The Prisoners’ Dilemma of Performance-Enhancing Drugs

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this is sophie cunningham from show me something do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or osa in adults with obesity they may be happening to you without you knowing If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

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Pushkin.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Konakova.
And I'm Nate Silver.

I felt like mixing it up. All right, Nate Silver.
So today on the show, we're actually doing an episode that's inspired by one of our listeners, Brandon.

So by the way, listeners, please do keep sending us questions.

And Brandon is wondering about performance enhancing drugs. He specifically asked for performance drugs outside of sports, but I think we'll be talking about sports as well.

So, in the Army, he says that they talk a lot about alertness, decision-making under stress.

Caffeine is basically a field-issued stimulant.

He goes on to talk about Adderall, modafinil, and the fact that it's being used not just in military, but you know, college students, professionals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So, he wants to know what are our thoughts and what are our experiences.

And, you know, it definitely does say a lot about modern performance culture.

So this is a topic that I've done a lot of thinking about, both in the past, but also, obviously, as I'm working on a book about cheating, you know, I do think about all of these ways to kind of enhance performance that may or may not be legal in any given setting.

And I think there's a lot to say here. Do you want me to start with some thoughts, Nate, or do you want to kind of give your reaction? Go ahead, Maria.

So, you know, people have been trying to figure out for decades, like, how can I think better, right? How can I perform better? How can I run better? How can I do everything just a little bit better?

You know, it's kind of a perfect storm with kind of social media and technology and all of these things where we're in a culture that's obsessed with, I mean, the culture has always been obsessed with youth, but now we feel like finally, like, oh, we're in the do not die effort moment.

That if I can just live for another 10 years, I'll be close to the moment in time where we can all live forever or at least greatly expand our life expectancy and our healthy life expectancy.

So, don't die, and also let's absolutely optimize every single moment of every single day: cognitive function, physical function.

In the case of certain social media influencer gurus who also happen to run big companies that sell supplements, erectile function as measured during the night, we won't be naming names, but I think anyone who's online knows exactly who I'm talking about right now.

So how do you basically enhance every single element of existence to the max? And we're seeing things.

Yes, some of them are pills. Modafinil has been kind of in the mix for a long time.
So has Adderall. There are other drugs that have been

basically

tested for Alzheimer's

and that are now also kind of in that conversation. But it's not just drugs, right? It's things like cold plunges.
infrared saunas,

you know,

do this, do that. Like, what can I possibly do to get just like a little bit better

and this is not a monolithic conversation in the sense that there's a big difference um nate between like poker players who decide that they're going to micro dose before a tournament because they think it's going to make them more creative and find better spots this does happen by the way i'm not just throwing this out um in the blue and like a lance armstrong who decides um that you know everyone's doping in cycling, so I'm going to do it too.

And we're going to create this culture where everyone is taking drugs that are explicitly forbidden to enhance their performance, right? So we've got, it's a huge spectrum, right?

And there's a huge spectrum between the college student who decides to take Adderall, even though they technically don't have ADHD, so that they can finish a paper, which by the way, Nate, is probably not happening anymore.

because you have ChatGPT, who's your Adderall, who could just finish the paper for you. So you don't even need to take take those supplements.

That was, you know, long before, or the investment beggars taking cocaine in the middle of the night to kind of stay up and make sure that they can get their

spreadsheets or whatever it is that they're doing done by the morning.

And then the wellness gurus who say, well, even though modafinil is a drug that was developed for narcolepsy and sometimes to treat ADHD and may not be the thing that I should be taking to kind of enhance my concentration, even though there's a little bit of data on that.

But I'm going to do it just in case, because I want to kind of maximize my ability to be the full me. All of these things are different, right?

And I have different opinions on these, on the different gradations along the way.

And even ones that seem very straightforward, such as, you know, we should not be allowing any performance enhancing drugs in sports.

When you start digging down, it ends up that some of them might be like a little bit murkier than you would think, right?

I would love to say that I'm just, you know, we shouldn't be doing any of this. But, you know, as our, as listener Brandern points out, caffeine is a great performance enhancing drug, right?

So it's not like everyone is living this existence where we're not taking any substances to increase performance. You need to kind of figure out what exactly are you talking about.

And I think that this is one of those episodes where there are going to be a lot of shades of gray.

I think that it's one of these case-by-case basis where you have to really understand what's the intention here, what are the data here, what is the responsibility here, and what are the rules here.

Yeah, in the poker world, you have an

interesting cross-section of a little bit of everything, right?

You certainly have some stimulant use, ranging from people who are probably taking annerall to people who are taking Zins or vaping.

Oh, yeah, by the way,

let me just interrupt you immediately just to say,

we said caffeine, but nicotine is another huge performance enhancing drug that people take all the time. And Zin is gaining huge market shares.
I see Zen at the poker tables all the time.

Please continue. Yeah, and in part because like

those are

as weird as smoking cigarettes, right, which is more disruptive.

Those are kind of more discreet ways to do it.

But yeah, people are taking adderall. People are, there's

varying amounts of drinking. People have different tolerances.
I will often have a glass of wine or two at dinner of a poker tournament, right?

But like everyone reacts differently in different things. You know what I mean?

And so you have to know kind of your own. I'm not claiming any of this is game theory optimal, right?

You have to kind of know your own physiology a little bit, but not as much drinking as you might have seen 20 years ago. You know, I'm always surprised that there are some players who

get quite stoned on

dinner breaks and stuff like that, or any break, right? Um,

I mean, we were talking about a well-known player, Maria, the other day, who seemed to be quite stoned at not playing optimally.

And you have some of those, but like, there are some people who are microdosing on different things. And like, again, I don't know, right? It's also partly a matter of habit, right?

For whatever reason,

probably done more drugs than you in my life, Maria, right? For whatever reason, like I've just never

really tried to play poker under the influence of THC, even though I'm not familiar with THC, whereas I have on alcohol. And so like, it just kind of like part of what you're familiar with.

The thing about poker, it's also important, though, is like

these are really long

sessions, particularly in tournaments, right?

So things that sustain energy and focus for a long time. Like, you know, you don't typically see like, necessarily, like, a lot of

cocaine use, to take an extreme example of poker tournaments, because, like, that is a drug where you kind of burn brightly for very quickly and then crash out, right?

Um, you know, that won't work if you're playing from noon to midnight in some tournament. I mean, unless you're taking a lot of it, I guess, right?

But Adderall, which is kind of a controlled version of speed, is something. And Riddle, these are things that

are actually incredibly common in the poker world. And they are common not just in the poker world, but in all sorts of professions that require concentration, right?

That require people to kind of pay attention for long periods of time. And the funny thing is, so I've actually written about this and I have

kind of dug a little bit deeper into the data with drugs like Adderall. I think this is true of a lot of performance enhancing drugs.
When you are taking anything that is off-label, right,

which means that it's not prescribed for this exact condition, especially when it's something that is

for a cognitive function and meant to counteract something that is kind of a neurological

abnormality or something that is kind of not a neurotypical brain, when you put it into a neurotypical brain that doesn't have these issues, you might get some benefits, but also some unintended side effects.

So the funny thing, I mean, I think it's funny because I don't do Adderall or Riddle and off-label.

The funny thing about it is that there's actually a disconnect when you take these drugs quite often with what you think your work product is and what it actually is, because it does put you into this like laser focus where you think, oh, I'm writing like a brilliant paper or I'm creating this brilliant work product or if I'm playing poker, I'm, you know, being able to execute all these wonderful creative lines, but it actually really dampens creativity and makes you create things that to you might seem great, but that actually objectively, you're working a lot, but your work output is not necessarily

what you think it is.

And so it's a very funny disconnect between self-perception and actual performance and uh so when it comes to cognitive enhancement that is something that you see now obviously when it's physical there usually there's no disconnect between what you think you're doing um and how you're doing because you have an objective measure immediately right am i running faster am i cycling faster am i able to actually lift more weight right when i when i use steroids what whatever it is but when it comes to cognitive enhancement you have these funny things yeah we talked to nick thompson the author of the running ground Ground.

Nick is one of the best runners in the world in his age class the other week, right? One of the things about running is that there's not much variation in it, right? You're running a fixed distance.

Most people who are runners are running

a few routes that they run commonly. There can be a few things, it can be traffic, right? You can other joggers and stuff like that, right? Or wind or weather, right? But like,

for the most part, it can be a fairly objective benchmark about your kind of overall cardiovascular, et cetera, health that day and your effort level.

Whereas in poker, it's extremely noisy. You know, the best poker players might have in the tough field an ROI of plus 10%

and

a mediocre player on his B game, not the C game, not the F game, but like on this B game, right, might be minus 10%, right?

Plus 10 versus minus 10 over the course of one poker tournament, you don't detect. You need a sample of like hundreds of tournaments to distinguish those.

And yeah, I certainly have had, um, it's kind of a common thing among writers too, to use like

things like Adderall. I've certainly been around

people who seem to be constantly on Adderall and they're talking a mile a minute and they're kind of hyper, right? And kind of dabbling.

And, you know, that's not a drug that leaves me with a great impression. But like, again, I'm not going to, I have my own habits, right? Good and bad.
I'm not going to critique anybody.

My empirical experience is that that one's a bit more noticeable than

some of the others, maybe among the drugs that people are kind of using for cognitive enhancement. Yeah.

So just full disclaimer, I've never used any cognitive enhancing pills. And I say pills because I drink a fuck ton of caffeine.

Let me just say that.

So like, and I've actually never used nicotine.

So I've never, I'm, I'm going to come across as kind of this goody two-shoes, but I do, I drink and, you know, I'm not doing this for like moral reasons or anything.

It's just not, I don't think it's right for me. And also I have a lot of allergies and can't stand smoke, but I've never used any nicotine products.
I've never smoked cigarettes. No nicotine.

By the way, poker players also love nicotine pills, nicotine patches, not just poker players. Like this is stuff that, you know, people use.

get into the science and they listen to the kind of gurus of how to enhance your performance, peak performance at any given time. And they do stuff like that.

So just total disclaimer, I've never used any of those, but I do use caffeine. And when I play poker, I am always drinking green tea.

And I specifically drink green tea because I've done the research and I know that green tea has the best kind of way of absorbing L-theanine into your brain, which helps you sustain your attention for longer periods of time.

Am I using a performance enhancing drug, Nate? You know what I mean? Like I realize I'm not trying to practice semantics here.

All I'm saying is that we do make choices all the time that try to optimize how we're doing.

Today, by the way, no amount of green tea is probably going to make me at absolute peak performance because I didn't get that much sleep.

And what we know is the number one cognitive enhancing drug is sleep. Like nothing else, nothing else comes even close.

So getting proper amounts of sleep is just like, you know, light years ahead of anything else.

And so when you do something like that, well, obviously it's not a performance enhancing drug, but it might as well be.

So, you know, there are.

So let's just, I guess, put a disclaimer and say, okay, yes, there's things that everyone does like caffeine, and it might give you a little bit more cognitive power.

And then there are other things that

people use that are more

out there. And

we can argue that, well, nicotine is closer to caffeine, or we can argue that it's not. But modafinil, definitely kind of

on the other side of that. And do you have a prescription, right? Is it something that you are actually using correctly because you need to?

Oh, and by the way, if you do have a prescription for it because you need to, is that giving you an unfair advantage? Is it giving you an unfair edge?

There are all of of these you know when we start getting into the ethics of it oh and by the way poker doesn't ban any sort of substances so that's like that's another thing here right no there's no yeah there's a didn't shamath what's his name but

yes there was a

drug free it's like come on bro yeah he proposed a drug-free poker tournament where you could not where you'd get tested and you weren't allowed to use anything i don't know if caffeine was included in that because if it was then you know i'm sorry chama

I'm totally out. But

yeah, I do want to say that it's not against the rules in poker to take whatever the fuck you want to take.

And to be perfectly honest, I would say like, if you want to take it, go right ahead because I actually don't think it gives you that much of an edge.

And I think it sometimes might make you play worse.

And we'll be right back after this break.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
where you can see the sky.

Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features. Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

They may be happening to you without you knowing.

If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleeponosa.com.

This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

We can put

some bounds on this, right? Like it's not like in poker there are,

look, you could make educated guesses about exactly which helpful and or unhelpful substances different players are taking, you know,

maybe apart from the really stone players and the really Adderall-y ones, right? It's not necessarily so obvious, right?

You know, it's not like there's some class of players that are like 30 better than the rest and you're like oh they're all in this drug app right and there are exotic things that are very subtle you know some poker players take um

beta blockers i'm not an expert in any of this stuff but i think it has the effect of like lowering your heart rate and things like that which can be helpful to a remain calmer maybe when you're under high stress and or to reduce the appearance of physical tells right i remember actually the main event of the world series right where there was a guy i played against on day two or day three, right?

Sitting right across from him, he just had a thing where, like, his heart was like literally kind of very visible in his whatever the fuck artery partoid or something, artery, right?

Every player knows it corroded, corroded, and it was the most

visible instance of this I'd ever seen. It's the main event.
He had a fairly big stack on day three, whatever it was. And, and

furthermore, he basically had like a running heart rate monitor for this player at all times, right?

Like, furthermore, I quickly deduced that there was a pattern that when he has a good hand, some players actually get more nervous in their bluffing, right?

This guy wouldn't have a big hand, you start to see boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

It was kind of funny, right? But like,

yeah, but the physical tail, you know, if

you start having a bunch of predictable involuntary ticks, or if you can suppress those ticks

in some ways,

it's not treated as like a TED use in poker is not treated as like some moral panic. Whereas in the other world, I know sports, then it is, of course.
Yeah. And I think, so let's

actually talk about that a little bit because, so I have very, very different perspectives about using all of these drugs, all of these techniques,

whatever you want to use when it is allowed versus when it's not allowed. So poker, you know, knock yourself out.

If you are an investment banker and you want to adder all it up or cocaine it up or whatever it is, awesome. Like you do you, right?

And if your superiors are happy with your work, awesome. My opinion changes completely when we have explicit rules that say, okay, you cannot take, you know, these performance enhancing drugs, right?

When we're talking about cycling, the argument, but everyone's doing it to me holds no water, right? I don't fucking care.

Like that, that is, if it's a rule, that means that everyone is cheating. If everyone is cheating, either you call out the cheating, you quit the sport, you know, you do something else.

And it's interesting because there,

you know, as I've been kind of researching cheating in games, I talked to a baseball player who was roommates with another player who was suspended for

using steroids.

East Coast team or West Coast team? Give us a little.

I'm not going to say anything else, Nate. You know these sports a little too well.

And it was one of these things where, you know, this roommate said, like, I, you know,

people were doing it. I just thought it was wrong.
So I didn't.

And like, I have no regrets about it, even though kind of my roommate ended up having like a much more storied career for a time than I did because like I, you know, I said, I basically said no.

And my career ended. Like I, you know, eventually kind of had to retire.
And, but it's not like you're forced to do it. You, you make choices.

So anyway, you can, I don't care if like, if the culture is that everyone is doing it, what I care about is it within the rules or is it not within the rules?

And if you, it's not within the rules and you're doing it, um, then you're cheating.

And if you're trying to figure out ways of doing it without getting caught by using these new drugs that aren't yet detectable on tests, then again, you're cheating and you're cheating in an even more kind of insidious way that is ruining the kind of sportsmanship, right?

The

playing field for everyone else, and that is kind of

ruining the integrity of your sport um and i you know things like um nate you know the enhanced games that were announced like that i'm like peter chield thing or what yeah i'm like what what are we even talking about like i guess people you know you you want to see a lot of people on steroids go like to me that's not even a sport i'm like well what are we even doing here and i think a lot of athletes uh felt the same way.

So on the one hand, I said there were going to be a lot of shades of gray here.

And this seems black and white, but I'm actually going to take a step back and put it back into the shades of gray. So one of my favorite sports.

stories that I think I've mentioned on this podcast before, but I'm just going to say it again, was this champion Finnish skier whom I've written about in the past, Eero Montiranta.

I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that. I don't speak Finnish, but he won seven Olympic medals over four games, three gold medals, two silver medals, two bronze medals.

And at the time, like no one had done anything comparable, right? Like that's insane if you're thinking about seven medals over four games. Like holy shit.
And he was accused of doping.

And he was tested and it seemed to confirm that he was doping because the

red blood cells in his blood, there were multiple deviations away from the average range. And so he was accused of doping.
But then it turned out that he didn't dope.

He was actually clean and he carried a genetic mutation in a receptor that controls the production of red blood cells. And

that genetic mutation ran in his family, right?

So it turns out that basically his entire family were kind of these mutants that had this red blood cell plant that that was just constantly you know basically constantly doping their blood by the way this is not if people are listening to this and it's like oh can i do this um please don't because this mutation also causes polythemia which is a disease of red blood cells and mantiarante did have it um but he didn't have any of the negative symptoms but anyway so you have this person who was absolutely cleared, right?

And he wasn't doping, but he just naturally had this insane advantage.

Now, you can look at someone like this and say, well, if he has this mutation and he's basically naturally doping, shouldn't we allow everyone else to kind of dope to the same level?

And I don't think that's true because then,

you know, you can start making that argument with all sorts of different things. But that just goes to show that there are so many different variations here.

And there's so much about the human body that we don't know.

And it's so easy to start making the, you know, the fairness argument that I think that that's, it's an argument that we shouldn't be trying to make because people are different.

And so all we can do is to try to make rules that control,

that control to the best of our abilities, what

substances you can use to enhance your performance versus how you can enhance your performance through your own physical merits and metal because you know isn't that the purpose of watching sports and kind of watching competitors right that we see what the human body is capable of on its own

we'll be back right after this

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features. Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Being a small business owner isn't just a career, it's a calling. Chase for Business knows how much heart and effort go into building something of your own.

That's why we make your business growth our priority. Our team takes the time to understand your mission, where you are now, and where you want to go.

Our broad range of solutions is designed with you in mind so you can bring your ideas to life.

From banking to payment acceptance to credit cards, you can conveniently manage all your business finances all in one place with our digital tools.

Looking for tips and advice, our online resources are always available to give you the solutions you need to help your business thrive. See how your business can go farther with Chase for Business.

Learn more at chase.com/slash business. Chase for Business, make more of what's yours.

The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices, message and data rates may apply jp morgan chase bank n a member fdic copyright 2025 jp morgan chase and company this is sophie cunningham from show me something do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or osa in adults with obesity they may be happening to you without you knowing If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

OSA is a serious serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Learn more at don'tsleep on OSA.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Yeah, look, to some degree, especially in like maybe Olympic type sports, which are sometimes

a little bit more linear functions of a particular type of ability in one or two areas, right? I mean, you are selecting for people who are

genetic

superheroes.

You know, the other thing just comes up, I'm just going to mention it once, right, is you'll periodically get athletes who are intersex in some form. It's not really the same thing as trans, right?

It's like, you know, it's how they're born. They're born, yeah, chromosomal differences.
But inherently, you have to draw some lines because,

you know, we're not going to talk about the gender binary versus fectum here, but if you're looking for outliers, you're going to find people who are outliers in lots of different ways, and that and that creates issues.

Um, but look, yeah, the game theory part of this that we haven't invoked yet

is that you do have a prisoner's dilemma when other people are

doping, right? So, like, in any workplace kind of culture, I mean, the original question comes from like the army, right? The um, you know, what is tolerated

versus tacitly encouraged versus

not so tacitly encouraged versus you know but you also get to point where like maybe you're just kind of falling behind in an extremely high performance area if if everybody else is doing something you're not barry bonds

i guess the most famous slash infamous um steroid user in baseball history was kind of like this fucking mark maguire and sammy so guys they're juicing right i was better than them before steroids, alleged.

And I'm going to be better than these fucking fucking guys afterwards. So I'm going to take steroids too.

And he has like, what are still the best offensive seasons in baseball history and kind of, you know, just this kind of huge non-linear outlier season, 73 home runs in a year, you know, whatever it was, 600 on base percentage or very, very high, right?

But you have a prisoner celebrity. If you don't have like, you know, it's the same thing as like Chat GPT being used to

cheat in college essays, right? If you don't have good enforcement, then like, then you get in the dilemma where it's like, well, my classmates are doing this shit, right?

So like, why do I have to work five times as hard as them and get like a worse grade? And look, I don't know

how effective these regimes actually are in different sports. You know, if you told me that, hey, people are using things that are hard to detect, that wouldn't surprise me, right?

You know, I think.

sports have kind of figured out that like to have a big moral outrage and panic over this isn't necessarily good for business, right?

There are still a couple of baseball players that could suspend it every year for different types of PEDs, right?

It's not quite perceived as the PR thing that it was in like the, in the, you know, late 1990s and early 2000s, which is kind of considered the whole steroid era.

You know, baseball has this kind of record book that's very

sacred, right? People care a lot about the home run record and the betting average record and

everything else, right? Whereas in football, it's a bit less true. People, football is more of a team sport.
You know, football, a little bit more slaps on the wrist for different types of PED use.

You know, look, you can even, if you want to get funky, you can even say, okay, are you being a bad teammate by not using steroids, right? You know,

well,

yeah, I mean, I think that the only, like, the way out of this prisoner's dilemma is through external enforcement and penalties, right?

Where the benefits in the moment of doping are outweighed by the potential penalties.

So, you know, what comes to mind to me right now is Russia in the Olympics, right, where you had basically an entire delegation doping,

including some athletes who didn't realize that they were doping because the coaches just gave them supplements and said, this is the health regime, and we're giving these performance-enhancing drugs to everyone.

Or at least that's the story. And I actually believe it in the sense that I believe that there were athletes who had no idea that they were doping.

And then, you know, you strip everyone of the medals, you disqualify them, and then the team can't compete in the Olympics, and no one can compete in the Olympics.

That's a pretty big disincentive, right? That will tell people, okay, you know what?

Maybe this is not a good idea because the risks and the penalties we'll have to pay far outweigh the benefit of winning a gold medal now because we're going to lose that gold medal anyway, and then we're not going to be able to compete going forward.

So if you had standards like that across the board, and if you really take the enforcement seriously, then I think that changes behavior because that changes behavioral incentives.

And that changes the culture from everyone is doing it to, okay, people are not going to be doing it anymore. But you also have to be smart, right?

You also have to test correctly and you have to stay on top of this shit, right?

You can't, you have to have people who are out in the field figuring out what are the latest drugs, like what is the cutting edge what are people using how do we detect this um so that you don't have situations where cheaters are trying to kind of stay ahead of the system um which also creates very perverse incentives yeah look and that you're willing to like

punish the actual cheaters you know absolutely yana kzinner who is one of the two best men's tennis players in the world has been accused of doping, taking amounts of clostabol.

It looks like I'm not a steroid knowledgeable person.

Hey, come on, steroid knowledgeable person.

But, you know, hey, if he's a big draw, maybe you turn the other cheek. I mean, we've seen

the poker world has not been great about people who are big names get away with a lot more, right? Yeah. With that said,

if you look at the whole list of all major league baseball players who have been suspended, which is kind of the longest, most consistent regime, there definitely are some all-stars, right?

However, it has moved more toward the more marginal players because, like, you know, if you're 10%

better,

I mean, it's also an open question kind of how much this actually helps, right?

But leaving that aside, if you get 10% better and you're already pretty good, I mean, that definitely produces benefits, right? Absolutely. But

you probably already have all the money you'll need for life. I mean, baseball is a sport that has long careers.
If you are taking kind of like long-term risks with your health, right?

I mean, you know, some of these anagolic steroids are not thought to be good for your long-term health, right? They may help in the short run, right?

If you're on the margins of the major leagues and you get in a major league roster, where what's the minimum salary? I'm sure, you know,

mid-six figures now, at least, right? You get that for a couple of years. You get a major league pension.
You get your first

post-draft team contract. I will use, I'm going to avoid more technical baseball terms here, audience may not know them, right? But like, you know, if you get like a real free agent contract.

And by your audience, you mean your co-host, Nate?

My co-host, yeah.

So it's the more marginal guys who are trying to extend their careers, right? Because 10% better when there's a whole threshold in anything, a whole threshold of

talent near the break-even line. Either just good enough to make the major leagues, you're just good enough to have a regular starting job, or just not good enough, right?

And those are the people where there's the most pressure, even though it's the

Barry Bonses and the Yannick Sinners and stuff of the world that receive more public scrutiny. Yeah, so I think kind of to

sum up, I think we both agree that if we want to keep it clean, like first of all, like performance enhancing drugs, yay or nay, like in things where it's where people don't care, like poker, you know, whatever,

do you, once again, because we don't even know what benefits necessarily are coming from any of these things. In areas where

there are explicit rules against them, right, like sports, then absolutely not. And I don't think there should be exceptions.
And I think that, you know, big

names need to get just as much,

need to be penalized just as much as smaller names to bring it back to poker.

This means that, you know, things that are illegal, like cheating of different sorts, which are not cognitive drugs or anything like that, needs to be very strictly punished no matter who you are, even if you're kind of the number one name in the game, I don't care.

You need to realize that that there are going to be very strict penalties against these sorts of behaviors. And that's the way that you kind of emerge.

from the prisoner's dilemma that you were describing, Nate. So we've got, you know, we've got areas like poker where it's legal.
You've got areas like sports where it's not.

Then you've got areas like the army where presumably they're doing their research and they want people to function as well as they possibly can.

And that's its own, you know, that's its own beast, right? Yeah, sure. If you think that this is going to create better soldiers and the soldiers are okay with it, then by all means, right?

Like we want the best functioning force. And there, your analogy of are you hurting the team if you don't do it? Well, are you hurting the team if you're in the army where the other country has

people using this and you aren't? Yeah, you kind of are.

And so that's like, that's its own different can of worms, right? That's that's a totally different area.

But I would say that, you know, please do try to figure out whether you're mortgaging your health in the long term, because I think a lot of people don't realize that there is a long-term cost to a lot of these performance-enhancing drugs.

Yeah, look, my general thing is

assume that in competitive industries, which basically everything is now in our capitalistic world, not that I don't like capitalism, Maria. I do.

But like, assume that people will optimize for their incentives, right? If you create rules that are easy to work around or are poorly structured, and there's a lot of money or fame

or championships to win on the line, assume that some substantial fraction of your player population in any sport or game, right,

will have no moral qualms about taking advantage of those rules. With that said, I'm going to have a performance-enhancing drug called lunch.

Likewise, Nate,

let's both go enhance our performance by food.

Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kanakova. And by me, Nate Silver.
The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit. Lydia, Jean Cott, and Daphne Chen are our editors.
And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too. But once again, only if you like us, we don't want those bad reviews out there.
Thanks for tuning in.

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