Welcome to two percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. Here's an insane idea. What if we took a bunch of athletes, rejuiced them to the gills with performance enhancing drugs, and then we had them all compete. Now, this might sound like something someone comes up with in their dorm room while stoned, but it actually just happened at the Enhanced Games, which were held in Las Vegas in May. So today we have Chris Guyemali and Sam Egan. They were on
the ground before, during, and after the Enhanced Games. They were talking to founders, athletes, and scientists. They were there reporting their podcast Superhuman, and they're here today to talk to us about the aftermath of the Games and the rise of websites selling us TRT peptides and other products that promise us better versions of ourselves with no effort, just the swipe of a credit card. We'll take a
break and then we're going to bring them on. All right, Chris and Sam, thanks for coming on two percent.
Oh, thank you for having us.
Really appreciate it.
So, you guys are about to release the final two episodes of your show on the Enhanced Games.
It might be out by the time this episode is out.
But for people who have no clue what the hell they Enhanced Games are, explain it to us.
Yeah, so the Enhanced Games were originally billed as the sort of steroid Olympics, which you know is kind of the kind of idea that like Stone College students tend to have or like, we're didn't it be sick if we like had all these like peds and people could do whatever they want.
But they actually made it happen.
It was founded by this guy named Aaron Desuza, who is an associated Peter Thiel's who is most famous for helping bring down the Gawker website from many many years ago. And yeah, we've just been embedded in this strange world where they convinced a bunch of former Olympians to take some peds and try to try to break some world records.
That's basically what this thing is.
It's actually gonna say some people who aren't who aren't even Olympians, like they got they I think obviously because this was so controversial, they kind of had to widen their their search and they got some people who had never competed in the Olympics, but you know, not to get ahead of myself, but actually ended up like beating former Olympians.
Yeah, so with the word controversy. So when I first heard word of this, and I don't know what, it was, probably a few months ago. You hear steroid Olympics, you hear like Saudi money, you hear we're do some people the gills, And my initial thing was like, this just sounds like a giant grift, Like this sounds insane.
What is this?
What did you find in terms of that? So what was your mindset entering doing this podcast?
And like where is it gone? Sence?
Then?
And I'm not wrong?
Am I wrong that this has kind of insane?
No? When I went in, I kind of didn't know what to expect. It just sounded so circusy and like a big old sort of carnival sort of thing that I was like, dude, this could end up being a firefest, this could end up being something stranger altogether. But as we've been sort of embedded in this thing this whole time, I kind of realized it's basically just you know, the website hymns with a WWE component attached to it as the marketing apparatus.
Basically, Yeah, and so people who don't know people who don't know hims, hymns cells basically supplements PEP dydes TRT.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I would say for me, I came out a little bit earlier to the project than Chris. I went to their initial event where they announced that this was actually going to happen at Resorts World in Vegas, like he's sort of in May of twenty five, and it took me about I mean, I don't know what this says about me, but it took me about a full day of like attending these events and talking to people to be like, hey, I think that they're trying to sell t stosterum to the wider pub. This is
an ad like, this is an advertise. It took me a full day to realize it. And I would say throughout the whole process of making this series that that suspicion was only was only confirmed.
Yeah, So tell me what the business model is, because when I first heard this, I was like, Oh, they just they want to see like what people can do if they're juice to the gills. Kind of interesting to your point, Chris, kind of sounds like something you come up with in your dorm room stoned. But there's a bigger play here because they are paying these athletes in same money. So then the questions will where's the money coming from and how are they actually going to make money?
So tell us about that.
It's the enhanced games are funded at least at it's the start. Now it's a publicly traded company by Christian Engermeier, who is this sort of biopharma billionaire who's played in the in the psychedelic space for some time. And the business model, like we said, the way they kind of pitch it is that it is more bespoke version of telehealth that will give you access to both drugs that need to be prescribed, like testosterone, and also just a
wider range of supplements. I think they sell like a sleep supplement for Chris, I think you said it was like seventy bucks. Well, on top of that, they're selling testosterone, they sell the whole list of peptides. They sell NAD and Chris actually went through the website and bought it. I have not done it yet, but as they pitched it, it was like you're going to have to talk to a doctor and it's going to be more specifically suited to like what we think that you need. But as
I understand it, that has not been the case. It basically is just essentially the same website model as Hymns or Row or Keeps or any of these other of these other companies.
So when you bought stuff, Chris, so the idea going in as you're going to meet with a doctor, it's gonna feel like just getting a precision from a doctor.
But that didn't happen. So what was that process?
Like?
Yeah, it was basically like filling out a Google doc survey of like what are you suffering from right now? And I was like anxiety, and it's like great prescription on the way. I actually ordered some Sammarell and that, in true enhanced fashion, hasn't gone to me yet because of some logistical hold ups.
In their shipping.
Yeah pipeline, but you know, as soon as it gets to me, I'm eager to try it. But basically the business model is they're using this, you know, this wacky sort of competition to sort of justify a framework that then they could like use to sort of normalize ped us.
And that's kind of like the big overarching mission of this thing, Like if we can provide a way where we can sort of do it in their words like safely and like rather conservatively honestly, like in the in the public eye, then we can sell.
That to the masses. And that's sort of how they're building this sole operation.
Yeah.
So Chris, your background as you were at GQ reporting on wellness quite a bit. Sam, you're a producer. Also, you were a D one athlete. You wrestled at Wyoming, Is that right?
That's correct?
Of polks you go, So, how did how did you two get pulled into this project?
I think for me, there's just you know, there's not a lot of people who come from like an athletic background at the level that I guess I come from that also work in the in the in the journalism space. So I think that it so I think that it was a natural fit. But I was also really curious
just from my own experience. I was fascinated by the idea of I guess just like the recovery part of PDEs because I just remember being competing at at Wyoming and I think people understanding theory the training regimen of like a divisional athlete or a big level athlete, but like to see it actually put in front of your face, and to actually do it is another thing entirely. And so of you're like an hour and a half in the morning, it's been from three and a half hours
at night. You're told when to go to class, you're told when to go to study hall, you have to go to recovery after practice, probably have tutors after that. So your entire day is built for you. Five hours of exercise, six days a week if you're not traveling. And even at like nineteen to twenty three, my body was messed up all the time. I still have like I mean like I still got like I got pinkies that do crazy stuff, like you know, like I was beat up, and the question of like does this have
to be this way? Like are we kind of closing ourselves off to a realm of drugs in pharmacology that could like make athletes lives better without compromising their safety and health. I was really interested to find that out. I don't know if I think that the answers were satisfying, but I wanted to. I wanted to see what they were selling.
You know, yeah, you're going look like I've been put through hell on the wrestling team.
It's taken a toll in my body.
If there's this thing I could do that is not going to affect my long term health, that seems like it would be interesting from an athletic perspective, just to make the lives of athletes not quite so totally.
And I think just because people don't realize how how stringent the anti doping uh sort of guidelines are on substances that you cannot you can and cannot take. So study that came up like time and time again with the athletes. We were interviewing one one of the athletes, Megan Romano, who came out of retirement after like ten years a swimmer. She was like, I was even I was afraid to take ibraprofen because you never know what's going to be tainted. You never know what's going to
get you banned. Like the list changes constantly. The book of like wat of guidelines is like a tone of different substances that you can and cannot take. It changes, it changes constantly, And it was also just creative without athlete, without athlete input. So for me, I was just really interested in how this could affect the athlete experience.
Yeah, that makes sense, So you kind of mentioned who is behind this, but how did this whole idea start to get legs of the enhanced games.
Yeah, so Aaron Desusa sort of like was kicking around a bunch of ideas post his Gawker project a couple of years ago, and he presented this sort of idea to Peter Teel, who's one of his buddies, and was like, hey, you know what if we threw a sort of steroid Olympics that you know, sort of allowed us to put on this big, big show, We'll create a lot of noise, it'll cause a lot of mischief, and from there we can sort of develop and reverse engineer as sort of
business plan. So I think they kind of went in with the big, nasty, sort of like you know, a dirt kicking idea, and then they sort of like, you know, we're building the plane on the way down.
To mix every metaphor possible to describe this, but.
Yeah, so in a way, yes, it does have elements of the this is an idea that you'd come up with in the dorm room, all stoned. At the same time, it's coming from two people that have billions of dollars and they're like, hey, we could actually figure this thing out, and then they also have the sort of gear in their mind going all right, and then how do we turn this into a super profitable business potentially?
Yeah, And so that's that's sort of how I came onto it too, because Aaron and Christian Angermeier went on Joe Rogan's podcast, like not too long ago. I think it was like in was it twenty twenty two or twenty twenty three?
I believe it was twenty four, twenty four, twenty four.
Yeah, So they went on, and you know, when I was at GQ, like, sort of my big story that I wrote over there was the story about the guys who got their legs artificially lengthened during COVID secretly, And so for me, I was like, I kind of want my next big story to be about weird stuff we do our bodies the way we can augment it and sort of improve it. I'm using air quotes here, but
improve our bodies. And when I heard them on Rogan, they were like Carnival Barkers basically, they were kind of like, you know, this is going to change everything. This is going to like, you know, sure in a new paradigm for enhancement and the future of humanity. And then when I actually wrote them and like you know, kind of pitched myself to be the guy to write a big magazine story on it, it was kind of like, oh,
this is just like another business. And so there was like this like incongruity between what they were actually pitching and what that actual project turned out to be.
Yeah, it was very much an extension of Peter Teal's
trans sort of transhumanist vision. For those who might not know, transhumanism is an idol like an ideology that has existed in the tech space for a long time that basically says that like to avoid the inevitable collapse of humanity, like that we must enhance and depending on who you ask, even like sort of supersede our own bodies, whether that is like uploading yourself to the cloud or ver it's aging yourself with like I think of Brian Johnson using
the blood of his son. You know. It's it's part of this this transhumanist ideology, this transhumanist vision that that that Peter Teal very much, very much subscribes to.
Part of the argument that they're making is that doping is already happening in the Olympics and sports. So I heard one of the numbers that one of the founders tossed out. They said, forty four percent of Olympians admitted to pds in the last year.
Did you report on that? Is that real?
Yeah? So that is a study. That is it's a it's a real study. It is an outlier among other sort of studies that have been done on the rates of doping and the Olympics. And the researcher that did it consistently has sort of outliers in his data. It's it's anywhere from like ten to twenty percent higher than than most other studies. Fine, twenty percent of athletes in the Olympics doing drugs is still a significants. I wouldn't. I wouldn't say that that's nothing, you know, but it is.
It is an outlier in the data for sure.
So they pulled the most favorable number because they're going to well, if forty.
No one would ever do that in the wellness space might come on.
Yeah, So they're basically saying, all right, if forty four Olympians are already doping, like that makes an unfair playing field at the real Olympics. So what if we just you know, pull back the curtain and say, hey, basically, more or less anything goes, let's let's see what happens.
So that's kind of their argument.
Yeah, yeah, and then you know it, it kind of has a little bit of a point, Like it's like you look at the Russian Federation or like the Chinese, like you know, so it's like, oh, these big apparatuses are basically like helping their athletes gain an unfair advantage. And then what are they getting from you know, the IOC or WATA. It's like basically like a slap on the wrist, like they're still competing, they're still able to win medals. It's a sometimes it's it feels like a little silly.
So I kind of see their point in some of this.
Yeah, And there is some research that suggests even if you've used certain banned substances in the past, those can still impact your performance moving forward. So you'll still have you know, you'll gained more muscle than you could have without them, while that muscle's going to stick around even if you're not on them, you're still getting this sort of boost from the past more or less.
Yeah, and you know, there was this really funny example of this Australian swimmer named James Magnuson. He was the first dude who signed on with Enhanced a couple of years ago, and he actually ended up taking like they didn't have a protocol in place, they didn't know what they were doing. He was kind of effectively, you know, the trial balloon and step free into the air, and he ended up doping so much that it made him significantly slower in the water.
Like he was huge.
He looked like, I don't know, like he Man, basically like the cartoon version of he Man, which you know, maybe having giant shoulders isn't the best for your buoyancy in the water, but you know, the dude, the dude was an ocean liner when he should have been a speedboat basically.
I mean, I'm not convinced that wasn't a problem at the Broader Games themselves a few months ago too. You know, like having more muscle on your body does not necessarily equate to like swimming faster in the water. You are basically turning yourself into a rock. You're far less buoyant. Uh, it makes it, It makes it a lot harder so I did find myself wondering why they chose swimming given given the reality of you know, the way that the water works.
But yeah, because a lot of the a lot of the drugs they are offering and athletes are using are essentially muscle enhancers. Are they using stuff like EPO for because most of the sports are power sports, right, So yeah, the distances. There's sprinting, but there's not they're not doing like marathons or anything like that.
No, they've been very like, we don't want to do right now. We don't want to do anything that is an endurance sport because it's not tiktokable. Basically, they want everything to be able to they they're very candidly candid about that. They want to be able to throw it on a clip, publish it, put it out there, get as many views as they can, which you could tell this was their model by being at the games for
kind like we were. We were kind of depressed being we were sequestered into this kind of corner of the arena and given very very limited access to interview the athletes during the games themselves. And meanwhile they were letting YouTube. I don't even know who they were sort of YouTube influencers, zoomer TikTok influencers like go poolside, and they were doing like Fortnite remote dances and interviewing athletes right as they came out of the right as they came out of
the water. So it was, it was, it was. It very much felt like they were trying to cater specifically to new age media.
Yeah, and you know these like short bursts, sprint sports and like lifting. It's like it makes a lot of sense for like, you know, the online economy, but for a six to eight hour live event, maybe not the best or most entertaining way to throw first games, I guess.
So you guys go to Vegas.
It's at the event is held at Resorts World, which is a big newish casino at the end of the strip. It's very nice. What are the vibes like before the event actually happens.
So they had sort of built this bespoke structure in the middle of a Resorts World, which was it had a four lane pool, one hundred yard track I think, or maybe a little bit longer than that, and then like a little stage for powerlifting. There was a big DJ booth and this was all taking place in like sort of the shadow of Trump Tower with the Sphere in the background. The vibes were a little I don't know, this is probably a little harsh, but they felt very cursed to me, Like.
What do you mean by that?
The swirl of the.
TikTokers, and then like there were the athlete families sort of in the stands. They neglected to put a roof over the whole thing, which you know, if you're competing in weightlifting or track and you're in the middle of like the Nevada Desert, that's probably not the best like
situation to break a world record in. So the sun's beating down, there's like old ladies like getting like having wheelchairs requested, and it feels sort of like it feels like a sort of wellness see Coachella in some ways, but they hadn't figured out all the kinks yet, and sort of that's kind of like how it is when we like parachute it into this thing.
It was ninety six degrees that day, yeah, because it's light May.
Yeah, and it was I don't know if you remember what I said to you, Chris beforehand, but I was like, I've spent my entire life going to wrestling tournaments where you compete for seven minutes at a time. Nobody here is going to be accustomed to how much of this is just waiting, just waiting for your turn, and they're kind of rolling through the events really slowly, and a lot of it is I would say, probably four hours
of it. We don't quote me on that, but like a significant chunk of the time was dedicated to Olympic weightlifting, because that just takes time people need to rest between reps. No shade to Olympic weightlifting. I think it's really cool, but it is not the best spectator sport I think it is. It happens, you know, like a handful of seconds. You're competing at a time, ton of build up, and I think they attempted. They only attempted one world record
the whole time. They didn't even in the way that think they didn't even attempt They didn't throw the weight on the bar and give it a go with with almost any of their almost any of their athletes. And this is the height of the day. So for most of the most of the weightlifting, the crowd was like empty downstairs, drinking free beer that they've been given by enhanced because it was for no no public tickets, it was invite only. Everybody in attendance was a press family or an influencer.
And so the deal for athletes is explain how they get paid and what the numbers are and how that compares to doing it the quote unquote non enhanced way. You're trying to get to the video onmpicks and.
Yeah, so you know, the sort of like pattern net emerged for us was if you're like not an NBA player or an NFL player or whatever you're you're you're
basically not making any money from your chosen sport. And so for a lot of these let's let's take swimmers for example, like their options after they're they're retired from their swimming career are basically, you know, they could they could teach kids, they could do seminars, but maybe you're not the type of person who wants to like, you know, help kids, like you know, kick around in the pool or whatever. And so, uh, if you're signing on with Enhance,
you get paid a monthly stipend. We don't have the exact numbers on that because they declined to share it.
You have basic health care, you have the futuristic health care with all the you know, enhancements and sort of like health monitoring and recovery stuff, and you had free housing and food, so you basically had a lot of your amenities taken care of and you could basically focus on training and training only, which you know, it's kind of like just like a luxurious version of going back to college and except you don't have to go to class.
Basically, it's kind of how I understood it.
We should add though, that they that they they were only given those amenities if you agreed to be well, not all of it. They're only given the like food and board and access to the pharmaceuticals if they agreed to go to the United Air memorates and participate in this study that they're doing on the drugs themselves. So you had to essentially agree to be a guinea pig to get not the stipend, but the board and the food and free access to the pharmaceuticals.
And then one of the big reasons that athletes would do this is that if you win an event, the purse is pretty big, and then if you break a world record at the Games, it's even bigger.
So what are the numbers there the.
Winners were getting in most of the events, we're getting two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is if you're running track, that's like more than you might make in your entire career, with the exception of the best of the best.
Of the best of the best. Yeah, and then low end was like fifty thousand dollars. So there was a range of money you were guaranteed to make from just competing alone basically.
And then for some of the events, I believe the one hundred meters sprint for men's and fifty and one hundred meter free in swimming, if you broke a record, you got a million dollars. The person was the world record breaking purse was less than that for other events, but for those ones it was up to a million dollars.
Yeah, And I think, just to put a pin in that so people have context, if you play in the NFL, you're probably guaranteed at least two million bucks a year. You play a few years, you're like, Okay, I'm probably gonna be okay for life, so long as I just manage my money decently. Now, if you're at a decent level, like you can, you can be in the nine figure range. So like, you know, some of these like bigger professional sports, you can do your thing, you'll make enough money that
you're probably set for life. But with more of these niche Olympic sports, you're really scratching by unless you're like the absolute top, like a Michael Phelps, and you can get these big advertising deals and all these other things, but like the average athlete isn't hardly making any money.
Yeah, that's that's basically it.
And we talked to a number of the athletes, and they all had the reasons for doing it, Like, you know, some of them had just put down a mortgage and then lost a bunch of their other sponsors, so this was like a way to you know, like earn a living.
Basically.
One of the more interesting guys, his name is Andre Govarov. He had actually fled Ukraine during the war and his business back there was basically destroyed.
He had no sort of like.
Literally destroyed to be clear, like with missiles.
Yeah, yeah, and he you know, he was like, in order to compete at an elite level that I want to compete at, it costs you know, ten thousand dollars a month, like between the coaches. I got to pay the trainers, my recovery, my food, all that stuff. So he was like, enhanced was just financially, you know, the most logical move that I can make in order to like be who I want to be.
We're going to take a quick break.
Then we're going to look at the actual events of the enhanced games and the records that were set and not set. Okay, So at this point we've said, up, we've got this big event. We're going to let people juice to the gills. We're going to see what happens. Do they get these crazy times and weights lifted we've never seen before. We've set down that this is sort of one big advertisement in order to sell these things
to the public. We've set up the fact that athletes are being pulled into this because they can make more money than they might have made their entire career for this. Now the event happens, what happens with the times? Are are these records being shattered across the board?
No, no, they go. They go most of the entire day without a record. They come close once in one hundred meters men's sprint, they were like one hundreds of a second off, but in most of the events. The one that comes to mind is kind of being the most egregious of the women's hundred meter sprint. I believe that I don't believe any of the times that were run would have qualified for the Olympics. All fine for
the Olympics. Yeah, even the winner, I believe. I have to don't check that, but I'm pretty sure there was the case. They were all elected the the eleven second range, which is, you know, certainly faster than you or I, but not an Olympic caliber. And not only that, they had multiple multiple non enhanced athletes, so for context, you could join the enhanced Games and say I don't want to do steroids, I just want to compete for the money.
And they had multiple athletes who were doing that, who at least said they were doing that, were won their events. One of them was Hunter Armstrong, who the guy that was trying to save his mortgage, basically who signed up for the Games. He won one hundred meter backstroke, yeah, backstroke, as well as the Fred Curley, the hundred meter sprinter, and the women's sprinter as well, whose name is escaping me.
So they have so basically one the times are not crazy the whites lifted are not crazy and people are winning who are not even enhanced, and this is supposed to be. Let's see what happens when we enhance the hell out of these athletes.
And yeah, and I don't know about you, Sam, but you could sort of like feel the tense, the tension like sort of like building in the in the arena. As the night goes on, it's like, Oh, another one that's not smashed, another one that didn't even come close, another lift that was like far, far far off from
a world record. And it wasn't until the very last race, which was a fifty meter free and they actually had maybe, you know, pound for pound, the highest caliber of athletes competing in that one, so that was kind of like their big bet. And it wasn't until that very last end of the night that the swimmer, Christian Golamyve like touches the wall and then like there's a split second that happens in between that where they like verify that a world record was broken, and then all the screens
like flash red. It's like, oh, they had all these like you know, I don't know if it was fireworks, but just like all this stuff firing off that they were sitting on all night, and you could just sort of feel like I was looking at the executives like it was like a load had lifted off their shoulders, like they were so relieved to finally have had a GenZ like break one single world record with the Games.
But he did that in some sort of suit that's banned in the normal Olympics, right, m h.
He did it and what's called the super suit, which is just like, really it looks like a wrestling singlet, but even kind of tighter, like somebody looking a wrestling singlet in a what suit, but it goes to the ankle and comes kind of over your body and what it like, it kind of compresses you. It makes you more more buoyant, which I do think when they first initially broke a record, and for context they they it's
kind of a proof of concept. A year ago they had gold Christian Golomy break the fifty meter world record as it stood at that point, which had been set by Caesar Clo in the late two thousands in a
super suit before the supersuit was banned. Okay, A few months after that, Cameron McAvoy, an Australian swimmer broke Christian the world record that the rest of the world recognized, and Christian Golimus world record in a regular sort of speedo, not in a super suit, so did not have the like extra gear that Christian Goldmife again raced in and broke the broke the record in so that I honestly, to me, that puts more of an asterisk on the
record than the steroids do. Uh. The line that I always say to people is like I use the Barry Bonds example, which is obviously extreme. You know, like you could go on YouTube right now and watch there's hundreds of videos on YouTube just analyzing Barry Bond's swing is the most beautiful swing ever. Right, Steroids aren't gonna make your the technique of your swing better. You know, they're gonna make you stronger, make you recover better, but they're
not gonna make you better at swinging a bat. But then like it's the super suit is almost like benching in like a sleeve the powerletters do versus benching raw without a know, like it's your a gear to a thing to assist you. At that point, if you want to go down the philosophical route, it's like why not put a fan behind him and like him to propel him forward. Why not give him flippers? Why not? You know, what is the what is the logical end of what
you're what you're doing? I think here was kind of my question.
So the so these events start happening, no records are getting broken initially, and then you finally have this moment where you know, screen flashes read At that point, what are the what's the energy among people who are not the owners? You said, it's almost like the felt relief. But what are people in the press area thinking and saying?
What?
What's the reaction from the TikTokers and the YouTubers. Is it sort of like this, I don't know if this is going well or at that point when then happens, is it are people reacting as if it's a success.
I think the TikTokers didn't really care. Yeah, either way that the families were happy, The athletes were ecstatic. I mean, these people have been living together for many months, you know, and tells them abudabims them like they're clearly they're very kind of tight knit. So they were they were ecstatic for I mean, they were extatic throughout for whoever won. For who, you know, the energy for them was kind of always always very high. The press was clearly yeah,
I think quite suspicious of the premise. What I've been kind of saying is like, I don't know if this says about me as a journalist, but I was like, you know, if they had broken a ton of records, that would have been like an incredible story just in terms of it being interesting, not good or bad, just really interesting. If they had broken no records at all,
that would have been so interesting. But breaking one in the event that we thought they might break it in that they'd already broken it in at one point we thought they might break it again with this suit on. At the very end, I was like, this is I don't want to say a letdown, but it wasn't as compelling as I think that it could have been. It was hard for the story part of my brain to not be like, ah, dang. You know, I think a lot of the press als similarly. I don't know about you, Chris, Yeah.
You know, when you ask about what was the mood between the influencers, it actually took me a second because by then most of them had already left, so the stands were a little bit empty by that point, which was, you know, probably not in their favor, But.
Yeah, I do think the.
For me at least, like I gained a lot of sympathy for these athletes over the months, just like the stuff that they struggle with, like the work they put in. How unique their situation was in terms of like being the best at what you do and being asked to train together in like the same pool every day, like that was really fascinating. Like the dynamic in there was a bunch of alphas in the same room. You look
to your left, it's like the second best guy. You look to your right, it's the third best guy, and they kind of like pushes you to be better in a lot of ways that you know how much that had to do with their success versus peds, I don't really know, but I thought it was like a really like sort of cute like dynamic.
Yeah, the I mean the athletes of the people throughout this process that I have absolutely the most sympathy for the ones that I'm I would say I'm the happiest for like it is. I would say my criticism of the Enhanced Games in no way should be construed as being support for the IOC or for the World Antidoping Agency, something that I thought was quite poetic in the days immediately after the Enhanced Games. I don't think they could
have timed this worse. Chirsty Coventry, who's the president of the IOC, was interviewed and she said, in effect, she said, I don't believe in paying athletes like prize money. Was kind of the arc that she was asked about prying prize money to Olympic athletes. She was like, I don't believe in that. I think that's a bad thing, which was which is just you know, the IOC makes tens billions of dollars. They have plenty of money. It's technically
a nonprofit, you know. I think that they can afford to pay life changing money to some of their to some of their athletes. On top of that, the I think that the methods that we use to decide who's doping isn't. Our sort of anti doping policies as they exist are draconian. Athletes have to surrender to test it. Basically any given moment, any given time, their athlete, their whereabouts have to be given to the World Antidoping Agency.
Literally twenty four to seven. If you miss a test if I think three times, then you give a year or two year ban. If you're just not where you're supposed to be. They have no sort of say on what is and isn't banned. It is also draconian, I think, kind of also dystopian in a way, almost opposite the spectrum of the Enhanced Games, and I have to think that there is a better option, some sort of middle ground.
We'll take a break, then we'll talk about the backlash that happened after the disappointments in the Enhanced Games. So the event happens, as you said, kind of a letdown allth Like you said, you wouldn't want to call it a letdown, but we'll just go with that.
You can call it a letdown. I think that's for Yeah. I stand by that it's a letdown.
Yeah, event was a letdown.
Stock price crashes like seventy five percent in the ensuing days. It could just be my algorithm, But I did not say a positive thing. I just saw a ton of hate being thrown at this thing. What reactions did you see and how do you sort of process that?
You know, I think our algorithms are probably coded very similarly, like it was a you know, maybe ninety nine percent people dunking on the whole thing. But at the same time, I feel like this whole thing was designed to sort of court controversy and to like, you know, I feel like for them, they feel like.
Any attention is good attention.
And so just the fact that people were talking about it and they had a lot of eyeballs and people were going to their website, like I think they would consider that a win, and you know, they were in the aftermath, they were trying to spin this as, hey, look, we had a bunch of athletes who happened to be thirty five who set prs and that's a you know, that's a moral victory for us and for them, and you know, maybe that can happen to you too. You could be the best version of yourself and feel ten
years younger. And so that was kind of the spin they were putting on the ball in the aftermath of the Games, which I thought was, you know, not the worst idea. But for me, the thing that was like very weird about the Games is if you are targeting a demo that is, like people who are like thirty five forty middle aged and you're like trying to help
them feel younger. Inviting a bunch of eighteen year old TikTokers who've never felt that we're back pain in their life just feels like the most twisted marketing stretch possible. So that was the part I couldn't quite reconcile.
Yeah, so that's the promise, is that you know, you two could set a pr at thirty five forty. What drugs do they actually sell to people? So there's like this range, right, It's there's peptides, there's testosterone. There's what all is being sold? And what do they do?
Well, it's changing constantly because the Trump because the Trump administration is constantly deregulating a lot of the stuff that they want to sell, like the peptide stuff. Interesting, I can tell you right now. For sure, they sell samrellan, which is a peptide that is supposed to boost your natural production of growth hormone. They sell testosterone, they sell they sell nady plus. What does that do?
Yeah?
Anydy plus is this sort of coenzyme that helps with sort of like cellular repair and helps a lot with energy, brain fog, that sort of thing. I've I've dabbled in it and take it once in a while. Before I got into like enhanced world, they sell a bunch of like glp ones creams, and then like they have like their your standard issue like creatine and like pre workout sort of stuff that are grossly overpriced and actually are a little too sweet for my liking after tasting them.
It would appear that they've added Cialis to Dalla phil since I last looked up maybe a week or two ago, which I believe some people are saying is like you can use as like a like a like a mental clarity booster. Now too, I've heard that on the kind of wellness circuits. So they have they have cialis, they have generic salis, they have they have trzepetide, they have
g hkcu, the copper peptide creating. I mean, they kind of got they kind of got everything in this kind of this whole gambit of of drugs.
And then how are they tracking the health effects of these because part of it is they're doing these sort of study on athlete help health to see do these things help or harm in the long run? What does that actually look like? And have they have they published any results yet?
No results they've they've throughout the whole process of reporting this. They were very at first. They kind of promised us, especially Chris, that they would have access to whatever information we wanted about what they were taking. And then as when it kind of push came to shove and we were like, hey, we're gonna go to Abu Dhabi and like we want to we want to be in the
room when you give them the needle. They're like, no, actually, we can't tell you because of privacy laws in the VIA, and so we don't know exactly what any given athlete was taking. They have since published some data on what percentage of different substances, like different athletes took. It was like something like seventy percent use of soostro and like forty percent use EPO. Just kind of generic like this percentage of our athletes use these drugs. But they have
not made the exact results public yet. And we talked to a bunch of doctors about we're just to basically gut check what this study was. And there's there's a few there's a few big problems. One is that like you really don't have any control. You have three athletes who are not taking drugs and you're not controlling anything else in their life, So that already kind of compromises
the study. And then two like there is no they're not drug They were very candid that they were not drug testing athletes and lead up to the games they were only going to test their sort of org and health and to make sure that they were healthy to compete, because some of these substances can in larger heart they
can cause liver damage, et cetera, et cetera. And kind of the hole in that logic that we we kept coming across was there's a huge financial incentive here, and there's you're not You've already said you're not drug testing any of these athletes, So what's stopping anybody here from taking more of this drug? Given that they could win a million dollars you know from on the side, getting some testogs around on you know, there's nothing stopping them.
So the on top of that, there's questions of you know, independence, like kind of independent could the study actually be? The data I think is compelling but dubious, Like I think there isn't a ton of research out there because we have been so I think punitive in our approach to drug research. For a long time, not not you know, especially with street drugs, but which steroids have been treated as a street drug for a long time. It's very hard
to research the effects of them. We didn't really have For many of these drugs, we still don't have a really good idea of what they do. Most of it is like broscience, and then on top of that broscience being just kind of anecdotal, like I like this, do you like that, how do you use it? Blah blah blah.
You know, they had a couple of different categories of drugs. It was you know, they had you know, they had the tesosterones, they had stimulants that they were able to take for the women, they had hormone regulators like you know, and then what was the last category stem There was one more metablock modulators metal block modulators, yes.
Yes, maldonium drugs that make your sales more energy efficient. Often they're used for like diabetes and libertines and stuff.
Yeah, And what was interesting is, you know, we talked to this guy, Guido Plis. He's this cardiologist from the UK who heads up there sort of like scare quotes Independent Medical Commission, and he said that peptides were actually like something that the athletes were going to be able
to take. In the lead up to it, like we talked to a couple of them who were excited about potentially taking you know, like BPC one five seven or you know, the Wolverine stack for healing and all of that, and he was like, you know, that stuff is a little too unregulated even for us, so we don't kind of want to we don't want to dive into that, which to me felt weird because it's like, oh, you guys are leaving a lot of money on the table by doing this, But at the same time, it's like
you're sort of I don't know, ability to regulate or not regulate, but to sort of like determine what the athletes can and can take.
It's just as squishy as say, wata.
You know, Like it was they kind of didn't have their own grounding.
What I was gonna say earlier was on top of how hard these drugs have been able to research, the other argument that they make, which has some merit I think to be fair, is that like most of what we understand of the symptoms of steroid abuse comes from people who are abusing extreme amounts of them in an unregulated manner off label for long periods of time. I
bodybuilders basically. And their argument is, although we can't know because they don't give us access to what they're doing, is that they're giving these athletes very small doses of these drugs relatively speaking, for much shorter periods of time. I think in total they dobe for about eight weeks, maybe slightly longer.
Okay, Yeah, And what's funny.
What's interesting about that too, is like, you know the powerlifters, it's like, oh, they were the ones who were the furthest away from breaking world records in some ways, was there more conservative dosing that enhancement was providing them different from what was available in other.
Contexts, which I think was unsurprising, and just because weightlifting has always always been I think the most drugged out of the Olympic sports totally.
Like in powerlifting, you have federations that are clean in theory, and then you have ones where it's like, this is a non clean federation, like just juice yourself to I mean, there's already kind of this experiment happening in the powerlifting world. One thing I would point out about the study, though, is if if you have people taking a bunch of different substances, how the hell do you figure out what
is helping and what is hurting an athletes health? Like there's just way too much fucking noise.
It's a strange cocktail. And also like, how do you extrapolate the effects of t stosterone from Ben and proud Olympic silver medalists to sixty year old ethel who wants to Like there is an example that they're like, we want Olympic athletes to have a to it and the sixty year old woman who wants to tend her garden bonger? How do you extrapolate the results from an Olympic silver medalist to a sixty year old woman who just wants to take care of her ponies? You know, Like yeah, and.
I think we mentioned it earlier too that it's like, you know, the the menu of drugs that are presented to each athlete is totally different for each one of them. Like it's totally bespoke, like catered to sort of your biometrics, your test, and it's recommended to you by your doctor. You decide what you actually do and don't want to take. And so just like the variants there alone between the athletes is like it's it's like just like such a wide spectrum that how do you control for that?
Right?
So you what I thought was interesting, Chris is that you had you would take an NAD mm hmm. What prompted you to do that and what was that like?
Yeah, So one of the funny things that happened in like Sam and I like getting put together for the story is we both do muay Thai and both compete, you know, so you know, obviously when we were in Vegas, were like, let's sit up a Muytai gym.
Let's like get some work.
In, you know.
But you know, I'm forty one.
I'm like it's sort of like the tail end of like my you know, ability to compete at this point. I also have a four year old son, and so my sleep is trash, Like you know, I don't get very much recovery. And a homegirl of mine was like, oh, I'm like she was in her mid forties and she was like, I started taking NAD and it really really helped me with like my daily brain fog and just my general ability to function and as a writer and
sort of someone who partacs in like combat sports. I was like, oh, the sort of mental acuity that comes with NAD plus is something that was really appealing to me. And I also wanted to understand what it's like to jab a needle into your belly so I could sympathize with these athletes a little bit more. And that was kind of like what kicks started the experiment for me?
What was it like? Did it improve things? Did it work?
Yeah?
You know what we I Sam actually tried it too when I when I had an extra dosing that was sent to me. For me, it's I think it's awesome. Like I feel like whenever I do need my brain fog lifted or I need a little bit more energy, it helps tremendously. I'm also a lot older than Sam, so this stuff like my you know, he has the wrestling background in the lifetime of those injuries compounded onto him.
But you know I got I got like ten years at least, so you know, maybe maybe the age is more of a factor for me.
Yeah, it was. And I would specify, you know our preface that you know, I am not forty, I'm thirty years old. Maybe in ten year os old, be like yeah, give me everything. I don't know. Yeah, But one thing I like about working with Crystal on this was which was it was a good gut check. Because I am my mother's a doctor. I grew up in a house with a medical professional, So I am deeply suspicious of anything that comes out of the wall Inness industry. Most
of it's unregulated kind of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Also, I just have this kind of like predisposed belief from my experience competing that like, I've seen what people can do if they just train really hard and sleep a lot and eat really well, and that's kind of all that they do and that's their focus. I'm like, maybe we as a society should try to sleep a lot more and work out. If you want to run faster, lift more, work out really consistently for many hours day,
and sleep well and eat better. Before we start talking about injecting exogynist substances and hormones into our body, I was like, I feel like we're starting at the wrong end here often because there's because there's something to sell. So I came into it, I think pretty suspicious. I took a pretty small dose of the nity I didn't really feel much. I thought the feeling of it being
in my stomach to be so off putting. Uh, it's like warm, and there's it feels like there's like a little it felt like one of those like little like weights that you see the like in like the old ladies and the jaggeritized classes, the like little bullet weights they hold. I felt like someone like slipped that under my skin and it was just sitting there. But again, you know, I don't know how I'll feel when I'm forty.
You know, it's easy for me, like I can still go out on the weekends and wake up, and I went out. I was out late, real late a couple of nights ago, watching the game two of the Knicks and partied until like two in the morning, and then I woke up. I was like, I got to get rid of this hangover. And my solution was to run five miles. So yeah, yeah.
That's about I was.
I was going to say, you know that it's I know sleep is important, but there's a Knicks game that starts at eight thirty.
And I don't have a kid, so it's like and it's easier for me to say, like, maybe you should work out four hours a day before you start putt stuff in your body.
We're going to take a break.
Then we're going to get into a little bit of a long of aging and why we as a culture are so obsessed with slowing down and stopping aging. I wonder, and Chris will be interesting to get your perspective on this. Part of me wonders, is having brain fog waking up kind of tired? Is that just part of aging? And is there almost a reward in that? It's like it's
a fundamental part of the process of being human. So if I think about myself from a writing perspective, it's like some mornings I wake up, I'm like, ah, the sentences aren't coming out, but I put the work in and then I get a couple good ones and I'm like, that was awesome. And I did that sort of by myself. Do we lose something when we buy a product that makes these important things about being a human easier?
That's a good question, you know.
To my mind, it's sort of indistinguishable from you know, having two shots of express in the morning.
In some ways, it's like if it.
Helps you do your job a little bit better, I'm like Yeah, dude, go for it.
That's fine.
Like we're sort of like thrust into this system where getting sleep is pretty much impossible, and like, if you do are in a situation where you can get a lot of sleep, it's kind of like that's like the new luxury in some ways. Like if you're Lebron getting twelve twelve hours of sleep at night, it's like, of course you're going to have an advantage over everyone else,
but none of us. If we're working our jobs, trying to get in our workouts, trying to like do any extracurriculars, it's like, yeah, sleep is always the first thing to go, and so you know, whatever you can do to sort of mitigate that, I'm personally kind of.
All for it.
Yeah, Sam, what was your take on that, giving your background as an athlete and you had to go through all these you know, PD checks and everything, and where do you draw the line? Because I think Chris's yeah is great. That's like, well, if I took four shots of espresso in the morning, that gives me some sort of boost, And so like, how do we how do we even determine these lines between what's a quote unquote banned substance versus Oh, that's good, that's totally fine.
It's a really hard question to answer. It's just kind of thinking out loud, Like I, especially as I have the experience of getting older to me and I've would preface that I've In ten years, I might be like, screw everything that I said when I was thirty. I'm like, Chris, give me the shot. But totally totally possible. But right now, I would never preasist to anybody because it's not my body.
And I really do believe that, like that's the autonomy is important, but I do think that you lose something of your The process of aging, I think is such an important part of our of our humanity. I think feeling what enhanced is selling is I think what so many in the sort of tech biopharmer space are selling, which is like, wherever possible, removing the friction of your lives.
And I think that the friction of our lives is where we grow, it's where we develop as people, it's where we if you're a father, it's where I think that we imbue valuable life lessons upon our children. And I don't want to do things that make me feel good all the time, personally, like it's I I intellectually I enjoy writing. The process of writing I find to be really unpleasant.
It sucks.
I do it because I don't like it, and it makes me anxious, and it makes me feel kind of insecure about how smart I am, and it makes me like, you know, like all these kinds of things in a very similar way that like combat sports did. They're very primal and personal, and if you lose, it's not like in football or soccer where we have a team to blame. It's like you got beat up in this very visceral, personal way. That's embarrassing and that's hard. It gives you insecurity,
and it gives you anxiety, and I worry. I guess I worry. NAD is one thing, but I just worry about the logic where that logic ends. And I like it doesn't end like this with everybody, but it's you can see how you get from NAD to let me hammer my face to make my bones grow sharper like clinticular, you know, like you can see how that kind of
rabbit hole can happen. And most people are gonna be like Chris and be reasonable about it, but there's you know, there's always the outliers that are gonna, you know, take things to extremes. And I think because the Internet, like taking things to extreme is rewarded because of the culture of the Internet, you know. So I just kind of worry where this goes. And for me, like I've found a lot of enjoyment in the aging of my body, in the way that I practice combat sports, like the
way that I when I wrestle. Now, I I'm not as quick as I once was. It my knees hurt. It's hard for me to take shots the way that I used to, Like I don't want to do a full penetration step where I hit my knees. I take like fat man old man shots and grab people's legs. But also like I wrestle college guys in high school guys now, and I'm like, I can see five moves
ahead of you. I know what you're doing. Like I've studied the scrolls too, young man, you know, and there's fun in that too, And I worry about losing that the more the more that this culture kind of propagates, I really do.
It feels like the enhanced games are kind of this collision between two forces that you just mentioned the removal of friction from life, but also kind of the machine of marketing, big money trying to sell us something like this is all kind of one big advertisement for the removal of friction. It's just this collision of those two forces in modern life.
Yeah, I feel like that's that's the read. It's funny because it like greases the skids in some ways to like introduce weirder frictions into your life. It's like I'm going to take the easy way out, but now I'm going to go spend three hours in the gym, you know what I mean?
There you go. That's a good point.
Yeah, it is a good point. Yeah. I mean I think I've been thinking about this a lot lately, just as I've gotten into I've been getting into running. And I'm not like I'm six one, two sixty. I'm not naturally predisposed to being.
Like it's built.
No, I'm getting I'm down, I'm under. I'm just barely under a twenty preid at five k. I'm working my way up at that build. I'll take it. But now I get running. Culture stuff peppered at me on my like toort form video feeds like TikTok and Instagram, and it is like all sports are consumerists, but running seems to be an extremely consumeris sort of subathletic culture. It's like you can buy your thirty dollars gels, and you can buy your like, you know, your fancy sunglasses and
your five hundred dollars shoes and this and that. And I see people out running in Brooklyn all the time and they're wearing like all these crazy drive hit gear and Oakley's and super expensive shoes and I'm running on like a gigantic old Wyoming shirt and like crappy trail shoes and I don't feel better than Actually, I definitely don't feel better than them, because like I went out and bought an actual period like two hundred dollar running
shoes like recently, and I was like, oh, this is incredible. Like there's utility to these. I understand that, but it's it's like been such a good case study for me and how far consumersm can kind of take these things, you know, And it's it's not it's not necessary all the time. It is, I think to me, in somebody's counter to what athletics is. And yeah, I struggle with it.
Yeah, well, you know, the two hundred and fifty dollars gentle glide racing shoes are kind of the testosterone for your feet, the super suit of the feet totally.
Yeah. Yeah.
We had Brady Homer, who's a two like twenty five marathon or Jesus psycho, and he said yeah, but he did say that the super shoes probably give him a six percent decrease in his time. So we're talking going from like two thirty down to two twenty five or something like that.
Wow, that's and it's just.
In the shoes. So it's really interesting. So where do you think the Enhanced Games go from here?
Shortly after the Games, you know, they they kind of doubled down the stakes. They were like, oh, Usain, if someone could beat Hussein Bolt sold record, We're going to not do a million dollar prize. It's going to be
a ten million dollar prize now. So in some ways I kind of feel like, you know, this sort of first iteration of the Games was designed to attract other athletes who are probably a higher caliber, who you know, have a little bit more of a reputation to be like, yeah, I could win that easy money, I could win two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars like beating some scrubs. And I thought what was really telling about it is afterwards Ryan Lockedey, you know, he was kind of like, Oh, I kind of wish I competed, Like that sounds like something I would do.
And so it's like, Oh, if you're going.
To get people who are on that level like sort of you know, voicing interest and perhaps even doing it, like, I think that's going to be a lot more interesting and kind of fun to see.
Do you think that legitimizes it or it becomes like even more spectacular spectacle.
So for me, like my two big questions about the future of this are I guess one thing I would preface is that like billionaires funding their like quirky sporting
events is not new. I think about Trump and the New Jersey generals, you know, like or the XFL and Vince McMahon, what I would say, like, you know, I think part of the one of the big points to that point is there one of the big questions to that point is how long will Christian Angermeier and company continue to want to hemorrhage money engaging in this operation because they're going to have to keep paying athletes a ton of money to do this, and they need the
business to work, and it's hard for me to understand how enhanced stands out from keeps or hymns or row or etcetera, etcetera. But then also I think the big question, I think this is maybe the most important thing for the future of the Enhanced Games is the case study of Hunter Armstrong, the backstroker who competed unenhanced. So he throughout the process was like, I I still want to
compete in the Olympics. I just desperately need money, and the Olympics are a scam and they don't pay you, and so I am going to do this and I want WADA. Please keep testing me. I will be you know, I'm just gonna do this competition and then come back. It is currently unclear if they're going to let him compete in the Olympics and the World Championships and whatever moving forward. They did happen to test him directly after the he competed at the Enhanced Games. They pulled him
aside and tested him, which is funny. But the question of whether or not he's going to get banned, I think is important because if he's not then that opens the door. I think two tons of other athletes who still want to stay in the Olympics system coming over and competing, and that's how you're going to get the kind of athletes who could break world records for at twenty five six, so you know, and I think that if that happens, if he's allowed to compete, then I
could see the floodgates opening. And then the question just is like how long does enhanced want to hemorrhage money paying because they cannot be profitable.
There's no way, right if everyone breaking the records is not actually using the substance as you're selling, there's no incentive to the consumer to go buy the substances, and then where does the money come from?
Yeah, yeah, and then you're left with like, you know, teachers versus the JV team day.
Yeah, all right, Well the podcast is superhuman. It's awesome, really great on the ground reporting. I love what you did with the episodes. I especially like episode three. That was one that I immediately sent to my producer Robbie. I was like, listen to this, this is great.
Shout out Lendams, our senior producer, incredible sound designer.
Yeah, awesome well, great work, guys, and I appreciate you coming on.
Thanks, I appreciate you for having us.
Thanks for checking out the show, and thanks to Chris and Sam for coming on to talk about the enhanced games and their podcast Superhuman. As a reminder, two percent is in your feed twice a week, so please subscribe so you get those updates. We are always open to your questions for our Ask Michael Anything section, Sending the media at two pc T dot com or drop me in the comments. If you want to watch this on video,
the free iheartapp allows you to do just that. Give them download, watch us on video, and as always, have fun, don't die