Very Bad Wizards Episode 29: PEDs, Tenure Pills, and "Hyberbolic Chambers"
Dave and Tamler try to artificially bulk up their expertise on the ethics of performance enhancing drugs and end up raising a lot more questions than they answer. Why do we condemn certain methods for boosting performance on the playing field and praise others? Why is it OK to train at high altitudes but not in hyperbaric chambers that simulate high altitudes? Why is Lance Armstrong a villain and Graham Greene (who wrote many of his most famous novels on benzedrine) a hero? Is there genetic therapy to cure haunted child haircuts, and if there is, how can Tamler get access to it? Of course, no discussion on PEDs would be complete without clips from South Park and Sanford and Son. Also, David misremembers Lyle Alzado as a regular on an 80's sitcom because of a single appearance on "Small Wonder." We probably should have taken some podcast enhancing drugs for this one.
Links- Performance-enhancing drugs [wikipedia.org]
- Benzedrine [wikipedia.org]
- What do Auden, Sartre, and Ayn Rand have in common? Amphetamines [slate.com]
- Lyle Alzado [wikipedia.org]
- "Turin Sample: The nonsense of Olympic doping rules" by William Saletan [slate.com]
- "Brain Gain: The underground world of 'neuroenhancing' drugs" by Margaret Talbot [newyorker.com]
- Adderall [wikipedia.org]
- Modafinil (Provigil) [wikipedia.org]
- "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems" -Paul Erdos [amphetamines.org]
- Up the down steroid [southparkstudios.com]
- Sanford and Son: "Gorilla Cookies" [youtube.com]