663. Is Weed a Performance-Enhancing Drug?

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23:23Angela Bryan:If you know only one thing about the former NFL running back, Ricky Williams, it probably has to do with his affinity for cannabis. So where does that story start?

23:34Ricky Williams:I first was introduced to Bob Marley when I was 12 or 13. I started growing dreads, and every day I was wearing green, gold, and red. And I was in Southern California. People would have assumed that I was smoking, but I wasn't. And why weren't you at that time? I was already a jock. The part of Bob Marley that resonated with me was the music and the message. But because I was a jock, the cannabis part didn't connect. It just didn't appeal to me. I remember the smartest kid in school, Ben Kotnick, one day in the 11th grade, he assumed that I smoked and I was trying to be cool. He said, well, why don't you come to my house at lunch and we'll hit my sister's bong.

24:10Ricky Williams:And that was my first time smoking. I hit the bong and I coughed, coughed, right out of Central Casting. I remember I had physics and I was sitting in physics, just daydreaming and thinking, I don't understand why people do this. That was my first experience with cannabis. Fast forward, I get into college, and my roommate, he was a football player who was a guy I respected a lot. He smoked every Friday. I was invited to hang out with the upperclassmen and shoot dice with them, and when they passed the blunt, then I would hit it. But to me, it was more the intoxication of being to hang out with the upperclassmen.

24:43Ricky Williams:That's where I became comfortable with it, but still not using it. It wasn't until my senior year. I could have gone to the NFL as a junior and become a first round draft pick, but something about college football that I just loved. And I had an opportunity to break a bunch of records and win the Heisman Trophy. I put all my eggs in one basket and I came back from my senior year. My senior year starts and my girlfriend at the time, who I'm convinced I'm going to marry, we break up. As soon as we break up. She's in a relationship with our quarterback. That doesn't feel great. The constant reminder every day.

25:17Ricky Williams:And the season starts. We play okay, but I have a couple of bad games and I have an injury. I'm obsessing about the girl. I'm thinking I wasted my opportunity. I'm not going to win the Heisman. I'm hurt and we're going to suck again. I was going to a really dark place and my roommate was a smoker, my best friend, Chad. He grabbed the bong and he slid it over and he said, dude, you just need to chill. I took a couple hits and I remember walking upstairs and laying in the bed. And as I was sitting there, I noticed it was the first time in weeks that I wasn't obsessing about the girl and I wasn't obsessing about how poorly I was playing.

25:51Ricky Williams:I noticed that in that space, I started to imagine myself playing better. I started thinking, okay, what are the things that I can do in practice this week to improve? It just shifted my focus. The next two games, I had back-to-back 300-yard rushing games, which is still a record. That was the first time I saw, okay, maybe this could help. How would you describe the benefits? I wouldn't try to describe or try to drum up a conversation about what are some of the biggest challenges or most painful experiences in someone's life. And I'll tell you why. Because I started doing a survey and just asking people, when was not the first time you consumed cannabis, but when was the first time that it said something to you?

26:34Ricky Williams:80 % of them said it was a healing kind of thing. But the way it's presented to us is as a party sort of thing. And so my relationship with cannabis was that I'm breaking a rule and I'm partying and I'm doing something I shouldn't, but my actual experience didn't match up.

26:50Angela Bryan:So you wound up having a great senior season. We can agree on that. Yes. How much did cannabis help you reach that level?

26:58Ricky Williams:It wasn't like after that I became an everyday smoker, maybe once or twice the rest of the season, but it was just that one moment where I was locked up that it opened up something and then I was good. Six months after that experience, I was in Southern California and I had money and I was staying on the beach. And it just felt like after I work out, nice to go home and smoke a blunt and relax on the beach. So I bought my first ounce. That ounce, I didn't smoke the whole thing. I gave most of it away. But it was just having it available. It was the beginning of the relationship. And then I was drafted by the Saints.

27:36Angela Bryan:The New Orleans Saints, under head coach Mike Ditka, drafted Ricky Williams in 1999. Ditka had wanted Williams so badly that he traded away eight more draft picks to get him. When it came time to negotiate his contract, Williams went for the minimum guaranteed money with big performance bonuses. His rookie year was okay, not great. Because of injuries, he played in only 12 games. He rushed for less than 900 yards with just two touchdowns, and he missed out on a lot of bonus money. The Saints went 3-13 that season, and Coach Ditka was fired.

28:10Ricky Williams:The time in New Orleans was kind of bumpy, so it was more of helping me just deal with it, helping me manage. I didn't really start to become a smoker until my second year in New Orleans, and I got hurt. I had a lot of downtime. my roommates both smoked. And so it just became a thing that when we got home from a hard day at work, it's like telly, roll up, play video games and smoke, decompress, get up in the morning and then go do it again. And then after my third year, I was traded to the Dolphins. There I was at a condo right on the beach training. It's kind of that thing where I'm about another ounce.

28:45Ricky Williams:So great after training to go on the balcony, smoke a blunt, see the ocean and get ready to do it again. So the season rolled around, and Miami was nice. I led the NFL in rushing. That's when I found my rhythm between using cannabis and using it to help me perform. Back then, we got drug tested once a year. When I was in New Orleans, that once a year drug test was in training camp. It never really was an issue. I got traded to Miami, and I started smoking in the offseason. No one told me, but Miami's drug test is in the middle of the offseason. So I came to work one day for training, and the piss test guy had the note on my locker and says it's your annual test.

29:22Ricky Williams:And I had smoked the day before, so I got popped. I failed the drug test. When you fail the first drug test, the NFL sends you to Atlanta to talk to a bunch of therapists to establish that you have a drug problem. And then it's a two-year program. The big difference in the two-year program is you talk to a therapist once a week, but I was now drug tested not once a year, but nine times a month, almost every other day. And at first, I'm an optimistic guy, so I was like, it can't hurt to have someone to talk to. It's no big deal. I don't have to smoke. I was fine. For a couple of weeks, stopped.

29:57Ricky Williams:And I was thinking, I don't know if I can do this if I don't have a way to take care of myself. So I started to play to see if I got tested on Tuesday. It means I probably won't get tested again until Friday. If I can take two hits, maybe smoke one joint. And then I found this drink that if you follow the instructions, your urine is clean for five hours. What was the drink? It was called Extra Clean.

30:20Angela Bryan:Did you think about buying somebody else's urine?

30:23Ricky Williams:No. People did that, right? They did, but the NFL was good. When you piss for the NFL, you got to drop your draws to your knees and the guy is just standing right there. I was willing to experiment and see if there's ways that I could pass the test and still play. And I figured it out for almost two years. It was two months before the two years. Monday night, we played against the Eagles. I had over 100 yards, hurt my shoulder. We lost that game at the very end, and we were eliminated from the playoffs. I was out late that night, kind of bummed about it, and I had a drug test like at 6 o 'clock in the morning.

30:58Ricky Williams:I set my alarm, and I got up, I drank my extra clean. The instructions for extra clean is you drink the bottle, you wait 15 minutes, you drink water, 15 minutes, drink water, and then your pee's clean. I drank the first bottle, and I was so tired I fell back asleep. I didn't wake up until the drug guy was ringing the doorbell. And I'm sure I could have weaseled my way out of it, but I was like, whatever. So I peed in the cup. A week later, I get a FedEx from the NFL saying you failed a drug test and you're advancing to the next stage of the drug program. So this is your second fail? This was my second fail, yeah.

31:31Ricky Williams:How much more serious does it get now? It gets serious for two reasons. One of them I didn't care about. The other one I did care about. The first reason it gets serious is because you failed the second test. it's four 17ths of your salary. So four game checks, four game checks. And to me, I was like, whatever. Once you get to this point, now the team knows. The first fail, they didn't? They didn't. Yeah. It's confidential. Some guys don't care and they just get drug tested at the facility. No one knew I was in the drug program because he would just come to my house. And so that was the thing where it really started to shake my foundation.

32:03Ricky Williams:Something that I found was beneficial to me and helped me perform and make everyone money and make everyone happy. It was something that I hid. I remember having to walk up and talk to the general manager. And, you know, he's like, what's this? I felt so silly. It's like I turned into like a criminal and a drug addict. It didn't feel good. I appealed to the NFL because it's just what you do. At the time, the NFL's substance abuse, they tested for 15 nanograms per milliliter. That's pretty much the lowest you can test. When you drug test, you piss in an A bottle and then you piss in a B bottle.

32:37Ricky Williams:And they keep both. When you do an appeal, they test the B bottle to check. So my A bottle was just barely over the limit. And they came back and they said, okay, if you will stay in the drug program until the middle of the next football season, so eight weeks, and you stay clean, then you're out of the drug program. And I said, no. I put it back on them to have to make a decision. How come? Because I thought I had a strong enough case that I wanted to put it on them to say, are are you really going to suspend one of the best players? It's like a speeding ticket for going 58. Exactly. And I was putting them in a position to make a choice.

33:13Ricky Williams:They were going back and forth. It was during this time where it was in limbo that I failed the third test before I decided to retire. And you're how old? 26 or 7 or something? I was 27. I'm going back and forth. And then I had one of those conversations with God. Obviously, I'm a risk taker. Now roll the die and see what the fates say. So I said, I'm going to do my thing. And if I fail a drug test, it's the sign that I need to retire. If I don't, it's a sign that I need to play. At the time, I was really enjoying the offseason. I went to Jamaica, and then I went to the Bahamas, and I got the call from my sister, you got a FedEx.

33:51Ricky Williams:My heart started beating. They say at the end of your life, your whole life flashes in front of you. And I had that moment. My whole life flashed in front of me, and I saw that pretty much everything that I was at that moment was because of football. And it was like on the brink. But I started thinking about it. I have enough money. I have my body attacked. Why am I going to go get the ball 500 times and get my body destroyed? It just stopped making sense temporarily. I picked up the phone and I called Dr. Brown, the head of the NFL's drug program. His job is to say, we've got the drug test and this means that I'm going to have to call the commissioner.

34:28Ricky Williams:And so I said, listen, Dr. Brown, don't worry about calling the commissioner because I am out. What did he say to that? He said, are you sure? And I said, yes. I said, it's obvious that I probably should be doing something else. And I said, thank you for everything because Dr. Brown and I had grown close at that point. He said, well, I wish you the best of luck. When I hung up the phone, it was like this million pound weight lifted off my shoulders. It was a sense of liberation that is hard to put into words. That sounds beautiful. And I'm happy you had that.

35:01Angela Bryan:How long were you able to enjoy that million pound relief of freedom?

35:07Ricky Williams:The story gets much more interesting. One of my really good friends at the time, Dan Lebitard, he was doing some stuff for ESPN and he was a columnist for the Miami Herald. He knew the story. He knew this background because we were close friends. And so as soon as I retired, because the NFL substance abuse program is confidential, nobody knew that it was connected to failing a drug test. It wasn't even part of the conversation. Dan is extremely articulate and he knows me. He was really telling the story and he put a really positive bent on the story. Like a young athlete who doesn't want to beat up his body and realize that he's finally free.

35:44Ricky Williams:And who has a lot of curiosity and interest in the world beyond football. Exactly. You got it. So he was tooting that horn and it was great. And I was like the hero. I was walking around, high fives. And then I was on the phone talking to Dan one night And Dan and I had always planned that we were going to write a book together. And I said, Dan, I can't wait to talk about the drug test. And Dan was like, what drug test? I said, oh, yeah, I filed a drug test right before I retired.

36:16Ricky Williams:Plot twist. I was young, right? I didn't realize the situation that I put him in because he's like a journalist.

36:22Angela Bryan:So he's going to feel like he was covering for you.

36:25Ricky Williams:Exactly. If the story breaks, it ruins his reputation. And so I say it to him, not thinking about it, and I can start to feel the panic in his voice about what is he going to do. He's a very principled person.

36:38Angela Bryan:Did he express this to you, that you would put him in a position that was difficult?

36:42Ricky Williams:I'm sure he did. Knowing Dan, I was young and idealistic, and there was a conflict between friendship and honor. And I was like, well, what are you going to do? I could tell he's in a state of panic. We leave it as like, well, you make a decision. Good night. When I woke up in the morning, the news was everywhere. He massaged it. He tried to put me up as an advocate. But the story was he rather smoke weed than play football.

37:11Angela Bryan:There had been some reporting about the second drug test that Ricky Williams had failed. But the third test, which would have led to a suspension, was not known about until Levitard published his piece in the Herald. By this time, Williams had established himself as one of the best running backs in the NFL. In 2002, his first season with the Dolphins, he led the league in rushing with more than 1 ,800 yards and he had 16 touchdowns. This success had a lot to do with how the media treated his quitting. Here's one headline from a Florida newspaper. Ricky Williams reveals a higher love than football.

37:49Ricky Williams:Everyone thought I was a drug addict or I was endangering my career for a drug. What I learned about social anxiety disorder, and if we think about it, it's built into the phrase, social anxiety, the people that I'm surrounding myself with give me anxiety. And I could make that about me, but I realized when I changed my environment and I was around other people that I wasn't anxious. I was thinking, do I want a life where I'm making money that I don't even feel is worth it? and I'm always anxious and feeling judged and not even appreciated for the parts of myself that I love, it just didn't add up anymore.

38:24Angela Bryan:John Wooden, the famous UCLA basketball coach who became a leader of leaders outside of sport even, he said this thing one time that I think about a lot. He said that you should 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. When I think about you, the reputation is what became very public and often negative, whereas now you're talking about what your character really was. Were you discovering who you actually were then? Yeah, wonderful question.

38:59Ricky Williams:What came up for me at that time was I was realizing how far apart my character and my reputation were. It was one of the most uncomfortable times of my life. That feeling of everyone knowing. oh, I thought my life was over. It woke me up to something that is true about me, that if I'm by myself, I don't feel any negativity about it, and it has value to me. But if people know about this, then I feel ashamed. And that can't be healthy. I thought I need to change my environment because I could see there are environments out there that I could be myself, and I wouldn't be ashamed or a disgrace to the game.

39:40Ricky Williams:So those other environments where you could be yourself

39:42Angela Bryan:and kind of grow into yourself because you were still young. Were those environments mostly around the healing universe?

39:50Ricky Williams:The first impulse was I wanted to travel. I had aspirations to be an intelligent person, but my intelligence had all been invested in being a football player. There are so many things about the world and about life that I was ignorant of. To me, there's no better way than to travel to have those kinds of experiences. I was traveling in Samoa. I spent a couple of months in Australia. I naturally started to gravitate towards people who were healers. I started to get a completely different reflection of what was valuable about me. As a football player, my sensitivity was something that I was made fun of for.

40:25Ricky Williams:And around the healers, my sensitivity was appreciated. It was acknowledged. Oh, wow. Did you look back at your football career with appreciation or with kind of mixed feelings? What was that like? It was an evolution. I had felt I had lived more in those three months than I had the previous 27 years of my life. So I could appreciate the value of first getting away because I had to come to terms with that first. When I was in India doing my yoga teacher's training, the schedule reminded me of training camp. I realized that everything that I learned in football, if I just applied it to being a better person, it would give me the same kind of benefit.

41:03Ricky Williams:So I found an environment where my work ethic and my ability to just hit it was rewarded, but instead of rewarding me with money and fame, it rewarded me with character. The structure of football, it allowed the aggressive side of myself to express freely, and I was rewarded for it. Outside of that context, I probably would have gotten myself into some kind of trouble. People like me, they need football or something like that early in life because that structure helps us gain a sense of control and mastery over certain things. But it gets to a point where there are diminishing returns. This part of me is full grown now.

41:39Ricky Williams:Why am I still doing this? It's time for another part of myself to be developed. So why'd you go back to football then? You retired in 2004, but then decided to return in 2005. I ended up here in Northern California studying alternative medicine, where I met a yogi who did my astrology chart, had a spiritual awakening, and I realized, well, if I'm going to get my life back on track, I probably have to go back to football and clean that mess up.

42:06Angela Bryan:But it's hard to make a comeback when people are calling you a disgrace to humanity. That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

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44:24Angela Bryan:In 2005, Ricky Williams unretired from the NFL and returned to the Miami Dolphins. He had a decent season, not great. The next season, he failed a fourth drug test. The penalty for that was a full year suspension. A few years earlier, when he had abruptly quit the NFL, the media response was indignant. This time, some of it was just hateful. Smoking weed is more important to him than playing professional football. He's always hated football. A disgrace to humanity, Ricky Williams. Watching the clips of sportscasters and other athletes, including former athletes like Joe Theismann and so on, hearing what they said about you, it took my breath away now.

45:08Angela Bryan:They're calling you a disgrace to the game, a disgrace to humanity. It blew my mind to hear that now. So I can't even imagine what that felt like for you then, if you paid attention to it. Maybe you blocked it out. I don't know. But if you didn't block it out, what was that like?

45:27Ricky Williams:It was further validation and justification for myself of why I don't need to be in that world.

45:35Angela Bryan:But Williams still wanted to play football. So he survived his one-year NFL suspension by playing in the Canadian Football League for the Toronto Argonauts.

45:45Ricky Williams:And I met an osteopath who did this work on me. I noticed like, wow, whatever you're doing, it's really opening up my mind and my body and it's improving the way that I play. He said, you should study this a little bit and see if you can figure some stuff out. I took his advice and it saved my life. It took layers of trauma off my body and allowed me to play at a high level for an extended amount of years.

46:07Angela Bryan:Was the trauma all physical trauma or was there also mental anxiety, anything like that? How did that all intersect?

46:15Ricky Williams:When you're a professional athlete, it's hard to separate mental and physical trauma. And I would even say existential trauma because something that we all have to do is make a living. The hero man archetype is you have to be good at making a living. So something about being injured in the NFL, it's like a deep wound because the thing that has made you who you are and everyone is giving you his adulation for, you realize how fragile it is. A bone breaks and you feel like you have nothing to offer. That hurts deep. I've wrestled with that a lot of times in my career with injuries. On top of the physical trauma that actually came from the game, locked in there was also the emotional trauma.

46:57Ricky Williams:I think especially for African Americans, there's like a deeper potential trauma because our value is what we can offer to other people through our physical bodies. But I will say it inspired me to develop more of the mental side of myself because it's easy for a lot of people gifted in sports to never be motivated to develop their minds or other parts of their personalities.

47:20Angela Bryan:I know you had childhood trauma, you had sexual abuse by your father when you were really young. I don't know if you want to talk about that. I certainly don't want to lead you into it if you don't want to. But when you think about yourself as a healer and whether it's cannabis or other healing methods that you embrace, can you talk about how successful you find it can be for other people's childhood trauma, whatever type it might be?

47:45Ricky Williams:Yeah. Studying alternative medicines, all of them have a spiritual basis that says the root of all illness, is not knowing who you truly are. I think a lot of times when we're kids, a lot of times the way we judge or filter information is through our parents' reaction to it. I mean, who knows? But I think I have a good enough memory in that moment as a four-year-old, he didn't touch us. He just masturbated in front of us. So I think I had an awareness of something's going on. Because obviously the next morning on the way to school when I told my mom about it, I didn't know I was telling on my dad.

48:20Angela Bryan:I see.

48:21Ricky Williams:And then the other kind of big issue with my dad, my dad had me take pictures and pull the rays of him naked. That was the last straw. So for me, more of the trauma was that I was the one responsible for getting rid of my dad. The story that I get is from the parents or the outsiders telling the story. That's what I'm hearing. Imagine someone 20 years later hanging out with a friend that they really trust and there's cannabis in the room. The topic comes up and they reflect on the situation and they can see their parents' opinions. They can appreciate themselves in it. And it's a different version of the story.

48:56Ricky Williams:What stores in our memory is not what happened. It's the last time we thought about what happened.

49:01Angela Bryan:Do you think cannabis helps you get to the truer version of the story?

49:04Ricky Williams:Yes, exactly. 100%. Yes.

49:07Angela Bryan:Interesting. So you become more reflective. I'm curious how you might connect the effect of the cannabis to help you know your true self like that with the healing stuff that you've learned? Are they totally different mechanisms? Are they similar? How do you think about that relationship?

49:26Ricky Williams:They're accomplishing the same ends. There are different ways of getting there. But there's a lot of the body work that I do, it puts people in an altered state. It's difficult to solve a problem from the same level that created it. And many indigenous cultures believe that you can't be healthy without having access to the other side. Because we are whole beings. The way we're raised, so much of our attention is outwards. We forget about the soul. We forget about who we are on the inside. And if we stray from living that way, it tends to cause pain and anxiety.

49:56Angela Bryan:So here's the thing that I don't quite understand in the story. It's an amazing story. It's got all these ebbs and flows and discovery and challenge and all that, like all good stories have. What I don't get is once you got on the path to becoming a healer and you recognize that in yourself. Why did you keep coming back to football?

50:15Ricky Williams:Part of my healing for me is to have a message that I can share with the world. And part of the reality of that is the world has to take you seriously. And I thought if I can come back and be myself more and not do football in a way that alienates myself, but do it in a way that my character and my reputation can align more, that I have a shot.

50:37Angela Bryan:After a year in Canada, Ricky Williams went back to Miami and the NFL. He was hurt most of the following season, but he put together a few good seasons after that, a nice way to end his eventful career. By the time he retired for real, Ricky Williams had become a fan favorite and a model for some other players.

50:58Ricky Williams:I see that I've made an impact. I hear it when I hear young African-Americans, athletes, they say, because of you, we have more freedom in how we can be as a professional athlete. Back when I was growing up, if you smoked and you were on the team, a lot of coaches would just run you off. But if you're the best player on the team, then the coach kind of protects you and guards you. It was rare to have the best player on the team not be afraid to be a rebel, and it opened doors for a lot of people. We have all these stories in history and in religions about how difficult it is to develop in a world that's trying to pressure you to be something else.

51:34Ricky Williams:I've tried to make my life a testament to that truth. One of the most powerful moments in my life is related to the University of Texas. Because after the drug test, after all of that stuff, the University of Texas erected a statue. And then they named the football field after me. This idea of I can tell the story of staying true to who I am, it worked. You can do it. You can do it.

51:57Angela Bryan:It's really beautiful. I mean, I'm so happy for you that things have worked out the way they have. It just makes me smile to think about this journey that you've been on. What share of NFL players do you think are using cannabis now? I'd say 70 to 75. And how do they use it typically? Like, I've heard you say that not many guys will smoke before a game, for instance.

52:17Ricky Williams:The smokers will, but that's always going to be a smaller percentage. It's probably larger now than it was then, because if you're in a state that's legal, it's harder not to. If we're being realistic about the age group and being social, it's just everywhere. It's more difficult to not do it. But then if they're not consuming cannabis, they're taking Ambien, they're taking Vicodin, they're taking NSAIDs. There's stress and pain that is generated by being a professional football player. And if a player can't find a way to manage that, they ain't going to make it. I'm biased, but I think you'd be stupid to not at least consider cannabis as a means of taking care of yourself.

52:53Angela Bryan:It's tough to fact check what Williams says about cannabis use in the NFL, but it wouldn't be that surprising. Over the past few years, the NFL has significantly loosened up its policies around cannabis. They're even funding research into using cannabinoids for pain management. The other major American sports leagues, the NBA, NHL and MLB, have also relaxed their cannabis policies. And Ricky Williams, well, Ricky Williams, in addition to his healing work, now runs a cannabis company in Northern California called Heisman, H-I-G-H-S-M-A-N. I went back to the psychology professor, Angela Bryan, to ask where she thinks we are at this moment in the long and strange relationship between drugs and humans.

53:41Angela Bryan:One thing we know about humans, honestly, not even humans, sloths, dolphins, chimpanzees, no matter if you have a brain, you try to alter it. That's been the animal condition for as long as we've been in existence. it always kind of baffles me that we have these moral judgments about people wanting to alter their consciousness. I had a big cup of coffee this morning. That's a drug. It's a mind-altering substance. And that one's fine. But then if I were to wake and bake and hit my dab rig in the morning, people would think, oh, horrors.

54:21Angela Bryan:I love that saying. If you have a brain, you try to alter it. Of course, there are a lot of ways to alter your brain, like listening to podcasts. So thanks for listening to this one. Thanks also to Angela Bryan and Ricky Williams. And from last week's episode, thanks to Floyd Landis, Louisa Thomas, April Henning, and Aaron D'Souza. If you want to let us know what you thought of these episodes, our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, I am taking the week off and Steve Levitt is in the host chair trying to figure out how to repurpose existing drugs for new cures.

55:02Angela Bryan:From the moment that that drug, serolimus, started saving my life, I just haven't been able to stop thinking about how many more drugs are out there that could treat more patients in need. 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. This episode was produced by Tao Jacobs with help from Dalvin Abouaji. It was edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston and Eleanor Osborne.

55:40Angela Bryan:Special thanks to Yasmin Hurd for background research help. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ilaria Montenacourt, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening.

56:02Angela Bryan:Ricky, if you would, just say your name and what you do. We'll start with that. What do I do? I don't know how to answer that.

56:13Angela Bryan:The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

56:21Angela Bryan:Stitcher.

56:26Angela Bryan:Freakonomics 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.

57:06Ricky Williams:So fire. Try them all. Now at McDonald's. Refreshers contain caffeine.

57:11Angela Bryan:A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99 % Invisible and BBC Studios.

57:18Ricky Williams:Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. Some of these objects are well known, many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment. Find a history of the United States and 100 objects on the 99 % Invisible feed, wherever you get your podcasts.