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

There are a lot of explanations going around for why our political moment feels more chaotic

than many of us have ever experienced. Let me offer up one more explanation. It has to do with rules. My belief is that many people in many different circumstances have come to think that the rules we live by are stupid. So stupid that the only sensible thing to do is break them. And if you get away with it, then you've got the confidence to just keep going. And now you've got different people playing the game of life by totally different rules.

How do we think that's going to work out? All this got me thinking about one place where rules are

“still followed for the most part at least, and that's what we're going to talk about today.”

[MUSIC] Can I take you on a really weird depression? I would love a weird depression. Okay, down a rabbit hole. Sure. Have you read Elsa's Adventures in Wonderland? Not in approximately 45 years, but yeah.

I read it when I was at sophomore in college. I was one of those annoyingly good students who took notes in the margins, and I wrote all my papers on time. Anyway, so my daughter was five or six. I picked up the book again, and I started reading it to her. This is Luis Atamus. She writes the sporting scene column for the New Yorker magazine, and she happens to be married to a former NFL player. Okay, back to Allison Wonderland.

I picked up the same copy I'd had in college. It was filled with these meticulous notes. All the words were defined. The logic puzzles were solved. Discussions in the back pages about the Victorian air and the creation of leisure and like the category of childhood. Then I started reading to her, and I realized I'd completely missed the point of this book.

In this book, Alice is just always too smaller, too big. She was just like my five-year-old daughter.

You know, she's caught between infancy and adulthood, the way in which she experiences this is that the rules of this Wonderland are completely arbitrary. And they change. Exactly. They're subject to the whims of the authority figure. But what she's doing over the course of the book is developing a moral sensibility, which is not the same as moralizing. There's actually a character that Duchess who does all the moralizing, and she's a befitting. Basically, it's a story about

a person growing up and gaining confidence to question the irrationality of these orders and rules that don't make any sense and are changing all the time. And where does this come to a head? It comes to a head in a croquet game. There are no rules in this croquet game. It's completely lawless. The queen is going off with her head. It's horrible. And that's where Alice just loses her mind. But she's learning a couple things. One is that the rules need to be fair. They need to be consistent.

What would a proper pro-K game look like? You would not use hedgehogs as balls.

“Yeah, exactly. The thing is that life is more like the croquet game with the flamingo is a mallet”

and the hedgehog is of all. We have to figure out some way of making our way through this totally

arbitrary and capricious world. Sports are really fun. But to me, they're a place where we basically

learn to live with arbitrary rules. They teach us how to tolerate these injustices and give us a framework for working them out and let us practice dealing with disappointment or experiencing success or working together. What you're describing are the virtues of sport, which is you're going to play this game. You're going to play by these rules and if not, then you might be judged and police or penalized or something theoretically what you're describing is also

supposed to apply to society generally. Yes. Yeah, but I mean, I think that sports are like when done well or practice for a society. Practice are just done better. Maybe done better. Maybe it's just a way of living, a way of being in the world. It doesn't have to be a similocrum, right? It can just actually just be life. What people care about changes over time is society changes. A lot of things that we used to care about, we know are frated with hypocrisy

or are complicated in some way. Sports reflect and to some extent, either anticipate or lead

“society and where it's going. What do you think about Luis Otamas' argument?”

Can sport really provide that kind of clarity? Does it really hold a mirror up to society? And what changes when the rules in sport change? For instance, it used to be that if a professional athlete used cannabis, it could end his career. 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. It's like I turned to do like a criminal and a drug addict.

But today around 75% of Americans live in a place where cannabis is legal and the major sports leagues pretty much ignore cannabis. Some people want to bring other drugs into the arena. My goal is to

enhanced. Today, on Freakonomic Radio, we will talk to athletes and academics, rule breakers

“and the new rule makers about what exactly constitutes cheating. People like to call it cheating,”

I'm not sure who was cheated, but that's just what it was. Winners and losers, sinners and saints and the very thin line separates all of them. That's over the next two episodes of Freakonomics Radio and it starts now. This is Freakonomic Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host Stephen Dubner. It's still relatively common for a professional athlete to get suspended for violating a band substance policy, just happened with Paul George of the Philadelphia

76ers in the NBA. This kind of thing may generate a headline or two and then it fades away. But once in a while, a violation turns into a global scandal, complete with moral outrage and a public reckoning. Floyd, people get asked all the time, but with you, I really want to know,

what was your first bicycle? Oh man, it was a huffie. I don't even know if you can get those anymore.

“Floyd Landis used to be a professional cyclist. For three years, he was a key member of the”

US Postal Service team, which was led by Lance Armstrong. Armstrong won the Tour de France all three years at Landis Road with him and then Landis left to lead his own team, Fonac, Fonac is a Swiss hearing aid company. And then Landis won the Tour de France, but the victory came with a huge asterisk as we'll hear later. Landis grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He was the second eldest of six kids. I grew up men and night, which is really conservative family-based. It's its own little community,

like the Amish, professional sports to them. It's just frivolous. It's not something that they would ever encourage me to get into. I was a teenager in the mid to late 90s, mountain biking was a new fad, so I got a mountain biking. I was so proud of that thing. And as a kid, it was a way to get around. And for me, it was in a scape to try to just go think about life and be alone out in nature. It was good for me. When I was clear that I was a little more obsessed with riding my bike,

then they would otherwise have wanted. I wouldn't say they tried to, you know, get in the way of it, but they just wanted to make sure that that wasn't my focus in life. Would they drive you to races and things like that? They did sometimes, as much as they tried to encourage me not to make that

the single thing that I was focused in on life, which is my personality. But they were always

supportive in the sense that they came to see what I was doing and wanted to just try to understand it. If you could just talk about your path to professional cycling, I really just want to hear what it took to get there. There's got to be such a thing as natural talent, but there's also hard work. There's luck. Later, there were chemicals. I would conflate the luck in the talent part

“together. I was talented and lucky to be talented at riding a bicycle. Were you good at other sports?”

Not as much because to be good at cycling, it helps to be a smaller, skinny or kid. In any event, it became clear quickly as soon as I went to a few local bike races, and I was really good at it, then it's fun, like you win the race. You think, okay, well, I'm just going to do this. But it's one thing to be good at junior sports, and then it's a whole other level to be good at the very high and of the professional athletics, and you don't really know how far you can get.

There were times when I really committed to it. This is what I'm going to do, and there were times when I just felt like I'd made their own choice, but I didn't really have other alternative options. And so I just kept going, how old were you when you became world class? I faced mountain bikes. I won the junior national championships in 1993. I was 17. I raised professional mountain bikes for three or four years after that, and then I switched to road racing, and within a couple of years

ended up on the Pulsal Service team. That was luck too, right? Lance was winning and it was an American team, and I happened to be an American with some talent. Right. Five years earlier, there wouldn't have been a big American team like that for you to be on, I guess. Yeah, that's right. A lot of these things are just chance. I got hired onto the team in 2002. I was 26 years old at the point. It was a real memorable experience. At that point, Lance had already won the Tour de France

three times. He was a superstar. I was never exposed to anything like this. The whole thing was

and the next thing you know, he's got a private jet. We got security around and we have our own hotel.

I assume it was a lot of fun, but also complicated. Oh, it was great. It was almost like it was a movie. He kind of envisioned, like, oh, I'm going to be a professional athlete, but you don't really know what it's going to be like when all of a sudden everyone's focused on you. To the extent that they were focused on me, it was because they're focused on Lance at that point, which was good, because I got to experience the whole pressure of the team winning, but it was really on him.

That actually, in the end, helped me to be able to win the race on my own. But let's not undersell

“you. Like you were the key to domestic. The worker be that's always making sure he's got the path to”

victory. That's right. There were nine people on each team, and typically you have one guy who's capable of doing the best, and so everybody supports that person in this case. It was Lance. What was your relationship with Lance? You didn't know him much before you got on the team. Did you? No, I didn't know him at all. I had met him one time at a racing the US, but pretty quickly, I became, I would say friends with him. I ended up being among the best teammates that he had in the

Tour de France. You know, he took care of me. We went to Samarits and trained for a couple of weeks before the tour just Lance and I, and so I got to know him pretty well and he's a strange person, but to the extent that he has any friends, I was his friend at that point. What was the performance enhancing drug situation like then? What did you know? What didn't you know? Then what were you asked or told to do? I had been around cycling long enough with people that had been on

different levels of teams that I understood that this was probably part of it, but I'd never been

confronted with the idea of actually doing it. I didn't have any kind of access to it or wouldn't even have known where to look. So you'd been a totally clean rider up to that point? It just wasn't a decision. I had to make up until June of 2002, the month before the tour. I talked to Yohan Bruniel, who was the team director a few months before Andy had brought it up. We had to talk to her name McKellie for Ari. He was really well known, cycling doctor. Two is credit. He was a smart guy. He wasn't just

giving people drugs and hoping for the best. He understood that that does come with some risk.

“And he wasn't just out there saying let's just take whatever amount of drugs you have to take to”

win. It was more likely. Let's be careful and try to help you understand what you were involved in. And this was mostly EPO. You're taking right the synthetic version of the erythro potent hormone. So there's a couple different things. There's EPO which increases your red blood cell count, which for endurance sports is a major limiting factor delivering oxygen to your muscles while you're exercising. But there's also antibiotics. There's testosterone and there's peptides human

growth hormone. Things like that that also help you recover faster. I think that there's really not much else you could do that you could get away with. And that means things like that are just too easy to test for. So we didn't do anything like that. Describe how you got put on the program and how you're supposed to beat the drug testing the way the tests had evolved in cycling. You couldn't just simply use as much EPO as you wanted. So you would do blood transfusions.

“You would take some blood out and refrigerate it for a period of time. We would add a little bit of”

EPO to try to more quickly replace those red blood cells. And then we would have that blood to use during the race. Got it. And when is the testing window for EPO? The testing window is like 6 to 8 hours. So you could pretty much be sure you could get away with it. When you put the blood back in, you do that immediately before a race. Then a week into the race, you could add a half a liter of blood and still appear as though you hadn't really added it. Because they're also testing

for the red blood cell parameters too. So you're trying to gain that system. So you would put it back in during the race. What happens during the race is you don't use up red blood cells. But because you have so much extra stress, you have what effectively looks like less red blood cells because it's diluted. There's more water in your blood and more plasma just because there's cortisol on of these stress hormones making the peers if it's reduced. So a week into the race,

you could add a half a liter of blood and still appear as though you hadn't really added it. Looking back now, you know a lot more now than you knew then, but we're pretty much all the top teams doing some version of this. Absolutely. Not pretty much. There was openly talked about, you know, within the sport. What was it like for you, especially, you know, someone who grows up in rural religious America and now you're on the superstar team and you're winning these

toward a fronces and you're doping, did you feel guilty, conflicted? When I was a kid and when I

first got into this and was winning mountain bike races and just enjoyed my life, this never

crossed my mind that this was a decision that would be confronted with. To this day, there is no

you can call it that. I'm not sure who was cheated, but that's just what it was. By the time I got to

“being one of the lieutenant's on the pulse service team of lands, I understood it to be part of what”

was happening. I just came to accept that either I'm going to have to quit or I'm going to have to accept that this is just what it is. I don't know that I understood the magnitude of the risk, but I understood that people viewed it in different ways depending on their perspective on the sport. If you're on the inside, it's one thing and if you're on the outside, it's another and I can't say it was a matter of guilt. I didn't really like it, but there wasn't anything I

could do about it. Were there physical repercussions? Were you concerned about long-term health anything like that? No, it's cycling. The amounts of these antibiotics, which are usually the more risky drugs that you would take in sports, it's such a small amount because you don't want to gain muscle mass. You just want to recover from it. Okay, so in 2006, you moved to the Fonak team and you, Floyd Land is not Land's Armstrong, you win the Tour de France, but pretty much immediately

after you're charged with doping. Correct? Yeah, it was a few days after. Were those few days like between winning and then being accused? I haven't really thought about it too much since. There's so many things happen since then, but even if you win the race, you're extremely tired. You're not out-partying. I mean, you even want to stand up and walk around. Everything I've read about cycling, like all you guys would minimize even walking to the fridge. Yeah, it's pretty bad.

I can't say that there was a time when I really got to celebrate the thing. I was still in Europe, I was with the team management when they got this call from the UCI, which is the NFL of cycling.

He came to my room and as soon as he told me, I mean, I knew life was never going to be the same

and I was kind of in shock. I didn't really know what to do. As much as I had been on the team with Lance, where he was a big star, I never had to actually manage the PR side of things. I didn't have a team around me of people that could advise me. If I had another, you know, season of having won the tour, I would have had all of that, but I just didn't have anybody that could advise me on what to do. I don't know if anybody would have known what to do. We got this positive test.

You're guilty. What are you going to say? So you denied? Yeah, I didn't want to deny it. I didn't really want to admit it. You're in the back of my mind. I knew that if you did admit to it and spill the beans, then you don't come back like you're never going to race again. In hindsight, I guess I probably should have just told the truth right up front. I don't know what would have happened. I might have been arrested. I was in France. It's actually a crime there. But if I tell the truth, it takes out

a bunch of people who are my friends. I've just spent the last 10 years of my life with. And then I'm going to put them in the same situation I'm in. So I just did the easy thing, which was just denial,

“but it wasn't very good at it. Your denial was pretty robust. You wrote a book, right?”

Positively false. The real story of how I won the Tour de France, which was not a truthful account plainly. It's a lot of trouble to write a book that says that you didn't do what you knew you had done. Why did you take that step? I'm faced with this situation where I do want to race my bike again. I don't know why I didn't just accept that this was over. If I could take a step back and look at it

from more clear frame of mind, I would have realized that they're never going to let me race my

bike again. This was too big of a scandal. But you hadn't quite comprehended that yet. Except, it probably is a better word. The minute you say that it makes sense, this is something you've done since you were a kid and you're great at it. You're not just going to stop. This is going to sound stupid out of context, but it just felt unfair. Like, I'm one of everyone else doing what we do. Within the game we were playing, I was not breaking the rules. So I decided that, okay, I have to fight this

thing, and I have to at least tell a story that is believable so that I can try to get back and race.

“I sound like an idiot. But that's what it felt like at the time. And it was wrong. Obviously,”

I was wrong. And it was not the right decision and I regret. I feel for you because you're stuck in this impossible situation. I don't think anyone hearing you talk now would know what they would do other than try to lose yourself somehow. What was your life like then three weeks after the tour ended, I had my hip replaced. I had broken my hip in 2003, while I was on the postal service team, and it had deteriorated over time. As part of that, I was prescribed, I'd like it into deal with

it. I was going to sound bad to say, but that really helped having that. I just had that and I drank way too much and I just checked out. I couldn't face it. I knew that I shouldn't be denying it and defending myself, but I wasn't willing to just give up on everything I had done in my life

with? Yeah, but nobody knew what to say. Once you understood the story and how ridiculous it was,

what was I going to do? That was already the fall guy, right? I'm just being crucified in the press. And what am I going to do? Turn on everyone else. Then they're just going to say, oh, yeah, he's just saying that because he got caught. I mean, there was no way out. There was just no way out. After the break, Floyd Landist finds a way out, but not the one that anyone expected.

“At some point, it all added up to, I can't live like this. Why am I doing this?”

I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. If you'd like to keep up with everything we do around here, you can sign up for our newsletter at Freakonomics.com or at stevendubner.substack.com. We will be right back. Before the break, we heard the former pro-cyclist Floyd Landist 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 Landist, 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 Wallet University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

“You'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 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?

So 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 at on a long run, 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. Afterwards, I was like, "Why the fuck 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. What 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 the love 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. Is 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 solaceous 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 morays or politics? I think it could be a mix of”

the two. So in two cases, Newton, Mark, 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. These were

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 around 109 miles. His death was immediately blamed on infedemines, 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. It 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 band substances, each of which only needs to meet two of three criteria. It poses a health risk, enhances performance, or it violates, quote, "the spirit of sport." April Henning, along with her co-author Paul De Mayo, has written about all this in a book

called "Doping, a Sporting History." Though 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. What 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 got in 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 this system much more complex because then there was this perceived need that then we have to test athletes outside of competition. The 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”

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. And 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. So what was the difference between normal and extreme in early 2000's 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, 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 on the

“selfish side. There's nothing in this for me. 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 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, CEO of USA cycling, everybody that was at the organization of cycling in the United States knew that this was

what was happening. All of them acted like, I was the bad guy and lost their hands of it. Like, well, we finally caught the bad guy. And at this point, Landis 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 him information that I knew they already knew, but just getting it on the record.

of USA Cycling Steve Johnson. In the email, he described how Landis Armstrong's US 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. So eventually I reached out to the anti-doping agency as well. That was the United States anti-doping agency, or use Sada. It's CEO then and now is Travis Tigart. I can't say that I put them on much higher pedestal than USA Cycling, but

but the end of the day, I figured they would do something because Travis Tigart was all about self promotion and if he could take down Landis, 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, Tigart ended up being in one of the time magazines people of the year.

“That's what he wanted. He wanted to be famous. We ran this characterization past USada.”

The spokesperson told us that Floyd Landis's take was, quote, inaccurate. They added, "many people were exposed and sanctioned for breaking the rules in addition to Lands Armstrong. Armstrong was given an opportunity to cooperate and chose not to." You write to you, Sada, what happened then? Within a matter of a couple weeks, you Sada reached out and asked if I would meet with them along with this guy, Jeff Novitsky.

I'd heard his name because he was part of the Belko thing. The Belko thing was a huge scandal around the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative. Federal agents, including Jeff Novitsky, had raided the lab in 2003, Belko 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 y'all meet with you guys. And so I sat in a conference room with them and read a 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. 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. What 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 Zabrisky, as part of what he told Novitsky 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 it was 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. At 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 US Postal 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 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 was he, of course, he used against me and said it's about money and it never was about money.

It became a matter of public dispute at that point. It became Lance against disgruntled Floyd. In 2018, Lance Armstrong agreed to pay the US 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 of people around the world have been

waiting for you to answer and for now I just like a yes or no. Did you ever take band substances to enhance your cycling performance? Yes. Yes or no? In all seven of your tour de France victories,

to win the tour de France without dopeing? Seven times in a row. You're not in my opinion.

“I also interviewed Armstrong in 2018. Freakonomics radio episode 342. If you want to hear it,”

we call 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? I'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 said about me that he's just not interested in talking to me. I don't really care when we're at the other.

I don't feel like it would be somehow sold cleansing to talk to him. He took it a little far. I did too. I wrote a book and lied and like I did things that don't really make sense if you step back and say it 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. I don't wish any harm on him. I don't foresee us ever talking to you. 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's well. It's good. It's something for me to focus on. I don't know if you can tell it. 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. I'm sure that it'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 regretting wishing that I could still raise my bike that I

“didn't really move on. Do you have to remember John Wooden, the basketball coach UCLA?”

Yeah, yeah. Long time ago, he won all those titles. He won said something I wanted to run past you. He won 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 do 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 and 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 and 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 over-emphasize the religious background, but a lot of people grow up religious and then move away from it. But 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 this 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 men and I church, I can't say a bad thing about them and 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 the whole thing. They'd 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 the 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.

Look, the world becomes a different place now. It's a whole different place and it was 20 years ago,

“that's for sure. Just 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 Steven Dubner and this is Freakonomic Radio. Nearly 20 years ago, Floyd Landis was stripped of his short-of-fronts victory because he, like most of his peers, had used performance enhancing drugs. This may,

My name is Dr. Aaron Desusza. I'm the president and founder of the enhanced games.

“Just for the record, Desusza 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 Desusza a few months ago. This is a pretty typical timeline for Freakonomic Radio. These episodes take a while to put together. Back then, Desusza was speaking with a lot of people. I've probably done over 2000 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, 24 hours. Then Peter Teele came to me and he said, "Oh, this is something very interesting." Peter Teele is the venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir. He is a major factor of what are sometimes called transhumanist projects. Life extension,

“human machine integration, things like that. And he had a history with Desusza going back to 2009.”

It was Desusza who came up with a plan to sue the gossip website Galker, which had outed Teele as gay. The plan worked. Galker was put out of business. Desusza 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

Tim's time immemorial. Many eminent scholars have written about the idea of an enhanced version of the Olympics. Most notably Professor of Julian Savarescu at Oxford University. I had read some of Professor of Savarescu'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 it, lots of people being interested in

“performance enhancements, no one had ever made it their job to make it a reality.”

So Desusza made it his job. We're building a purpose-built arena on the campus for arts world Las Vegas. Three sports tracks swimming in weightlifting, all sprint events, and the objective there is to break all of the major world records. Athletes have three avenues of competition. First, they could be a natural athletes, which a lot of journalists forget about. You can be a fully natural athlete and compete at 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. The total purse for each event is $500,000,

with half going to the first place finisher. A new world record in the 50m swim or the 100m sprint

will earn another $1 million. Among the financial backers of this project are Peter Teele

and Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm 1789 capital. Aaron Desusza 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. They warned that some performance enhancing drugs can lead to serious long-term health consequences, even death.

Desusza says there are safeguards against that. There's pre-care and aftercare. Before any athlete competes, they have to take a full-system health check-up. MRIs, echocardiograms, blood work. After the event, particularly if they've chosen to be a part of the clinical research trial, we will monitor them for five years. But Desusza's goals extend far beyond the athletic competition. My goal is to bring about the tenth age of mankind, the enhanced age, where everyone has the

opportunity to become enhanced. The use of enhancements is actually pretty common place 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-theraputic procedures, not treating a disease and a 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.

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 Ozenbick and other products. Right now, biotechnology companies will not invest in building new performance in hands and drugs because they can't be used by athletes in their core context. Now that they can

use 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 invested into R&D. New start-ups 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. So what does success look like for disusza?”

Success looks like breaking all the major world records building a sustainable public playlist of 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 being human's one-point-o

and never try and progress? The enhanced games are inevitable. If I walk out the store today and

get hit by a bus, this will succeed. There 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 disusza. 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

disusza's vision, but that, quote, "the viewpoints expressed by disusza 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 bedding

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. I was also curious to know what someone like Floyd Landis thought about this idea. Oh, man. I haven't looked it up at what was fascinating 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 is 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. Then 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's take. I also went back to April Henning the scholar of sports doping. Well, 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. So 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. But sport has told us that these are very bad things. Sports 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. This 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

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 Weedys 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. And that's why we're so let down when we find out that”

athletes have been doping or that they've broken rule or that they've done one of these things that

we consider to be a moral. But 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 found 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. This episode was produced by Taylor Jacobs, with help from Dalvin Abouagi. It was edited by Ellen Frankman. It was

mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnson. The Freakonomics radio network staff also includes a Gupta Chapman, Eleanor Osborn, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Alaria Montenicort and Zac Lipinski. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by the hitchhikers and our composer is

Luis Garra. As always, thanks for listening.

So, 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.”

The Freakonomics radio network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher.