I had no interest whatsoever in steroids.
I got involved in this because an editor who
is a friend of mine called me up and said
Jose Canseco just wrote this crazy book where
he said steroids are the wonder drug of tomorrow.
And I said look man, I am not much of a baseball
fan.
It kind of bores me and everybody knows steroids
are terrible for you.
Canseco’s out of his mind.
There’s no way – like you’re wasting
my time.
And he said, you know, it was very, very convincing.
He said I’ll pay you to do the research.
I was like absolutely I’m in.
So I started looking at it and I just started
I said okay, I’m just going to read – I’m
going to go back ten years and read the articles
in major journals – The New England Journal
of Medicine, Science, Nature – that kind
of thing.
I’m not even going to go that deep.
Very very quickly what I started to discover
is every single thing I thought I knew about
steroids was wrong.
Every crazy disease these drugs had been linked
to have nothing to do with it.
I’ll give you a phenomenal example.
Steroids were linked to liver cancer, liver
problems, right.
It had nothing to do with the steroid.
It has to do with the coating they put around
the steroid so it could pass through the stomach
and get into your bloodstream.
That was what was causing the problems.
That coating has obviously since been replaced.
But Nick Evans who’s at UCLA is the only
person literally in history whose ever done
long-term steroid studies, right.
Long term abusers.
Body builders, double and triple stacking
steroids for 10, 20 years at a time.
None of the things we’ve been told about
are real.
The only danger he found is since the heart
is a muscle there is a certain point if you’re
taking massive massive doses over long periods
of time it can expand it, it can grow, right
and grow bigger than the blood vessels and
the ventricles and what not which would be
a problem.
And this doesn’t mean, by the way, when
teenagers use steroids, right, when you’re
still producing lots of these substances it’s
an absolute disaster, right.
That’s bad news.
But in adults everything we’ve been told
tends to be wrong and some of what we’ve
been told costs millions of lives, right.
It turns out steroids are phenomenal, phenomenal
in fighting back AIDS.
They’re really, really, really good.
Nobody wanted to talk about it.
When doctors started treating AIDS patients
with it the guy who started doing this was
a guy named Walter Jekot.
The government jumped in and put him in jail
for five years.
He scared the hell out of a ton of doctors
and the result of this kind of us trying to
keep sports pure and, you know, preserve the
competitive advantage has been millions of
people died as a result.
So not only is everything you’ve been told
about steroids wrong, but there were a lot
of consequences.
The people who have been at the forefront
of this and kind of pushing it forward is
the life extension community, right.
Our hormones decline as we age so the idea
here is we can replace them.
And they’ve been working on this stuff for
10, 15 years at this point with some success.
It is now one of five or six different ways
people are attacking aging, right, and fighting
back death.
But one thing seems to be sure.
Since Google’s in the anti-death game, right,
Peter Diamandis, my partner, in Bold and Abundance
has human longevity incorporated there in
the life extension game.
There are big companies, massive amounts of
resources getting involved and steroids are
a piece of this puzzle.
And I think we’re going to have to as a
country rethink our position on these drugs
and anti-aging stuff is going to force us
to do it.
