Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. I'm Chris Guyamali This is Superhuman.
Speaker 1: I did a ton of interviews over the course of
Speaker 1: this series, and one that really informed how I think
Speaker 1: about this whole world was my conversation with doctor Mike Isertel.
Speaker 1: Mike has a PhD in sports physiology, co founded the
Speaker 1: fitness company ARP Strength, and is a competitive bodybuilder and
Speaker 1: Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt. He's also one of the
Speaker 1: most candid voices on the Internet when it comes to
Speaker 1: what performance enhancement actually feels like from the inside. We
Speaker 1: didn't talk about whether steroids are good or bad. We
Speaker 1: had a conversation about what steroids do to your body,
Speaker 1: to your mind, your recovery, your mood, your relationships, and
Speaker 1: your judgment. We also get into where he thinks all
Speaker 1: of this is heading, and his answer might surprise you.
Speaker 1: He's not a cheerleader for the status quo. He thinks
Speaker 1: the entire category of anabolic steroids may be obsolete within
Speaker 1: a decade, and he makes a pretty interesting case for why.
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, my name is doctor my Chisratel. I have
Speaker 2: a PhD in sport physiology. I've been a professor at
Speaker 2: several major institutions and talk courses like nutrition, exercise science
Speaker 2: courses or some training courses. I'm a co founder of
Speaker 2: the company RB Strength, and I regularly produce content for
Speaker 2: social media that attempts to educate people about how to
Speaker 2: get more jacked, more lean, and have a little bit
Speaker 2: of farm while we're.
Speaker 1: Doing in, Mike, thanks so much for doing this. Man,
Speaker 1: So little background on us for both martial arts bros.
Speaker 1: So you have taken over both of our algorithms in
Speaker 1: very powerful ways online.
Speaker 2: That sucks. I'm sorry, No, it's.
Speaker 1: Good shit, man. Yeah, if you don't mind, can you
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about your basic athletic background.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I was born in Moscow, Russia, in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty four, and my first involvement with sport was playing
Speaker 2: soccer indoors in Russia. When I was younger, I really
Speaker 2: liked to wrestle my friends and stuff, and eventually that
Speaker 2: led me to start wrestling. In high school, I played
Speaker 2: basketball recreationally, but at three intersections of Jewish, five foot
Speaker 2: six and on athletic basketball didn't really work for me.
Speaker 2: I had aspirations of a career, and so I took
Speaker 2: to wrestling pretty decently. Wrestled in high school, and then
Speaker 2: I started lifting for wrestling, fell in love with lifting,
Speaker 2: powerlifted competitively in college, and then started bodybuilding competitively when
Speaker 2: I was in my PhD program, and then after a PhD,
Speaker 2: got my first professor job at the University of Central Missouri,
Speaker 2: where during the interview process I met a future would
Speaker 2: be a great friend of mine, doctor Jen Case, and
Speaker 2: she was already highly competitive of jiu jitsu. And so
Speaker 2: I started my jiu jitsu journey when I was twenty
Speaker 2: nine years old something like that. Wow, And two years
Speaker 2: ago ish I got promoted to black belt in jiu jitsu.
Speaker 2: And so wrestling, powerlifting, bodybuilding, and britiller jiu jitsu that
Speaker 2: I think is most of my athletic competitive careers.
Speaker 1: How did you get into powerlifting in the first place?
Speaker 2: I was bench pressing at the Jewish Community Center in
Speaker 2: metropolitan Detroit and there was a local gentleman named Bill
Speaker 2: who was a competitive powerlifter. Once he saw me bench
Speaker 2: and he was like, hey, like, you know, if you
Speaker 2: have talent, he could actually like learn to bench press.
Speaker 2: And I was like, teach me, please, and he just
Speaker 2: taught me how to arch and retract, which is like
Speaker 2: the two things most people don't know about bench pressing,
Speaker 2: and that unlocks like fifty pounds on your bench within
Speaker 2: a few weeks. And he's like, I'm going to teach
Speaker 2: you how to do this. Here are all the principles.
Speaker 2: Took five minutes, and he's like, it's your The bench
Speaker 2: is going to go down at first, and it's going
Speaker 2: to go way, way way up. And I was like, okay, cool.
Speaker 2: I bit the bullet and then I learned how to bench,
Speaker 2: and my bench went down and then it went up, up, up, up,
Speaker 2: up up. I looked up some Federation records and I
Speaker 2: realized it could break like a Federation world record with
Speaker 2: my bench press when I was nineteen that was benching
Speaker 2: like three sixty three seventy raw at look one hundred
Speaker 2: and eighty ish pounds. So I went competed in bench
Speaker 2: press only competition, broke that Federation record and it was
Speaker 2: really fun and I was really jealously that the other
Speaker 2: guys got to squad and deadlift to two. I was
Speaker 2: full send into powerlifting for like four years after that.
Speaker 1: Holy shit, man, what's your pr now for the bench?
Speaker 2: My PR for the bench is three hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: pounds Jesus Graze.
Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, amazing.
Speaker 2: It's not amazing at all for my size and the
Speaker 2: amounto of steroids. But I do like that you say
Speaker 2: that I had chest injury when I was powerlifting and
Speaker 2: it prevented me from really getting as good at benching
Speaker 2: as I would have liked.
Speaker 1: Were the injuries sort of your entry point to being
Speaker 1: curious about steroids and peds?
Speaker 2: It was really the fact that when my friends and
Speaker 2: I were coming up and being fans of bodybuilding, before
Speaker 2: we ever did any bodybuilding, the predominant media around bodybuilding
Speaker 2: was of enhanced bodybuilders. And that's just something we thought, like,
Speaker 2: you just get some point, you just become enhanced. That's
Speaker 2: just what you do, and so that's just what we did.
Speaker 2: It was as body simple as that. You know. It's like,
Speaker 2: you know, Michael Jordan wears basketball shoes. Eventually you have
Speaker 2: enough money, you buy basketball shoes.
Speaker 1: Do you remember what the first ped that you tried was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, testosterone and anthete at five hundred milligrams per week.
Speaker 1: Oh wow? And what did that do to your body
Speaker 1: and your mind? After a week or so of trying it?
Speaker 2: After a week or so, it did absolutely nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: several weeks in the first thing I felt was that
Speaker 2: my work capacity was really substantially higher. My recovery ability
Speaker 2: was higher, both acutely and chronically. So I have a
Speaker 2: distinct memory of doing I think it was like bent
Speaker 2: over rose, and typically, like after four or five sets
Speaker 2: of rows, I would just be like systemically very tired,
Speaker 2: like ugh that feeling. And then I remember that a
Speaker 2: few weeks of maybe a month or two on steroids,
Speaker 2: I had done multiple sets of bent rows, and I
Speaker 2: was like, I feel fine, I could just keep going,
Speaker 2: and I did, and so I was like, whoa, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's different. And then the next thing I felt was
Speaker 2: right clinical grade health anxiety. So I would hear my
Speaker 2: own heartbeat as I was falling asleep, and I was like,
Speaker 2: this is for sure like my last heartbeat. Ever, so
Speaker 2: the anxiety was like, look insane and has persisted for
Speaker 2: a long time.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. And then what did sort of like
Speaker 1: layering on new like treatments look like after that for you?
Speaker 2: So I got into some eq equipoise. I think that
Speaker 2: was like an extra three hundred milligrams on top of that,
Speaker 2: so it's eight hundred total and I had done a
Speaker 2: fat loss phase during that time when I lost zero
Speaker 2: strength during the fat loss phase, and at the end
Speaker 2: of that phase, it was like the first time in
Speaker 2: my life I had ever seen a semblance of abdominal
Speaker 2: musculature and I was like, WHOA, that's neat. That never
Speaker 2: happened before. And then a little bit after that, I
Speaker 2: tried some Trend because I was hanging out mostly with
Speaker 2: powerlifters and they just had really prepread simple way of
Speaker 2: doing things. The first time I tried TRENT, I did
Speaker 2: seventy five milligrams of Trend in one injection because that's
Speaker 2: just what you did every other day. It was kind
Speaker 2: of starting dose and I had unbelievable maybe panic attack
Speaker 2: is how you could call it. Like I was very
Speaker 2: aware of it's going on, but I remember feeling a
Speaker 2: sensation of imminent death, like I knew I was going
Speaker 2: to die real soon. I didn't know it logically, but
Speaker 2: I felt that I was going to die really soon.
Speaker 2: And this happened like twenty four hours injecting. So I
Speaker 2: actually went home and got my laptop open and just
Speaker 2: started journaling my thoughts. I was like, whoa, this is
Speaker 2: this is a neat don't want to feel like this
Speaker 2: for much longer. And I talked to a friend of
Speaker 2: mine who was a neuroscientist, and I was like, dude,
Speaker 2: it's crazy. Seventy five is the starter dose, but for
Speaker 2: me it's nuts. I was like, I should maybe cut
Speaker 2: it in half, and he goes, why don't you cut
Speaker 2: it in a quarter? I was like, eighteen seventy five
Speaker 2: are not so nobody does that. He's like, try it.
Speaker 2: I tried it. I was able to do eventually. So
Speaker 2: I did that for two weeks, and then I did
Speaker 2: another week and a half or so at thirty seven five.
Speaker 2: That really eased me in and I remember losing like
Speaker 2: a like a visible amount of body fat while on
Speaker 2: trend in just three three and a half weeks. I
Speaker 2: was like, WHOA, Holy shit. And I felt very, very
Speaker 2: different strength wise. There's lots I can talk about how
Speaker 2: the sensation of being on PDS feels a little different.
Speaker 2: I had another experience with anavar a little bit later,
Speaker 2: which was similar as far as how strength feels when
Speaker 2: you're on drugs, and so that to me, it was like,
Speaker 2: holy crap. And so I messed around with test and
Speaker 2: NPP adrelum FENL propionate and trend and EQ. For several
Speaker 2: years with I was putting on plenty of muscle, but
Speaker 2: I didn't really know what I was doing drug wise,
Speaker 2: and I would absolutely not recommend taking that specific path
Speaker 2: for people who want to enhancemen.
Speaker 1: Why where are you getting your information from? Was it
Speaker 1: from online or from people that you knew a.
Speaker 2: Little bit online, a little bit people that I knew
Speaker 2: prior combination of the two, and a lot of internal
Speaker 2: reasoning to see what ideas had coherence and what ideas didn't.
Speaker 2: As a either online or in person, when you talk
Speaker 2: to any one source or read any one source, you
Speaker 2: can take sort of two things from it. At least
Speaker 2: one is the actual literal information, and the other is
Speaker 2: the degree at which that information has two kinds of coherence.
Speaker 2: One is internal coherence and the other is external coherence.
Speaker 2: So internal coherence means, like, somebody gives you a paragraph
Speaker 2: about drugs, here's how train works. If the internal coherence
Speaker 2: is low, you're like, there are parts of this paragraph
Speaker 2: that contradict other parts, and actually the whole thing's largely
Speaker 2: fucking not. And so you're like, okay that I'm going
Speaker 2: to heavily discount this source because it doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: this person is somebody who's making any sense. If it
Speaker 2: high eternal coherence, you're like, well, okay, so in this
Speaker 2: little paragraph everything blidens up. And then external coherence would
Speaker 2: be like, what about like how this lines up with
Speaker 2: other things I've heard? Low external coherence would be like
Speaker 2: it just really contradicts other things that I've heard. High
Speaker 2: external coherence would be like, ah, actually makes a lot
Speaker 2: of sense in the brand scheme. And then a kind
Speaker 2: of applied coherence, and the last one is real world
Speaker 2: coherence is like, actually does this match my own experience
Speaker 2: in how things work? Because once you do drugs for
Speaker 2: long enough, you like start to know how things feel
Speaker 2: and how things react. You get a really really good
Speaker 2: sense of like in the real world, though, is this
Speaker 2: going to work? Because people say all kinds of things
Speaker 2: about enhancement, and a bunch of them are like super
Speaker 2: spot on, and a bunch of them are like that
Speaker 2: this person is hypothesizing or had a very rare case
Speaker 2: and it does not generalize. And so based on kind
Speaker 2: of judging coherence and taking information from real humans and
Speaker 2: from four on people and reading like a blog post
Speaker 2: and websites like meso rx dot com. Back in the day,
Speaker 2: they had like article entries for each kind of steroids.
Speaker 2: So I consumed a lot of that, and I was
Speaker 2: kind of building my world model of like what do
Speaker 2: steroids do, what do they not do? How to properly
Speaker 2: use them? And that's kind of how I went about it.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit more about the strength you
Speaker 1: were feeling. Did you feel like a superhero, Like what
Speaker 1: did your body sort of feel like?
Speaker 2: I would say more like a supervillain than a superhero.
Speaker 2: I was on Alexandra Loan an of Ar, and I
Speaker 2: was doing the hack squats and it was nearing what
Speaker 2: I thought was failure, and then I realized, like with gear.
Speaker 2: Funny enough, it's called gear, I had like a second
Speaker 2: gear I could switch into, and I just started pushing harder.
Speaker 2: And I realized two things. One I could just keep going,
Speaker 2: so I just kept doing reps. And the other was
Speaker 2: the degree of perceptive tension I felt in my muscles,
Speaker 2: Like the tension in my quads got to be so
Speaker 2: high that I instantly had a realization of, ooh, this
Speaker 2: is how people tear muscles off bones when they're on steroids,
Speaker 2: Because like The amount of tension I was feeling was
Speaker 2: like nothing I had ever willfully imposed on myself. And
Speaker 2: I'd competed in powerlifting, I'd squad of five hundred for
Speaker 2: reps by then, and I still never fought my quads
Speaker 2: contract that hard. And so I stopped the set because
Speaker 2: I was like, it's dumb. This could be really bad.
Speaker 2: And so from then on I really started to respect
Speaker 2: the amount of OO you can get out of your
Speaker 2: muscles if you're enhanced. From then on, I capped my
Speaker 2: relative effort pretty decently how hard you work in anyone's set,
Speaker 2: because I realized that it's those tail end two or
Speaker 2: three reps that have a much higher chance of injuring
Speaker 2: you if you're enhanced, and you can just flip that
Speaker 2: switch and just go crazy.
Speaker 1: Are muscle tears pretty common if you're on steroids.
Speaker 2: Much more common than they are when all of steroids.
Speaker 2: There are two factors largely that account for that. One
Speaker 2: factor is that when you're stronger, your muscles are stronger,
Speaker 2: and they're pulling on your attendance, and they can just
Speaker 2: pull a higher force, and so they have of like
Speaker 2: a higher probability of breaking those other structures anytime anyone stronger,
Speaker 2: the probability of injury goes up if they're pushing themselves.
Speaker 2: The probability of injury going goes down in all of
Speaker 2: like standard life tasks, because those have a certain level
Speaker 2: of strength requisite that's just stable. So like probability you
Speaker 2: get hurt falling goes down exponentially as you get stronger,
Speaker 2: you're just the same you and you fall the same distance,
Speaker 2: and then your muscles are stronger, tendons are stronger, But
Speaker 2: the probability you get hurt bench pressing exponentially skyrockets when
Speaker 2: you go from three hundred pound bench to four one
Speaker 2: pound bench to five hundred pound bench. Every six hundred
Speaker 2: pound bench is testing the limits of am I going
Speaker 2: to pop my packs today? And the other reason is
Speaker 2: the steroids can radically increase the strength and size of
Speaker 2: your muscles, but they don't increase the strength and size
Speaker 2: of your connective tissues like your tendons, nearly as fast.
Speaker 2: And so especially if you're early into a steroid cycho,
Speaker 2: you're going very heavy, it's just been a few weeks
Speaker 2: and your strength is escalating really fast. That probability that
Speaker 2: your muscles are now so much stronger than your tendons
Speaker 2: and so absolutely strong, and it multiplies together and forms
Speaker 2: a little perfect storm for evulsion injury where your muscles tear,
Speaker 2: come off the bone and all that other stuff. I mean,
Speaker 2: one gentleman at a gym UM's training in North Carolina,
Speaker 2: he took his bench from three point fifteen for one
Speaker 2: rep max to four h five for one rep max
Speaker 2: in one month, which is an outlier even for a trend,
Speaker 2: but possible. If I were him, I would have never
Speaker 2: attempted four o five after a month, because that is
Speaker 2: like the exact case, Chris, where like that's how you
Speaker 2: tear your shit, because think about it, your tendons adapt
Speaker 2: on months and years of timescale in not weeks. And
Speaker 2: so he's roughly the same tendon strength as he had
Speaker 2: a month ago, but his muscles were exhibiting a strength
Speaker 2: that was twenty five thirty percent higher. You're asking for it.
Speaker 2: He didn't get hurt, but everyone who doesn't get hurt
Speaker 2: is a testament to the fact that absolute risk of
Speaker 2: injury and the gym is very low. The relative risk
Speaker 2: when you're on a shipload of drugs is much much higher.
Speaker 1: Is there a story that comes to top of mind
Speaker 1: for you? About feeling more aggressive or particularly anxious after
Speaker 1: you've been taking this stuff.
Speaker 2: It was headed to the gym quite recently and just
Speaker 2: taken long oral anavar or alexandrium, and I was driving
Speaker 2: to the gym, and the var hits pretty fast, especially
Speaker 2: if the tablet dissolves in your mouth, and so it
Speaker 2: was kind of like a like a little rocket ride
Speaker 2: you go on. And I was listening to a podcast
Speaker 2: and it got me thinking about somebody totally unrelated, and
Speaker 2: that totally unrelated thought process made me angry, and I
Speaker 2: just spent like twenty minutes in a car fuming, super
Speaker 2: fucking pissed. And I was aware, very very coherently at
Speaker 2: the time that this was pharmacologically induced, but the thought
Speaker 2: stream of angry thoughts just kept going nonetheless and was
Speaker 2: very uncomfortable. And so at the same time that I'm
Speaker 2: experiencing this anger, I'm experiencing a tremendous amount of anxiety
Speaker 2: about the lift I have coming up. I was hurt
Speaker 2: the time, like had a back injury, and so I
Speaker 2: didn't even know if like the libror god I was
Speaker 2: driving to was even gonna happen, or if I was
Speaker 2: going to discover like oh shit, like I can't train
Speaker 2: for a little while because of myron shift fucked up.
Speaker 2: So it was just absolutely nothing fun about that whatsoever.
Speaker 2: That's how it felt. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: Have any of those episodes hit you while you were
Speaker 1: training jiu jitsu?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What was that like?
Speaker 2: Better? Because jiu jitsu allows you to express some of
Speaker 2: that better but also sometimes worse. The degree of impatience
Speaker 2: than I have rises when on steroids, and the degree
Speaker 2: anxiety rises, and I remember drilling and just just kind
Speaker 2: of wanting everything to be over, like I just don't
Speaker 2: want to fucking be here at me anywhere. And that's
Speaker 2: like not really a good attitude to have for training sport.
Speaker 2: And then one time I was peeking for a bodybuilding
Speaker 2: show and I was taking in a steroid called floximesterone Halo
Speaker 2: testom aka halo Halo's not something else ever take again
Speaker 2: very likely because it makes me really really angry, but
Speaker 2: not anxiously angry, righteously angry. And so I remember I
Speaker 2: had I was a white belt, and I had passed
Speaker 2: somebody's guard in the gee and went to me on belly.
Speaker 2: My first thought that I had was, oh, I should
Speaker 2: reach down and open up their rib cage like that
Speaker 2: was actually like a thought that entered into my mind
Speaker 2: that you should do that. And obviously, as I had
Speaker 2: that thought, I was like, what the why why it's
Speaker 2: not a jiu jitsu move. It's wildly and realistic. It
Speaker 2: would kill this person. Everything's wrong with that. They can
Speaker 2: be wrong with it, And I was like, holy shit,
Speaker 2: that's a that's an interesting thought. But the amount of
Speaker 2: like dedication and energy for passing guard that I got
Speaker 2: from Halo was like monumental. Like you ever rolled with
Speaker 2: someone and they're like trying to pass your guard and
Speaker 2: you're like, can't they just give up? Like can't they
Speaker 2: just get tired? And with Halo, you don't really feel
Speaker 2: like giving up or getting tired. You're just like a
Speaker 2: door jam, just blood them to the fucking door. And
Speaker 2: you know, there's a reason that lots of people in
Speaker 2: the tasteteroids, you know, enough steroids will give you kind
Speaker 2: of confidence to some extent, like you know, some people
Speaker 2: get like precomic anxiety, like they'll see the other guy
Speaker 2: across the way and you know, like you're registering at
Speaker 2: your table or whatever in competition, because you know, people
Speaker 2: will get some thoughts about doubt and stuff like that, like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm that guy, Like he's got old team and he's
Speaker 2: got a bunch of stripes on his belt and what
Speaker 2: the same belt ring. Maybe he's a killer, you know
Speaker 2: that thought like that, maybe he's a killer thought or whatever.
Speaker 2: And like, if you're on enough steroids and you have
Speaker 2: pretty decent sports psychology, it's easy to get in the
Speaker 2: mind frame of like, dude, this fucking chump made a
Speaker 2: stupid decision signing up for my bracket, and I'm gonna
Speaker 2: show him why. It's really offensive to me that he
Speaker 2: decided to come here like he shouldn't have and he's
Speaker 2: going to be in a real nasty, nasty world as
Speaker 2: soon as possible. And so if you have that kind
Speaker 2: of mindset, if you're also good, it can help. So
Speaker 2: however good you are, that kind of confidence mindset of
Speaker 2: like fuck this chump, that helps, and you know that's like, uh,
Speaker 2: that's cool. I guess it's not fun, but it works.
Speaker 1: So Wow, when you had that thought about wanting to rip,
Speaker 1: you know, your training partner's rib cage open, what was
Speaker 1: your reaction in that moment? Did you pause and bow
Speaker 1: out or did you keep going?
Speaker 2: I just went chest to chest and went north south
Speaker 2: and started asserting kee chokes. It's like, know what I'm doing,
Speaker 2: But I was kind of giggling in my head like whoa,
Speaker 2: that was weird. It was like surreal, you know, like
Speaker 2: holy fuck. It's like, you know, if you're on mushrooms
Speaker 2: and you're at a gas station getting a drink and
Speaker 2: the person the band encounter looks like their head looks
Speaker 2: like the sun or something, you're unlikely to just be like, oh,
Speaker 2: oh sorry, I don't want to drink from the sun.
Speaker 2: Your pie is still like, oh, here's my credit card,
Speaker 2: while you're like, oh my god, I just don't say anything,
Speaker 2: and you walk out and you're like, oh, like I
Speaker 2: just see that guy's face and just yeah, it look crazy,
Speaker 2: and you like just laugh about it, like that's kind
Speaker 2: of how it felt. It wasn't like it didn't throw
Speaker 2: me off or anything like that, and it's just like
Speaker 2: a little blip in the radar, like, oh that's interesting.
Speaker 1: So, you know, the sort of stuff is becoming a
Speaker 1: little bit more normalized throughout the fitness wellness industry in
Speaker 1: no small part like thanks to your influence and your
Speaker 1: curiosity and willingness to experiment where are you sort of
Speaker 1: hoping to see usage like this take the industry as
Speaker 1: a whole.
Speaker 2: I hope it's going to end within a few years,
Speaker 2: and I think it will. I think it's a high
Speaker 2: probability it will. Steroids are a hammer when you need tweezers.
Speaker 2: What we want from steroids typically maybe an enormous faction
Speaker 2: of what we wanted as steroids is muscle growth, just
Speaker 2: skeletal muscle hypertrophy. What we get from them is a
Speaker 2: hormone that wasn't simply designed to enhance scale of a
Speaker 2: muscle hypertrophy.
Speaker 1: Can you briefly explain how hypertrophy works?
Speaker 2: So basically like, you have a variety of mechanisms in
Speaker 2: your muscles that sends a few things and respond by
Speaker 2: telling the muscle to grow more of itself. The number
Speaker 2: one of these mechanisms is mechanical tension detectors. Your body
Speaker 2: detects that there's a lot of mechanical tension and a
Speaker 2: given muscle, it kind of gives the signal to the
Speaker 2: rest of the cell, different parts like the nucleus, like hey, yeah,
Speaker 2: let's start growing some more muscle. And if you get
Speaker 2: this in a high signal like not just one rep,
Speaker 2: but multiple reps, not just one step, with multiple sets,
Speaker 2: and when you're recovered enough halfway through the week to
Speaker 2: do another multiple sets again, you get this repeated, consistent
Speaker 2: signal grow Grow, Grow, Grow, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: you're getting more jacked. And that's kind of a core
Speaker 2: of how I purchase it works. So you resistant strain,
Speaker 2: lift heavy things, impose mechanical tension, and then if you
Speaker 2: eat enough protein and calories, then you get more jacked
Speaker 2: over several months, and then if you keep going several
Speaker 2: years and so on, so forth. The testosterone hormone is
Speaker 2: designed to do one very specific things to masculinize an
Speaker 2: entire organism, and that means grow hair, increase the amount
Speaker 2: of oil secreted by the skin, deep in the voice,
Speaker 2: give you more male like thoughts, aggression, lower verbal fluency,
Speaker 2: all these things that just have absolutely nothing to do
Speaker 2: with muscle growth. And so what we're looking at now,
Speaker 2: who's a very different environment where aipowered drug discovery is
Speaker 2: going to be like the big story of the late
Speaker 2: twenty twenties. And so we're also in this world where
Speaker 2: we have this incredible constant proof of concept with the
Speaker 2: weight loss drugs that have recently come up, so like
Speaker 2: ozenpic and Manjaro and all those other drugs, and so
Speaker 2: it was possible to get drugs that does like a
Speaker 2: really really good job of promoting fat loss and it
Speaker 2: just doesn't have a ton of side effects compared to
Speaker 2: steroids via long shot, and so because of that principle,
Speaker 2: the pharmaceutical aspect of the medical field is kind of
Speaker 2: starting to turn its eye of sauron towards non androgenic anabolics,
Speaker 2: which are drugs that would increase scalt and muscle like
Speaker 2: pertrop fee, but have a very few side effects, very
Speaker 2: specific targeting, and they're going to crack that. They've probably
Speaker 2: already cracked it in the lab, and it's just a
Speaker 2: matter of getting through animal trials and then human trials,
Speaker 2: and these non androgenic anabolics are going to be an
Speaker 2: unbelievable revolution for athletes and for people who just want
Speaker 2: to be more jacked, because then I suspect most people
Speaker 2: that are thinking it through will end up being on
Speaker 2: testosterone replacement therapy, So just just enough testosterume to make
Speaker 2: you feel better and be healthier, which is like a
Speaker 2: much an arrow arrange that people take for enhancement, and
Speaker 2: then the rest of your anabolic drive will come from
Speaker 2: these drugs that will have ten times fewer side effects
Speaker 2: then steroids. And I think these drugs are going to
Speaker 2: hit the gray market. I would say, if I had
Speaker 2: to guess, slash Hope, maybe twenty twenty eight or so.
Speaker 2: Kind of the real golden fleece would be an oral,
Speaker 2: small molecule, non rogenic anabolic, which means you could just
Speaker 2: take a pill, means it survives the digestion process, it
Speaker 2: doesn't screw up your liver or something, and it just
Speaker 2: grows muscle and does almost nothing else. The medical incentive
Speaker 2: and the pharmaceutical profit incentive for discovering such drugs is
Speaker 2: not only massive, but it's been well described in the literature.
Speaker 2: Because now we have older people that are using these
Speaker 2: weight loss drugs, and they're amazing for their health, but
Speaker 2: they're losing tons of muscle. And you can tell them
Speaker 2: to lift weights and eat more protein. That absolutely helps,
Speaker 2: But they're already using a drug to help them lose weight.
Speaker 2: Might as well use a drug to help them keep
Speaker 2: the muscle on. And so I think these drugs are inevitable,
Speaker 2: and I think they could do an unbelievable thing for
Speaker 2: the sport community because they're going to make people stop
Speaker 2: or curtail their use of steroids that are fucking poisonous
Speaker 2: and destroying your body and your mind and replace the
Speaker 2: most drugs that are just categorically better. I think that's
Speaker 2: coming really soon. They are likely to have probably zero
Speaker 2: psychological effects. They probably won't have any effects on cardiac tissue.
Speaker 2: It's probably not going to be much involvement with heart,
Speaker 2: there's probably going to be no involvement or minimal involvement
Speaker 2: with liver and kidneys, and probably not going to be neurodegenerative,
Speaker 2: like many steroids are in high amounts. I predict in
Speaker 2: the late twenty twenties, you leve older folks taking a
Speaker 2: combination of them most advanced weight loss drugs of the
Speaker 2: time and in combination with the most advanced or available
Speaker 2: non entergamic kindabolic charities at the time, and like over
Speaker 2: the course of like six months to a year, you'll
Speaker 2: see lots of people drop twenty to thirty pounds of
Speaker 2: fat and add ten to fifteen pounds of muscle at
Speaker 2: the same time. I mean, that's just like a total transformation,
Speaker 2: and health wise, it's just going to be a total renaissance.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about when you first heard about the Enhanced
Speaker 1: Games and what they were trying to do, and what
Speaker 1: your first impression of, you know, this whole experiment was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's wonderful. I was really really pleased
Speaker 2: somebody's trying to do this sort of thing, because I
Speaker 2: remember we had like a seminar class in my master's
Speaker 2: program where it was to kind of debate format, and
Speaker 2: I took the position that there should be an enhanced
Speaker 2: Olympics or a non tested Olympics and a tested Olympics.
Speaker 2: I thought it was just split into two, but I
Speaker 2: think it's At some points I was the only person
Speaker 2: in a class of like thirty people who is our
Speaker 2: being my position, and I thought I had made some
Speaker 2: pretty compelling points, at least in my own head, and
Speaker 2: so I thought it was kind of an open and
Speaker 2: shutcase that enhanced competition was not just better for the
Speaker 2: overall state of competition, but it was actually better for
Speaker 2: natural competition because you no longer had to do this
Speaker 2: pretend like so currently the Olympics is mostly pretend. We
Speaker 2: pretend that the athletes are drug free. They pretend they're
Speaker 2: drug free. The testing committee pretends it's ahead of the curve.
Speaker 2: It's almost never ahead of the curve. If you had
Speaker 2: an untested federation all the Olympics, you could just be like,
Speaker 2: look checks out, you get popped for drugs in the natural,
Speaker 2: are cheating? You get caught cheating. We have one of
Speaker 2: two things we could do. One idea is, let's say
Speaker 2: you get popped on the drug free, every single record
Speaker 2: of yours is completely stripped, and you are allowed now
Speaker 2: to compete in the enhanced version if you'd like. So
Speaker 2: it's like accounts for tests being false positives, you know,
Speaker 2: because like sometimes you fail a test, but you never
Speaker 2: really were anything like Statistically, it has to happen to
Speaker 2: sub fraction of tests. It's a low fraction, but you're
Speaker 2: testing thousands of athletes five or six every year are
Speaker 2: going to be popped for drugs and just never took.
Speaker 2: And so that's like a very nice way to do it.
Speaker 2: The other way to do it is everyone signs the
Speaker 2: contract beforehand to say, if you ever get popped for
Speaker 2: drugs in the natural, your records get stripped. You're never
Speaker 2: allowed to compete in that sport or in any sport
Speaker 2: associated Olympics ever again, enhanced or not, So just don't
Speaker 2: fucking lie and you're good to go. And so that right,
Speaker 2: there is a model that's similar to what they do
Speaker 2: in natural versus enhanced bodybuilding and powerlifting today, and the
Speaker 2: rate of drug cheating in those sports is phenomenally lower
Speaker 2: than it is at the Olympics, because if you want
Speaker 2: to take drugs, there's a place where you can do
Speaker 2: it and just compete against the best guys. And since
Speaker 2: the best guys compete in the drug version anyway, the
Speaker 2: probability that people cheat to win a local natural bodybuilding
Speaker 2: title it was just like way, way smaller. But if
Speaker 2: there was just one bodybuilding show and it had to
Speaker 2: be drug free and if national pride was on the line,
Speaker 2: then yeah, everyone would cheat like they do currently in
Speaker 2: the Olympics. So that was kind of my thought process
Speaker 2: at the time. And then when I saw that the
Speaker 2: enhance games were happening, I was like, whoa, this is cool.
Speaker 2: Someone's actually doing some version of this. So I got
Speaker 2: really good.
Speaker 1: But what do you make of the argument that USADA
Speaker 1: and WADA and other governing bodies make sports more fair?
Speaker 2: It's good argument, It's marginally true, except the margins who
Speaker 2: will be small. You know, the mistake I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people make, a very very honest mistake, is
Speaker 2: assuming that testing is a guarantee or near guarantee that
Speaker 2: people don't cheat, and it's not. It's just a certain
Speaker 2: level of effect, right. It's like if you're a super rich,
Speaker 2: famous person and you just have no security, and then
Speaker 2: you have a security apparatus in place, like you hire bodyguards.
Speaker 2: The bodyguards do not guarantee that you're not going to die.
Speaker 2: Some of them could just take a sniper shot for
Speaker 2: really far off And even if you have the Secret Service,
Speaker 2: as we clearly saw with President Trump recently, people still
Speaker 2: say shots at you. So there's no guarantee. All effects
Speaker 2: are mardrone. And I think a lot of people think like, oh,
Speaker 2: like there's testing in the Olympics, that means it's drug free.
Speaker 2: It's like no, no, no, no, no no no. That just
Speaker 2: means the probability it's drug free goes up. That there's
Speaker 2: a very big difference between more fair and totally fair,
Speaker 2: like huge difference, and I think that gets lost a
Speaker 2: little bit.
Speaker 1: Do you have any sort of concerns about what they
Speaker 1: enhanced games are going to do in terms of normalizing
Speaker 1: PD use in the future of sports.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure, they could hit younger demographics and
Speaker 2: normalize PD use and give them heroes to look up to,
Speaker 2: and people don't want to run the kitchen sink, and
Speaker 2: that's definitely a thing. So again that effect is going
Speaker 2: to be marginal. An effect is highly modified by messaging.
Speaker 2: The thing is, this is nothing new. We you know,
Speaker 2: when Billy the eight year old who loves baseball finds
Speaker 2: out that, you know, a lot of talented athletes also
Speaker 2: go to strip clubs often, and some of them are
Speaker 2: very disrespectful to the opposite sex, even physical at times.
Speaker 2: Some of them drink alcohol, I know, it's crazy, and
Speaker 2: use recreational marijuana and even cocaine. You know, it's typically
Speaker 2: quite easy for mom and dad to be like now,
Speaker 2: so when older people or adults they do some adult
Speaker 2: stuff and you've got to do kids stuff. It's a
Speaker 2: great athlete, just don't look up to him for that
Speaker 2: stuff that he does outside of sport. It's hypothetically, roughly
Speaker 2: as easy to tell the kid, Look, these guys use
Speaker 2: steroids and all this crazy stuff because they're adults, and
Speaker 2: it doesn't screw up their young bodies, and that's true,
Speaker 2: like a few stereos are you're younger, it screws you
Speaker 2: up like way way worse, totally different ways too, And
Speaker 2: so I think that normalization should be put into context
Speaker 2: of it's absolutely a thing and could absolutely raise rates marginally,
Speaker 2: but an honest discussion about that this is an adult
Speaker 2: thing and an honest declaration about the system for everyone
Speaker 2: and has side effects could have an effect of both normalizing, contextualizing,
Speaker 2: and making the use less extreme. Here's another really trippy
Speaker 2: thing that happens with teenagers that I think a lot
Speaker 2: of people don't account for. When you make something forbidden
Speaker 2: and cool and you lie about it, the teens just
Speaker 2: want to do it. When you make it a technical
Speaker 2: quality that advanced athletes like compose on themselves, and you
Speaker 2: make it nuanced and you make it acceptable, but like
Speaker 2: it's gnarly, and you talk about all the side effects openly,
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, they're like, I don't any I
Speaker 2: guess I'll use that when it comes time to it,
Speaker 2: but I'm not rushing into it because it's not even
Speaker 2: like it's not forbidden. You look at like what's happened
Speaker 2: with weed since it became mostly legal in the US,
Speaker 2: and most teenagers are like someone's like, hey, do you
Speaker 2: want to do weed? My dad does weed. No, I'm fine,
Speaker 2: and you're like, right, okay. So if you normalize use
Speaker 2: of various compounds for adults, it does take the edge off,
Speaker 2: which actually could drive more responsible use potentially in some cases.
Speaker 1: Wow, is there like a general like baseline age one
Speaker 1: should be if they're curious about enhancing themselves.
Speaker 2: They are like physiological developmental landmarks. So you hit and
Speaker 2: I would say by your mid to late twenties, your
Speaker 2: brain has matured in macrostructural ways that probably steroids won't
Speaker 2: reverse or inhibit. So I'd say, like after age twenty five,
Speaker 2: I think it's a fine time to get on. Before
Speaker 2: aage twenty five, I just wouldn't do it. The other
Speaker 2: thing is, before age twenty five you are in the
Speaker 2: prime of your life physically and getting incredible gains anyway,
Speaker 2: and so might as well build a huge natural base
Speaker 2: and really milk out everything you can out of your
Speaker 2: like your natural physique, natural abilities, and then have a
Speaker 2: really fun time enhancing over the course of the next
Speaker 2: ten years. Rather than shooting your load early enhancing when
Speaker 2: you're eighteen, and then by twenty four year out of
Speaker 2: the spot, the torn pack, torn bicep, and I'd like
Speaker 2: shitload of kidney problems.
Speaker 1: How does like the current state of steroid use, how
Speaker 1: does that affect sex drive?
Speaker 2: You can have fact sex drive in a few different ways,
Speaker 2: and it depends on what you're taking, what doses, how
Speaker 2: you respond to it. And the classic, most common way
Speaker 2: is it increases sex drive. It's not just a quantity difference,
Speaker 2: it's a quality difference. The other two ways of that
Speaker 2: are common. There's a bunch of different ways that are not.
Speaker 2: One is like they reduced sex drive. So, for example,
Speaker 2: if you take some kinds of steroids that don't convert
Speaker 2: into estrogen, some of who can block estertyperversion, and if
Speaker 2: you're not replacing the testosterone, end up having a very
Speaker 2: low estrogen state. It actually turns out that a decent
Speaker 2: amount of estrogen is required for high sex drive, as
Speaker 2: if you don't have high estrogen, in fact, very low estrogen.
Speaker 2: You just like look at people's bodies and you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: she's really hot, and someone's like do you want it?
Speaker 2: And you're like, I have no desire to do anything
Speaker 2: with that. Person at all, like or you don't feel anything.
Speaker 2: It's weird. So that's the thing. And then the other
Speaker 2: one is some steroids in particular class, the nandrolones, so
Speaker 2: decaduraboland nandrolone to cannolate causes something called Decca dick, which
Speaker 2: is like a good old eighties slaying and basically means
Speaker 2: that you lose a large fraction of very rectile function
Speaker 2: and there's nothing wrong with you, it's just the chemical
Speaker 2: pathway there that the drug interacts with makes you just
Speaker 2: not have boners anymore, but you have commentanthing, really really
Speaker 2: horny because Decca like radically escalates your astronic exposure and
Speaker 2: so you just really want it. And then the time
Speaker 2: comes and you're like tada, your boys like a fucking
Speaker 2: tube sock baby, ain't none happening. And so I think
Speaker 2: some people are like, man, I can't wait to take
Speaker 2: stare it's get super high sex drive, and they run
Speaker 2: into one of those two other effects and they're like
Speaker 2: what the fuck is going on? But for the most part,
Speaker 2: yea sex drive is increased, so like the number of
Speaker 2: times you randomly drift to thinking about sex through the
Speaker 2: day can go up a lot. It can alter or
Speaker 2: broad on your range of people that you find attractive.
Speaker 2: The depth of emotion and sexual emotion in the interaction
Speaker 2: can escalate wildly. Your degree of risk taking and sexual
Speaker 2: interactions you probably should avoid goes up. It can go
Speaker 2: up if you're not like cognitively gating your decision made.
Speaker 1: Does the sex drive thing apply to women as well?
Speaker 2: From my experience, it applies more to women than it
Speaker 2: does to that. Wow, the amount of testosterone or testosterone
Speaker 2: like androgenic steroids that women typically have is like almost zero.
Speaker 2: It's like a rounding air, and then they take even
Speaker 2: really small doses it like twenty or forty axes their
Speaker 2: andron exposure right away. That huge of a difference is
Speaker 2: you gotta feel. Whereas if a guy produces normal testosteron
Speaker 2: holes naturally, then he gets some pretty decent cycle. I
Speaker 2: think maybe you're five xing in the amount that he's experiencing.
Speaker 2: At a five x versus forty, it's a very different
Speaker 2: psychological experiencing.
Speaker 1: Do you see a connection between sort of like the
Speaker 1: desire for young men to experiment with injectables right now
Speaker 1: and sort of like where the state of modern manhood
Speaker 1: is at all?
Speaker 2: My first caveat is a absolute no idea. So the
Speaker 2: following speculation. One intellectual trait that I've tried to impose
Speaker 2: on myself over the years is that double check that
Speaker 2: the phenomenon you are discussing is an extant phenomenon before
Speaker 2: you begin to discs And so when people talk about
Speaker 2: the masculinity crisis, I just I'm not sure if that's true.
Speaker 2: Is there a well defined, clearly articulated metric compared over
Speaker 2: the cohorts ten to fifteen years back in perpetuity a
Speaker 2: masculinity crisis of any kind they could withstand rigorous empirical
Speaker 2: cross checking for confounders. I don't know if that's the case.
Speaker 2: I think the vast, vast majority people that will tell
Speaker 2: you we have a mascinity crisis and be like, can
Speaker 2: you explicitly and specifically define what that means and compared
Speaker 2: to Cohort analysis from ten to fifty years ago, back
Speaker 2: back back back back like that to show like both
Speaker 2: kind of the ideology of how it's happening. And you're
Speaker 2: gonna lose them real quick because they just have like notions,
Speaker 2: like ideas that there is a masculinated crisis and it
Speaker 2: looks like this, and you go, well, actually, in the
Speaker 2: following ways, men are better than I ever been before,
Speaker 2: and are like, oh fuck, But some people on the
Speaker 2: internet are upset. I guess now, are there some people,
Speaker 2: some sub demographics, in some age groups and some races
Speaker 2: that are struggling in ways they have I haven't struggled before.
Speaker 2: Absolutely does that have anything to do with people's and
Speaker 2: embracing of steroids and stuff? And I don't know. I
Speaker 2: suspect the answer is probably not. You know, the people
Speaker 2: that are that have in masculinity crises, I don't know
Speaker 2: if they're less likely to use steroids, they are more
Speaker 2: likely to use steroids. Stereoids are like a reassertion and
Speaker 2: an enhancement of masculinity, and you've like lost touch with
Speaker 2: your masculinity. You may get a lot out of steroids
Speaker 2: to get you back in touch with it, but you're
Speaker 2: also may be way less likely to even try them
Speaker 2: because you're like, fuck, what do they need with that?
Speaker 2: You know, like a lot of your kids today they
Speaker 2: have like the broccoli haircuts and the hoodie sweatshirts, and
Speaker 2: they do like weed and xanax a lot. And you're like,
Speaker 2: do you want to like become jacked and vainye and
Speaker 2: be good at sports And I'm like, no, that's fucking lame,
Speaker 2: and you're like, right, okay, well that didn't work. So
Speaker 2: my best answer there is that I'm just not sure.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if any connection is there whatsoever. It
Speaker 2: would be cool if there was a clean connection that
Speaker 2: it may very well be. I just would be like
Speaker 2: really reserved about being like, yes, of course, that's how
Speaker 2: it works. As TRT is a response to the masculinity crisis,
Speaker 2: and it's like, but but there is a masculinatory.
Speaker 1: But what do you make of the argument between fairness
Speaker 1: something that can help an athlete versus something that would
Speaker 1: make sports more fair?
Speaker 2: Fairness is a trip. People have fairness. They usually have
Speaker 2: a concept of what economist and philosopher Thomas Soul call
Speaker 2: a notion. So to say, idea you have in your
Speaker 2: hand is very poorly defined. If you try to explain
Speaker 2: it specifically, you usually run around and you're like, I actually,
Speaker 2: I don't even know what I'm saying. So fairness is
Speaker 2: like a vibe, you know, But like, what's fair about
Speaker 2: me playing basketball against Lebron James? What's fair about anyone
Speaker 2: playing basketball against Lebron, he was born perfect. Like, what's
Speaker 2: fair about having better genetics than someone At the end
Speaker 2: of the day, sport is a huge test of genetics.
Speaker 2: Absolutely nothing fair about that whatsoever. And so if someone
Speaker 2: has allowed to open season on enhancements, everything's fair as
Speaker 2: I use whatever you want hit. I really like that
Speaker 2: the enhanced game seems to be going in the direction
Speaker 2: of the going to monitor health, including like the day
Speaker 2: of competition, and if you don't have the right biomarkers
Speaker 2: and stuff, they just won't let you compete because they're like,
Speaker 2: you're not going to croak on fucking watch, and that's important.
Speaker 2: I think that's really good. So I think you just
Speaker 2: need to set like reasonable health parameters and then test
Speaker 2: your athlete pool to make sure they're not exceeding those,
Speaker 2: and if they are, you retire them or tell them, look,
Speaker 2: come back in six months. You're not gonna be able
Speaker 2: to compete for six months. And if you come back
Speaker 2: with better blood work, well you can bet a lot
Speaker 2: of enhancements have health trade offs. It's not just true
Speaker 2: for enhancements for example, like downhill skiing. It just doesn't
Speaker 2: take a lot of creativity to imagine how that could
Speaker 2: go wrong, and most sports themselves are not healthy for
Speaker 2: you to be doing. The number of people that die
Speaker 2: in skiing accidents makes anabolic steroids look like the safest
Speaker 2: fucking thing in the world, and so people make trade offs,
Speaker 2: and so that's kind of my perspective on that health
Speaker 2: versus what's too much but it's not enough. It's really
Speaker 2: up to the sport government body to decide, and the
Speaker 2: athletes to decide, and the fans to decide, because there's
Speaker 2: a bit of a not hypocrisy, but a bit of
Speaker 2: a contradiction a lot of people have in a sport.
Speaker 2: If you believe in any kind of modicum of freedom,
Speaker 2: any kind of philosophy that spreads out to the rest
Speaker 2: of the world, you have to believe that people that
Speaker 2: are adults own themselves. If I own myself, I should
Speaker 2: be able to do anything I want with myself that
Speaker 2: just doesn't hurt other people. So if I want to
Speaker 2: take a bunch of drugs and ski downhill and see
Speaker 2: the competition Chris is whose blood splatter can go the
Speaker 2: furthest after you hit a tree? You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: If that's a sport, if the payouts are good enough
Speaker 2: and then the glory is good enough. Fuck it, Mike,
Speaker 2: let's rip.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Mike, You've You've been phenomenal. You are the Goat.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for for all of this. Superhuman
Speaker 1: is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The
Speaker 1: series is produced, reported, and co hosted by Sam Egan.
Speaker 1: The Name is Zizzi's Mental is our senior producer. Production
Speaker 1: support from Dara luck Potts, Edited by Kate Osborne, Editorial
Speaker 1: consulting by Adiza Egan, original composition by Hannis Brown, mixing
Speaker 1: by Pran Bandy, Reported and hosted by me Chris Guyamali.
Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope, Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Ozwa Oshan
Speaker 1: Mangeshatikador and kosisnos Julia Nutter is the head of Studio
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