Claims

Human growth hormone, contrary to common belief, makes you literally larger but not stronger and there's evidence it does not help athletic performance; steroids combined with weightlifting do help—primarily by speeding recovery from injury and reducing soreness—and can turn a 340-foot warning-track out into a 380-foot home run.

Steroid use in baseball should not carry the cheating opprobrium it does, because hitting and pitching are skills and raw power/size from drugs has little to do with them—unlike sprinting or weightlifting where pure power matters.

Rick Ankiel, once a star 20-year-old left-handed pitcher who collapsed in the 2000 playoffs by throwing five wild pitches in one inning, reinvented himself as an outfielder and was hitting over .300 with multiple home runs in a pennant race—then news broke he had a 2004 human growth hormone prescription, after which he went 1-for-23 and the Cardinals went 1-9.

Cheating that everyone agrees is cheating (like Bobby Thompson's stolen-signs home run via binoculars and a buzzer) is distinguished by shame—Thompson hid it for decades—whereas steroid users like Sosa, Palmeiro, McGwire, Bonds and Giambi refused to answer, answered evasively, or expressed shame, indicating they too knew it was a form of cheating.

Since many players (perhaps 20-60%) were using steroids yet only Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs, either Bonds is an extraordinarily gifted athlete or had an unusually effective regimen—implying the drugs alone don't explain elite outliers and the achievement isn't simply attributable to cheating.

The left tackle commands premium pay because he protects the blindside of a right-handed quarterback dropping back to pass; a quarterback hit from behind is more likely to be injured and to fumble, and since the passing game has grown steadily more important than the running game, protecting the blindside became the linchpin of the offense in a way the right tackle is not.

The New England Patriots succeed by treating players strategically like commodities—letting glory players go once they become overvalued stars and replacing them with cheap substitutes, going for it on fourth down more than other coaches, and reportedly valuing roster depth (the 38th–51st players) because injuries accumulate over a season.

The offensive line is actually asymmetric: because most running backs run right, the right side gets an extra blocker, and because the best pass rushers line up across from the left tackle, the right tackle faces less ferocious threats—so the asymmetry compounds the left tackle's higher value.

A baseball manager's job is far easier than a football coach's because it is mostly people-management rather than strategic complexity—an untrained person installed as Yankees manager might not lose many more games, whereas an untrained head coach of the Patriots would be a disaster because he genuinely would not know what he was doing.

The NCAA seriously investigated whether the Tuohys' adoption of Oher was a new recruiting workaround in which wealthy white booster families adopt star ghetto athletes on behalf of a university—since once adopted as family there is nothing the NCAA could do to stop money flowing to them—illustrating how distorted recruiting incentives had become.

Lewis predicts the Colts will beat the Patriots, the Saints will beat the Bears, and the Saints will win the Super Bowl.

Billy Beane believes the manager role is so minor that an outsider could run the Yankees without losing many games, whereas only social disruption would prevent it.

Sports illustrates that when enormous money is at stake, participants will respond to incentives by taking steroids, human growth hormone, and other measures economists would predict; people romantically resist accepting that sports is a lucrative business whose participants respond to incentives, and college football can never return to its earlier form because of the money washing through it.

Baseball players post measurably better individual numbers in the year before free agency (controlling for other factors), yet their teams don't win more — suggesting incentives elicit individual effort but possibly toward flashier individual stats rather than team success.

The NFL's extreme revenue sharing makes it realistically possible for any of 32 franchises to win the Super Bowl, whereas Major League Baseball's weaker revenue sharing makes it hard to win the World Series outside about eight big-market franchises; revenue sharing also lets mediocre NFL owners earn a decent living, creating a strange incentive to free-ride on harder-trying owners.

Steroid use in baseball will never be fully eliminated because the psychic and economic rewards of athletic excellence guarantee perpetual incentives to cheat and an ongoing arms race between chemists devising performance enhancers and chemists devising tests—though Will believes the testers are currently winning.

The Yankees demonstrate the declining utility of dollars in baseball, just as Meg Whitman's failed California gubernatorial run showed it in politics—money buys less competitive advantage than commonly assumed.

Since the Second World War the three biggest events in baseball were Jackie Robinson (bringing waves of new talent including from Latin America), free agency (extending to players the basic right to negotiate employment with the employer of their choice, without the predicted bad consequences), and Camden Yards (reviving the old-style ballpark that takes advantage of baseball being the most observable team game).

Absence of trans men competing as men is telling

In every domain where strength differences matter, we don't see the reverse trend—trans men (former women) seeking to compete in male divisions like the UFC—which reveals the asymmetry of biological advantage but doesn't resolve the policy dilemma, since insisting trans women are women keeps the door open to anyone claiming to be a woman.

Trans women in combat sports is unacceptable

The transgender-athletes issue is a spectrum, not one issue: in combat sports like MMA, where the advantages of having gone through male puberty are glaring, allowing trans women to compete against women is trivially unacceptable, whereas in sports like ping pong the male advantage is smaller and the problem less acute.

Reassessing Simone Biles Withdrawal

Harris initially judged Simone Biles' Olympic withdrawal as 'snowflakery' akin to tennis players quitting over press pressure, but revised his view upon learning she was a victim of the gymnastics abuse scandal and, more importantly, that gymnastics is fantastically dangerous—losing spatial orientation in a vault can leave one a quadriplegic—so no outside observer is in a position to second-guess an athlete's game-time decision about their fitness to perform something genuinely dangerous.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Origin of Their Acquaintance

Harris and Wood first met around the topic of Brazilian jiu-jitsu after Wood wrote a piece in the Atlantic on it.

Quitting BJJ As Best Physical Therapy

Harris has found that not training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is the best physical therapy he has experienced, eliminating neck, hip, and back pain, and expects that returning to the mat after several years away would unmask all of those problems again.

Fighters develop unique style through long aliveness

Rather than assembling a personal style by collecting techniques from different arts, each athlete should master the fundamentals of stand-up, clinch, and ground and through 10–20 years of alive training organically develop his or her own unique style; a coach's job is to guide others through that same journey rather than to teach his own style.

There is no good empty-handed defense against a knife

Knives are extremely dangerous and there is no good way to defend against one empty-handed; a genuinely intent attacker will not brandish the knife but walk up close, grab you, and repeatedly pump the blade in, so you feel it before you see it, and the closest viable method (the STAB system) involves using clinch skills to control the weapon arm via a two-on-one while accepting you will likely get stabbed.

Street-versus-sport distinction is a fallacy

The claim that some martial arts are 'for the street' and others 'for sport' is a fallacy: there is no special street technique, because fixed positions like a headlock admit universal best practices based on base, posture, and leverage that work identically in a cage, a tournament, or a parking lot, and a few years of sport grappling will defeat an untrained attacker who cannot make up the deficit with eye-gouges or groin strikes.

Combat reduces to stand-up, clinch, and ground ranges

Effective fighting should be understood as three ranges or delivery systems—stand-up (striking with a boxing base), clinch (fixed positions like underhooks and neck ties), and ground (any position you can fall into)—rather than as individual styles; best practices like a choke or a hip throw are universal across cultures, so there is no such thing as a 'Japanese choke' just as there is no 'Canadian geometry.'

UFC was a science experiment of styles

The early UFC functioned as a science experiment that pitted different martial arts styles against each other with almost no rules, weight classes, gloves, or time limits, revealing empirically which arts were functional rather than relying on speculation—similar to throwing different animals together in a coliseum.

Functional martial arts share the opponent process

All martial arts that work in any environment—boxing, muay thai, wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo, sambo—share that they are sports with meritocratic competition and an 'opponent process,' which Thornton calls aliveness (timing, energy, and motion); this opponent process is the key determinant of whether a martial art is functional or fantasy-based.

Wrestling coaches brought superior training epistemology

The best early MMA coaches were wrestling coaches because they brought an athletic training epistemology—drills, movement, training like an athlete—whereas many Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches had applied a traditional martial arts teaching method that only worked because rolling itself provided live training.

Grappling can be trained at full intensity safely

Grappling is uniquely valuable because it can be trained at nearly 100% effort against 100% resistance without injury, since submitting an opponent (choking unconscious or breaking a limb) requires no harm when they tap, whereas striking is synonymous with injury because knocking someone out is by definition a concussion—so striking arts must be trained judiciously as a pantomime of violence.

Choking unconscious is the most reliable fight ender

A physical altercation ends only three ways—the person leaves, it gets broken up, or you knock them unconscious or control and choke them—and choking someone unconscious is the most reliable method because no matter their size, strength, or what substances are in their system, cutting off blood flow to the head puts them to sleep.

Controlling distance controls the altercation

In any physical conflict—from a one-on-one fight to military conflict—controlling the distance lets you control the encounter, and the ultimate form of distance management is staying away from the situation entirely.

Violence against women is inherently grappling

Most violence directed by men at women is grappling almost by definition—an effort to physically control them, often as part of an attempted sexual assault rather than a striking exchange—which makes training in a grappling art like jiu-jitsu especially well-suited self-defense for women.

Nothing is too deadly to train alive

There is nothing too deadly to be trained with aliveness; weapons, including knives, should be drilled alive just like hand-to-hand, so anyone who claims a technique is too dangerous to train alive does not understand live training or the reality of violence.

Knife escape priority: flee, barrier, then engage

The correct priority when facing a knife is first to get away, then if you cannot flee to put something between you and the attacker (or pick up an object), and only as a last resort to attempt to control the person, accepting that you will likely get stabbed or sliced in the process.

Concealed carry demands extensive training

Carrying a concealed firearm is good but requires extensive training; you cannot simply buy a gun, put it on your person, and expect to defend yourself—you must invest time learning to operate it, including fundamentals like stance, sight alignment, trigger pull, clearing malfunctions, and weapon retention, the last of which loops back to clinch and standing grappling.

Baseball and hockey are successful honor communities

Baseball and hockey are the most honor-oriented sports and examples of successful honor communities because their elaborate unwritten codes—about retaliation, when to accept being hit by a pitch, keeping conflicts in-house, not appealing to the league or media—allow them to contain conflicts and prevent feuds from spinning out of control.

Grappling Arts Allow Honest Testing of Skill

Grappling arts like Brazilian jiu-jitsu can be trained at near-full force without serious injury, so unlike traditional martial arts there is no luck or pretense involved: a much better practitioner will defeat you 100% of the time, making it as decisive a test of real skill as chess and exposing fraudulent martial arts whose practitioners only pretend to be effective.

Jiu-Jitsu Wins By Violating Fighting Distance

Jiu-jitsu defeats other martial arts not through speed, strength, or explosiveness but by violating the distance from which fights are normally fought—closing in, taking the opponent to the ground where their strikes lose power, controlling and exhausting them, then applying a leverage-based joint lock or choke that forces submission with minimal violence.

Jiu-Jitsu Levels The Playing Field For Weaker People

Jiu-jitsu uniquely allows a smaller, weaker, less athletic person to defend themselves against and control a larger, more athletic opponent through distance management, leverage, and energy efficiency, neutralizing them in a relatively non-violent manner.

The 100-Second Rule Of Positional Control

The recommended law-enforcement strategy is to get the suspect onto their back (not their belly) and hold them with body-to-body control for 100 seconds; once the suspect realizes through failed escape attempts that they cannot get out or reach the gun, hope dies, the survival savagery ends, and they comply with verbal commands—because as long as there is hope of escape there is savagery.

Early UFC Was A Martial Arts Science Experiment

The first UFC in 1993, launched by Rorion Gracie and Art Davie, was effectively a near-no-rules science experiment to discover the most effective martial art—a single-elimination tournament with no weight classes or time limits—and Royce Gracie's dominance by closing distance and strangling opponents reset thinking about martial arts.

Skill Mismatch In Grappling Feels Supernatural

When there is a significant skill mismatch in grappling, the more skilled person—even if smaller—controls the other as if operating with different physics, making the untrained person's attempts to get up completely hopeless; only sufficient training creates this disparity needed for low-force arrests.

Biological Sex Differences Diminish in Endurance Swimming

In some sports the biological differences between males and females matter less, and according to long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad the differences essentially disappear at a certain length, suggesting accommodations like an open category alongside a female category could resolve some sports conflicts.

Aggregation of marginal gains wins championships

Dave Brailsford's principle of the aggregation of marginal gains, seeking 1% improvements in everything related to cycling (lighter tires, wind-tunnel-tested suits, handwashing surgeons, optimized pillows), transformed British Cycling from a century of mediocrity into a team that won multiple Tours de France and roughly 60-70% of available Olympic gold medals, showing small improvements can unlock elite success.

Football Is Ethically Problematic Due to CTE

Football is ethically problematic and its future is in jeopardy because of its connection to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); professional football reportedly has the worst prevalence of brain damage of any sport, worse than boxing or MMA, and even soccer's heading is objectively harmful, so a parent would not want a child to play tackle football.

We Want Human Failure in Sports

Sports will endure in the AI age because we want to see humans represent us and witness both greatness and failure; robot failure means nothing, so a robot basketball league where every shot is a dunk from mid-court would hold no lasting appeal.

Bonds struck out very rarely in his peak years (47 times in 2002, 58 in 2003) — 'Ruthian' numbers — and his low strikeout rate and rare misses are unrelated to steroids.

Mark McGwire's improvement late in his career was due to perfecting the modern Charlie Lau swing (long extension, backhand off the bat, upward swing path, high finish) rather than steroids, as his home-run efficiency rose only after he adopted that swing technique.