Joe Rogan | Why Don't We Like PED's in Sports w/Adam Conover

But the celebrity aspect of basketball is so huge. And like in baseball, it's not. The celebrity aspect of baseball is gigantic. Yeah? You're A-Rod and still there's five, 10, max 10 guys on the court and if you do anything, camera's right on your face immediately. Versus you have to have a home run. And here's the crazy thing about baseball, this was pointed out to me, the website Deadspin did this thing where they were like pointing out the problem with baseball today. They went around, they asked people, hey, can you name, what's the most famous baseball player that you could name? And people were like Derek Jeter, A-Rod, Big Poppy, Manny Ramirez. Retired guys. Retired guys. And if you ask people, if they're a baseball fan, they'd say someone from my team or maybe they'd say Mike Trout or they'd say one of the guys in the Yankees, right? But there is no A-Rod Jeter level celebrity right now. What happened? I don't know exactly. I can't. Steroids. Giving back the steroids. Good. It's a goofy game. No one's getting hurt. What the fuck is the problem? We're not talking about fighting, we're talking about baseball. Give them the steroids. The best part about that stupid game is when someone hits the ball. Does the steroids make them hit the ball better? Yes. Okay, well give it to them. What the fuck are you guys doing testing for that? Performance enhancing drugs, man, are the craziest, the debate about that. We've never done this on the show so I'm not fully boned up. I would like to. I've thought about it in the past. Because the divisions, it's like the rest of the drug war, right? The divisions we make between the things that are acceptable and not acceptable are so arbitrary. So the example I always use is like, okay, why don't we like performance enhancing drugs? Not everyone has access to them so they're unfair, right? They're bad for your health and we think they're unnatural, right? Okay. Cheating too. Yeah, they're cheating. Well, those are the reasons why we think they're cheating. But there's some drugs you can take that aren't cheating. No, unfair advantage is the reason why it's cheating. That's the primary reason. So let me give you a counter example. For runners, right? For endurance athletes. I like running, I'm a shitty runner, but I like it. I think it's a fun sport. So I follow it a little bit. So runners, endurance, the big thing is how much oxygen your blood can hold, right? If you train at a high altitude, then you can increase that, right? So there are these runners, the American runners, right? They live at a high altitude, they live super high up in Colorado or whatever, right? And then when they're not there, they train there all year round, they buy a place there. And then when they're not there, when they're competing somewhere else, they sleep in a chamber that simulates low altitude, right? How is that not the same thing as taking a performance enhancing drug? It's not illegal to do that, right? It's unnatural, right? It is an unfair advantage because not everybody can afford one of those chambers. And I'm not gonna say it's bad for your health, I don't know, but it's certainly as weird for your body as taking a drug, I would think, right? So why do we draw the line? Because it's only like living at altitude. It's really just simulates low altitude. It's not like taking the EPO, which would be the drug that would simulate that, which I've got recent experience with, not personally, but because the UFC just had one of its champions stripped because of testing positive for EPO. And then we're just finding out now they don't test for EPO in everybody, that it's very expensive. And so they do it based on the athletes biological passport and what they think are changing variables that for whatever reason, it triggers their interest. And they start testing additionally. It's a big deal. It's a serious drug. I mean, it's a serious endurance drug that also has some serious health complications. People have died from taking it, young guys in their 20s in cycling have gotten strokes and died from EPO. That's serious. But there's no health negative effects of sleeping at altitude. It's just, can you afford to live there? Can you uproot your life? No, if you can't, yeah, it's an advantage for that person over you. So I'm just saying, we have sort of an arbitrary, it's sort of an arbitrary, where we're drawing the lines is not consistent. And it's kind of random. That is a big one. In terms of the impact on endurance, it is a big one. They're actually saying now that they think the best course of strategy is to train at low altitude and then sleep at high altitude. They think that when you train at low altitude, you have more output. So you're putting in more repetitions because you get more oxygen, so you have more work. And then you get the same effect by living at altitude. So you get up there and sleep and you don't have to train up there. And if you train up there, it's actually slightly less valuable than training at low altitude and staying up there. Damn, because whenever I'm staying somewhere high altitude, like I just did a weekend in Denver, and I was like going on a run up there, and it was like obviously torture compared to like being here in LA, but I was like, oh, I'm getting strong because I'm running at high altitude. That's not true. Well, you just really did something for me. Thank you. It's work, it will help you. But if you are an athlete, athletes are literally working for one or 2% of an advantage occasionally, on many occasions. When you are living at high altitude and training at sea level, they think that that gives you a slight advantage because you can put more work in. Especially for fighters, they think that skill work and repetitions and drilling is one of the most important aspects of it, and you can just simply get in more repetitions, you can get in more drills. But they, again though, you're right, because this is sort of a performance enhancing thing. You're not just living and just being yourself and then showing up and competing. You are engaging in this activity that significantly raises your red blood cells, significantly raises your oxygen capacity, changes your cardio, your VO2 max changes. Here's the weird thing, there's this weird idea in sports. And look, you know a little more about athletics than I do, it's not my real forte, but I do enjoy. And the thing that's always weird to me is that we have this idea that there's some kind of level playing field, that there's this baseline human that we can just say, well you gotta be at the baseline. And humans are so variable, you're always gonna find these weird cases, and when you try to adjudicate, it gets really weird. Do you know about Castor Semenya, do you know who she is? No. Oh, no I do know, but you gotta tell the story. This story pisses me off so much. So she's a, not a marathoner, she's a middle distance runner. I believe she's South African. She's like the best in the world at the 200 meters. I actually got to see her, because I went to the pre-Fontaine classic in Eugene, Oregon with my dad to watch Big Track Meet, best in the world. People, this is like an Olympics, not qualifier, but it's like the Olympics caliber athletes saw her, she's incredible, just one of the best in the world. She's got a, she her whole life has faced accusations that she's a man basically, because she has like an elevated level of testosterone. This is her natural body, right? And so she's had to deal with people saying, oh we gotta do a sex check on you, which is humiliating and like also completely unscientific, you know, what are they gonna do? Like a sex check, they wanna look at her genitals? Well here's the weird thing, man, is that, yeah, they wanna look at her genitals first of all, which is humiliating to have that happen if you're an athlete. How many people have to be in the room? This is the problem, right? How do you adjudicate that, right? And also, there's such a thing, I don't know anything about her personal situation, right? There's such a thing as intersex people, right? Where when you look at their genitals, you can't, it's not like, hey, just look at their junk and you can tell, right? This is a real phenomenon, like 1% of people are intersex, right? Is it really that high? I was speaking off the top of my head, but it's higher than you think, you know? It's definitely higher than, it's a non-zero number of people, right? Intersex people are a real thing. Yeah, it's a real thing. And so, but, so she got past that, right? They stopped challenging whether she was like a man or a woman. They did a chromosome test on her. I think you might be right, yeah. But so she's, she's had a deal with that, that's not fair, right? Well she's just an outlier, she's a physical outlier. She's a physical outlier, and now the IAAF, which is the organization that runs, it's like FIFA for track, right? They run all track. They have tried to put forward a rule, I don't know what the status is right now because it's being challenged, but they've tried to put forward a rule that says, if you have a testosterone level over a certain amount, you have to take a hormone-changing drug to change your hormones, and she's gonna fall under that. And so they literally wanna change the body that she was born with because they're saying your body is unfair to her. How fucked up is that, right? That's crazy. That's really, really fucked up. And so the thing is, when we make those decisions about what's fair and what's not fair, there's no baseline human. It's always a value judgment, and when we're excluding some people, that's almost, we always need to look at that and say, are we discriminating? They're definitely discriminating against Castrocemania. And is this the IOC that's doing this? No, it's the IAAF, which is, the IOC is the Olympics, IAAF. The Olympics aren't doing this, so they don't have an issue with her? I don't know what the Olympic policy is. The Olympics is fucked up, we did a whole episode on the Olympics. The Olympics is fucked up in a lot of ways too. Yep.