Lance Armstrong joins Joe Rogan to confront doping accusations, admitting nearly all top cyclists used PEDs in the 1990s—especially undetectable EPO—due to financial pressure and team culture. He frames his confession as a life-or-death necessity after cancer, detailing extreme training like starvation, while criticizing the government’s selective focus compared to bigger crimes. Armstrong laments sponsors’ legal abandonment post-scandal, despite their prior profits, and reflects on how loyalty fractured amid media narratives that ignored collective complicity. Now living modestly in Austin with five kids across four schools, he balances running, golf, and therapy for his children grappling with the fallout, questioning whether systemic hypocrisy overshadows personal accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
I think one of the things about this whole scandal, the whole thing, it illuminated the real issue.
And the real issue is the entire...
And this is what we're talking about.
Bill Burr did that thing on Conan, where he was saying, the fucking whole sport is like this.
It's not...
There was...
All the people that won the Tour de France in all the years that you did it, if you go back to people that either weren't implicated or didn't test positive, like, what is it, like, 18th place or something fucking crazy like that?
Well, I guess it is, but, you know, people don't want to talk about that.
I mean, people want to talk about my issue, and that's, I guess, also understandable.
But, look, it was a fucked-up time.
And you were at this crossroads of a very hard sport, a very hard event.
Some would say one of the hardest sporting events in the world.
Three weeks, 2,500 miles, conditions, terrain, etc., etc.
So that meets, really, the perfect drug.
You have a drug that's incredibly beneficial.
And at the time, totally undetectable.
And everybody dove in.
And so, nobody wanted to be in that position.
It's not like any of us growing up as kids thought, dude, I'm gonna go to Europe and get, you know, all doped up and try to win biker.
No, nobody wanted to be there.
Like, we all went with pure intentions.
We got there.
And I'm talking about this crop of Americans that went to Europe.
And the shit was messy.
And we're like, whoa!
Like, okay, do we go home?
Or do we stay and fight?
And literally almost everybody stayed and fought.
And they fought, you know, we fought the way that the fight was being fought.
And, you know, and that all meets with where we are today.
And the people who were there, I think, can speak to it.
Me, my teammates, my peers, my rivals, the competition.
And we have a unique perspective on it because we were in the war.
But the person on Main Street, right, the corner of Main and First, Wasn't there, and they don't understand it, and so they can't really speak to it, but that doesn't change the fact that they're disappointed.
They're really disappointed.
They're disappointed in me.
They're disappointed in the sport.
They might hate me.
They might hate the sport.
They were most likely defenders of mine, and so they're pissed off.
It's taken me a long time to really understand that.
But I'll spend the rest of my life trying to work that one out with that person.
Well, they have a legitimate point, but there's also, there's people out there that want you to be wrong and want you, they want to find someone who's done something bad and never let it go.
And I think there's definitely some of that going on.
And there's also people that they don't have a lot of sympathy for people who've been extremely successful and have made mistakes.
Like it gives them the green light to just decide to just continually attack you.
But what I tried to do when this whole thing was going down is I tried to put myself in your position.
Like you're this world-class biker, it's 1994, and that's right around when you started UZPO? 95. 95?
When you realized that pretty much all the best guys are doing this now, what is that feeling like when you're like, okay, I've got to cross over into this deceptive territory.
Now all of a sudden I have to lie about this, I have to hide this, and I have to be a part of this sort of Underground thing this underground aspect.
Well we we held off as long as you know, I mean You know EPO came along in the early 90s We sort of got to Europe in 92 93 And then it's by that point by 94. It's you know full-on and And we're thinking, okay, this isn't good, but surely they're going to have a test for this for EPO. And we waited, we waited, and it just never came.
And then we get to 95. There's tremendous pressure on the team, within the team.
We're losing the sponsor.
Will the sponsor renew?
The team wants results, and we're going...
Alright, we're really fucked here.
And so we all collectively made the decision in spring of 95 that, alright, we have to go play ball.
Well, it's such a strong anti-inflammatory that with that, inevitably, you feel better.
Whether it's physically you feel better, even just a euphoria that comes with that.
That's, you know, and who knows what, you know.
But at the same time, you have a drug that, you know, I love it in cycling, if you took cortisone, you would be banned.
However, you know, you watch, you know, the NFL and somebody gets banged up in the first half, they go in at halftime, they come out, The announcer says, they went in, they got a cortisone injection, they're going to play the second half, they rush for 100 yards, they win the game, they're a hero.
We've talked about that a bunch of times with me and my friends.
When you go to GNC, the UFC has this company, Muscle Farm, which sells a bunch of Supplements and things along those lines, but yet they ban performance-enhancing drugs.
What do these supplements do?
Well, they enhance you in some way, but it's like a certain level will allow.
Will allow a certain level of improvement, certain level of aid in recovery, but anything past that is cheating.
But there also, too, has to be – and I don't want to be critical of whether it's the UFC's efforts to combat doping or USADA or water or anybody or any major sport.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
That's just – and I get asked that all the time because people get frustrated with the issue.
They kind of throw their hands up and say, well, look, we should just – it should just all be legal.
And, you know, they said that to me, and they're thinking I'm going to go, yeah, you're right.
But you can't.
That's not the answer either.
There has to be a structure in place.
There has to be a line.
That line might seem weird or fuzzy to people sometimes, but shit, you have to have something.
And so...
Dude, it's tricky.
I mean, anytime you mix athletes that are super motivated with money, with pressure that comes with that temptation that comes with that, you know, people are for the rest of, I mean, come on, I mean...
The original Olympic Games, there was going on.
So you have to think that it's going to happen forever.
You know, there's a lot of stories about whether it's alcohol, cocaine, crazy substances.
But at the same time, you had guys...
The Tour de France is 100 years old, right?
So doping is cheating.
We know that.
But there's other ways.
I mean, guys would hang on to cars.
Guys would get in trains.
Yeah.
There were guys...
They would take a cork out of a wine bottle and they would put, this is fucking crazy, they would have fishing string in the cork, right, so wired up and they would have it, you know, they have a car up the road and they'd put it in their teat.
Oh my god!
And it would be, you know, just a subtle pull.
I mean, they, you know, any way to get ahead.
I mean, this is, you know, the sport is just, it's a brutal sport and you're not getting your face pounded in like UFC, but You certainly feel like you're getting your face pounded.
When they first started introducing things like, when they started using transfusions and things along those lines, how much of an improvement did it have on the times?
Well, you know, it's hard to say because the times are, you know, people look at our era, they look at my generation, and they say, okay, well the times must be You know, significantly faster.
But you can't compare cycling to track and field or cycling to another sport that's had a rough patch and is now trying to clean itself up because technology changes, road surfaces change, obviously training has changed.
But, I mean, if you go back to the 84 games right here in Los Angeles, that was really the first major exposure you had for transfusions.
Which the American team did, and Rolling Stone exposed it.
But a transfusion was an old-school...
EPO replaced that, right?
Because a transfusion is just adding red cells to your system, which carries oxygen and gives you more oxygen.
Then you had a drug came along that did that for you.
So you didn't have to extract the blood, you didn't have to put it back in.
It made it a lot easier.
And then when the test, when they refined the EPO test and ultimately came up with it, then people went back to the old school system.
And then came other ways to detect that through, not so much through a test, but just through what they call the biological passport.
Studying parameters in your blood, whether it's reticulocytes or red cells or all of these things that smart people can come up with tests for.
It was more of a screening method to detect a transfusion.
There's a situation that happens when you're involved, you're involving money, you're involving sponsors, you're involved...
Once you first start, once the ball starts rolling, and the first deception has been launched out there into the ether, there's no way to take it back if you want to keep racing.
It is what it is, but that's, anyhow, there was the doping, okay, which led to the lying, right, which led to the treatment of other people.
I think, by and large, people can have the perspective that you have.
They can say, look, looks to me like everybody did it.
So, okay.
Then they can look to the line, and that's where they really start to not like it.
They say, this guy lied to us repeatedly.
But of course, you get, you know, there's no defense to that, but if I could share any personal insight.
I mean, once you lie once, you just keep lying, you keep lying.
It's not as if I'm going to sit here, you know, this is 15 years ago, and Joe, you're a nice guy, and I mean, if I was on this podcast, I would have lied to your fucking face a million times, just so you know.
Yeah, so I was stuck, for lack of a better word, in that lie or that deception.
But then the way that I took my competitive nature, which served me well in training and in racing, and took it into the real world, took it into a press conference, took it into a personal relationship, took it into former teammates, my relationship, that's the part where people go, okay, fuck this guy forever.
I'm done.
And so that, you know, you got sort of the three phases.
None of them are good, but as it got further away, That lack of respect for others Is the thing that totally fucked me.
And, you know, to that, I would say to anybody that I understand, and I may be in their time out forever, I have, and the only thing I will add that may sound like I'm trying to defend myself, is I've tried to make amends with all those people, right?
The ones that we all know, the ones people talk about.
I've traveled the world, I've sat with them, I've looked them in the eyes and said, what I did was totally unacceptable, and I'm sorry.
And almost everybody has accepted the apology and we've moved on.
But that doesn't get to this crowd of people that you can't sit with face to face and you can't say you're sorry.
I mean, I can talk to you.
We can talk about it.
Some people may view that as an apology or not.
But the ones that I could go sit with, I did.
And that's all that I would add to that.
And I'm proud that most of those people, and I say most, not everybody, because not everybody's ready, but most of those people said, you know what?
We're good.
And so if it was my son and he acted that way, first of all, I'd say, what the fuck are you doing?
You can't act that way.
But nobody was standing over me going, dude, you're acting like an asshole.
Nobody did that.
But if my son did that, I would say, you get over there and you make it right with that person.
Seeing these kids with face masks on because their immune system is so compromised and they don't have any hair and they're just devastated.
And you're hanging out with these kids and you're generating all this positive energy for them, generating all this money, all this research that's being funded.
But look, I mean, I don't want anybody to be mistaken.
My interests were selfish.
I mean, I was defending myself and protecting myself.
But at the same time, it wasn't just myself I was protecting.
I was protecting the sport.
I was protecting our sponsors.
I was protecting the tour.
I was protecting the foundation.
And, you know, it's just hard to say, I'm going to stop.
And what we just said, I mean, we now know, on all of those things, right?
We know what's happened to the foundation.
We know what's happened to the sport.
We know what's happened to the sponsor.
We know.
We can now see.
It was a devastating toll.
You know, most would say, well, that's all your fault, Lance.
And maybe they're right, but it's been, you know, especially on the foundation side, dude, it just breaks my heart to see the effect it's had on their effectiveness.
Well, it's got to be way more complicated than it's just all your fault.
It's way more complicated, because when you're talking about an entire sport that's dirty, I mean, for lack of a better word, an entire sport that's being deceptive, an entire sport that's using these performance-enhancing drugs, and then you're talking about you, because you're this weird outlier.
You're this one guy who is incredibly successful at it in a country where nobody gave a fuck about the Tour de France until you came along.
The story being what it was, a cancer survivor that comes back, that wins this event, that transcends the sport, that brings the sport to cycling, although Greg did do a tremendous job.
Really, that was like the first blow up of cycling in the United States.
And then comes my story.
I mean, the story was too big, right?
And that's the reason that incentivized and motivated people like Nowitzki and like the feds to come along and say, oh.
Yeah, but, right, and we'll get into that, but the...
My rivals, so if you take my main rivals, whether it's Jan Ulrich or Basso or Baloki or Pantani, their star factor, for lack of a better phrase, was just different.
They weren't cancer.
So there was this disparity, which the sport enabled there to be, because it's just kind of an old-school, janky sport in terms of the way it's organized and run as a business.
But don't you have only a certain amount of resources?
I mean, one of the things that I've always said about extreme winners is there's a borderline between greatness and madness, and it crosses back and forth.
I would say that greatness and madness are next-door neighbors, and they borrow each other's sugar.
Because there's almost no way you can get that good without almost losing your fucking mind.
Right?
I've met some people that are fantastic at things, the great ones.
Yeah, it's an endurance event, so you have to be a little careful with that.
But there are those moments where you just have to unleash...
Everything you have and you can unleash them in training or in in racing and yeah, but yes That seems like a really good point where you just put that up is there's you have to be careful with that You have to know when to put like how you have to know your body Yeah, like really intimately as far as you didn't you have to manage it over the course of many many Say the marathon I mean nobody takes off and you know like it's a hard-yard dash I mean you have to manage that you obviously you have the experience of knowing What that effort is going to look and feel like,
and you know how to manage all of that.
But yeah, three weeks long, man, you've got to be careful.
Like, if you go back to, like, a hundred years ago, assuming that people weren't using corkscrews or corks and fishing line and whatever other ways they were cheating.
Yeah.
Like, what is, like, a realistic difference between the...
I mean, I think if you have a sport where everybody's, you know, and we were both talking about the Bill Burr thing that he did on Conan, which is like, yeah, our psychopath is better than your psychopath.
You know, that's really what it is.
You can't say...
I mean, how could they take away?
This is one of the things that drove me the craziest about this.
Like, what did they do with the seven years where you won, where they said, you're not the winner anymore?
All I will say is that I don't think it's, far be it from me to talk about what's fair or not fair, but I don't think it's fair for the sport to leave those empty.
I think that's crazy.
And compare and contrast, so in the tour you have the yellow jersey, who's the guy who wins.
You have the polka dot jersey, who's technically the best climber.
And then you have the green jersey, who's technically the best sprinter.
Those seven years were...
The green jersey was won by Zabel, who admitted to having doped all seven of those years.
The polka dot jersey was won by Varenk from France, who admitted to having doped all those years.
And I'm proud of, and that's the thing, too, is that As weird as it is and as strange as it is that there's just a line through those years as if they did not happen, man, I was paid to do a job, right?
As messy as the job was, whatever, I was paid to do it and I did it.
And I wanted to win.
I wanted to capture those memories for myself and for my teammates.
Nobody can take those away from me.
I still hold those memories to myself.
Yeah, it's had a complicated ending, but I still view those as victories and I still view those memories as good.
And I think people expect me to say, well, it was just this huge relief off your shoulders when you talked to Oprah or whatever you did that you can now move forward and live...
The life of an honest man and et cetera, et cetera.
But it's taken me...
Let me just sum it up.
I mean, sitting here today having this conversation, I would much prefer to have this conversation than the one where I would have lied to your fucking face 15 times 10 years ago.
I'd much rather us talk like this.
So that's a relief.
But it's not like I walked out of sitting with Oprah and was like, Oh my God, I feel amazing.
Number one, I wasn't emotionally ready to do that interview.
I wasn't in a place where I think that I sit today where it is a position of contrition and understanding the tremendous sense of betrayal that's out there.
My perception of that today is much sharper than it was three years ago when I sat with her.
The feds and other lawsuits forced my hand.
I had to sit there with that because I knew I was going to be sitting with her or with you or with Tom Brokaw, or I was going to be sitting with a government lawyer, being deposed, being videoed, and being leaked.
So I said, well, I'm going to go, I'm going to find the place that I'd rather sit down and talk about this as opposed to a grainy video that the government leaks to the world.
And that's your coming out party.
So I did that.
But the thing about Oprah is, aside from me just not being ready at the time to do it, you know, people sensed that.
But most importantly, for the diehard cycling fans and sports fans, I didn't say enough.
You didn't name names.
You didn't call anybody out.
It wasn't detailed enough.
You're holding back.
You're protecting people.
That's what they said.
That's a very small percentage of the population.
For the majority of the population, those first five minutes was way too much information.
I mean, it takes a hit in terms of, obviously in terms of fundraising, which directly leads to its effectiveness in terms of helping create change for cancer survivors all around the world.
You need to raise money in order to do that.
Staff layoffs.
I mean, you name it.
But I don't have specifics because once I left the board and left the organization and they legally changed the name, I don't know.
My friend John was a professional cyclist, and this was 2003, 2004, and he told me, he was like, listen, man, we're all on it.
He goes, guys would get off the bus in the middle of the night, you'd hear them taking off their bikes and going for a ride because their blood got too thick.
It didn't surprise me that when you came clean, I was like, well, good for him.
That was really what I thought.
I was like, it's kind of fucked up that he was lying all this time, and it's kind of fucked up that he was suing people that were saying that he was telling lies, and...
But one of the things that shocked me the most when I was thinking about it was that you had recovered from cancer.
You had one of your testicles removed.
You had brain surgery.
You had lung cancer.
I mean, your body was ravaged by this, and yet you still were taking drugs.
Saying it like that, there's no justifying that other than I was in this sport that I really wanted to be in and stay in.
And after the disease, I wanted to go back to.
And that was the landscape.
And so you viewed it.
You thought, okay, this is not ideal.
But you asked the question, knowing my health history with cancer, with all that I went through, Is going back to my sport and taking EPO a risk to my disease or to my health?
And the answer to that, obviously, my answer to myself was no.
And that's the only difference that was made was, I mean, I had a slight experience with growth hormone before the disease and then after the diagnosis and the treatment and the recovery, I said, okay, that does not sound like a good idea.
Man, I was, and again, this is the stuff that we can talk about.
I talked about forever and, you know, and it's almost sort of mocked now, you know, because we talked about the change in diet and the increased, you know, intensity of training and the reconnaissance and the technology and the wind tunnel and we did all of those things and they all worked.
You know, but I say they're mocked now because people now know the truth.
We all know the truth.
And people say, oh, he told us it was all that other bullshit.
Yeah, if you look at me racing in 96 before I was diagnosed, and then you look at me winning the Tour in 99, I mean, this is 20 pounds difference.
So, I mean, I had this, when I got out of sort of my cancer mission, you know, and recovered and took a year and a half away and went back, I viewed racing bikes as life and death.
I viewed my disease as a competitive event, as a sporting event.
It's me versus the opposition, looking at the scoreboard, how we doing.
And then when I got back on the bike, it was like life and death.
And so everything was intensified.
Starving yourself, training your ass off, just being, as you said a minute ago, just being generally fucking totally crazy for a result.
Well, anytime I go anywhere near that, I just get destroyed because the people view it as me accusing them.
I mean, because I get a lot of questions, so I'll tweet back.
Don't ask me.
I have no idea.
You know, people take that as saying, well, he just blamed them.
He just accused them of doing the same shit.
I feel bad for those guys, man.
I feel bad for any top-level rider that is racing their bike in 2015 and has to answer questions about a guy from 1999. Like, if I was winning in 1999, what is that, 16 years?
If somebody asked me a question about somebody from 1983, I said, what the fuck are you talking about?
Don't ask me that question.
unidentified
Like, why are you asking me about some dude 20 years ago?
But there was just this revelation that came out of International Track and Field and the Russian Federation and the covers up there and all of those stories that get written, whether it's on Deadspin or...
I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it brings people back to my history.
And it came on the heels of a two or three year criminal investigation, which you're well aware of through Jeff Nowitzki and through the US Attorney's Office here in Los Angeles.
So once that case was closed, Then the Civil Division picked up the postal case, and it's been ongoing for years, and we've sort of finished that first phase of litigation, and it'll go to trial maybe a year from now in Washington, D.C. We talked about this very briefly before the podcast.
I don't understand the allocation of resources towards someone who is bike racing.
I feel like in a world where we have Bankers, it causes gigantic 2008 financial collapse.
We have pharmaceutical companies making billions of dollars getting people hooked on OxyContin when we have crime and murder and all the fucking problems we have in this culture to spend taxpayers dollars On bike racing, a guy who may have cheated or definitely cheated in a sport where everybody's cheating.
Nobody's out protecting us, whatever we did or didn't do in Europe 20 years ago.
The banks do, Big Pharma does, etc., etc.
So that's kind of a good old boys club that we're not a part of.
And we've talked about this offline.
I mean, when you have a federal agent in a guy like Nowitzki who's made his career with these types of cases, whether it's Balco or Bonds or Marion Jones, when you have a guy like that that all of a sudden is interested, it's going to happen.
And when you have that particular agent or any agent that walks into Interview a witness or interview an old teammate with a badge and a gun.
I think the idea that – and again, I don't work for the government, I don't work for the U.S. Attorney's Office here – but I think the idea that he was brought into the investigation I don't know that that's necessarily true.
I think, and again, I don't know Jeff, but I think he looked for those cases.
And whether or not, and by the way, when you're an agent for the Food and Drug Administration, I don't know how, I mean, all of these things have missions.
He was an agent for the IRS, and so that's when Balco and Bond started.
I don't know that doping in baseball is an IRS issue.
I don't know that doping and cycling 20 years ago is an issue for the FDA. I mean, they regulate who makes aspirin and who gives you your lettuce and your eggs.
What does that have to do with...
But I think he was opportunistic when it came to these cases, whether it's Barry Bonds or myself.
Yeah, well that's, that's obviously, that's laughable, but Whatever the number was, it wasn't 100,000, but it was probably not as much as what was reported.
Well, I think he wanted to find out how he felt about it, what it feels like now.
He works right now doing drug investigations for the UFC, and he's done a fantastic job to the point where, as I was telling you before the podcast, we've seen radical changes in fighters' physiques and their performances.
Guys who are world beaters have dropped off substantially.
The word in the mixed martial arts community, when I talk to fighters, when I talk to trainers, it's had a gigantic impact and they're terrified because they've imposed these very strict fines and probationary periods.
And as you also said before the podcast, you have a sport where the bigger and stronger you are physically, the more you're pummeling somebody else's head in.
It's hard to say if it's just as exciting or not, because I think there's a lot of great fighters who are world champions who are clean.
It's just, it's like some of the all-time greats.
I mean, there's great guys right now.
Frankie Edgar, clean as a whistle.
Chris Weibin, very clean.
Rockhold, clean.
He's a new champion in the middleweight division.
There's a lot of great fighters that are clean.
It's hard to tell.
There's a lot of fighters who weren't clean who are fucking awesome.
When they weren't clean, Vitor Belfort, who went on this wild run For like, at 36 years old, when he, they had, this is one of the problems, one of the big problems with the UFC, was that they had legal testosterone replacement for a short period of time, for a few years, and guys were just fucking juicing to the tits.
Oh, they would come back with these hyperhuman levels.
They would test them and, you know, like a normal person in your testosterone level would be like a low 3, a high 800. Vitor was like 1,475 and he looked like a fucking silverback.
Yeah, so yeah, so I mean that's I don't know that sport that well and I don't know what people's feeling are in and amongst the sport I mean you just gave a pretty good perspective on it so More power to him there.
It's messy because it was so pervasive It's like if they had figured out If the tour, if half the guys were clean and half the guys were dirty in the Tour de France, and then they figured out how to pull the drugs out from half, it would be messy, right?
Because then it would be like, okay, well, what happened?
Why were these guys doing so well and now they're not?
The guys are winning or not winning?
But the tour seems like it's so pervasive that if they pulled the drugs out, the same guys would be winning, the times would be slower.
But what happened was primarily, I guess, through Nowitzki's investigation, which when was closed, he more or less handed everything to USADA, USADA picked up the investigation, and then they acted.
They gave me the lifetime ban.
When the world reads that in 2012, it was the summer of 2012, the world reads that.
The impression is, or when I do Oprah, for example, which is three or four months later, the impression is that we were hanging a blood bag six months ago.
Like, it's a current event.
It feels, although it had been...
It had been seven years before any line had ever been crossed.
Ever.
Even during the comeback.
But it made it current.
The comeback made it current for people.
Nowitzki investigating, getting everybody to speak through his own tactics.
It made it a current event.
When it really wasn't, it's like...
I remember sitting there in 2012 thinking, Alright, this shit's going down.
This is unbelievable.
Being in the middle of it, being me, this is unreal.
And I thought, you know, and we're talking about 1999 through 2005, but let's use 99 as an example.
I remember thinking to myself, who won the Super Bowl in 99?
And it was the Broncos, and Elway was the MVP. I remember thinking to myself, what if I opened the paper today and the NFL has opened a case against John Elway?
In 2012. I would have read that and gone, this is a joke, right?
Is it April Fools?
He's like an old guy who stands on the sideline now.
So it just...
They were able to go way, way back and sidestep and ignore any sort of due process and statute of limitations.
When that Nike commercial, when you were doing that Livestrong Nike commercial, and you're riding your bike, and you're talking about people calling you a doper.
This is before you had come clean.
That was in 2000. Yeah, and this is before you'd never failed any tests.
But you still had to address it in a fucking Nike commercial.
But that's, again, I mean, all of this, whether it's agreeing to that commercial or the way you treat it, I needed, you know, somebody in my life to go, I just read this script or this storyboard, and I think that's a real bad idea.
He drinks two cups of coffee in the morning, then he takes a shit, then he drinks water all day, and then he waits until about five, about five, and then he starts drinking.
That's a good drug.
I was going to ask him about marijuana.
Because if he smoked marijuana and he was holding in all those lies, that shit would fuck with you.
Like, I'll smoke some weed and I'll think about a lie I told in high school and it'll fuck with me.
It really will.
I'll think about some shit that I did in high school and it'll make me go, oh, why the fuck did I say that?
That's one of the crazy things about marijuana.
It never lets you forget.
It'll bring those things up that you're trying to hide.
Well, the post office one, I know you can't talk about it, but can you talk about, this is a reality.
When you are accused of defrauding the federal government, which is what they're saying, because you were riding for the U.S. Post Office, that was the team, and you won X amount of money during that time, they can sue you for three times that money.
You know, honestly, that's the only active case, so that one does get a little trickier to talk about, just from a...
I don't want to get crushed by my lawyers, but we like our case.
We think that we're confident in the case.
We believe that the Postal Service...
While none of this story is perfect, we believe that the Postal Service, and their own numbers support it.
I mean, the Postal Service commissioned three separate studies to analyze the effect of the sponsorship on the team.
We believe they made hundreds of millions of dollars.
And we know that they were also using the team as a sales vehicle.
So, coming during the tour, bringing over potential new clients, bringing over new clients, They were actually converting their business to the Postal Service.
We know that happened, and we know that it equaled a significant increase in revenue.
Well, I'm not a lawyer, but my view of, it's called a KETAM case, which is a false claims case.
My view is, and I think is one that our side shares, is it's about damages.
Was the Postal Service damaged?
And what can we prove to be the damages?
If there are no damages, then I would like to think that there's no case.
It is what it is.
The federal government is interested, the Department of Justice is interested in the case, and I have no choice but to fight it.
I don't have, after the dozen previous lawsuits, I'm not in a position to really cut any more checks, and so I'm in a position where I have to go fight this one out.
Well, the first thing that I did was, and I saw this coming, knew this was going to happen, is life was big.
I mean, we had three houses, we had a jet, I mean, we had the whole...
You just take that burn rate way down.
So you just, your overhead goes way down.
And, you know, the crazy thing is, if you'd have told me before, like, you're going to go sell a bunch of shit and sell your plane, I'd be like, dude, that is, life is going to suck.
Obviously, going direct somewhere and not dealing with a terminal and, you know, fucking TSA. Obviously, that's different, but it takes a little more time, you know, around more people.
Yeah, they've done studies on people that actually complicate their lives with more success, more houses, more things, and it actually makes you more tense.
I mean, there was the industries that benefited on the way up, and I was one of those industries.
They were the sponsors.
I mean, you look at Trek Bicycles, for example.
I mean, before the first tour, I think they did $125 million in sales.
They do a billion now.
So, yeah, that's a big difference.
So you have those sort of industries.
But then, you know, on the way down, so those are all people making money on the way up.
And then on the way down...
I think it did happen, but it's probably normal and natural that people capitalize on the way down.
I mean, look at Bill Clinton.
I mean, as he's going through everything he went through, believe me, there were plenty of people going, all right, now it's my turn to make some money.
And fair play.
I mean, that's just the way it is.
And, you know, some people may think that's BS, but shit.
I mean, like, some of them are publicly traded companies, so they have concerns about that.
Some of them are just covering their ass, whatever.
But they're all gone.
And friends are interesting.
I mean, just use the foundation as an example, right?
I mean, I was on the board.
I was the chairman of the board.
I was the founder.
The board was my friends.
But these are the friends that say, okay, you're out.
And so I get it that there might be a strategic reason for that.
But then when you never hear from these, then all of a sudden these people disappear from your life.
I mean, the way I sum it up is anytime anybody goes through anything, and I don't know if you've had some heavy shit in your life, but when you're going through it, people either lean in or they lean out.
And some people lean out, which means they run away, and you're surprised by that.
And you're like, what the fuck?
I mean, that guy was at every champagne party we threw in Paris.
And now he's like, I haven't heard from the dude in three years.
Like, that's strange.
Right.
But he probably has his own motive, either covering his own ass, or maybe he's one of these people that has a tremendous sense of betrayal and is just so pissed still and hurt.
We have to, I mean, I have to be receptive to that.
But then there are the ones who lean in, right?
And most of those people don't surprise you, but then there are others that lean in and they surprise you like, wow.
I didn't know you had my back like that.
And so you get surprised on both sides.
And at the end of it all, dude, you look around and you're like, all right, these are the people that are going to ride anything out with me.
Which is kind of cool and refreshing for me to really know, right?
If you're loading up a bus with all your most loyal, closest friends, I fucking know who's on that bus now.
I remember, this is a funny question, we were, this is a postal thing, but we were, once I was at a, I don't remember the postmaster general's name, his name at the time, but we did a, this is totally unrelated, but you said adversity, so it reminded me.
He was introducing me at this thing, and he wanted to say, you know, introducing me, he's overcome great adversity.
He says, here's Lance, he's overcome great diversity.
Shit, anybody would have been surprised, I suppose.
And it was just surreal, you know, the way it all came out, and, uh...
And the method at which they sort of advertised the findings.
To their credit, there was a strategy on their end.
So let's take Nowitzki's work, let's do some additional investigations, let's package it in with something they called the reasoned decision, and then let's go out and talk about it all over the place.
I think there's plenty of people that, and I'm just guessing.
This is not based on any proof.
And I've had conversations with USADA. I mean, I think we're still getting to the point where we can Do stuff together or have a conversation, so I'm not trying to criticize them.
I mean, I think there ought to be a place for them.
But I think there's also realistic, I mean, in reality, there are people that think they're ineffective.
They think they spend 10 or 20 or 50, whatever the number is, millions of dollars a year, and they don't catch anybody, right?
I mean, if you look at the amount of positives, it must be, you know, less than 1%.
Well, if I told you, well, Joe, we're all good, man.
So they needed a landmark case to say, no, we are effective.
And here it is.
And I think also from a legal perspective, it sets some legal precedence for them that they can use going forward in other cases with future cases.
And then you add in just a ginormous story that was guaranteed to get a lot of press.
But it still pains me to—look, I know what went on.
We all know what went on.
But I can't take—when I hear that this program or this particular athlete being me was the greatest fraud in the history of sport, You know, I can't.
That's just not true, right?
And then when you hear that our team's doping program was the most sophisticated program in the history of sport, well, we also know that's not true, right?
So those are...
And then the final one, which is really, I think, bothered a lot of people that this person, being me, Forced young, impressionable young men to put dangerous substances into their body.
That just is not true.
But if I heard somebody, if somebody said that about one of my son's friends, I would be pissed off too.
What is it like now, like, in, I mean, I don't want to get too personal, but your personal life, like, people value honesty.
It's one of the most important things in friends and lovers, when you have this thing where you're On video over and over and over and over and over and over again being deceptive over and over again defending yourself when you it's and then you come out and say it's all a lie.
And so this is like database of lying.
Like what is it like like trying to get people to trust you?
No, I mean, I haven't thought, I mean, I guess the answer is no, because I haven't, there's not been a, you know, sort of a new mission statement or sort of this key, but, but, I mean, life was pretty transparent anyways before that, but, I mean, there was obviously, there was the huge deception, but it's not as if, you know, There's anything crazy out there outside of that.
But I mean, you know, it's just, that's a big thing with people, you know, to be able to trust their friends or be able to trust their boyfriend or girlfriend, you know?
I didn't know you were a fan until I saw your, maybe Bill Burr, retweeted maybe your tweet that said, if there's one person that's dead that I could meet today or was alive, it would be Hunter.
Yeah, it was an Instagram post that I made about one of his incredible quotes about...
It was about heroes, and it was particularly poignant about...
It was after Ronda Rousey got knocked out that I posted it, that people, they love the idea...
Of someone who is like a superhuman person, like someone who's a legend, someone who can defy the odds because it gives them hope in this crazy world of boredom and cubicles.
I'm doing a shitty job of paraphrasing it, but it's a fantastic quote.
And then you got a hold of me about it and had that incredible book sent to me when Hunter was running for sheriff of Aspen.
I mean, Hunter was nuts in a lot of ways, but I mean, he had such a diverse group of friends, whether it was our sheriff, or whether it was Lyle Lovett, or whether it was Johnny Depp, or whether it was Doug Brinkley, I mean, just this diverse group of fucking artists and thinkers and lawmen and druggies, and dude...
Seven o'clock, Woody Creek Tavern for lunch with Heineken, two margaritas, coleslaw, taco salad, double order, fried onion rings, carrot cake, ice cream, a bean fritter, Dunhills, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the ride home, a snow cone, a glass of shredded ice over which is poured three or four jiggers of Chivas.
I mean, the transparency we see in our society today, whether it's politicians or politics or sports or entertainment, I mean, dude, imagine, like I always say, like, you know, if I give you three names that were alive today, like Sinatra, we just, you know, just had celebrated his 100th birthday.
If you took Sinatra, JFK, and Michael Jordan, and they were at their peak today, TMZ alone.
Well, I think what's going on with technology, too, is we're seeing this very obvious trend that the boundaries between people and thoughts and ideas and reality and facts, they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller to the point where they're going to be erased.
And I don't know how that's going to happen, but I think it's going to happen with something that connects us in a much more personal way than peripheral devices like laptops or phones.
I think there's going to be some technology that connects us Body to body, whether it's some sort of a neural implant or something along those lines.
I leave my phone sometimes in the car when I go do the podcast, and I don't realize that I left it, and I'll be in the middle of a great podcast, but like, fuck, my phone's not here.
I'm not even going to use it.
It's out there.
I don't touch it.
But the fact that it's not physically, like, I want it right there.
Dude, imagine if, like, you know, you're on here, and you just start, like, you know, you got some guests on, and you're, like, texting them, and the guests would be like, what the fuck?
I come all the way over here, this godforsaken valley, And that LA traffic, and the guy's on his phone?
I did a talk a couple months ago in Denver, and it was 600 people, and it was kind of a moderated Q&A, and then the audience was allowed to ask questions.
And people were cool.
They were asking questions, and the moderator says...
And there's a line to get to the mic desk questions.
And the guy says, not that this lady, I'm not calling her a troll, but the guy says, is anybody in line really pissed at Lance and want to ask a question?
This lady in the back, she's like, me!
She comes trucking up there.
And so, you know, I was like, this is going to be super interesting.
Well, there have been some fucking ridiculous people that were that wound up killing themselves, like preachers and shit like that, that it was found out.
But how dumb do you have to be to think that that's going to be secure?