Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast.

We start today's episode on the athletic track.

It was the finals of a world-class sprinting event and an odd detail emerged.

Many of the sprinters at the starting line carried a medical approval for the disorder

called narcolepsy. That's right. The disorder that makes people suddenly and uncontrollably fall

asleep in the daytime. On paper, these fastest humans on earth were apparently narcoleptic, which was hard to believe.

In reality, it was a loophole.

They had been prescribed a drug called modafinil, normally prescribed for patients with narcolepsy,

as an alertness performance booster.

In one high-profile 2003 case, the US champion sprinter, Kelly White, who won two

gold medals, had them stripped after testing positive for modafinil. She claimed a doctor had

given it to her for a so-called sleep disorder. It turns out she wasn't alone. Officials went on to

uncover six to eight similar modafinil cases among elite athletes around that time. In short,

a lot of Olympians had suddenly, quote-unquote, fallen ill with narcolepsy just to get their hands on this alertness pill.

The subtext was clear.

Modafinil had quietly become the secret weapon to cheat sleep and gain an edge.

Let's talk about this supposed all-nighter in a pill, which I know coming from me, a sleep scientist,

sounds rather antithetical to all that I speak about on this show. But it's a drug frequently used

in society, and hence I think it's important that I not shy away from discussing the science

of modafinil and any pros and any cons.

And there are cons which will come to. But let's take a step back first, because to me the story of modafinil is really a story about the market for human performance, the market value of your cognitive economy. And markets, as we know,

have a way of discovering what people want before they even know they wanted. In this case,

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