I competed in uh long distance cycling so I was one of the co-founders of the 3000 mile non-stop 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 you know I went across America 20 times total by biker car so I know the sport inside and out in the early in the uh 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

• 7:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:57Michael Shermer?

  Uh it was legal it wasn't even banned and everybody was doing it uh I 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 and that's really when the whole doping thing became an issue.

• 8:19Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 8:20Michael Shermer?

  As Lance noted you know that that 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 uh I mean it was just knowing everybody did it you had to do it uh it wasn't until the 80s and 90s that it became a thing to regulate uh and that's when it became a moral issue.

• 8:38Chuck Nice?

  So now let's talk about this um because 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?

• 8:56Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, what he's talking about there is, uh, for endurance athletes in particular, like cyclists, uh, the, the best thing you can have for performance enhancement is delivering oxygen to your muscles. So when he talked about power, weight and then oxygen, he's talking about, uh, once you've trained up to your maximum, uh, performance output, say, watt, watts per minute that you can push, uh, up a hill. Um, the only thing you could do, uh, to change your performance is to reduce your weight. So you're, you're, you're pushing less weight up the hill.

• 9:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Michael Shermer?

  And deliver more oxygen to the muscles, which is what EPO does. So EPO is a, um, a genetically, uh, modified form of erythropoietin, which is naturally in your body.

• 9:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 9:41Michael Shermer?

  That, that stimulates the production of red blood cells. So people that are anemic, they take this. We think probably around 91, 92 or so, uh, uh, the Amgen produced drug erythropoietin, or EPO was introduced into the modern, 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, uh, you have to do it. And when Lance is talking about 1%, well, what he meant was maybe I don't want to do the 1% 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

• 10:22Michael Shermer?

  was because it was probably between 7 and 10% performance difference and that you can't.

• 10:27Chuck Nice?

  So, so, 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?

• 10:40Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 10:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Gotcha.

• 10:42Michael Shermer?

  Dop- doping was part of cycling for decades. But the drugs they were doing probably didn't make that big a difference.

• 10:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I gotcha.

• 10:48Michael Shermer?

  Maybe blocking pain or just stimulants so you could keep going. But, but it didn't, it didn't make any difference on, on, you know, what you were actually doing on the bike. It was more off the bike recovery kind of stuff. What EPO did, and then also blood doping. I mean, blood doping is the same thing. You take your blood out.

• 11:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Michael Shermer?

  Uh, 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, uh, EPO does.

• 11:09Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's, but it's your own blood is what you're talking about, right?

• 11:12Chuck Nice?

  Always.

• 11:12Michael Shermer?

  Yes, yes, it's your own blood, right. But, but it's a little risky because it involves needles and, and storing blood for long periods of time.

• 11:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, okay.

• 11:21Michael Shermer?

  Blood cells automatically start dying the moment you take them out of your body.

• 11:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 11:24Michael Shermer?

  So you gotta preserve them and, and, and keep them, you know, fresh in a refrigerator somewhere, freezer maybe for a while. And then, and then deliver it back into your body. So you gotta, you gotta be, uh, agile with needles. And, you know, imagine these guys in hotel rooms, the bag of blood on the hook on the wall where they took the picture. I mean, it's just insane. And, you know, it gets contaminated. So there, there are risks.

• 11:44Gary O'Reilly?

  What other ways will a cyclist try and enhance their performance? Uh, okay, EPO? Uh, it's point, it's pointless getting the weight because that's destroying the old, the whole equation. So where else do they go?

• 11:57Michael Shermer?

  Well, that, well, really that was the game changer, the EPO. And that, and then once there was a test for EPO, so they shifted to just back 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 a- ahead of the drug. And all, and, and it will always be like that. And, uh, the, the biggest controversy now are these therapeutic use exemptions, TUEs, in which you get, um, uh, exemption from the racing organization that it's okay to take this particular drug because you have asthma or allergies. So the one that came out this year was thanks to the Russian hackers, the Fancy Bear hackers, in retaliation for the, uh, the hacking and, and release of their drug use.

• 12:41Michael Shermer?

  So it's a little bit of an arms race, uh, internationally. It, 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, and funny, they all got allergies and asthma just before the Tour de France.

• 12:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, of course. Michael, you're such a cynic.

• 13:02Michael Shermer?

  But if we analyze it from, the way I look at it is, from a scientist's 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?

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:16Michael Shermer?

  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, just thinking, then the pressure is on you to do it also. Because as Lance said, you know, 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'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. To, you know, "Okay, I'm not gonna dope, so I'm gonna go back and be a, you know, work on Wall Street." No, it's not like that.

• 13:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Michael, stay with us, we're gonna 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? Let's have a listen.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If everyone does it, and, 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?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Well...

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I could take it, and I'm not gonna win the Tour de France.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, the person still matters.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Right. The person still matters. The, there's a bunch of arguments here, okay? There's, there's, there's, 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 2,000, 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, every, I mean, it was the, it was the Wild, Wild West back then. You didn't have testing, you

• 15:12Speaker 02

  didn't have, these guys were, it was, 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 I say that because I think, I believe in my heart and soul that my rivals and my peers would support that.

• 15:35Chuck Nice?

  Okay, simple, Michael. That's a great, Michael, what do you think? Do you agree with Lance that he won seven Tour de France? And seriously, 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?

• 16:00Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, I think, I think he's right. If you asked, 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.

• 16:15Michael Shermer?

  You know, 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 doped, I can't say that. We don't know that for sure. But absolutely, virtually all of them, or almost all of them, or nearly, whatever adjective you want to use, certainly all the top ones.

• 16:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow, okay.

• 16:44Michael Shermer?

  Does that mean, it doesn't mean the level, the playing field was perfectly level because the doping is not a perfect art. It's a science that has some flexibility. So maybe, you know, one of the things that Lance did that was different from the previous dopers, doping programs, was he hired the best doctor, this McKelley 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, or 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 McKelley Ferrari guy did.

• 17:25Michael Shermer?

  So the problem is we'll never know for sure because you know can't rerun the experiment and where no one dopes and we see if Lance wins anyway. My guess 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 Oerke was on was pretty sophisticated. So their doping program was probably pretty good, probably the same as Lance's.

• 17:50Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that is, that's, that's, that's, that's big, that's big news man for me. I mean seriously, you've, you've really changed the way I thought, think about the entire situation. I mean I've, right with what you just said, I have a completely different mindset on the whole situation.

• 18:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so if everybody on, in, in road racing was doping, how do you feel if you're the guy that always came last?

• 18:15Chuck Nice?

  If, if I'm the guy.

• 18:16Michael Shermer?

  Well, here's the other aspect of it. Yeah, the, the things we don'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, like I talked to, for my, that article I wrote for Scientific American, 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, 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 just, on, 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, you know, just to stay in the race.

• 18:59Chuck Nice?

  Just to keep up.

• 19:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow. Michael, 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.

• 19:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back, I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 19:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Isn't he just?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:25Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is Playing with Science and today, we are diving deep into the murky terrain of performance enhancements, aka 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 American.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  And a man who has changed my entire perspective of the Tour de France in every single way. Unbelievable.

• 19:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Cyclists on rocket fuel.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  So I guess we should take a listen to another clip, right Gary?

• 20:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, 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.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  And I get that question a lot.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And is that different from sumo wrestlers? Who, so they're not, they're not lab chemically changed, but they're dietarily changed. So a sumo wrestler doesn't look like anybody else and they have shorter life expectancies. It affects their health.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Or a bodybuilder.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or bodybuilders. There's a whole other thing going on there and we pay to see that. Faster, higher, stronger.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  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, that's where, that's where I sit here as a father or as a friend.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  And I say, "Well, I don't know, my son plays football and he's a great football player and my little guy is gonna, who knows what he's gonna grow up to do? And I don't want him playing in that sport or playing in that..." System, so I I see it all. If you ask, if I got to vote, I'd say no, let's not do that.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if the public kind of wants it. I mean, we want to see records broken. It could, I'm just saying, I'm just wondering, I'm imagining a future where an entire Olympics goes by and not a single world record is set.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  I think, I think your average NFL fan doesn't care what what those athletes, I mean, look big, fast, strong.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Aggressive, they don't, 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 and the Twitter, it it it changed their view of that. But when they go back to watching football, they have the same view they have.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  So it's just different.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inexplicably.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Inexplicably. I can't explain it. You're the smart one. Maybe you can.

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  I'm going to explain it. And with all due respect to Lance Armstrong.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 22:49Chuck Nice?

  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, okay? 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 Captain America.

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 23:36Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no. So it's more offensive for you that he lied to his country rather than he performance enhanced?

• 23:43Chuck Nice?

  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 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.

• 24:01Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 24:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Michael, are you surprised at Lance's stance? From that interview?

• 24:33Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, actually I am. He's been 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, 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 you're NFL free, you know.

• 25:16Michael Shermer?

  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, Lance didn't do that. I think 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. Restorative justice, which is not a big thing in America. It's a bigger thing in Europe now.

• 25:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:42Michael Shermer?

  Where you want to restore the damage that was done. Now, so what brought Lance down was not the doping. They were doping before, they're still doping. They doped during Lance's time, you know, 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 justice, well, you know, he needs to make amends with the people he hurt, really. Help the sport clean up if that's what, you know, if he believes that and the sport still wants to do that, as opposed to legalizing it all, which I don't, 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 was, you know, I'm sorry I did what I did. It's hard for any of us to do that.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:23Michael Shermer?

  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.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Right. And I'm with you on that.

• 26:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's go to our last clip and take a listen to the last one of Neil's Little Questions with Lance himself.

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It reminds me of this skit on Saturday Night Live back in the eighties where they were making fun of all of the, you know, the doping. And they said, we're going to have a new event, a weightlifting 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. There's blood splurging out of his shoulders.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, that is, that's great on Saturday. That's just never gonna happen. By the way, too, the, the, the pressure, that, it won't happen because the, the government, the ultimate governing body, right? The International Olympic Committee, you know, all the individual sports committees, the media, the sponsors, they, they don't, they don't want that. So they'll, they, they will put enough pressure on that, that that, that will never happen.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it makes a good skit.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  It was a great skit. It was a great skit.

• 27:53Gary O'Reilly?

  There's another thing we've learned. Neil's a big fan of Saturday Night Live.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 27:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. Is Lance right there? I mean, yes, tremendous, tremendous athlete. We know he did some wrong things, seven times or more. But with his understanding of the whole, 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, want 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?

• 28:33Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, no, the drugs don't make that much of a difference. You rip your legs off and you're psyched.

• 28:39Gary O'Reilly?

  I hope not.

• 28:40Michael Shermer?

  And 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, on the genetic bell curve of, of performance without any drugs. I mean, and, 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. And 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, 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

• 29:23Michael Shermer?

  hard men. 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.

• 29:31Chuck Nice?

  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?

• 30:01Michael Shermer?

  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, you know, 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 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.

• 30:45Michael Shermer?

  Short of 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 send their kids to Harvard and they start them in kindergarten at some private schools, like, oh, come on.

• 31:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 31:10Michael Shermer?

  So 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.

• 31:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 31:19Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 31:27Gary O'Reilly?

  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 Hildebrandt and Dr. Arthur Kaplan. Arthur Kaplan is a professor at NYU of Medical Ethics and author of The Ethics of Sport. While, Tom Hildebrandt 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.

• 32:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back, I'm Gary O'Reilly. And I am Chuck Nice. 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 athlete's body, athlete's brain. And to do that, let's bring in Dr. Tom Hildebrandt, welcome to the show, Tom.

• 32:35Speaker 05

  Hi, how are you guys?

• 32:36Gary O'Reilly?

  We are good. Just so as people know, you're a clinical psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 32:44Gary O'Reilly?

  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 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.

• 33:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 33:14Gary O'Reilly?

  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? Hmm, good.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Well, I think what you do is you strip your, certainly your brain's natural ability to adapt to those situations. By manipulating it pharmacologically, you sort of, you take the, 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, a low dose, right? So it takes time for your system to catch back up and, and re-regulate itself. So either too high or too low, you end up in situations where you act outside of your normal behaviour.

• 33:57Chuck Nice?

  Hey, can you do me a favor?

• 33:58Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  What Gary just explained, uh, sounds absolutely frightening. I never really thought of it that way. Um, uh, so take us through that each, what the body and the brain is going through with each one. So the, we know about the oxygen to the bloodstream, but that, that we discussed already with Michael Shermer. So then you want to talk about adding on top of that, uh, the, the steroids for recovery. What does that do to you?

• 34:27Speaker 05

  Synthetic androgens, uh, as they hit the brain, they sort of, they occupy the primary receptors that male hormones work on.

• 34:34Chuck Nice?

  Ah, right.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  And depending on your, on your baseline, uh, development, uh, you're either more or less sensitive to those, uh, signals. Uh, if you think of what androgens do, they kind of, uh, uh, motivate people to act externally in the world. So, uh, they can provide energy, confidence, they make you feel, uh, really strong and impervious to pain. They also start to change the signaling, uh, in the opiate system. Uh, so part of that confidence or invincibility really comes from, uh, a true kind of knockout of, of pain signals that are coming up, uh, through the central nervous system. So what you have is a kind of a perfect storm of, of competitiveness. You have increased muscle strength, uh, and power, and you have a brain that's primed

• 35:19Speaker 05

  to feel less pain, uh, and act more aggressively outwardly, uh, on the world. Now take that away, when you take, uh, sort of that unnatural stimulation away, uh, all the, uh, the natural ability to sort of maintain those behaviors and that action, uh, fall with those, uh, reduced levels of, of male hormone.

• 35:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So Tom, um, all right. So we've decided we're building the perfect beast here, uh, 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 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?

• 36:13Speaker 05

  Sure. 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.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  And probably the most dangerous part of it are those withdrawal periods. If you have periods of time where you've cycled on the drug and then cycled off, you've gone into a low testosterone state, you essentially age the brain more quickly. So, you sort of, the data look more and more like kind of 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.

• 37:26Gary O'Reilly?

  That serious?

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Is that serious? From your research, you've been able to discover that it could...

• 37:31Chuck Nice?

  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 um 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 um uncertainty.

• 38:16Chuck Nice?

  You just can never know. I'm talking about for a professional athlete, um why can't we find a way to make this safe and regulated and say, here are the acceptable parameters in which uh you're able to use these agents?

• 38:31Speaker 05

  Well, I think there are two reasons why that hasn't happened. One, uh, it's because it's associated with cheating.

• 38:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:37Speaker 05

  So that that initially will eliminate any of the kind of scientific investigation into that very question.

• 38:43Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 38:44Speaker 05

  Because if you if you try to answer, can this be safe? But uh safe for people who use it already to cheat uh to begin with, uh, no one's going to fund that. No one's going to support that kind of research, even if it's a good idea.

• 38:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay, well, you know what? That's a you you I don't 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. Uh, give me, give me just the, give me, 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, uh. Want to break a record? As far as I can tell, I'm ready to break some records. Doctor, let's stop him.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  Sure. Ask yourself if it's worth um uh having early dementia uh in your 50s uh and cardiac problems so that all of that uh that muscle that you're carrying around, you have a weak heart uh and a failing brain uh to carry it with you.

• 39:45Chuck Nice?

  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 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, great to have you on the show. Pleasure. Thank you.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Anytime.

• 39:59Chuck Nice?

  I have to tell you that uh 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 gotta admit, slowly, I'm I'm kind of changing my mind about this. I don't know.

• 40:15Gary O'Reilly?

  From one doctor to another, say goodbye to Dr. Tom Hillbrand 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.

• 40:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let's see. Hey, Dr. Kaplan, how are you? Welcome to the show.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me.

• 40:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you're 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 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.

• 41:10Gary O'Reilly?

  I do.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  Doping and steroids and a lot of other performance enhancement things are dangerous for athletes. And you might say, hey, they take their, they make their choices, they take the risk, but kids do what athletes do.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Ah, okay.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  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. So if the stars do it, people they admire do it, they'll do it. And the earlier you do it, the worse the side effects. Second, it's just not fair. So 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 gotta do it 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 necessarily

• 42:06Speaker 06

  the athlete, but, 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.

• 42:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Is there a simple one-stop shop that will cut all of it out?

• 42:26Speaker 06

  I don't think so. And in fact, it may get worse for a science reason that's pretty interesting.

• 42:32Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:32Speaker 06

  A lot of the doping now is drugs, maybe moving, uh, things like red blood cells, you know, moving them up in your body. But the future is genetic engineering.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 42:42Speaker 06

  I was on the Olympic committee that met a couple of 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.

• 43:01Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 43:02Speaker 06

  So it's hard to detect.

• 43:03Chuck Nice?

  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?

• 43:21Speaker 06

  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. Um, uh, so, you know, everybody has their, their issues. But the idea being, baseball cares about its history, its comparative statistics.

• 43:52Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 43:52Speaker 06

  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.

• 44:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  Who emulate what the adults do.

• 44:18Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  And to do things that make the sport so distorted, people pole vaulting 50 feet, that, you know, it's just an 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 every- Everybody has a chance to do it, even things like sleeping in those oxygen chambers, the tents that athletes use.

• 44:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  You know, Brazil uses them, Argentina uses them. They play these poor countries, they can't afford that, that technology.

• 44:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 44:52Speaker 06

  So they do better. I don't like that in my sports. I like it at least when the, what we try for is a level playing field, performance enhancement undercuts that. Last point quick. You know, some of those bikes had tiny motors buried in them, right?

• 45:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, some of them, some of them have been found to, to carry motors in them. Yes. So that's, that's technical doping. It's bike doping rather than the cyclist.

• 45:15Speaker 06

  So 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 gotta be open about it. If you're hiding it, that's trouble.

• 45:29Chuck Nice?

  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 just, it's not cool. Okay. We just know that's.

• 45:47Gary O'Reilly?

  That image.

• 45:49Chuck Nice?

  We just know that that's not cool. You know.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  People did say he had big hands and we know it's not a problem.

• 45:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't encourage him, doctor, please.

• 45:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And I'm with you about the genetic doping. That is the scary thing. It's, I mean, I've got.

• 46:05Chuck Nice?

  I'm for it. I am so for genetic doping. I am so, I, 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.

• 46:29Speaker 06

  I'll tell you why you won't like this. One of the dirty secrets of science, when it starts to look at sports. Okay. 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 kinda 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.

• 47:13Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:26Gary O'Reilly?

  The thing that would, 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 from, 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.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you'll, you'll see, you'll see the mutation.

• 47:56Gary O'Reilly?

  That change in their passport occurs. Are we close to that? Or is that just me?

• 48:01Speaker 06

  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.

• 48:15Chuck Nice?

  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 and that level alone, I'm with you guys, but everything else, screw that. Everything else, I'm like, screw that, man. So.

• 48:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Back to the rock star. Doctor, Doctor Arthur Kaplan. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Doctor 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.

• 48:59Chuck Nice?

  There it is.

• 49:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Thanks to our guests and we mustn't forget.

• 49:02Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 49:11Gary O'Reilly?

  So Chuck's mind's been changed. I wonder if yours has regards doping. I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 49:16Chuck Nice?

  I'm Chuck Nice.

• 49:17Gary O'Reilly?

  And this has been Playing with Science. You know what we're going to say next. See you all soon.