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- [00:00]
Victoria Song
What's up y'? All? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven time WNBA All Star, Olympic gold medalist and mom.
- [00:06]
Cassidy Hubbard
And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and Mom.
- [00:14]
Victoria Song
And this is and Mom, a community for athletes, game changers and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th tap in with us. Cheating on your partner is a huge breach of trust. All of the pain and the guilt
- [00:31]
David Pierce
and the real reality of what was happening hit me just like a tidal
- [00:37]
Cassidy Hubbard
wave all at once.
- [00:38]
Victoria Song
Why do people cheat?
- [00:40]
David Pierce
And why does it make us so mad, even when we are not the ones it's happening to?
- [00:45]
Cassidy Hubbard
That's this week on Explain It To Me.
- [00:48]
David Pierce
New episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the vergecast flagship podcast, Roid Rage. I'm your friend David Pierce, and on today's show, we're going to talk to the Verge's Victoria Song, who recently went to Las Vegas. Let's go to the Enhanced Games. Everybody calls the Enhanced Games the Steroid Olympics, which is not a completely wrong description. But the idea of giving athletes all of the possible biological and medical advantages they have and then seeing what happens is just deeply fascinating. V had a wild time. We're going to get into it. I'm very excited. But first, here's a look at everything happening on the verge today. It's 90 seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, June 3, 2026. Supernatural, everybody's favorite VR fitness game, appears to have a lease on life. A few months ago, when Meta laid off big chunks of its metaverse and VR teams, it seemed like Supernatural was just kind of being left to die. But now my colleague Victoria Song reports that it's being spun off as an independent company called Supernatural Health. And importantly, it's going to be run by the original founders and coaches of Supernatural. This is a huge win for Supernatural moms, for VR fitness fans, for VR fans in general, and frankly, for me, who now has a reason to turn on my quest for the first time in, I don't know, a year. Big win. Google put out a big blog post today laying out its commitment to solving some of the water problems created by data centers. It said that it plans to replenish more water than it uses by 2030. It said it will invest in local water infrastructure where it has data centers. It says it will find other water sources, and it will just be honest and transparent about its water use. Google is just one of the companies grappling with this giant backlash against data centers. And at Least in part. That backlash is about water usage and these other environmental concerns. Google seems to hope that other companies will match this commitment and follow its lead here, and that this might make people feel better about having data centers in their communities. I'm not so sure any of that is going to work, and frankly, I would argue there are much bigger problems here than water usage. But we'll see. Google also published the specs and guidelines for people to make their own straps, cases, and other accessories for the new Fitbit Air, the $99 fitness tracker people are really exc. Excited about. I've already been seeing people build ways to combine the Air with a watch. So you can have a watch on top and the Air on the bottom and get the best of both worlds. Very excited to see where this little modular fitness tracker goes. I think it's going to be very cool. You can read about all of this and much more@theverge.com that's it. That's 90 seconds on the Verge for June 3rd. All right, now let's talk steroid Olympics. The Verge's V song is here. Hi, V. Hello. Back from Vegas. You survived a turn at the Enhanced Games. Are you feeling enhanced? How do you feel these days?
- [03:39]
Victoria Song
I decided to come to this podcast as unenhanced as possible, just as a reset. So I have glasses, which I don't know if those count as an enhancement, and one of my ubiquitous smartwatches is on the charger. So this is about as unenhanced as I get.
- [03:58]
David Pierce
So not including the several injections you're currently getting as we record this, but
- [04:03]
Victoria Song
we'll leave those to the side off screen. Just. I'm. I'm emotionally roided up. How's that?
- [04:10]
David Pierce
There we go. That counts. Let's. Let's get some of that out now. So let's. Let's just start at the very beginning here. What. What is the Enhanced Games? Where did this thing come from?
- [04:20]
Victoria Song
Okay, so in 2023, Aaron D', Souza, a famous tech entrepreneur, basically came out and he's like, what if Olympics, but with performing enhancing drugs. Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of think pieces at the time about what that meant for ethics in sports. You know, forget ethics in games. Ethics in sports, sure. And I think in 2025, they were just like, hey, guys, you remember when we said pro doping or the Steroid Olympics? Yeah, we're actually gonna do it. And then last weekend, over Memorial Day weekend, the inaugural Enhanced Games happened where about, I believe, 42 athletes, four of which were unenhanced and the rest of whom were doping in some shape, way or form, got together at this makeshift stadium in what was formerly a barren lot in the backyard of the Hilton Las Vegas Resorts hotel. Got together and did some sports and tried to break a bunch of world records because the prize money was up to $1 million if they broke a world record.
- [05:33]
David Pierce
I'm trying to figure out how much this is a sporting event, how much this is a scientific thing. There is some honest to God science being done here, it seems, and how much of this is just a bit, to some extent, right? Like Donald Trump Jr. Is a backer of this. Peter Thiel is a backer of this. There is a very specific kind of person feels drawn to this event. And so I'm trying to figure out to what extent this idea of what if we did sports, but you were allowed to flaunt all of the rules of what you can and cannot put in your body if you just take it at that level as a, as a sports fan. There's actually something really interesting about that, right. Really complicated. We should get into all the reasons that's complicated. But like this, this thing as an organization, if I give you the spectrum between like honest to God, sporting event, grifter bit, and we'll put sort of genuine science right in the middle, where does the Enhanced Games actually belong, do you think?
- [06:33]
Victoria Song
I have been mulling this over for again, probably the roughly 48 to 72 hours since it ended. And I think the unsatisfactory answer is that there's a little bit of everything in there. So one of the things that was really striking to me is that, you know, I've written about it before in Optimizer, but that I have this theory called the Wellness Grifter Playbook. And that's where again, you take a broad medically true fact and you put it next to a misleading assertion. And in the process, to boost your own credibility to sell something like a supplement or whatever your silver bullet cure is, you discredit an institution or like established institutional things that the average person is supposed to trust. And at some point along the way, you profit. Okay? And the Enhanced Games does bits and pieces of this, but in ways that are unexpected because the institutions that they're kind of throwing shade on is not medical institutions, it's not doctors, like throughout everything. And, you know, we're always looking as journalists for are they lying to us, are they trying to pull the wool over our eyes and all of that. I spoke to the CEO, Maximilian Martin, who is A character. I spoke to their chief medical officer or like the head of their independent medical commission, Dr. Guido Piles, who is a really respected elite sports cardiologist who has worked with both FIFA and Manchester United FC for my soccer heads out there. And Christian Angermeyer, who is a biotech entrepreneur with ties to the Trump family, Peter Thiel, and all of those people, every single one of them has been like, don't, like, look at what's happening in the world right now where people are getting gray market peptides from China and injecting them into themselves irresponsibly without the medical supervision that's necessary. And I basically came at them at every single possible angle. Forwards, sideways, the other sideways, upside down, diagonal, to kind of really get a sense if I felt that they didn't believe in medical supervision. And I did not get that interesting. I talked to several of the athletes that's like. And these are elite athletes, mostly past their prime, but, you know, we're talking Olympic medal winners. James Manusen, Benjamin Proud. There were so many there. There even was Thor Bjornson, who played Gregor the Mountain Clegane in Game of Thrones. He was also at the event. So, you know, talking to several of these athletes who were absolutely ready to talk to press, all of them were just like, no, we worked with doctors. We're doing. We really care about the science. And there is an affiliated institutional review board approved clinical study that is not done yet because it will take five years for this study to be complete.
- [09:31]
David Pierce
Sure.
- [09:31]
Victoria Song
So there is a lot of science going on. These people were tested out the wazoo. We're talking MRIs, CT scans, metabolic panels. I was told that if they were not able to pass a medical screening, that they would not be allowed to dope.
- [09:46]
David Pierce
Wait, hold on, hold on. Make that sentence make sense to me. If they didn't pass a medical screening, they weren't allowed to dope. This, I think, is like, there is a core misunderstanding of what the Enhanced Games is trying to do that I think is wrapped up in that sentence. Right? Because there's one way to look at this that is just like, what if everything was allowed, right? Like, if you're, if you're an athlete, there are a tremendous number of things you are simply not allowed to put in your body, some of which are very safe to put in your body, some of which are very unsafe to put in your body. Like, these things are unbelievably heavily regulated. It seems to me the Enhanced Games are not. Let's just take the top off of the Regulation and do whatever you want, and let's see what happens. It's actually aggressively regulated just in a slightly different direction. Like, what is your understanding of kind of the rules of the road for the Enhanced Games in that sense?
- [10:38]
Victoria Song
So, right, like when you say every performance enhancing drug is allowed, you would expect that, hello, BPC157 is on the table, TB500. Everyone's gonna be on a wolverine stack, roided up to the gills. And actually, that's not the case. They are only allowing FDA approved drugs that happen to be used in a performance enhancing context that is often banned by organizations like the World Anti Doping Agency, the US Anti Doping Agency, the ioc.
- [11:11]
David Pierce
So testosterone is a very simple example of that. Right.
- [11:13]
Victoria Song
Testosterone is allowed. Some anabolic steroids are allowed, something called epo, which regulates your red blood cell production so that you can take in more oxygen that is allowed.
- [11:27]
David Pierce
The sorts of things that if you're like an NBA player, you immediately get suspended for having an elevated testosterone level. But understanding how to elevate your testosterone level is a thing we have established science on. So this is just saying we are going to allow you to use that established science to give yourself whatever advantage it gives you.
- [11:45]
Victoria Song
Yes. Also, athletes don't necessarily control how much they get to take. Um, when I talked to Dr. Piles, he was like, we're not maxing them out on steroids. There is a specific period of time that they are allowed to dope under close medical supervision. They have to be healthy enough to dope. So let's say if they had, you know, their markers were showing that they could be put at health risks, they would not be allowed to take a certain amount. And the amounts that they're taking, they're not like, let's go maximum. Yeah. It's more like they're allowed to take a certain amount and then they'll work with their coaches and they'll work with the doctors to see if it's making an improvement. And some of the examples that were given were, like, in a trial run that they did of this last year. And you can see before and after pictures of James Manusen, where what he looked like when he was an Olympic athlete winning three Olympic gold medals. He looks like a typical swimmer, very lithe, very swimmerly. And then what he looked like when he first started enhancements, and it was a little more broad what he was taking at that time. And the man, let's just say he's bulging. You can see his veins from Jupiter, like, he can't fit into the polyurethane suit, which are banned and that they allowed them to use. So there's, like, a lot of things happening here about what they are and aren't allowed to use that's different from traditional sporting events. And actually, he roided up too hard, he flew too close to the sun, and he started to sink in the water and he actually got slower. So that's what they did last year. You. When I saw what James Manderson looked like this time, he was still kind of like, hoorah. Bigger than he was during his prime, but not as, like, frightening to look at. I mean, I could still see his veins and his, like, his veins popping from underneath his whoop band. But because he was wearing a whoop band, that's in my notes. But he was not like the Hulk, which, which, which is what he was last year. And, you know, that was something Dr. Beelis told me that they saw that several athletes were actually responding a little too well to the testosterone and bulking up a little too heavily so that they dialed them back. But like, at. At the Games itself, it's not that every athlete was actually forced to dope. Of the 42 athletes, four decided to compete unenhanced. So they are clean. And they did that for various reasons, but a lot of it was so that they could compete in the Olympics. They have Olympic aspirations. And if you dope, you're basically because these other professional sporting leagues are just like, well, if you go to the Enhanced Games, guess what? You're banned. You can't compete with clean athletes. So, you know, there were. We were told by Enhanced that there actually were USADA and I think the World Aquatics association officials there testing the clean athletes to make sure that they stayed clean. And supposedly they arrived unannounced, but they were like, yeah, we support that. Please test them. Please prove that they are clean. So that was Hunter Armstrong, who was a swimmer, another swimmer whose name I am forgetting right now. But Tristan Evelyn and Fred Curley, those were the four unenhanced athletes. And three out of four of them won their races over the doped athletes.
- [15:04]
David Pierce
I'm so torn on how to feel about the fact that the clean athletes mostly beat the crap out of the enhanced athletes and the fact that the single greatest success came from a swimmer wearing a suit that has been banned for, like, 15 years. So I think, like, I'm. I'm always fascinated by the sort of march of illegal running shoes. Like, we actually know how to make people run faster. And it's. It's with shoes we know how to make shoes that make people run faster and to the point where there are shoes that are banned from marathons, which is just a bananas thing to think about. It seems very clear to me that for all of the science, for all of the doping, for all of this stuff going on, maybe we actually don't have any idea how to make a person swim faster.
- [15:53]
Victoria Song
Right?
- [15:53]
David Pierce
And I think about, like, your example of James Manusen, who, like, went from guy who looks like a swimmer to super yoked dude with all available science and drugs to him and got worse. That it's like, maybe we actually don't know how to enhance people in this way, but then these are largely, like you said, past their prime athletes who weren't swimming as fast as they were. And maybe, and this is, I think, a thing you heard from a bunch of the athletes, that just the fact that they were able to get in there and feel competitive again was a huge win. And that's the part of me that actually finds this whole thing sort of endearing, that it's like these athletes are. These are people who train for, you know, all of their lives, hit this teeny, tiny window of peak performance, and if we can use science and these drugs to widen that window a little bit, that there's actually something very cool about it. So, I don't know, peel all of this apart for me. What, what do you make of the actual performance of these enhanced athletes? Do we know anything about how to enhance athletes?
- [16:52]
Victoria Song
A lot of what we do know is kind of in the shadows, right? Because it's not allowed. But, uh, and I. This is such a hard thing to verify. You know, not every athlete who competes in the Olympics is squeaky clean. We do know, because there have been doping scandals, right, that there are some unfair advantages happening. And that's absolutely not great for the people who are honest and show up and are following the rules, right? So one of the narratives that enhanced his peddling is like, listen, we all know everybody's doing it, right? Let's do it transparently, safely, under medical supervision. This is a harm. This is what we call a harm reduction argument. And there, again, there are flaws to that argument right there. Because, you know, you could justify anything by saying, let's. Let's just do it transparently then. But, you know, there is a nugget of truth there that, that they are hitting on. And so, like, if you can find out what the safe things are, if you can study them a little bit more, you can have a. Theoretically, you can have A more open discussion about, like, well, you know, maybe athletes could benefit from recovery. What surprised me was that a lot of the athletes, what they said was the most notable change for them was that they recovered faster. Like they could do more efficient workouts more times in a row instead of like doing a really hard workout and feeling like dog shit for three days after. A lot of these athletes, okay, so when we're talking about the metrics that we're judging this particular event by, a lot of people are like, oh, they only broke one world record. Ha ha, ha, ha, ha ha. The, the unenhanced athletes were better than the enhanced dances. Hahaha. You have athletes in a, in a very wide age range happening here and very wide timeframes of how long has it been since they retired and actually competed competitively. Like, Megan Romano was one of the athletes who participated. She was the first female, I think, to agree to participate. And she was retired for eight years before coming back. And another thing is most of them only doped for eight weeks. So that's a very small time period for them to be doping. And again, under very close monitoring because people are questioning how strict it was and whether some of these people were. You know, there's a lot of questions people have because for one, enhance has not been great about communicating its narrative and some of the things. So a lot of journalists, we were talking amongst ourselves and being like, hey, did you know this? Did you know that? Like, that's not what was said before. This is kind of weird. And so like, there's a lot of just confusion, I think, as to like, what is actually happening. And also, let's talk about optimizing, let's talk about personal best performances. One of the questions that went in is like, is this a failure if you don't break a bunch of world records? And the CEO was like, no. Because what also is great is if you have a bunch of athletes past their primes making personal bests, that's also a success to us.
- [20:05]
David Pierce
I kind of agree with that.
- [20:06]
Victoria Song
And on that front, you had, I believe, 12 athletes past their prime who set 14 personal bests. Like, you do have people who have been retired for a long time who came back for a short period of time for this level of training, and they did set their own personal records. Um, there were two races where people came very close to breaking the world record, but like, were just a bit short. And I have to bring up Eliyud Kipchoge here, who's a really famous marathoner. One of the all time greats of marathon running. And there was an experiment that he did where he ran a sub two hour marathon. And if you're not a runner, sub two is just like kind of the threshold where you're just like Holy moly. Sub two jaw. Jesus Christ. And for that attempt he had like pacers running in a V formation to stop the wind. It was the flattest possible course. Everything was tuned to give him the best possible chance of smashing that, you know, that barrier, that two hour barrier mark temperature, all of those things were highly optimized at the Enhanced games. It was 95 fricking degrees. I was dying. I was absolutely dying. People in the stands were dying. It was open air, there was no shade. This was not indoors, it was not temperature controlled. And they put the weightlifting events in the beginning of the day where everyone was just like. And I will say a lot of the weightlifters, they looked like they were in pain. They didn't look like they're comfortable. And several of them DNF'd, which meant they could not finish their events. I don't know the reasons why they couldn't do that. It wasn't explained. It just came over the kind of the loudspeaker where they're like and such and such athlete will not be attempting their second and third lift. And you know, I'm not a sports reporter. I, I kind of look at sports tangentially as it relates to wearables and all of that stuff. But I was like, is that normal? Is it normal for them to change the clean and jerk to a clean and press mid event? And like some of that I can
- [22:10]
David Pierce
tell you is not normal. DNFing something like that. Not completely out of character because for something like that you're like, the whole goal is to push yourself to your absolute limit for one second. And if you can't like the, the risk of overextending is really huge. But I had, it's so funny to me that like for all of this stuff that we figured out and all the stuff that we've solved, they forgot to do indoors. It's like, right, we have air conditioning friends. We've, we've fixed this one too. We know how to solve this.
- [22:36]
Victoria Song
We have like air conditioning, we have temperature control.
- [22:39]
David Pierce
Yeah, you can't dope your way past. It's real hot, guys.
- [22:42]
Cassidy Hubbard
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- [23:33]
David Pierce
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- [23:47]
Victoria Song
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- [24:14]
David Pierce
What is your sense of the size of the ambition of this thing for the next few years? Because even the way they're talking to you about it, this like we think it's cool that past their prime athletes are setting personal bests. That's not how you get to mainstream sports success. Nobody cares about a bunch of 42 year old swimmers doing a good job. Like they just don't. Right? Like either this thing is going to need to be so powerful and so impressive that it is actually a leap beyond. And we're looking at this as the Enhanced Games, not the old people games. This is like there's a, there's a senior tour for golf that is like fun and cool and it's like, oh, isn't it sweet that he's 78 and playing golf? Do you know who watches that? Is essentially nobody, right? So it's like, is that the future of the Enhanced games or are they, do they actually in their heart of hearts want to be the great? This is the set of greatest athletes on earth, period, comma, the end. Like that's how they framed it. At the beginning that these people are going to be so impressive that we're going to have to reckon with what we do to our bodies. Isn't this going to be unbelievable? This first round obviously did not achieve that. Is your sense that they still think they can't?
- [25:28]
Victoria Song
I am very confused as to what their ultimate goal is, to be quite frank, because the games, the sports business of the games is not the primary or only way that they plan to make money. There is actually a lot of criticism that the sports aspect of it is a giant marketing.
- [25:48]
David Pierce
This is where it gets grifty, isn't it?
- [25:50]
Victoria Song
This is a giant marketing scheme because what they do have is a direct to consumer telehealth program where you.
- [25:57]
David Pierce
Oh, so it gets grifty real fast.
- [25:59]
Victoria Song
Yeah. So again, but you know, there's nuance here. There is nuance here where basically they're selling things like GHKC cu. They're selling things like Tessa Morlin, I believe it's Tessa Marlin, it might be the other one. There's a lot of peptides out there, David. And so they're selling some peptides including GLP1 agonists, microdosed versions of GLP1 agonists, testosterone replacement, hormone replacement therapies and just good old supplements that don't require prescription. That all of those things are being sold on their website. And some of those were actually not available to athletes. Uh, I think someone said, well, it's like, well, you know, copper peptide for your skin isn't gonna make you swim faster. So that's why the athletes aren't taking that. But we are selling it to consumers. What they're selling is the idea of enhancing, quote, unquote enhancing, which in a more common parlance is biohacking. They are trying to make biohacking a mainstream movement. And so in that respect they're like, look at what these athletes can do under medical supervision with legal enhancements. And then we're gonna sell that to you too. So look at what they can do. Now. What if you did that? What if you had a personalized goal for personalized health and medicine that you can come to us for? And for everyone who says we're doing a grift, guess what? We're going to do the same medical rigor. You're going to have to go consult with a doctor, you're going to have to go get blood tests, we're only going to give you one month's amount at a time and you have to do consistent follow ups and screenings and whatnot to do it safely and legally. And I was like, huh, interesting, because that sounds responsible. But what if you don't make a lot of money? Are you going to then continue to do that? Because what you're doing is you're introducing friction into a telehealth platform, which seems like antithetical, right, because telehealth is supposed to reduce friction. And that's one of the main complaints about telehealth. Things like Trim RX or Hims and hers and Row is that are you actually getting the appropriate medical care to get these GLP1s, or are you just doing it and using it indiscriminately in a compound? Are you, like, taking advantage of the compounding system? So for some people, yes, it's. It is to help with accessibility. And for some people, yeah, they might be abusing these, these substances that are originally meant for medical conditions. So that's why there's a lot of controversy. Like if, if you look at the, the discourse around GLP1s right now, you can kind of just like apply some of that to the enhanced games and be like, you know, on paper, what they are saying sounds responsible, it sounds above board. And I'm telling you, I think I have a pretty good bullshit meter when I'm talking to these people. They are so like golden retriever, puppy dog, earnest talking to me, even though I'm just like, are you putting on a bit for me? Are you doing a show? Are you? And I asked Max Martin and Christian Angermeyer, are you enhanced? Do you take the stuff yourselves? And they're like, of course. How could we advocate for athletes taking this if we don't do it ourselves? And so their CEO is 20 giant, by the way. He looks like the type of person a looks maxer would be like, that guy. Yes, him. Very chiseled jaw, very like, conventionally handsome in a way that I was just like, that's very upsetting because now I don't know if people are going to focus on the science like they should be. And you have these athletes with these incredible bodies and like these incredible aesthetics going, I enhanced and I feel great. I enhanced and I feel a certain way. And so, you know, they can talk about the science all they want with journalists like me asking really tough questions, trying to detect where the bullshit is, where the dangers are, trying to give like a really fair, balanced, nuanced discussion with people like our bridge cast listeners who do care about that sort of thing. And then there's just the people who are just watching and Being like, oh, they're all roided up and they fucking suck. And then so you, you get a very weird telephone game happening between what they're saying and how it's perceived. And that was my biggest concern going into these games, going like, how are they broadcasting this? And that is like, we could spend another 3,000 word feature about how this game was broadcast, because who was in attendance? This was not a game that you could buy tickets to. The audience was mostly the athletes, friends and family, a small cadre of credentialed media, about 250 media people in total, spanning 75 publications across the globe, and a fuck ton of influencers. I mean, just, they were. You didn't see them on the broadcast, but they were in the corners where I could see them from my station, just in corners everywhere, making content. Oh, James Magnuson, how do you feel about this? Oh, I feel great. And just like watching this online, I'm just like, the. What is happening? Because if you watch the social media coverage of it versus what the press have been writing, the Games were a success. The Games were an unmitigated disaster. Both of these narratives are competing. I do want to say I think the athletes had a fucking great time. Because there's no downside for so many of these athletes to join. Because, you know, we talk about the $1 million prize a lot. What I realized when I was sitting there in the Games, because they're telling you how much each of these athletes is taking home, is that if you finish dead last, if you finish dead last, you're still taking home a minimum of $20,000 by comparison. Let's, let's, let's talk about what you win for a gold medal at the Olympics. $37.5K.
- [31:38]
David Pierce
Right?
- [31:38]
Victoria Song
The swimmer that I think caused a lot of shockwaves or sent a lot of shockwaves through that community was Ben Proud. He won a silver medal in the Paris Olympics. So not that, not that long ago. And he basically is like, what good did it do me? I'm struggling financially. This is a chance for me to not be a social media influencer. Well, kind of. Cause he has to do all these media appearances, which he gets paid for. But he's like, he doesn't have to be a sports swimming influencer anymore. He can just have sort of a second career and live comfortably. He, he won one of his events. He took. He didn't break a world record, but he took home $250,000 for what, a minute of swimming in front of people? So for the athletes. It's very, very, very compelling. And I think it raises a huge question about how do we compensate professional amateur athletes. It's actually extremely expensive and financially draining to be an Olympian. And if you don't get an endorsement deal from the Olympics, what have you put your life on the line for? Right. So I think that is a very valid and true thing that kind of lends the enhanced Games a sort of credibility, even though there are a lot of things that we should be critical about. Right. That's kind of the Grift playbook right there, where you're just like, oh, there's some dissonance happening here, because how do we think about those things? How are we thoughtful about those things?
- [33:02]
David Pierce
But again, all of that only works once. It works once and then it works. If people care.
- [33:07]
Victoria Song
Yes.
- [33:07]
David Pierce
And this is the thing, I think, like, the fact that they're on a five year journey here is really interesting.
- [33:13]
Victoria Song
They have to be for safety reasons, because they've doped these people. So that, that five year clinical study is to make sure that if side effects happen with these athletes after the fact, that it can get caught. A lot of people are saying this was a one one and done stunt. They're not saying that the athletes are like, can't wait to do this again next year. They have plans to do it yearly. This, this event that I saw, they have plans to do that yearly. They said they have plans to expand into other sports like cycling, which. That would be something. Right. And they plan to have this direct to consumer business where if, if enough people buy into it, maybe that gambit pays off for them. At the same time, look at their stock price. Right now, it's gone after the initial games, partly because the coverage of it has been like, oh, you only broke one world record. And even that, we don't know if we trust that you broke the world record. But I will tell you, Christian Golamiev, who won that he took home a $1 million check, that man is.
- [34:18]
David Pierce
Listen, I am, I am so in favor of everybody else getting Peter Thiel's money. So that's all fine.
- [34:23]
Victoria Song
Yeah.
- [34:24]
David Pierce
But like, I, Yeah, to me, this, this thing has not yet remotely tipped from. This is a science experiment happening in real time to, like, this is in some really fascinating way, sports. Right? Like, this is not sports. This is shtick. And it's maybe science, but it's not yet sports. And for them to try to do the thing they want to do, I think it has to be sports.
- [34:48]
Victoria Song
It does.
- [34:49]
David Pierce
I just don't I don't see it
- [34:50]
Victoria Song
yet, but I will say they replaced the kiss cam with a flex cam. And there were hella jacked people in that audience.
- [34:57]
David Pierce
I'm fully in favor of a flex cam.
- [34:59]
Victoria Song
It was just a lot of people going, like. And I was like, oh, my God. Also, when I left the event, there was this lady going, who wants to sexy water? Who wants sexy water? And she just had these bottles and she's like, sexy water. And I was like, what the fuck is sexy water? And again, I was like, I. I need to go to my hotel room and I need to emotionally process everything I've seen. So I kind of ran away at that point. I was like, get me out of here. Get me out of Vegas.
- [35:28]
David Pierce
Should always run away from sexy water. If there's one thing I believe, it's that you should always run away from sexy water. Yeah, like, no good comes of that.
- [35:35]
Victoria Song
No, no good comes of sexy water. Just drink regular water.
- [35:39]
David Pierce
All right, V, thank you for being here. All right, thanks again to V for being here. Before we get out of here, new Vertcast thing to tell you about. So we've always tried to do a lot of your feedback on the show through the hotline, through our email. And now that we're doing a daily show, the goal is to do even more of that. So most of the time, once a week, usually on Wednesdays, we're going to do a whole episode of your questions. Sometimes it'll be one that we talk about for the whole show. Sometimes we'll bring somebody on and answer a bunch in a row. But we want to have all of the hotline questions kind of talking to each other. So Travis Larchuk, our producer, is here. Travis, welcome. Travis is here. We, last week on the show, we asked people to send us thoughts on the Ferrari Luce.
- [36:30]
Travis Larchuk
Right.
- [36:30]
David Pierce
And we talked about our currently unnamed company that we are now part of. And you, you, dear God, I hope have brought us some thoughts on all of this from.
- [36:43]
Eric Gomez
Sure thing. Okay, we have some suggestions for what our new company name should be.
- [36:47]
David Pierce
Okay, good.
- [36:48]
Eric Gomez
All right, first, suggest. I'm just going to run these by you. You can give me a thumbs up, thumbs down.
- [36:52]
David Pierce
Okay.
- [36:53]
Eric Gomez
Or thumbs sideways. Okay. First one. Unsponsored for flavor.
- [36:58]
David Pierce
Too many words.
- [36:58]
Eric Gomez
Too many words.
- [36:59]
David Pierce
The problem is how many. How many dots between unsponsored and flavor.
- [37:02]
Eric Gomez
There's no dots in this suggestion.
- [37:03]
David Pierce
Then we're out. Immediate. Immediate.
- [37:05]
Eric Gomez
No, a few people suggested flagship media.
- [37:09]
David Pierce
Oh, I like that.
- [37:10]
Eric Gomez
It's not a bad idea.
- [37:11]
David Pierce
I like that a lot to the point where I'm like, if that's not taken, I'm buying some domain names today. Unfortunately, Flagship Media is taken. Your trusted partner in digital innovation, creative excellence and online growth,
- [37:27]
Eric Gomez
a listener named Scott suggested herealfcc.
- [37:34]
David Pierce
Tricky, Tricky Trademark. But I like just the Real FCC as our company name. The Real FCC Incorporated is pretty good. I'm into it.
- [37:42]
Eric Gomez
Some more suggestions. These all came from one listener named Thomas. Uh, we've got Voice Media.
- [37:51]
David Pierce
Listen, we. We did that already.
- [37:55]
Eric Gomez
We've got Box Media.
- [37:56]
David Pierce
So Box Media is, according to about half the people in my life, where I have been working all of this time. Anyway, so Box Media and Fox Media, both strong contenders because just no change.
- [38:11]
Eric Gomez
Voice Box Media,
- [38:15]
David Pierce
not bad.
- [38:16]
Eric Gomez
A suggestion. I also had Populi Media.
- [38:19]
David Pierce
No, see, listen, again, we've. We've done the Latin thing. No one knows where we work. Let's real words only from now on. This is also the problem with. I'm realizing the real FCC people are like, oh, where do you work? Oh, I work at. At the real fcc. Like, what? Sorry, it's like my Instagram handle is imdavidpierce. Unbelievable mistake.
- [38:41]
Eric Gomez
And let me just give you Real websites Media.
- [38:46]
David Pierce
That's actually pretty good. Real websites. Real websites only.
- [38:51]
Eric Gomez
Real websites only. All right. Through the power of a new technology called Montaj, I have compiled lists.
- [38:58]
David Pierce
Also a good company name, by the way. Montage Media.
- [39:00]
Eric Gomez
Montage Media. Honestly, it's not bad.
- [39:04]
David Pierce
Sorry, keep going.
- [39:05]
Eric Gomez
Yeah. So I've compiled our listeners defense of the Ferrari Luce, which I would say the overall theme is that if this wasn't a Ferrari, it would be a much more appealing car.
- [39:18]
David Pierce
Interesting. Okay, all right, let's hear.
- [39:20]
Eric Gomez
It wasn't called a Ferrari. Okay, here we go.
- [39:23]
Travis Larchuk
I don't think the Ferrari Luche looks that bad. It just doesn't look like a Ferrari, but it looks like a pretty cool car. I think it looks great. I don't love the blue color, but whatever in red and yellow, I think it looks amazing. I would have loved this as, you know, a $75,000 Apple car as an objective car without a badge associated with it or a price for that matter. I think it's actually a pretty nice car. And like, say it cost 50 grand, I'd probably be okay with that. Actually, I think the problem with it is that, like, none of the things in this car actually cost as much as they're charging for it. And so by virtue of it being just like, artificially inflated price for the brand kind of takes away the value of it. I think that they're trying to actually make a futuristic car that is different. It's profound. It's not like what a Ferrari is. And that's the point. Is it a sexy two person coupe? No, it's not. It's the sexiest five person sedan. If they wanted to make it a two person sexy car, they would have done that, and they didn't.
- [40:33]
Eric Gomez
So there you go.
- [40:35]
David Pierce
Okay. I would say these are all very bland defenses. Like, to start your defense with. It's not that bad. Is not. I do agree with the idea. And I think thinking back to last week, I think I overstated my feeling about how annoying it is that they swung so hard in a different direction. Right. Like, I think, and Ferrari has spent a lot of time saying this, that they very deliberately didn't make a thing that looks like a Ferrari. And I think in a vacuum, that's cool. Like, everybody should try new things. We should not settle on what a car looks like and then never change it ever again. I just don't think this is it.
- [41:16]
Eric Gomez
Yeah.
- [41:16]
David Pierce
And I think there are ways to make something that feels like a Ferrari if you're Ferrari. A reminder that Ferrari made this. It's not like, it's not somebody doing a Ferrari impression. It's Ferrari. Like, be the thing that you are. I will say, the more I look at the interior, the more I'm into it. Like, the. The experience of sitting behind the wheel of this car, I think will be sick.
- [41:40]
Victoria Song
Oh, yeah.
- [41:41]
David Pierce
The experience of standing next to it and walking up to it. Less sick. I. The main defense, though, that drives me nuts is everybody being like, if it were $50,000, I would like, sure, sure. If every car was a tenth the price, I would like it more than I do. But look, I'm glad there are people who like it. I do agree it looks way better in red. I think it's very weird that they spent all this time talking about it in blue because I think in red, I'm kind of on the yellow, but the red is pretty, pretty nice looking. So it's. It's okay. Maybe I'll come around. I'm glad that there are people out there who like it. And if you can find one for $50,000, I'll buy it today.
- [42:19]
Eric Gomez
If you could give me one for free, I'll take it.
- [42:21]
David Pierce
Exactly.
- [42:22]
Eric Gomez
You hear that, Ferrari?
- [42:25]
Travis Larchuk
All right.
- [42:25]
Eric Gomez
I'm willing to throw the ethics policy under the bus for a free car.
- [42:30]
David Pierce
Nobody tell Neil. When people are like, how did David and Travis get Ferraris? Nobody tell Neil. Uh, all right. That's it. So, again, the plan is to do this every week. We, I, we want to keep talking about the stuff that we've been talking about. Um, next week's hotline episode is going to be next Wednesday, and it's going to be ideally wwdc.
- [42:49]
Eric Gomez
Wwdc.
- [42:51]
David Pierce
So WWDC is on Monday. And as all of that stuff is happening, if you have questions or thoughts or things you want us to talk about, send us emails, vergecastofedge.com, call the hotline 866 version 11. And we're gonna probably have an episode's worth of stuff to follow up on. We're gonna do a live stream on Monday right after the event ends, and then we'll follow up on everything on the hotline on Wednesday. And if you continue to think I'm wrong about the Ferrari Lucier, please keep calling. Travis will keep making montages.
- [43:18]
Eric Gomez
I can't guarantee you that.
- [43:21]
David Pierce
And with that, from the studio in New York City, we're gonna get out of here. The Verge cast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast network. The show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Locasio. We will see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.