662. If You’re Not Cheating, You’re Not Trying

24:20And at less than$1 per serving, it's easy to make part of your routine. Noon is made for people who show up, value growth, and find joy in the effort. It helps support clear focus, steady energy, and the mindset to take on whatever comes next. Shop Noon Hydration at NoonLife.com. That's N-U-U-N Life.com. And fuel your next hard thing. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Lowe's. Son's out, and so is Dad. This is Father's Day. Find what'll make his summer with Lowe's Father's Day deals. Get two free DeWalt power tools when you buy a select 5-amp hour battery kit. Plus, get a free Blackstone 6-piece stainless steel griddle kit when you buy a select Blackstone griddle.

25:00Shop Lowe's Father's Day deals in-store or online, valid through June 24th, while supplies last. Selection varies by location.

25:17Before the break, we heard the former pro cyclist Floyd Landis talk about getting caught for doping after his 2006 Tour de France victory. There is much more to that story, which we will get to. But first, I want to back up a bit because the story of performance enhancers in sport did not end with Floyd Landis, and it certainly didn't start with him. Historically, we know that this has been a pursuit of the many. The ancient Greeks and Romans were pursuing this. That is April Henning. I am an associate professor of international sport management at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

25:51You're American. I am American, yes. How would you describe your research interests generally? I'm mostly interested in performance enhancement as well as the overlap of the performance world with well-being culture. My main motivator is that I want to make sport better and safer for athletes. The foundational part of that is getting rid of binary black and white good bad thinking and really looking at the reality of what athletes do and holding that up against the rules and policies that we've put in place to say, do these actually make sense? And how did you become interested in sports policy doping, etc?

26:33So I'm a runner, and I was training for my first marathon while I was entering my PhD proposal stage. That sounds like a lot to do at one time. Yes, maybe not the best set of things to do. But when I was training for that first marathon, I was running with this running group. It was these older men who were much more experienced at the marathon, and we were out on a long run. And one of them handed me one of those little electrolyte gels and said, try this. It'll give you some energy. So I took it. And then 10 minutes later, just hurling my guts out on the side of the road, it turns out it did not agree with me.

27:09Afterwards, I was like, why the f*** would I have taken candy from a stranger? I know better than this. But it got me thinking about what athletes do in their preparation and how they get interested in these things. What's the definition of a performance-enhancing drug? How academic do you want me to be? Very. Performance enhancing drugs are a category of a broader set of drugs known as human enhancement drugs. Generally speaking, performance enhancement drugs are those that are taken with the intent to enhance some aspect of human performance, whether physical, cognitive or social, some aspect of the human condition.

27:48What would you say have been the best performance enhancing drugs in history? I mean, most effective and safest, let's say. You don't want to die. Stimulants are very effective, especially in the short term. And many of them can be used quite safely, as those of us who use a lot of caffeine know. Of course, anything has risks. But stimulants, in a lot of cases, could be used within reason to get a performance benefit and to have fairly benign side effects. I gather from your writing that there is a pretty long history of blaming bad outcomes on performance enhancing drugs, even when there's not strong evidence.

28:31Is that the case? Yes. Yes. There have been a couple of cases where an athlete has died and there has been some evidence that they were using some form of performance enhancement. And the cause of death has been pinned by often the media on the substances rather than what the medical examiner has said. And is that because journalism likes the most salacious story possible? Or does that more reflect the way that our definition of performance enhancing is informed, you know, maybe less by science and more by cultural mores or politics? I think it could be a mix of the two. So in two cases, Knud Enmark Jensen and Tommy Simpson, the evidence that it was actually the performance enhancing drugs that was the cause of death was picked up by the media.

29:19These were cycling deaths. And what was missed is that they were both racing in conditions that were difficult, often without what we would consider contemporary nutrition and hydration. Canude Enemark Jensen, a 21-year-old Danish cyclist, died at the 1960 Rome Olympics during a race of 175 kilometers or around 109 miles. His death was immediately blamed on amphetamines. And the International Olympic Committee, the IOC, set out to create an anti-doping commission. Decades later, when Jensen's original autopsy report was recovered, it showed that no drugs had been found in his body. His death was more likely due to heat stroke.

30:04It was 104 degrees that day in Rome. The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, was founded in 1999. It maintains a list of over 300 banned substances, each of which only needs to meet two of three criteria. It poses a health risk, it enhances performance, or it violates the. quote, the spirit of sport. April Henning, along with her co-author Paul DeMeo, has written about all this in a book called Doping, A Sporting History. There are lots of twists and turns. It wasn't always so straightforward, and that perhaps the initial reasons for pursuing anti-doping are maybe less fit for purpose today than what they were when this all started.

30:47What do you mean by that less fit for purpose today? when anti-doping first became something that was being pursued by the IOC they were worried about stimulants the tests that they were able to develop for those were straightforward it was after that when substances that people were using became much more complex much harder to test for directly but also that could be taken and the benefit gotten months or weeks before the competition so when you were testing them in a competition there wasn't necessarily evidence that they had taken anything. This made the system much more complex because then there was this perceived need that then we have to test athletes outside of competition.

31:26The nature of doping, because it is secretive, because it's against the rules, because it has to be done underground on the quiet, the best substances are the ones that we don't know about. How do you think about the spectrum between daily, let's just call it drug use, caffeine, From there to performance enhancers, I'm just curious how you think about what's a drug and what's not a drug. I think it's very fluid. You do have on the one end the sort of things that are, you know, very culturally, socially acceptable. And what's culturally or socially acceptable varies across time and space. One of the things that lots of people try to do is break down between natural and artificial.

32:08And I think that that's really a trap. I mean, I'm sitting in a room surrounded by electricity and LED lights and talking to you across an ocean. Is any of this natural? 50 years ago, no, but now this seems totally normal. So when we think about performance enhancers, the difference between something that's very normal and something that we think of as being extreme changes over time.

32:33so what was the difference between normal and extreme in early 2000s cycling when lance armstrong kept winning the tour de france and then when floyd landis won his today we know that most of the top tier cyclists back then were doping but when landis tested positive after his victory it came as a shock it was still relatively new at that point i was somewhat recognizable Anytime I would interact with people, they would say, oh, I'm so sorry about what happened to you. And it was so unfair. And it made me feel awful. At some point, it all added up to, I can't live like this. I don't want to deal with this anymore.

33:11On the selfish side, there's nothing in this for me. Like, I'm never racing again. Why am I doing this? So ultimately, in 2010, you decided to blow the whistle. Walk me through that. Once I decided, okay, I need to tell this story somehow. How do I do it in a way that, number one, people will believe it because I've already lied about it. And number two, what are they going to think my motive is? At this point, all my motive was to just try to stay sane. But I also still had this real resentment towards USA Cycling who was in on this whole thing. Everybody there, the CEO of USA Cycling, everybody that was at the Organization of Cycling in the United States knew that this was what was happening.

33:53All of them acted like I was the bad guy and washed their hands of it. Like, well, we finally caught the bad guy. And at this point, Lance Armstrong's reputation is still sterling, yeah? Maybe not quite sterling. There were articles here and there, and if you piece them all together, you could be pretty skeptical of the whole thing. But he was able to navigate it all. He had a PR machine behind him. So what I decided to do was send some emails to USA Cycling, telling them information that I knew they already knew, but just getting it on the record. In April of 2010, four years after the Tour de France that Landis won, Landis wrote to the CEO of USA Cycling, Steve Johnson.

34:29In the email, he described how Lance Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team had repeatedly used performance-enhancing drugs. The subject line of the email read, Nobody is copied on this one, so it's up to you to demonstrate your true colors. They wouldn't do anything about it. And so eventually I reached out to the anti-doping agency as well. That was the United States Anti-Doping Agency, or USADA. Its CEO then and now is Travis Teigart. I can't say that I put them on much higher pedestal than USA Cycling, but at the end of the day, I figured they would do something because Travis Teigart was all about self-promotion.

35:09And if he could take down Lance, that's really what they wanted. Why was there that hunger to get him? Because the guys that run these anti-doping agencies are former athletes themselves. Tiger ended up being one of Time magazine's People of the Year. That's what he wanted. He wanted to be famous. We ran this characterization past USADA. A spokesperson told us that Floyd Landis' take was, quote, inaccurate. They added, many people were exposed and sanctioned for breaking the rules in addition to Lance Armstrong. Armstrong was given an opportunity to cooperate and chose not to. You write to USADA.

35:46What happened then? Within a matter of a couple of weeks, USADA reached out and asked if I would meet with them, along with this guy, Jeff Nowitzki. I'd heard his name because he was part of the Balco thing. The Balco thing was a huge scandal around the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative. Federal agents, including Jeff Nowitzki, had raided the lab in 2003. Balco was found to have been supplying designer steroids to elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Marion Jones. At this point, I just accepted the fact that I was committed. I'm just going to have to tell the story. So I said, yeah, I'll meet with you guys.

36:18And so I sat in a conference room with them in Marina Del Rey. I can tell by your tone of voice now, it's a shitty memory to think about, yeah? Yeah, I just didn't want to have to do it. But I decided this is what had to be done. And so I sat there for 12 hours and told them pretty much in detail whatever I could remember about how things worked. There was some risk in it. I didn't have a lawyer with me. He was a federal agent at the time, but I just laid it all out and left and said, do whatever you want with it. At this point, I'm not looking for anything from this. I just want the truth to be out there, and I don't have a solution, but maybe you do.

36:53What was their solution? Their solution was to take down Lance. They really didn't expose any of USA Cycling. One of my good friends and teammates, Dave Zabriskie, as part of what he told Novitski and Travis Tiger, was that he had initially gone to USA Cycling when he was confronted with this and asked Steve Johnson why they aren't doing something about it. Like, I'm being asked to use drugs, and Steve told him, well, it's just the way it works. You're just going to have to deal with it. They just kept everything about USA Cycling out of it. So, unfortunately, all they really wanted was Lance.

37:23At the end of the day, if you can't face the fact that the organization that runs the whole thing is in on it, then you didn't fix anything. Where does that leave you, though? When I first decided to do this, I thought, I'll lay this out there and see what happens. And then the Wall Street Journal, I'm not sure how they got them, but they printed a lot of the emails that I had sent. And of course, Lance, then he took his PR machine and just started attacking me. We reached out to USA Cycling and Steve Johnson and didn't hear back, but Johnson has previously denied these allegations. Floyd Landis responded to the campaign against him by filing suit under the Federal False Claims Act, alleging that Lance Armstrong had defrauded the U.S.

38:03Postal Service by accepting millions of dollars of sponsorship money while knowingly cheating in races. So I said to myself, I don't know how much power Lance has here and how much of this he can stop. If I file this whistleblower complaint, then I have some control over actual depositions and getting information. I can force the issue because I need people to believe this is true because if he can shut this down then I'm f***ed from every direction. He's going to fight so I have to deal with him on the level that he likes to fight. I filed this whistleblower complaint which of course he used against me and said it's about money and it never was about money.

38:40It became a matter of public dispute at that point. It became Lance against disgruntled Floyd. In 2018, Lance Armstrong agreed to pay the U.S. government$5 million to settle the claims. Floyd Landis got a whistleblower award of a little over a million dollars and another$1.65 million to cover his legal fees. By then, Armstrong had gone on a confessional tour. It started in 2013 with Oprah Winfrey. Let's start with the questions that people around the world have been waiting for you to answer. And for now, I'd just like a yes or no. did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?

39:21Yes. Yes or no? In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope? Yes. In your opinion, was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping? Seven times in a row. Not in my opinion. I also interviewed Armstrong in 2018. Freakonomics Radio episode 342, if you want to hear it. We called it, Has Lance Armstrong Finally Come Clean? So, Floyd, when is the last time you spoke with Lance? Oh, man, it's got to be 18 years. The last time I saw him was in a mediation for the whistleblower case, but he didn't speak to me. What do you think it would be like to sit down with him?

40:10I'm just curious if a part of you would like to reconcile or at least have a conversation I know based on things that he's said about me that He's just not interested in talking to me. I don't really care one way or the other. I don't feel like it Would be somehow soul cleansing to talk to him He took it a little far. I did too, you know, I wrote a book and lied and like I did things that Don't really make sense if you step back and say was this person being objective He's in the same position I empathize with him on how badly he's been beaten down and it sucks. It's awful. And he's a human in the end.

40:47I don't wish any harm on him. I don't foresee us ever talking again. I don't feel like we need to, but I don't have any aversion to it. Let's talk about your life now. What are you doing? I have a brand of nutritional products. Some of it's hemp based, some of it's CBD, but nutritional products called Floyd's of Leadville. We have a marijuana dispensary in Leadville as well. it's good it's something for me to focus on I don't know if you can tell but as much as I've come to accept all this when I have to sit and talk about it for a little while it still causes me some anxiety and I'm sure that's probably never going to go away but one thing that I didn't have for many years was something positive and completely unrelated to focus on there was so much litigation and also it's just so much just regret and wishing that I could still race my bike that I didn't really move on do you happen to remember John Wooden the basketball coach UCLA Yeah, yeah.

41:36Long time ago, he won all those titles. He once said something I wanted to run past you. He once said, be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. I wonder how that idea lands with you, how you think about the difference between your reputation and your character. It took me a long time to really make the distinction between the two. If you have the drive and the obsession with being a professional athlete, you kind of do care what people think. Your reputation does matter in the real world because that's how people are going to treat you based on what they perceive you to be.

42:16And so I've learned the hard way that it does matter. But at the end of the day, when you lay down at night and go to sleep, it's just you. I regret a lot of these things, and I wish they hadn't happened. You can sit here and say, what would you change? I'd change all kinds of things, but I have to deal with it. I have to accept the fact that that reputation is gone. What does really matter? It's just, can I just say to myself today, I was a good person and I didn't make any decisions like that again. How do you feel about yourself? I don't mean to overemphasize the religious background, but a lot of people grow up religious and then move away from it.

42:49But when you grow up in a religious household, you have values instilled in you, whether you know it or not. Then, you know, if your life goes a slightly different direction and you do some things that you know that your family would have frowned upon. You know, everybody has a different way of dealing with that. You can just say, well, screw them. I'm me. They're them. They're old fashioned, whatever. But I'm just curious how you're feeling about yourself. One thing that made a real difference for me is that my parents are just, I mean, I have wonderful parents. As much as I left the Mennonite church, I can't say a bad thing about them.

43:22And they're loving and they're forgiving. In some ways, I made it harder. I can't even put into words the amount of shame I felt over this whole thing. They just forgave me, and that's all they would ever do. But the shame that I felt just prevented any kind of reflection on what my character might need to be or what I need to change. It was more like I just can't even believe I got myself into this situation. As much as I had lived it, I still just couldn't believe it. People's reputations can change, and the context can change. The world becomes a different place now. It's a whole different place than it was 20 years ago, that's for sure.

43:57Just how different is the world now when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs? The Enhanced Games are a new version of the Olympics, but we allow performance-enhancing drugs. It's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

44:16Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Advantech. No one likes a creaky floor, and builders know that the subfloor sets the tone, which is why Advantech subflooring is engineered for strength, stiffness, and moisture resistance. Advantech products are designed to stand up to the elements and give you a bond so strong it's backed by the industry's first squeak-free guarantee. No squeaks, fewer callbacks, no problem. When the schedule is tight and performance matters, head to huberwood.com slash Advantech to lay the foundation of a solid build.

44:53Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Dell Technologies. When you're at work, you never know when you'll be interrupted. But with the Dell Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra with VPro, no matter what distracts you, your laptop won't. It's battery optimized for the way you work with built-in intelligence that quiets distractions when you need to focus. Your laptop will help keep you locked in even when it's bring your dog to work day. Built for those who stay in the flow, the Dell Pro, built for you. dell.com slash dell-pro.

45:30Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by TalkAboutPD.com. Let's talk about Peyronie's disease or PD. It's not widely talked about and some men may feel reluctant to bring it up, but it's more common than you would think. PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis, causing a curve with a bump during an erection that for some men may lead to pain during intimacy and impact mental health. A trusted urology specialist can help diagnose PD and walk you through your options, including non-surgical treatment. Visit talkaboutpd.com.

46:13Nearly 20 years ago, Floyd Landis was stripped of his Tour de France victory because he, like most of his peers, had used performance-enhancing drugs. This May, a sporting event is scheduled in Las Vegas that will celebrate the use of performance-enhancing drugs. My name is Dr. Aaron D'Souza. I'm the president and founder of the Enhanced Games. Just for the record, D'Souza has a doctorate in law, not medicine. The Enhanced Games are a new version of the Olympics, but we allow performance-enhancing drugs and we pay all athletes. We spoke with D'Souza a few months ago. This is a pretty typical timeline for Freakonomics Radio.

46:51These episodes take a while to put together. Back then, D'Souza was speaking with a lot of people. I've probably done over 2 ,000 interviews in the last three years. I'm sitting here in your studio as a very successful businessman today, but when this started, it was just me. This started with just one tweet. That was in 2023. Our very first tweet got 9 million views in 24 hours. Then Peter Thiel came to me and he said, oh, this is something very interesting. Peter Thiel is the venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir. He is a major backer of what are sometimes called transhumanist projects.

47:26life extension, human-machine integration, things like that. And he had a history with D'Souza going back to 2009. It was D'Souza who came up with a plan to sue the gossip website Gawker, which had outed Teal as gay. The plan worked. Gawker was put out of business. D'Souza went on to work for a couple of finance startups and then started working on an idea he'd been thinking about since he was an undergraduate. I always say it's not my idea. It's been talked about in pubs and bars for, it seems, time immemorial. Many eminent scholars have written about the idea of an enhanced version of the Olympics, most notably Professor Julian Sevalrescu at Oxford University.

48:09I had read some of Professor Sevalrescu's papers, and about three years ago, I decided to make it a reality. My theory of social change is very simple. Change only happens when someone puts a suit on and goes to work every day trying to solve a problem. Despite lots of people being interested in performance enhancements, no one had ever made it their job to make it a reality. So D'Souza made it his job. We're building a purpose-built arena on the campus of Resorts World Las Vegas. Three sports, track, swimming, and weightlifting. All sprint events. And the objective there is to break all of the major world records.

48:42Athletes have three avenues of competition. First, they could be natural athletes, which a lot of journalists forget about. You can be a fully natural athlete and compete at the Enhanced Games. You can be self-enhanced. Some athletes have a doctor they'd like to work with and a system that they work through. Or you can be enhanced through a clinical research project, which is fully supervised by an independent institutional review board and authorized by regulators. This clinical research project will be administered by the United Arab Emirates Department of Health. As of this recording, 45 athletes from around the world have signed up to compete in these enhanced games.

49:19The total purse for each event is$500 ,000, with half going to the first place finisher. A new world record in the 50-meter swim or the 100-meter sprint will earn another$1 million. Among the financial backers of this project are Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm, 1789 Capital. Aaron D'Souza sees the enhanced games as using science and technology to expand the boundaries of athletic achievement. The old guard, not surprisingly, is horrified. The International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency issued a joint statement calling the enhanced games irresponsible and immoral.

50:03They warned that some performance-enhancing drugs can lead to serious long-term health consequences, even death. D'Souza says there are safeguards against that. There's pre-care and after-care. Before any athlete competes, they have to take a full system health checkup. MRIs, echocardiograms, blood work. After the event, particularly if they've chosen to be part of the clinical research trial, we will monitor them for five years. But D'Souza's goals extend far beyond the athletic competition. My goal is to bring about the 10th age of mankind, the enhanced age, where everyone has the opportunity to become enhanced.

50:42The use of enhancements is actually pretty commonplace now. Cosmetic medicine is very accepted. You can walk into a doctor here in New York City on Park Avenue and say, I would like a breast augmentation or remove wrinkles. Those are non-therapeutic procedures, not treating a disease. And they carry great risk, particularly surgical interventions. Yet if you walk into that same doctor and say, I'd like to run faster, jump higher. I'd like to be stronger or younger for longer. Somehow this is ethically complex in medicine. I don't believe that that's correct. The moral question is not to say some substances are good or some substances are bad, but rather to say some interventions are productive and some are not.

51:26D'Souza sees the Enhanced Games as both a sporting event and a biotech play. The Enhanced website shows three testosterone products that they say will be available to order in March. The end conclusion of the Enhanced Games is not a sporting event, but it's actually curing aging. Because we can create the market structure by which performance enhancements can come to market. We think there's a very large market for this, as proven by Ozempic and other products. right now biotechnology companies will not invest in building new performance enhancing drugs because they can't be used by athletes in their core context now that they can be used at the enhanced games and then sold to the wider public only one of them needs to succeed it will be worth a trillion dollars all that money will then be reinvested into rnd new startups will come out of that which will sell their products on the enhanced games platform and then suddenly we're in a world where we have literal superpowers.

52:23So what does success look like for D'Souza? Success looks like breaking all the major world records, building a sustainable, publicly listed company that pays athletes extraordinarily well. I can't foresee what would stop us. Like, are we going to say, oh, you know what, we will limit ourselves to being humans 1.0 and never try and progress? The enhanced games are inevitable. If I walk out the store today and get hit by a boss. This will succeed.

52:57There are a few updates to report here. Enhanced is indeed trying to go public and is currently in regulatory review, but they will be doing it without Aaron D'Souza. He told us it was, quote, the right time to install corporate management. He has been replaced by Maximilian Martin as CEO. Enhanced gave us a statement saying that they were grateful for D'Souza's vision, but that, quote, the viewpoints expressed by D'Souza during this interview should be considered personal opinions and do not in any way reflect those of Enhanced. So we will just have to wait and see what happens in May. I thought that the big sports betting sites or prediction markets might have contracts written on whether any world records will be broken at the Enhanced Games, but I haven't seen any yet.

53:44I was also curious to know what someone like Floyd Landis thought about this idea. Oh, man. I haven't looked it up in a while. I was fascinated by the idea that the Olympic Committee was somehow opposed to it. I don't know what possible power they would have to say you can't have enhanced games. Like, do whatever you want. This has nothing to do with the Olympics. You think they're worried that no records will be broken, which would indicate that everybody in the Olympics is already doping? Yeah, I mean, that's what will happen. I can tell you right now, that's what will happen. No records will be broken.

54:14Then they have a dilemma. There's two possible options. either the drugs don't work or the real option, which is everybody's already on them, then they don't want to face that. Okay, so that's Landis' take. I also went back to April Henning, the scholar of sports doping. What I consider to be the biggest victory of anti-doping has been the cultural acceptance of doping as being a thing that is off limits, as being a thing that if you do, you are a bad person. That sort of moralization. This has become so taboo that if you test positive for something, we don't even want to hear your explanation.

54:51So the founder of the Enhanced Games would probably argue that that's about to change. What do you make of that new competition? The Enhanced Games are an interesting idea. I think it's important to distinguish between the broad strokes philosophical or principled view of these things aren't necessarily bad and sport isn't necessarily pure from the distinct thing that is the Enhanced Games. There are things that are prohibited in sport that could potentially be used in ways that are less risky or lower harm, that might actually benefit a lot of people. Lots of things that are prohibited in sport are used as medications for very specific purposes.

55:29But sport has told us that these are very bad things. Sport sets up a moral framework for how we should be. It's a phenomenon bound by rules. Rules are what make it what it is. And if those rules aren't consistently applied, then the sport ceases to make any sense. A foul in basketball is a foul in basketball no matter where you're playing it. 100 meters is 100 meters no matter which track or swimming pool or anything else that you're competing in. That's what makes it sport. We want everything to be very black and white. We want it to be clear cut. It's why we get upset when somebody cheats. if somebody gets away with something, if they get away with a foul, if they get away with doing something dishonest, because that's not what sport is meant to be.

56:16This is why doping caught the public imagination and why it's been so easily painted in moralistic terms. We talk about sport in terms of being clean sport or dirty sport. We talk about clean athletes and dirty athletes. That is very, very polarizing, moralistic language. But we've also extrapolated this to wider life. We use athletes as role models. We use what they do, how they prepare, how they live as an example for how we want to be. Everybody wants to be like Mike, right? There's a reason athletes are on the Wheaties box. We want to be like them. It's this collision of culture with rules, with morality, with doing things the right way, with sporting success that we hold up as the ideal.

56:59And that's why we're so let down when we find out that athletes have been doping or that they've broken a rule or that they've done one of these things that we consider to be immoral.

57:10But what happens when the rules of society are changing more quickly than the rules of sports? We will get into that part of the conversation in our next episode. We'll hear from Ricky Williams, the former NFL running back, who paid an enormous price for his cannabis use. That feeling of everyone knowing, Oh, I thought my life was over. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes.

57:49This episode was produced by Tao Jacobs with help from Dalvin Abawaji. It was edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Elaria Montenacourt, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

58:21So I don't drink alcohol. Why? Because I don't think it's a productive intervention in my body. versus I'd be very happy to have a brain-computer interface implanted because I think that would be a very productive use of technology.

58:39The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

58:47Stitcher.

58:52Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Vitamix. According to the LA Times, the average American home contains 300 ,000 items, including a staggering number of appliances. All those gadgets just clutter. But there's one tool that delivers what a dozen others only promise. From pureeing to chopping, Vitamix blenders bring the power of an entire kitchen to your countertop, offering enduring performance and precision you can count on. In a world full of clutter, do more with less. Visit Vitamix.com and shop now.

59:27Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 milligrams, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.

59:57The wrongs we must right. The fights we must win. The future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this. you